252
I was once before Alderman Kelley, when he was Lord
charged with obstructing, or some humbug. "What are you my
he says quietly, and like a gentleman. "In the same line as yourself,
lord," says
I.
"How's that?" says he. "I'm a paper-worker for my
my lord," says
I.
I was soon discharged and there was such fun
laughing, that if I'd a few slums in my pocket, I believe I could
sold them all in the justice-room.
And the great heavy Victorian morality overhead, which
at
best produced such titans as John Stuart Mill, George Eliot,
Matthew Arnold, but which also produced, in lesser vessels,
and Christina Pontifex, finally toppled over in the direction of
class morality, and
The
Way
of All Flesh
celebrates a way of life
far different from the life of the costers.
II
It hardly needs to be pointed out that Butler's attack upon
cial Victorian morality jibes, almost point by point, with the
morality of the lower orders: freedom, or neglect, for children,
early exodus from the parental domain, no tie to formal religion
formal education, impudence, in general, about the sacred cows
the middle class, a wholesale rejection of the idea of "f(!spectabll1tv;
an over-all anarchism, and a belief in the instincts. Add a
income, some book learning, some notions-none too formal
precise-about a Deity, and subtract the love of brutality
and
terrible suffering that often prevailed, and a street patterer
come close to being a Butlerian hero. It
is
no accident that
has his hero shed his last illusions about the middle-class
among the London poor (whom he is supposedly "converting"
who in actuality convert him) and that after his ultimate
the period spent in jail-he should, like a street patterer, have
out of his own class and joined the lower one. But the heart of
matter goes deeper than explicit ideas and institutions. What
was attacking, above all, was middle-class consciousness, that
is,
way the middle-class mind operated, and he opposed this
cOIlSCil"~
ness with another type or way of handling experience, which he
sociated with either the aristocracy or the lower class, for it was
these that had the famous Butlerian "grace," the ability to act
instinct and by the unconscious. Towneley, upper-class,
and
