But the men who can honestly claim to have made a signal success of life without being spoiled by their prosperity are far fewer in number. "If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, And-which is more-you'll be a man, my son." The man who can be trusted is always a man's man. "A man's word should be as good as his bond." We use the trite phrase without reflecting that if every man's word were a guarantee of good faith, the lawyers who draw up our contracts and agreements would very soon be among the great unemployed. Absolute reliability of word is unfortunately rare. Judges are constantly deploring the patent perjury of witnesses in law-courts. It was a very experienced magistrate who, weary of the false evidence given before him, snapped out the cynicism: "David said in his haste, but I say deliberately, 'All men are liars.'" This was an impatient exaggeration; but it is a painful fact that verbal contracts have to be accepted very cautiously by business men. The late Mr. Charles Frohman, the theatrical entrepreneur, had a world-wide reputation as a man whose word bound him. Dramatists who wrote plays for him never concerned themselves about written contracts. Frohman would talk an idea over with a playwright, commission him to write the play, say what royalty he would pay, and there the matter ended. Frohman was implicitly trusted on both sides of the Atlantic. He always kept his word. But he died over head and ears in debt! I am not sure that any characteristic repels men so sharply as cynicism-especially in a young man. Walpole's sneer that "every man has his price and every woman" is a gross libel on human nature; and Lord Chesterfield's declaration that the heart of man hardens as he grows older is a manifest slander on mankind. A cynic has been defined as one who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Young men are often tempted into affecting an airy cynicism. The habit is one of the worst a young man can acquire. It usually brings upon him the reproach of shallowness. Moreover it is a habit that, beginning as an affectation, settles into a confirmed twist of mind, resulting in a low and distressing estimate of all men and women. In Mr. Andrew Burger's Thistledown and Mustard Seed there is an illustrative story, called "The Motive-monger," of a boy who as a child used to sit apart and wonder why. His childish mind was always on the search for motives. This frame of mind grew, and as Sir Ralph was thrown among cunning people who confirmed him in it, the habit gradually consumed him. "It darkened the brightness of the sun, took the taste out of food, and the merriment out of wine. One day, in answer to his usual question, 'What's your motive?' a friend said: 'What's your motive in asking my motive?' Sir Ralph caught the man's hand, swore he was a splendid fellow, and-refused his request. But ever afterwards he took a keener delight in seeking for motives. Nay, he would often stop in the road and say to himself: 'What's my motive?' It did not take him many years to fret him to the verge of the grave. And when the devil came to take him, his first remark to the fiery gentleman was 'What's your But the devil did not give Sir Ralph time to finish the question. Just because cynicism paralyzes a man's better nature, and vitiates his whole outlook on life, it is one of the vices of character that men regard with aversion. The qualities that commend a man to men are reliability in act and word, a dutiful sense of obligation to his fellows, a joyful zest for action, a cheerful acceptance of good fortune or ill fortune, and a modest and frank appreciation of other men's good points without censoriousness of their shortcomings. These are the qualities that enable men to— The cup of strength in some great agony, So may we all join "The choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world." VII THE MARKS OF A GENTLEMAN "W HAT is it to be a gentleman?" asks Thackeray; and answering his own question, he said: "It is to be honest, to be gentle, to be generous, to be brave, to be wise; and, possessing all these qualities, to exercise them in the most graceful outward manner." A shorter and truer definition is that "a gentleman is one who never willingly inflicts pain." The black cook in The Lady of the Decoration, who did not want to discomboberate" anybody-inconvenience anybody-helps us to an understanding of the essence of gentlemanliness. A whole hemisphere separates gentlemanliness from gentility. Genteel is a word that was often on the lips of our grandfathers, but is now happily almost obsolete. It has horrible associations. Miss Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler somewhere makes one of her girl characters ask her mother the question: "Is Mrs. So-and-so a lady?" "Well," comes the guarded reply, subtle in its cunning differentiation, "not exactly. She belongs to the class of people who pronounce the t in often. Genteel is the word for her, I think." Gentlemanliness involves a very different order of moral quality from mere gentility. The war, it has been said, has stirred the muddy depths of modern civilization, and left the world badly in need of a moral spring-cleaning. Necessarily in time of war the man of force leaps into the forefront, and the man of sensitive instincts is overshadowed. War-time is the halcyon age of the bounder, the man of push and energy and few scruples. The marks of a gentleman get obliterated or blurred out of recognition when brute forces are contending. We shall have to retrace our paths to recover the gentleman, and for the quest we must clean our minds of false conceptions of his attributes. The first essential mark of a gentleman is neither the fashionable cut of his clothes nor the superfine polish of his manners, but just that quality of heart which restrains him from causing distress, inconvenience, or pain to those who cross his path. Unselfishness is as the core of gentlemanliness. Now of all the virtues unselfishness is the one most foreign to the natural man. Selfishness, conscious or unconscious, is instinctive-it dates from the days when men lived in trees and courted their sweethearts with a club-and it is only overcome by severe training, and by firm moral resolution. A true gentleman does not make life hard for any one. King Edward VII gave a glorious example of his scrupulous regard for the fine susceptibilities of others when M. Fallières, the French President, was making a State visit to England. Anxious that nothing should jar upon his visitor, the King gave express instructions that the train bringing the President to England should not arrive at Waterloo Station, and that the route of his carriage should avoid Trafalgar Square. Both names |