This is a suggestive, though not conclusive, meditation on the persistent appeal of the life of the English gentry; Buruma is a half-outsider of all sorts, and kindly towards people's comfortable delusions.
He returns often to his own experience of Anglo-ism and Anglomania, which is as full of counterbalances as a crib ornament. He grew up in a quietly snobbish section of The Hague, where all the respectable people imitated out-of-date upper-class Englishisms; but Buruma had grandparents living in a perfect old vicarage in Berkshire; but the grandparents were the children of Jewish immigrants from Germany, and their perfect English life could not be called instinctive, though it was heartfelt. With this opener I was afraid the book would never leave the cosy grounds of reminiscence, as in 's
Oxford philosophy, to be cursory,
Never really leaves the nursery;
All those arguments anent
What Nanny really meant.
Fortunately Buruma has an outward-looking as well as an inward-looking tendency, and can quote a broad range in conditions and eras of people who admired, more or less enviously, some image of the English gentleman. (There are little side-notes on the occasional extension of this to merely British gentlemen, and sometimes even to the health and independence of the English working class, whether yeoman or union; but mostly it's about the English gentleman who can pretend to be of private means.) What's interesting is how various, even contradictory, that image has been; and how various, even contradictory, are the actions one image could inspire. What's funny is how effective the most ersatz versions were, from Queen Victoria's imaginary medieval Highlands to Leslie Howard's screen career.
The shortest summary I can make of Buruma's finding is that the idea of a permeable upper class, in a nation peacefully based on the equality of law, was strong enough to outweigh any evidence that actual England didn't live up to the idea. England symbolizes muddling through, avoiding excesses of principle that would only have to be undone later. This is a common view.
A distinction more particular to Buruma is that England was representative of all the trading cities, especially the ones on the western coast of all of Europe; cosmopolitan, lawful, open cities that had learnt to benefit from social change. The opposing principle was that of the Blood-and-Soil nativism in which all status was inherited.
Now, given even my frivolous dips into English novels of the last three centuries, I think more attention should have been paid to the tension between these ideas in England itself. The Manchester man is not 'the English gentleman'. Buruma's point is probably that Manchester and Country Life co-existed better in England than elsewhere. I think one should check whether the tolerance followed the wealth, rather than generated it. The strongest form of the 'city air makes free' argument is that the tolerance causes the wealth; but one does notice that the Low Countries were for some time noticeably more open than their neighbors, and then rich—so far so good—until conquered by those aristocratic neighbors, including though not mostly England. Having a protective ocean lets a nation feel awfully smug for a while.
I think the smugness is intrinsic to the charm; if one is fantasizing about the perfect life, one might as well dream of being effortlessly at the top of a meritocracy. Many a Victorian three-decker novel is a story of compromise inside the English gentry, the compromise between shutting out meritocracy vs. letting it in. The worse novels, descending to pulp romances. are more about 'effortless winning'; Mary-Sue-ism.
somewhere mentions the final political triumph of a barely-permeable upper class, that it seduces the most competent of the unfortunate away from the interests of their birth-fellows.
ISBN: 0375502068
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