Читать книгу My Remarkable Uncle and Other Sketches - Стивен Ликок - Страница 6

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I mentioned above that I had gone away from the farm where I lived as a child to a boarding-school—the old Upper Canada College that stood half a century ago on King Street in Toronto. It has all been knocked down since. I look back at it now with that peculiar affection that every one feels for his old school after it has been knocked down and all the masters dead long ago.

But certain things that I was reading the other day, in the English papers, brought the old school back vividly to my mind. What I was reading belonged in the present English discussion, which the war has so much accentuated, about social classes, and whether “gentlemen” can go on finding a place. For it seems there is a good deal of alarm now in England over the idea that “gentlemen” may be dying out. In an old civilization things come and go. Knighthood came and went; it was in the flower, then in the pod and then all went to seed. Now it seems to be gentlemen that are going. It appears that the upper classes are being so depressed and the lower classes so pushed up, and both shifting sideways so fast, that you simply can’t distinguish an upper birth from a lower. In fact it is hard to make up their births at all.

I wasn’t meaning to write on that topic. The thing is too big. Every one admits that if gentlemen go, then Heaven only knows what will happen to England. But then Heaven only ever did. But the point here is that the question has got mixed up with the fate of the public schools; I mean of course public in the English sense, the ones the public can’t get into. The best solution—it is generally admitted—in fact a solution “definitely in sight” is in the idea that if you throw the big board schools into the public schools and then throw the small private schools into both of them, then you so mix up your gentlemen with your others that they all turn into gentlemen. Of course you can’t face this all at once; a whole nation of gentlemen is a goal rather than—well, I mean to say it takes time. Meantime, if it is “definitely in sight,” that’s the place where the genius of England likes to leave it. It can roost there and go fast asleep along with Dominion Status for India and the Disestablishment of the Church.

So, as I say, this talk of “gentlemen” in England turned me back to our old Upper Canada College on King Street sixty years ago, and the desperate struggle there to make us gentlemen. We didn’t understand for a while just what they were trying to do to us. But gradually we began to catch on to it, and feel that it was no good. There was a kindly and oratorical principal, whom I will not name but whom the affection of Old Boys will easily recall—a kindly principal, I say, with a beautiful and sonorous voice that used to echo through the Prayer Hall in exaltation of the topic. “This school, I insist,” he would declaim, “must be a school of gentlemen.” We used to sit as juniors and think: “Gee! This is going to be a tight shave! I’ll never make it.” But presently we learned to take it more easily. We noticed that the gentlemen question broke out after a theft of school-books, or the disappearance of small change foolishly left in reach. Not being yet gentlemen, we made a distinction between “stealing” a thing and “hooking” it. A gentleman, you see, classes both together. He’d just as soon steal a thing as hook it.

But, bit by bit and gradually, we were led towards the ideal. We were often told, by oratorical visitors, that Upper Canada College was founded as a “school for gentlemen.” When I entered the school there were still a few old, very old, boys around, who belonged to the early generations of the foundation. We felt that the school had been fooled in some of them. They seemed just like us.

Personally, however, I got by on a side issue. In those days there was none of the elaborate registration, the card index stuff, that all schools have now. Any information that they wanted about us they got viva voce on the spot by calling us up in front of the class and asking for it. So there came a day soon after I entered when the principal called me up to be questioned and a junior master wrote down the answers. “What,” he asked, “is your father’s occupation?” I hesitated quite a while and then I said, “He doesn’t do anything.” The principal bent over towards the junior master who was writing and said in an impressive voice, “A gentleman.” A sort of awe spread round the room at my high status. But really why I had hesitated was because I didn’t know what to say. You see, I knew that my father, when in Toronto, was probably to be found along on King Street having a Tom-and-Jerry in the Dog and Duck, or at Clancey’s—but whether to call that his occupation was a nice question.

Slowly we learned the qualifications of a gentleman and saw that the thing was hopeless. A gentleman it seemed would take a bath (once a week on bath night) and never try to dodge it. A gentleman would not chew gum in St. George’s Church, nor imitate the voice of an Anglican Bishop. A gentleman, it seemed, couldn’t tell a lie—not wouldn’t, just couldn’t. Limitations like these cut such a swath through our numbers that in time we simply gave up. There was no use in it. Mind, don’t misunderstand me. Of course we could behave like gentlemen—oh, certainly—act like gentlemen. At first sight you’d mistake us for it. But we knew all the time that we weren’t.

So, like the other boys, I left school still puzzled about the gentlemen business, and as the years have gone by the perplexity has only gone deeper. What is, or was, a gentleman, anyway? I remember that a little after I left school, while I was at college, there was a famous Canadian murder case that attracted wide attention because the murderer, who was presently hanged, was a gentleman. He was a young Englishman who enticed another young Englishman into a dismal swamp and for the sake of his money shot him in a brutal and cowardly way from behind. I met and knew afterwards several of the lawyers and people on the case and they all agreed that the murderer was a gentleman; in fact several of them said, “a thorough gentleman.” Others said, “a perfect gentleman.” Some of them had the idea that his victim was perhaps “not quite a gentleman”—but you’d hardly kill a man for that.

This shows, if any demonstration is needed, that a “gentleman” is not a moral term. As a matter of fact, all attempts to make it so break down hopelessly. People have often tried to sort out a class of people whom they call “nature’s gentlemen.” These are supposed to have it all—the honour, the candour (you can see it in their candid faces), all except the little touches of good manners and good English and the things that lie, or seem to lie, on the surface. They may be. But gentlemen don’t mix with them.

Hence you can’t qualify for being a gentleman by being good, or being honest, or being religious. A gentleman may be those things, but if he is, he never talks about them. In fact a gentleman never speaks of himself and never preaches. All good people do; and so they are not gentlemen. See how perplexing it gets? No wonder it worried us at school. For example can a clergyman be a gentleman? Certainly, if he keeps off religion. Or, for example, would a gentleman steal? He would and he wouldn’t. If you left a handful of money right on a table near him, with no one in sight, no one to find out, he wouldn’t steal it. Of course not; its not the kind of thing a gentleman does. But if you left it in a bank account, he might have a go at it; but, of course, that’s not exactly stealing; that’s embezzlement. Gentlemen embezzle but don’t steal.

And, of course, it goes without saying that being a gentleman isn’t just a matter of wearing good clothes. You can’t make yourself a gentleman by going to a good tailor. There is all the difference in the world between a man dressed like a gentleman and a tailor’s dummy. No gentleman ever lets a tailor have his way with him. After the tailor has a suit measured to what he thinks an exact fit, a gentleman always has it let out six inches behind. You can tell him by that; and just when the tailor has the waistcoat what he calls “snug,” the gentleman has it eased out across the stomach. You see, if you give a tailor his way he carries everything too far; his profession becomes a mania. All professions do. Give a barber his own way and he’ll roll a man’s hair into little ringlets, like a baby’s coqueluche. That’s why foreigners, as seen by a gentleman, are never well dressed and well shaved. They are too submissive to their tailor and their coiffeur. Hence instead of being well dressed and clean shaven, they are all overdressed and parboiled. This is what a gentleman means by a “French Johnny.”

So one understands that a gentleman may dress as he likes.

I noticed an excellent example of this as related in a recent fascinating book of Australian travel. The scene was in that vast Australian empty country that you are not allowed to call desert. They speak of it as the “never-never-country,” or the “walla-boo” or the “willa-walla”—things like that. Out there—or in there—I don’t know which you call it—there is nothing but sand and cactus and spinnifex, and black fellows, with occasional excellent shooting at great flocks of cockatoos, and an odd shot at a partridge or a pastoralist.

It was away off in this country that the travellers in the book I speak of came across a queer lost specimen of humanity, who had been living there twenty or thirty years—“a hairy, bushy-whiskered, unkempt individual. Grey hair grew on every part of his face. The only place where there was no hair was the part of the head where hair usually grows. That part was as bald as an egg. He had elastic-side boots but no socks. He had trousers but neither braces nor belt. The trousers were loose about the waist-band, and whilst he talked, when standing, he spent most of the time grabbing them and hitching them up just as they were on the point of falling down. It was constant competition between himself and the trousers—the trousers wanting to fall down and he wanting them to keep up.”

But the odd thing is that when they came to talk to this man, there is no mistaking from their narrative that he was a gentleman. It was not only his contempt of a tailor that showed it. He had been to a public school, in the proper English sense as above. He still talked like a gentleman and, like a gentleman, had no word of complaint against a little thing like twenty years of sand.

When we say that this man “talked like a gentleman,” how then does a gentleman talk? It is not so much a matter of how he talks but how he doesn’t talk. No gentleman cares to talk about himself; no gentleman talks about money, or about his family, or about his illness, about the inside of his body or about his soul. Does a gentleman swear? Oh, certainly; but remember, no gentleman would ever swear at a servant—only at his own friends. In point of language a gentleman is not called upon to have any particular choice of words. But he must, absolutely must, have a trained avoidance of them. Any one who says “them there,” and “which is yourn” and “them ain’t his’n,” is not a gentleman. There are no two ways about it; he may be “nature’s gentleman”; but that’s as far as you can get.

The more I look at this problem of the gentlemen the more I realize how difficult it is, and yet, in spite of everything, there seems to be something in it. One recalls the story of how Galileo was bullied and threatened by the Inquisition till he took back and denied his theory that the earth went round the sun. Yet as he came out from the tribunal he muttered to himself, “But it does really.” So with the gentleman. There’s something in it. This quiet man who never breaks his word and never eats with his knife; never complains of hard luck and wears his pants as he wants them; deferential to those below, independent to those above; the soul of honour, except in embezzlement; and when down and out goes away and looks for a wallaboo and enough sand and cactus to die in—

It’s a fine thing. I’m sorry they failed at my school. I must have another go at it.