The chapter opens in the middle of Emerson's thought on Manners, and it begins with a puzzle. Man serves himself with metals and wood and glass, writes laws, and above all sets up a self-constituted aristocracy, a fraternity of the best that has no written law and still perpetuates itself. What fact in modern history is more conspicuous than the creation of the gentleman? Chivalry is that, and loyalty, and half the drama and all the novels from Sidney to Scott. Yet every word for this excellence is equivocal, because the quality shifts and the senses mistake the effect for the cause. The word gentleman, like the word Christian, records an age's homage to properties that cannot be handed over like a costume.
Emerson is plain about what makes a leading class. Power comes first, or there is no leading class. In politics and trade, bruisers and pirates are of better promise than talkers and clerks, and the name gentleman, used with any emphasis, points at original energy and a man standing in his own right. Money is not essential. What matters is an affinity that crosses clique and caste, so that the aristocrat is valid with truckmen and the man of the people can talk to the gentleman as an equal. Diogenes, Socrates and Epaminondas were gentlemen of the best blood who chose poverty when wealth was open to them, and Emerson says he uses old names for his contemporaries. Fashion grows out of this. Manners aim to facilitate life, as a railway aids travelling by clearing the road so that only pure space is left to conquer. But forms soon harden into badges. Napoleon, child of the revolution, never ceased to court the Faubourg St Germain, because fashion is a homage to men of his stamp. Emerson calls fashion a virtue gone to seed, a hall of the Past, full of the children of the great while the great themselves are absent in the field. Destroy one class, and a new one rises as cream rises in a bowl of milk.
What the gentleman needs, besides force and taste, is reality, self-respect and deference. The first thing a man requires of a man is reality, so we introduce two people by name and they look each other in the eye. We visit a great house and ask whether a man was in it. Emerson praises Montaigne, who on his journey through Italy paid his respects to every prince on the road and hung his arms on the wall of the house where he had lodged. He wants every chair to be a throne and to hold a king. The dry light of accuracy must be tempered, and intellect alone is selfish and barren. Good-nature completes the class, from the willingness to oblige up to magnanimity. He gives Mr Fox as the model of it, joining great abilities to a real love of men. A tradesman who had long pressed Fox for a note of three hundred guineas found him counting gold. Fox said he owed that money to Sheridan, a debt of honour. The creditor tore up his own note and changed his debt into a debt of honour, and Fox thanked him and paid Sheridan first because his debt was of older standing.
Society keeps its own gatekeepers, the mercuries and chamberlains of the lesser gods, and Emerson tells us to accept their coldness and not to mistake a fop for the dispenser of honour. It also loves a drowsy strength that disarms criticism, and an ignoring eye that does not see the awkwardness of others. Within the circle of good society he finds a narrower one, a parliament of love and chivalry. Review the purest aristocracy of Europe closely, he says, and we might find no gentleman and no lady, because elegance comes of no breeding but of birth. The essay then tests all this against real life. The false gentleman may almost bow the true one out of the world, yet living blood and a passion of kindness still distinguish God's gentleman from Fashion's, and Emerson quotes the epitaph of Sir Jenkin Grout, who loved his friend and persuaded his enemy. Woman, with her instinct of behaviour, can tell at the door whether magnanimous deportment is present. For ambitious youth shut out of the Golden Book, Emerson prescribes a remedy: move your house a couple of miles, because the advantages fashion values go for nothing on the farm, in the forest, in the market or in war. Everything called fashion and courtesy humbles itself before the heart of love, which impoverishes the rich. What is rich? Are you rich enough to help anybody, or to make the lame pauper feel the noble exception of your house? Emerson says he may hear without pain that he plays the courtier ill. Society has good laws as well as bad, too good for banning and too bad for blessing. He ends with a story Silenus tells: Jove said the earth had failed, and Minerva answered that mankind were only ridiculous little creatures, whose whole look changed with the name you gave them.
