It is now a complaint of quite respectable antiquity that the types in
which humanity was originally set up by a humour-loving Providence are
worn out and require recasting. The surface of society has become
smooth. It ought to be a bas-relief--it is a plane. Even a Chaucer (so
it is said) could make nothing of us as we wend our way to Brighton.
We have tempers, it is true--bad ones for the most part; but no
humours to be in or out of. We are all far too much alike; we do not
group well; we only mix. All this, and more, is alleged against us. A
cheerfully disposed person might perhaps think that, assuming the
prevailing type to be a good, plain, readable one, this uniformity
need not necessarily be a bad thing; but had he the courage to give
expression to this opinion he would most certainly be at once told,
with that mixture of asperity and contempt so properly reserved for
those who take cheerful views of anything, that without well-defined
types of character there can be neither national comedy nor whimsical
novel; and as it is impossible to imagine any person sufficiently
cheerful to carry the argument further by inquiring ingenuously, "And
how would that matter?" the position of things becomes serious, and
demands a few minutes' investigation.
As we said at the beginning, the complaint is an old one--most
complaints are. When Montaigne was in Rome in 1580 he complained
bitterly that he was always knocking up against his own countrymen,
and might as well have been in Paris. And yet some people would have
you believe that this curse of the Continent is quite new. More than
seventy years ago that most quotable of English authors, Hazlitt,
wrote as follows:
"It is, indeed, the evident tendency of all literature to generalize
and dissipate character by giving men the same artificial education
and the same common stock of ideas; so that we see all objects from
the same point of view, and through the same reflected medium; we
learn to exist not in ourselves, but in books; all men become alike,
mere readers--spectators, not actors in the scene and lose all proper
personal identity. The templar--the wit--the man of pleasure and the
man of fashion, the courtier and the citizen, the knight and the
squire, the lover and the miser--Lovelace, Lothario, Will Honeycomb
and Sir Roger de Coverley, Sparkish and Lord Foppington, Western and
Tom Jones, my Father and my Uncle Toby, Millament and Sir Sampson
Legend, Don Quixote and Sancho, Gil Bias and Guzman d'Alfarache, Count
Fathom and Joseph Surface--have all met and exchanged commonplaces on
the barren plains of the _haute litterature_--toil slowly on to the
Temple of Science, seen a long way off upon a level, and end in one
dull compound of politics, criticism, chemistry, and metaphysics."
Very pretty writing, certainly[53]; nor can it be disputed that
uniformity of surroundings puts a tax upon originality. To make bricks
and find your own straw are terms of bondage. Modern characters, like
modern houses, are possibly built too much on the same lines.
Dickens's description of Coketown is not easily forgotten:
"All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe
characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary,
the infirmary might have been the jail, the town hall might have been
either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the
contrary in the graces of their construction."
[Footnote 53: Yet in his essay _On Londoners and Country People_ we
find Hazlitt writing: "London is the only place in which the child
grows completely up into the man. I have known characters of this
kind, which, in the way of childish ignorance and self-pleasing
delusion, exceeded anything to be met with in Shakespeare or Ben
Jonson, or the Old Comedy."]
And the inhabitants of Coketown are exposed to the same objection as
their buildings. Every one sinks all traces of what he vulgarly calls
"the shop" (that is, his lawful calling), and busily pretends to be
nothing. Distinctions of dress are found irksome. A barrister of
feeling hates to be seen in his robes save when actually engaged in a
case. An officer wears his uniform only when obliged. Doctors have
long since shed all outward signs of their healing art. Court dress
excites a smile. A countess in her jewels is reckoned indecent by the
British workman, who, all unemployed, puffs his tobacco smoke against
the window-pane of the carriage that is conveying her ladyship to a
drawing-room; and a West End clergyman is with difficulty restrained
from telling his congregation what he had been told the British
workman said on that occasion. Had he but had the courage to repeat
those stirring words, his hearers (so he said) could hardly have
failed to have felt their force--so unusual in such a place; but he
had not the courage, and that sermon of the pavement remains
unpreached. The toe of the peasant is indeed kibing the heel of the
courtier. The passion for equality in externals cannot be denied. We
are all woven strangely in the same piece, and so it comes about that,
though our modern society has invented new callings, those callings
have not created new types. Stockbrokers, directors, official
liquidators, philanthropists, secretaries--not of State, but of
companies--speculative builders, are a new kind of people known to
many--indeed, playing a great part among us--but who, for all that,
have not enriched the stage with a single character. Were they to
disappear to-morrow, to be blown dancing away like the leaves before
Shelley's west wind, where in reading or playgoing would posterity
encounter them? Alone amongst the children of men the pale student of
the law, burning the midnight oil in some one of the "high lonely
towers" recently built by the Benchers of the Middle Temple (in the
Italian taste), would, whilst losing his youth over that interminable
series, _The Law Reports_, every now and again strike across the old
track, once so noisy with the bayings of the well-paid hounds of
justice, and, pushing his way along it, trace the history of the bogus
company, from the acclamations attendant upon its illegitimate birth
to the hour of disgrace when it dies by strangulation at the hands of
the professional wrecker. The pale student will not be a wholly
unsympathetic reader. Great swindles have ere now made great
reputations, and lawyers may surely be permitted to take a pensive
interest in such matters.
"Not one except the Attorney was amused--
He, like Achilles, faithful to the tomb,
So there were quarrels, cared not for the cause,
Knowing they must be settled by the laws."
But our elder dramatists would not have let any of these characters
swim out of their ken. A glance over Ben Jonson, Massinger, Beaumont
and Fletcher, is enough to reveal their frank and easy method. Their
characters, like an apothecary's drugs, wear labels round their necks.
Mr. Justice Clement and Mr. Justice Greedy; Master Matthew, the town
gull; Sir Giles Overreach, Sir Epicure Mammon, Mr. Plenty, Sir John
Frugal, need no explanatory context. Are our dramatists to blame for
withholding from us the heroes of our modern society? Ought we to
have--
"Sir Moses, Sir Aaron, Sir Jamramagee,
Two stock-jobbing Jews, and a shuffling Parsee"?
Baron Contango, the Hon. Mr. Guinea-Pig, poor Miss Impulsia Allottee,
Mr. Jeremiah Builder--Rare Old Ben, who was fond of the City, would
have given us them all and many more; but though we may well wish he
were here to do it, we ought, I think, to confess that the humour of
these typical persons who so swell the _dramatis personae_ of an
Elizabethan is, to say the least of it, far to seek. There is a
certain warm-hearted tradition about their very names which makes
disrespect painful. It seems a churl's part not to laugh, as did our
fathers before us, at the humours of the conventional parasite or
impossible serving-man; but we laugh because we will, and not because
we must.
Genuine comedy--the true tickling scene, exquisite absurdity,
soul-rejoicing incongruity--has really nothing to do with types,
prevailing fashions, and such-like vulgarities. Sir Andrew Aguecheek
is not a typical fool; he _is_ a fool, seised in fee simple of his
folly.
Humour lies not in generalizations, but in the individual; not in his
hat nor in his hose, even though the latter be "cross-gartered"; but
in the deep heart of him, in his high-flying vanities, his low-lying
oddities--what we call his "ways"--nay, in the very motions of his
back as he crosses the road. These stir our laughter whilst he lives
and our tears when he dies, for in mourning over him we know full well
we are taking part in our own obsequies. "But indeed," wrote Charles
Lamb, "we die many deaths before we die, and I am almost sick when I
think that such a hold as I had of you is gone."
Literature is but the reflex of life, and the humour of it lies in the
portrayal of the individual, not the type; and though the young man in
_Locksley Hall_ no doubt observes that the individual withers, we have
but to take down George Meredith's novels to find the fact is
otherwise, and that we have still one amongst us who takes notes, and
against the battery of whose quick wits even the costly raiment of
Poole is no protection. We are forced as we read to exclaim with
Petruchio: "Thou hast hit it; come sit on me." No doubt the task of
the modern humorist is not so easy as it was. The surface ore has been
mostly picked up. In order to win the precious metal you must now work
with in-stroke and out-stroke after the most approved methods.
Sometimes one would enjoy it a little more if we did not hear quite so
distinctly the snorting of the engine, and the groaning and the
creaking of the gear as it painfully winds up its prize: but what
would you? Methods, no less than men, must have the defects of their
qualities.
If, therefore, it be the fact that our national comedy is in decline,
we must look for some other reasons for it than those suggested by
Hazlitt in 1817. When Mr. Chadband inquired, "Why can we not fly, my
friends?" Mr. Snagsby ventured to observe, "in a cheerful and rather
knowing tone, 'No wings!'" but he was immediately frowned down by Mrs.
Snagsby. We lack courage to suggest that the somewhat heavy-footed
movements of our recent dramatists are in any way due to their not
being provided with those twin adjuncts indispensable for the genius
who would soar.
_Augustine Birrell._