"What is your favorite character, Gentle Reader?" "I like to read about
gentlemen," he answers; "it's a taste I have inherited, and I find it
growing upon me."
And yet it is not easy to define a gentleman, as the multitudes who have
made the attempt can testify. It is one of the cases in which the
dictionary does not help one. Perhaps, after all, definitions are to be
looked upon as luxuries, not as necessities. When Alice told her name to
Humpty Dumpty, that intolerable pedant asked,--
"'What does it mean?'
"'Must a name mean something?' Alice asked doubtfully.
"'Of course it must,' Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh. 'My name
means the shape I am,--and a good handsome shape it is, too.'"
I suppose that almost any man, if he were asked what a gentleman is,
would answer with Humpty Dumpty, "It is the shape I am." I judge this
because, though the average man would not feel insulted if you were to
say, "You are no saint," it would not be safe to say, "You are no
gentleman."
And yet the average man has his misgivings. For all his confident talk,
he is very humble minded. The astral body of the gentleman that he is
endeavoring to project at his neighbors is not sufficiently materialized
for his own imperfect vision. The word "gentleman" represents an ideal.
Above whatever coarseness and sordidness there may be in actual life,
there rises the ideal of a finer kind of man, with gentler manners and
truer speech and braver action.
In every age we shall find the true gentleman--that is, the man who
represents the best ideal of his own time, and we shall find the mimicry
of him the would-be gentleman who copies the form while ignorant of the
substance. These two characters furnish the material, on the one hand
for the romancer, and on the other for the satirist. If there had been
no real gentlemen, the epics, the solemn tragedies, and the stirring
tales of chivalry would have remained unwritten; and if there had been
no pretended gentlemen, the humorist would have lost many a pleasure.
Always the contrasted characters are on the stage together; simple
dignity is followed by strutting pomposity, and after the hero the
braggart swaggers and storms. So ridicule and admiration bear rule by
turns.
The idea of the gentleman involves the sense of personal dignity and
worth. He is not a means to an end; he is an end in itself. How early
this sense arose we may not know. Professor Huxley made merry over the
sentimentalists who picture the simple dignity of primitive man. He had
no admiration to throw away on "the dignified and unclothed savage
sitting in solitary meditation under trees." And yet I am inclined to
think that the gentleman must have appeared even before the advent of
tailors. The peasants who followed Wat Tyler sang,--
"When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?"
But a writer in the age of Queen Elizabeth published a book in which he
argued that Adam himself was a perfect gentleman. He had the advantage,
dear to the theological mind, that though affirmative proof might be
lacking, it was equally difficult to prove the negative.
As civilization advances and literature catches its changing features,
the outlines of the gentleman grow distinct.
In the Book of Genesis we see Abraham sitting at his tent door. Three
strangers appear. When he sees them, he goes to meet them, and bows, and
says to the foremost, "My Lord, if now I have found favour in thy sight,
pass not away, I pray thee, from thy servant. Let a little water, I pray
you, be fetched, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree:
and I will fetch a morsel of bread, and comfort ye your hearts; after
that ye shall pass on."
There may have been giants in those days, and churls, and all manner of
barbarians, but as we watch the strangers resting under the oak we say,
"There were also gentlemen in those days." How simple it all is! It is
like a single palm tree out-lined against the desert and the sky.
We turn to the Analects of Confucius and we see the Chinese gentleman.
Everything with him is exact. The disciples of Confucius are careful to
tell us how he adjusted the skirts of his robe before and behind, how he
insisted that his mince-meat should be cut quite small and should have
exactly the right proportion of rice, and that his mat must be laid
straight before he would sit on it. Such details of deportment were
thought very important. But we forget the mats and the mince-meat when
we read: "Three things the master had not,--he had no prejudices, he had
no obstinacy, he had no egotism." And we forget the fantastic garb and
the stiff Chinese genuflections, and come to the conclusion that the
true gentleman is as simple-hearted amid the etiquette of the court as
in the tent in the desert, when we hear the master saying: "Sincerity is
the way of Heaven; the wise are the unassuming. It is said of Virtue
that over her embroidered robe she puts a plain single garment."
When we wish to see a masculine virtue which has no need of an
embroidered garment we go to Plutarch's portrait gallery of antique
gentlemen. What a breed of men they were! They were no holiday
gentlemen. With the same lofty dignity they faced life and death. How
superior they were to their fortunes. No wonder that men who had learned
to conquer themselves conquered the world.
Most of Plutarch's worthies were gentlemen, though there were
exceptions. There was, for example, Cato the Censor, who bullied the
Roman youth into virtue, and got a statue erected to himself as the
restorer of the good old manners. Poor Plutarch, who likes to do well by
his heroes, is put to his wits' end to know what to do with testy,
patriotic, honest, fearless, parsimonious Cato. Cato was undoubtedly a
great man and a good citizen; but when we are told how he sold his old
slaves, at a bargain, when they became infirm, and how he left his
war-horse in Spain to save the cost of transportation, Plutarch adds,
"Whether such things be an evidence of greatness or littleness of soul
let the reader judge for himself." The judicious reader will conclude
that it is possible to be a great man and a reformer, and yet not be
quite a gentleman.
When the Roman Empire was destroyed the antique type of gentleman
perished. The very names of the tribes which destroyed him have yet
terrible associations. Goths, Vandals, Huns--to the civilized man of the
fifth and sixth centuries these sounded like the names of wild beasts
rather than of men. You might as well have said tigers, hyenas, wolves.
The end had come of a civilization that had been the slow growth of
centuries.
Yet out of these fierce tribes, destroyers of the old order, a new order
was to arise. Out of chaos and night a new kind of gentleman was to be
evolved. The romances of the Middle Ages are variations on a single
theme, the appearance of the finer type of manhood and its struggle for
existence. In the palace built by the enchantment of Merlin were four
zones of sculpture.
"And in the lowest beasts are slaying men,
And in the second men are slaying beasts,
And on the third are warriors, perfect men,
And on the fourth are men with growing wings."
Europe was in the second stage, when men were slaying beasts and what
was most brutal in humanity. If the higher manhood was to live, it must
fight, and so the gentleman appears, sword in hand. Whether we are
reading of Charlemagne and his paladins, or of Siegfried, or of Arthur,
the story is the same. The gentleman has appeared. He has come into a
waste land,
"Thick with wet woods and many a beast therein,
And none or few to scare or chase the beast."
He comes amid savage anarchy where heathen hordes are "reddening the sun
with smoke and earth with blood." The gentleman sends forth his clear
defiance. All this shall no longer be. He is ready to meet force with
force; he is ready to stake his life upon the issue, the hazard of new
fortunes for the race.
It is as a pioneer of the new civilization that the gentleman has
pitched
"His tent beside the forest. And he drave
The heathen, and he slew the beast, and felled
The forest, and let in the sun."
The ballads and romances chronicle a struggle desperate in its beginning
and triumphant in its conclusion. They are in praise of force, but it is
a noble force. There is something better, they say, than brute force: it
is manly force. The giant is no match for the gentleman.
If we would get at the mediaeval idea of the gentleman, we must not
listen merely to the romances as they are retold by men of genius in
our own day. Scott and Tennyson clothe their characters in the old
draperies, but their ideals are those of the nineteenth century rather
than of the Middle Ages. Tennyson expressly disclaims the attempt to
reproduce the King Arthur
"whose name, a ghost,
Streams like a cloud, man-shaped, from mountain peak,
And cleaves to cairn and cromlech still; or him
Of Geoffrey's book, or him of Malleor's, one
Touched by the adulterous finger of a time
That hovered between war and wantonness."
When we go back and read Sir Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur, we find
ourselves among men of somewhat different mould from the knights of
Tennyson's idylls. It is not the blameless King Arthur, but the
passionate Sir Launcelot, who wins admiration. We hear Sir Ector crying
over Launcelot's body, "Ah, Launcelot, thou wert the head of the
Christian knights. Thou wert the courtliest knight that ever bare
shield; and thou wert the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrode
horse; and thou wert the truest lover for a sinful man that ever loved
woman; and thou wert the kindest man that ever strake with sword; and
thou wert the goodliest person that ever came among press of knights;
and thou wert the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall
with ladies; and thou wert the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that
ever put spear in the rest."
We must take, not one of these qualities, but all of them together, to
understand the gentleman of those ages when good and evil struggled so
fiercely for the mastery. No saint was this Sir Launcelot. There was in
him no fine balance of virtues, but only a wild tumult of the blood. He
was proud, self-willed, passionate, pleasure-loving; capable of great
sin and of sublime expiation. What shall we say of this gentlest,
sternest, kindest, goodliest, sinfulest of knights,--this man who knew
no middle path, but who, when treading in perilous places and following
false lights, yet draws all men admiringly to himself?
We can only say this: he was the prototype of those mighty men who were
the makers of the modern world. They were the men who fought with
Charlemagne, and with William the Conqueror, and with Richard; they were
the men who "beat down the heathen, and upheld the Christ;" they were
the men from whom came the crusades, and the feudal system, and the
great charter. As we read the history, we say at one moment, "These men
were mail-clad ruffians," and at the next, "What great-hearted
gentlemen!"
Perhaps the wisest thing would be to confess to both judgments at once.
In this stage of his evolution the gentleman may boast of feats that
would now be rehearsed only in bar-rooms. This indicates that the
standard of society has improved, and that what was possible once for
the nobler sort of men is now characteristic of the baser sort. The
modern rowdy frequently appears in the cast-off manners of the old-time
gentleman. Time, the old-clothes man, thus furnishes his customers with
many strange misfits. What is of importance is that through these
transition years there was a ceaseless struggle to preserve the finer
types of manhood.
The ideal of the mediaeval gentleman was expressed in the word
"gallantry." The essence of gallantry is courage; but it is not the
sober courage of the stoic. It is courage charged with qualities that
give it sparkle and effervescence. It is the courage that not only faces
danger, but delights in it. What suggestions of physical and mental
elasticity are in Shakespeare's description of the "springing, brave
Plantagenet"! Scott's lines express the gallant spirit:--
"One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."
Gallantry came to have another implication, equally characteristic. The
knight was gallant not only in war, but in love also. There had come a
new worship, the worship of woman. In the Church it found expression in
the adoration of the Madonna, but in the camp and the court it found its
place as well. Chivalry was the elaborate and often fantastic ritual,
and the gentleman was minister at the altar. The ancient gentleman stood
alone; the mediaeval gentleman offered all to the lady of his love. Here,
too, gallantry implied the same overflowing joy in life. If you are
anxious to have a test by which to recognize the time when you are
growing old,--so old that imagination is chilled within you,--I should
advise you to turn to the chapter in the Romance of King Arthur entitled
"How Queen Guenever went maying with certain Knights of the Table Round,
clad all in green." Then read: "So it befell in the month of May, Queen
Guenever called unto her knights and she gave them warning that early
upon the morrow she would ride maying into the woods and fields besides
Westminster, and I warn you that none of you but that he be well horsed
and that ye all be clothed in green.... I shall bring with me ten ladies
and every knight shall have a squire and two yeomen. So upon the morn
they took their horses with the Queen and rode on maying through the
woods and meadows in great joy and delights."
If you cannot see them riding on, a gallant company over the meadows,
and if you hear no echoes of their laughter, and if there is no longer
any enchantment in the vision of that time when all were "blithe and
debonair," then undoubtedly you are growing old. It is time to close the
romances: perhaps you may still find solace in Young's "Night Thoughts"
or Pollok's "Course of Time." Happy are they who far into the seventies
still see Queen Guenever riding in the pleasant month of May: these are
they who have found the true fountain of youth.
The gentleman militant will always be the hero of ballads and romances;
and in spite of the apostles of realism, I fancy he has not lost his
charm. There are Jeremiahs of evolution, who tell us that after a time
men will be so highly developed as to have neither hair nor teeth. In
that day, when the operating dentists have ceased from troubling, and
given way to the manufacturing dentists, and the barbers have been
superseded by the wig-makers, it is quite possible that the romances may
give place to some tedious department of comparative mythology. In that
day, Chaucer's knight who "loved chevalrie, trouthe and honour, fredom
and curtesie," will be forgotten, though his armor on the museum walls
will be learnedly described. But that dreadful day is still far distant;
before it comes, not only teeth and hair must be improved out of
existence, but a substitute must be found for good red blood. Till that
time "no laggard in love or dastard in war" can steal our hearts from
young Lochinvar.
The sixteenth century marks an epoch in the history of the gentleman, as
in all else. Old ideas disappear, to come again in new combinations.
Familiar words take on meanings that completely transform them. The same
hands wielded the sword and the pen. The scholars, the artists, the
poets, began to feel a sense of personal worth, and carried the gallant
spirit of the gentleman into their work. They were not mere specialists,
but men of action. The artist was not only an instrument to give
pleasure to others, but he was himself a centre of admiration. Out of
this new consciousness how many interesting characters were produced!
There were men who engaged in controversies as if they were tournaments,
and who wrote books and painted pictures and carved statues, not in the
spirit of professionalism, but as those who would in this activity enjoy
"one crowded hour of glorious life." Very frequently, these gentlemen
and scholars, and gentlemen and artists, overdid the matter, and were
more belligerent in disposition than were the warriors with whom they
began to claim equality.
To this self-assertion we owe the most delightful of
autobiographies,--that of Benvenuto Cellini. He aspired to be not only
an artist, but a fine gentleman. No one could be more certain of the
sufficiency of Humpty Dumpty's definition of a gentleman than was he.
If we did not have his word for it, we could scarcely believe that any
one could be so valiant in fight and so uninterrupted in the pursuit of
honor without its interfering with his professional work. Take, for
example, that memorable day when, escaping from the magistrates, he
makes an attack upon the household of his enemy, Gherardo Guascanti. "I
found them at table; and Gherardo, who had been the cause of the
quarrel, flung himself upon me. I stabbed him in the breast, piercing
doublet and jerkin, but doing him not the least harm in the world."
After this attack, and after magnanimously pardoning Gherardo's father,
mother, and sisters, he says: "I ran storming down the staircase, and
when I reached the street, I found all the rest of the household, more
than twelve persons: one of them seized an iron shovel, another a thick
iron pipe; one had an anvil, some hammers, some cudgels. When I got
among them, raging like a mad bull, I flung four or five to the earth,
and fell down with them myself, continually aiming my dagger now at one,
and now at another. Those who remained upright plied with both hands
with all their force, giving it me with hammers, cudgels, and the
anvil; but inasmuch as God does sometimes mercifully intervene, he so
ordered that neither they nor I did any harm to one another."
What fine old days those were, when the toughness of skin matched so
wonderfully the stoutness of heart! One has a suspicion that in these
degenerate times, were a family dinner-party interrupted by such an
avalanche of daggers, cudgels, and anvils, some one would be hurt. As
for Benvenuto, he does not so much as complain of a headache.
There is an easy, gentleman-like grace in the way in which he recounts
his incidental homicides. When he is hiding behind a hedge at midnight,
waiting for the opportunity to assassinate his enemies, his heart is
open to all the sweet influences of nature, and he enjoys "the glorious
heaven of stars." He was not only an artist and a fine gentleman, but a
saint as well, and "often had recourse with pious heart to holy
prayers." Above all, he had the indubitable evidence of sainthood, a
halo. "I will not omit to relate another circumstance, which is perhaps
the most remarkable that ever happened to any one. I do so in order to
justify the divinity of God and of his secrets, who deigned to grant me
this great favor: forever since the time of my strange vision until now,
an aureole of glory (marvelous to relate) has rested on my head. This is
visible to every sort of man to whom I have chosen to point it out, but
these have been few." He adds ingenuously, "I am always able to see it."
He says, "I first became aware of it in France, at Paris; for the air in
those parts is so much freer from mists that one can see it far better
than in Italy."
Happy Benvenuto with his Parisian halo, which did not interfere with the
manly arts of self-defense! His self-complacency was possible only in a
stage of evolution when the saint and the assassin were not altogether
clearly differentiated. Some one has said, "Give me the luxuries of
life, and I can get along without the necessities." Like many of his
time, Benvenuto had all the luxuries that belong to the character of a
Christian gentleman, though he was destitute of the necessities. An
appreciation of common honesty as an essential to a gentleman seems to
be more slowly developed than the more romantic sentiment that is called
honor.
The evolution of the gentleman has its main line of progress where there
is a constant though slow advance; but, on the other hand, there are
arrested developments, and quaint survivals, and abortive attempts.
In each generation there have been men of fashion who have mistaken
themselves for gentlemen. They are uninteresting enough while in the
flesh, but after a generation or two they become very quaint and
curious, when considered as specimens. Each generation imagines that it
has discovered a new variety, and invents a name for it. The dude, the
swell, the dandy, the fop, the spark, the macaroni, the blade, the
popinjay, the coxcomb,--these are butterflies of different summers.
There is here endless variation, but no advancement. One fashion comes
after another, but we cannot call it better. One would like to see
representatives of the different generations together in full dress.
What variety in oaths and small talk! What anachronisms in swords and
canes and eye-glasses, in ruffles, in collars, in wigs! What affluence
in powders and perfumes and colors! But "will they know each other
there"? The real gentlemen would be sure to recognize each other.
Abraham and Marcus Aurelius and Confucius would find much in common.
Launcelot and Sir Philip Sidney and Chinese Gordon would need no
introduction. Montaigne and Mr. Spectator and the Autocrat of the
Breakfast-Table would fall into delightful chat. But would a "swell"
recognize a "spark"? And might we not expect a "dude" to fall into
immoderate laughter at the sight of a "popinjay"?
Fashion has its revenges. Nothing seems so ridiculous to it as an old
fashion. The fop has no toleration for the obsolete foppery. The
artificial gentleman is as inconceivable out of his artificial
surroundings as the waxen-faced gentleman of the clothing store outside
his show window.
There was Beau Nash, for example,--a much-admired person in his day,
when he ruled from his throne in the pump-room in Bath. Everything was
in keeping. There was Queen Anne architecture, and Queen Anne furniture,
and Queen Anne religion, and the Queen Anne fashion in fine gentlemen.
What a curious piece of bricabrac this fine gentleman was, to be sure!
He was not fitted for any useful purpose under the sun, but in his place
he was quite ornamental, and undoubtedly very expensive. Art was as
self-complacent as if nature had never been invented. What multitudes of
the baser sort must be employed in furnishing the fine gentleman with
clothes! All Bath admired the way in which Beau Nash refused to pay for
them. Once when a vulgar tradesman insisted on payment, Nash compromised
by lending him twenty pounds,--which he did with the air of a prince. So
great was the impression he made upon his time that a statue was erected
to him, while beneath were placed the busts of two minor contemporaries,
Pope and Newton. This led Lord Chesterfield to write:--
"This statue placed the busts between
Adds to the satire strength,
Wisdom and wit are little seen,
But folly at full length."
Lord Chesterfield himself had nothing in common with the absurd
imitation gentlemen, and yet the gentleman whom he described and
pretended to admire was altogether artificial. He was the Machiavelli of
the fashionable world. He saw through it, and recognized its
hollowness; but such as it was it must be accepted. The only thing was
to learn how to get on in it. "In courts you may expect to meet
connections without friendships, enmities without hatred, honor without
virtue, appearances saved and realities sacrificed, good manners and bad
morals."
There is something earnestly didactic about Lord Chesterfield. He gives
line upon line, and precept upon precept, to his "dear boy." Never did a
Puritan father teach more conscientiously the shorter catechism than did
he the whole duty of the gentleman, which was to save appearances even
though he must sacrifice reality. "My dear boy," he writes
affectionately, "I advise you to trust neither man nor woman more than
is absolutely necessary. Accept proffered friendships with great
civility, but with great incredulity."
No youth was more strenuously prodded up the steep and narrow path of
virtue than was little Philip Stanhope up the steep and narrow path of
fashion. Worldliness made into a religion was not without its
asceticism. "Though you think you dance well, do not think you dance
well enough. Though you are told that you are genteel, still aim at
being genteeler.... Airs, address, manners, graces, are of such infinite
importance and are so essentially necessary to you that now, as the time
of meeting draws near, I tremble for fear that I may not find you
possessed of them."
Lord Chesterfield's gentleman was a man of the world; but it was, after
all, a very hard and empty world. It was a world that had no eternal
laws, only changing fashions. It had no broken hearts, only broken vows.
It was a world covered with glittering ice, and the gentleman was one
who had learned to skim over its dangerous places, not caring what
happened to those who followed him.
It is a relief to get away from such a world, and, leaving the fine
gentleman behind, to take the rumbling stagecoach to the estates of Sir
Roger de Coverley. His is not the great world at all, and his interests
are limited to his own parish. But it is a real world, and much better
suited to a real gentleman. His fashions are not the fashions of the
court, but they are the fashions that wear. Even when following the
hounds Sir Roger has time for friendly greetings. "The farmers' sons
thought themselves happy if they could open a gate for the good old
knight, which he requited with a nod or a smile, and a kind inquiry
after their fathers and uncles."
But even dear old Roger de Coverley cannot rest undisturbed as an ideal
gentleman. He belonged, after all, to a privileged order, and there is a
force at work to destroy all social privileges. A generation of farmers'
sons must arise not to be so easily satisfied with a kindly nod and
smile. Liberty, fraternity, and equality have to be reckoned with.
Democracy has come with its leveling processes.
"The calm Olympian height
Of ancient order feels its bases yield."
In a revolutionary period the virtues of an aristocracy become more
irritating than their vices. People cease to attribute merit to what
comes through good fortune. No wonder that the disciples of the older
time cry:--
"What hope for the fine-nerved humanities
That made earth gracious once with gentler arts?"
What becomes of the gentleman in an age of democratic equality? Just
what becomes of every ideal when the time for its fulfillment has come.
It is freed from its limitations and enters into a larger life.
Let us remember that the gentleman was always a lover of equality, and
of the graces that can only grow in the society of equals. The gentleman
of an aristocracy is at his best only when he is among his peers. There
is a little circle within which there is no pushing, no assumption of
superiority. Each member seeks not his own, but finds pleasure in a
gracious interchange of services.
But an aristocracy leaves only a restricted sphere for such good
manners. Outside the group to which he belongs the gentleman is
compelled by imperious custom to play the part of a superior being. It
has always been distasteful and humiliating to him. It is only an
essentially vulgar nature that can really be pleased with the servility
of others.
An ideal democracy is a society in which good manners are universal.
There is no arrogance and no cringing, but social intercourse is based
on mutual respect. This ideal democracy has not been perfected, but the
type of men who are creating it has already been evolved. Among all the
crude and sordid elements of modern life, we see the stirring of a new
chivalry. It is based on a recognition of the worth and dignity of the
common man.
Milton in memorable words points out the transition which must take
place from the gentleman of romance to the gentleman of enduring
reality. After narrating how, in his youth, he betook himself "to those
lofty fables and romances which recount in solemn cantos the deeds of
knighthood founded by our victorious kings and thence had in renown
through all Christendom," he says, "This my mind gave me that every free
and gentle spirit, without that oath ought to be born a knight, nor
needed to expect a gilt spur or the laying on of a sword upon his
shoulder."