THE PATHOLOGY OF THE DISEASE.
"The evil is not merely a stagnation of blood, but a stagnation
of spirit. Many, no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by
constitution and by habit, or they cannot conceive of a man who is
actuated by higher motives than they are."
THOREAU.
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.