Abstract
This chapter traces the origins of modern gentility to the princely courts of Renaissance Italy, and identifies Castiglione as the first major modern theorist of the genteel lifestyle. However, the Spanish Jesuit Baltazar Gracian was the first true modern student of the moral psychology of the gentleman, as expressed in good taste, and consequently an entire section is devoted to discussing his most famous work, The Art of Worldly Wisdom. The author shows that the in-depth character analysis of the gentleman inaugurated by Gracian was also undertaken in France by La Bruyère. Passing from the Continent to the British Iles, the chapter details the unique social and political conditions that gave rise to that most renowned modern form of gentility, the English gentleman. The author argues that a number of Britian’s most important thinkers, including Shaftesbury and Burke, viewed the gentleman as playing an indispensable role in the distinctive British tradition of civil liberties and limited government.
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Notes
- 1.
Ellery Schalk, “The Court as ‘Civilizer’ of the Nobility,” in Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age c. 1450–1650, eds. Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke (The German Historical Institute, London: Oxford University Press, 1991) 248.
- 2.
Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Leonard Eckstein Opdycke (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903) 34–35.
- 3.
Ibidem, 35.
- 4.
Ibidem.
- 5.
Balthasar Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, trans. Joseph Jacobs (London: Macmillan, 1904) 51.
- 6.
Ibidem, 7.
- 7.
Ibidem, 37.
- 8.
Ibidem, 7.
- 9.
Ibidem, 38.
- 10.
Ibidem, 16–17.
- 11.
Ibidem, 5.
- 12.
Ibidem, 136.
- 13.
Ibidem, 94.
- 14.
Ibidem, 37.
- 15.
Ibidem, 57.
- 16.
Ibidem, 16.
- 17.
Ibidem, 99.
- 18.
Ibidem, 67.
- 19.
Ibidem, 59.
- 20.
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, trans. William A. Cooper (New York: The German Publication Society, 1914) 153.
- 21.
Gracian, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, 157.
- 22.
Ibidem, 95.
- 23.
Ibidem, 131.
- 24.
Ibidem, 94.
- 25.
Ibidem, 93.
- 26.
Ibidem, 94.
- 27.
Ibidem, 179–180.
- 28.
Jean de la Bruyère, The Characters, trans. Henri Van Laun (London: John C. Nimmo, 1885) 209.
- 29.
Ibidem.
- 30.
Lest the reader assume that La Bruyère finds courtly life to be utterly dismal, there is this, the penultimate aphorism in his chapter on the court: “Whoever has seen the court has seen the most handsome, the best-looking, and the most decked-out part of the world. He who despises the court after having seen it, despises the world” (Ibidem, 220).
- 31.
Ibidem, 183–184.
- 32.
Ibidem, 340–341.
- 33.
Ibidem, 329–330.
- 34.
My translation. From the preface to La Bruyère’s translation of Theophrastus, in Jean de La Bruyère, Les caractères (E. Michallet, 1696).
- 35.
La Bruyère, The Characters, 229–230.
- 36.
Henry Lemonnier, Charles VIII, Louis XII, François Ier et les guerres d’Italie (1492–1547) (Paris-14e: Éditions Tallandier, 1911) 293.
- 37.
Norbert Elias, Die höfische Gesellschaft (Nördlingen: Suhrkamp, 1983) 229–232.
- 38.
Ibidem, 238.
- 39.
Henri Sée, Französische Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Erster Band (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1930) 120.
- 40.
Kautsky, The Politics of Aristocratic Empires, 359.
- 41.
Ibidem, 357–358.
- 42.
Ronald G. Asch, Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, s.v. “Court and Courtiers” (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004).
- 43.
La Bruyère, The Characters, 245.
- 44.
Alexis de Tocqueville, L’ancien régime et la révolution (Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard, 1952) 99.
- 45.
Ibidem, 100.
- 46.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Gentleman”, 1911.
- 47.
Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England, “Social Class”, Daily Life Through History Online (Greenwood Press, 2002).
- 48.
Ibidem, “Educating Gentlemen”.
- 49.
Ibidem, “The Universities”.
- 50.
Ibidem, “Social Class”.
- 51.
Ibidem, “Local Government”.
- 52.
De Tocqueville, L’ancien régime et la révolution, 111–112.
- 53.
Ibidem, 112.
- 54.
Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 183.
- 55.
Anthony, “Third Earl of Shaftesbury,” Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, Vol. II (London: J. Purser, 1732) 43.
- 56.
Thomas Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson (London: Gilbert and Rivington Ltd., 1882) 5.
- 57.
Ibidem, 5–6.
- 58.
Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Vol. III, 156.
- 59.
Ibidem, Vol. I, 238–239.
- 60.
Ibidem, Vol. I, 239.
- 61.
Ibidem, Vol. I, 240.
- 62.
Ibidem, Vol. I, 241.
- 63.
Ibidem, Vol. I, 235–236.
- 64.
Ibidem, Vol. III, 303.
- 65.
Ibidem, Vol. III, 154–155.
- 66.
Prior to developing his strictly deontological view of ethics, Kant was a moral sense theorist along the lines of Shaftesbury. In Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1763/64), he argued that virtue is rooted in the individual’s feeling for moral beauty, a sentiment that arises through contemplation of the beauty and dignity of human nature. According to Hannah Arendt, in the early phase of his philosophical career Kant had even planned on writing a “Critique of Moral Taste”! Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982) 10.
- 67.
Ibidem, Vol. II, 28–29.
- 68.
Ibidem, Vol. III, 177.
- 69.
Ibidem, Vol. III, 186–187.
- 70.
Ibidem, Vol. II, 401.
- 71.
Ibidem, Vol. I, 190–191.
- 72.
Ibidem, Vol. III, 153–154.
- 73.
Ibidem, Vol. III, 164–165.
- 74.
Ibidem, Vol. I, 239.
- 75.
Ibidem, Vol. I, 64–65.
- 76.
Ibidem, Vol. I, 69.
- 77.
Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994) 8.
- 78.
Shaftesbury, Characteristicks, Vol. III, see the footnotes to pages 34 and 183.
- 79.
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume X—Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985) 199.
- 80.
Ibidem.
- 81.
Edmund Burke, On Taste, Vol. XXIV, Part 1, The Harvard Classics (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14) 4.
- 82.
Over 170 years later, the American philosopher John Dewey propounded a quite similar view of taste in The Quest for Certainty (1929): “The word ‘taste’ has perhaps got too completely associated with arbitrary liking to express the nature of judgments of value. But if the word be used in the sense of an appreciation at once cultivated and active, one may say that the formation of taste is the chief matter wherever values enter in, whether intellectual, aesthetic or moral. Relatively immediate judgments, which we call tact or to which we give the name of intuition, do not precede reflective inquiry, but are the funded products of much thoughtful experience. Expertness of taste is at once the result and the reward of constant exercise of thinking. Instead of there being no disputing about tastes, they are the one thing worth disputing about, if by ‘dispute’ is signified discussion involving reflective inquiry. Taste, if we use the word in its best sense, is the outcome of experience brought cumulatively to bear on the intelligent appreciation of the real worth of likings and enjoyments. There is nothing in which a person so completely reveals himself as in the things which he judges enjoyable and desirable. Such judgments are the sole alternative to the domination of belief by impulse, chance, blind habit and self-interest. The formation of a cultivated and effectively operative good judgment or taste with respect to what is aesthetically admirable, intellectually acceptable and morally approvable is the supreme task set to human beings by the incidents of experience”.
- 83.
Ibidem, 13.
- 84.
Ibidem, 15.
- 85.
Ibidem, 13.
- 86.
Edmund Burke, Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Daniel E. Ritchie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1992) 41.
- 87.
Ibidem, 42–43.
- 88.
Edmund Burke, Select Works of Edmund Burke, Vol. 3 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999) 74–75.
- 89.
Burke, Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, 109.
- 90.
Ibidem.
- 91.
Edmund Burke, Select Works of Edmund Burke, Vol. 2 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1999) 92.
- 92.
Burke, Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, 109.
- 93.
Burke, Select Works of Edmund Burke, Vol. 2, 93.
- 94.
Ibidem, 66.
- 95.
Burke, Further Reflections on the Revolution in France, 64.
- 96.
Ibidem.
- 97.
Ibidem, 109.
- 98.
Burke, Select Works of Edmund Burke, Vol. 2, 81.
- 99.
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XVIII (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977) 166.
- 100.
Ibidem.
- 101.
Ibidem, 181.
- 102.
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. X (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985) 217.
- 103.
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. XIX (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977) 13.
- 104.
Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. X, 191.
- 105.
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981) 96.
- 106.
Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. X, 264.
- 107.
Ibidem, 265.
- 108.
Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, 106.
- 109.
Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol. X, 181.
- 110.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, viii.
- 111.
In passing it should be noted that Arnold found steady employment as a school inspector, and that his father, Thomas Arnold, was a famous headmaster of Rugby School and one of the most influential educational reformers of his day.
- 112.
Ibidem, 14.
- 113.
Matthew Arnold, Mixed Essays (London: John Murray, 1903) 40.
- 114.
Calvin Coolidge, “Address Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors Washington, DC, January 17, 1925”, https://www.coolidgefoundation.org/resources/speeches-as-president-1923-1929-16/.
- 115.
It bears mentioning that other, less well-known forms of gentility existed contemporaneously with the British gentleman. For instance, the northern German “free imperial” cities of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck were governed for several centuries by local oligarchs known as the Hanseaten or Hanseatics. The ruling class in each of these cities consisted of prominent families whose members enjoyed hereditary rights to full citizenship and political participation. Mayors, senators, diplomats, and senior clergy were recruited out of their ranks. In contradistinction to the rural nobility, the Hanseatics prided themselves on their Protestant work ethic, business acumen, cosmopolitan practicality, and republicanism. The hereditary voting privileges upon which these oligarchies were based ultimately ended in 1918, with the demise of the German Empire. In Buddenbrooks, the novelist Thomas Mann provided the best known literary portrait of this class as it existed from the 1830s to the 1870s.
Another German form of gentility was the Bildungsbürgertum , a humanistically educated, cultured middle class elite that originated in the mid-eighteenth century. The main factor behind the emergence of this group was the growing need on the part of government for an efficacious workforce to staff its ever-expanding bureaucracy. One source of inspiration to European reformers was the Chinese system of imperial examinations, which was the first civil service system designed to award administrative positions on the basis of merit. In addition to filling the ranks of government bureaucracy, the Bildungsbürgertum supplied eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany with many of its professionals, including doctors, lawyers, engineers, and educators. Membership in this middle class elite was, in principle, meritocratic, and many of those who belonged to it at least professed to esteem learning and culture over material wealth. In addition, the Bildungsbürger believed that they had a special responsibility to the rest of society to be actively engaged in state and community affairs. By virtue of their posts in education and in the media, they enjoyed a considerable degree of influence in cultural matters.
In the New World, some of the earliest ancestors of the East Coast establishment were the so-called Brahmins of Boston. This New England gentry was composed of old, wealthy families who were of Anglo-Saxon extraction and predominately Protestant in creed. The genteel aspect of the Brahmins was particularly evident in their concern for excellence of character and their strong sense of noblesse oblige, which led them to actively support charities, sponsor the arts, and take on leadership roles in the community. They were united by the ties of extended family and marriage, as well as attendance at Harvard and at the same prep schools and private clubs. They spoke with a distinctive accent and shared the same Anglo-American customs and manner of dress.
This trio of examples should suffice to show that although England probably offered the most hospitable environment to the gentleman during the Victorian era, his range was by no means restricted to the British Isles. Our sampling was, of course, never intended to be exhaustive, and it is likely that other instances could be found.
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Mitchell, J. (2019). The Ethos of Gentility from the Italian Renaissance to Victorian England. In: On the Decline of the Genteel Virtues. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20354-2_5
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