A WORD FOR RESPECTABILITY.
ONE of the many charges which have from time to time been brought against Christianity, is that its moral code seems to consist of nothing but " Nots." Its votary, instead of being instructed what to do in the various contingencies of life, is only directed to abstain from doing this, that, and the other, which, whenever he is too much left to himself, as the Scotch put it, he may be tempted by his own nature to in- dulge in doing. The statement is only partly true as regards even the laws of Christianity, the essence of that code, though its details involve many restrictions, having been summed up by the Founder in the two positive commandments, " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God, and thy neighbour as thyself ; and the complaint must be regarded as the outcome of an impatience which, like Socialism, forgets human nature, rather than of a sober reason. So also, we think, is a version of it that is current to-day, a sort of horror of respectability which we meet with everywhere in litera- ture, under a hundred forms and in every degree of exag- geration. The respectable man is not only told not to rely on his respectability—which is quite reasonable, for Christianity deals, or should deal, with the heart, and respect- ability is matter only of conduct—but he is informed that his respectability may be counted against him, as if it were, or could be, of itself sin. To use the words of the Vicar of Rye, uttered, according to the Daily Telegraph, in a sermon of last Sunday, " there is more hope of the bad woman and the drunkard than of the respectable perfunctory Christian." More secular preachers tell him that he is a " smug " being, with little conscience and no emotions, whose faith is mainly in the value of material comfort, and whose notion of virtue is abstinence from any act which would draw upon him the
rebuke of other respectable neighbours. He is taunted with his love for decorum as if it were a criminal taste, and abused for his preference for black broadcloth as if his censors believed in white linen garments, or would not consider him a pauper and a horror if he ever presumed to dress himself in sackcloth and ashes. Poets regard him as Ulysses regarded Telemachus, in Tennyson's famous lines, as something only to be pitied, being beneath active scorn, and novelists impute to him a desire for every vice which they can decorously describe. Horror of this kind seems a little hard, especially in a country which is what it is mainly because there are, say, six millions of respectable men within its borders, and we should like those who express it to reflect for five minutes on what they actually mean, to imagine for a brief apace what the world would be like if there were no respectables in it, and to tell us clearly whether they believe that a working rule of conduct which, if not the highest, is opposed to no law, natural or revealed, is really of no benefit to the world, whether, in other words, they fancy that such a thing as second-class goodness is of no sort of merit or advantage. We can tell theta that if they do, they know little of human nature, and should live for a few months, just to acquire charity for English- men, in one of the lawless communities,—say, among the criminal classes of Paris, or the beachcombers of the Pacific, or the rowdies of the American border, or the loafers of Valparaiso, or, better still, among the savages who are so gentle in legend and so ferocious in fact, or, best of all, among Negroes of the Upper Congo or the Lower Nile, not yet tamed by the white man, but living "a sincere life" according to their own devices.
They would find very quickly, if they were not killed for the value of their shirt-buttons, that although respectability is not Christianity or holiness, or even virtue of any but a second-rate order, it is the equivalent of moral civilisation,— that is, a basis upon which all other good and desirable things may grow. Civilisation, properly described, is nothing but a system of minute restraints imposed upon ourselves or by others in order that no man may be injured or frightened or annoyed by his neighbour, and that men may be able to live in some kind of community ; but just suspend it, and see what kind of a roaring wild-beasts' den you are thrown into instead. Nobody is holy because murder is forbidden ; but if murder is allowed, as it is allowed in some towns of the American Far West, how much holiness will there be left then ? Little has been accom- plished when theft has been prohibited ; but until it is forbidden, where is the hope of accumulation, or of advance in the arts, or of a pleasant place in life for any but the cunning and the strong, who, again, cannot, until they can pass laws against stealing, benefit by their own rapaciousness? Chastity is not purity ; but until chastity can be preserved, where is the chance for the domestic virtues, for marriage, fatherhood, the home, and all the graces, as well as beneficial influences, that those words include ? Civilisation of itself is but a veneer; but so is the crust we walk on, with all its uses and beauties and productiveness, only a veneer, in places like Japan and the Eastern Archipelago a veneer through which you can almost see the light of the fires beneath. The crust is not to be con- temned because it is only a crust, but used and lived on with thankfulness, and with some confidence in it too, and loyalty to it in the way of cultivation, until the upheaval comes. Respectability is just that moral veneer. The man who has acquired a belief in it can live and cultivate and im- prove until the hour arrives when something better and more self-sustained shall in the course of Providence, or of his destiny, if you like that phrase better, be required of him. Respectability nothing ! Just consider what the smugly re- spectable man has done for himself. He has so completely conquered the instinct of murder, which never quits the savage or the true rowdy, that the crime seems impossible to him, something which appertains to another order of creature than himself. He has subdued the instinct of rapine until his- neighbour is as himself as far as his goods are concerned, and he is as likely to take valuables by force as to refuse food when hungry, or to break with the habit of sleep. We do not hesitate to say that there are a million of white persons in London, with no particular religion or piety about them, to whom the theft of another man's spoons is literally impossible, as impossible as for them to avoid winking in a glare, or wishing for a greatcoat in frosty weather. They have conquered the "primitive instinct" of lust, till all men's wives are safe for them, and, be their inner selves what they may, women may, for them, grow up pure and gracious and sweet. They have conquered common selfishness until they can and do toil every day and all day in order that others than themselves may be tranquil and at ease ; that their children may be educated, their parents fed—though we admit that the filial habit often lies low among them—their wives protected from wearing them- selves out with the double toil, child-rearing and earning wages, which over at least half the world falls to their unhappy lot. Is it nothing that the "respectable man" everywhere, in Asia no less than Europe, stops public labour for the women of his household F Grant that the respectable man is " smug " —a word which properly only means conceitedly spruce, but which has become one of vague contempt—and is over- respectful to conventions which are his laws, and desires broadcloth, and hot suppers, and a seat in chapel rather than a place for prayer, he is still, if only in right of his steady, habitual, unsleeping self-control, miles nearer to the true ideal than the barbarian, or the savage, or the rowdy. The Vicar of Rye would possibly say—we know nothing of his opinions, except as represented, perhaps misrepresented, in the Telegraph—that he is not better, that he is further from the possibility of religious emotion, and therefore from a burning faith in Christ and his laws ; but he should just preach for a twelvemonth to true savages and see. Mr. Spurgeon, who has been a kind of apostle to " smug " respectability, could tell him better than that, and many an East End pastor, who, taught by terrible experience, has hailed among his worst cases the faintest sign of reversion to the " respectability " which means, if it means no more, a conviction that lawlessness does not pay, and that self-restraint is essential to any kind of hap- piness. If the entire flock of the Vicar of Rye has embraced the gospel of respectability, they have made an advance above what might be their position, which only men who have lived where human beings are free even of the restraint of smug- ness can properly appreciate. He is right enough in asking more ; wrong in casting such scorn upon an advance which is in truth enormous, and only appears contemptible because it is shared in the same generation by uncounted millions, who, in their ceaseless industry and self-restraint, make up the nations of the world. Take the habit of respectability out of London, and what would be the first work of a thousand preachers like the Vicar of Rye ? Lashing the people back into respectability with the sharp thongs of penal law.
There is, we suppose, among those who honestly sneer at or condemn respectability, a secret belief that the love of it and profession of it are always accompanied with a certain amount of hypocrisy. We should not totally condemn it, even if it were so, holding that the man who wishes to murder but does not is a better man, as well as a better citizen, than the man who both wishes and commits the crime; but, as a matter of fact, it is not so. The immense majority of civilised men in all countries are sincerely respectable because they wish to be, because they deliberately prefer decent conduct to indecent, honesty to rapine, the protection of the home and of neighbours to the neglect of both. They have made to them- selves a conventional creed, which falls, unhappily, far short of Christianity, especially in its controlling power in the greater emergencies of life, and its influence in elevating the soul, but which is in itself a good and wholesome creed nevertheless. It takes experience of many sorts of men to know that there is such a thing as virtue combined with a low ideal ; but there is such a thing nevertheless, and it is not only not despicable, but an immense buttress to the civilisation and the morality of the country which has got it. Respecta- bility is a kind of clothing without which we not only see a great deal more of the natural man than is desirable, but he himself, loding the perpetual training necessarily involved in the weight of clothes, becomes perceptibly weaker and more liable to moral disease. The naked tribes are not long-lived, nor can they resist epidemics ; nor has it yet been found that their comparative freedom from social hypocrisy conduces to the cultivation of the primitive virtues. We can assure the Vicar of Rye that he would not like a disrespectable—how odd and how characteristic that the English should not have that word !
—congregation at all, and would find among people with no rule of conduct to follow, that the task of conversion was infinitely heavier even than, apparently, he finds it at Rye. Britons in woad and nothing else were doubtless free from the hypocrisies of respectability, and so they were from its virtues too. He may think it an irreverent question to ask, but does he really doubt that before the Apostles followed their master, eleven of them were in the strictest sense respectable men, hard- working handicraftsmen, in conduct a good deal like the respectable fishermen of Rye ?
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