I can hardly make a legitimate claim to be either, but there was a time when I had aspirations. My present thoughts have been prompted by my reading. Having recently re-read The Dons, by Noel Annan, and just recently finished David Cannadine's Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, I immediately began Philip Mason's The English Gentleman: The Rise and Fall of an Ideal. While contemplating the origins of the type, Mason rehearses one of my favorite old books, Baldesar Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, wherein a bunch of Renaissance Italian nobles (ladies and gentlemen) sit around after dinner discussing the qualities of the perfect courtier. It's one of the places where this notion of the Renaissance man gets established, the man of many parts, and so forth. Of course, he must be of noble birth, a man of arms, an excellent horseman, but also able to talk and dance and write well, both poetry and prose, not to mention play a musical instrument and dabble in the other arts.
Right away I'm at a considerable deficit. I haven't been on a horse since I was ten years old, and while I don't mind guns or hunting, I have no military experience, plus I'm a terrible dancer, just ask my wife. In some of the other respects, though, I could be in the running. Very early on I learned to play a couple of musical instruments, I've always enjoyed drawing and have dabbled with painting, and I've written quite a bit. Naturally enough, or so I would think, I have also sometimes imagined myself a sort of latter day gentleman scholar, though there's not really much call for such creatures in this day and time.
One of the main attractions, or what mainly attracted me, to such a life was the more or less enforced leisure of it. Neither gentlemen nor scholars are inclined to do much in the way of useful work. Well, scholars sometimes teach, although that's generally considered a necessary distraction from the real work of reading and writing and doing research. But gentlemen scholars, in my fantasies anyway, tend to avoid most of the heavy lifting associated with genuine scholarship. What we like to do, if I may be so presumptuous, is dabble. We consider ourselves to be the last amateurs.
So that's me: an amateur dabbler. Over the years I've dabbled a little in art and music and writing. I'm a fair draftsman; I can play the guitar a bit, and I've published both poetry and prose, but only a little. These are the prerequisites of the true amateur. I never stick with any one thing long enough to become expert or (heaven forbid) professional (which would imply remuneration). But I am willing to turn my hand to just about anything. As an amateur sportsman, I can play a little ball (basketball and baseball but not football); I can hunt and fish, although I haven't done either lately; I can swim well enough to avoid drowning and ride a bike at a respectable clip. I'm still a decent hiker, when the mood strikes me, and enjoy a day on the trails.
My original fantasy, from undergraduate years, was always that one day I would be a college professor at a small liberal arts college. But after living the reality for about ten years, I moved to the big city and went to work for the federal government. Now, after more than twenty years in the civil service, my fantasy is to retire from government and spend my declining years honing my skill as a classical guitarist, but only so far as necessary to attain the status of a respectable amateur. Meanwhile, I shall continue to read up on the history of gentlemen scholars; like other extinct species, they present a fascinating field for further study.
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