You have only to give the Respectables plenty of rope, and they will strangle every effort of advance. 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 themselves with fat meats; they fought tooth and nail against the Sunday opening of museums and picture-galleries; they prosecuted Mr. Vizetelly for selling translations of Zola's novels; they oppose amelioration of our absurd, cruel, and ineffective 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 Beaconsfield as a politician, but I admire him for his unconventionality. How many young men possess the pluck to appear at a dinner party in green velvet trousers, a canary-coloured waistcoat, low shoes with silver buckles, lace at their wrists, and their hair in ringlets? On another occasion, Disraeli 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 accordance with your own taste, instead of in the mufti of convention, you are dubbed a mountebank and a posturer. Of course, after these aberrations 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."
Walt 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 "advanced 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 "nobody has attempted a definition of civilisation," and that "we usually suggest it by negations;" 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 refinement, 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; and 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 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.