ded in mystery. In fact, though one
thus speaks of her as so potent a personification, she has of course
never had any real existence. For that very reason she has been so hard
to kill. Nothing is so long-lived as a chimera, nothing so difficult to
lay as a ghost. From her first appearance, or rather mention, in
literature, Mrs. Grundy has been a mere hearsay, a bugaboo being
invented to frighten society, as "black men" and other goblins have been
wickedly invented by nurses to frighten children. In the old play itself
where we first find her mentioned by name, she herself never comes on
the stage. She is only referred to in frightened whispers. "_What will
Mrs. Grundy say?_" is the nervous catchword of one of the characters,
much in the same way as Mrs. Gamp was wont to defer to the censorious
standards of her invisible friend "Mrs. Harris." In the case of the last
named chimera, it will be recalled that the awful moment came when Mrs.
Gamp's boon companion, Batsey Prig, was sacrilegious enough to declare
her belief that no such person as "Mrs. Harris" was, or ever had been,
in existence. So the awful atheistic moment has come for Mrs. Grundy,
too, and an oppressed world at last takes courage to say that no such
being as Mrs. Grundy has ever really existed, or that, even if she has,
she shall exist no more. _What will Mrs. Grundy say?_ Who cares
nowadays--and so long as nobody cares, the good lady is as dead as need
be.

Mrs. Grundy, of course, is man's embodied fear of his neighbour, the
creation of timid souls who are afraid of being themselves, and who,
instead of living their lives after their own fashion and desires,
choose to live them in hypocritical discomfort according to the
standards of others, standards which in their turn may be held
insincerely enough from fear of someone else, and so on without end--a
vicious circle of insincere living being thus created, in which no man
is or does anything real, or as he himself would naturally prefer to be
and to do. It is evident that such a state of mutual intimidation can
exist only in small communities, economically interdependent, and among
people with narrow boundaries and no horizons. If you live in a village,
for example, and are dependent on the good opinion of your neighbours
for your means of existence, your morals and your religious belief must
be those of the village, or you are liable to starve. It is only the
rich man in a village who can do as he please