been shared by
the ablutionary Pharisees, who resembled the English public-school
aristocrats in so many respects: in their care about club rules and
traditions, in their offensive optimism at the expense of other people,
and above all in their unimaginative plodding patriotism in the worst
interests of their country. Now the old human common sense about washing
is that it is a great pleasure. Water (applied externally) is a splendid
thing, like wine. Sybarites bathe in wine, and Nonconformists drink
water; but we are not concerned with these frantic exceptions. Washing
being a pleasure, it stands to reason that rich people can afford it
more than poor people, and as long as this was recognized all was
well; and it was very right that rich people should offer baths to poor
people, as they might offer any other agreeable thing--a drink or a
donkey ride. But one dreadful day, somewhere about the middle of the
nineteenth century, somebody discovered (somebody pretty well off)
the two great modern truths, that washing is a virtue in the rich and
therefore a duty in the poor. For a duty is a virtue that one can't do.
And a virtue is generally a duty that one can do quite easily; like
the bodily cleanliness of the upper classes. But in the public-school
tradition of public life, soap has become creditable simply because it
is pleasant. Baths are represented as a part of the decay of the Roman
Empire; but the same baths are represented as part of the energy and
rejuvenation of the British Empire. There are distinguished public
school men, bishops, dons, headmasters, and high politicians, who,
in the course of the eulogies which from time to time they pass upon
themselves, have actually identified physical cleanliness with moral
purity. They say (if I remember rightly) that a public-school man is
clean inside and out. As if everyone did not know that while saints can
afford to be dirty, seducers have to be clean. As if everyone did
not know that the harlot must be clean, because it is her business to
captivate, while the good wife may be dirty, because it is her business
to clean. As if we did not all know that whenever God's thunder cracks
above us, it is very likely indeed to find the simplest man in a muck
cart and the most complex blackguard in a bath.

There are other instances, of course, of this oily trick of turning the
pleasures of a gentleman into the virtues of an Anglo-Saxon. Sport, like
soap, is an admirable thing,