WHAT IS RESPECTABILITY?

Respectable is a word that has been wrested from its true meaning of worthy of respect, and applied to the most sordid characteristics and conditions of human life. Respectability, like vulgarity and prudery, is an Anglo-Saxon attribute appertinent chiefly to the huge middle-class part of society. It is not the fetish of "the upper ten thousand," nor do the majority of the working class bow down before it. Respectability stands for gentility, and the genteel folk are not often of the orders aristocratic and proletarian, but of the bourgeoisie. To call a decent, intelligent man respectable is to dub him genteel, and to label him so implies that he has reached about the lowest level of mental degradation. Would it not be an act of sheer defamation of character to describe Ben Jonson, Shakspere, Dryden, Fielding, and Burns as "respectable men?" No great man has ever been, or ever can be, of the respectabilities, for the simple reason that the great are not ordinary, and the ordinary alone are respectable. Have you ever read or heard of a truly noble man or woman who was also respectable? Nobility of character and a reputation for respectability, the two things are utterly incompatible! Supposing it possible for an original mind to pursue the preposterous chimera of respectability, where would such a mind find itself ultimately? Prone and lazy on "the unclean straw of intellectual habits," an impotent among impotents, or a sheep among sheep.

The respectable man is a slave to convention, and therefore a stick-i'-the-mire. He is fearful of being deemed a crank, so fearful that he succeeds in becoming a nonentity. Now some men are born respectable; they could never be anything else. But that is no reason why they should exert the tyranny of their personal preferences over the minorities of their fellow-men. Defiance of Respectability is the beginning and the end of social progress; you cannot be at once highly respectable and progressive. Respectability is one of those dull and sordid sins that are entirely without charm.

All good, regular conduct was once bad and irregular. But originality and irregularity are abhorred of the respectable mass. "He who lets the world, or his portion of it, choose his plan of life for him," says J. S. Mill, "has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation." It is by the exercise of this simious instinct that "genteel" people order their lives down to the minutest detail. They scout eccentricity and individuality of speculation and judgment; they live in streets of houses all built alike; they imitate each others' mode of dress, think each others' thoughts, and say "It is better to be dead than out of the fashion!"

Originality! is there anything greater under the sun? "Yes," say the Respectables, "it is better to be a sheep amongst sheep than to gain a name for eccentricity." This is why our national, moral, intellectual, and artistic advance is so slow: men and women infected by the craze for respectability act as dead weights on the arms of pioneers. Grundy, Bowdler, and Podsnap are the three gods of the shoddy respectabilities.

Respectability! who has it not cursed and perverted at some time in his life? There is perhaps no better instance of the moral blight that respectability has upon the middle-class mind than the treatment of Mr. Bradlaugh, not only at the hands of rabid sectarians, but by timorous and respectable rationalists and utter indifferentists.

It may be taken as an axiom that if you want to blast a man's reputation as a tolerable specimen of the human race, you have merely to class him as respectable. The very word is damnatory and detestable. At best it always leaves a bad flavour of middle-class hashes in the mouth, and wafts to the nostrils the reek of stuffy parlours with horsehair couches, dried grass, and wax flowers. "A most respectable man." We all know him—a sort of factory-made cheap line in humanity, with a few prim, precise, little superstitions, no reasoned morals, and no intellectual or Æsthetic needs. He is a big man of a petty sect, and on Sunday he troops a stout, silk-dressed wife and seven or eight children to hear Boanerges hold forth at the tin Bethel at the end of the street. This is one type, perhaps the commonest. Another sort is not particularly pietistic, but "eminently respectable." He lives at Brixton or Clapham in a continuous struggle to keep up a "decent" appearance among the neighbours. His wife "takes in paying guests," and his daughters spend most of their time in blocking the pavement in front of drapers' shops. Mamma and the girls are gangrened with respectability and snobbishness, but were it not for the inherited virus they might have been decent and wholesome women. Their minds are blank to all the wider interests of life; they are simply mechanical dolls. Says a woman concerning these types: "I have known miners, railway men, iron and cotton and wool workers, many who have denied themselves physical necessities to buy and read a book, attend lectures, or a concert. I never knew a middle-class woman guilty of such a glaring want of common-sense."

To live respectably, as the world deems respectability, is to live a lie. No man or woman with a part to play in life can play it well if they are constantly exercised as to what people will think—people, in this instance, standing for Respectability. Can any wholesome influence come out of the frowsy atmosphere of a villa inhabited by Veneerings? As well expect to find lilies within the fences of the alkali works. The fact is that what Respectability thinks is never of the slightest importance to a man of real moral stamina and vigour of intellect. He has learnt with Schopenhauer that reputation is of little avail in the making of happiness. "What we are in and for ourselves," says that philosopher, "is of sole moment; and if we have had an opportunity of seeing how the greatest of men will meet with nothing but slight from half-a-dozen blockheads, we shall understand that to lay great value upon what other people say is to pay them too much honour."

A woman who was horribly crushed in the Crewe railway accident begged the surgeon with her dying breath to set her bonnet straight. It was not death that she feared, but the opinion of that grimmer monster Respectability; a striking instance this of the firm hold that the instinct has upon feeble minds.

Yes, to be appraised as a thoroughly respectable man among Philistines, you must either possess scanty ideas, or you must perpetually dissemble your opinions. Dr. Stockman, in Ibsen's "An Enemy of Society," is ostracised by respectable society because he refuses to be an unmitigated liar. A finer satire on Respectability has never been written. Stockman discovers that the water supply of the town is polluted, and he tells the truth about it. The respectable authorities, the tag-rag of the bourgeoisie, and the toady editor of the local journal—who is at heart a Freethinker—hoot him down in compliance with the "respectable" methods of toleration usually accorded to reformers. At a public meeting the Doctor says:

"I am going to make a great revelation to you, fellow-citizens! I am going to disclose that to you which is of infinitely more moment than the unimportant fact that our waterworks are poisonous, and that our hygienic baths are built upon a soil teeming with pestilence.... I have said I should speak of the great discovery I have made within the last few days—the discovery that all our spiritual sources of life are poisoned, and that our whole bourgeois society rests upon a soil teeming with the pestilence of lies. For I am going to revolt against the lie that truth resides in the majority."

Upon reading a Philistine opinion of himself, Diderot laughed, and said: "I must be an eccentric sort of fellow: but is it such a great fault to have preserved amid all the friction of society some vestiges of the angularity of nature?"

No thralls to Respectability can ever be natural men and women. The respectability of the middle-class is largely a growth of the Calvinistic theory of submission and poorness of spirit; the effort of the Respectables is towards docile conformity to the custom of their narrow community, "until," as Mill says, "by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth or properly their own." No fanatical fakir ever endured the torments that some English folk inflict upon themselves before the Mumbo Jumbo of respectability. Dwarfed social endeavour, suppressed healthy desires, degraded faculties—these are the sacrifices in the name of conventionality. Daily, men and women do a score of things that they know to be hurtful and insane, because they fear to be accounted "peculiar," and "not quite respectable;" and so it comes about that "the keeping up of appearances," as it is called, the incessant striving to be popular at all costs, engenders endless hypocrisies and falsehoods, and makes knaves and cowards.

Not content with warping our national character by slavish veneration of this abstraction, we have corrupted decent barbarians by inoculating them with our miserable disease of Respectability. We have clothed the innocent nude, and taught them shame, and in making them respectable we have annihilated their pristine morality, and substituted Western cant and indecency. Fortunately, however, the savage is too wholesome an animal to become respectable without protest, and in most instances, we have failed to convince him of the benefits of insanitary clothing as badges of respectability and tokens of civilisation. Quoting from Dalton, Reclus, in his "Primitive Folk," says of the Kolarian women:—

"These savage women win hearts by their frank and open manners and naÏve gaiety. Mixing freely from earliest childhood with the other sex, they have none of the prudery of Hindoos and Mussulmans, who have been brought up in strict seclusion; a prudery which at moments gives place to unclean talk, and is full of suggested obscenities. On the other hand, the modest grace of young Hos or Moonah maidens and the little girls of the Larkas is a subject of praise. Patience! Civilisation will soon cure them of this barbarism, will correct their ignorance."

It is a wretched reflection that these delightful women will one day be as respectable as the female natives of Stoke Newington.

A lady novelist writes that every English woman is a savage at heart. Does she not pay her sisters too high a compliment? The enforced clothing of the Curumbas women of Malabar, at the instigation of the "respectable English ladies" at Calcutta, is one of the pitiful examples of the indecency of thought born of our ideas of respectability. These damsels of the Curumbas tribe wore aprons of leaves suspended from a bead waistband. Such garb was not only suited to the climate, but it was charming as well as healthy. The Calcutta British Matrons thought such wear abominable. How could these women be respectable in such scanty drapery? Accordingly, by direction of Bumble, four corporals and two sergeants of infantry were told off with a company to drag the leaf aprons from the front and behind, and to put the women into petticoats. The greenery was then burned in a bonfire. What a glorious triumph of Respectability! How thoroughly British matronly and indelicate in conception was this compulsory clothing of innocent modest women by Tommy Atkins and his "pals." Is there the least need to dwell upon the contrast of decency that these Curumbas women present to the "respectable English ladies" of Calcutta?

Our insular arrogance is the twin sister of respectability. When we are not taking pride in the personal possession of a pot-hat and a frock coat, we go about bragging of national respectability and superiority. "Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud," says Schopenhauer, "adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and glad to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his inferiority. For example, if you speak of the stupid and degrading bigotry of the English nation with the contempt it deserves, you will hardly find one Englishman in fifty to agree with you; but if there should be one, he will generally happen to be an intelligent man!"

Nothing can destroy Respectability but a gradual extirpation of the bourgeoisie. I say gradual advisedly, and in a double sense; first, because we have many respectable relatives and friends whom we would be grieved to asphyxiate; and, second, because gradual processes in social evolution have more permanent resultants than cataclysms. Diderot, with wonderful prescience, asserted that a scientific anarchism is the extreme goal of social progress. This was in 1776. In 1897 a thousand sociologists recognise this fact, this "diablement idÉal," as Diderot termed it.