‘Humpty, you wouldn’t be upset if I described you as a gentleman, would you?’ Suddenly I had misgivings. It’s a word with an old-fashioned ring about it. It seems to belong to a world of spats, monocles and plus-fours.
Humpty laughed. ‘I’ve been called worse,’ he said. (I remembered those king’s men who had the thankless task of picking up the pieces after his accident. Prim would not be the way to describe their vocabulary.
Old-fashioned the word ‘gentleman’ may be but it remains an accolade. JVT’s father, a Francophone mathematician, used to call me ‘mon pote’. I liked it. It was even better than being labelled ‘gentleman’. And ‘gentleman’ is welcome in its own right.
Reading Galatians five, we find that one of the fruits of the Spirit is gentleness. That gives rise to the word ‘gentleman’. The word has been understood in different ways over the years. Before the industrial revolution it described a member of the land-owning class. It would probably not have occurred to an Englishman at that time to use the word to describe Jesus. David Livingstone did that but he came later and he was a Scotsman.
If we leave aside the Edwardian era and its spats, we find it an important factor in our humanity. The great pioneer missionary William Carey told his son: ‘A gentleman is the next best character after a Christian and the latter includes the former. Money never makes a gentleman, neither does a fine appearance, but an enlarged understanding joined to engaging manners.’
A high standard indeed. And when we look at it, we find that it includes courtesy, which means being considerate and tactful. It also involves asking questions rather than making allegations. Another requisite is generosity. Jesus approved the generosity of the woman who anointed him with expensive perfumed oil. (And we must remember that the word ‘gentle’ applies to women as well as men.)
A gentleman (and gentlewoman) is magnanimous – i.e. large-hearted, not petty-minded, taking account of all the elements in a situation and accepting human shortcomings. Benevolence is close to this, as we see in Paul’s attitude to Onesimus, giving a leg-up to the under-privileged. Again, close to this is being obliging, going half-way to meet people, flexible, happy to agree. Notice Paul’s readiness to circumcise Timothy. (Acts 16.3).
In Charles Kingsley’ s words: ‘Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever.’ Replace the word ‘good’ by the word ’gentle’ and you have it. We can all, man or maid, be gentle.
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