Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 Part 8

THE SURVIVAL OF TYPES

The London _Daily News_, in the course of an article on what it calls "International Reproaches," refers to the fact that there is much that is "traditional" in them. It thinks that, both in America and in France, the qualities and peculiarities attributed to English people are derived, to a great extent, less from experience than from inherited tradition. "We hear that Englishmen are rude to ladies; that they fail to yield them precedence at the ticket-offices of steamboats and railway stations; that they complain of everything that is given them as food; that they occupy more than their share of public conveyances with mult.i.tudinous wraps, sticks, and umbrellas.

They a.s.sert themselves, it would seem, when they have placed 3,000 miles between themselves and their old home. There is, however, in all these complaints the ring of old coin." In the same way it says that the Parisian of the boulevards still believes the English man to be a creature who wears long red whiskers of the mutton-chop species, and wears a plaid--although, as a matter of fact, the typical Englishman of to-day does not look like this at all.

Anyone interested in the matter might make a very queer collection of types which, having disappeared from actual life, survive in the popular imagination, and by surviving keep alive international prejudice, hostility, suspicion, or distrust, and which go on doing duty in this way for years and years, until suddenly some fine day it is discovered that they are out of date and must in future be dispensed with. There is, for instance, our old friend, the stage Irishman. How often have our hearts been touched by the qualities of grat.i.tude, devotion to sentiment, faithful friendship, and heroism of this n.o.ble creature. No doubt, there must have been a time when he was as common in Ireland as he has been in our day in melodrama.

But the Irishman, as he exists in New York, and as he is described by those who have seen him at home, is strangely unlike the type. He is a decidedly practical, hard-headed man, with a keen eye to the main chance, a considerable fondness for fighting, and a disposition which we should call the reverse of sentimental. Harrigan and Hart represent the actual Irishman in America capitally at their little theatre in Broadway, yet the stage Irishman is to mult.i.tudes of Americans a more real creature than the actual Irishman, and we suppose there is hardly a Democratic statesman from one end of the country to the other who has not constantly before his mind an image of him, by the contemplation of which he solves many of the knottiest problems of contemporary politics.

Then there is the Dundreary Englishman, first-cousin or lineal descendant of the Englishman so dear to the French imagination.

Dundreary really represents, as we know very well, when we think about it, a past type of swell as extinct as the dodo. It is not common any longer for English swells to change all their rs to ws, and to spice their sentences with "aw-aws." We have numbers of them over here every year, but we do not hear them talk nowadays the once familiar Dundreary language. Yet there is hardly a newspaper in the United States whose funny man does not a.s.sume for the benefit of his readers that Dundreary is alive, and every now and then reproduce him with gusto. It is not in _Punch_ that we find Dundreary, but in the funny department of the Oshkosh _Monitor_ and the "All Sorts"

column of the Bungtown _Clarion_. Even _Puck_ contributes to perpetuate the belief in the continued existence of Dundreary by devoting a column a week to observations on American society in the Dundreary dialect, which thirty years ago might have been decidedly funny.

_Punch_ still has John Bull as a national type; but it shows great reserve in the use of him, and now continually resorts to Britannia as a subst.i.tute. Is not this because our old friend John is now only a survival, a tradition of the past? The bluff, stout, honest, red-faced, irascible rural person--of whom the photographs of John Bright remind us--has really been supplanted by a more modern, thinner, nervous, intellectual, astute type. For English use the Yankee type of Uncle Sam still seems to represent America, although it belongs to the past as much as slavery or the stage-coach. He would be a bold man who should undertake to say what the national type is now; but it is safe to say that it is not a long, thin, cute Yankee, dressed in a swallow-tailed coat with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, whittling a stick, and interlarding his conversation with "I swan!"

and "I calc'late." If Mr. Lowell were writing the "Biglow Papers"

now, would "Uncle S." serve his purpose as he did during the war? By a merciful dispensation of Providence, however, Brother Jonathan and Uncle Sam still live on in the imaginations of large ma.s.ses of conservative Englishmen, and no doubt enable many a Tory to people the United States with a race as alien from that which actually inhabits it as Zulus would be.

In the same way it may be possible--to the Providence that guides the destinies of nations nothing is impossible--that the rude Englishman is, as the _Daily News_ suggests, getting to be a survival. The _Daily News's_ portrait of him is fair enough, though it would require Americans who have suffered from him to do him real justice. He is, or, was, a very rude person, and always seemed to take great delight in "a.s.serting himself" in such a way as to produce as much general annoyance and discomfort as possible.

During the war he had a brilliant career. He used to come over and express great surprise at the silly fuss made about the Const.i.tution and secession, and profess an entire inability to discover what it was "all about." If they want to go, he always said, why don't you let 'em go? What is the use of fighting about the meaning of a word in the dictionary? It was in small things as in great. When he went into society he dressed to suit himself, and not as gentlemen in England or anywhere else do, thus contriving to exhibit a general contempt for his host and his friends. When his meek entertainer ventured to offer him some American dish which he did not like, he would frankly warn his companions against it; and if he asked for sugar in his coffee he would, in the same outspoken way, explain that he always sweetened it "when it was bad." One of his favorite topics of conversation was the awful corruption and rottenness of American society and politics, and he dwelt so much upon this that it often seemed as if what he was really interested in was to find out whether the people he was staying with, and being entertained by, were not themselves, if the truth were known, rotten to the core.

He was a very rude man, and he did exist. But is he gone, or going?

Is the time coming when we shall have to regard him too as a survival, and admit that the rude Englishman is a creature of the past? Time and continued international experience can alone settle this question. There are, however, bitter memories of past sufferings at his hands in hundreds of American homes, that make it better for both countries not to probe the subject too deeply.

WILL WIMBLES

Mr. Thomas Hughes's attempt to provide a refuge in Tennessee for the large cla.s.s of young Englishmen whom he calls "Will Wimbles," after one of Sir Roger de Coverley's friends in Addison's _Spectator_, is said to be a failure, owing mainly to the poverty of the land and the remoteness of the markets. An acute writer in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ maintains that there is another and more potent cause to be found in the quality of the Will Wimbles. The Will Wimbles are the young men who are educated in the public schools and universities, or at least in the public schools, and are turned out into the world between eighteen and twenty-one, without any special training whatever, but with the manners and instincts of gentlemen, and with entire willingness to take to any calling but the lower walks of "trade." The great body of them are the sons of middle-cla.s.s parents--clergymen, doctors, lawyers, and small squires--whose means are very moderate, and who have to submit to more or less privation in order to send their sons to the public schools at all. They do it in order to launch them in the world unmistakably in the gentle cla.s.s, and in order to enable them to form their first social relations in that cla.s.s. Unfortunately, however, as the writer in the _Pall Mall Gazette_ points out, the tone and temper of the public schools, and their way of looking at life, are the products of a vague, but none the less powerful, a.s.sumption that every boy is the son of a man with about five thousand pounds a year. The whole atmosphere of the school is permeated with this a.s.sumption. The boys' code of manners is formed in it. Their intercourse with each other is more or less influenced by it, and they all look out on the world, up to their last day at school, with the eyes of youths whose home is a well-equipped manor-house surrounded by a prosperous estate.

The love of the middle-cla.s.s Englishman of every age for this point of view is curiously exemplified in the social articles, not only in the "society paper," properly so called, but in the _Sat.u.r.day Review_. The troubles and perplexities and minor disappointments of life form a favorite topic with the writer of the "sub-leaders"

in this last-named paper, but they are always of the troubles, perplexities, and disappointments of a landed gentleman who keeps hunters, and has a stud groom and extensive covers. He hardly ever examines the state of mind of anyone less well-to-do than a younger son whose means only allow him to hunt two days in a week instead of six, and who has to rely on invitations for his shooting. These and their sisters, cousins, and aunts, apparently form the reviewer's entire world, and the only world in which there are any social phenomena worth discussion. It is, in other words, a world made up exclusively of "gentlemen," and of the persons, male and female, who wait upon them. Its sorrows are the sorrows of gentlemen, and arise mostly out of the failure of some amus.e.m.e.nt, or the loss of the money with which amus.e.m.e.nts are provided, the missing of some social distinction, or the misconduct of "upper servants." It is, however, really the only world that the English public-school boy or university man sees, or hears of, or thinks about while in _statu pupillari_. This is true, let his own home be never so modest, or the sacrifices made by his father to secure him the fashionable curriculum be never so painful. The result is, of course, that when his "education" is finished, he is really only prepared for what is technically called a gentleman's life. He has only thought of certain employments as possible to him, and all these are exceedingly hard to get. The manners of the great bulk of mankind, too, are more or less repulsive to him, and so is a good deal of the popular morality. In short, he is turned out a Will Wimble--or, in other words, a good-hearted, kindly, gentlemanly, honorable fellow, who is, however, entirely unfitted for the social _milieu_, in which he must not only live, but make a living.

Mr. Hughes's idea has been that, though he dislikes trade, and is a little too nice for it as now carried on, at least on the retail side, he has an innate liking and readiness for agriculture, and that, if enabled to till the soil under pleasant, or at least not too novel, social conditions, he would do it successfully. Out of this the Rugby, Tenn., experiment has grown, and if it has not actually failed, as some say, it is certainly too early to p.r.o.nounce it a success. At all events, the signs that it is going to fail are numerous. Among them is the deep disappointment of the settlers, few of whom probably realized not only the monotony and drudgery of labor in the fields--these things can be borne by men with stout hearts and strong arms--but its effect in unfitting a man for any kind of amus.e.m.e.nt. There has been much delusion on this subject in this country, where far more is known by the reading cla.s.s about all kinds of manual labor than is known in England. The possibility of working hard in the fields and keeping up at the same time some process of intellectual culture, has been much preached among us both by educational projectors and social reformers, though nearly every man who listens to them here knows the effect of physical toil in the open air in producing sleepiness and mental inertness. It is not surprising, therefore, that it should find ready acceptance in England among people who think ability to bear a hard day on the moors after grouse, or a long run in the saddle after the hounds, argues capacity to hoe potatoes or corn for twelve hours, and settle down in the evening, after a bath and a good dinner, to Dante, or Wallace, or Huxley.

Will Wimbles are much less common among us than in England. We fortunately have not a dozen great endowments used in turning them out, or a large and rich society occupied in spreading the gentlemanly view of life. But they, nevertheless, are more numerous than is altogether pleasant. The difficulty which our college graduate experiences in getting room for what the newspapers call his "bark" on the stream of life, is one of the standing jokes of our light literature. We have no schools which take the place of the English public schools in our scheme of education. But the view of life which prevails in the English public schools and turns out the Will Wimbles, is more or less prevalent in our colleges, and tends to spread as the wealth of the cla.s.s which sends its boys to college increases. In other words, colleges are to a much greater extent than they used to be places in which social relations are found, rather than places of preparation for the active work of life. This last character, indeed, they almost wholly lost when they ceased to have the training of ministers as their main function. Scarcely any man who can afford it now likes to refuse his son a college education if the boy wants it; but probably not one boy in one thousand can say, five years after graduating, that he has been helped by his college education in making his start in life. It may have been never so useful to him as a means of moral and intellectual culture, but it has not helped to adapt him to the environment in which he has to live and work; or, in other words, to a world in which not one man in a thousand has either the manners or cultivation of a gentleman, or changes his shirt more than once a week, or eats with a fork.

College education is prevented from suffering as much from this source in popular estimation in England as it does here, by the fact that, owing to the peculiar political traditions of the country, college-bred men begin life in a large number of cases in possession of great advantages of other kinds, such as hereditary wealth. Here they have almost all to face the world on their own merits, and in so far as they face it feebly or unskilfully their defects are set down in the popular mind to the fact that they went to college. If the discredit ended here, it would perhaps be of small consequence.

But it may be safely said that the college graduate is never seen groping about in a helpless and timid way for "a position," and shrinking from the turmoil and dirt of some walks of life, without spreading among the uncultivated a contempt for culture and increasing their confidence in the rule of thumb. The mere "going to college" is recognized as a sign of pecuniary ease, and of a desire for social advancement, but not as preparation for the kind of work which the bulk of the community is doing, and thus makes mental culture seem less desirable, and cultivated men less potent, especially in politics.

The question is a serious one for all colleges, and it is not here only, but in England and France, that it is undergoing grave consideration. In Germany society may be said to have been organized as an appendage to the universities, but here the universities are simply appendages to society, which is continually doubting whether their existence can be justified.