626
PARTISAN REVIEW
his individual life. Society and the body politic depend on man–
ners and conventions, but these will never fully express the inner
man . Thus civilization and the cultured individuals who are its
flower are, at best, the result of an uneasy and constantly fluctuat–
ing compromise or, at worst, of a hypocritical masquerade in
which the baser passions are publicly denied while privately
given full license. Though Ms. Letwin does not use the example,
one thinks of the court of Louis XIV which, of course, had its
English admirers and imitators, but which came to stand for a
distastefully " foreign " blend of ostentation and brutality.
Ms. Letwin does not claim to
be
writing social history and
therefore she does not attempt to trace the development of the
gentleman either in England or on the continent. Her method is
to use literature as a means to define a type. While noting its par–
tial origins in philosophy and particularly in Christianity and
making persuasive suggestions about how and why it came into
its own, she is primarily interested in defining and exploring the
phenomenon in the fiction of Victorian England. She sets out to
understand the peculiarly English "ability to tolerate without
strain a combination of qualities that were elsewhere considered
incompatible. " Key to Ms. Letwin's search is the distinctive Eng–
lish attitude toward reason, an attribute that is neither trans–
cendent nor absolute, but practical and human.
The only thing given to a human being is the power to
choose what to see, feel, think, and do, which constitutes
his rationality and his humanity.. . . Rationality . .. is not a
link
to
something outside the human world.... Though
called reason, it must not
be
confused with a cosmic prin–
ciple of "Reason. "
It
is a purely human property which en–
ables men to make of themselves what they will.
The stress on the individual will and the challenge to hu–
man beings to shape themselves and their environment lead to a
special emphasis on education and a view of learning that con–
tinue to distinguish British and American schools from those of
continental Europe.
Learning carries no threat to individuality.... The pupil has
the character of an apprentice, not a disciple, and his is only
