KEEPINC UP APPEARANCES.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 19, 7 May 1892, Page 478

KEEPINC UP APPEARANCES.

It is really wonderful what a number of people in this last decade of the nineteenth century are employed in keeping up appearances, and nothing else. This is their sole occupation, their one all-absorbing thought. For this they plan and scheme, and struggle and toil, through anxious days and wakeful nights, from week’s end to week’s end.

For this they go deeper and deeper into debt, incurring liabilities which in all human probability they can never meet, and laying up for themselves an ever-increasing load of trouble for the years to come which must ultimately crush them to the earth.

Strange, indeed, is the charm that many people—not, so far as we can judge from their conversation, lacking in the first principles of honesty and honour—seem to find in playing this dangerous game. What satisfaction can they feel in it ’ It puzzles us to imagine. For, after all, their efforts have no good or worthy object ; there is nothing in the end to justify the means. For keeping up appearances, look at it which way we will, is not, and never can be, a good and elevating occupation to engioss all a reasonable human being’s time and attention.

Life was surely given us for better things than that. To keep up the appearance of something that, if it ever existed, has long ceased to do so; to strive to reanimate a dead past, and throw dust in the eyes of the world by making their lives one continual lie—such is the lofty object that many very respectable people have at heart; such is the grand purpose that fills many a presumably intelligent soul.

‘ Oh, the pity of it!’ Ay, and the puerility, too ! It is a difficult matter indeed to respect a human nature capable of such things as these.