¥leTOR/AN MORALS
245
vitality,
is
giving herself to a dried-up old pedant with two white
IIlOIes-with hairs in them-on his cheek, who makes unpleasant
noises
when eating his soup, and who has one foot in the grave, al–
though, as Mrs. Cadwallader says, he evidently intends to pull it back.
Still, with all these
proviso~
admitted, Victorian morality was
lbingent, and it exercised a stringent censorship on the novel, and,
partially anyway, upon life itself. But its historical irony consists in
the fact that it broke down, in the novel, if not in life, in the direction
of
the morality and mores of the lower class, whose conduct and atti–
tude the middle-class Victorians found so reprehensible and whose
"Iap;ed" and unregenerate mode of life the bourgeoisie attempted to
meliorate, usually without success. Mayhew reported that the coster–
mongers said that tracts and sermons gave them "the 'orros," and,
indeed, the poor were adamant in their unregeneracy in the face of
the admonitions to "purity" that were administered to them. The
classic
instance in Victorian fiction is the impassioned retort of the
workingman to the hectoring Mrs. Pardiggle in
Bleak House:
con–
cluding a lengthy and aggressive list of his sins, he exclaims:
How
have
I
been conducting of myself? Why, I've been drunk for three
days;
and I'd a been drunk four,
if
I'd a had the money. Don't
I
never
mean for to go to church? No,
I
don't never mean for to go to church.
I
shouldn't be expected there, if
I
did; the beadle's too genteel for me.
And how did my wife get that black eye? Why,
I
giv' it her; and if
me
says
I
didn't, she's a Lie!
But the moral stance of the workingman, passive and helpless as
he
was in the context of the society of which he was more or less
the
creature, prevailed in a deep sense, and the revolt that occurred
in
English fiction in Butler and in Hardy and others, and later on pre–
eminently in D. H. Lawrence, was in a sense an upsurge from below,
an
affirmation of the naturalistic and instinctive ways of life of the
lower class, as against the theoretical and restrictive moral precon–
ceptions of the middle class. And the history of the novel in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century is, in part, the story of how
that workingman, whom Mrs. Pardiggle hectored, got up off the
floor, and went, or perhaps staggered, to a writing desk, where he
composed first
The Way of All Flesh
and
Jude the Obscure
and,
later, such books as
The Rainbow, Women in Love,
and
The Man
Who
Died.
