THE HERO AS GENTLEMAN
573
of the globe. The French, for instance, have a popular
litterature des
wagons-lits,
some sentimental adventure stories about North Africa and
the Middle East, and some genuine literature, such as Malraux's novels,
Pere Hue's superb
Travels in Tartary,
Rimbaud's poetic fragments and
Gide's African diaries, but in all of them the tone is quite different.
There is never the sheer thrill of being abroad, which is the fundamental
English emotion. Frenchmen never seem to be abroad in quite the same
way. They tend to carry their intellectual universe with them. The
Englishman may miss his hot bath and his early morning tea, but if he
belongs to, or has adopted, the genuine aristocratic tradition (Waugh
is outside it; bad temper undoes him as it undoes Smollett), he takes
a childlike pleasure in going dirty and in drinking fermented mare's
milk. The best type of Hero in the pseudo-literary best-sellers, like the
best type of genuine English traveler, accepted the variety of the world,
while retaining a simple belief in Right and Wrong.
When the Gentleman was back at base, his behavior continued to
be, in several respects, most praiseworthy. He treated the lower classes
at least as well as he treated his livestock, which is saying a great deal.
He was a sworn enemy of the Left, of course, but what else could be
expected in those days? His servants were faithful, and that is the best
testimonial any master can have. Buchan, Yates and Sapper are almost
impeccable in this respect. Wodehouse is sound enough too;
J
eeves has
the right attitude; he is not a genuine Figaro, although he occasionally
diddles his master. Waugh passes muster in both the early and the later
books. Only the women break the unwritten rules. Miss Sayers allows
Lord Peter's valet to put the lower classes in their place during a public–
house conversation, and one of Miss Mitford's books has a dreadful
episode in which Lady So-and-So (the character, being a woman, is not
absolutely pukka) remarks how nice it is to drive along in a warm
Daimler and watch the lower orders trudging through the snow. The
men are never as cynical, and they genuinely like their fellow English–
men; even Mr. Waugh likes Cockneys. Again Buchan is perhaps the
writer who shows up best on this score; he can draw an almost convinc–
ing grocer and an Ernie Bevin type of trade union official, and his
Gentlemen-Statesmen are all working for the good of the country, so
hard, indeed, that-as Mr. U sbome remarks-they often bring them–
selves to the verge of nervous breakdowns. It is true that an unpleasant
partisan spirit was to appear in the later books of Dornford Yates and
Waugh, but, in the heyday of the Gentleman, the England of the best–
sellers must have been quite a pleasant place to live in, even for the
denizens of Maida Vale,
if
they accepted their hopeless position in a
proper spirit of cheerful humility.
