VOLUME XI SLICE V Gassendi, Pierre to Geocentric (continued 10)

Sir George Sitwell gives a lucid explanation of this development, the incidents of which are instructive and occasionally amusing. The immediate cause was the statute I Henry V. cap. v. of 1413, which laid down that in all original writs of action, personal appeals and indictments, in which process of outlawry lies, the “estate degree or mystery” of the defendant must be stated, as well as his present or former domicile. Now the Black Death (1349) had put the traditional social organization out of gear. Before that the younger sons of the nobiles had received their share of the farm stock, bought or hired land, and settled down as agriculturists in their native villages. Under the new conditions this became increasingly impossible, and they were forced to seek their fortunes abroad in the French wars, or at home as hangers-on of the great nobles. These men, under the old system, had no definite status; but they were generosi, men of birth, and, being now forced to describe themselves, they disdained to be classed with franklins (now sinking in the social scale), still more with yeomen or husbandmen; they chose, therefore, to be described as “gentlemen.” On the character of these earliest “gentlemen” the records throw a lurid light. According to Sir George Sitwell (p. 76), “the premier gentleman of England, as the matter now stands, is ‘Robert Erdeswyke of Stafford, gentilman,’” who had served among the men-at-arms of Lord Talbot at Agincourt (ib. note). He is typical of his class. “Fortunately—for the gentle reader will no doubt be anxious to follow in his footsteps—some particulars of his life may be gleaned from the public records. He was charged at the Staffordshire Assizes with housebreaking, wounding with intent to kill, and procuring the murder of one Thomas Page, who was cut to pieces while on his knees begging for his life.” If any earlier claimant to the title of “gentleman” be discovered, Sir George Sitwell predicts that it will be within the same year (1414) and in connexion with some similar disreputable proceedings.3

From these unpromising beginnings the separate order of “gentlemen” was very slowly evolved. The first “gentleman” commemorated on an existing monument was John Daundelyon of Margate (d. c. 1445); the first gentleman to enter the House of Commons, hitherto composed mainly of “valets,” was “William Weston, gentylman”; but even in the latter half of the 15th century the order was not clearly established. As to the connexion of “gentilesse” with the official grant or recognition of coat-armour, that is a profitable fiction invented and upheld by the heralds; for coat-armour was but the badge assumed by gentlemen to distinguish them in battle, and many gentlemen of long descent never had occasion to assume it, and never did. This fiction, however, had its effect; and by the 16th century, as has been already pointed out, the official view had become clearly established that “gentlemen” constituted a distinct order, and that the badge of this distinction was the heralds’ recognition of the right to bear arms. It is unfortunate that this view, which is quite unhistorical and contradicted by the present practice of many undoubtedly “gentle” families of long descent, has of late years been given a wide currency in popular manuals of heraldry.

In this narrow sense, however, the word “gentleman” has long since become obsolete. The idea of “gentry” in the continental sense of noblesse is extinct in England, and is likely to remain so, in spite of the efforts of certain enthusiasts to revive it (see A.C. Fox-Davies, Armorial Families, Edinburgh, 1895). That it once existed has been sufficiently shown; but the whole spirit and tendency of English constitutional and social development tended to its early destruction. The comparative good order of England was not favourable to the continuance of a class, developed during the foreign and civil wars of the 14th and 15th centuries, for whom fighting was the sole honourable occupation. The younger sons of noble families became apprentices in the cities, and there grew up a new aristocracy of trade. Merchants are still “citizens” to William Harrison; but he adds “they often change estate with gentlemen, as gentlemen do with them, by a mutual conversion of the one into the other.” A frontier line between classes so indefinite could not be maintained, especially as in England there was never a “nobiliary prefix” to stamp a person as a gentleman by his surname, as in France or Germany.4 The process was hastened, moreover, by the corruption of the Heralds’ College and by the ease with which coats of arms could be assumed without a shadow of claim; which tended to bring the “science of armory” into contempt. The word “gentleman” as an index of rank had already become of doubtful value before the great political and social changes of the 19th century gave to it a wider and essentially higher significance. The change is well illustrated in the definitions given in the successive editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In the 5th edition (1815) “a gentleman is one, who without any title, bears a coat of arms, or whose ancestors have been freemen.” In the 7th edition (1845) it still implies a definite social status: “All above the rank of yeomen.” In the 8th edition (1856) this is still its “most extended sense”; “in a more limited sense” it is defined in the same words as those quoted above from the 5th edition; but the writer adds, “By courtesy this title is generally accorded to all persons above the rank of common tradesmen when their manners are indicative of a certain amount of refinement and intelligence.” The Reform Bill of 1832 has done its work; the “middle classes” have come into their own; and the word “gentleman” has come in common use to signify not a distinction of blood, but a distinction of position, education and manners. The test is no longer good birth, or the right to bear arms, but the capacity to mingle on equal terms in good society. In its best use, moreover, “gentleman” involves a certain superior standard of conduct, due, to quote the 8th edition once more, to “that self-respect and intellectual refinement which manifest themselves in unrestrained yet delicate manners.” The word “gentle,” originally implying a certain social status, had very early come to be associated with the standard of manners expected from that status. Thus by a sort of punning process the “gentleman” becomes a “gentle-man.” Chaucer in the Meliboeus (c. 1386) says: “Certes he sholde not be called a gentil man, that ... ne dooth his diligence and bisynesse, to kepen his good name”; and in the Wife of Bath’s Tale:

“Loke who that is most vertuous alway Prive and apert, and most entendeth ay To do the gentil dedes that he can And take him for the gretest gentilman,”

and In the Romance of the Rose (c. 1400) we find “he is gentil bycause he doth as longeth to a gentilman.” This use develops through the centuries, until in 1714 we have Steele, in the Tatler (No. 207), laying down that “the appellation of Gentleman is never to be affixed to a man’s circumstances, but to his Behaviour in them,” a limitation over-narrow even for the present day. In this connexion, too, may be quoted the old story, told by some—very improbably—of James II., of the monarch who replied to a lady petitioning him to make her son a gentleman, “I could make him a nobleman, but God Almighty could not make him a gentleman.” Selden, however, in referring to similar stories “that no Charter can make a Gentleman, which is cited as out of the mouth of some great Princes that have said it,” adds that “they without question understood Gentleman for Generosus in the antient sense, or as if it came from Gentilis in that sense, as Gentilis denotes one of a noble Family, or indeed for a Gentleman by birth.” For “no creation could make a man of another blood than he is.” The word “gentleman,” used in the wide sense with which birth and circumstances have nothing to do, is necessarily incapable of strict definition. For “to behave like a gentleman” may mean little or much, according to the person by whom the phrase is used; “to spend money like a gentleman” may even be no great praise; but “to conduct a business like a gentleman” implies a standard at least as high as that involved in the phrase “noblesse oblige.” In this sense of a person of culture, character and good manners the word “gentleman” has supplied a gap in more than one foreign language.

The evolution of this meaning of “gentleman” reflects very accurately that of English society; and there are not wanting signs that the process of evolution, in the one as in the other, is not complete. The indefinableness of the word mirrors the indefinite character of “society” in England; and the use by “the masses” of “gentleman” as a mere synonym for “man” has spread pari passu with the growth of democracy. It is a protest against implied inferiority, and is cherished as the modern French bourgeois cherishes his right of duelling with swords, under the ancien régime a prerogative of the noblesse. Nor is there much justification for the denunciation by purists of the “vulgarization” and “abuse” of the “grand old name of gentleman.” Its strict meaning has now fallen completely obsolete. Its current meaning varies with every class of society that uses it. But it always implies some sort of excellency of manners or morals. It may by courtesy be over-loosely applied by one common man to another; but the common man would understand the reproach conveyed in “You’re no gentleman.”

Authorities.—Selden, Titles of Honor (London, 1672); William Harrison, Description of England, ed. G.F.J. Furnivall for the New Shakspere Soc. (London, 1877-1878); Sir George Sitwell, “The English Gentleman,” in the Ancestor, No. 1 (Westminster, April 1902); Peacham’s Compleat Gentleman (1634), with an introduction by G.S. Gordon (Oxford, 1906); A. Smythe-Palmer, D.D., The Ideal of a Gentleman, or a Mirror for Gentlefolk: A Portrayal in Literature from the Earliest Times (London, 1908), a very exhaustive collection of extracts from authors so wide apart as Ptah-hotep (3300 B.C.) and William Watson, arranged under headings: “The Historical Idea of a Gentleman,” “The Herald’s Gentleman,” “The Poet’s Gentleman,” &c.

(W. A. P.)

1 Description of England, bk. ii. ch. v. p. 128. Henry Peacham, in his Compleat Gentleman (1634), takes this matter more seriously. “Neither must we honour or esteem,” he writes, “those ennobled, or made gentle in blood, who by mechanic and base means have raked up a mass of wealth ... or have purchased an ill coat (of arms) at a good rate; no more than a player upon the stage, for wearing a lord’s cast suit: since nobility hangeth not upon the airy esteem of vulgar opinion, but is indeed of itself essential and absolute” (Reprint, p. 3). Elsewhere (p. 161) he deplores the abuse of heraldry, which had even in his day produced “all the world over such a medley of coats” that, but for the commendable activity of the earls marshals, he feared that yeomen would soon be “as rare in England as they are in France.” See also an amusing instance from the time of Henry VIII., given in “The Gentility of Richard Barker,” by Oswald Barron, in the Ancestor, vol. ii. (July 1902).

2 Even this classification would seem to need modifying. For certain of the great patrician families of the cities were certainly nobiles.

3 The designation “gentilman” is, indeed, found some two centuries earlier. In the Inquisitio maneriorum Ecclesiae S. Pauli Londin. of A.D. 1222 (W.A. Hale, Domesday of St Paul’s, Camden Soc., 1858, p. 80) occurs the entry: Adam gentilmā diḿ acrā, p’ iii. d. This is probably the earliest record of the “grand old name of gentleman”; but Adam, who held half an acre at a rent of three pence—less by half than that held by “Ralph the bondsman” (Rad’ le bunde) in the same list—was certainly not a “gentleman.” “Gentilman” here was a nickname, perhaps suggested by Adam’s name, and thus in some sort anticipating the wit of the famous couplet repeated by John Ball’s rebels.

4 The prefix “de” attached to some English names is in no sense “nobiliary.” In Latin documents de was the equivalent of the English “of,” as de la of “at” (so de la Pole for Atte Poole, cf. such names as Attwood, Attwater). In English this “of” was in the 15th century dropped; e.g. the grandson of Johannes de Stoke (John of Stoke) in a 14th-century document becomes John Stoke. In modern times, under the influence of romanticism, the prefix “de” has been in some cases “revived” under a misconception, e.g. “de Trafford,” “de Hoghton.” Very rarely it is correctly retained as derived from a foreign place-name, e.g. de Grey.

GENTZ, FRIEDRICH VON (1764-1832), German publicist and statesman, was born at Breslau on the 2nd of May 1764. His father was an official, his mother an Ancillon, distantly related to the Prussian minister of that name. On his father’s transference to Berlin, as director of the mint, the boy was sent to the Joachimsthal gymnasium there; his brilliant talents, however, did not develop until later, when at the university of Königsberg he fell under the influence of Kant. But though his intellect was sharpened and his zeal for learning quickened by the great thinker’s influence, Kant’s “categorical imperative” did not prevent him from yielding to the taste for wine, women and high play which pursued him through life. When in 1785 he returned to Berlin, he received the appointment of secret secretary to the royal Generaldirectorium, his talents soon gaining him promotion to the rank of councillor for war (Kriegsrath). During an illness, which kept him virtuous by confining him to his room, he studied French and English, gaining a mastery of these languages which, at that time exceedingly rare, opened up for him opportunities for a diplomatic career.

His interest in public affairs was, however, first aroused by the outbreak of the French Revolution. Like most quick-witted young men, he greeted this at first with enthusiasm; but its subsequent developments cooled his ardour and he was converted to more conservative counsels by Burke’s Essay on the French Revolution, a translation of which into German (1794) was his first literary venture. This was followed, next year, by translations of works on the Revolution by Mallet du Pan and Mounier, and at this time he also founded and edited a monthly journal, the Neue deutsche Monatsschrift, in which for five years he wrote, mainly on historical and political questions, maintaining the principles of British constitutionalism against those of revolutionary France. The knowledge he displayed of the principles and practice of finance was especially remarkable. In 1797, at the instance of English statesmen, he published a translation of a history of French finance by François d’Ivernois (1757-1842), an eminent Genevese exile naturalized and knighted in England, extracts from which he had previously given in his journal. His literary output at this time, all inspired by a moderate Liberalism, was astounding, and included an essay on the results of the discovery of America, and another, written in French, on the English financial system (Essai sur l’état de l’administration des finances de la Grande-Bretagne, London, 1800). Especially noteworthy, however, was the Denkschrift or Missive addressed by him to King Frederick William III. on his accession (1797), in which, inter alia, he urged upon the king the necessity for granting freedom to the press and to commerce. For a Prussian official to venture to give uncalled-for advice to his sovereign was a breach of propriety not calculated to increase his chances of favour; but it gave Gentz a conspicuous position in the public eye, which his brilliant talents and literary style enabled him to maintain. Moreover, he was from the first aware of the probable developments of the Revolution and of the consequences to Prussia of the weakness and vacillations of her policy. Opposition to France was the inspiring principle of the Historisches Journal founded by him in 1799-1800, which once more held up English institutions as the model, and became in Germany the mouthpiece of British policy towards the revolutionary aggressions of the French republic. In 1801 he ceased the publication of the Journal, because he disliked the regularity of journalism, and issued instead, under the title Beiträge zur Geschichte, &c., a series of essays on contemporary politics. The first of these was Über den Ursprung und Charakter des Krieges gegen die französische Revolution (1801), by many regarded as Gentz’s masterpiece; another important brochure, Von dem politischen Zustande von Europa vor und nach der Revolution, a criticism of Hauterive’s De l’état de la France à la fin de l’an VIII, appeared the same year.

This activity gained him recognition abroad and gifts of money from the British and Austrian governments; but it made his position as an official in Berlin impossible, for the Prussian government had no mind to abandon its attitude of cautious neutrality. Private affairs also combined to urge Gentz to leave the Prussian service; for, mainly through his own fault, a separation with his wife was arranged. In May 1802, accordingly, he took leave of his wife and left with his friend Adam Müller for Vienna. In Berlin he had been intimate with the Austrian ambassador, Count Stadion, whose good offices procured him an introduction to the emperor Francis. The immediate result was the title of imperial councillor, with a yearly salary of 4000 gulden (December 6th, 1802); but it was not till 1809 that he was actively employed. Before returning to Berlin to make arrangements for transferring himself finally to Vienna, Gentz paid a visit to London, where he made the acquaintance of Pitt and Granville, who were so impressed with his talents that, in addition to large money presents, he was guaranteed an annual pension by the British government in recognition of the value of the services of his pen against Bonaparte. From this time forward he was engaged in a ceaseless polemic against every fresh advance of the Napoleonic power and pretensions; with matchless sarcasm he lashed “the nerveless policy of the courts, which suffer indignity with resignation”; he denounced the recognition of Napoleon’s imperial title, and drew up a manifesto of Louis XVIII. against it. The formation of the coalition and the outbreak of war for a while raised his hopes, in spite of his lively distrust of the competence of Austrian ministers; but the hopes were speedily dashed by Austerlitz and its results. Gentz used his enforced leisure to write a brilliant essay on “The relations between England and Spain before the outbreak of war between the two powers” (Leipzig, 1806); and shortly afterwards appeared Fragmente aus der neuesten Geschichte des politischen Gleichgewichts in Europa (translated s.t. Fragments on the Balance of Power in Europe, London, 1806). This latter, the last of Gentz’s works as an independent publicist, was a masterly exposé of the actual political situation, and at the same time prophetic in its suggestions as to how this should be retrieved: “Through Germany Europe has perished, through Germany it must rise again.” He realized that the dominance of France could only be broken by the union of Austria and Prussia, acting in concert with Great Britain. He watched with interest the Prussian military preparations, and, at the invitation of Count Haugwitz, he went at the outset of the campaign to the Prussian headquarters at Erfurt, where he drafted the king’s proclamation and his letter to Napoleon. The writer was known, and it was in this connexion that Napoleon referred to him as “a wretched scribe named Gentz, one of those men without honour who sell themselves for money.” In this mission Gentz had no official mandate from the Austrian government, and whatever hopes he may have cherished of privately influencing the situation in the direction of an alliance between the two German powers were speedily dashed by the campaign of Jena.

The downfall of Prussia left Austria the sole hope of Germany and of Europe. Gentz, who from the winter of 1806 onwards divided his time between Prague and the Bohemian watering-places, seemed to devote himself wholly to the pleasures of society, his fascinating personality gaining him a ready reception in those exalted circles which were to prove of use to him later on in Vienna. But, though he published nothing, his pen was not idle, and he was occupied with a series of essays on the future of Austria and the best means of liberating Germany and redressing the balance of Europe; though he himself confessed to his friend Adam Müller (August 4th, 1806) that, in the miserable circumstances of the time, his essay on “the principles of a general pacification” must be taken as a “political poem.”

In 1809, on the outbreak of war between Austria and France, Gentz was for the first time actively employed by the Austrian government under Stadion; he drafted the proclamation announcing the declaration of war (15th of April), and during the continuance of hostilities his pen was ceaselessly employed. But the peace of 1810 and the fall of Stadion once more dashed his hopes, and, disillusioned and “hellishly blasé,” he once more retired to comparative inactivity at Prague. Of Metternich, Stadion’s successor, he had at the outset no high opinion, and it was not till 1812 that there sprang up between the two men the close relations that were to ripen into life-long friendship. But when Gentz returned to Vienna as Metternich’s adviser and henchman, he was no longer the fiery patriot who had sympathized and corresponded with Stein in the darkest days of German depression and in fiery periods called upon all Europe to free itself from foreign rule. Disillusioned and cynical, though clear-sighted as ever, he was henceforth before all things an Austrian, more Austrian on occasion even than Metternich; as, e.g., when, during the final stages of the campaign of 1814, he expressed the hope that Metternich would substitute “Austria” for “Europe” in his diplomacy and—strange advice from the old hater of Napoleon and of France—secure an Austro-French alliance by maintaining the husband of Marie Louise on the throne of France.

For ten years, from 1812 onward, Gentz was in closest touch with all the great affairs of European history, the assistant, confidant, and adviser of Metternich. He accompanied the chancellor on all his journeys; was present at all the conferences that preceded and followed the war; no political secrets were hidden from him; and his hand drafted all important diplomatic documents. He was secretary to the congress of Vienna (1814-1815) and to all the congresses and conferences that followed, up to that of Verona (1822), and in all his vast knowledge of men and affairs made him a power. He was under no illusion as to their achievements; his memoir on the work of the congress of Vienna is at once an incisive piece of criticism and a monument of his own disillusionment. But the Liberalism of his early years was gone for ever, and he had become reconciled to Metternich’s view that, in an age of decay, the sole function of a statesman was to “prop up mouldering institutions.” It was the hand of the author of that offensive Missive to Frederick William III., on the liberty of the press, that drafted the Carlsbad decrees; it was he who inspired the policy of repressing the freedom of the universities; and he noted in his diary as “a day more important than that of Leipzig” the session of the Vienna conference of 1819, in which it was decided to make the convocation of representative assemblies in the German states impossible, by enforcing the letter of Article XIII. of the Act of Confederation.

As to Gentz’s private life there is not much to be said. He remained to the last a man of the world, though tormented with an exaggerated terror of death. His wife he had never seen again since their parting at Berlin, and his relations with other women, mostly of the highest rank, were too numerous to record. But passion tormented him to the end, and his infatuation for Fanny Elssler, the celebrated danseuse, forms the subject of some remarkable letters to his friend Rahel, the wife of Varnhagen von Ense (1830-1831). He died on the 9th of June 1832.

Gentz has been very aptly described as a mercenary of the pen, and assuredly no other such mercenary has ever carved out for himself a more remarkable career. To have done so would have been impossible, in spite of his brilliant gifts, had he been no more than the “wretched scribe” sneered at by Napoleon. Though by birth belonging to the middle class in a country of hide-bound aristocracy, he lived to move on equal terms in the society of princes and statesmen; which would never have been the case had he been notoriously “bought and sold.” Yet that he was in the habit of receiving gifts from all and sundry who hoped for his backing is beyond dispute. He notes that at the congress of Vienna he received 22,000 florins through Talleyrand from Louis XVIII., while Castlereagh gave him £600, accompanied by les plus folles promesses; and his diary is full of such entries. Yet he never made any secret of these gifts; Metternich was aware of them, and he never suspected Gentz of writing or acting in consequence against his convictions. As a matter of fact, no man was more free or outspoken in his criticism of the policy of his employers than this apparently venal writer. These gifts and pensions were rather in the nature of subsidies than bribes; they were the recognition by various powers of the value of an ally whose pen had proved itself so potent a weapon in their cause.

It is, indeed, the very impartiality and objectivity of his attitude that make the writings of Gentz such illuminating documents for the period of history which they cover. Allowance must of course be made for his point of view, but less so perhaps than in the case of any other writer so intimately concerned with the policies which he criticizes. And, apart from their value as historical documents, Gentz’s writings are literary monuments, classical examples of nervous and luminous German prose, or of French which is a model for diplomatic style.

A selection of Gentz’s works (Ausgewählte Schriften) was published by Weick in 5 vols. (1836-1838); his lesser works (Mannheim, 1838-1840) in 5 vols. and Mémoires et lettres inédites (Stuttgart, 1841) were edited by G. Schlesier. Subsequently there have appeared Briefe an Chr. Garve (Breslau, 1857); correspondence (Briefwechsel) with Adam Müller (Stuttgart, 1857); Briefe an Pilat (2 vols., Leipzig, 1868); Aus dem Nachlass Friedrichs von Gentz (2 vols.), edited by Count Anton Prokesch-Osten (Vienna, 1867); Aus der alten Registratur der Staats-Kanzlei: Briefe politischen Inhalts von und an Friedrich von Gentz, edited by C. von Klinkowström (Vienna, 1870); Dépêches inédites du chev. de Gentz aux Hospodars de Valachie 1813-1828 (a correspondence on current affairs commissioned by the Austrian government), edited by Count Anton von Prokesch-Osten the younger (3 vols., Paris, 1876), incomplete, but partly supplemented in Österreichs Teilnahme an den Befreiungskriegen (Vienna, 1887), a collection of documents of the greatest value; Zur Geschichte der orientalischen Frage: Briefe aus dem Nachlass Friedrichs von Gentz (Vienna, 1877), edited by Count Prokesch-Osten the younger. Finally Gentz’s diaries, from 1800 to 1828, an invaluable mine of authentic material, were edited by Varnhagen von Ense and published after his death under the title Tagebücher, &c. (Leipzig, 1861; new ed., 4 vols., ib. 1873). Several lives of Gentz exist. The latest is by E. Guglia, Friedrich von Gentz (Vienna, 1901).

(W. A. P.)

GEOCENTRIC, referred to the centre of the earth (Gr. γῆ) as an origin; a term designating especially the co-ordinates of a heavenly body referred to this origin.