THE PATHOLOGY OF THE DISEASE.

I had written my first chapter when I met a friend possessed of the qualities of moral and intellectual seriousness, which, when conjoined with a sense of humour, are proper elements for the making of a fine man. This estimable Mentor had read my midnight lucubration with a sad heart. He told me, with appropriate gravity, that his standpoint was the ethical-cum-philosophic. Judged from that imposing standard, my "screed" depressed him by reason of its "cynicism."

"I wish," said he, "that you had dealt less ruthlessly with the Philistine. Is he not a man and a brother?"

Whereupon he proceeded to administer reproof with Demosthenic eloquence, concluding with the altruistic admission, "Though I have endured much from the Philistine, I still love him."

Well, the Respectables are a large body, very much in the majority so far as my researches have informed me; and, if the right and the truth are on their side, they will not be worsted in a fair encounter. I am still impertinently chuckling at that charge of cynicism and ruthlessness. I love not Diogenes nor Torquemada. By all means let us be just and fear not in this anatomy of the Respectable Person. Have I not said that "were it not for the inherited virus," the veneering girls "might have been decent and wholesome women?" Did I not indicate a method of prophylaxis, a scientific, humane, and gradual extinction of the taint? Vulgarity, snobbery, prudery and obscenity are common specific contagious affections, manifesting a dangerous tendency to increase. I regard these diseases, with their concomitants and sequelÆ as momentous social evils, and it is entirely on humanitarian principles that I emphatically refuse to sprinkle rose-water over the victims of the contagion, and to leave the disorders to take their lingering and miserable course. These ailments are, without question, hereditary, and the microbes have a strong and deadly hold upon the host. I pity the vulgarian, the snob, and the prude; I commiserate them with the same sympathy that I extend to the leper, the blind, and the insane. Every physician must perforce at times be cruel to be kind; and I do not intend to exercise injudicious gentleness in treating these forms of mental disease.

It is well known that firmness, amounting occasionally to severity, is most essential in dealing with certain neuroses. Therefore, from that ethical basis upon which my honourable Mentor takes his stand, I shall discuss these social disorders in plain vigorous terms, recognising that the Respectable is not to be cured and his offspring preserved from the inherited sting by sentimental demonstrations of fraternal affection and pats on the back. Such methods as that have utterly failed. No, we must endeavour to convince the sufferer from chronic respectability that he is an anti-social being, a moral and mental paralytic, a prey to the hallucinations and dreads of his class, showing by this very habit of imitation that serious lesions have arisen within his brain.

As in many diseases, the congenital cases of Respectability are the most stubborn, and the prognosis cannot often be technically described as "good." It is a serious and important fact to be carefully noted by the Respectable, that many incurable imbeciles are the descendants of steady, stolid, and apparently well-conducted ancestors of the trading order, the folk who live in a petty round of narrow interests, without the inclination to form their minds, and without any cultivation of the Æsthetic and poetic sides of their natures. If you add to this a dour religiosity of the ultra-puritanic type, you have an excellent nidus of insanity. In every asylum you may find the heirs of such unfortunate prenatal influences. They are the victims of certain forms of Respectability, the result of "the ape-like faculty of imitation" in their forbears.

What were the peculiarities of these ancestors whose idiosyncracies have degenerated into actual brain disease? They tried to be conventional. It was of no matter to them what Bacon or Diderot or Herbert Spencer said about the conduct of life. Their ethical guides were the lesser lights of the sectaries, the pastors and deacons of Zoar and Bethesda, teachers often, akin in intelligence to Mr. Ruskin's "little squeaking idiot," telling "an audience of seventeen old women and three louts that they were the only children of God in Turin." All their "culture" came from such inspired sources. They were afraid of God, but, as a minor poet says, more afraid of Mrs Grundy. Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Smith, and Mrs. Robinson were their models; the Brownian view of life was good enough for them. Was not Mr. Brown very respectable? Did not Mrs. Smith set the example in ton, in Little Muddleton Road? Was not Mrs. Robinson distantly related to a branch of the aristocracy? They lived like human sheep. If one of the flock jumped automatically, the others began to jump; and one moral or social baa set all the rest bleating in the same respectable mechanical strain. Rarely a boy or a girl in the community began to develop healthy independence of judgment, or a taste for one of the arts or sciences. If the youthful rebel had tough grit in him he pursued his own course against tremendous obstacles, and amid taunts of eccentricity and disrespectability, until he freed himself from the miserable petty tyranny of the Brownian and Smithian codes. But if the boy or the girl of originality was timid and submissive, Respectability triumphed, and society lost a useful member. It is impossible to estimate the immense amount of moral, intellectual, and artistic capacity that has been impaired, perverted, and stamped out of existence in the bud by the slavish worshippers at the altar of the Goddess Grundy.

I do not deny that a strong mind may emerge comparatively unscathed from the blighting environment of Little Muddleton Road; but a man or woman with inherited Respectability in his or her fibres, starts life's race handicapped, and it may need years before the poison can be eradicated from the moral system. In most cases the true congenital Respectable is a hopeless subject for experimentation. The task of reforming him needs far more patience and tact than most reformers possess; and even if the patient shows improvement, a transference into the infected areas is certain to result in a recrudescence of the disorder. Remember the true Congenital Respectable inherits a very vigorous and malignant taint; that his system is surcharged with humours that resist the most patient treatment. Are we, then, to despair of a cure? The answer must be, "No, not if all the available hygienic remedies are employed while the Respectable is young." I could not hope to heal the mind of a patient of forty, for instance, and especially a female patient of that age. In women there are characteristic symptoms of a nature so peculiar that we must differentiate them in our pathology from the specific manifestations of the affection in men.

Obviously, the greatest impediment to recovery lies in the fact that, in nine instances out of ten, the subject has no desire to be cured. Respectability presents the phenomenon of most neurotic diseases: the patient does not understand that he is ill. If you tell a maniac that he is not the Emperor of Russia, but an inmate of Bedlam, he will think you are the madman, and that he is the sane man. In the same way, a person attacked by an insidious wasting malady imagines he is in robust health, because, when he has eaten a full meal he feels ready to eat another. He thumps himself on the chest, and says, "Sound as a bell! Look at my appetite!" Like these deluded folk, the Respectable believes firmly that his derangement is a normal healthy state. All his friends are Respectable; he is Respectable also, thank heaven!

While the Respectable remains in this grateful frame nothing can be done for him. You must convince him that Respectability is a species of mania, and until you have done this, there is palpably no hope of curing him. Ridicule, contempt, satire—these are the instruments that you must employ. Scarify him mentally, if you can, with Titanic laughter at his wretched hallucination. Kick his preposterous idol till the sawdust flies out of it; deride it, mutilate it, tear off its flimsy tinsel. You must be prepared for a tussle with the Respectable. He will fight long and savagely for his fetish, for it is the god of his fathers, and he was taught to revere it when he left the cradle. He is fighting for all that he conceives to be most dear and sacred to him, and he looks upon you as an impious iconoclast and a fanatic. To a Respectable, all are mad who seek to destroy illusions, to show the inside of things, and to disencumber the social ground of the tares and thistles that make such a brave show. He loves his world of seems and shams and hypocrisies.

Our hope is in the young, in the rising generation, ere they are hopelessly crushed and disfigured beyond all recognition beneath the wheels of Respectability's triumphal one-horse brougham; before their callow brains are dwarfed and warped in Dame Grundy's seminary and in Dr. Birch's select school for the sons of wholesale tea merchants; before the miasma of Villadom has poisoned their morals and befogged their mental vision. Education must be widened and democratized. The principle that "a mon's a mon for a' that" must be inculcated, and true worth of character will then be dissociated in the mind from that vile, tawdry, make-belief virtue called Respectability.