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النشر الإلكتروني

282

Anti-Respectability.

THERE are a number of commonplaces which are constantly attracting attention under slightly different forms. From time to time they strike the fancy of ingenious writers, who give them a new gloss by the help of some degree of literary talent. One of the most attractive and popular of these is what may be called the anti-respectability commonplace. In every generation-in fact, several times in a generation-it occurs to some lively person who combines power of expression with more than average sensibility, that a certain proportion of those who are condemned, and even stigmatized, by the world at large-who fall, so to speak, under its official censure are in reality better than others who are rewarded with its smiles and its favours. The approval of mankind, its causes and its effects, are all summed up in the one word, 'Respectable.' To be respectable, whether the object of the feeling is a man or a woman, is to fall under the protection of public opinion-to come up to that most real, though very indefinite standard of goodness, the attainment of which is exacted of every one as a condition of being allowed to associate upon terms of ostensible equality with the rest of the human race. The anti-respectability commonplace or commonplaces are made up of denunciations of the triviality of this standard, and illustrations of the numerous cases in which it fails to secure even that small amount of average virtue which it may be supposed to be intended to

secure.

Novels, for very good reasons, are, generally speaking, made the vehicles of denunciations of this kind; and the publication of a popular novel is the commonest mode of bringing forward what is to be said on the subject. Such, at least, is the practice of our own day. Formerly, poetry answered the same purpose. Though at present it is hardly ever so employed, at least in this country, it is the common theme of all satirists from Horace to Pope. Whether Byron sneered or declaim d -whether Childe Harold or Don Juan was in hand-almost all his utterances might be summed up as protests against respectability. This style of writing has, perhaps, been carried farther in France than in any other country. It is the common topic of all the most popular French writers, and especially of Balzac and Victor Hugo, that the monster, Society, is the most oppressive of tyrants, imposing the most absurd tests by the most unreasonable means, on persons who are dwarfed in intellect and character by the discipline to which they are subjected, even if they are not driven into the very vices against which it is professedly directed. The popularity of these writers was such that at one time they no doubt

exercised a great influence over the character, and even over the politics and history, of France. In our own country the same tune has been frequently played to audiences far less disposed to listen, and in every respect of a much less malleable constitution. Its characteristic merits and defects have been recently displayed in a very attractive way by Mrs. Norton. In her tale, Lost and Saved, that distinguished authoress has shot one more little arrow at poor old Society, who has in her time been made into a sort of Aunt Sally, eternally battered more or less skilfully by the missiles of a crowd of writers whose exertions are watched by the public at large with keen interest, and are rewarded, if they are in the least degree successful, by an applause which can hardly be said. to be strictly proportioned to their merits.

The story itself is probably well known to most of our readers, and for the purpose of extracting and observing upon its moral, which alone, and not the literary merits of the book, is the object of the present article, it may be stated very shortly. Beatrice Brook-all youth, beauty, innocence, and virtue-loves, and is loved, by one Montague Treherne, who is heir subject to the provisions of an oppressive and absurd will-to a title and an immense estate. Her father, a retired lieutenant in the navy, gets ruined by some unfortunate speculations, and at the height of his misfortunes his daughter, by the infernal arts of a certain Mrs. Grey, who is in league with Treherne, is inveigled into taking a journey on the Continent, under Mrs. Grey's care. At Venice she finds the existing incumbent of the title to which Treherne is the heir; and this formidable old man, armed by the tyrannical will with all manner of authority over Treherne's marriage, utterly forbids him to have anything to do with Beatrice. Treherne thereupon prevails upon Beatrice to elope with him to Trieste, where he expects to get married at all hazards, and the wicked Mrs. Grey helps him therein. Unluckily they get into a wrong steamer, and go to Alexandria, and thence to the middle of the desert, where, between travelling and emotion, Beatrice falls ill, and is likely to die. For the sake of her reputation she is extremely anxious to be married, and no clergyman being available, a passing doctor is dressed. up to look like one, and performs the service. Hereupon Beatrice recovers, and, thinking herself Treherne's wife, lives with him as such. They then get back to England, and the whole story being kept very quiet, and especially the marriage, which would have endangered all Treherne's splendid prospects, Beatrice returns to her father, who supposes that she has been spending her time with Mrs. Grey. As, however, it becomes clear that she is going to have a child, she presses Treherne to acknowledge the marriage, and at last, going to his lodging for that purpose, is actually confined there. Her father does not know where she is, and Treherne keeps her as well as he can in the front parlour, promising that when he reaches the period fixed by the will for his majority, he will acknowledge her as his wife. There she and her child live for about a year in a most uncomfortable way, and by degrees she makes the dis

covery that there is very little sympathy between her lover and herself, and, in short, that she has made a great mistake. During this period a certain Lady Nesdale is put and is kept prominently before the reader. She is the wife of Lord Nesdale, and a niece of the wicked Mrs. Grey, and is the mistress of several men, of whom, at the period of the story, Treherne is the most favoured, and also the most prominent. Lady Nesdale is honoured and respected, while Beatrice pines away in her front parlour, neglected and wretched. Beatrice at last finds out the relations between her lover and Lady Nesdale. There are a variety of scenes of love and rage. Treherne tells Beatrice that the supposed marriage is all nonsense, and that if it were valid she could not prove it, and at last deserts her and her child, and leaves her in her front parlour without even money to pay her rent. As she happened, when she left her father's lodging to go over to Treherne's, to have in her pocket 1707. worth of old Brussels lace, which she had a special gift of mending, she contrives to support her child and herself by mending lace, and to keep the 1707. in reserve. After a good deal of trouble she is discovered by one Maurice Llewellyn, who, having been rejected by her sister, had immediately taken up with her intimate friend, and who happens also to be a friend of the doctor who celebrated the sham marriage. She is thus restored to her family, who receive her with open arms. Her father, however, dies of paralysis, and her child of epilepsy, and she goes abroad with her sister, and is kindly received by the father and mother of her sister's ex-lover, Maurice Llewellyn. At Genoa she falls in with an Italian count, who is an interesting widower, his wife having deserted him before her death. Treherne, who had married again, being about this time poisoned by Mrs. Grey, Beatrice considers herself as a widow, and marries the count. The public, we are informed, were pretty gracious to her, but were in the habit (surely not an altogether unnatural one) of asking whether in her youth there had not been some odd story about her having a child, and about an elopement?

Such is the story. It was put before the world with a certain stern, uncompromising air. The authoress showed in the preface, in the occasional observations interwoven with the story itself, and in a subsequent letter to the morning papers, that she took a high moral view of what she had done. She obviously regarded the tale by no means as a mere pastimea tale like another intended to be a mere elegant toy, destined to go the way of all such toys, and to be forgotten as soon as it had accomplished its purpose of amusing a few idle hours. On the contrary, it was to give the world a lesson, to make it reflect, to lash and expose wickedness in high places, and show the Lady Nesdales and other such sinners of this wicked world that there was one eye upon them which they could not hope to evade, the eye of a three-volume Providence, turned on as required by the monster circulating libraries which in these days provide so large a part of the world with both sentiments and opinions. Such being the pretensions of the book, let us see what it proves, and especially

what it proves against the wicked world and the corrupt practices which it was apparently intended to expose and reform.

It proves first of all, or at least it appears to be meant to prove, that whereas Beatrice Brook was very good and perfectly innocent, she underwent great and needless sufferings, cruelly inflicted on her by hypocritical Society. If Mrs. Norton did not mean to say this at least, it is impossible to make out that she did mean anything specific. Is this, then, true? In the first place, was Beatrice Brook very good? No doubt she was attractive. A very pretty girl, accomplished, ladylike, natural, and full of life and animal spirits, is as pleasant an object as is to be found in this poor old world; and whatever the faults of the world may be, want of readiness to recognize that fact is most assuredly not one of them. It is, however, one thing to be charming, and quite another to be good; and though it might be, and no doubt was, not only natural but hardly avoidable to fall in love with Beatrice Brook, there was nothing much to praise in her, taking her at Mrs. Norton's own estimate. No girl of good feeling would have left her father and sister all alone and in great distress, in a wretched lodging in London, to go pleasuring about in France and Italy, with people whom she hardly knew. No woman who had any proper feeling of self-respect and decency would have eloped with her lover in the middle of the night, at half an hour's warning, putting herself entirely in his power, in a foreign country, when she might have received the protection of one of her own sex, and when, at all events, by simply staying where she was, she might easily have obtained some proper guardianship. Surely no one will contend that it is a mere conventional prejudice, not founded on any solid reason, which forbids a girl of eighteen or nineteen to travel about with a young man of twenty-four. To say that there is no great harm in such a step if the girl is in love with the man, is in effect to say that a pretty girl can do no wrong, and is under no moral obligations. The test of goodness, the very meaning of it, is to do right when it is unpleasant to do so; everybody can do right when it is pleasant. If Beatrice Brook had picked a pocket, her beauty would have been no excuse. Why was it an excuse for running away with her lover? She clearly did wrong; and not only wrong, but very wrong indeed, and richly deserved to be severely punished. Then, was the punishment unreasonably severe? The answer is, that whatever it was, it was self-inflicted. Society had nothing to do with it. She suffered great agony by concealing what had happened from her father. But why did she not take him into her confidence? Simply because she did not choose. Would society have blamed her if she had? So far from it, any sensible person whose advice she might have asked would instantly have said, "Tell your father, whatever you do; and lose no time about it. He is your natural protector; and Treherne has no right whatever to compel you to sacrifice your character to his prospects. If you have been foolish enough to promise him secrecy, the facts of the case not only excuse but require a breach of the promise to that extent. It is bare justice to your

self, to your father, and to your child, that you should have proper advice on the subject; and the promise made by you to your lover was clearly made under undue influence, and without reference to the present state of affairs." If this had been done, half the suffering which Beatrice had in fact to undergo, and a large part of the far more grievous suffering which her father and sister had to undergo, would have been avoided, and the rules of society-the ordinary current morality by which the great mass of mankind regulate their conduct-would have been complied with. By keeping her own counsel, Beatrice punished herself; and it is not only absurd, but absolutely impudent, to blame the rules of society for a result which would have been avoided by observing them.

What happens next? Beatrice's child is born under circumstances which are almost grotesquely improbable. After its birth, she lives with its father for more than a year without saying a single word about her marriage, and during this time she has no respectable female friends. She feels herself, in fact, out of the pale of society, and judiciously enough keeps herself to herself. Is society to blame for this? Ought it to lay down the rule, that whenever a young woman lives with a young man who is the father of her child, and to whom she is not known to be ▸ married, it is to be presumed that she is privately married to him, and has good reasons for concealing the fact? If not, it is difficult to see what else would have happened to Beatrice Brook than that which is said to have happened. As far as the world knew, she was living with a man who was not her husband, and the world refused, or, rather, if they had known of her existence, would have refused, to call upon her. Was the world so very wrong? So far respectability seems to have the best of it. At last, her sham marriage is proved to have taken place, and, her child being dead, she meets with friends with whom she lives quietly and respectably, though she avoids the world at large; and people who know little about the matter, to some extent avoid her, thereby wounding her pride. What is to be said of this? It would appear on the whole that she was rather leniently treated. Her friends were kind to her, and forgave her for a very serious fault, or, indeed, for more than one. The general public-the half-dozen people who knew her slightly-knew no more than this, that she had eloped with a man with whom she went through the thinnest possible kind of marriage ceremony, lived with him for more than a year, and then allowed him, without any attempt on her own part or the part of her friends to establish the validity of the first marriage, to treat it as a mere nullity, by deserting her and marrying somebody else. This being all that was or could be known upon the subject by the world at large, was the world at large. wrong in shaking its head, saying that the story was a very queer and unpleasant one, and declining, upon the whole, to be intimate with the lady to whom it related—at least, until she had established a new position, and for a considerable time behaved herself well elsewhere? Candid observers will probably be of opinion that this was about the least that

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