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 well if they are constantly exercised as to what people will think—people, in this instance, standing for Respectability. Can any wholesome influence come out of the frowsy atmosphere of a villa inhabited by Veneerings? As well expect to find lilies within the fences of the alkali works. The fact is that what Respectability thinks is never of the slightest importance 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 ourselves," 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 blockheads, we shall understand that to lay great 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 striking instance this of the firm hold that the instinct has upon feeble minds.
Yes, to be appraised as a thoroughly respectable 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 Respectability has never been written. Stockman discovers that the water supply of the town is polluted, and he tells the truth about it. The respectable authorities, the tag-rag of the bourgeoisie, 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."
Upon reading a Philistine opinion of himself, Diderot laughed, and said: "I must be an eccentric 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 Calvinistic 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 desires, 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 hurtful 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 striving to be popular at all costs, engenders endless hypocrisies and falsehoods, and makes knaves and cowards.
Not content with warping our national character by slavish veneration of this abstraction, we have corrupted decent barbarians by inoculating them with our miserable disease of Respectability. 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 insanitary clothing as badges of respectability and tokens of civilisation. Quoting from Dalton, Reclus, in his "Primitive Folk," says of the Kolarian women:—
"These savage women win hearts by their frank and open manners and naïve gaiety. Mixing freely from earliest childhood with the other sex, they have none of the prudery of Hindoos and Mussulmans, who have been brought up in strict seclusion; a prudery which at moments gives place to unclean talk, and is full of suggested 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."