"Oswald: Have you never heard these respectable men, when they got home again, talking about the way in which immorality was getting the upper hand abroad?
"Manders: Yes, of course.
"Mrs. Alving: I have, too.
"Oswald: Well, you may take their word for it. They know what they are talking about! (Presses his hands to his head). Oh! that that great, free, glorious life out there should be defiled in such a way!"
When Respectability has a strong hold on a man's moral sense, there is no low crime that it may not lead him to commit. Respectables, like the congenital criminals described by Lombroso, almost invariably profess religion, and many are outwardly very devout, but full within of ravening and venality. "He shows the whites of his eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week," says Thoreau. When the plate is passed around after divine service, the Respectable ostentatiously deposits a florin upon it, registering a secret vow that he will get back that coin, with ample interest, by some shady trick of trade on Monday morning. He gets it, too, you may be sure, and with a swinging profit on it, in consideration of his Sabbath generosity. There may be treasure laid up in heaven for the Respectable, but he is not the fool to despise the good things of this life. He believes that all things have been given unto him richly to enjoy, here and hereafter, and he takes care that none of these good things go by mistake to the wrong quarters. His golden rule is, obtain from others all that you can. However latitudinarian he may be upon some points of doctrine, he is strictly orthodox in the application of that useful text, "Blessed are the poor." "Decent Society" is full of these whited sepulchres; their dank, poisonous stench pervades every Little Muddleton Road in the Kingdom.
I like to hear the working man speak his mind on the Respectables. The British working man has his palpable faults and failings, but he is most often free from the disease of Respectability. He knows worth of character when he sees it, and he detests the two-faced dealings, snobbishness, and cant of his self-styled superiors. The British working man has his failings, I say, but he is not very seriously infected with Respectability, except in rare instances. He is a cleaner, much more moral man than the bourgeois, and considerably more intelligent as a rule, because he is under no social necessity to lie to his better judgment and juggle with his reason. The proletariat, like the aristocratic class, have obtained a tolerable liberty of opinion and conduct. They can afford to be Non-Respectables, and they possess the pluck to be honest thinkers. And one can say this without having a profound veneration for "noble lords" and the institution of the peerage, and without intending to whitewash blackguards, whether they be mere patricians or simple costermongers. A friends of mine, a man of feeling, once sojourned for a space in the home of a provincial linen-draper of eminent, Respectability. I don't know what my friend was doing in that galley; I can't explain the juxtaposition of a Man of Feeling in such company; but it is enough to say that my eccentric friend was there. Well, the highly Respectable linen-draper was likewise "very religious," as the phrase is, and he used continually to dwell upon the importance of devotional exercise, as most Respectables do. He read Scripture aloud to his family and assistants, went to chapel regularly, observed Sunday scrupulously, behind drawn window blinds, believed in small profits and quick returns, drove a good trade, and held his head high, for the sober, God-fearing, enterprising shopkeeper that he was. At meal times this fellow would hold forth on grace—a virtue in which he was strangely lacking—also on obeying the precepts of Christ. "Ah," he would say, rolling the yellows of his greedy little eyes; "ah, that I were more like the Master!" Now, this speech incessantly on the lips of a sweater and a hypocrite began to cause the Man of Feeling's gorge to rise, for he was a healthy, decent liver, and a hater of cant. So one day, when the Respectable lifted his gaze to the ceiling and muttered his usual aspiration, the Man of Feeling could endure the sickening ordeal no longer.
"Like the Master!" he cried vehemently. "You wish to be like the Master, and you pay your female assistants eight or ten shillings a week, and expect them to live on that miserable sum! Don't insult Christ! Don't cant and pretend that you wish to be a penniless socialist, and go about trying to do good. You!" And, with these words, the Man of Feeling arose, and left that Respectable house, shaking its dust from his feet, and panting to breathe once more a pure and bracing air among the Non-Respectables, to whom, by moral conviction, he rightly belonged.
Ah! "the mud-hearted Bourgeois!" I don't wonder that another Man of Feeling, poor, sensitive, pitying, indignant Francis Adams, called you by that title! Can you by any human power be dragged out of the slime in which you love to wallow?