No Cant in Immanuel

by Theodore Dalrymple (April 2013)

My late friend, the development economist Peter Bauer, had the most beautiful manners: so beautiful that I took them for my model. Alas, I could never equal them for, though not particularly ill-mannered, I have always to remember to behave well. Just as style in prose should be imperceptible, as the uniquely perfect vehicle for what is said and indissoluble therefrom, so manners should be unconscious, not added to conduct but intrinsic to it. They should not arise from reflection but from a habit so deeply ingrained that, however much they might once have been instilled or learned, they are now entirely natural and normal to the person who has them. And since their purpose is to ease social intercourse and make it agreeable, they should not be carried to the point of making anyone uncomfortable, turning them into mere etiquette in order to distinguish those who know how to behave from those who do not.

creatively developed by her follower and disciple, Anthony Blair, and that created the nomenklatura class that was and is largely responsible for the country’s disastrous situation. In retrospect, Mrs Thatcher was just another political figure wrestling unsuccessfully with her country’s inexorable, century-long decline and slide into sub-mediocrity. But one should not blame her too much: no one could have done better and she was, after all, the greatest reformer in Argentinian history.

To my knowledge, Peter Bauer made only one great speech in the House of Lords, remarkable for its power and brevity. A bill had been introduced to allow the prosecution of alleged war criminals who had taken up residence in Britain after the Second World War. Bauer said (and here I quote from memory, which I realise with sorrow is highly fallible):

My Lords, I am of Jewish extraction. Some of my relatives died in Auschwitz. I am opposed to this bill because it is against the Rule of Law.

[of his decline] are too minute and circumstantial, so as to be at one time undignified, and at another unfeeling.

To this he replies:

The essay is profoundly moving and all doctors who have to deal with the old, the decaying and the dying ought to be enjoined to read it. Wasianski describes the night before he died, and it is worth quoting him in extenso:

raised his hand to his lips, until with a rattling sound it was swallowed.

were his last words. It is enough! Sufficit! Mighty and symbolic words.

And here De Quincey adds a beautiful footnote:

those who watch, as did the Greek and the Roman, the deep meanings that oftentimes hide themselves (without design and without consciousness on the part of the utterer) in trivial phrases, this final utterance would have seemed intensely symbolic.

What did he mean by them? That he was sorry to be a nuisance, to be so helpless? Or was he apologising for the fact that, despite his great gifts, he brought nothing but unhappiness to those around him? Was he apologising for my unhappy childhood, in which moments of happiness illuminated the landscape of misery as a flash on lightning illuminates a night-time landscape enshrouded in darkness? I will never know.

apparent incoherence, but with great warmth, and increasing self-possession.

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