DIRT.
DR. LYON PLAYFAIR has given great offence to the Roman Catholics by saying at Edinburgh, evidently without his- torical inquiry, and probably because he had read the remark in Michelet, that for a thousand years not a single bath was taken in Europe, and by dating the revival of cleanliness from the era of the revival of learning and the Reformation. Father Bridgett has just written a criticism on this hazardous "working hypothesis" that there is a vital and organic connection' between spiritual obedience and dirt ; and he finds it tolerably easy to overturn the rash generalisations of his opponent. Indeed, he seems to think the lowest strata of modern society less completely provided with the means of cleanliness than the same strata of mediaeval society, and possibly he may have a good case. The divine right of the morning tub is, even now, a religious principle confined to the wealthy and the professional classes, or at least the higher section of the middle- classes, and the dogma invented for the instruction and the aggra- vation of the poor, that cleanliness is next to godliness,' has almost gone out with the didactic century which gave it birth. The modern revival of sanitary enthusiasm has no very close connec- tion with the old doctrine preached to children and to house- wives. It is a physiological doctrine resting on our knowledge of the origin of fevers, and of the pernicious qualities of putrid organic matter. The old ideas about cleanliness had nothing of this large utilitarian character about them. They were founded rather on esthetic or self-regarding than on prudential or social principles, and were essential to that somewhat 'prim, not to say priggish, self-respect which the Dirs. Trimmers of our great-grand- mothers' days inculcated in vain on the heedless and greedy Master Tommys, and not in vain on the self-possessed and abstemious Master Harrys of our grandfathers' generation. Lord Palmerston once defined dirt as 'matter in a wrong place,' but that leaves the crucial point of the question where it was. What is the wrong place ? Which is the worse place, say, for a little garden- mould,—the hands and the coat of a diligent gardener, or the surface of the garden-beds from which it was transferred by virtue of his operations ? Which is the worse place for the dust of a fresh mountain-side,—the faces and hands of the children who enjoy a good roll down it, or the solitary sward from which there is no romping child to disturb and borrow it? Again, which is the worse place for the stains of a hospital ward,—the dresses and hands of the nurses who cannot do their office with- out contracting spots and stains, or the dishes of food and-the glasses of drugs from which the dress of the faithful nurse derives its temporary disfigurement? There is a standard of cleanliness
▪ which can only be attained by devoting a very large proportion of your time to your personal appearance. The hasty traveller cannot keep as immaculate as the man of fashion who dresses
three times a day, and never wears any dress after there is a stain or a mark perceptible upon it. Miss A.usten, in her amusing little tale of "Northanger Abbey," tells us that when Catherine Dlorland was a child of ten, she "hated cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house," but that at fifteen, "her love of dirt gave way to an inclination for finery, and she grew clean as she grew smart." That, we take it, has been equally true of large classes of society. Their love of dirt has given way to an inclination for finery, and sometimes, though by no means always, they have grown clean as they have grown smart. But who can say that the change has been in any sense one deserving the praises lavished upon it by the prim discourses of our great-grandmothers ? The pleasure in good looks is no nobler in itself than the pleasure in noise and scrapes and wild indifference to outward appearance. The one state of mind belongs to one stage in the individual and in the social life, and the other to another ; but there is no particular moral reason for praising the love of comeliness, any more than the love of unconventional, harum-scarum enjoyment. The fop who will not walk or ride lest he should dirty his boots is, on the whole, a more contemptible creature than the bear who comes in to dinner in dishabille, and never brushes his coat from week's end to week's end. It is quite true, as one class of moralists tells us, that the dislike for dirt, when it reaches a certain point, is a contemptible self-indulgence, indeed, a thoroughly unchristian sort of luxuriousness and effeminacy; nor do we see that, even short of this contemptible extreme, a highly refined personal fastidiousness can often be consistent with the wider and manlier order of character. The case against that species of monkish austerity which sometimes took the form of a stern self-denial of cleanliness, was that it expressed a self-loathing even more inconsistent with beneficent work for other men than the priggish eighteenth-century didacticism which so delighted itself with the attempt to make mankind "benignant, intelligent, and clean." If it is very difficult to connect the highest purity with self-mortification of the deliberately uncleanly kind, it is almost equally difficult to connect the highest humility with self-cultivation of the deliberately fastidious kind. There is, no doubt, a necessity for symbolism in the relation between the inward and the outward nature of men, and people who habitually reject from their thoughts every moral stain, will hardly ever endure the particular form of self- denial involved in needless and habitual bodily dirt ; while those who habitually reject all thoughts of self-complacency will certainly not surround themselves with a perfumed atmosphere of fastidious delicacy and decorum. That rigid and tormenting cleanliness which used to be thought the quality of a good housewife, reappears in a more refined world in the form of Rathetic precision, and in an unhealthy dread of all the superficial discolourments and disarrangements of outward disorder. A man who really wishes to sweep off any of the worse kind of dirt which disfigures the world, cannot well be very fastidious about the mere outside of his daily life. Indeed, it is not the truest purity which has the greatest horror of dirt, any more than it is the truest humility which hag the greatest love of self-abasement. Children, who in their way are, as Miss Austen says, almost fond of dirt, because they hate what they call "particularity," and like the oddities and fun of life, are at least as pure, though they are less self regarding, than the same individuals are at the later age when they cease to be dirty and begin to grow "smart." The extravagances of fastidiousness are quite as morbid in their way, as the extravagances of self-humiliation.
Even sanitary cleanliness, which is quite a different affair,— resting on prudential and benevolent considerations, and not on the minutim of self-respect,—is in our day, we think, not exactly made too much of, but made much of in a wrong sort of way. It is just as right and necessary to take pains not to spread fevers, as it is not to spread fires ; but it is not more so. To light and drain a city well, is precisely as much a duty, and for the same kind of reason as to have it well built and well policed. Plagues and sickliness are misfortunes of the same order as falling houses and insecurity of life or property. But sanitary laws are often talked of in a much higher and more sentimental strain, as if there were a sort of mystery of iniquity in bad smells and water full of nitrates, which would not belong in any degree to ricketty walls or the liability to pillage. Now, it is a very bad thing to be ill, and a worse thing to make anybody else ill by our negligence ; but in itself there is nothing more discreditable in typhoid fever than in croup or inflammation of the lungs, and yet people have begun to talk of late years as if, while ordinary illness is mere calamity, illness arising from an unsanitary condition of life were a sort of stain not simply on those who neglected to prevent it, but on all who have to suffer from it. Just as a superstitious character is attached by teeto- tallers to the substance alcohol,—as if there were a touch of diablerie and black magic in it,—so our sanitary reformers are apt to speak of the various ferments which spread the contagious maladies, as if they were the causes of ailments distinctly unholier than pleurisy, or consumption, or paralysis, or disease of the heart. This is one of the many signs which mark the almost hysteric cleanliness of the age, or rather of the middle- classes, who give the literary tone to the age. Avoidable evils of all kinds are, of course, disgraceful to us, while inevitable evils are not. But avoidable evils which spring out of dirt are no more disgraceful than avoidable evils which spring out of negligence in other matters,—out of too much pleasure, too much indif- ference, or too much bigotry. There is nothing wickeder in untrapped drains than in rotten permanent ways to the great lines of railway. There is nothing more worthy of moral reprobation in allowing a graveyard to taint a well, than in allowing unseaworthy vessels to go to sea. The superstitious emphasis given to all eulogies on sanitary progress, is at least as mistaken as the medimval austerity which denied itself water and refused to run up washing-bills. Dirt is, of course, often mischievous, though it is also, in some degree, quite essential to every form of human energy ; but the ethics of those who ascribe to its mischievous- ness a sort of special and peculiar iniquity not belonging to any other results of human carelessness, are as curious distortions of the sane view, as were the ethics which approved the humiliation of the flesh by complete renunciation of the luxury of washing.
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