Clever Bohemians, having heard so much of “smug respectability,” take a dislike to respectability. But some of the smuggest persons are not respectable at all,—far from it! Serenely satisfied with their own irresponsibility, they look patronizingly upon the struggling world that owes them a living. I remember a visit from one of these gentry. He called to indicate his willingness to gratify my charitable impulses by accepting from me a small loan. If I did not believe the story of his frequent incarcerations I might consult the chaplain of the House of Correction. He evidently considered that he had a mission. He went about offering his hard and impenitent heart as a stone on which the philanthropists might whet their zeal. Smug respectability, forsooth!
From force of habit we speak of the “earnest” reformer, and we are apt to be intolerant of his lighter moods. Wilberforce encountered this prejudice when he enlivened one of his speeches with a little mirth. His opponent seized the opportunity to speak scornfully of the honorable gentleman’s “religious facetiousness.” Wilberforce replied very justly that “a religious man might sometimes be facetious, seeing that the irreligious did not always escape being dull.”
An instance of the growth of a verbal prejudice is that which in certain circles resulted in the preaching against what was called “mere morality.” What the preachers had in mind was true enough. They objected to mere morality, as one might say, “Mere life is not enough to satisfy us, we must have something to live on.” They would have more than a bare morality. It should be clothed with befitting spiritual raiment. But the parson’s zeal tended to outrun his discretion, and forgetting that the true object of his attack was the mereness and not the morality, he gave the impression that the Moral Man was the great enemy of the faith. At last the parishioner would turn upon his accuser. “You need not point the finger of scorn at me. What if I have done my duty to the best of my ability! You should not twit on facts. If it comes to that, you are not in a position to throw stones. If I am a moral man, you’re another.”
There are prejudices which are the result of excessive fluency of speech. The flood of words sweeps away all the natural distinctions of thought. All things are conceived of under two categories,—the Good and the Bad. If one ill is admitted, it is assumed that all the rest follow in its train. There are persons who cannot mention “the poor” without adding, “the weak, the wretched, the oppressed, the downtrodden, the suffering, the sick, the sinful, the erring,” and so on to the end of the catalogue. This is very disconcerting to a young fellow who, while in the best of health and spirits, is conscious that he is rather poor. He would willingly admit his poverty were it not for the fear of being smothered under the wet blanket of universal commiseration.
When the category of the Good is adopted with the same undiscriminating ardor the results are equally unfortunate. We are prejudiced against certain persons whom we have never met. We have heard nothing but good of them, and we have heard altogether too much of that. Their characters have been painted in glaring virtues that swear at one another. We are sure that we should not like such a combination of unmitigated excellencies, for human nature abhors a paragon. And yet the too highly commended person may, in reality, not be a paragon at all, but a very decent fellow. He would quickly rise in our regard were it not for the eulogies which hang like millstones around his neck.
It is no easy thing to praise another in such a way as to leave a good impression on the mind of the hearer. A virtue is not for all times. When a writer is too highly commended for being laborious and conscientious we are not inclined to buy his book. His conscience doth make cowards of us all. It may be proper to recommend a candidate for a vacant pulpit as indefatigable in his pastoral labors; but were you to add, in the goodness of your heart, that he was equally indefatigable as a preacher, he would say, “An enemy hath done this.” For the congregation would suspect that his freedom from fatigue in the pulpit was likely to be gained at their expense.
The prejudices which arise from verbal association are potent in preventing any impartial judgment of men whose names have become household words. The man whose name has become the designation of a party or a theory is the helpless victim of his own reputation. Who takes the trouble to pry into the personal opinions of John Calvin? Of course they were Calvinistic. When we hear of the Malthusian doctrine about population, we picture its author as a cold-blooded, economical Herod, who would gladly have ordered a massacre of the innocents. Let no one tell us that the Reverend Richard Malthus was an amiable clergyman, who was greatly beloved by the small parish to which he ministered. In spite of all his church wardens might say, we would not trust our children in the hands of a man who had suggested that there might be too many people in the world. But in such cases we should remember that a man’s theories do not always throw light upon his character. When a distinguished physician has a disease named after him, it is understood that the disease is the one he discovered, and not the one he died of.
When the Darwinian hypothesis startled the world, many pious imaginations conceived definite pictures of the author of it. These pictures had but one thing in common,—their striking unlikeness to the quiet gentleman who had made all this stir. By the way, Darwin was the innocent victim of two totally disconnected lines of prejudice. After he had outlived the disfavor of the theologians, he incurred the contempt of the apostles of Culture; all because of his modest confession that he did not enjoy poetry as much as he once did. Unfortunately, his scientific habit of mind led him to say that he suspected that he might be suffering from atrophy of the imaginative faculty. Instantly every literal-minded reader and reviewer exclaimed, “How dreadful! What a judgment on him!” Yet, when we stop to think about it, the affliction is not so uncommon as to call for astonishment. Many persons suffer from it who are not addicted to science.
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After all, these are harmless prejudices. They are content with their own little spheres; they ask only to live and let live. There are others, however, that are militantly imperialistic. They are ambitious to become world powers. Such are those which grow out of differences in politics, in religion, and in race.