THE BLIGHT OF RESPECTABILITY. UNIVERSITY PRESS. THE BLIGHT OF RESPECTABILITY AN ANATOMY OF THE DISEASE AND A THEORY OF CURATIVE TREATMENT BY GEOFFREY MORTIMER. LONDON THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED, 16, JOHN STREET, BEDFORD ROW, W.C. 1897. CONTENTS. 1. WHAT IS RESPECTABILITY? 2. THE PATHOLOGY OF THE DISEASE. 3. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN. 4. SPECIFIC SYMPTOMS OF THE MALADY IN WOMEN. 5. RESPECTABILITY AND MORALS. 6. CULTURED GENTILITY. 7. PLUTOCRACY. 8. VILLADOM. 9. THE TYRANNY OF RESPECTABILITY. 10. RESPECTABLE CIVILISATION AND AFTER. 11. CONCLUSION. "It was never merry world in England since gentlemen came up." II. HENRY VI. iv. II. "Opinion's but a fool that makes us scan, The outward habit by the inward man." PERICLES II. II. CHAPTER I. 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.