RESPECTABILITY AND MORALS.

That which people call thorough Respectability is, in the main, very bad morality. I do not state that the disease under discussion invariably annihilates the subject's sense of justice, integrity, and charity, but it does so in many cases, and in the generality of instances, it certainly perverts the ethical judgment. The true Respectable is compelled to work out his own social salvation and prestige by means of consistent duplicity and craft. He must be artificial to succeed in winning the popularity that he craves. He has, therefore, two sets of opinions—one for the sanctum and the other for the marketplace. For example, to satisfy the Brownian code, our Respectable, though he may be anti-Sabbatarian in private belief and practice, is careful to dissemble his views on the question. He probably goes to chapel, at least now and then, in order to maintain a reputation for Respectability, but he has been known to sneak by devious ways to his favourite side bar at the conclusion of his penance. Brown knows nothing about the side bar; he gulls himself with the idea that Smith attends Bethesda from a deep sense of devotion.

But Brown is as great a humbug as Smith. Has he not been heard to declare in private that his regular attendance at chapel is a matter of business? And, as for Robinson, does he not absent himself from service whenever he is beyond the espionage of the Little Muddleton Road clan? I have even seen him fishing at Datchet on Sunday. I do not wonder that these three worthies distrust each other in trading. Each one is conscious in fleeting moments of honest self-introspection that the man who habitually deceives his neighbours concerning his religious, political, and social opinions, is scarcely the one to practise strict commercial probity. Nor, indeed, is he. Respectables who dupe their neighbours as to their moral and intellectual beliefs and convictions are just as likely to defraud them in business transactions, and I have never met an intellectual liar who was scrupulously truthful and upright in his business affairs.

A man, for one reason or another, emotional or purely expedient, wishes to believe, or to persuade his acquaintances that he believes, certain theological doctrines, and, by a process of deliberate stultification of his reason, he may actually cajole himself that he does believe them. Is this the kind of man who will sedulously guard against soiling his hands in dirty commercial enterprises? I think not. If he deceives you about his private views, and plays the mental poltroon and hypocrite in public, you may be almost certain that he adulterates his bread, or sells his customers American Cheddar, assuring them that it is of English make. We cannot draw a sharp line of distinction betwixt intellectual and moral dishonesty. The man who pretends to have Radical leanings, when he is at heart a Tory, is the man who will probably swindle you in the way of trade. A trimmer and an opportunist is to be distrusted all round.

Respectability, like emasculation, makes men cowardly, untruthful, and mean-spirited. It is a terrible moral and mental blight upon the community. Do you not know the unctuous provincial tradesfolk who never attend their local theatres for fear of the Puritans of Little Peddlington? I have known scores of them—aye, and seen them with my own eyes at the Alhambra and other places of entertainment in London. They don't spend all their holiday in town at Exeter Hall and the City Temple. I need not say any more about these unmitigated impostors; but this passage from Ibsen's "Ghosts" will not be an inapt illustration of their slyness:—

"Manders: What! Do you mean to say that respectable men from home here would——?

"Oswald: Have you never heard these respectable men, when they got home again, talking about the way in which immorality was getting the upper hand abroad?

"Manders: Yes, of course.

"Mrs. Alving: I have, too.

"Oswald: Well, you may take their word for it. They know what they are talking about! (Presses his hands to his head). Oh! that that great, free, glorious life out there should be defiled in such a way!"

When Respectability has a strong hold on a man's moral sense, there is no low crime that it may not lead him to commit. Respectables, like the congenital criminals described by Lombroso, almost invariably profess religion, and many are outwardly very devout, but full within of ravening and venality. "He shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week," says Thoreau. When the plate is passed around after divine service, the Respectable ostentatiously deposits a florin upon it, registering a secret vow that he will get back that coin, with ample interest, by some shady trick of trade on Monday morning. He gets it, too, you may be sure, and with a swinging profit on it, in consideration of his Sabbath generosity. There may be treasure laid up in heaven for the Respectable, but he is not the fool to despise the good things of this life. He believes that all things have been given unto him richly to enjoy, here and hereafter, and he takes care that none of these good things go by mistake to the wrong quarters. His golden rule is, obtain from others all that you can. However latitudinarian he may be upon some points of doctrine, he is strictly orthodox in the application of that useful text, "Blessed are the poor." "Decent Society" is full of these whited sepulchres; their dank, poisonous stench pervades every Little Muddleton Road in the Kingdom.

I like to hear the working man speak his mind on the Respectables. The British working man has his palpable faults and failings, but he is most often free from the disease of Respectability. He knows worth of character when he sees it, and he detests the two-faced dealings, snobbishness, and cant of his self-styled superiors. The British working man has his failings, I say, but he is not very seriously infected with Respectability, except in rare instances. He is a cleaner, much more moral man than the bourgeois, and considerably more intelligent as a rule, because he is under no social necessity to lie to his better judgment and juggle with his reason. The proletariat, like the aristocratic class, have obtained a tolerable liberty of opinion and conduct. They can afford to be Non-Respectables, and they possess the pluck to be honest thinkers. And one can say this without having a profound veneration for "noble lords" and the institution of the peerage, and without intending to whitewash blackguards, whether they be mere patricians or simple costermongers. A friends of mine, a man of feeling, once sojourned for a space in the home of a provincial linen-draper of eminent, Respectability. I don't know what my friend was doing in that galley; I can't explain the juxtaposition of a Man of Feeling in such company; but it is enough to say that my eccentric friend was there. Well, the highly Respectable linen-draper was likewise "very religious," as the phrase is, and he used continually to dwell upon the importance of devotional exercise, as most Respectables do. He read Scripture aloud to his family and assistants, went to chapel regularly, observed Sunday scrupulously, behind drawn window blinds, believed in small profits and quick returns, drove a good trade, and held his head high, for the sober, God-fearing, enterprising shopkeeper that he was. At meal times this fellow would hold forth on grace—a virtue in which he was strangely lacking—also on obeying the precepts of Christ. "Ah," he would say, rolling the yellows of his greedy little eyes; "ah, that I were more like the Master!" Now, this speech incessantly on the lips of a sweater and a hypocrite began to cause the Man of Feeling's gorge to rise, for he was a healthy, decent liver, and a hater of cant. So one day, when the Respectable lifted his gaze to the ceiling and muttered his usual aspiration, the Man of Feeling could endure the sickening ordeal no longer.

"Like the Master!" he cried vehemently. "You wish to be like the Master, and you pay your female assistants eight or ten shillings a week, and expect them to live on that miserable sum! Don't insult Christ! Don't cant and pretend that you wish to be a penniless socialist, and go about trying to do good. You!" And, with these words, the Man of Feeling arose, and left that Respectable house, shaking its dust from his feet, and panting to breathe once more a pure and bracing air among the Non-Respectables, to whom, by moral conviction, he rightly belonged.

Ah! "the mud-hearted Bourgeois!" I don't wonder that another Man of Feeling, poor, sensitive, pitying, indignant Francis Adams, called you by that title! Can you by any human power be dragged out of the slime in which you love to wallow?

Yet these are the censors of genius, the founders of public taste, the friends of religion, the conservers of morality, forsooth! Every little shallow, mean-souled Respectable thinks himself capable of deciding that Shelley and Burns were "immoral;" that this or that work of genius is "injurious to morals;" that one brilliant man is morally incapacitated from assisting in legislation, and that another ought to be imprisoned for the expression of heterodox religious or political opinions. British Respectability makes Britain the laughing-stock and butt of the wits of the world. Nay, more; the Respectable's stupid blatant "patriotism" and bullying arrogance cause us to be hated in all the quarters of the globe.

I repeat that Respectability is practically incompatible with moral worth. With true, sound, broad morality it is quite incompatible. You cannot grow grapes on thorn bushes, nor force lilies among stinging-nettles. Politics, commerce, the relations of the sexes, science, art, and literature, are all more or less corrupted by the mephitic blight of Respectability.

I will conclude this chapter with a quotation from M. Taine, who estimates our insular propriety very shrewdly in his entertaining "Notes on England." "I am acquainted with a London merchant who visits Paris twice yearly on business. When he is there he is very jovial, and amuses himself on Sunday as freely as anyone else. His Paris host, who visited him at his home in London, where he was made thoroughly welcome, going downstairs on Sunday to the room where there was a miniature billiard table, pushed the balls about on it. The merchant in alarm begged him to stop at once, saying, 'The neighbours will be scandalised should they hear this.'"