Sad Princesses; Lieberman the Fraud; The Gentlemanly Code

Classicus Feature Gentlemanly Ideas Surtees says, "The one infallible rule is that anyone who talks about being a gentleman never is one." That's Robert Smith Surtees, who died in 1864, not his descendant William J.C. Surtees (born 1947), the world's rackets champion. Historically, in England, a gentleman has been a man entitled to bear arms, but not of the nobility?hence, says Brewer's Dictionary, "One of gentle birth, of some position in society, and with manners, bearing, and behavior appropriate to one in such a position." Is it the top drawer or not? Well, that's precisely the point. As has been written, "The King, who has powers to make Esquires, Knights, Baronets, Barons, Viscounts, Earls, Marquesses, and Dukes, cannot make a gentleman, for Gentilitie is a matter of race and blood, and of descent..." So a gentleman is not near the top in rank, but he is somehow finer in other terms. He has a code.

There is a story that illustrates the point. Supposedly a member posted a notice in White's Club, London, saying, "Would the peer who stole my umbrella please return it." When asked how he knew it was a nobleman who had pinched his brolly, the member replied that no gentleman would take another man's umbrella.

"Gentle" does not mean a spoiled, easy or luxurious upbringing (the reverse is more often the case). It comes from the Latin gentilis, belonging to the same gens, race or family, and came in the Romance tongues to mean "belonging to a good family." In other words, a gentleman is born, not made.

Simon Raven wrote The English Gentleman (1961) despite his having been expelled from Charterhouse for homosexuality, having left Cambridge University owing debts and having resigned his commission in the King's Shropshire Light Infantry just before being presented with a writ from his unpaid bookmaker. He knows whereof he speaks because he traveled in gentlemanly company: "I myself am not a gentleman. This defect [his dishonorable behavior] would not necessarily disqualify me from being 'upper class,' but it does mean that I cannot be a gentleman, which is a very different thing."

A very different thing indeed. Class comes from the Latin classis, the first use of which was in the 6th century BC Servian Constitution of Rome composed by King Servius Tullius. Ironically, in terms of our theme, the constitution assigned to property the influence in the state that had previously belonged to birth exclusively. Servius, who was reputed to be lowborn, the son of a household slave, instituted the first census (every five years) and divided the whole of the Roman people into classes based on their wealth. The highest class was termed Classicus and, according to Livy, required, remarkably, a minimum ownership of 100,000 asses. How much could an ass have been worth?$10, $100? How many assherders would one require? Any way you look at it, these folk had asses up the wazoo.

The Surtees family is a splendid example of the ancient gentlemanly type. In fact, the first recorded use of the title "gentleman" as appended to a man's name, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is attributed to a very early Surtees who compiled the Newminster Cartularly, 1425. This discovery we owe to the Robert Surtees Society, which is devoted to the memory of Robert Smith Surtees, whom we quoted in our opening. He created John Jorrocks, the Cockney grocer besotted with fox-hunting, in sketches beginning in 1831 in the New Sporting Magazine. They were immediately highly popular in this period between the swellish, aristocratic English Regency and the later, more circumspect and conventional early Victorian age. It has been written that Jorrocks gave someone the idea that blossomed into the Pickwick Papers (1836-'37).

The pundits have dealt cruelly with Surtees: "Dickens and horsedung," says a Kipling character. But a minority opinion holds that Surtees' Falstaffian Jorrocks is a match for the eponymous original. Cyril Ray, the English critic, writes that in the richness of his detail of the clothes, transport, food, furniture and fun enjoyed in England in the period, Surtees is the "best guide of all"?better than Austen, Dickens, Disraeli, Meredith, Peacock or Trollope. He says you could describe Dickens as "Surtees and saccharine." Paul Johnson in The Spectator recently compared Surtees with Dickens, so a revival may be at hand.

R.S. Surtees' nephew to the power of several "greats," William Surtees, was on and off for several years in the 1970s world's champion of the esoteric, dangerous and arguably most gentlemanly of all games?rackets. As the first world champion claimed the title in 1820, rackets is one of the few pastimes from the R.S. Surtees era, unlike bearbaiting, cockfighting, bare-knuckle fighting and drawing the badger, that is still legal. The game is played in a black court, in which you could fit three of the modern squash variety, with a hard white ball that the aces smack at speeds measured up to 160 mph. Being struck by it produces serious injury. Very few can play the game that is limited to some English boarding schools and a handful of private clubs. It's dangerous, difficult and expensive. Surtees says that the game is not dangerous?because it's so dangerous, one takes special care not to injure one's opponent. There's a code.

Taki LE MAÎTRE Sad Princesses She was the most beautiful princess of them all and was on holiday abroad; the driver lost control of the automobile and there was the most terrible crash. She was killed. The world truly mourned. An August outing turned into a Greek tragedy. I am, of course, referring to the death of Queen Astrid of Belgium 65 years ago. The driver was her husband, King Leopold of Belgium, and the place was Lake Lucerne, Switzerland. Astrid was 29 years old when the car fell into a lake. A mother of three, she had been queen only a year. I write this on my birthday?August 11?and by the time I was three, and she had been dead for four years, my parents were still talking about her tragic death. Princess Diana, although not forgotten, is no longer a subject for conversation. People stopped talking about Astrid only when total war broke out.

Princess Astrid was born in Stockholm in 1905 and was the niece of the King of Sweden. Hers was the kind of beauty that tortures the souls of poets. She had dark hair and soulful looks and a perfect figure. She was a devoted mother who would serve her children and husband herself and shoo away the servants. She worked tirelessly for charitable institutions and was by far the most loved and adored royal of Europe. There was hardly a smile in Belgium for weeks after her death. To this day, whenever her name comes up, people of my generation comment on the unfairness of it all. King Leopold escaped with minor injuries. His heart died with her, went the popular saying.

Compare Astrid's death with that of Diana's and the latter's seems lewd by comparison. Astrid went driving in a small two-seater car with her husband toward a mountain they were going to climb that brilliant August morning. Diana went into a tunnel at midnight driven by a drunk, in the company of a playboy who may or may not have been her lover.

Astrid and Diana died in automobile accidents, whereas the biggest drama queen of them all, Empress Elizabeth of Austria, was murdered by a wayward anarchist while peacefully walking by Lake Geneva in 1898. "Sisi," as she was called, was the daughter of Duke Max of Bayern. She had married the last Austro-Hungarian monarch, Emperor Franz-Joseph, when she was 16. Among her children was Crown Prince Rudolph, of Mayerling infamy (the hunting lodge in which he and his mistress, Maria Vetsera, committed double suicide).

Sisi's life was straight out of a romantic potboiler. She was crowned Queen of Hungary; escaped to Achilleion, a beautiful villa in Corfu; and saw her cousin, King Ludwig of Bavaria (the one who built all those cream-cake-looking castles) go slowly mad until his early death. Her death was made the more poignant by her continuing on for 50 yards, unaware that she had been fatally stabbed.

Hollywood has been kind to princesses dying young. Sisi was played by that quattrocento beauty Romy Schneider, a fellow Austrian, in numerous films of the 50s. Ironically, Romy Schneider herself saw her son's tragic death at age 14, and she took her own life as a result. Talk about life imitating art. Catherine Deneuve played Maria Vetsera, while Helmut Berger portrayed mad King Ludwig in a memorable Luchino Visconti film. Diana's death has been exploited by a couple of cheapos, with plebeian blondes making fools of themselves trying to speak like Di. No one has tried to exploit Queen Astrid's death. The Belgians and Swedes would simply not put up with it. My favorite queen, Marie Antoinette, was portrayed by Norma Shearer in a 1930s movie, with Tyrone Power playing Count Axel von Fersen, her Swedish admirer.

There is a new book, Marie Antoinette, The Last Queen of France, by the distinguished French historian Evelyne Lever, (Farrar Straus & Giroux) that has received wonderful reviews. Marie Antoinette is a much maligned figure. She was an Austrian princess who became Queen of France and did absolutely none of the things she was accused of. Political bias had all to do with it. Although she defied court etiquette by hugging, a la Diana, those she loved, she also snubbed those who were forever plotting against her. Again, just like Diana. She was only a child, 14 years old, when she arrived in Versailles, where intrigue and plots were de rigueur. She was almost illiterate, just a sweet and uncomplicated girl brought up in a court that was simple and dull. Her martyrdom at the hands of a frenzied mob of cutthroats was indicative of her upper-class education. She showed great fortitude while suffering dreadfully when her son was literally torn from her arms. Her husband?whom she never betrayed?had been guillotined nine months earlier. She bore it all with great stoicism. From her tiny prison cell, she could at times catch a glimpse of the little boy where he was incarcerated with a particular brute of a jailer who forced the boy to curse her.

She was 37 when she died at the guillotine, showing elegance and gallantry until the end. She never said, "Let them eat cake," and I only wish she had. The mob?any mob?deserves nothing but scorn, and if I were in her place I would have urged them to eat s?t.

There is something terribly sad and romantic about princesses and queens dying young. In their infinite wisdom, the ancient Greeks believed that those whom the gods adored had their bodies taken up to Olympus to life everlasting. All I can say is, what happened to women like Astrid, Sisi, Marie Antoinette, even Diana? How is it possible that now we have to deal with Hillary Clinton? Whatever happened to gentleness, tenderness and kindness? Whatever happened to sensitivity? Finally, whatever happened to shame?

George Szamuely The Bunker The Good Lieberman Two weeks ago in these pages, I wrote a column entitled "W's Oil Warriors." I pointed to the intimate connection among George W. Bush's advisers, the oil industry and the push to build an oil pipeline from the Caspian to the Mediterranean. Taki, who has made no secret of his wish to see George W. elected in November, was not pleased. He told me he did not want to spend money helping to secure a Gore victory. I pointed out that journalistic credibility demands one should attack without fear or favor. It is no good criticizing the Clintons if one then keeps silent when the Republicans behave badly. This is what distinguishes a journalist from a hack: an Alex Cockburn from a David Corn; a Mickey Kaus from a Joe Conason. As a matter of fact, there are very few genuine journalists around. We are overwhelmed by hacks?all agendas and double standards. Amid the flurry of stories a few weeks ago about George W. and the death penalty, how many bothered to point out that the Clintons and Gore all support capital punishment? The nation's prison population stands at two million. Yet if you just went by the papers, you would assume they were all housed in Texas.

Income inequality has been growing at a steady clip during the Clinton years. Yet reporters choose to write only about the meaningless GDP growth rate. There are a record number of people without health insurance today. Yet this issue, which seemed so urgent in the latter years of George H.W. Bush's administration, is now of only minor concern. At the recent Camp David summit, the United States pretty much adopted Israel's policy as its own. Yet the media parrots the line that it was the Palestinians who had been obdurate.

Few have benefited so handsomely from such double standards as Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Last week we heard ad nauseam about his moral uprightness, his devoutness, his bipartisanship, his moderation and his thoughtfulness. Yet a Republican with his sorry record on civil liberties would have been roasted alive. Lieberman is supposedly much exercised over the terrible temptations afflicting America's youth. However, this did not stop him from sponsoring legislation last year to fund and arm the Kosovo Liberation Army?an "army" in name only, and more concerned with drug trafficking and racketeering than "liberation." Protecting children from drugs all of a sudden lost its urgency. At the height of the U.S. onslaught on Yugoslavia Lieberman popped up on NBC's Meet the Press to declare: "I hope the air campaign, even if it does not convince Milosevic to order his troops out of Kosovo, will so devastate his economy, which it's doing now, so ruin the lives of his people, that they will rise up and throw him out." So here was this model of rectitude, this living reproach to all partisanship, demanding that the United States commit a war crime.

Lieberman's specialty is censorship, longing for which is deemed reprehensible when it is Republican, but evidence of seriousness and high moral purpose when Democratic. For years, Lieberman has waged war on the entertainment industry. He championed the V-chip. He wants to slap a label on anything he finds offensive. He is cosponsor of the Media Violence Labeling Act of 2000, which would impose a single national rating system on videogames and movies.

And he has not been above shamelessly exploiting tragedy for his own ends. Following the Columbine school shooting last year?and without any evidence?he blamed what happened on Hollywood. "None of us wants to resort to regulation," he declared. This is standard throat-clearing. It invariably precedes the announcement of regulations. "But if the entertainment industry...continues to market death and degradation to our children, and continues to pay no heed to the real bloodshed staining our communities, then the government will act."

Lieberman is a great one for "acting." A couple of months ago, he served notice that his next target was the Internet. He told the Children's Online Protection Act Commission that the U.S. government should consider creating a new top-level domain such as ".sex" or ".xxx." "This idea," he explained, would "establish a virtual red-light district" to which just about anything he finds distasteful would be shunted off. Like all censors, his professed desire is to "shield children from pornography... [W]e cannot afford to do nothing," he wailed in his usual stentorian voice, "to continue tolerating the intolerable, to continue dumping the burden solely on parents and abdicating any larger societal role in protecting our children." Lieberman concluded with the menacing suggestion that unless the Internet industries started to censor themselves, Congress would have to step in and get the job done. Piously, and insincerely, he denies any intent to "criminalize speech."

Last November Lieberman and Tennessee Republican Fred Thompson introduced the Government Information Security Act, a bill supposedly meant to protect federal government information systems from the latest scare?cyberattack. "The government's computer-reliant infrastructure," he explained, "is frighteningly vulnerable to exploitation not only by troublemakers and professional hackers but by organized crime and international terrorists." Yet the only cyberattack so far has come from the government, when the office of the drug czar took to tracking visitors to its website.

Who cares? Joe Lieberman will continue to suppress free speech undisturbed. And Frank Rich will continue to chill us with tales of the doings of Jesse Helms and Jerry Falwell.