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'Doctrine of the English Gentleman' examines the many influences on the European Renaissance ideal of noble virtue - primarily from ancient Greek and Roman sources. Under Tudor rule, there was an increasingly practical notion of the gentleman unique to Elizabethan England. There an emergent, modern sensibility evolved to consider the worth of a man, regardless of his origins, based on public service for the greater good of orderly government and a peaceful society.
Of all the magnificent researches that have engaged the human spirit, the most ancient and honourable has been the quest for the perfect man. Poets and philosophers have gone on pilgrimage; and Diogenes with his lantern is not an eccentric, but a type and a symbol. Though the image has varied with time and place, like the ancestral portraits of an ancient house a family resemblance shows in Greek and Roman, medieval and renaissance ideals despite disguising robe, ruff, or coat of mail. The roots of every age lie buried deep in the past, and most of what seems new in one age is only the reflowering of old things that have lain dormant or unnoticed. Yet, any attempt to set forth the ideal of personal perfection, which an age sought for itself, presents difficulties because of the protean character of ideals - they will scarcely bear seizing; and in the English renaissance, with its sharp contrasts and contradictions - its intellectualism and its bestiality, its reverence for authority in the ancients and its originality - the difficulties are multiplied. For us today such a study, however, is of particular interest because the perfect man of the renaissance bears a modern look and we have not yet found a better name to express our ideal than that of gentleman, which the sixteenth century first made current.
The adoption of the name is in itself significant of the setting - the new current which marks the modern period. It indicates the broadened base of the ideal and its greater attainableness. The perfect man of the Greeks was the philosopher, admittedly realizable by only a few individuals in the state. The loftiest conception of the Romans was the orator, obviously also of extremely limited distribution. The ideal of chivalry belonged only to the warrior class of the middle ages, and the courtier of the Italian renaissance could live only in the palaces of princes. But the gentleman of England was a pattern men might take to themselves not merely at the court and on the battlefield, but in the universities, the halls of justice, and even the countinghouse. It may be doing, however, a sort of violence to the facts to talk of the English ideal, since strictly speaking, in England there was not one but many - the courtier's, the scholar's, the lawyer's, the soldier's, the statesman's, the merchant's - but all proudly claimed the name of gentleman, and today no origin is so mean, no calling so mechanical as to shut out a man from striving to become a gentleman.
Thus have class prerogative and exterior marking fallen away from the ideal, and inner qualities of mind and character received increasing emphasis. So far has the process gone, indeed, that men wish to lay hold of the title through sheer possession of a common humanity, as if to say, "I am a man and therefore a gentleman," and thus are emptying the term of meaning; but in its most indiscriminate use it still bears witness to the impulse of man to walk erect, and even yet covers more amply than any other one word all that we prize in man.
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