The Gentleman’s Guide: "What is a Gentleman?"

From the Introduction

As promised, this is an excerpt from the book’s Introduction.

You can buy the book on Amazon.com (paper or Kindle), but the publisher is currently offering a discount on the paperback: here.

What Is a Gentleman?

In civilized society — and especially throughout the English-speaking world — being a man means being a gentleman.  What precisely is a “gentleman”?  This question has been the subject of extended debate for centuries, in novels, plays, films, essays, histories, and advice books like this one.  Here we will push the envelope a bit.  To be a gentleman is much more than (as some books from past centuries felt it necessary to advise) learning to look at the ceiling when belching, not peering into your handkerchief after you blow your nose, or refraining from cooling your coffee by pouring it into the saucer.  And one guidebook further insists that it is considered bad form to strike an enemy while he is defecating.

Being a gentleman is a more serious matter than the colloquial usage of being polite and considerate of others, as when we tell boys to “Be a gentleman.”  Being a gentleman means accepting responsibility, first, for oneself, and then as well for one’s family, community, and country.  It is essential to being an effective citizen and a leader.  Valuing the gentleman may well be the distinguishing feature of our civilization.

Misconceptions abound about what it means to be gentleman.  Perhaps the most unhelpful is that it is a status into which one must be “to the manor born”—that is, with the right parentage, family background, and upbringing.  But this is directly contrary to the ideal and to the history as it has been formulated by some of our greatest minds.  It is true that, ideally, gentlemanly conduct is something a man learns from his father and passes on to his son.  This has never been reliable however, and it is especially unreliable today.  So at least since the Renaissance older men of the governing class have been writing advice manuals like this one addressed to younger men not only of their own class but also to newcomers and parvenus, instructing them on how to behave in accordance with the norms of the class into which they aspire to membership.  Peasants moving to the cities and working their way up through the social ranks had to be instructed on how to stop behaving like bumpkins and start acting the part of civilized urban-dwellers, citizens, and even rulers.  Castiglione’s The Courtier and Machiavelli’s The Prince are only the most outstanding examples, if not entirely typical.

One of the recurring themes over the centuries is that merit and practice are far more important than ancestry in establishing a gentleman.  Indeed, there was no point in writing the advice books in the first place if gentlemanly status was simply inherited or absorbed from one’s aristocratic ancestors, as if by osmosis.  Many renowned gentlemen started life as the humblest commoners, and some began worse than that.  The advice writers themselves were at pains to emphasize that low origins are nothing to be ashamed of.  “Neither are the truly valorous, or in any way virtuous, ashamed of their so mean parentage,” wrote Sir Henry Peacham in The Compleat Gentleman (1634) “but rather glory in themselves, that their merit hath advanced them above so many thousands far better descended.”  One reason the English aristocracy managed to survive to the present day—long after their French counterparts were having their heads removed—was because the English aristocracy was an “open elite” into which newcomers were, if not exactly welcomed, at least able to penetrate—but only after they had learned to behave appropriately.  It might require a generation or two for the children of the new arrivistes to be properly instructed in the correct manners from an early age before they would be fully accepted as equals.  But that is why the books existed, to equip the sons with the education and social graces to be admitted into circles from which the father had been excluded.  As Americans and other colonials took over the ideal, it became even less tied to elite families with aristocratic titles and came to be the model as well for the republican gentleman and democratic citizen.

This is turn points to a larger truth that you may find helpful to know from the start:  Being a gentleman—being a man—is never effortless, however much part of the ideal may be to make it appear that way.  It requires conscious and even strenuous effort.  Today, one of the greatest impediments to becoming a man may be an ironic snobbery that manliness is something to be ridiculed, which is usually combined with the secret desire for some men to believe that they are above having the make a conscious effort.  No man is ashamed of being masculine, after all.  But men are often ashamed of aspiring to be more masculine than they presently are, and of having to work to improve themselves, as if the aspiration itself and the effort reveal inadequacy.  It is this secret fear that the culture today exploits to denigrate manhood.

We cannot all be born into an earldom, and none of us is born with six-inch biceps or a classical education.  But some of these things we can achieve, if not at one point in life then at another, and we are only at fault to the extent that we do not try.  (The lives of Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are often held up as examples of heroic men born with great physical disadvantages.)

So get over this idea right now that you cannot be a gentleman, or that it is too late for you, or that you are adopting some kind of false persona, or that it is “just not me.”  Any man can be a gentleman, and it is never too late.  It is the goal to which every man should aspire.  Being a gentleman is not a matter of family, or ancestry, or going to the right schools, or having the right accent, or wearing the right clothes, or knowing the right people, or going to the right clubs, sporting competitions, or cultural events.  You are not required to attend Henley Regatta, hunt wild boar in the Ardennes, or crook your little finger while (excuse me, whilst) drinking tea.  Being a gentleman is a state of mind, though it is also one that must nevertheless be put into practice in daily life.  As Richard Steele wrote over three centuries ago, “The appellation of Gentleman is never to be affixed to a man’s circumstances, but to his behaviour in them.”

So remember the old adage—repeated again and again over the centuries to remind even the most illustrious that they too had “their place”—that while a king can create a duke, an earl, a viscount, a marquis, a baron, or a knight, “The king cannot make a gentleman.”

Today, the traditional advice manuals and “courtesy” books may seem quaint and out-of-date.  It is not my intention here to instruct you, as does one late medieval authority, on “when, where, and how you can urinate, defecate, spit, belch, and fart politely,” though it might be worth pondering the wisdom behind the stipulation that “only the head of household was entitled to urinate in the hall.”  And yes, you would probably do well to ensure that the toilets in your home are “situated so as to keep unpleasant smells to a minimum.”[8]  But while the application of the rules may change with circumstances, the principles underlying them remain essentially the same.

You may also think that some features of a gentleman I describe are stodgy and my strictures old fashioned.  But before you dismiss them, do consider one thing:  The decline of the gentlemanly ideal has been followed quickly by the decline of the manly ideal.  Once gentlemen lost their unique status, no men could keep theirs for long.

---