Men in straw boaters

In 1885, more or less, a Harvard professor, himself born in the 18-teens or 20s, looked out upon the eager faces in the lecture hall, at young men in jackets and stiff-collared shirts and dark ties, and said, “Probably none of you young men has ever even seen a gentleman.” (Emerson had made a similar quip, saying that gentlemen are rare: “I think I remember every one I have ever seen.”)

The anecdote is told by Henry Dwight Sedgwick, who was probably a student in that elderly professor’s class and was enough struck by the comment to write a book on the subject, In Praise of Gentlemen, published in 1935. “And now even the ideal is gone,” Sedgwick observed gloomily, “like an old fashion in dress, not spoken of but to be laughed at.”

There is in Sedgwick’s version of the gentleman rather more of [Lord] Chesterfield and less of [John Henry] Newman or, as we shall see, Robert E. Lee. He spoke of a Guild of Gentleman, not latter-day Templars, mind you, not a cabal of scheming Masons, but a confederation of decent fellows, much as I remember my grandfathers (born in 1888 and 1890) to have been. These were men who possessed “courtesy, self-restraint, a nice regard to the rules of etiquette, a command of speech, an elegance of dress, a familiarity with the habits of the leisure class, a respect for appearances, for outside things, a desire to make the passing moment pleasurable.”

I picture men in straw boaters punting on the Charles River of a late summer’s afternoon: 1935 may as well have been 1835. The Great War fades from memory, and the bad news has yet to come from Pearl Harbor. It is, you might say, perpetually December 6, 1941—or September 10, 2001. There is no reason not to swallow ever-greater helpings of democratic sludge and call it ambrosia. The world is so safe that the response to moral flabbiness is mere irritability. – from The Compleat Gentleman (2004)

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