It is now a complaint of quite respectably 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 Blas 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; {244} 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.'
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.