Sins of the Modern Gentleman

I had intended, when I first conceived of this undertaking, to proceed directly to matters of instruction and to spare the reader any prolonged recitation of grievances. A guide, after all, ought to guide, and there is little to be gained from dwelling upon the very failures one proposes to correct. That was my position, and it was a sound one, and I held it for the better part of a month before the evidence became too considerable to ignore.

What follows is not a complaint. It is a catalogue. I have compiled it not from occasional observation but from years of sustained, and largely involuntary, attention to the habits of the modern gentleman, if one may still employ that word without irony, which one increasingly may not. The offences are numerous. I shall confine myself to those which occur with such regularity that they have ceased to surprise and begun, instead, to alarm.

The matter of personal cleanliness requires addressing first, not because it is the gravest failing but because it is the most fundamental, and because its neglect renders all subsequent instruction rather beside the point. I have observed, in public lavatories and in private quarters alike, a standard of hygiene which would have been considered unacceptable in any well-managed house of my acquaintance and which, in the house where I was trained, would have resulted in a conversation of such brevity and clarity that the offending party would not have required a second.

There are men, and they are not few, who do not wash their hands upon leaving a lavatory. There are men who leave a public convenience in a state which suggests they regard the next occupant as an abstraction rather than a fellow human being who must sit where they have sat and touch what they have touched. There are men who treat the most basic act of personal maintenance as an inconvenience to be concluded as rapidly as possible, without particular regard for thoroughness, and who then present themselves in company as though nothing whatever were amiss. Something is amiss. The evidence, though I would prefer not to dwell upon its particulars, is often visible to the naked eye, and always, without exception, apparent to the nose.

The fingernails of the modern man deserve a paragraph of their own, which is more attention than most modern men have given them in the past calendar year. Long fingernails on a man are not, as some appear to believe, a matter of personal style. They are a repository. Beneath them collects the residue of every surface touched, every meal eaten without the proper implements, every absent-minded excavation of ear or nostril which the owner believes to have occurred unwitnessed. It has not occurred unwitnessed. One notices the nails first, and from the nails one draws conclusions about the remainder of the person which are, in my experience, almost invariably correct.

I am informed that musicians bear some responsibility for the fashion of keeping the nails long. I do not doubt it. I would observe only that a guitarist requires length on one hand, and that the gentleman I encountered last Tuesday at the grocer appeared to require it on all twenty digits, which suggests either a remarkably complex instrument or a remarkably simple attitude toward personal care.

On the subject of fragrance, the modern gentleman has managed to fail in two directions simultaneously, which is a feat of a kind. There are those who apply no fragrance whatsoever and whose natural state, unassisted by deodorant or soap of sufficient ambition, announces their arrival several seconds before their person does. And there are those who have applied so much cologne that one cannot, in their proximity, draw a breath without tasting it. The first man does not care. The second man cares far too much, and in entirely the wrong direction. Both have, in their separate fashions, made the air around them a matter for other people to endure rather than to share, and neither appears troubled by the imposition.

The teeth I mention only in passing, because to dwell upon them would require a strength of stomach I do not always possess. There was a time when a gentleman's smile was a considered thing, maintained with regularity and attended to by a professional at least twice yearly. Today I encounter men whose teeth suggest that the toothbrush is a rumour they have heard but not investigated, and whose breath, at conversational distance, constitutes what I can only describe, with restraint, as an event.

The matter of dress warrants particular attention, because it is here that the modern gentleman has not merely lowered his standards but abandoned the very concept that standards exist. I do not speak of formality. I am not so foolish as to expect a collar and cravat in an age which has decided that the trouser and the pyjama are, for most practical purposes, interchangeable. What I speak of is intent. The deliberate choice to present oneself as though one had, that morning, considered the question of what to wear and arrived at an answer more considered than "whatever was nearest."

The emphasis upon comfort is, I confess, the point upon which my patience wears thinnest. Comfort, in the modern vocabulary, appears to mean the total absence of structure, form, or any garment which might indicate that the wearer has a skeleton. Trousers which pool at the ankle. Shirts which billow as though designed for a man several sizes larger, or, alternatively, cling as though designed for a man several sizes smaller. Shoes which are, upon close inspection, not shoes at all but a species of padded slipper which has been permitted, by some catastrophic failure of judgement, to leave the house.

These men do not know what comfort is. Comfort is a well-made shoe which has been broken in by walking, not by surrender. Comfort is a shirt which sits upon the shoulders as it was cut to sit, neither binding nor billowing, and which permits its wearer to raise his arms, sit at a table, and move through a room without appearing to have been dressed by someone who bore him a grudge. The modern notion of comfort is simply the absence of effort, and the absence of effort is visible, always, to everyone except the man who has made the absence his principle.

I could continue. The grooming abandoned in favour of whatever state the mirror presented that morning. The hair which has not been cut in months and which has not, in the intervening period, been washed with any frequency that a charitable observer might call adequate. The skin attended to with nothing at all, as though the face were a surface which required no maintenance despite being exposed to the weather, the pollution, and the accumulated grime of a modern city for every waking hour of every day.

But I shall stop here, because the purpose of this preamble is not to exhaust either the subject or the reader, but to explain, with what I hope is sufficient clarity, why the guide which follows was written at all. It was not written from enthusiasm. It was not written from a desire to improve, which implies an optimism I have not been able to sustain. It was written because I looked, and could not stop looking, and what I saw required, at the very minimum, a response.

The response is this guide. It is not comprehensive. It is not gentle. It is, I hope, clear.

Proceed to the Contents, or return to the matter at hand.