Book Reviews 479

rewarding approaches to the study of Hitler’s regime. Along the way, they provide some very instructive insights into, among other things, the support role of bureau- crats, the unstable position of the Nazi party and its inability to bind people to the regime, the failure of the regime to formulate a coherent strategy toward the ‘Third World’, the role of the SS in integrating the old elites into the system and the continued activity of ‘pressure groups’ within the dictatorship.

In summation, then, this study represents the most up-to-date review of the issues. conflicting interpretations and paths of future inquiry involving the Third Reich that the reader is likely to find.

University of Utah Ronald Smelser

The Return to Camelot Chivalry and the English Gentleman, Mark Girouard (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), viii + 312 pp., f12.50.

This splendidly illustrated book is a history of chivalry in the nineteenth century, through a variety of media: art, architecture, literature, social custom and the flotsam of popular culture. Mark Girouard treats his readers to an exhilarating journey, showing them the influence of the Gothic Revival and Sir Walter Scott, the mania for castle building and the taste for mock tournaments, the antiquarian interest in geneal- ogy, heraldry and armour, the changing ideals of royalty, the cult of St. George and the enthusiasm for the Arthurian romances. The text brings out well the paradoxes in the image of the knight-errant, which was espoused, for conflicting political reasons, by arch-conservatives like Kenelm Digby and by a succession of radicals - Lord Brougham’s circle, the Fraserians, ‘Young England’, the Christian Socialists and muscular Christians. There were the Victorian exponents of chastity, who looked to Sir Galahad, and the defenders of courtly love, who liked active love-making and who found a model in Tristan or Sir Lancelot. The idea ran through the whole religious spectrum, from Digby’s reactionary Catholicism to the ferociously anti-Catholic Pro- testant nationalism of Charles Kingsley and the anti-Christian agnosticism of A. J. Symonds. Despite the snobbish associations of ‘chivalry’ with birth and money, there was a sustained series of attempts to ‘declass’ it, by making it a moral ideal requiring no qualification but nobility of soul, and by giving it a wider social outreach, through the public schools, the Churches, the boy scout movement and popular sport. There is another paradox in the mixture of fantasy and realism in the otherworldly escapism of the mildly erotic dreamworld of the Lutyens country houses, and the call, in the same country houses, to serve England and the Empire through sacrifice. The supreme paradox appears in Girouard’s concluding chapter, on the apotheosis of the mediaeval knight on the battlefields of the First World War, at the very time when the mud and blood of four years of fighting in the trenches were creating the first great modern revulsion against the whole chivalrous idea.

Girouard presents both in his prose and his plates a superb collection of vivid images, but he is better at the art-and-architecture aspect of the subject, its external trappings in stained-glass and coloured stone, than in penetrating the ideas them- selves. Part of the problem lies in the link which he assumes between chivalry and the ‘gentleman’. He ignores the eighteenth-century origins of the ‘gentleman’ in the Augustan code of manners, as exemplified by the Gentleman’s Magazine (published from 1731) and Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son, and its continuing association with states of mind which had nothing to do with chivalry. The term ‘gentleman’ was

most useful, not to the aristocracy and gentry as such, the classes described in most detail in this work. but to an aspiring middle class who found in ‘gentility’ a new assurance of rank and status, linking them to the traditional order but also asserting, against Norman pride, their rightful place and station in it. Thus the question of who was, or was not, a gentleman, became a central preoccupation of the Victorian mind, as chivalry arguably never was, despite its rich imaginative expression; so that discus- sion of the gentleman is a recurring theme in nineteenth-century novels, as a subject of perennial interest to Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope, who had no particular interest in or liking for chivalry or the Middle Ages. Thus Dr. Arnold. as the author points out, despised chivalry; but he had a profound belief in the supreme virtues of the English gentleman. The work implies that .Arnold’s hostility to

mediaevalism disappeared: but it survived in the affectionate satire of the Reverend Richard Harris Barham, and in the passion of Punch against chivalry as an ideal contaminated by Catholicism, conservatjsm and snobbery.

These are some of the themes which appear in a number of very recent works on the history of the ‘gentleman’: Robin Gilmour’s The idea of the Gentlemrm in the Victorinn Novel; Shirley Robin Letwin’s The Gentlemun in Trollope: Individuality and Mot-u! Conduct; and more generally, Philip Mason’s The English Gentleman: The Rise and Fall ofan Ideal. The materials on which they draw suggest that Mark Girouard does not get very far beneath the surface of the subject, in all its social and psychological complexity. There is not even a reference here to Newman’s immortal definition of a gentleman, in the many shades of his virtues and his deficiencies, and the very abundance of these images points to something deeper than the author ever quite manages to describe. Yet as a gallery of images, the book is a stunner, and is a significant and moving survey of one of the favourite landscapes of the Victorian mind, where a shining knight, moved by a quixotic nobility of spirit, wanders on horseback through a forest glade, seeking damsels to rescue and dragons to destroy.

University of Durham Sheridan Gilley