Worn-Out Types

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Title:     Worn-Out Types
Author: Augustine Birrell [More Titles by Birrell]

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.

[The end]
Augustine Birrell's essay: Worn-Out Types

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