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 THE BLIGHT OF RESPECTABILITY.
 
 UNIVERSITY PRESS.
 
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 THE BLIGHT OF RESPECTABILITY 
 
 AN ANATOMY OF THE DISEASE AND A THEORY 
 OF CURATIVE TREATMENT 
 
 GEOFFREY MORTIMER. e 
 
 LONDON 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED, 
 
 16, JOHN STREET, BEDFORD ROW, W.C. 
 
 1897- 
 
 S
 
 W
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 1. WHAT is RESPECTABILITY ? 
 
 2. THE PATHOLOGY OF THE DISEASE. 
 
 3. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. 
 
 4. SPECIFIC SYMPTOMS OF THE MALADY IN WOMEN. 
 
 5. RESPECTABILITY AND MORALS. 
 
 6. CULTURED GENTILITY. 
 
 7. PLUTOCRACY. 
 
 8. VILLADOM. 
 
 9. THE TYRANNY OF RESPECTABILITY. 
 
 10. RESPECTABLE CIVILISATION AND AFTER. 
 
 u. CONCLUSION.
 
 "It was never merry world in England since gentlemen 
 came up." 
 
 II. HENRY VI. iv. II. 
 
 " Opinion's but a fool that makes us scan, 
 The outward habit by the inward man." 
 
 PERICLES II. II.
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 WHAT IS RESPECTABILITY? 
 
 " You live a respectable man, but I ask 
 If it's worth the trouble." 
 
 GEORGE MEREDITH. " The Beggar's Soliloquy." 
 
 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 attri- 
 bute 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. Respect- 
 ability stands for gentility, and the genteel folk 
 are not often of the orders aristocratic and prole- 
 tarian, but of the bourgeoisie. To call a decent, 
 intelligent man respectable is to dub him gen- 
 teel, 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. 
 (1 )
 
 2 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 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 ! Sup- 
 posing 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 suc- 
 ceeds in becoming a nonentity. Now some men 
 are born respectable ; they could never be any- 
 thing else. But that is no reason why they 
 should exert the tyranny of their personal prefer- 
 ences over the minorities of their fellow-men. 
 Defiance of Respectability is the beginning and 
 the end of social progress ; you cannot be at
 
 What is Respectability? 3 
 
 once highly respectable and progressive. Re- 
 spectability 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 imita- 
 tion." It is by the exercise of this simious 
 instinct that " genteel " people order their lives 
 down to the minutest detail. They scout eccen- 
 tricity and individuality of speculation and judg- 
 ment; they live in streets of houses all built 
 alike ; they imitate each others' mode of dress, 
 think each others' thoughts, and say " It is bet- 
 ter 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 ad- 
 ance is so slow : men and women infected by the 
 craze for respectability act as dead weights on 
 the arms of pioneers. Grundy, Bowdler, and
 
 4 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 Podsnap are the three gods of the shoddy 
 respectabilities. 
 
 Respectability ! who has it not cursed and per- 
 verted at some time in his life? There is per- 
 haps 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 indiffer- 
 entists. 
 
 It may be taken as an axiom that if you want 
 to blast a man's reputation as a tolerable speci- 
 men of the human race, you have merely to class 
 him as respectable. The very word is dam- 
 natory 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 aesthetic needs. He is a 
 big man of a petty sect, and on Sunday he troops 
 a stout, silk-dressed wife and seven or eight
 
 Wliat is Respectability? 5 
 
 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 re- 
 spectable." 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 pave- 
 ment 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 whole- 
 some 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, man^ 
 who have denied themselves physical necessities 
 to buy and read a book, attend lectures, or a con- 
 cert. 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
 
 6 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 well if they are constantly exercised as to what 
 people will think people, in this instance, 
 standing for Respectability. Can any whole- 
 some influence come out of the frowsy atmos- 
 phere of a villa inhabited by Yeneerings? As 
 well expect to find lilies within the fences of the 
 alkali works. The fact is that what Respect- 
 ability thinks is never of the slightest import- 
 ance 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 our- 
 selves," 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 block- 
 heads, we shall understand that to lay greatj 
 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 strik- 
 ing instance this of the firm hold that the 
 instinct has upon feeble minds.
 
 What is Respectability ? 1 
 
 Yes, to be appraised as a thoroughly respect- 
 able 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 Respect- 
 ability has never been written. Stockman dis- 
 covers that the water supply of the town is pol- 
 luted, and he tells the truth about it. The 
 respectable authorities, the tag-rag of the bour- 
 geoisie, 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."
 
 8 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 Upon reading a Philistine opinion of himself, 
 Diderot laughed, and said : " I must be an ec- 
 centric 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 Cal- 
 vinistic 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 desirea, 
 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 hurt-
 
 What is Respectability ? 9 
 
 ful 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 striv- 
 ing to be popular at all costs, engenders endless 
 hypocrisies and falsehoods, and makes knaves 
 and cowards. 
 
 Not content with warping our national charac- 
 ter by slavish veneration of this abstraction, we 
 have corrupted decent barbarians by inoculating 
 them with our miserable disease of Respect- 
 ability. 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 insani- 
 tary clothing as badges of respectability and 
 tokens of civilisation. Quoting from Dalton, 
 B-eclus, in his " Primitive Folk," says of the 
 Kolarian women: 
 
 " These savage women win hearts by their frank and 
 open manners and naive gaiety. Mixing freely from
 
 10 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 earliest childhood with the other sex, they have none of 
 the prudery of Hindoos and Mussulmans, who have heen 
 brought up in strict seclusion ; a prudery which at 
 moments gives place to unclean talk, and is full of sug- 
 gested 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 Cummbas 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 Curum- 
 bas 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,
 
 What is Respectability? 11 
 
 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 Re- 
 spectability ! 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 
 Ourumbas 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 miser- 
 able 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,
 
 12 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 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 asphyxi- 
 ate ; and, second, because gradual processes in 
 social evolution have more permanent resultants 
 than cataclysms. Diderot, with wonderful pre- 
 science, 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 " didblement ideal," as Diderot 
 termed it.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 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 
 iriend 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 
 ( 13 )
 
 14 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 with Demosthenic eloquence, concluding with 
 the altruistic admission, "Though I have en- 
 dured 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 ruth- 
 lessness. 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, manifest- 
 ing a dangerous tendency to increase. I regard 
 these diseases, with their concomitants and 
 sequelae as momentous social evils, and it is 
 entirely on humanitarian principles that I em- 
 phatically refuse to sprinkle rose-water over the
 
 The Pathology of the Disease. 15 
 
 victims of the contagion, and to leave the dis- 
 orders 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 deal- 
 ing with certain neuroses. Therefore, from that 
 ethical basis upon which my honourable Mentor 
 takes his stand, I shall discuss these social dis- 
 orders in plain vigorous terms, recognising that 
 the Respectable is not to be cured and his off- 
 spring 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
 
 16 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 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 aesthetic and poetic sides of 
 their natures. If you add to this a dour religi- 
 osity of the ultra-puritanic type, you have an 
 excellent nidus of insanity. In every asylum 
 you may find the heirs of such unfortunate pre- 
 natal 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 conven- 
 tional. It was of 110 matter to them what Bacon
 
 The Pathology of the Disease. 17 
 
 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. Buskin's "little 
 squeaking idiot," telling " an audience of seven- 
 teen 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. Robin- 
 son distantly related to a branch of the aris- 
 tocracy ? They lived like human sheep. If one 
 of the flock jumped automatically, the othera 
 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 inde- 
 pendence of judgment, or a taste for one of the 
 arts or sciences. If the youthful rebel had tough
 
 18 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 grit in him he pursued his own course against 
 tremendous obstacles, and amid taunts of eccen- 
 tricity and disrespectability, until he freed him- 
 self from the miserable petty tyranny of the 
 Brownian and Smithian codes. But if the boy 
 or the girl of originality was timid and submis- 
 sive, 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, per- 
 verted, 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 en- 
 vironment 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 eradi- 
 cated 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
 
 The Pathology of the Disease. 10 
 
 areas is certain to result in a recrudescence of the 
 disorder. Remember the true Congenital Re- 
 spectable 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 aifection 
 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 dis- 
 eases : 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
 
 20 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 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 grate- 
 ful 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. Ridi- 
 cule, 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
 
 The Pathology of the Disease. 2) 
 
 him, and he looks upon you as an impious icono- 
 clast 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 genera- 
 tion, ere they are hopelessly crushed and dis- 
 figured 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 
 Yilladom has poisoned their morals and befogged 
 their mental vision. Education must be widened 
 and democratized. The principle that " a men'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.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. 
 
 " The snob in soul who looks above, 
 Trampling on what's beneath." 
 
 FRANCIS ADAMS. 
 
 " Is she a Lady or a Person ? " asked a British 
 Matron when I spoke of a certain young woman. 
 The question is well calculated to set one ponder- 
 ing on those nice distinctions of class, and sub- 
 distinctions within the classes, characteristic of 
 most semi-civilised and so-called highly civilised 
 nations of the world. Unquestionably, my inter- 
 rogator was a " lady " in the popular sense of the 
 title. She lived in a large house, received visits 
 from the rector and the curate, gave parties at- 
 tended by well-to-do tradesfolk and one or two 
 professional men, with their wives and families, 
 and refrained from committing the misde- 
 meanour of carrying parcels in the street. Un- 
 doubtedly she was considered a lady by most 
 members of her own order. But was she a 
 ( 22 )
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen. 23 
 
 lady ? I confess I do not know what you in par- 
 ticular mean by a lady. I must know you toler- 
 ably intimately before I can even hazard a sur- 
 mise. This dame was the daughter of a trades- 
 man, and she earned her own livelihood. That 
 is quite enough to stamp her as a mere person in 
 the judgment of an immense class. 
 
 For many years I have been trying to under- 
 stand the jargon of Respectability, and I have 
 failed. I cannot get three people in one room 
 to entirely agree as to the constituents of a lady 
 or a gentleman. One will tell me that the claim 
 to the distinction depends upon birth; another 
 denies this, and says it is simply a matter of 
 good manners ; but a third, in spite of my pro- 
 test that the manners of my housemaid betoken 
 a gentle-woman, affirms that her social status 
 debars a domestic servant from the label lady, 
 though she may be a very well-behaved young 
 woman. If you think it is easy to obtain a pre- 
 cise definition of lady and gentleman, I suggest 
 that you interrogate your near acquaintances, 
 and make notes of the answers. Perchance your 
 luck is better than mine. 
 
 No, I do not to this day know exactly what
 
 24 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 people mean by calling this man gentleman and 
 that man plain man. I have heard that there 
 was a time when only those men who plundered 
 the poor, swore " gad-zooks " and very much 
 worse than that, got drunk nearly every night, 
 and debauched a great number of maids were the 
 only respectable gentlemen in the land, all the 
 rest, who were not " up to" this " form " in usual 
 practice being churls, and knaves, and clowns. 
 It is a matter of history that these crapulous 
 bandits were the only gentlemen of their day. 
 
 But take the phrase in its most modern sense. 
 A. is a patrician, and therefore pre-eminently a 
 gentleman in the esteem of tens of thousands. 
 He uses the foulest back-slum expressions in the 
 hunting-field, "pals" with harlots, gamblers of 
 shady notoriety, and ruffianly hybrid sportsmen 
 of the turf and ring, drinks to excess, and, after 
 a career of low vice and mean trickery, he pays 
 his creditors many of them struggling trades- 
 men sixpence in the pound, or less than that. 
 You say he is no gentleman. Quite so ; but he 
 is received in that polite company where you and 
 I would be cold-shouldered, and the society that 
 receives him is undoubtedly very high and good
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen. 25 
 
 society. Moreover, the Respectable million, 
 though they may roll their eyes unctuously at 
 his misconduct, would be extremely delighted to 
 have the honour of entertaining Lord A. at 
 afternoon tea. You know perfectly well, my 
 friend, that his lordship is " a gentleman bred 
 and born," and that circles closed to B., an impe- 
 cunious artist, but a man of exemplary deport- 
 ment and refinement of feeling, are open to 
 Lord A. 
 
 I hold that the terms lady and gentleman, like 
 the word Respectable, have become grossly per- 
 verted, and are now merely the connotations of 
 an odious snobbery. I would like to see the 
 phrases deleted from every dictionary. In their 
 original sense they were good words, i.e., gentle- 
 man and gentle-woman, or if you will, lady. But 
 they are now utterly corrupt and meaningless, 
 except when applied to the vulgar of all ranks. 
 The lady who does washing calls for the woman's 
 linen. The cant term has become the privileged 
 title of the vulgarest plebeian. An ignorant, 
 ill-mannered, middle-class woman dubs herself 
 Lady, and describes her cultured governess as a 
 Person.
 
 26" The Blight of Respectability, 
 
 Diogenes went about with a lantern looking 
 for a man. Some of us are questing for those 
 mythical personages known as ladies and gentle- 
 men; and, like Mrs. Gamp, who doubted the 
 existence of Mrs. 'Arris, we are feign to believe 
 "there aint no sich a person." When the ma- 
 jority disagree as to the outward semblance and 
 the inner attributes of '' real gentlefolk," how can 
 we distinguish individuals of the order? 
 
 At a flower show I once overheard the 
 daughter of a provincial solicitor remark to her 
 " lady " friend : " My dear, there is really no 
 one here but us." I looked around, and saw 
 " bankers and brewers, men of evil omen," with 
 their resplendent wives and daughters, and a 
 great number of social small-fry. But these 
 were nobodies. They were not lawyers, or the 
 sons and daughters of lawyers, therefore they 
 were nonentities. How quaint are the invidious 
 distinctions and the usages of Snobbery! For 
 example, it is considered impertinence if a brewer 
 follows the hounds in a scarlet coat, but a banker 
 may wear the " pink and buckskins." Such, at 
 Any rate, is the unwritten law in some hunting 
 districts. As for army snobbishness, it is well
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen. 27 
 
 known that in several regiments the impecunious 
 officer, not "up to" the extravagant "form" of 
 the mess, is regarded as a cad by brainless, 
 swaggering subalterns, whose expenditure on 
 their stomachs amounts to several hundred 
 pounds per annum. But to write upon the 
 inflated Respectability of " the Service ' would 
 require a separate section of this essay. It is 
 enough to say that the bullying, blustering mili- 
 tary Respectable is usually a scion of a parvenu 
 family. The type is not only to be found in the 
 regular forces ; it is very common in the county 
 militia and in the provincial volunteer corps. A 
 son of a wine merchant, or some other prosperous 
 tradesman, secures a lieutenancy in the volun- 
 teers, and soon rises to a higher rank. He is an 
 officer, and therefore a " gentleman ; " and he 
 lords it over other tradesmen and tradesmen's 
 sons with the air of a patrician major-general. 
 One of these precious jackanapes once abused 
 me for a " civilian," and threatened me with " an 
 orderly," in a raucous tone of wrath, because I 
 inadvertently trespassed within the lines of a 
 volunteer camp. I said : " Where is the orderly? 
 I'll wait for him," and I sat down on the grass
 
 28 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 and smoked my pipe, and summoned fortitude 
 for the awful tribunal of a court-martial. But 
 the orderly came not, though the "civilian" 
 waited long and patiently. 
 
 Much as I dislike slang, I find the cant terms 
 " side " and " bounce " so admirably adapted to 
 my purpose in delineating certain phases of 
 Respectability that I may perhaps be pardoned 
 for using them in this attempt at a scientific 
 exposition. Side and bounce will carry you far 
 in Respectable society. Self-assertiveness is an 
 excellent thing. Johnson and Carlyle were born 
 with the faculty ; they knew how to inspire awe, 
 and no one dared to contradict them. The 
 Yankees call this quality " side." They say that 
 an egotistical, swaggering, dominant man ' ' puts 
 on a lot of side." Many men and women make 
 their way to Respectability by putting on side. 
 The rules are : (1) To appear to know all about 
 everything. (2) to talk in a loud voice, and to 
 interrupt other speakers. (3) to push, jostle, and 
 trample upon the weak, the very young, and the 
 diffident. The man who observes these rules is 
 sure to get on in the world. 
 
 Have you not seen the crowd cower like
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen. 29 
 
 frightened sheep at the sound of a self-important 
 voice? If you wish to get the better of your 
 brother man, you must terrify him and awe hin 
 into admiration. There is a good story of Colonel 
 Burnaby. He was once speaking on a political 
 platform, and some dissentients made a hubbub, 
 and shouted " Chuck him out ! " Burnaby knew 
 the value of " side." He walked down to the 
 menacing rowdies, asked one of them for a light, 
 sat down among them, and smoked his pipe. 
 
 We may not love bumptious, thrusting mortals, 
 who make their brother men their stepping- 
 stones to higher things. But we are all more or 
 less envious of their success ; and we are always 
 giving way to them, and making their path easy 
 and pleasant. When we see a pompous person- 
 age walking grandly up Pall Mall, and gazing 
 scorn upon the vulgar herd, we are often tempted 
 to step up to him and say, as Douglas Jerrold, or 
 someone else, once said to one of these superior 
 persons : " Pray, sir, are you anyone in particu- 
 lar?" But we don't do it. We wither beneath 
 the glassy stare of an eye-glass. 
 
 Some men are born with " side." It is easy and 
 natural to them. As children they are never the
 
 30 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 horse, but always the driver when playing at 
 horses, and at school they become cocks of the 
 walk and chiefs of the dormitories. They are 
 destined to be highly respected among the Re- 
 spectables, for the rank and file of Respectability 
 like to be dominated. 
 
 The other day I read a letter from a young 
 English Respectable settled in South Africa. He 
 wrote : " You have no idea how much time it 
 takes to kick sense into nigger servants/' Glori- 
 ous British supremacy! That is the way to 
 plant the banner of civilisation in heathen lands. 
 
 In a modern comedy which I have seen played 
 (I forget the title), a flunkey who inherits an un- 
 expected fortune, thumps the table with his fist, 
 crying, "Now I'll be a gentleman! I'll be a 
 gentleman, by God ! " You will possibly try to 
 convince me that this fellow never could become 
 a gentleman. Why not? Money makes the 
 man. He may not be a gentle-man in your sense, 
 but he is a gentleman in the estimation of an 
 immense number of the " general public." Do 
 not dupe yourself with the notion that there is 
 only one kind of gentleman in the community. 
 There are at least a dozen sorts the true gentle-
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen. 31 
 
 man, the real gentleman, my idea of a gentle- 
 man, your idea of a gentleman, Mrs. Grundy's 
 gentleman, the Veneering conception of a gentle- 
 man, the Oxford University definition of a 
 gentleman, the crack cavalry notion of a gentle- 
 man, the county society idea of a gentleman, the 
 gentleman who keeps a shop, but is too gentle- 
 manly to sell you things over the counter, the 
 natural gentleman, the born gentleman, the 
 gentlemanlike person, and so on. Is there no 
 room for Jeames in this mixed assemblage? 
 Once and for all, clear your mind of the fallacy 
 that your especial conception of a gentleman is 
 the only true one. There are, fortunately, not 
 one, but several standards of feminine beauty. 
 There are also several criteria of the real gentle- 
 man and the perfect lady. 
 
 Turn to the dictionary for a " correct defini- 
 tion " of gentleman if you wish to fog your mind 
 still more upon this subject : " Gentleman (from 
 genteel and man) In a general sense, every edu- 
 cated person above a labourer, an artisan, or a 
 tradesman, an individual possessed of the con- 
 duct, habit, and outward appearance which 
 belong, or are expected to belong, to persons born
 
 32 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 and educated in a high social position ; a man in 
 any station of life who is possessed of good breed- 
 ing and refined manners, strict integrity and 
 honour, kindliness of heart, and suchlike quali- 
 ties ; in a limited sense, a person of good fortune 
 and good family, whether titled or not ; one who 
 bears a coat of arms ; a term of complaisance or 
 respect, as in the plural gentlemen, when address- 
 ing a number of persons." Does this hotch- 
 potch of contradiction help you in determining 
 the qualities of a gentleman? I confess it is of 
 no service to me. 
 
 No, we must end this disquisition as we began 
 it. Terminology merely bewilders and frustrates 
 clear thought on the question. There is obvi- 
 ously room and to spare for all of us in the temple 
 of gentility. We can all be gentlemen and 
 ladies if we choose. The only thing to decide is, 
 which sort? Personally, I feel honoured at 
 being spoken of as " that man." " I endeavour," 
 writes M. Taine, '' rightly to comprehend the epi- 
 thet so essential ' a gentleman ' ; it constantly 
 recurs, and comprises a mass of ideas wholly 
 English. . . In France we have not the word, 
 because we have not the things, and these three
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen. 33 
 
 syllables, as used across the Channel, summarise 
 the history of English society."* 
 
 * " Notes on England."
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 SPECIFIC SYMPTOMS OF THE MALADY 
 IN WOMEN. 
 
 " Their hypocrisy is a perpetual marvel to me, and a constant exercise of 
 cleverness of the finest sort" 
 
 THACKERAY, " Mr. Brown's Letters to a Young Man." 
 
 " It would take a large volume to contain the authentic accounts of de- 
 ception practised by women." 
 
 DK. E. J. TILT, "The Change of Life." 
 
 Women are particularly susceptible to the 
 disease of Respectability. Our sisters esteem 
 rank and birth ; they bow down to all kinds of 
 idols with a veneration seldom equalled in men. 
 Form, ceremonies, modes of dress, points of eti- 
 quette, and social observances mean more to them 
 than to us ; and it is difficult to prove to them the 
 hollowness and inutility of mere seems, because 
 externals satisfy their sense of decorum and give 
 them pleasure. The average bourgeois woman 
 reads the court news and aristocratic tittle-tattle 
 with avidity mingled with envy. Baubles, in- 
 signia, uniforms, and the pomps of officialdom 
 ( 34 )
 
 Specific Symptoms. 35 
 
 attract and dazzle her, and she would rather know 
 a stupid peer than a sage, unpretentious philoso- 
 pher, man of science, or poet. 
 
 Notice the large proportion of women in the 
 crowds that gather outside a West End man- 
 sion, or at the door of a church, on the occasions 
 of a ball or a fashionable wedding. Many 
 women will travel long distances, and endure 
 severe fatigue and discomfort to gain a transi- 
 tory glimpse at titled personages. Lacking the 
 power of analysis, and being deficient in imagi- 
 nation, they admire the popular and ostentatious, 
 and contemn the persons and the things of true 
 worth. Besides this, women's sense of humour 
 is less keen than that of men ; they fail to see 
 the droll side of customs and fetishes, and they 
 get angry with those who jest and chuckle at 
 grotesque ceremonies and functions. It matters 
 not to the middle-class woman how good or wise 
 a man or woman may be if they do not conform 
 to preposterous codes and usages. 
 
 The romantic youth who imagines that most 
 women are more sentimental and romantic than 
 himself, discovers his error when he becomes a 
 lover, and is received as a suitor in the family
 
 36 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 of his inamorata. He finds the Little Muddle- 
 ton Road folk extremely practical and respectable. 
 Materfamilias may possibly have been slightly 
 tinged with romance and poetry in her teens ; 
 but at fifty she is a slave to Respectability, and 
 she teaches her daughters, in season and out, that 
 they must, before all else, be " Respectable mem- 
 bers of society." Is it a matter for wonder? 
 Naturally, the romantic youth puzzles over this 
 shrewd, business-like phase of woman's charac- 
 ter ; but he forgets that " human beings, cramped 
 under worse than South Sea Isle taboo," develop 
 astuteness in order to survive. You cannot 
 expect women who have been fenced around by 
 Respectability and restricted to the back parlour 
 and the kitchen, to be wild, free, natural 
 creatures, and nymphs of the woodland. We 
 ought not to have imprisoned them in this way at 
 the beginning. By this time, alas ! the majority 
 of them appear to hug their fetters. 
 
 The black shadow of the plague of Respect- 
 ability is over love and the relations of the sexes, 
 and women suffer more than men from this 
 terrible blight. Respectability isolates the sexes 
 before marriage, and only allows them to dis-
 
 Specific Symptoms. 37 
 
 cover each other's idiosyncracies, caprices, and 
 foibles when they are inseparably united ankle to 
 ankle and wrist to wrist, to hobble on through 
 life, and pretend that they are enjoying the 
 penance. I do not say that the shackles always 
 gall. It is almost a sheer question of chance if 
 they do not. For this fearful uncertainty Re- 
 spectability is much to blame. Girls are im- 
 mured and guarded, like vestal virgins of old ; 
 there is no wholesome widespread social com- 
 mingling of the sexes. Boys are free ; but what 
 is their liberty worth to them, when girls are 
 watched, chaperoned, and secluded at the very 
 age when their society is most sought by the 
 youth of the opposite sex ? This nunnery system 
 is practically restricted to the middle-class Re- 
 spectables. What is its effect upon the morals 
 and the weal of the order? Most disastrous. 
 The young man, in a very large number of 
 instances, gains his knowledge of womankind 
 among the flashy, flighty, and even more undesir- 
 able specimens of the sex. He meets the Little 
 Muddleton Road girls at parties occasionally, but 
 if he walks home from chapel with one of them, 
 Paterfamilias or Mamma intervenes, and cuts
 
 38 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 short the friendship, or they want to know the 
 young fellow's " intentions " towards Ethel. His 
 own parents tell him he is too youthful, or too 
 poor, to think of wooing yet; and I have even 
 known mothers who excluded all girls from the 
 house for fear that their sons should fall in love 
 prematurely. 
 
 Now, it is quite probable that the young man 
 has no " intentions," beyond gaining a friend in 
 one of the Little Muddleton Road girls. He may 
 simply desire social intercourse with one of the 
 feminine kind, out of obedience to an eternal and 
 immutable law of attraction. But no, such inti- 
 macies, unless they are distinctly understood to 
 be the prelude to marriage, are rarely permitted 
 by the Respectables. " It is not proper for Ethel 
 to be seen about with that young Simpkins. 
 What will Mrs. Robinson think ? " Therefore 
 Ethel is interdicted from communication with the 
 estimable Simpkins, and injured propriety is 
 appeased and quieted. 
 
 I say without hesitation that such isolation is 
 ruinous to the morals of the community. Find- 
 ing how exceedingly difficult it is to associate 
 with the daughters of the Respectables, young
 
 Specific St/mptoms. 39 
 
 Simpkins finds companions among the female 
 outcasts of society, women who besmirch his 
 romance, and degrade his pure passion to the 
 lowest animal lust. The world is full of love, 
 could he but find it ; but Respectability locks it 
 up in fusty dens, and says : " You mustn't be a 
 close friend of my daughter. That will never do ! 
 If you were engaged to her it would be a different 
 matter ; but you're not, and people would talk." 
 So Simpkins goes away, and "picks up" very 
 questionable girls in the street, and buys his first 
 experience of " love." And the saddest thing is 
 that he forms his opinion about women from 
 these types, which is, of couise, unwise, to say the 
 least. But is he wholly to blame for this ? No, 
 he is one of the victims of Respectability, the 
 grim tyrant who mars and blasts millions of 
 human lives in England. At thirty-five Simp- 
 kins is a blase, cynical young man-about-town, a 
 sufferer, probably, from inordinate sexuality, 
 with a profound contempt for all women, founded 
 on his miserable experiences with female harpies 
 and panders. " A fool and sinner," cries the 
 moralist. Yes, but there are many like to him 
 amongst us ; and they were once decent, healthy, 
 chivalrous voung men,
 
 40 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 And what of the isolated young girl? Her 
 case seems to me even more sorrowful and piteous. 
 Half of life is a sealed book to her. She has 
 scarcely any ideas that are not delusions about 
 love and the opposite sex, and the most important 
 offices of her being. Her natural impulses have 
 been suppressed, stunted, and perverted, and her 
 physical health is probably feebler than that of 
 the dissipated young man. She marries late, 
 dazed with joy that her hour has come at last, 
 and frequently awakes in the first year of mar- 
 riage to the truth that she knew little about men 
 in general, and not nearly enough about the man 
 she has wedded ; that she was wofully inexperi- 
 enced and ignorant, and that Respectability con- 
 demns her to drain the bitter cup of disappoint- 
 ment to the dregs, to drain it with composure and 
 a smiling face to the world. She was not allowed 
 to mix freely with men. All her ideas of male 
 human nature are derived from mawkish novels 
 and story books, often written by women as ill- 
 informed as herself. Many women have con- 
 fessed to me that they did not understand men 
 till they married one, and many men have said 
 the same concerning women.
 
 Specific Symptoms. 41 
 
 How, then, can we lessen the chances of draw- 
 ing the wrong card in the great lottery of mar- 
 riage? Certainly not by the sequestration of 
 youths and maidens, for that is one of the chief 
 causes of unsuccessful unions. Grundyism and 
 Respectability must be set at defiance, and boys 
 and girls in adolescence allowed to form com- 
 panionships with each other. The artificial 
 barriers between them must be broken down; 
 the old stupid inhibitions rescinded, and a whole- 
 some association not only permitted, but by every 
 means encouraged. Education in life through 
 the fellowship and the interchange of ideas 
 between the sex3s is one safeguard against wreck- 
 age in the perilous journey of matrimony. 
 
 Discoursing upon the " eternal feminine," 
 Schopenhauer says : " Individual and partial ex- 
 ceptions do not alter the fact that women are, and 
 will always remain, the most thorough and in- 
 curable Philistines. . . Their domination and 
 influence ruins modern society. . . The essen- 
 tially European lady is a being who ought to 
 have no existence at all; there ought, on the 
 other hand, to be housewives and girls who hope 
 
 to become such, and who are, in consequence, 
 
 P
 
 42 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 brought up to domesticity by subordination. 
 Just because there are ladies in Europe, women 
 of a lower grade, who form, therefore, the great 
 majority of the sex, are much more unhappy than 
 they are in the East." 
 
 As to the charge of Philistinism, I am, un- 
 fortunately, compelled to agree with the pessi- 
 mistic mysogynist. Women are the larger part 
 of humanity in this country, and, that part being 
 Philistine, it must exercise a bad influence upon 
 society in the mass. I do not deny that the 
 spirit of rebellion lurks in every woman's breast, 
 but, for all that, women are not readily per- 
 suaded to rebel against absurd conventions, 
 Their great desire is to be on the popular side, 
 and in the ranks of the mightier force, because 
 unpopular causes are generally accounted dis- 
 creditable by the majority. Women, therefore, 
 set a high value on Respectability, and they en- 
 dure much suffering to maintain it. Yet here 
 and there we find women as leaders and foremost 
 fighters in assaults upon irrational institutions 
 and customs, and they are often wise tacticians 
 and valorous assailers. But such women are not 
 of the Respectables ; they are thinkers and re-
 
 Specific Symptoms. 43 
 
 formers who have cast aside the cumbrous, tawdry 
 trappings of that order, so that they may be of 
 service to humanity. The Philistine woman 
 cares little or nothing for social advance and the 
 welfare of posterity, and in this respect she is 
 always rather more apathetic or actively hostile 
 to progress than the Philistine man. She feels 
 that a woman has more to lose than a man by 
 abandoning conventionalities and orthodox 
 opinions. But this dread is somewhat ill-founded 
 and exaggerated, because there are many uncon- 
 ventional men only too ready to warmly welcome 
 the women who revolt, and not only to bid them 
 cheer, but to pay them high homage for their 
 bravery and independence. In the long run, a 
 woman gains far more esteem and friendship in 
 the army of the Unconventionalists than she wins 
 from the host of the Respectables. 
 
 Timidity is one of the prime sources of the dis- 
 ease of Respectability in both sexes, and women 
 are by nature more timid than men in the matter 
 of revolt against ignorant Public Opinion. The 
 result is that women are much less free than men 
 in so-called free countries. " A man glories in, 
 being considered bold, but a woman shrinks from
 
 44 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 the charge of boldness, as degrading to her sex."* 
 And here I shelter myself behind a doughty 
 champion of women, because if I wrote the indict- 
 ment which he has set down, my ethical-cum- 
 philosophical Gamaliel, and possibly many of my 
 women readers, would charge me with "cynicism" 
 and " sex-bias." I quote again from Mr. Gib- 
 son, who, in this charge of the alleged untruth- 
 fulness of women, is almost as emphatic as Scho- 
 penhauer : " Owing to the subordinate position of 
 women, they are less truthful than men. They 
 work up to their ends without the exercise of 
 force, and must therefore use guile. Men lie aa 
 readily as women when they think lies will serve 
 their purpose, but, having more freedom, and 
 being less afraid of conflict, they have less cause 
 to lie. Women are taught to lie from their child- 
 hood, in order to hide their desires, their disap- 
 pointments, and their sufferings. Women are 
 driven in upon themselves, and in sheer self- 
 defence lie as men are not called upon to lie."t 
 
 I know several charming women who lie most 
 glibly and as to the manner born, without a tinge 
 
 * " The Emancipation of Women," by J. Gibson, 
 t The italics in this passage are mine.
 
 Specific Symptoms. 45 
 
 of shame ; indeed, it is a difficult matter to make 
 sure that you have " got them," so to speak, for 
 their speech is so slippery, and they fib so artis- 
 tically that no reliance can be placed upon their 
 admissions of belief or disbelief in this or that. 
 All that they say must be swallowed with a large 
 grain of salt. But let me qualify this impugn- 
 ment somewhat. I think we may fairly say that 
 the tarradiddles of women are not generally of 
 the more ignoble order of lies. They are mostly 
 pretty little semi-transparent falsehoods which do 
 not utterly deceive the hearer who has studied the 
 psychology of women. It is Respectability that 
 makes cowards and cozeners of men and women ; 
 and those who imagine that they have the most 
 to lose by frankness will naturally practice the 
 most deception.* The woman-thrall to conven- 
 tion is forced to use the weapons of falsehood and 
 to don the armour of deceit. In corroboration of 
 this assertion, I shall again quote the words of 
 another writer, and a woman to boot. Miss 
 Violet Hunt, a clever satiric novelist, thus de- 
 scribes the unhappy girl who has been inoculated 
 with the virus of Respectability : 
 
 * Heine, in his confessions, says : " We men will sometimes lie outright ; 
 women, like all passive creatures, seldom invent, but can so distort a fact 
 that they can thereby injure us more surely than by a downright lie.'
 
 46 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 " How one knows the kind of girl ! One meets a speci- 
 men in almost every house-party. She is nicely dressed, 
 but not quite so nicely as the other girls staying in the 
 house. She has charming manners, but there is some- 
 thing of the offensive and defensive sharpness of the 
 street Arab about her. She has had to take care of her- 
 self ever since she was grown up, and make her tongue 
 do the work of chaperonage. If it rains, she is in mute 
 agony, because she cannot afford to spoil her clothes. 
 She takes Champagne regularly at dinner because she 
 does not have it at home. She is at some pains to pro- 
 pitiate her hostess, because she intends to be asked 
 again. She holds her tongue when grand functions are 
 mentioned, because she was not there. In short, she is a 
 kind of innocent whited sepulchre ; a frail, jerry-built 
 edifice, whose prestige may be destroyed at any moment 
 by untoward revelations as to her social standing, whose 
 whole endeavour is to give the impression that she lives 
 in a mentionable part of London, and dresses on more 
 than thirty pounds a year."* 
 
 This is a pitiless exposure of the shifts and 
 subterfuges to which you must stoop in posing as 
 a lady or gentleman, when you are only a person. 
 What happiness, what profit, come out of such 
 masquerading? It is better, a hundred times 
 better, to save your soul alive, and preserve some- 
 thing of self-respect, as one of the unreceived and 
 unrecognised Non-Respectables. You will find 
 
 * "The Way of Marriage."
 
 Specific Symptoms. 47 
 
 this enchanted garden of Pliilistia, fenced with 
 high walls bristling with spikes, and set with 
 warning boards, is a very shoddy Paradise when 
 you are admitted to it on sufferance. It is the 
 domain of the " bores and bored," the haunt of 
 parasites and toadies, incessantly scheming and 
 distrusting each other in a deadly dull atmo- 
 sphere of uncongeniality. 
 
 My sister, you gain nothing by fostering this 
 malady of Respectability, by vapouring and 
 wasting your sweetness in the aridity of the) 
 Little Muddleton Road. So long as you slav- 
 ishly conform to the barbaric customs and codes 
 of that wretched clan, so long will you be abject 
 and unhappy. Come out of the fetid air of the 
 Charnel-house of Convention, rip off those corsets 
 and cramping disguises, cast away your high- 
 heeled boots, and stand erect and fearless among 
 men and women who dare to live free uncon- 
 taminated lives, beyond the reek and blight of 
 the infected purlieus.
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 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 i people call thorough Respect- 
 ability is, in the main, very bad morality. I do 
 not state that the disease under discussion in- 
 variably annihilates the subject's sense of justice, 
 integrity, and charity, but it does so in many 
 cases, and in the generality of instances, it cer- 
 tainly perverts the ethical judgment. The true 
 Respectable is compelled to work out his own 
 social salvation and prestige by means of consis- 
 tent 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 market- 
 place. For example, to satisfy the Brownian 
 code, our Respectable, though he may be anti- 
 ( 48 )
 
 Respectability and Morals. 49 
 
 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 Re- 
 spectability, but he has been known to sneak by 
 devious ways to his favourite side bar at the con- 
 clusion 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-intro- 
 spection that the man who habitually de- 
 ceives his neighbours concerning his religious, 
 political, and social opinions, is scarcely the one 
 to practise strict commercial probity. Xor,
 
 50 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 indeed, is he. Respectables who dupe their 
 neighbours as to their moral and intellectual 
 beliefs and convictions are just as likely to de- 
 fraud them in business transactions, and I have 
 never met an intellectual liar who was scrupu- 
 lously 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 theo- 
 logical 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 enter- 
 prises? I think not. If he deceives you about 
 his private views, and plays the mental poltroon 
 and hypocrite in public, you may be almost cer- 
 tain 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
 
 Respectability and Morals. 61 
 
 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 com- 
 munity. Do you not know the unctuous pro- 
 vincial tradesfolk who never attend their local 
 theatres for fear of the Puritans of Little Pedd- 
 lington? I have known scores of them aye, 
 and seen them with my own eyes at the Alhain- 
 bra 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 respect- 
 able 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 denied in such a way ! "
 
 52 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 When Respectability lias 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 raven- 
 ing 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 Respect- 
 able 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
 
 Respectability and Morals. 58 
 
 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 Respect- 
 ability, 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 pro- 
 letariat, 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 venera- 
 tion for " noble lords " and the institution of the
 
 54 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 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, Respect- 
 ability. 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 assist- 
 ants, 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 in-
 
 Respectability and Morals. 55 
 
 cessantly 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 pre- 
 tend 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 f
 
 56 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 Yet these are the censors of genius, the found- 
 ers of public taste, the friends of religion, the con- 
 servers 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 legisla- 
 tion, 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 in- 
 compatible 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, com- 
 merce, 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
 
 Respectability and Morals. 57 
 
 from M. Taine, who estimates our insular pro- 
 priety very shrewdly in his entertaining " Notes 
 on England." " I am acquainted with a London 
 merchant who visits Paris twice yearly on busi- 
 ness. 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.' "
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CULTURED GENTILITY. 
 
 " I hardly know an intellectual man, even, who is so, broad and truly liberal 
 that you can think aloud in his society. Most with whom you endeavour to 
 talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to 
 hold stock that is some particular, not universal way of viewing things." 
 
 THOREAU. 
 " Do you persuade yourself that I respect you ? " 
 
 "MEASURE FOR MEASURE." 
 
 Cultured gentility is one of the signs of the 
 times. Snobbishness is a deep-seated vice of 
 human beings, and a trait of the gregarious 
 mammalia, with which the human snob, when he 
 is more than ordinarily ignorant, disclaims re- 
 lationship. When Darwin told people that their 
 early progenitors were hairy and ape-like, with 
 prehensile feet, great canine teeth, and tails 
 equipped with the proper muscles, all the Re- 
 spectables jeered at him, and said that they were 
 " only a little lower than the angels," and that 
 monkeys must have been fashioned as travesties 
 of men. But though we have moved upwards, 
 ( 58 )
 
 Cultured Gentility. 59 
 
 "working out of the beast," Man still exhibits 
 race prejudice, patriotic bias, and the low instinct 
 of class exclusiveness. Perhaps at no period of 
 our social evolution have we been more cultured, 
 and yet more vulgar, than at the present time. 
 Such a juxtaposition may appear to indicate that 
 a little knowledge for the masses is not without 
 its disadvantages as well as its blessing. The 
 proletarian of the sixteenth century could not 
 read nor write ; but he was probably less vulgar 
 than those among his descendants whose ac- 
 quaintance with modern literature is restricted to 
 the gutter library of cuts and snips and racing 
 tips. Simple, merry Dick trolled " Old Rose " ; 
 flash 'Arry and his blatant mates hiccough the 
 staccato of " Glorious Beer." 
 
 Contemporaneous with a widespread vulgarity 
 of thought and a hideous banality of living, 
 there is an immense development of culture. 
 Nowadays it is the fashion to " go in " for 
 "culture," and in society you must know, or 
 affect to know, something about evolution, the 
 higher criticism, Ibsen, Whistler's pictures, and 
 Chippendale furniture. You may learn much 
 about these, and be " smart " at the same time ;
 
 60 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 for smartness and culture go hand-in-hand to the 
 " crushes " and " at homes," and are as brother 
 and sister one to the other. To use a phrase from 
 the vocabulary of culture-cum-smartness, you 
 are " not in the running " if you have merely 
 mastered the theory of the universal germ, and 
 neglected to practise the skirt dance or the plan- 
 tation song. 
 
 Once upon a time, the philosopher and the man 
 of letters came out and was separate from 
 amongst the crowd. He lived mostly in the se- 
 clusion of his library, which was neither good for 
 his understanding nor his digestion. But ha 
 forewent the pomps of smart society, partly 
 because smart society did not wish to be bored, 
 and partly owing to his enlightened instinct of 
 Bohemianism, which found wholesome gratifica- 
 tion in the unostentatious amenities of the 
 literary symposium, the forgathering with one or 
 two of his craft at the historic " Cheshire 
 Cheese " or the " Cock Tavern." He dressed 
 himself with a certain careless distinc- 
 tion; he drank cider with Porson, and 
 spent ambrosial nights in the fumes from 
 churchwardens with genial Lamb, Hazlitt,
 
 Cultured Gentility. 61 
 
 Godwin, Leigh Hunt, and Landor. These were 
 men of culture who refused to hover on the fringe 
 of a shallow, fashionable society, not because they 
 were intellectual snobs, but because their pur- 
 suits were on a higher plane than the frivolities 
 of Respectability. 
 
 Wordsworth dwelt remote among the hills; 
 De Quincey led laborious days in the solitude of 
 Mavis Bush; Shelley lived unknown of his 
 neighbours at Marlow ; and Landor, " a noble- 
 looking old man, badly dressed in shabby snuff- 
 clothes, a dirty old blue necktie and unstarched 
 cotton shirt," lived chiefly, aloof in Florence. 
 None of these qualified themselves for lionisation 
 in society. The arts of gentility are not com- 
 patible with the study of science and philosophy. 
 
 Ampere, the scientific investigator, went one 
 day to dine with Madame Beauregard. His 
 hands were stained by a drug which leaves its 
 mark on the skin for several days. Poor Ampere ! 
 what did he in a company where externals count 
 for all a man is worth? His hostess could not 
 dine with one whose hands were soiled in the 
 interest of posterity : " I promised not to return 
 there before my hands were white. Of course,
 
 62 The Blight of Respectability, 
 
 I shall never enter the house again," wrote 
 Ampere to his wife. And have we not read how 
 Dr. Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds were mis- 
 taken by a finical lady for a pair of working 
 men when she saw them conversing together ? 
 
 But we have fallen upon different days. The 
 philosopher has been lured from his den; the 
 poets have come down from Parnassus to sport 
 with the nymphs of Philistia, the intellectual 
 rogue elephant has been tamed to "caper nimbly 
 in my lady's chamber," and the recusant and the 
 pariah sat down to table with the imposing digni- 
 taries of the Church and State. It may be well 
 on the whole, but these gracious concessions 
 from the Philistine are not without their perils 
 for the philosopher and the artist. Even the 
 wisest of them cannot always escape the moral 
 and mental deterioration that comes of being au 
 fait in the whiffles and frothy small talk of draw- 
 ing-rooms, the parlour tricks and pretty deport- 
 ments ; and the donning of a chimney-pot hat and 
 a dress coat is often the first step on the down- 
 ward career of the intellectual Have we not seen 
 it? One season will transform the modest, single- 
 hearted, plain-living artist or student into a vain,
 
 Cultured Gentility. 63 
 
 insufferable, intellectual mountebank. A few 
 months of interviewing, and " log-rolling," and 
 posturing in Mayf air, and you change your ideas, 
 stultify your conscience, and degenerate into a 
 -Respectable. It is almost inevitable. We are 
 all sweetly human, and vanity is one of our prime 
 characteristics. Most of us, also, as some critic 
 of life observes, would rather be " the chief of 
 a committee of four than the unknown benefactor 
 of our species." An author of mediocre ability, 
 possessing that quality of self-assertiveness 
 known commonly as " side," can far outpace the 
 shy genius in the race for public esteem. The 
 brazen bumptiousness and supercilious disdain of 
 the mere talent which lacks astute worldly 
 wisdom are the components of the snobbishness 
 that makes for social success. Society closes the 
 door upon the needy philosopher in his thread- 
 bare garb; but it throws its portals wide to 
 welcome the adept of claptrap, whose higher phi- 
 losophy is the study of the main chance. 
 
 I do not applaud the intellectual exclusiveness 
 with which some of the cultured attempt to keep 
 their immaculate souls unspotted from the world. 
 We want no Respectability of pedants and book-
 
 64 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 worms. Erudition is worthy of the highest 
 respect ; but the erudite snob is imperfectly culti- 
 vated. He is frequently more ignorant of many 
 important phases of life than the sheer illiterates 
 whom he pities for a narrowness of judgment 
 upon men. Who can gainsay Sir Thomas 
 Browne, when he writes : " It is an unjust way of 
 compute to magnify a weak head for some Latin 
 abilities; and to under- value a solid judgment 
 because he knows not the genealogy of Hector " ? 
 It is difficult to dissociate arrogance from igno- 
 rance, even when we know that the arrogant man 
 is learned. Snobbishness is a mark of shallow- 
 ness. 
 
 Undoubtedly, many men and women of genius 
 have evinced the specific snobbery of culture. 
 Shakspere, Jonson, Victor Hugo, and Tur- 
 guenieff, are great figures that suggest excep- 
 tions to the rule. Carlyle is a bad case of play- 
 ing to the Respectables ; for, despite his loudly- 
 proclaimed reverence for humanity, his vanity, 
 like that of Antisthenes, peered through the rents 
 in his cloak. In extolling the imposers of brute 
 force in the community, the sage displayed a 
 tendency to cajole the oppressing class, for whom
 
 Cultured Gentility. 65 
 
 lie Had about as much real sympathy as the 
 Southerner has for the negro race. He jeered at 
 and snubbed his contemporary writers ; he des- 
 pised mere literary artists ; he told a now eminent 
 novelist that he was " ganging to the de'il by the 
 very vulgarest road " ; he described Lecky as 
 " a willow-pattern sort o' man, voluble but harm* 
 less, a pure herbivorous, nay, mere graminivorous 
 creature ; " he called Landor a " wild man," and 
 sighed " over the spectacle of the commonplace 
 torn to rags ; " Maurice was " uninteresting. 
 . . . twisted, screwed, wiredrawn ; " and it is 
 said that the most he could say for George Mere- 
 dith was that he was " nae fule." To a host of 
 minor essayists, journalists, and literary hangers- 
 on, Carlyle set that fashion of priggishness and 
 snobbery that prevails so widely at the present 
 time. 
 
 What a mighty and fearsome foe to knowledge 
 is Academic Respectability. Beneath its sway 
 the seats of learning become fusty abiding-places 
 of mouldy pedantry. It posts its wary lackeys 
 at every avenue of research to warn back adven- 
 turous explorers, with their theological or politi- 
 cal red flags and notice boards. Academic Re-
 
 66 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 spectability expelled Shelley. It frowns upon 
 Bain, Francis Newman, and other bold investi- 
 gators and scholars of modern times. It killed 
 Socrates, persecuted Spinoza, insulted David 
 Hume, sneered at Buckle, and derided Darwin. 
 De Quincey tells us that he scarcely spoke to a 
 soul while he was at Worcester College, Oxford. 
 Was the pensive opium-eater thoroughly over- 
 awed or depressed by the Respectability of the 
 classic city ? Possibly those were the days of the 
 genesis of the " Oxford manner," that supercili- 
 ous drawling affectation of superior sapience 
 which characterises the sons of bourgeois families 
 at Alma Mater. 
 
 Let William Morris speak : " Oxford was 
 beautiful even in the nineteenth century, when 
 Oxford, and its less interesting sister, Cambridge, 
 became definitely commercial. They (and 
 especially Oxford) were the breeding places of a 
 peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves 
 cultivated people; they were, indeed, cynical 
 enough, as the so-called educated classes of the 
 day generally were ; but they affected an exag- 
 geration of cynicism, in order that they might be 
 thought knowing and worldly-wise." (" News
 
 Cultured Gentility. 67 
 
 from Nowhere.") Thomas Hardy, in describing 
 the manners of Christminster,* writes in a simi- 
 lar strain of the system that has elbowed the pro- 
 letariat off the pavements, to make room for the 
 sons of millionaires. 
 
 Academic stubborn opposition to new and revo- 
 lutionary theories of all kinds is one phase of the 
 mental malady of Respectability. All hier- 
 archies and autocracies have the sacrosanct seal 
 of Respectability ; they have a conventional repu- 
 tation to maintain, and it is to their vital interest 
 to fight innovating opinion. For instance, the 
 French Academy refuses persistently to elect M. 
 Zola, on the very plea of his literary unconven- 
 tionality and virility. He writes for the 
 thoughtful and wide-visioned, and not for the 
 horde of shallow Respectables. Yet Zola is 
 beyond doubt the greatest novelist of our age; 
 and perhaps the only French novelist of his day 
 who can count upon immortality. It is his 
 greatness, his genius, that exclude hiin from the 
 narrow coterie. " My position is simple," he 
 writes. " Since there is an Academy in France, 
 I ought to belong to it. I have stood for election, 
 
 * " Jude the Obscure."
 
 68 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 and I cannot recognise anything wrong on my 
 part in having done so. So long as I continue to 
 stand, I am not beaten, therefore I will always 
 stand." But Zola may rest well content ; he has 
 won greater fame and honour than the Academy 
 could confer upon him. 
 
 Instance, again, the Respectable hostility to the 
 evolutionary theory. Was the opposition en- 
 tirely motived by a spirit of scientific scepticism 
 and caution? Certainly not. The main attack 
 was made by the army of Respectables, who be- 
 came exceedingly angry with Charles Darwin 
 because he calmly demolished a number of 
 groundless suppositions as to the origin of life, 
 the descent of man, and the development of the 
 sense of morality. Tour true conventionalist, 
 confronted with a new and startling idea, is like 
 the savage who lashes himself into a passion at 
 the sight of a steamboat or some other mechanical 
 invention. The savage wants to smash the 
 machine and the man who made it. 
 
 Mr. Lawson Tait, the well-known physician, 
 has stated that he suffered in social and profes- 
 sional life for his acceptance of the Darwinian
 
 Cultured Gentility. 69 
 
 hypothesis. Mr. Tait writes : " ' The Origin of 
 Species ' was published in 1859. I came across 
 it in 1861 as a boy of 17 it captivated me, and 
 took such a hold of me that I tried the applica- 
 tion of its principle in every direction open to 
 my youthful mind. In 1863, as president of the 
 Hunterian Medical Society (the Society of Uni- 
 versity Students), I applied Darwin's doctrines 
 in directions which brought upon me the ex- 
 pressed anger of the authorities, and my career 
 as a University student was in danger of a pre- 
 mature ending. Not only was there not a single 
 professor of the University of Edinburgh at that 
 time who was other than actively hostile to Dar- 
 win's views, but the acceptance of them actually 
 drove me from my native city, in 1866." 
 
 Such is a typical illustration of the mental 
 corrosion induced by the insanity of Academic 
 Respectability. 
 
 I am not tilting at Universities, but against 
 Respectability in every guise. With the growth 
 of power in the bourgeois class, the Universities 
 have, to a large degree, degenerated from halls of 
 knowledge into mere forcing beds of the disease 
 of Respectability.
 
 70 The Blight of Respectability, 
 
 The case seems even worse in " free America." 
 Plutocracy has taken the colleges under its 
 aegis, and knowledge has been cramped to suit the 
 whims of millionaire patrons. Just as happened 
 in the case of the academic professors who pro- 
 tested against slavery, so are they now threatened 
 when they advocate new economic doctrines, 
 which do not fit in with the ideas of big capital- 
 ists. Sensational light was thrown on this mat- 
 ter by a letter written by one of the professors 
 of the Leland Strawf ord University of California, 
 and given to the public by the chief of the 
 Literary Bureau of the Democratic Bryan Party, 
 though its language seems to suggest that its 
 writer did not expect its publication. This pro- 
 fessor states that college professors enjoy no free- 
 dom of expression on the money question. "I 
 know," he says, "there are many who wish to 
 champion national bi-metallism, but I am very 
 sure if there were such, they would be compelled to 
 surrender their present livelihoods." He cites by 
 
 name several instances of instructors who have 
 been placed under duresse for teaching views that 
 
 are considered heterodox by the wealthy men who 
 rule the Board of some of our principal colleges,
 
 Cultured Gentility. 71 
 
 and rule them in orthodox obedience to the gos- 
 pel of self-interest.* 
 
 The same writer informs us that for advocating 
 the passage of a Bill by the Illinois State Legis- 
 lature to give the City of Chicago the option of 
 becoming the owner of a municipal gas plant, 
 and for some other exhibitions of a spirit of 
 economic freedom, Professor Bemis was dismissed 
 from his position in the University of Chicago, 
 an institution created and largely maintained by 
 a great millionaire, part of whose fortune is in 
 gas stock. Wisconsin has a university supported 
 by the people of that State, and there learning 
 has a chance to flourish. But wherever the influ- 
 ence of the patron is found, there progress is 
 blocked by plutocracy. 
 
 "A most competent professor of political economy, in 
 one of the greatest of our universities, allowing himself 
 to become an advocate of the ownership and operation 
 of our telegraphs by the Government, was compelled to 
 give up his place by the influence of one of the trustees, 
 who happened to be a large owner of telegraph stock. 
 . . . The victorious trustee carries about with him in 
 his pocket-book a little printed slip, containing the 
 offensive views of the discharged professor, and it is his 
 
 From| article " Freedom in the American Colleges," in " Progressive 
 Review," January, 1897.
 
 72 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 pleasant habit to read this when occasion offers, to 
 instructors or students who may, he thinks, need bracing 
 up, and he accompanies the reading with cheering com- 
 ments on the fate which befel the heretic who uttered 
 such doctrines." 
 
 An important scientific school in America had 
 been created and endowed by one of our " poor 
 boys," become plutocrat. He was dissuaded with 
 difficulty by the President from carrying out the 
 idea which he proposed, that the teachers should 
 be hired by the month, as were the clerks in his 
 factories, so that they could be discharged when- 
 ever he wanted to do so ! " You see, even in 
 democratic nations, the trail of Respectability is 
 over education.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 PLUTOCRACY. 
 
 ' Constant at church and change ; his gains were sure, 
 His givings rare, save farthings to the poor." 
 
 POPE. " Of the Use of Riches." 
 
 " Here you a muckworm of the town might see 
 At his dull desk, amid his ledgers stall'd, 
 Eat up with carking care." 
 
 THOMSON. " Castle of Indolence." 
 
 Everyone knows Pugsley, the great Pugsley, 
 proprietor of Pugsley's Pure Piquant Pickles. 
 You have seen his gracefully alliterative adver- 
 tisements on the hoardings at the railway 
 stations, and all down the Great Turnover Line, 
 glaring at you in pastoral scenes, where Chloris 
 led her lambkins in the pre-plutocratic days of 
 " merrie England," and even obtruding their 
 hideous drawing of the pickle bottles (" Ask for 
 Pugsley's, Pure and Piquant") upon you in 
 lonely mountain inns of the Grampians. There 
 is no escaping the all-pervading Pugsley. Your 
 grocer has foisted Pugsley's Pickles on you, and
 
 74 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 you have had to taste them, willy-nilly. He had 
 a good reason for sending you Pugsley's Pickles. 
 The firm are able to undersell all other competi- 
 tors in the drysaltery interest, because they pay 
 low wages to their workpeople. 
 
 But, though you are familiar with the name 
 of the Great Pugsley, and know the flavour of 
 his relishes and condiments, you have never 
 troubled to learn how the man made his huge 
 business. I will tell you his history. It is very 
 instructive. 
 
 Pugsley's father was a village grocer at Hook- 
 ham Nooton. He sold butter and cheese and tea 
 for forty years, and left his son 500 at his 
 demise. Young Pugsley early developed shrewd 
 commercial instincts. At school he retailed his 
 father's sugar to the boys, making a clear half- 
 penny profit on each penny; and when he had 
 made a little capital by this huckstering, he 
 launched out into bigger trading ventures, such as 
 the vending of knives and cricket bats, and cheap 
 magic lanterns, till he became a kind of " Uni- 
 versal Provider " at the select academy for young 
 gentlemen. This was good training for his after 
 career of buying, and selling, and exploiting.
 
 Plutocracy. 75 
 
 There is nothing like beginning these things 
 when you are young. 
 
 At fifteen, Pugsley, junior, was installed 
 behind the parental counter at Hookham Nooton, 
 where he learned how to weigh tea with a bit of 
 paper under the scale pan, and other recognised 
 dodges of the trade, so that he soon became his 
 father's right hand, and a great acquisition to 
 the business. When Pugsley, senior, departed 
 hence, his son took sole control of the shop. But 
 the young man realised that he was born to be a 
 great merchant, and not a petty trader in a 
 remote village. One day he chanced upon an old 
 book of practical recipes, which told you how to 
 make ketchup and sauces, and, by dint of mess- 
 ing with vinegar and spices, he hit upon the 
 famous blend that made his name as a sauce 
 maker. Bottles of the stuff sold readily in the 
 village and neighbouring small towns, for there 
 is no denying that it was a tasty relish. Then 
 came small wholesale orders, and trade began " to 
 hum," as business slang has it. Five years later 
 we find Pugsley the owner of a pickle factory in 
 Spitalfields, and the employer of fifty hands, 
 mostly girls and boys. Ten years after, his
 
 76 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 pickles are used in every Respectable family in the 
 kingdom, and their repute has reached America 
 and the Colonies; and so, before the prime of 
 life, Pugsley is a pursy citizen, with a fine house 
 at Richmond, a horse and chaise, a housekeeper, 
 maidservants, and a gardener and coachman 
 all the proper rewards of industry. 
 
 At thirty-six, Pugsley married money, and 
 further extended his business. His wife "re- 
 ceived" local snobs, and gave "at homes," at- 
 tended by inferior celebrities and " all the people 
 who are likely to be of use to us." At forty 
 Pugsley was a Constitutional condidate for Did- 
 dleham, the hope of the Respectables, the cyno- 
 sure of the hide-bound conventionalists in 
 politics. You may remember that he was 
 returned by the imposing majority of six. Now 
 came the zenith of his fame. Pugsley' s politics 
 like his pickles, are notoriously piquant. He has 
 voted against every democratic measure, and 
 prated about " the natural leaders of the working 
 class." 
 
 See him now, in his honoured old age, hated of 
 his workpeople, envied by Respectables, despised 
 by the county gentry and feared by almost
 
 Plutocracy. 77 
 
 everyone, a millionaire to-day, with a seat in 
 Clodshire, a house in Portland Terrace, a yacht 
 at Brighton, and a deer forest in Inverness-shire. 
 I have met his son, the Master of the Slowcomb 
 Hounds, a good sort of Philistine, who would 
 rather do his fellow-men a good turn than an ill 
 one, but a terrible ignoramus and deadweight for 
 all that; with far less real knowledge of men 
 and books than my cobbler round the corner. 
 There are three daughters. One of them, Miss 
 Evelyn, is betrothed to Lord Durt, the young 
 impoverished peer, who was lately earning thirty 
 shillings a week as society reporter to the " Gad- 
 about." I am glad for Durt. He has had a 
 rough time, and Evelyn is an amiable, even 
 hopeful specimen of the Respectable girl. She 
 has lately talked about industrial questions, and 
 I believe she is half ashamed already that papa 
 has women in his employment earning nine 
 sjiillings a week upon which to keep body and 
 soul together. 
 
 Yes, it is with the sweat of women and child- 
 ren that Pugsley has become a plutocrat. His 
 wife is the Patroness of the Refuge for the 
 Fallen. How many of Pugsley's women have
 
 78 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 been forced to supplement their wretched earn- 
 ings by prostitution? Someone once put this 
 question to the pickleman. "Really, Mrs. ," 
 he said, " I am not responsible for the morals of 
 my working people." But I say that it is such 
 fellows as Pugsley who force girls to sell them- 
 selves in the street. I ask you, my Respectable 
 sister, could you live yourself and help to sup- 
 port your widowed mother and two young child- 
 ren on a wage of seven shillings a week ? I have 
 known one of Pugsley' s women workers try to do 
 this till death came with its eternity of rest for 
 that poor, semi-starved, aching body. To me it 
 is a constant source of wonder, and a matter of 
 profound respect for woman's moral courage that 
 more of Pugsley's ill-paid women helpers do not 
 walk the streets for hire. 
 
 ! Great Pugsley, I would that I could be cer- 
 tain of a day of reckoning betwixt you and an 
 Almighty Judge ! Sometimes, in dreams, I hear 
 the tramp, tramp, of thousands of feet, and see 
 the white faces of toilers gleam in the murk of a 
 London night, a night of violent retribution. 
 Must we wait for this ? Must hands be stained 
 with men's blood ere the rich will bestir them-
 
 Plutocracy. 79 
 
 selves to render justice to the poor? I pray the 
 fates that it may not be so ! But everywhere, in 
 the great cities, and out in the fields, I hear the 
 murmur of deep, sullen discontent. 
 
 Think what such a man as Fugsley has 
 wrought in the name of Respectability. He has 
 systematically lied, cheated, and crushed the 
 weaker to the wall. He has piled up wealth by 
 defrauding the widow and the orphan of bare 
 human rights, turning them into worse than 
 slaves by his thrice-accursed lust for money. I 
 have heard of old servants being deposed in his 
 warehouse, and put into subordinate positions to 
 make way for the young ; of men dismissed for 
 the expression of Liberal political opinions ; of 
 hands threatened with discharge for professing 
 trades union principles; of fines wrung from 
 hungry children for trivial offences; and of 
 bullying and insult and injustices without 
 number. 
 
 I hear my cut-and-dried economist calling me 
 to account with his formulas and expositions. 
 Ah ! I have listened to them ; I have read them ; 
 but they never have, and never will, persuade me 
 that Pugsley, the plutocrat, does what is right
 
 80 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 and humane and reasonable towards those who 
 have built up his fortune, and bought his man- 
 sions and his yacht, and dowered his daughters. 
 I know about competition, and the law of demand 
 and supply, and I take my stand on sound social 
 science. But no science that I have studied con- 
 vinces me that this plutocracy and plunder and 
 monopoly are good for anyone but the plutocrats 
 and the plunderers. And not good for them, 
 either, in any moral sense. Is it moral to kill the 
 social affections? I say that the professional 
 burglar is a model of virtue by the side of Pugs- 
 ley. He does not pose as a Christian philanthro- 
 pist and a friend of the people when he goes 
 about his nefarious business. Pugsley, the great 
 successful gambler, fines poor country louts for 
 playing pitch and toss with halfpence. The next 
 day he perpetrates a filthy fraud on 'Change. 
 Shelley was right, the true ruffian of a com- 
 munity is not the cutpurse who knocks you down 
 in the Gray's Inn Road, and gags you, while his 
 accomplice grabs your watch and valuables, but 
 the " Respectable man the smooth, smiling vil- 
 lain whom all the City honours, whose very trade 
 is lies and murder; who buys his daily bread
 
 Plutocracy. 81 
 
 with, the blood and tears of men." I want to 
 know why the big thief, Pugsley, is made a peer, 
 and the man who steals a handful of turnips is 
 sent to the County gaol ? 
 
 The other day, a labourer, out of work, wired 
 a rabbit on Pugsley's estate, and went to prison 
 for a week for the misdemeanour. But Pugsley 
 annexed the very land that the rabbit was on, a 
 good wide strip of it, too, which belonged to the 
 people. I used to walk on that same ground, 
 looking for the first primroses. Now I must ask 
 Pugsley's permission before I dare set a foot! 
 there, on this property which I own in common 
 with my neighbours ! And you tell me that this 
 sort of " law and order" is good for my morals. 
 
 I am glad that my ethical-cum-philosophical 
 friend is not at my elbow just now, to suggest 
 that I ought to be kind to Pugsley. Why, in the 
 name of reason, am I to flatter and applaud this 
 commercial gamester? I look upon him as a 
 victim of morbid acquisitiveness induced by Re- 
 spectability. Pugsley thinks he must keep up 
 his reputation among the Respectables of his set, 
 and to do this he is urged to plunder the poor. 
 He is a dangerous maniac ; he ought to be de-
 
 82 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 tainted and set to hard labour to cure him of his 
 derangement. 
 
 The stupidest farce played by the Pugsleys is 
 when one of the girls goes district visiting, and 
 tells the wives of the peasants earning twelve 
 shillings a week, that they " ought to put by for 
 a rainy day." I wonder that the women can 
 keep their patience with the ninny. If Miss 
 Clara Pugsley were to use her atrophied brain for 
 five minutes, she would know that no woman, 
 with a husband and five children to feed and 
 clothe, and a rent of eighteenpence a week to pay, 
 can save a farthing out of such wages. It is 
 gross insolence of this over-fed, idle, ignorant 
 girl to talk in this fashion to the poor. But this 
 fatuous nonsense is preached all over the country 
 every day in the week. Ladies call it " helping 
 the poor to be thrifty," " elevating the workers," 
 etc. 
 
 0, Great Pugsley, it is not envy of your pos- 
 sessions that makes me dip my pen in gall, 
 though I know well that is what you will think 
 should you read these words of mine. I would 
 be well content with the income of your under- 
 steward. You have measured human nature
 
 Plutocracy. 83 
 
 with, your little foot-rule, and come to the opinion 
 that all men are naturally greedy vampires like 
 yourself. Believe me, Pugsley, you are sadly 
 wrong in this view. I know men and women 
 who would not stain their fingers with your 
 wretched blood-money for their own usage, 
 though they would gladly employ it for the\ 
 benefit of those from whom you filched it, drib 
 and drab, by underpayment of their hard, dull 
 toil. 
 
 I wish, how I wish in malignant moments, 
 that I had assurance of a hereafter for Pugsley 
 in a dark, noisome factory, where he would have 
 to work for ten hours a day on skilly. The 
 parson tells me that there is a mansion in the 
 skies prepared for Pugsley. And another equally 
 sumptuous residence for the more honest Bill 
 Brown, the poacher ? Why not ? 
 
 London,Liverpool,Manchester,Shefl5eld these 
 are the paradises of the Pugsleys ; they batten in 
 the rechy air of these gambling centres. How 
 do these dismal, over-crowded, smoke-blackened 
 haunts of Respectability impress " the intelligent 
 foreigner?" " Send a philosopher to London, 
 but no poet," says Heine. " Everywhere we are
 
 84 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 stared down on by wealth and Respectability, 
 while, crammed away in retired lanes and damp 
 alleys, poverty dwells, with her rags and her 
 tears." Heine, like many another thinker, was 
 struck by the wretchedness and poverty of Lon- 
 don, hiding away behind the mansions of pluto- 
 crats and Respectables. He saw " gaunt hunger 
 staring beseechingly at the rich merchant who 
 hurries along, busy and jingling gold, or at the 
 lazy lord who, like the surfeited god, rides by on 
 his high horse, casting now and then an aristo- 
 cratically indifferent glance at the mob below, as 
 though they were swarming ants, or, at all 
 events, a mass of baser beings, whose joys and 
 sorrows have nothing in common with his feel- 
 ings ; " and the poet cried to poor Poverty, " Well 
 art thou in the right when thou alliest thyself to 
 vice and crime. Outlawed criminals often bear 
 more humanity in their hearts than those cold, 
 blameless citizens of virtue, in whose white hearts 
 the power of evil is quenched, but also the power 
 of good." 
 
 Mr. Grant White has written a book entitled 
 " England Within and Without," a very pungent 
 and witty delineation of the English character
 
 Plutocracy. 86 
 
 from an American point of view. He tells us 
 that the British Philistine is " perfect of his 
 kind ; " that " Philistinism pervades the whole 
 society of Great Britain south of the Tweed." 
 Mr. Grant says that this Philistinism is of late 
 growth in England, a phenomenon of the last 
 hundred and fifty years. We cannot find traces of 
 it in the " spacious days," in the plays of Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Ford, and Mas- 
 singer, nor in all the comedies of Shakspere. 
 Master Ford and Master Page, the townsmen of 
 Windsor, are neither snobs nor Philistines. But 
 now, in this wonderful nineteenth century, the 
 Philistines are as obvious as the poor; they 
 swarm and teem everywhere. The dense-minded 
 middle-class man, rich, purse-proud, vulgar, in- 
 capable of apprehending anything beyond the 
 range of his own personal experience, comes upon 
 the stage. Enter Pugsley, with a capacious 
 abdomen, a red beef face, set off with cropped side 
 whiskers, a shiny pow, a big voice, and an im- 
 posing cough. " He is the butt, it is true, of the 
 courtier and of the travelled man ; nevertheless, 
 he is represented as the type of a large class, and 
 as one who is becoming a power in the land, and
 
 84 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 stared down on by wealth and Respectability, 
 while, crammed away in retired lanes and damp 
 alleys, poverty dwells, with her rags and her 
 tears." Heine, like many another thinker, was 
 struck by the wretchedness and poverty of Lon- 
 don, hiding away behind the mansions of pluto- 
 crats and Respectables. He saw " gaunt hunger 
 staring beseechingly at the rich merchant who 
 hurries along, busy and jingling gold, or at the 
 lazy lord who, like the surfeited god, rides by on 
 his high horse, casting now and then an aristo- 
 cratically indifferent glance at the mob below, at) 
 though they were swarming ants, or, at all 
 events, a mass of baser beings, whose joys and 
 sorrows have nothing in common with his feel- 
 ings ; " and the poet cried to poor Poverty, " Well 
 art thou in the right when thou alliest thyself to 
 vice and crime. Outlawed criminals often bear 
 more humanity in their hearts than those cold, 
 blameless citizens of virtue, in whose white hearts 
 the power of evil is quenched, but also the power 
 of good." 
 
 Mr. Grant White has written a book entitled 
 " England Within and Without," a very pungent 
 and witty delineation of the English character
 
 Plutocracy. 86 
 
 from an American point of view. He tells us 
 that the British Philistine is " perfect of his 
 kind; " that "Philistinism pervades the whole 
 society of Great Britain south of the Tweed." 
 Mr. Grant says that this Philistinism is of late 
 growth in England, a phenomenon of the last 
 hundred and fifty years. We cannot find traces of 
 it in the " spacious days," in the plays of Beau- 
 mont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Ford, and Mas- 
 singer, nor in all the comedies of Shakspere. 
 Master Ford and Master Page, the townsmen of 
 Windsor, are neither snobs nor Philistines. But 
 now, in this wonderful nineteenth century, the 
 Philistines are as obvious as the poor; they 
 swarm and teem everywhere. The dense-minded 
 middle-class man, rich, purse-proud, vulgar, in- 
 capable of apprehending anything beyond the 
 range of his own personal experience, comes upon 
 the stage. Enter Pugsley, with a capacious 
 abdomen, a red beef face, set off with cropped side 
 whiskers, a shiny pow, a big voice, and an im- 
 posing cough. " He is the butt, it is true, of the 
 courtier and of the travelled man ; nevertheless, 
 he is represented as the type of a large class, and 
 as one who is becoming a power in the land, and
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 VILLADOM. 
 
 " There is less inconvenience in being mad with the mad than by being 
 wise by oneself." 
 
 DIDEROT. 
 
 " It is among the respectable classes of this vast and happy empire that 
 the greatest profusion of snobs is to be found." 
 
 THACKKRAY. 
 
 " I sojourned perforce for a long while in Villa- 
 dom," says an enemy of Respectability ; " and I 
 came away with some of its froust about my per- 
 son." You can't bide there without getting 
 harm ; but the worst of it is, we have no option, 
 many of us ; we have to live in Villadom at some 
 time or another in our lives. Thackeray, Guy de 
 Maupassant, George Gissing, and George Moore 
 have given us some clever studies of the kind of 
 folk who live in those genteel residences in the 
 suburbs. Mr. Moore's picture of Ashbourne 
 Crescent, in the last chapter of "A Drama in 
 Muslin," is about the finest of the sort I have met 
 with in fiction. It is so good a description of the 
 ( 88 )
 
 Villadom. 89 
 
 region that I am tempted beyond resistance to 
 steal parts of it. 
 
 "In Ashbourne Crescent there is neither dissent nor 
 Radicalism, but general aversion to all considerations 
 which might disturb belief in all the routine of existence, 
 in all its temporal and spiritual aspects, as it had come 
 amongst them. The fathers and the brothers go to the 
 City every day at nine, the young ladies play tennis, 
 read novels, and beg to be taken to dances at the Ken- 
 sington Town Hall. On Sunday the air is alive with the 
 clanging of bells, and, in orderly procession, every family 
 proceeds to church, the fathers in all the gravity of 
 umbrellas and prayer-books, the matrons in silk mantles 
 and clumsy, ready-made elastic sides ; the girls in all the 
 gaiety of their summer dresses, with lively bustles 
 bobbing; the young men in frock-coats which show off 
 their broad shoulders, as from time to time they pull 
 their tawny moustaches. Each house keeps a cook and 
 housemaid, and on Sunday afternoons, when the skies 
 are flushed with sunset, and the outlines of this human 
 warren grow harshly distinct black lines upon pale red 
 these are seen walking arm-in-arm away towards a 
 distant park with their young men. . . And that Ash- 
 bourne Crescent, with its bright brass knockers, its 
 white-capped maidservants, and spotless oilcloths, will 
 in the dim future pass away before some great tide of 
 revolution that is now gathering strength far away, deep 
 down and out of sight in the heart of a nation, is prob- 
 able enough ; but it is certainly now, in all its cheapness 
 and vulgarity, more than anything else representative, 
 though the length and breadth of the land be searched,
 
 90 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 of the genius of Empire that has been glorious through 
 the long tale that nine hundred years have to tell." 
 
 I have conceived of a suburban colony of 
 houses where a man might live and be natural 
 and healthy-minded among his neighbours ; 
 where he might, if he chose, walk about in cool, 
 backwoods dress, a shirt, breeks, and wide- 
 brimmed hat or no hat in hot weather, with- 
 out inciting derision, or becoming a pariah. But 
 Villadom cares nothing for naturalness, nor 
 liberty of opinion and conduct ; and, unconscious 
 of the madness of its severe conventionality, it 
 deems those insane who cultivate ideas and try 
 to live up to them. What ! is there one man in 
 ten in this great sheep-pen who would like to be 
 seen blacking his own boots or sweeping the snow 
 from the front of his house ? No, they prefer to 
 ill-pay some man's daughter to do all their irk- 
 some and dirty work. What does Villadom read, 
 talk of, and think upon? The fathers read the 
 newspapers, the mothers and daughters peruse 
 " John Halifax," and such like literature of the 
 Pap-boat and Pumplighter sort ; and the talk is 
 of money, the neighbours, and the back-parlour 
 window curtains and carpets all good themes
 
 Villadom. 9 1 
 
 enough in their season, but not the only things 
 in life of vast importance. The denizens of Villa- 
 dom tell you that they have their livings to earn, 
 dinners to cook, and houses to control ; therefore 
 there is no time for cultivating their intellects, 
 and developing their sense of the beautiful in 
 nature and art. No time ! It is the old plea of 
 the men and women who squander hours in 
 tittle-tattle and loafing. Gerald Massey, a barge- 
 man's son, and a fag in a factory ; Elihu Burritt, 
 a blacksmith ; Thomas Edward, a shoemaker ; 
 Walt Whitman, a compositor ; Bradlangh, a 
 soldier, and afterwards a clerk ; James Hosken, a 
 postman, not to mention a hundred other hard- 
 working men, found time to read, and think, and 
 improve themselves. It is the will, and not the 
 leisure, that is lacking in Villadom, the will to be 
 something better than mere Respectables in the 
 eyes of society. 
 
 The foppery and frippery of Villadom are 
 miserable outlets for human energy. If this is 
 the end of civilised beings, give me rather the 
 wildest life of primitive barbarians, for they, at 
 least, wish to learn higher arts of living. No 
 past civilisation presents this picture of Philis-
 
 92 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 tine apathy to the nobler interests of life. Karl 
 Pearson says truly that the two most pitiful illus- 
 trations of our pseudo-civilisation may be seen in 
 the main streets of the West End of London. In 
 the afternoon you see crowds of idle, shallow; 
 women standing, rapt in the admiration of bits 
 of ribbon in the windows of the drapery stores. 
 A few hours later, when the shops are closed, 
 another army of women parade the pavements, 
 ogling and smirking in their nightly quest for 
 the bread of prostitution. The " ladies " of the 
 afternoon promenade are mostly the wives and 
 daughters of Yilladom. They do not know how 
 largely responsible they are for that nocturnal 
 orgy of the streets when they are snug in their 
 luxurious drawing-rooms. It is the fetish- 
 worship of Respectability that makes thousands 
 of women redundant, drives some to the streets, 
 and condemns others to withered celibacy. Men 
 realise that the Respectable daughters of Villa- 
 dom are luxuries that they cannot afford to main- 
 tain, in early life, at least ; and the demi-monde 
 know this, too. As Mr. W. R. Greg wrote : "While 
 the monde has been deteriorating, the demi- 
 monde has been improving ; as the one has grown
 
 Villadom. 93 
 
 stupider and costlier, the other has grown more 
 attractive, more decorous, and more easy. The 
 ladies there are now often as clever and amusing, 
 usually more beautiful, and not infrequently (in 
 external demeanour, at least,) as modest, as their 
 rivals in more recognised society." 
 
 This writer, rightly or wrongly, affirms that 
 the way to set things straight in this anomaly of 
 polyandry for thousands of women, and celibacy 
 for thousands of their sisters is by the respectable 
 ladies emulating the manners, and attaining the 
 charms of the hetserse, in " cheerfulness and kind- 
 liness of demeanour," " economy of style," and 
 " ease and simplicity." 
 
 I know the advanced women some of them, at 
 any rate will tell me that men are not worth 
 winning at this expense, and that they prefer to 
 go their own ways alone. So be it. There is no 
 coercion to matrimony for such as elect to remain 
 in single independence. On the other hand, we 
 have not yet killed the sexual attraction and the 
 maternal instinct in all our emancipated women. 
 And, as for the girls of Villadom, they, at all 
 events, look upon marriage as their destiny. 
 Then, I say, let them get lid of this spurious
 
 94 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 virtue of Respectability, which costs so much to 
 maintain, and is worth nothing after all their 
 pains. Villadom exists principally for women. 
 Bachelor men do not, as a rule, need domestic 
 whim-whams and nick-nacks to make them 
 happy in their " diggings." Villadom has been 
 built and embellished for the fair sex ; they reign 
 almost supreme there, and it is their part to refine 
 the atmosphere of their domain.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE TYRANNY OF RESPECTABILITY. 
 
 " Men, and still more women, who lift themselves above the ordinary 
 standard by their philosophical tastes and speculations, may indeed be 
 accounted fortunate if they escape calumny or obloquy from general 
 
 society." 
 
 W. CAREW HAZLITT. 
 
 " Mankind is an ass, who kicks those who en- 
 deavour to take off his panniers," says a Spanish 
 proverb. When we are very young and enthusi- 
 astic about the great part we mean to play in the 
 reformation of society, we work ourselves into 
 fearful furies of indignation with those who have 
 persecuted innovators in all ages. Later in life 
 we learn that the persecutor is more of an ass 
 than a villain ; and the more we study humanity, 
 not forgetting our own human nature, the more 
 are we persuaded that this is the right scientific 
 view to take. While we had the taint of Re- 
 spectability in us (and very few men and women 
 are born without it), we were disposed sometimes 
 to do some of this asinine kicking upon those 
 ( 96 )
 
 
 96 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 whom we considered dangers to society. We did 
 not pause to think whether they wished to help 
 us by removing the packs from our galled backs ; 
 but, as soon as a Samaritan approached us with 
 kindly intent, we let fly our heels and attacked 
 him. The fact is, as Thoreau says, there are 
 really very few men, even of the Non-Respect- 
 ables, without some trace of Respectable prejudice. 
 Let us, therefore, be as tolerant as possible 
 towards the misguided Respectables who brutally 
 maltreat their would-be benefactors. Perhaps 
 you have never thrown flints at an itinerant 
 evangelist, nor hustled a Socialist in the parks ; 
 nevertheless, you have persecuted in some shape 
 or form at one time of your life. Too lazy by 
 nature to inquire into a novel social doctrine, or 
 to dispassionately examine a new theory of 
 morals, you have misunderstood and denounced 
 the promulgators and theorists. This is very 
 often the outcome of your Respectability, and a 
 purely emotional manifestation of prejudice 
 against something that you have not tried to 
 understand. Thus persecution begins. If you 
 have a large element of the savage in you, your 
 opposition will take the form of actual physical
 
 The Tyranny of Respectability. 97 
 
 violence and scurrilous abuse; if you are 
 moderately humane and intelligent, you will 
 merely scorn and deride the heretic. Your blood 
 seethes when you read of the persecution of mar- 
 tyrs. Take heed of yourself that you do not 
 evince the malevolent spirit that impels men to 
 denounce others unheard, at the first suggestion 
 of heterodox opinion. 
 
 Priestley, a Unitarian minister, of Birming- 
 ham, experimented in chemistry, and discovered 
 oxygen, alone and entirely unassisted, in a 
 laboratory fitted up at his own expense. The 
 world owes much to this industrious man of 
 science. But the human nature that killed 
 Christ and Bruno, hated Priestley because he 
 tried to convey new truths. A mob of fanatical 
 Respectables burned down his house, and des- 
 troyed all his books, notes, and apparatus, and 
 drove him from his native land. 
 
 Home, the author of the tragedy of " Douglas," 
 was persecuted and turned out of the ministry 
 by Scotch Respectables for writing a play to 
 amuse and instruct his fellow men; and Dr. 
 Alexander Carlyle was threatened with a prosecu- 
 tion for standing by Home, his friend. Reli-
 
 98 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 gious Respectability persecuted the devout 
 Hannah More for instructing the children of the 
 poor. Moneyed Respectability hanged John 
 Brown, mobbed Theodore Parker, and threatened 
 to shoot Ernestine Rose for endeavouring to free 
 negro slaves. Shelley, one of the humanest souls 
 who ever lived, was driven from Eton by respect- 
 able young cads, expelled from Oxford by Re- 
 spectability, and banished to another country. 
 Byron, who taught men, by brave precept and 
 example to love liberty, was reviled, slandered, 
 and forced to live abroad. Walt Whitman, for 
 showing men the beauty and purity of the repro- 
 ductive function, degraded and assailed by Re- 
 spectability, was " greeted with howls of execra- 
 tion/' Respectability has cursed Ibsen, Zola, 
 and Bjornson, three mighty forces for righteous- 
 ness in Europe. Charles Bradlaugh, who de- 
 voted his life to the service of man, was bitterly 
 assailed and vilely aspersed by his contemporary 
 Respectables. Respectable human nature kicks 
 everyone who sets himself to benefit humanity. 
 The history of this moral pest and mental blight 
 abounds with instances of its venomous effect 
 upon men's hearts and minds.
 
 The Tyranny of Respectability. 99 
 
 "I can bear it no longer," cries Thackeray, 
 "this diabolical invention of gentility which 
 kills natural kindliness and honest friendship. 
 Proper pride, indeed ! Bank and precedence, 
 forsooth! The table of ranks and degrees is a 
 lie, and should be flung into the fire. Organise 
 rank and precedence ! that was well for the 
 masters of ceremonies of former ages. Come for- 
 ward, some great marshal, and organise equality 
 in society, and your rod shall swallow up all the 
 juggling old court ' goldsticks.' ' Carlyle calls 
 England " the wealthiest and worst instructed of 
 European nations." Respectability piles up 
 money, accumulates vast stores of material pro- 
 ducts, and starves men's minds in the process. It 
 tyrannises in every province of ethics, science, 
 art, literature, and politics, laying continually on 
 our shoulders burdens grievous to bear. You 
 can scarcely move without coming into collision 
 with Respectability; you are expected to eat, 
 drink, dress, think, marry, and be buried in ac- 
 cordance with its canon. The Respectables of 
 the Exchange will snub and insult an indepen- 
 dent-minded man who ventures within the 
 shoddy circle without a chimney-pot hat. I have
 
 100 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 heard this stupid tyranny of majorities defended 
 as a safeguard of decency and order. What! 
 these attempts to stamp out individuality of char- 
 acter promote social progress? This is an odd 
 way of reasoning. But the Respectable doesn't 
 reason ; he follows the crowd mechanically. 
 
 You have only to give the Respectables plenty 
 of rope, and they will strangle every effort of ad- 
 vance. They form societies for suppressing this 
 thing and harrying that, with their wary scouts 
 prowling in every direction ; they try to " rob the 
 poor man of his beer," while they gorge them- 
 selves with fat meats ; they fought tooth and nail 
 against the Sunday opening of museums and 
 picture-galleries ; they prosecuted Mr. Vize- 
 telly for selling translations of Zola's novels ; they 
 oppose amelioration of our absurd, cruel, and in- 
 effective prison system ; they ban the teaching of 
 physiological morality in sex matters ; and they 
 put hobbles and blinkers on women. 
 
 I have no especial veneration for Lord Beacons- 
 field as a politician, but I admire him for his un- 
 conventionality. How many young men possess 
 the pluck to appear at a dinner party in green 
 velvet trousers, a canary-coloured waistcoat, low
 
 The Tyranny of Respectability. 101 
 
 shoes with silver buckles, lace at their wrists, and 
 their hair in ringlets ? On another occasion, Dis- 
 raeli turned up at a diocesan gathering at Oxford 
 clad in a black velveteen shooting jacket, with a 
 wideawake hat. A Respectable booby, writing 
 the other day to a Liberal newspaper, referred to 
 these eccentricities as though they were vices in a 
 man, instead of recognising that such flaunting 
 of a dull, drab Respectability, betokened courage 
 and individuality. Immediately you dress in ac- 
 cordance with your own taste, instead of in the 
 mufti of convention, you are dubbed a mounte- 
 bank and a posturer. Of course, after these aber- 
 rations of deportment and form, there is not a 
 good word to be said for Dizzy, only vehement 
 abuse and denunciation. Yet the same Radical 
 Respectable knew perfectly well, when he sat 
 down to write that diatribe, that many of his 
 class affect peculiarities of dress.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 RESPECTABLE CIVILISATION AND 
 AFTER. 
 
 " I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold." 
 
 WAI.T WHITMAN. 
 
 It is the boast of the ordinary patriotic Briton, 
 that he lives in a highly civilised country. 
 During his tutelage, he learns that climate, or 
 insularity of position on the face of the globe, or 
 the system of monarchy, or the Bible, has, or 
 have, combined or separately, made England the 
 foremost nation on earth. In later life he is 
 sometimes prone to exclaim against our " ad- 
 vanced civilisation," and even to go to the 
 extreme of asserting that we could well dispense 
 with much of it. The latter-day Anglo-Saxon, 
 who thinks without thought, has for himself a 
 very clear and satisfying idea of civilisation. 
 Emerson, on the other hand, remarks that " no- 
 body has attempted a definition of civilisation," 
 and that " we usually suggest it by negations ; " 
 
 ( 102 )
 
 Respectable Civilisation and Aftei: 103 
 
 and he adduces instances of people lacking an 
 alphabet, iron, and abstract thought. Thus, 
 when we ask for an explanation of the term 
 Civilisation, we usually hear an enumeration of 
 the constituents of a state of primal savagery, 
 and are then possibly referred to the material 
 products, money, and Gatling guns of a nation 
 for signs of its civilisation. 
 
 It is then much simpler for the majority to 
 formulate intrinsic barbarism than to define re- 
 finement, and to delineate a reliable ideal of 
 Civilisation. They are conscious that much, 
 if not most of that which they would designate 
 civilised could, upon close examination, be 
 proved to be barbaric. Their easy exposition will 
 not withstand keen scientific scrutiny; end a 
 definition which will not stand this test is merely 
 a stumbling-block in the way of inquiry. A 
 member of a reputedly cultured community or 
 class naturally resents attack upon those views 
 and customs which in his estimate denote 
 civilisation, and are of its very essence. If he is 
 a pious Englishman, he will probably confess 
 that in the matter of faith the people of Eastern 
 countries are barbaric, while he fails to discern
 
 104 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 the trail of barbarity in his own creed and ritual. 
 In like manner, a Philistine aristocrat will 
 scarcely accede that there is barely one degree of 
 coarseness betwixt his pleasures and those of the 
 illiterate proletarian, who, in his turn, persuades 
 himself that he is more intelligent and decent 
 than his compeers of another land. 
 
 Yet the truth is that a very small number of 
 the inhabitants of these isles can be justly 
 labelled civilised. We must search, as it were, in 
 the mode of Diogenes for " the highly organised 
 man, brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, 
 as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense of 
 honour and taste," who stands for Emerson's type 
 of civilised humanity. That such examples are 
 not unknown at this stage is as certain as the 
 fact that many more are in the process of evolu- 
 tion. And although savagery in idea and prac- 
 tice confronts us this way and that in each scale 
 of society, we shall do ill if we approach the 
 study of modern barbarism, in a vein of mocking 
 pessimism. It is also necessary that a lively 
 faith in the evolutionary principle applied to 
 human nature should be tempered by a look 
 behind while our hopes are young.
 
 Respectable Civilisation and After. 105 
 
 Slowly and painfully are we " working out the 
 beast," slowly and painfully must we climb the 
 stages till we cease to obey the blind dictates of 
 instinctive impulse and to base our codes on the 
 reigning opinions of the irrational mass. It is 
 hardly needful to reiterate even one of the pre- 
 liminary conclusions of all philosophers and 
 humanists to prove that most men have no 
 reasoned views upon the conduct of life. Seneca 
 says that "the common sort find it easier to 
 believe than to judge, and content themselves 
 with what is usual, never examining whether it 
 be good or no. By the common sort is intended 
 the man of title as well as the clouted shoe." The 
 veracity of Swift's aphorism that most men have 
 as much turn for flying as for thinking, and of 
 Carlyle's laconic '* mostly fools," is unquestioned. 
 
 It is therefore no unsupported postulate that 
 the larger part of civilised people always tend to 
 lead barbaric lives, and that what each class is 
 apt to accept as an approximation to a complete 
 civilisation is a very inchoate form of that truer 
 culture urged upon society by individualist re- 
 formers in each successive age. A very slight 
 examination of the thought and pursuits of what 
 is called the highest class in our existing social
 
 106 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 scale will serve to demonstrate tlie prevalence of 
 barbarism. For there, as in the lower circles, we 
 find the lines of apathy, vulgarity, and animalism 
 graven on patrician faces, and proclaimed in 
 the talk of the dinner-table, the smoking-room, 
 and the covert-side. Obviously, all our peers are 
 not ultra-barbarians ; neither are all our bargees 
 and coalheavers savages. Yet the dominant tone 
 is just as often low and inane in the mansion as 
 in the tenement, and with much less to offer in its 
 extenuation. Millions toil and ache, and are 
 vulgarised in order that a coterie of hereditary 
 lords and titled parvenus shall enjoy the leisure 
 which they mainly devote to frivolity and the 
 killing of the seons of time. Upon these, the 
 intimates of monarchs, the protectors of the 
 sacred pheasant, the distributors of largess, a bar- 
 baric populace alternately lavishes its affection 
 and its abuse. So long as the baron flings his 
 groats to the churls, all is peace in vassaldom ; 
 but when rents are racked, game laws enforced to 
 their utmost limits, and the dice rattled in the 
 hall, the voice of the people is upraised in tumult, 
 and the virtuous artizan, clinking his silver win- 
 nings on the way from the racecourse, thanks
 
 Respectable Civilisation and After. 107 
 
 heaven he is not as these nobles are, gamblers, 
 adulterers, and oppressors of the widow and the 
 orphan. 
 
 Set a barbarian to lash a barbarian if you wish 
 to see injustice done. The fact is that, being 
 barbarous, we first allow an accident of birth to 
 raise a man to a position of power, and then run 
 atilt at our shoddy dignities because the power 
 tends to impede general well-being. Worth of 
 mind is the one qualification for esteem, a trite 
 enough dictum in the mouths of those who per- 
 sistently ignore its truth. But the time must 
 come when the aristocracy of character will be 
 the only recognised aristocracy in civilised 
 nations. 
 
 I think that if one should suggest that it is 
 right to hate the members of our " bloated aris- 
 tocracy," he is no less absurd than those who 
 fawn around the lackeys of a court. Our noble 
 lords are not of one type, as our common people 
 are not of one cast, though in many rude 
 examples of nobility we can trace the basic ele- 
 ments of ruffianism, and see the bestial fruits 
 thereof. What most concerns us is the question 
 whether a society that grants titles to its success-
 
 108 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 ful money-grabbers is clean-purged of its antique 
 barbarism. An academical diploma conferred 
 upon a teacher of the arts or sciences is possibly 
 one means by which the respectful heed of the 
 uncultured is secured for new doctrine. For 
 the one who appends certain characters to his 
 signature will be held in esteem by the many as a 
 man worth hearing. Even in the matter of 
 degrees given to scholars of distinction, we too 
 often discover that such award fosters moral and 
 mental deterioration, and that it narrows and 
 mars the career of thinkers who are elevated to a 
 throne of authority. Our laureates must need 
 be eminently wary in their main theories, though 
 they may pipe an undernote of revolt in the se- 
 questered grove, to ease their souls of the sting of 
 the stultifying penalty of vulgar rank. Yes, 
 titles of all kinds seem to have a tendency to 
 degrade; and the sun of courtly favour often 
 withers the real and aids the growth of the spuri- 
 ous nobility. "Brave old Samuel," ever a Re- 
 spectable in leading sentiments, was more so 
 when he took a dole from the palace. There is 
 little hope for the amendment of the semi-bar- 
 baric prophet when he is taken from the wilder-
 
 Respectable Civilisation and After. 109 
 
 ness and thrust into a position only tenurable by 
 wily compromise with the Respectabilities. 
 
 Very engrossing is the study of Respectability 
 in high places. " These be the men we are told 
 to look up to,' said a tattered plebeian, whose 
 .eyes had been blasted by the hunting magistrate 
 who was riding on other men's land. But that 
 we do " look up to " our rich, idle folk with an 
 avid awe is undoubted. Few persons in a town 
 are especially interested in hearing that Mr. 
 Herbert Spencer is there on a visit ; but we are 
 most of us anxious to shake hands with a prize- 
 fighter, or the "Jubilee Plunger," or to take tea 
 with a millionaire's wife. We look up to or hunt 
 after such because they have vulgar notoriety 
 or money, and we are not concerned to know 
 how they came by their popularity and their cash, 
 and whether they deserve either, and make a good 
 use of their power. Were it not for the few 
 civilised beings who dare to be considered odd, 
 this odious admiration of trivial character and 
 empty claims would mean a ripening to the decay 
 of society. Involuntarily, the civilised make the 
 ways of barbarity easy to thousands, for they 
 absolve the lethargic from the exertion of severe 
 thinking.
 
 110 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 The paradise towards which the bourgeoisie 
 strive is not the leisure to refine the mind, but the 
 opportunity to vie with the more commonplace 
 section of the upper class in dissipation. The 
 labourer who resents the lordling's contumely, 
 and indicts him for living a lazy life, may only 
 work when he is starving, and perhaps not then. 
 His ideal may rise no higher than perpetual beer 
 and ninepins, while the squire craves no higher 
 satisfaction in life than hunting six days a week, 
 and champagne, billiards, and the sporting 
 papers on Sunday. The evil is in the setting up 
 of a barbaric aim of life in all classes. Our 
 greatest ideals are the commercial and the volup- 
 tuous The eternal pursuit of the frivolous, 
 which makes up the chief part of what is 
 foolishly termed "high life," and the sordid 
 middle-class struggle to amass money, are ac- 
 cepted by the shallow as tokens of our progress 
 in civilisation. We are rich and luxurious ; we 
 are therefore far above the savage. Yet how 
 far? Our leisured and affluent have for the 
 greater number returned to the employment of a 
 pre-pastoral epoch. Look at the lives of 
 thousands of English gentlemen. Truer bar-
 
 Respectable Civilisation and After. Ill 
 
 barians never existed of old than many of those 
 whose whole thought, energy, and wealth are 
 given up to sport. Many of them are restless 
 nomads, ever hurrying from one quarter of the 
 globe to another in search of fresh game to kill. 
 I do not underrate the need for the development 
 of the physical man, nor ignore the value of 
 sports rightly comprehended as a means to the 
 end of training and recreating the body. But 
 what shall be said of that multitude of our 
 countrymen who live to amuse themselves in 
 such primitive fashion? It is these who waste 
 their powers, and barbarise the vulgar by the 
 force of ill example. 
 
 Let us not wonder that, in bygone days, a 
 gaping peasantry, with quaint uncouth notions of 
 what constituted an efficient mouthpiece of their 
 wants, yelled at the hustings for the return of 
 those who rode straight, and could pummel the 
 best man of the mob in a brace of rounds. Of 
 such order are still the credentials in some of the 
 Pagan constituencies, where the beer-steeped 
 intelligence pleads the election of "an old- 
 fashioned sort and a thorough sportsman." 
 
 We are still rearing these rude types in our
 
 112 The Bliyht of Respectability. 
 
 public schools and universities, and for these we 
 laudably reserve the chief places on the senate, 
 on justiciary benches, and in local boards. De- 
 spite their educational chances and social oppor- 
 tunities, these are surely among the retrograde, 
 with their argot culled from the racing journals, 
 their strange drawling pronunciation of the 
 English tongue, their points of breeding, their 
 caddish hauteur, their rampant John Bullisms, 
 and their innate aversion to thought and earnest- 
 ness. " The fop of Charles's time," says Leslie, 
 in Mr. Mallock's " New Republic/' " aimed at 
 seeming a wit and a scholar. The fop of ours 
 aims at being a fool and a dunce." 
 
 Quitting this strange horde, let us descend to 
 the mart for an examination of the Commercial 
 Ideal. No one denies that for a nation of shop- 
 keepers we have done great things in the world's 
 history. In a very large measure we are civilised 
 by the shop, and it is only when the shop absorbs 
 the best of us, mental and physical, that commer- 
 cial activity tends to retard progress. Provide 
 that a man's moral sense and intellect are not 
 warped or unexercised in the making of money, 
 and there is nothing degrading, but the opposite,
 
 Respectable Civilisation and After. 113 
 
 in his desire to succeed commercially. But in 
 the fierceness of competition in an over-populated 
 country, cruel barbarity and detestable meanness 
 and cunning arise. And not only these, but the 
 curse of intellectual and aesthetic atrophy lights 
 upon the host. Out of this undue stress is de- 
 veloped a tendency to sordid living, a preference 
 for the lower gratifications of life. Yet need 
 money-getting always degrade the people ? Will 
 the prosperous business career of the future be 
 alone compatible with a low standard of thought, 
 and a corrupt canon of commercial morals ? 
 
 " Life without industry is guilt ; industry 
 without art is brutality." Now, in the push and 
 drive of industry at the close of this century it is 
 as hard for myriads to keep the soul alive, as it is 
 for many thousands to find food for the body. 
 I'he trader who makes Mammon his idol, who 
 thinks money, and spends his wealth irrationally, 
 brutalises life. But for the others, let us rather 
 pity and try to amend the condition of those who 
 cannot, in plain terms, " leave the shop." There 
 are strong-minded and somewhat exceptional 
 tradesmen who can shake off the dust of the ware- 
 house, and spend the hours of freedom in thai
 
 114 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 cultivation of the intellect. There are men of 
 business who do excellent work in art and science, 
 while their jaded associates are satisfying their 
 purely animal wants. The question is Can a 
 man live the higher life, and succeed in the 
 worldly meaning of prosperity? Men do not 
 grow money by storing the brain with knowledge, 
 and the merchant who ponders upon a phase of 
 evolution, or murmurs a rhythm of Tennyson 
 while he is at the ledger, will most probably be 
 an indifferent money-maker. Lamb's Good 
 Clerk, you will remember, " gets on " because his 
 first aim is to be a good piece of mechanism. It 
 is a grievous reflection that zeal for the desk 
 should eat up the brain and better part of a good 
 man, and leave him a machine. The expert clerk 
 is as valuable as the clever author or the great 
 painter ; but the trouble is that while the trader 
 is making himself efficient as a trader, he is fre- 
 quently neglecting his mind, narrowing his 
 social judgments, and tending backwards. 
 
 Is there no escape from a seemingly invincible 
 fate that restricts the thought and energy of the 
 million to the bare affairs of the shop ? It does 
 almost seem at first that there is none. What we 
 have to determine is whether we shall aid the
 
 Respectable Civilisation and After. 115 
 
 production of mediocre shopkeepers, who will 
 desire to live cultured lives, while they devote a 
 due share of thought to the shop, or whether we 
 shall continue to rear a class who place business 
 first and culture last, or practically without their 
 scheme of life. For every sociologist this is a 
 great problem. Speaking out of my own preju- 
 dice, I would rather live in a country of moder- 
 ately prosperous men, who read, and speculated, 
 and had aspirations for something higher than 
 lucre, than in the land where the mass were rich 
 and unintellectual. 
 
 There is an economic aspect of the alternatives. 
 Art thrives where there is wealth; but money 
 does not of necessity make good art. At present 
 two formidable hindrances stand in the way of 
 developing culture over-population, and a pas- 
 sion for ostentation. Regulate the reproductive 
 faculty, and save the potential slave of industrial- 
 ism from a struggle that waxes keener yearly. 
 This must be done in the individual and national 
 interest, to the gradual diminishnient of abject 
 poverty and the lessening of the awful strain in 
 the congested centres. Allied with this teaching, 
 there should be a wide inculcation of the value of
 
 116 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 a refined simplicity of material life, a substitu- 
 tion of high-thinking for mere barbarous display 
 in living. These were the leading precepts of 
 John Stuart Mill to an unheedful generation; 
 but I, for one, take courage in the view that this 
 will become the creed of many as we advance in 
 
 the art of living. In Liberty, Mill writes : 
 
 "The superior worth of simplicity of life, the ener- 
 vating and demoralising effects of the trammels and 
 hypocrisies of artificial society, are ideas which have 
 never been entirely absent from cultivated minds since 
 Rousseau wrote ; and they will in time produce their due 
 effect, though at present needing to be asserted by deeds, 
 for words, on this subject, have nearly exhausted their 
 power." 
 
 The way of the civiliser is hard. If the men 
 and women of ideals and broad sympathies go, as 
 Mills enjoins, into Barbaria and Philistia as 
 apostles, they must be prepared to receive the 
 hurts of primitive weapons. Missionaries are 
 not welcomed with barbaric shouts of glee when 
 they land to subvert ancient faiths. Neither are 
 apostles of righteousness and sweetness and light 
 beloved of our children of darkness in Belgravia 
 and Bloomsbury. But as Mr. Hamerton asks 
 in his " Intellectual Life " : " Are the Philistines 
 to have all the talk to themselves for ever; are
 
 Respectable Civilisation and After. 117 
 
 they to rehearse their stupid old platitudes with- 
 out the least fear of contradiction? How long, 
 Lord, how long ? " Yet, let your apostle be 
 the quintessence of tact and humility, he will not 
 escape slander, odium, and contempt when he 
 essays to contradict the ancient platitudes. 
 Broach boldly any subject, from religion to corset- 
 wearing, in the drawing-room at Bloomsbury, or 
 in the back parlour at Lambeth, and you will 
 have to contend against stubborn apathy. To 
 cultivate eccentricity of opinion and conduct for 
 the purpose of evoking the curiosity of the 
 languid Respectables, is a form of insanity which 
 no one will suppose I am advocating as an effort 
 towards civilisation. But social danger is always 
 to be apprehended from conventionality that is 
 stagnantly content with the existing order, and 
 has not the desire nor energy to advance. It is, 
 then, the onerous duty of a thoughtful member of 
 the respectable classes to awaken his relatives 
 or associates from a blank contentment with mere 
 animal well-being and trivial aims. He must 
 not shrink from the burden because it is the 
 habit of unthinking persons to believe that the 
 conclusions of sounder brains have been gained
 
 118 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 by the same meagre thinking as their own 
 flimsy theories, or that his wrought-out views are 
 only crotchets advanced to flatter his egoism. 
 For by those who shirk deep thinking, intellec- 
 tual seriousness in others is merely regarded as a 
 more or less peculiar temperamental trait. They 
 do not know that the eternal voluntary martyr- 
 dom of thinkers is their salvation. They are 
 unaware that the good and the earnest toil daily 
 in order that the evil and the frivolous may be 
 preserved to reap the reward of toilsome thought, 
 in which the apathetic have had no share, and for 
 which they have little praise. Reflect upon what 
 Darwin has done for morality, science, and art, 
 and then mark the mean ingratitude and igno- 
 rant misrepresentation of some of those who are 
 now being made whole by his sane science. Will 
 the B-espectables always crucify their social 
 redeemers ? 
 
 Not wholly encouraging is the investigation of 
 barbarism in our industrial and proletarian 
 classes. Yet perhaps, if there is one party above 
 another that appears to be progressing rapidly 
 towards a higher civilisation, it is the operative. 
 When one thinks of what the working class has
 
 Respectable Civilisation and After. 119 
 
 done, with its lack of advantage in the past, and 
 its scant opportunity in the present, the progress 
 is one of the most wonderful and hopeful omens 
 of modern times. It is inevitable that the acqui- 
 sition of a little knowledge should bear some ill 
 fruit among the sound; but the humanising 
 influences of education far exceed in their proved 
 result the expectation of the early pioneers of a 
 noble movement. Much has been done, and much 
 remains to be accomplished, in the work of con- 
 structing the foundations and superstructure of 
 an ultimate democratic civilisation. Whitman 
 and Ibsen, latter-day prophets of sound social 
 foresight, predicted at the outset of their careers 
 that in the fibre and stuff of a cultured democracy 
 lies our hope. 
 
 Undoubtedly, the moral tone of the industrial 
 class is growing higher yearly. The rough hand 
 of the artisan has fashioned much of our civilisa- 
 tion, and his hard, calculating intelligence will 
 have a larger share in the government of the near 
 future. I confess that it thrills me to hear that a 
 set of miners in the North have begged the cus- 
 todian of a public library to provide them with 
 Mr. Meredith's fine but ''difficult" novels.
 
 120 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 Again, we should rejoice to learn that a factory 
 worker, who has taught himself to read at the age 
 of forty, is studying Mr. Spencer's " First 
 Principles." 
 
 As I have before tried to show, the neglect of 
 civilising thought and study is not voluntary in 
 the case of many busy men and women. It is 
 largely an outcome of complex commercial 
 rivalry and overpressure that thousands should 
 not share in the higher refinements of civilisation, 
 and that science should be outside their rule of 
 life instead of at the bottom of it. Thoreau, 
 speaks of the best part of the husbandman being 
 ploughed into the soil for compost; and the 
 figure represents the case for legions of toilers. 
 Mr. Ruskin is among the oracles when he an- 
 nounces that " the final outcome of all wealth is 
 the producing as many as possible full-breathed, 
 bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human crea- 
 tures." Perhaps so; but for the nonce, we 
 mostly plod on in that "dim-eyed and narrow- 
 chested state of being," which we are wont to 
 describe as " getting on in the world." 
 
 It is a great thing, this educational advance of 
 the tool-skilled. Yet there is much to be done.
 
 
 Respectable Civilisation and After. 121 
 
 It is needless to rehearse the manifold savage 
 characteristics, the mob frenzies, and the low 
 pleasures of many of the working class imper- 
 fections which all of us exhibit either in like 
 kind or with faint difference. We forget that a 
 mechanic who indulges in a weekly debauch, and 
 sometimes beats a constable, has his counterpart 
 in those who call themselves superior. Ruffian- 
 ism, brutality, and gross sensuality are not re- 
 stricted to one class. English epicurism is 
 mostly of the lower kind in every rank. The un- 
 civilised of the upper class spend the larger part 
 of their incomes upon dishes and drinks ; the 
 coarse of the labouring class expend nearly half 
 their wages on beer. Our sensuousness trends in 
 the direction of sensuality. We pride ourselves 
 that we are able to consume quantities of flesh, 
 and we apotheosise John Barleycorn with 
 Shakspere. 
 
 Very sombre is the spectacle of the life that 
 bruises the million. To one who walks the 
 streets observantly on public holidays, the white 
 faces and worn bodies of his toiling brothers tell 
 of dull, grinding lives. See the poor mercantile 
 clerks and the shopmen, the genteel drudges, the
 
 IJiJJ The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 indispensable factors of wealth which they will 
 never share. Well does Guy de Maupassant 
 picture the type : 
 
 "With sallow faces and twisted bodies, and one of 
 their shoulders a little forced up by perpetual bending 
 at work over a table . . . they all belonged to the 
 army of poor threadbare devils who vegetate frugally in 
 a mean little plaster-house, with a flower bed for a 
 garden." 
 
 How can we inveigh against these tired workers 
 for the drowsy occupation of their few leisure 
 hours ? What is chiefly at fault is the crushing 
 system that leaves so little time for expansion of 
 the mind and the sympathies, the ideal that 
 shapes the many to this level cast. Mr. Grant 
 White gives a grimly sardonic sketch of a Lon- 
 don shopkeeping pair in his " England Without 
 and Within." He tells of faces that had prob- 
 ably " once expressed some of the vivacity of 
 youth ; but this had passed away, and nothing, 
 no trace of thought or feeling, had come into its 
 place only fat; a greasy witness of content." 
 But there is more pathos than humour in this 
 study from lower middle-class life. Were there 
 not originally the germs of ideas, imagination, 
 and emotion, in these unfortunate contented
 
 Respectable Civilisation and After. 123 
 
 souls ? Are such, doomed to take no thought for 
 higher things than bread-getting and eating, 
 and will their minds for ever starve on the Bethel 
 hymn and the newspaper ? 
 
 More pitiful and tragic is the state of the 
 lowest, the lapsed, the untameable of the slums. 
 " Our society," says M. Taine, " is a fine edifice, 
 but in the lowest story what a sink of impurity. 
 . . . It seems to me that the evil and the good 
 are greater here than in France." The law can- 
 not cure inherent propensities to evil doing, and 
 pious philanthropy can merely patch a rotten 
 vestment; but scientific criminologists will 
 eventually probe to the root. Too long have we 
 relied upon the gaoler and the priest. We are 
 learning now that congenital crime is a subject 
 for the physiologist and the mental pathologist. 
 So, too, with the plague of chronic destitution, 
 the prime infamy of pseudo-civilisation. In- 
 stinctive barbaric pity urges liberal almsgiving ; 
 but the beautiful emotion of sympathy needs as 
 much control in its gratification as the purely 
 animal appetites. We shall awake soon to the 
 truth that it is our selfish Respectability that 
 must be fought with the weapons of a new
 
 124 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 economic science, based upon righteousness. We 
 should strive to destroy the sources of hopeless 
 want, as we endeavour to exterminate disease 
 microbes in the body. 
 
 Are these the visions of TTtopianism ? No; for 
 when we consider what modern science has done 
 in its infancy, we may surely reckon upon 
 greater victory in days now dawning. To sup- 
 port this inspiring creed of science we do not 
 need to fabricate evidences out of improbability, 
 conjecture, and fallacy ; for the proofs are plain 
 and convincing, and will survive the severest 
 criticism. Truly, if we make moan one day for 
 the tenacity of unreason in the human brain, we 
 may rejoice on the morrow in the thought that 
 never in history has the outlook been brighter. 
 
 It is too evident that thousands who can no 
 longer be satisfied with the guesses of primitive 
 barbarians concerning man's origin and destiny 
 still cover their inner convictions with the cloak 
 of Respectability, and endeavour to seem that 
 which they are not. Honesty will thrive with 
 the wane of Eespectability.
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 " Respect is often paid in proportion as it is claimed." 
 
 DR. JOHNSON. 
 
 Respectable reader, you are perchance by this 
 time partly inclined to at least agree that this dis- 
 ease of yours may be harmful to yourself and to 
 others. I have not minced my words in dis- 
 cussing the unpleasant symptoms of your ailment. 
 You are a prey to hallucinations, and it behoved 
 me, as a judicious physician, to jeer at your 
 fancies and to deride your dreads. I have en- 
 deavoured to convince you that Respectability is 
 anti-social, improgressive, and often cruel. You 
 cannot deny that the world's greatest moral 
 worthies have been the Non-Respectables, the 
 Unconventionalists, the enlightened Eccentrics. 
 They have all deviated in some particular, or in 
 many ways, from the ordinary standards and cus- 
 toms of the majority. In many instances they 
 have been accounted immoral, but that has not 
 ( 125 )
 
 126 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 deterred them, because new morality has always 
 been deemed immorality by the Respectables. 
 Wesley, for example, thought it immoral to 
 doubt the existence of witches. Yet, who to-day 
 but the most degraded peasants of the wild hills 
 believes in witches? Mr. Gladstone considers 
 divorce immoral ; but those who differ from him 
 may be counted in millions. They are the ad- 
 herents of a new morality, more reasonable, just, 
 and humane than the old which has passed away. 
 Therefore, to make progress we are compelled 
 to defy Respectability, and to outrage propriety. 
 But that does not mean that we are to become 
 ruthless Vandals, taking delight in destroying 
 everything that is old. Far from it. We must 
 pull down that idol Respectability from its 
 throne, and set up some worthier object of venera- 
 tion in its place. True worth and integrity of 
 character can have no alliance with intellectual 
 insincerity and social hypocrisy. We need more 
 brave-hearted men and women, with the courage 
 of their opinions, more heterodox thinkers, more 
 consistent heretics to stand solidly together in a 
 great attack on the shams and falsehoods that 
 constitute Respectability.
 
 Conclusion. 127 
 
 Our children must be taught to use their 
 brains, so that when they grow up they will not 
 allow their little corner of the world to rule their 
 lives and make them cowardly and deceitful. 
 The words of the Knight in " Pericles " should be 
 taught to boys : " We are gentlemen that neither 
 in our hearts nor outward eyes envy the great, nor 
 do the low despise." Education must be freed 
 from the restrictions and hindrances of Respect- 
 ability, and made catholic, comprehensive, and 
 equal for both sexes. 
 
 The canker has eaten too long at the heart of 
 our great nation. Its ravages, if unchecked, will 
 ultimately destroy our prestige, and we shall fall 
 as Babylon, Rome, and Greece have fallen. Our 
 social affections are blighted and chilled by this 
 fell disease, our emotions are shrivelled, our 
 national virility enfeebled. Colonies in their 
 youth offer us a good illustration of the rapid 
 progress of a people who have abandoned the cant 
 of Respectability. In such communities men 
 and women work for the commonweal, on a fra- 
 ternal basis, with no heed to rank and precedence, 
 and it is in these societies that individualism, 
 independence, and unconventionality have full
 
 128 The Blight of Respectability. 
 
 play and outlet. Only at a later stage does the 
 blight of Respectability descend upon the people 
 of a new country, as we see it now in America, 
 and, to a certain extent in Australia and Canada, 
 where the bourgeoisie have established themselves 
 and infected the populace with their disease. 
 " This diabolical invention of gentility,'" as 
 Thackeray terms it, is disintegrating society in 
 England, slowly and surely. It is not foreign 
 aggression, nor anarchy within, that we should 
 most fear, but the insidious virus of the disease 
 that is sapping our vitals. 
 
 It is the middle-men of the middle class who 
 chiefly spread the contagion and transmit it to 
 posterity. Antiquated political economists tell 
 us that the middleman is useful to everyone, and 
 that the man who gambles with other folk's 
 money is a benefactor. There was a time when 
 trade meant a handicraft ; now it is a term for 
 gambling with articles made by ill-rewarded 
 workers. And the man who lives by this system 
 of dealing expects the farmer, the miner, and 
 craftsmen to doff their caps to him, and call him 
 gentleman. " Since every Jack became a gentle- 
 man, there's many a gentle person made a Jack/'
 
 Conclusion. 129 
 
 says Shakspere. No one with a clear gaze on 
 the future can delude himself that the middle- 
 man is a permanent institution, to be preserved 
 and commended. His respectability, without 
 dwelling upon his economic raison cFetre, has 
 made him the contempt of the upper class and the 
 detestation of the working population. He has 
 made himself king of provincial towns, censor of 
 morals, and patron of the arts ; and the mob has 
 let him gain the upper hand, looking on with 
 mouths agape at his cleverness. Respectability 
 in its worst forms will last as long as the bour- 
 geoisie possess this power over the masses. 
 
 I leave it to Anarchists, Socialists, Individual- 
 ist, Tories, and the rest to settle whether the 
 shoddy god, Respectability, is to reign des- 
 potically over England.
 
 THE UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE 
 
 AND 
 
 FREE REVIEW. 
 
 Among the high-class magazines, the University 
 Magazine and Free Review takes the first place in 
 English advanced literature. Independence of thought, 
 freedom from conventional fetters, and boldness where 
 necessary, impart a freshness and vigour to the articles 
 of this publication, which we miss even in the best and 
 most earnest literature of the day. 
 
 It is tlie Magazine for such readers as care for pro- 
 gressive thought in all or any of the main fields of dis- 
 cussion the religious, the political, the sociological, 
 the ethical, the economic, the literary, the scientific, 
 and the aesthetic. 
 
 It always takes the part of the weak and oppressed, 
 and this Magazine has done much to call attention to 
 indisputable evils. 
 
 Contents of the APRIL No., 1897, Vol. VIII., No. I 
 
 The Case Of Dr. Romanes, by John M. Robertson. 
 
 Cardinal Manning, the Sceptic, by R. de Villiers. 
 
 The Inertia of English Universities, by F. R. Sarritor. 
 
 The Bible and the Child, by Chilpetic. 
 
 Tourgenieff, by Ernest Newman. 
 
 Roden Noel, by Karl Blind. 
 
 The Whole Duty Of Woman, by Geoffrey Mortimer. 
 
 The Blasphemy Laws, by Fted. Vennder. 
 
 Martin Turner, by H. J.Cressingham. 
 
 The Intellectual Movement in France, by A. Hamon. 
 
 Periodicals, by Wallet Skaw Sparrow.
 
 University Press, Limited. 
 
 Contents of the MAY No., 1897, Vol. VIII., No. 2 
 
 Bentley and Anthony Collins, by M. W. Wiseman. 
 
 Roden Noel, by Karl Blind. 
 
 Tourgenieff, by Ernest Newman. 
 
 The Downfall of Olive Schreiner, by X. 
 
 Marie Corelli and her Public, by A. W. Stanbury. 
 
 Moral Instruction without Theology, by F.J. Gould. 
 
 The Social Purity Hallucination, by J. P. Gilmour. 
 
 Current Pseudo-Philosophy, by John M. Robertson. 
 
 Slumland by Night, by G. M. 
 
 William Blake and Modern Problems, by Edward 
 
 Willmore. 
 
 The Social Evil and the Moral Law, by A. Macevir. 
 Periodicals, by Walter Shaw Sparrow. 
 New Books. 
 
 Contents of the JUNE No., 1897, Vol. VIII., No. 3 
 
 Nietzsche's Indictment of Christianity, by John M. 
 
 Robertson. 
 
 An Ethical Excursion, by Hugh Mortimet Cecil. 
 The Teachings of Thomas Hardy, by Duanc Williams. 
 The Tory Professor, by Robert Duncanson. 
 Mr. Gladstone's Latest Postcard, by Alan Stephens. 
 Usury and Thrift, by J. Greevz Fisher. 
 A Specimen of Religious Journalism, by Stanley Bruce. 
 In Extremis, by Allan Laidlaw. 
 The Legitimation League, by A. Goldwin. 
 Nancy, by Ernest Newman. 
 New Books.
 
 DNIYERSITY PI{ESS, LIMITED, 
 
 16, JOHN STREET, BEDFORD Row, LONDON, W.C. 
 
 Just published, IDS. nett, 
 
 PSEUDO-PHILOSOPHY 
 
 AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 By HUGH MORTIMER CECIL. 
 An Irrational Trio : Kidd, Drummond, Balfour. 
 
 A vigorous refutation of the well-known Pseudo-Philo- 
 sophical Works, Social Evolution (Kidd), The Ascent of Man 
 (Drummond), and The Foundations of Belief (Balfour), show- 
 ing the absurdity of the methods adopted on the one hand, 
 and the insincerity of these Pseudo-Philosophers on the 
 other. 
 
 The Academy, APRIL 17, 1897 : 
 
 Mr. Hugh Mortimer Cecil will have none of this 
 legerdemain; the flank of the rationalist position shall 
 not be so turned if his vigilance can frustrate the 
 manoeuvre ; and with a pen steeped in sulphuric acid, 
 he has set out to confute these writers one by one. 
 ,, . . . He is one who must be reckoned with as a 
 clear thinker, a cogent reasoner, a lucid and accomp- 
 lished writer. . . 
 
 It is impossible, in the space at our disposal, to 
 consider at large Mr. Cecil's criticism of " Foundations 
 of Belief." It is a very serious and capable attack 
 which will have to be reckoned with. Especially 
 damaging is the criticism of Mr. Balfour's theory of 
 authority. That argument can be employed with effect
 
 University Press, Limited. 
 
 only by one religious body, and it is not that body of 
 which Mr. Balfour is a member. And here we venture 
 to suggest to Mr. Cecil that it would be well were he to 
 find out, before the issue of a second edition,, the 
 meaning of the Roman Catholic dogma of the Immacu- 
 late Conception, to which he more than once alludes ; 
 he appears to be under the impression that the phrase 
 is equivalent to parthenogenesis. 
 
 The New Satwday Review, APRIL 17, 1897 : 
 
 The book is only one of many evidences of the fact 
 that it is quite time the theologians recognised the real 
 danger of their position, and sent into the lists stronger 
 champions than those we have been writing about. It 
 is little to the credit of the theological leaders that, 
 after first condemning Darwin and vilifying some of his 
 supporters, they should adopt his teaching only to mis- 
 represent it, and to make a sophistical use of that mis- 
 representation. Of what moment are all the questions 
 concerning ecclesiastical tradition and ritual in com- 
 parison to the great question of the relation between 
 science and religion which is agitating the minds of those 
 who will be the shapers and formers of the next 
 generation ? 
 
 It is not the simple souls who find their modern gos- 
 pel in Kidd's " Social Evolution " or in Drummond's 
 "Ascent of Man," good as those simple souls are, that 
 will make the dominant public opinion of the next half 
 century. Nor are the rank-and-file of the clergy of 
 all denominations in many instances qualified to 
 engage effectively in this controversy. Their pulpit 
 science has long been a by- word. Unless some defenders 
 of the orthodox position abler than those that have yet 
 appeared can be found, the rationalists will be believed
 
 University Press, Limited. 
 
 when they boast, as our author does, that they hold a 
 "fortress that is quite impregnable." Pseudo-science 
 and pseudo-philosophy are not science or philosophy at 
 all. 
 
 Our author's book will probably win its way into only 
 a few of the libraries of the orthodox. Rationalists will 
 read it, and will find in it only a vigorous statement of 
 their own opinions. The proper use of the book is to 
 show the orthodox what they have to do, if they would 
 defend their position. . . 
 
 It is a challenge which would deserve attention if it 
 stood alone. But it does not stand alone; it is 
 backed up by a great body of philosophers and scientists 
 and social reformers, and men of the highest culture 
 and noblest characters, as well as by a vast amount of 
 smouldering suspicion and distrust and doubt among the 
 people. 
 
 National Observer and British Review, APRIL 17, 1897: 
 Portions of the author's criticisms are not only just, 
 but valuable ; and when he is judicious enough to sup- 
 press his own personality, he can often be read not only 
 with assent, but with satisfaction. The chief object of 
 Mr. Cecil's antipathy is any attempt at reconciling 
 positive science with religion, whether the religion be 
 Christianity, or merely a natural theism ; and, as types 
 of the methods by which the attempt is now being made, 
 he takes the arguments of three modern apologists Mr. 
 Kidd, Mr. Drummond, and Mr. Arthur Balfour. He 
 takes these in order. The first section of his work is a 
 criticism of " Social Evolution " ; the second of " The 
 Ascent of Man " ; the third, of " The Foundations of 
 Belief." In completely discrediting the two first of these 
 three works, Mr. Cecil's task has been easy, and he has
 
 University Pita, Limited. 
 
 shown considerable skill in accomplishing it. If we take 
 Mr. Kidd's "Social Evolution" as it stands, it is diffi- 
 cult to imagine a more signal monument of self-decep- 
 tion ; and when we recollect the avidity with which a 
 large section of the public devoured the volume, and 
 allowed themselves to be deceived with the author, we 
 feel that such a fallacious guide can hardly be too 
 trenchantly exposed. Mr. Cecil contrives, with the 
 adroitness of a sharp solicitor, to collect and place side 
 by side a number of Mr. Kidd's self-contradictions, and 
 shows that his argument, taken as a whole, falls to 
 pieces at one touch of serious criticism. He shows also 
 that Mr. Kidd's history is as childish and imperfect as 
 his logic. 
 
 . . . But, in spite of these omissions, he has said 
 quite enough to discredit effectually what would rank 
 as the most remarkable specimen of contemporary 
 pseudo-philosophy, if it were not for a specimen pro- 
 duced by a Scottish writer, who has distanced alto- 
 gether the fallacies of his English rival. This last is 
 Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man; " and it is in his 
 criticism of this that Mr. Cecil shows himself at his 
 best. Had he only been less destitute of the rudiments 
 of good behaviour and good feeling, we should have had 
 little but commendation to bestow on the manner in 
 which he exposes Mr. Drummond's absurd justifica- 
 tions of the ways of God to man, and the hopeless in- 
 accuracies of his theories as to altruism, and "the 
 struggle for the life of others." Few books in the long 
 run do more harm than such books as " The Ascent of 
 Man." Instead of really reconciling religion and sci- 
 ence, they injure religion by making the attempt at 
 reconciliation ridiculous.
 
 University Pres$, Limited. 
 
 The Morning Leader, MARCH 25, 1897 : 
 
 Mr. Cecil is a born fighter. He attacks with courage 
 and cunning and resource, having at command a never- 
 failing artillery of invective to complete the havoc he 
 works by means of his sapping and mining. This latter 
 plan of campaign he mercilessly pursues by quotation 
 after quotation from previous essays and pamphlets of 
 his " irrationalist trio," preparing his reader for the over- 
 throw of the citadel by showing how hollow and unsub- 
 stantial are the outworks. So savagely complete, indeed 
 is the attack that as one gazes upon the ruins of Kidd, 
 Drummond, and Balfour, a feeling of sympathy with the 
 fallen philosophers must take the place of joy in the 
 whizzing of the rationalist shells. 
 
 The method of attack adopted by this new and 
 puissant slogger shows, perhaps, a little too much con- 
 tempt for the enemy, a little too much confidence in 
 the impregnability of the attacking party's position. 
 But, although the book may enrage the philosophic 
 doubters, it is bound to make a glorious show for the 
 robuster members of the rationalist party. The author's 
 advice to the former is to "feed on the religious novel 
 of Mrs. Humphry Ward, the geology of Sir J. W. Dawson, 
 the apologetics of Mr. Gladstone, and the biographies of 
 Jesus that are said to bein preparation by Mr. Hall Caine, 
 Mr. Ian Maclaren, and Mr. Crockett three gentlemen 
 whose capacity for sentimental fiction is the best guaran- 
 tee of their fitness for such a task." Language of this 
 kind is distinctly provocative, but it may be found brac- 
 ing enough to the energetic rejector of scientific compro- 
 mise. Whatever "Pseudo-Philosophy may lack in ur- 
 banity and serenity, no charge can be brought against it 
 on the score of dulness or stupidity. The book is at once 
 a brilliant and pitiless exposure of loose thinking, and 
 a literary entertainment of the richest kind.
 
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