Autumn of the Gentleman-Scholar

     There is a cult of change and progress in our society which extends to the scholarship produced in the Anglosphere. In their hurry to disprove our assumptions about everything, the academics of today look back only when there is something to tear down or denounce. Or maybe we look back sometimes if there is some way that modern civilization can be found unsatisfactory by analogy to some ancient and enlightened one (though this is not very common anymore). It is easy to forget that scholarship was once largely the domain of the leisure class; that academics, if they could be called that, were often concerned with the accumulation of knowledge rather than the significance of it; and most of all that scholarly pursuits were a form of pleasure (I cannot write this sentence without reference to Lucille and Buster Bluth's conversation in Arrested Development: Buster — “I'm a scholar. I enjoy scholarly pursuits.” Lucille — “Suddenly playing with yourself is a scholarly pursuit?”).

     These gentleman scholars, to give them a very sentimental and flattering name, still exist, but they are fewer in number. Our current generation may be the last, though maybe the upper classes of tomorrow will follow in their footsteps in some way. Like their predecessors and unlike their peers in academia, these men (for the authors I am talking about just now are all men) concern themselves more with preservation than change or epiphany. And they allow themselves to enjoy their work. It is hard to avoid thinking that their approach to writing is related to their class. Each writes with an ease and familiarity which can only come from security of social place, which in turn is characteristic of the aristocracy. It would be snobbish and unfair to congratulate an author for being born into a situation which allowed him to pursue whatever he wished, but it would be a bit more cynical than I am to deny that there is a certain pleasure in reading something produced for the sheer pleasure of knowledge and of language. John Julius Norwich satisfies the first requirement for gentleman-scholardom. Like most with titles now do, he does not get his out of the closet very often, but he is properly John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich. He is related to William IV.

The great project of Norwich's life has been Venice. He has written several books on the city and its history and has dedicated himself to its preservation. Here he is talking about his acquaintance with Venice and his subsequent infatuation:

     

     Two things are very clear in the video: Norwich writes about Venice because he loves it; and, as a scholar of the old school, he is content with preservation and not driven to revolutionize anything. In this case, it is the quite literal preservation of the city which concerns him. But the nature of his works demonstrates that he is also interested in the preservation of knowledge. All of his books, as history books often do, look backward, but some, such as Great Architecture of the World and Great Cities in History (of which he is editor), reveal another habit of this outgoing class of author: the tendency to catalogue.

     This tendency is pronounced in the work of the Anglo-Irish Thomas Pakenham. Since we are talking about aristocratic authors, it is worth observing that Pakenham is the 8th Earl of Longford and has, as his family home, Tullynally Castle. He is recognized equally as historian and arborist, though history pops up in his work as an arborist more than the other way round. He is an arborist the way Pausanias is a geographer: more of a tour guide than a navigator. His tree books exemplify more his propensity for cataloguing. Almost all of them include the phrase “remarkable trees.” Most of them are not very scientific, but rather kinds of tree versions of Who's-Who. Maybe even tree versions of Debrett's Peerage, since Pakenham seems most interested in the historical pedigree of the trees he finds. Which brings us to another trait which Pakenham shares with Norwich and with the archetype of the old gentleman-scholar: the desire to preserve; the backward-looking reverence for the past. It is not sentimentality of course. That is a much lower emotion. It is fascination, more. Maybe it is even a feeling of necessity. Someone has to write about these trees or else no one will remember.

     It is hard to imagine anyone more different from Pakenham than Nick Foulkes is. Pakenham seems the country naturalist. The sight of his books inspires the image of cloth caps and walking sticks. Foulkes is urbane, dandy, almost brash. The video below is probably the most country Foulkes has ever looked:



     Foulkes is also curiously undocumented. It is not clear from where he sprang. If he is not by the most snobbish standards aristocratic, then he is at least relatively rich and has been educated as many an aristocrat is. More importantly, his writing is chatty, elegant, light and a tiny bit scandalous, just as we all want our aristocrats to be (if we are going to have any, that is). Even more than Pakenham or Norwich, Foulkes seems to write for pleasure, even fun. Foulkes is the world authority on the upper classes — of the past and present — at play. He is a very big fan of spending money. The biography on the sleeve of his books says that he “lives beyond his means,” and he edits the Financial Times' How to Spend It section (do not read it unless you want to feel very populist for a few hours). He is also a bit of a jewelry-lover and made this segment for Van Cleef and Arpels:

   

      Younger than the other two, Foulkes is a more modern version of the gentleman-scholar (though he clearly does not see himself as a gentleman). He is a more capitalist version, less restrained. Perhaps he is the new generation in this tradition. His books can be enjoyable, but does not have the charm of the old guard, the Pakenhams and Norwichs of the world. However you feel about the aristocracy in general, it is hard not to feel a little sentimental about the passing of the gentleman-scholar. It is like getting sentimental when the Italian gangs in your favourite gangster movie put the Irish ones out of business. Not that aristocrats are gangsters. Only, it is okay sometimes to think wistfully of the past, even if change is for the better.