Lord Balfour had an original view of the gentleman- concept,
with which he would toy occasionally, not so much as a considered theory, but as a theme for conversation. According to him the ideal gentleman was a pathetic fallacy on the part of the middle classes. The aristocrats of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not, according to his paradox, gentlemen at all. They were rude and ostentatious ; they were dishonourable and noisy ; they were arrogant and ill-kempt ; they were unkind to children and cruel to animals and women ; they burst into tears at the slightest provocation and they spewed upon the dining-room carpet. The gentleman concept, according to his theory, was the invention of Thomas Arnold. This headmaster of Rugby was anxious to train the sons of the industrial revolution to become little patterns of nobility. Yet he mistook for the patrician manner that tone of reserved imper- turbability which the patricians adopted towards his own class. Arnold's father was a customs officer and it is quite probable that, in his presence, the Lords of England neither boozed nor blubbed. Yet such was the force of Arnold's faith in his own fallacy that he was able to impose it upon his own and subsequent generations. " In this manner," Lord Balfour would remark, " the aristocratic principle in England was fortunately stilled."
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