The Perfect Gentleman | Page 3

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.
Don't break the Ten Commandments-- Moses meant YOU!
Dress Well--Behave Better.
A Perfect Gentleman has a Good Heart, a Good Head, a Good Wardrobe, and a Good Conscience.

AS A MAN DRESSES
At some time or other, I dare say, it is common experience for a man to feel indignant at the necessity of dressing himself. He wakes in the morning. Refreshed with sleep, ready and eager for his daily tasks and pleasures, he is just about to leap out of bed when the thought confronts him that he must put on his clothes. His leap is postponed indefinitely, and he gets up with customary reluctance. One after another, twelve articles--eleven, if two are joined in union one and inseparable--must be buttoned, tied, laced, and possibly safety-pinned to his person: a routine business, dull, wearisome with repetition. His face and hands must be washed, his hair and teeth brushed: many, indeed, will perform all over what Keats, thinking of the ocean eternally washing the land, has called a 'priestlike task of pure ablution'; but others, faithful to tradition and Saturday night, will dodge this as wasteful. Downstairs in summer is his hat; in winter, his hat, his overcoat, his muffler, and, if the weather compels, his galoshes and perhaps his ear-muffs or ear-bobs. Last thing of all, the Perfect Gentleman will put on his walking-stick; somewhere in this routine he will have shaved and powdered, buckled his wrist-watch, and adjusted his spats.
When we think of the shortness of life, and how, even so, we might improve our minds by study between getting up and breakfast, dressing, as educators are beginning to say of the long summer vacation, seems a sheer 'wastage of education'; yet the plain truth is that we wouldn't get up. Better, if we can, to think while we dress, pausing to jot down our worth-while thoughts on a handy tablet. Once, I remember,--and perhaps the pleasant custom continues,--a lady might modestly express her kindly feeling for a gentleman (and her shy, half-humorous recognition of the difference between them) by giving him shaving-paper; why not a somewhat similar tablet, to record his dressing-thoughts?
'Clothes,' so wrote Master Thomas Fuller,--and likely enough the idea occurred to him some morning while getting into his hose and doublet,--'ought to be our remembrancers of our lost innocency.' And so they are; for Adam must have bounded from bed to breakfast with an innocency that nowadays we can only envy.
Yet, in sober earnest, the first useful thing that ever this naked fellow set his hand to was the making of his own apron. The world, as we know and love it, began--your pardon, Mr. Kipling, but I cannot help it--when
Cross-legged our Father Adam sat and fastened them one by one, Till, leaf by leaf, with loving care he got his apron done; The first new suit the world had seen, and mightily pleased with it, Till the Devil chuckled behind the Tree, 'It's pretty, but will it fit?'
From that historic moment everything a man does has been preceded by dressing, and almost immediately the process lost its convenient simplicity. Not since Adam's apron has any complete garment, or practical suit of clothes, been devised--except for sea-bathing--that a busy man could slip on in the morning and off again at night. All our indignation to the contrary, we prefer the complicated and difficult: we enjoy our buttons; we are withheld only by our