The Perfect Gentleman | Page 2

with elegance, and by varying his attitudes, shows that he has been used to good company.' Good company, one judges, must have inclined to be rather acrobatic.
Now, in the seventeen-nineties there were doubtless purchasers for the Gentleman's Pocket Library: the desire to become a Perfect Gentleman (like this one) by home study evidently existed. But, although I am probably the only person who has read that instructive book for a very long time, it remains to-day the latest complete work which any young man wishing to become a Perfect Gentleman can find to study. Is it possible, I ask myself, that none but burglars any longer entertain this ambition? I can hardly believe it. Yet the fact stands out that, in an age truly remarkable for its opportunities for self-improvement, there is nothing later than 1794 to which I can commend a crude but determined inquirer. To my profound astonishment I find that the Correspondence-School system offers no course; to my despair I search the magazines for graphic illustration of an Obvious Society Leader confiding to an Obvious Scrubwoman: 'Six months ago my husband was no more a Perfect Gentleman than yours, but one day I persuaded him to mark that coupon, and all our social prominence and ��clat we owe to that school.'
One may say, indeed, that here is something which cannot conceivably be described as a job; but all the more does it seem, logically, that the correspondence schools must be daily creating candidates for what naturally would be a post-graduate course. One would imagine that a mere announcement would be sufficient, and that from all the financial and industrial centres of the country students would come flocking back to college in the next mail.
BE A PERFECT GENTLEMAN
In the Bank--at the Board of Directors--putting through that New Railroad in Alaska--wherever you are and whatever you are doing to drag down the Big Money--wouldn't you feel more at ease if you knew you were behaving like a Perfect Gentleman?
We will teach YOU how.
Some fifty odd years ago Mr. George H. Calvert (whom I am pained to find recorded in the Dictionary of American Authors as one who 'published a great number of volumes of verse that was never mistaken for poetry by any reader') wrote a small book about gentlemen, fortunately in prose and not meant for beginners, in which he cited Bayard, Sir Philip Sidney, Charles Lamb, Brutus, St. Paul, and Socrates as notable examples. Perfect Gentlemen all, as Emerson would agree, I question if any of them ever gave a moment's thought to his manner of sitting; yet any two, sitting together, would have recognized each other as Perfect Gentlemen at once and thought no more about it.
These are the standard, true to Emerson's definition; and yet such shining examples need not discourage the rest of us. The qualities that made them gentlemen are not necessarily the qualities that made them famous. One need not be as polished as Sidney, but one must not scratch. One need not have a mind like Socrates: a gentleman may be reasonably perfect,--and surely this is not asking too much,--with mind enough to follow this essay. Brutus gained nothing as a gentleman by assisting at the assassination of C?sar (who was no more a gentleman, by the way, in Mr. Calvert's opinion, than was Mr. Calvert a poet in that of the Dictionary of Authors).
As for Fame, it is quite sufficient--and this only out of gentlemanly consideration for the convenience of others--for a Perfect Gentleman to have his name printed in the Telephone Directory. And in this higher definition I go so far as to think that the man is rare who is not sometimes a Perfect Gentleman, and equally uncommon who never is anything else. Adam I hail a Perfect Gentleman when, seeing what his wife had done, he bit back the bitter words he might have said, and then--he too--took a bite of the apple: but oh! how far he fell immediately afterward, when he stammered his pitiable explanation that the woman tempted him and he did eat! Bayard, Sir Philip Sidney, Charles Lamb, St. Paul, or Socrates would have insisted, and stuck to it, that he bit it first.
I have so far left out of consideration--as for that matter did the author and editor of the Pocket Library (not wishing to discourage students)--a qualification essential to the Perfect Gentleman in the eighteenth century. He must have had--what no book could give him--an ancestor who knew how to sit. Men there were whose social status was visibly signified by the abbreviation 'Gent.' appended to their surnames. But already this was becoming a vermiform appendix, and the nineteenth century did away with it. This handsome abbreviation created an invidious distinction between citizens which democracy refused longer to countenance; and, much