Page:The Poems and Prose remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, volume 1 (1869).djvu/42

26 Decade was held in Balliol Common-room. The subject of debate was—"That the character of a gentleman was in the present day made too much of." To understand the drift of this would require one to know how highly pleasant manners and a good exterior are rated in Oxford at all times, and to understand something of the peculiar mental atmosphere of Oxford at that time. Clough spoke neither for nor against the proposition; but for an hour and a half—well on two hour—she went into the origin of the ideal, historically tracing from mediaeval times how much was implied originally in the notion of a "gentle knight"—truthfulness, consideration for others (even self-sacrifice), courtesy, and the power of giving outward expression to these moral qualities. From this high standard he traced the deterioration into the modern Brummagem pattern which gets the name. These truly gentlemen of old time had invented for themselves a whole economy of manners, which gave true expression to what was really in them, to the ideal in which they lived. These manners, true in them, became false when adopted traditionally and copied from without by modern men placed in quite different circumstances, and living different lives. When the same qualities are in the hearts of men now, as truly as in the best of old time, they will fashion for themselves a new expression, a new economy of manners suitable to their place and time. But many men now, wholly devoid of the inward reality, yet catching at the reputation of it, adopt these old traditional ways of speaking and of bearing themselves, though they express nothing that is really in them.

'One expression I remember he used to illustrate the truth that where the true gentle spirit exists, it will express itself in its own rather than in the traditional way. "I have known peasant men and women in the humblest places, in whom dwelt these qualities as truly as they ever did in the best of lords and ladies, and who had invented for themselves a whole