The Survival Of Types

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Title:     The Survival Of Types
Author: Edwin Lawrence Godkin [More Titles by Godkin]

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 multitudinous wraps, sticks, and umbrellas. They assert 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and which go on doing duty in this way for years and years, until suddenly some fine day it is discovered that they are out of date and must in future be dispensed with.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 gratitude, devotion to sentiment, faithful friendship, and heroism of this noble 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 multitudes 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 assume 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 substitute. 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 brass buttons, 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 masses 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 "asserting 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 Constitution 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.

[The end]
Edwin Lawrence Godkin's essay: Survival Of Types

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