In his essay in _The Century_, for October, 1883, on the “Characteristics of London,” W. J. Stillman contrasts the English gentleman with the best American type as follows:
“And it is in this very class that we find here and there that best type of humanity, as the world knows it, the true English gentleman--a being whose exterior decorum may be counterfeited by his emulator, whose inmost gentleness and courtesy may be shadowed forth in peer or peasant--who loves his kind, and feels the common bond of divine birth, but whose most perfect union of noble demeanor and large-heartedness can only be found where the best type of mind has been permitted the largest and richest culture, and the completest freedom of hereditary development in the most favorable external circumstances. There are nobles and noblemen--men who seem to be conscious only that surrounding men are lower than they, and others whose illumination pervades every one near them and brings all up into the same world of light and sweetness. The prestige of nobility is founded on a true human instinct; occasionally one finds an English nobleman who justifies its existence, and makes us snobs in spite of our democracy.
“I could, I am certain, point to Americans who in every substantial trait of the gentleman will stand comparison with any aristocrat born--men in whom gentlehood has grown to hereditary ripeness; the third and fourth generations of men who have cultivated on American soil the virtues of honesty, morality, sincerity, courtesy, self-abnegation, humanity, benevolence; men and women whose babyhood was cradled in those influences that make what we call ‘good breeding,’ and to whom the various vulgarities of our parvenu princes are as foreign as to the bluest-blooded heir of Normandy fortune; and this is to me a more grateful and sympathetic type of humanity than that of its English congener.”
In the writings of a Gallic philosopher, of a former generation, that I lately chanced upon, I find the _homme comme il faut_--a man that is pretty nearly the counterpart of our _gentleman_--described essentially as follows:
At the first glance we discover in him nothing that arrests the attention. He is simple, calm, ingenuous, manly rather than graceful, sedate rather than animated. His manner is neither reserved nor demonstrative, but attentive, respectful and guarded; neither obsequious nor imperious, but calm and self-possessed. His politeness appears in acts rather than in protestations. Though he does not despise convention, he is not its slave; he does not allow himself to be hampered by the unimportant, nor does he ever see a heinous offence in a trifling breach of established usage.
