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 Cæsar (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 as a Lenin would destroy the value of money in Russia by printing countless rouble notes without financial backing, so democracy destroyed the distinctive value of the word 'gentleman' by applying it indiscriminately to the entire male population of the United States.
The gentleman continues in various degrees of perfection. There is no other name for him, but one hears it rarely; yet the shining virtue of democratization is that it has produced a kind of tacit agreement with Chaucer's Parson that 'to have pride in the gentrie of the bodie is right gret folie; for oft-time the gentrie of the bodie benimeth the gentrie of the soul; and also we be all of one fader and one moder.' And although there are few men nowadays who would insist that they are gentlemen, there is probably no man living in the United States who would admit that he isn't.
And so I now see that my bright dream of a Correspondence-School post-graduate course cannot be realized. No bank president, no corporation director, electrical engineer, advertising expert, architect, or other distinguished alumnus would confess himself no gentleman by marking that coupon. The suggestion would be an insult, were it affectionately made by the good old president of his Alma Mater in a personal letter. A few decorative cards, to be hung up in the office, might perhaps be printed and mailed at graduation.
A bath every day
Is the Gentleman's way.