In short, every time Tony uses like, he is admitting, and explaining, that he has expressed himself as best he could, but inadequately notwithstanding. He has felt something more delicately, thought upon something more accurately, than he can possibly say. He is always pathetically eager to make himself plain, to be understood. One knows well that touching look in the eyes of a dog when, as we say, it all but speaks. Often have I seen that same look, still more intense, in Tony's eyes, when he has become mazed with efforts to express himself, and I have wished that as with the dog, a pat, a small caress, could change the look into a joyfulness. But it is just because I am fond of him that I am able to feel with him and to a certain extent to divine his half-uttered thoughts; to take them up and return them to him clothed in more or less current English which, he knows, would convey them to a stranger, and which shows him more clearly than before what he really was thinking. That seems to be one of my chief functions here—thought-publisher. Evidently grateful, he talks and talks, usually while the remains of a meal lie scattered on the table. "Aye!" he says, at the end of a debauch of likes. "I don' know what I du know. Tony's a silly ol' fule!"
He does not believe it; nor do I; for I am often struck with wonder at the thoughts and mind-pictures which we so curiously arrive at together.
15
The old feudal class-distinctions are fast breaking down. But are we arriving any nearer the democratic ideal of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité? In place of the old distinctions, are we not setting up new distinctions, still more powerful to divide? There is to-day a greater social gulf fixed between the man who takes his morning tub and him who does not, than between the man of wealth or family and him who has neither. New-made and pink, the 'gentleman' arises daily from his circle of splashes, a masculine Venus from a foam of soap-suds. (About womenfolk we are neither so enquiring nor so particular.) For the cults of religion and pedigree we have substituted the cult of soap and water, and 'the prominent physician of Harley Street' is its high priest. Are you a reputed atheist? Poor man! doubtless God will enlighten you in His good time. Are you wicked? Well, well.... Have you made a fortune by forsaking the official Christian morality in favour of the commercial code? You can redeem all by endowing a hospital or university. But can they say of you that somehow or other you don't look quite clean? Then you are damn'd!
The cottage where the heroine of the 'nice' book lives is always spotlessly clean. A foreigner who adopts the bath-habit, is said to be just like an Englishman. It is the highest praise he can earn, and will go further in English society than the best introductions.
CLEANLINESS
Cleanliness is our greatest class-symbol. In living with people who have been brought up to different ways of life, a consideration of cleanliness is forced upon one; for nothing else rouses so instantaneously and violently the latent snobbery that one would fain be rid of. Religiously, politically, we are men and brothers all. Yet still—there are men we simply cannot treat as brothers. By what term of contempt (in order to justify our unbrotherliness) can we call them? Not poor men; for we have Poor but honest too firmly fixed in our minds, and we would all like a colonial rich rough diamond of an uncle to appear suddenly in our family circle. Hardly men of no family; for men of no family are received at court. Not workmen; for behold the Carlylese and Smilesian dignity of labour! Not the masses; for the masses are supposed to be our rulers. What then can we call these people with whom we really cannot associate on equal terms? Why, call them The Great Unwashed. O felicitous phrase! O salve of the conscience! That is the unpardonable social sin. At the bottom of our social ladder is a dirty shirt; at the top is fixed not laurels, but a tub! The bathroom is the inmost, the strongest fortress of our English snobbery.
Cleanliness as a subject of discussion is, curiously enough, considered rather more improper than disease. Yet it has to be faced, and that resolutely, if we would approach, and approaching, understand, the majority of our fellow-creatures.
Chemically all dirt is clean. Just as the foods and drinks of a good dinner, if mixed up together on a dish, would produce a filthy mess, so conversely, if we could separate any form of dirt into the pure solid, liquid and volatile chemical compounds of which it is composed, into pretty crystals, liquids and gases, exhibited in the scientific manner on spotless watch-glasses and in thrice-washed test-tubes,—we might indeed say that some of these chemicals had an evil odour, but we could not pronounce them unclean. Prepared in a laboratory, the sulphuretted hydrogen gas which makes the addled egg our national political weapon, is a quite cleanly preparation. Dirt is merely an unhappy mixture of clean substances. The housewife is nearest a scientific view of the matter when she distinguishes between 'clean dirt' and 'dirty dirt,' and does not mind handling coal, for instance, because, being clean dirt, it will not harm her. Cleanliness is a process by which we keep noxious microbes and certain poisons outside our systems or in their proper places within. (It has been shown that we cannot live without microbes, and that there exist normally in some parts of the body substances which are powerfully poisonous to other parts.) Rational cleanliness makes for health, for survival. It is, ultimately, an expression of the Will to Live.
DIRT