No polished person could have done it better. What was the matter? I looked at him and suddenly it came to me. If he had tried familiarity with me the first two minutes of our acquaintance, I should have resented it; by what right, then, had I tried it with him? It smacked of patronizing; on this occasion he had come off the better gentleman of the two. Here in flesh and blood was a truth which I had long believed in words, but never met before. The creature we call a gentleman lies deep in the hearts of thousands that are born without chance to muster the outward graces of the type. (37)
In this frontier, the true character of rough individuals such as the Virginian shine through and show their nobility:
Even where baseness was visible, baseness was not uppermost. Daring, laughter, endurance, these were what I saw upon the countenance of the cowboys. And this very first day of my knowledge marks a date with me. For something about them, and the idea of them, smote my American heart, and I have never forgotten it, nor ever shall, as long as I live. In their flesh our natural passions ran tumultuous; but often in their spirit sat hidden a true nobility, and often beneath its unexpected shining their figures took a heroic stature. (39)
As an honest person, the Virginian also follows a code that is not the law of the East, yet a means of establishing some type of order in the ruggedness of the West.
And so when your ordinary citizen sees this, and sees that he has placed justice in a dead hand, he must take justice back into his own hands where it was once at the beginning of all things. Call this primitive, if you will. But so far from being a defiance of the law, it is an assertion of it -- the fundamental assertion of self-governing men, upon whom our whole social fabric is based. (40)
Lastly, for Wister, the most significant aspect of the West was not how the Western experience altered the characters, but in the rebirth of aristocracy. For this author, the rise of the Virginian symbolized the resurfacing of a new form of elite with the ability of offering the political leadership that America so badly needed. America, believed Wister, was...
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