RESPECTABILITY AND MORALS.
Mrs. Alving: Oh! that perpetual law and order! I often think it is
that which does all the mischief here in the world. "Ghosts."
IBSEN.
"Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without
merit."
"OTHELLO."
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.'"