574
PARTISAN REVIEW
The Gentleman had, of course, his darker side, which Mr. Usborne
touches on firmly but discreetly. He had a tendency to take the law
into his own hands. This characteristic, very flattering to the ego of
the individual reader, he shares to some extent with the usual detective
story hero. They differ, however, in that the private detective, having
shown himself to be superior to the official agents of the law, usually
hands the criminal over to them in the last chapter. He is the avenging
angel, the "saint," the inquisitor; they are his "secular arm." Lord
Peter falls into this category, but he is given the unusual distinction of
remorse when the criminal is hanged. Buchan, Yates and Sapper, how–
ever, tend to dispose of their villains without the help of the law. Mr.
Usborne suggests that they are carrying over into adult life the rough
and ready justice administered by prefects in public schools. This may
well be so, in spite of the fact that Buchan was not a public-school
boy; he displayed such an ability to assimilate the gentlemanly ethos
that he may have absorbed this too. It is perhaps, like so many other
public-school characteristics, an old aristocratic freedom adapted to
upper-middle-class tastes. Whatever the explanation, the Gentleman
Hero thought nothing of engaging in single combat with the villain
(whom he treated at the same time with due respect) or even of hang–
ing the villain's henchmen on his own initiative. Such private enterprise
could easily-and,
in
fact, does at times in the works of Yates and
Sapper-degenerate into proto-fascism. The term is all the more justified
since anti-Semitism is latent in Buchan and overt in Yates and Sapper.
The forces of Evil are not sound foreigners, rooted in their own soil, but
cosmopolitan adventurers who are disrupting the
status quo
through
sheer devilishness. (Strangely enough, a few years later Buchan's Bol–
shevik villain, in his turn, was to become a Soviet gentleman with a
Buchan-like detestation of Jewish cosmopolitans.) It is true, however,
that the most forceful of these villains in the end appear attractive, be–
cause the hero has to have an adversary worthy of
him.
Carl Petersen
is an essential counterpart to Drummond, and
in
Buchan's
Three Hos–
tages,
for instance, Medina is the best character; he is even credited
with loyalty "to his own people," who seem to be the Erse-speaking Irish.
One gets the impression, nevertheless, that Jews are working for him.
Perhaps he is meant to be a kind of Irish Jew.
If
one went still further and had the Gentleman psychoanalyzed,
the most distressing things might come to light. In Yates and Sapper,
anti-Semitism is probably the most alarming feature. Their treatment
of sex seems quite straightforward; Yates, in particular, appears to give
an attractive picture of married life, although the absence of children
may have some dreadful significance. Buchan, according to Mr. Us-
