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 attribute 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. Respectability stands for gentility, and the genteel folk are not often of the orders aristocratic and proletarian, but of the bourgeoisie. To call a decent, intelligent man respectable is to dub him genteel, 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, 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! Supposing 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 succeeds in becoming a nonentity. Now some men are born respectable; they could never be anything else. But that is no reason why they should exert the tyranny of their personal preferences over the minorities of their fellow-men. Defiance of Respectability is the beginning and the end of social progress; you cannot be at once highly respectable and progressive. Respectability 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 imitation." It is by the exercise of this simious instinct that "genteel" people order their lives down to the minutest detail. They scout eccentricity and individuality of speculation and judgment; they live in streets of houses all built alike; they imitate each others' mode of dress, think each others' thoughts, and say "It is better 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 advance is so slow: men and women infected by the craze for respectability act as dead weights on the arms of pioneers. Grundy, Bowdler, and Podsnap are the three gods of the shoddy respectabilities.
Respectability! who has it not cursed and perverted at some time in his life? There is perhaps 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 indifferentists.
It may be taken as an axiom that if you want to blast a man's reputation as a tolerable specimen of the human race, you have merely to class him as respectable. The very word is damnatory 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 æsthetic needs. He is a big man of a petty sect, and on Sunday he troops a stout, silk-dressed wife and seven or eight 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 respectable." 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 pavement 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 wholesome 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, many who have denied themselves physical necessities to buy and read a book, attend lectures, or a concert. I never knew a middle-class woman guilty of such a glaring want of common-sense."