Servants, masters, and the art of bantering.

• Author: Grenier, Richard

ARISTOTLE, IN HIS Politics, mounts a spirited defense of slavery. "For that some should rule, and others be ruled, is a thing not only necessary but expedient, for from the hour of their birth some are marked for subjection, others for rule." This duality originates "in the constitution of the universe." With qualms regarding only noblemen and free men reduced to slavery after capture in battle, Aristotle insists that the lower sorts of human being "are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master." He adds matter-of-factly that, unsuited as they are for political life as well as for the arts of both war and peace, "the use made of slaves and of tame animals is not very different."

A Booker Prize winning novel, The Remains of the Day, and now an extremely accomplished motion picture with the same title, have arisen to contest vigorously this, in the modern age, not very fashionable Aristotelian doctrine. Set as are both novel and film in one of the great houses of England in the 1920s and 1930s, with what Hollywood calls the "frame story" taking place in the postwar 1950s, both works focus not on slavery as such, of course, but on the servant class, and above all on that pinnacle of servanthood, the supreme servitor, the perfect English butler. Although a man of considerable skills and intelligence, Mr. Stevens, our butler (played marvelously in the film by Anthony Hopkins), takes great pride in not being his own man, but entirely the man of his employer, Lord Darlington (James Fox). Except for matters of a subsidiary housekeeping nature, Stevens firmly suppresses all his own opinions and thoughts and even feelings, certainly on the great events sweeping over Europe in the period leading up to the Second World War, events in which his employer, Lord Darlington, is in fact actively engaged. For Stevens's sole goal, his raison d'etre, on which is based his entire self-esteem, is to be the perfect butler. He firmly suppresses every personal desire and wish to that end. If the employer whom the perfect butler serves is himself a man of great stature, the status of the butler is naturally very largely enhanced, and this thought occasionally crosses Stevens's mind. But he realizes that this is a matter quite beyond his capacity to influence, and indeed that it would be unseemly for him to dwell too much upon it. His duty is to serve and trust his employer, and to have faith in his greatness.

Hitler, Nazi Germany, antisemitism, the occupation of the Rhineland, Munich, "peace in our time"--all of which come marching through the story of The Remains of the Day, discussed and debated by the grand guests at Darlington Hall--are not appropriate matters for our butler Stevens to concern himself with. Such matters are Lord Darlington's affair. No lesser figures than Hitler's Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, as well as certain associates of the English Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley make appearances at Darlington Hall. But Stevens, ever the perfect butler, makes a professional point of not listening to their conversation and only reports snatches of it, concerned as he is with keeping the gentlemen's glasses of port filled and making sure that the small army of footmen under his command are on their toes. Stevens's employer, Lord Darlington, is what was known in Chamberlain's time as an "appeaser," even a Nazi sympathizer and sporadic antisemite. But this is of no concern to Stevens, driven by ambition to become a "great" butler, recognized as such among his professional colleagues throughout the length and breadth of England. The parallels between the total surrender of will of the perfect butler to his employer and the total surrender of will of the Nazis to their Fuehrer are left implicit, but I believe they are the intellectual substructure of The Remains of the Day.

ANOTHER THEME of The Remains of the Day, inevitably entwined with the study of the perfect servitor, is its reflections on the perfect master, on those marked out "in the constitution of the universe" to rule. In 1880, a half century before the story of The Remains of the Day begins, members of Britain's landed aristocracy were still the richest, most powerful, and most admired people in the land--perhaps in the world--individually and collectively conscious of their mastery. As Alexis de Tocqueville had realized still a further half century before that, the tide of history had turned decisively and irrevocably against aristocracy, but for a time the British nobility resisted this tide with resourcefulness and tenacity. Because their decline, when it came, was conducted gradually and relatively peacefully, in a socially responsible and public-spirited manner, with timely concessions in the national--and not their class--interest (an "epic of moderation," some have said), many Britons were not fully aware at the time of inexorable nature of what was taking place.

But while inexorable it was also exquisitely drawn out. At the opening of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, not only the House of Lords but the House of Commons was still utterly dominated by the landowning classes. As late as 1880, when agricultural land was still the country's primary source of wealth, government surveys showed two thirds of the land in the British Isles was owned by under 11,000 people, and in Wales, 61 percent of the land was owned by only 672 people. (One can only wonder if in a shadowy sort of way this might have had some influence on the class perceptions of actor Anthony Hopkins, a Welshman of modest origins.) Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, prime ministers remained invariably landowners and their cabinets overwhelmingly patrician. It was not until the early decades of the twentieth century that the power of the aristocracy began to wane to the point where a real transference of class power took place. Following World War II, concealment was no longer possible and the aristocracy was publicly recognized as being what David Cannadine, in his masterful The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Anchor Books), calls at best an...