ONE Sometimes wonders where national types come from. One cannot help believing in them, and yet, if anybody says, 'So-and-So is a typical Englishman,' someone else is almost sure to contradict him. We differ, however, as to what the national type is, not as to whether such a thing as a national type exists. We have heard an occasional skeptic denying that there is any such person as a typical Englishman. The reply is that there is and there is n't.

The typical Englishman exists, not in the flesh, but as a standard. He is a formula. He is the lowest common multiple or the greatest common measure — we have long forgotten which is which of thousands of of thousands of Englishmen whose shadows have been thrown on the imagination. He is a sort of composite photograph. He is partly the result of one's own experience, and partly the result of the common experience. We could not easily paint a picture of him, however, that would not be a caricature. We should be puzzled even as to many of the details of his personal appearance. Should his eyes be blue or brown or gray? Should his hair be fair or brown? Should he be long or short? We can easily enough say what he is not like. His hair is not black like a Chinaman's. His eyes are not brown like a negro's. He is not so short as a Japanese. He is not so dark as a Hindu. He is not so excitable as a Frenchman. He is not so simpleminded as an American. He is not so capable de tout as a Russian.

Gradually, by process of elimination, we might come a little nearer to de

fining him. But there would be the danger that, having robbed him of all extremes, we might arrive at the conclusion that he was a ‘neitherone-thing-nor-the-other' sort of person. We should portray him as a compromise.

It may be that this is the Englishman's genius. Perhaps it is symbolic of him that his eyes are neither blue nor brown, his hair neither gold nor black, his figure neither short nor tall, his temper neither savage nor gentle. But then one begins to wonder whether, after all, compromise is not a characteristic of the whole human race

or the successful part of it. The Frenchman, the German, and the Italian have all learned the great art of compromise.

We shall have to seek a further explanation than compromise before we find a satisfactory formula to embrace Nelson, Mr. Asquith, Lord Birkenhead, Mr. Massingham, Mr. Wells, Mr. Bottomley, Dr. Clifford, and Mr. Lansbury. There you have a list of Englishmen men who would be recognized at a glance as Englishmen by any foreigner and yet the only one of them who can be called a typical Englishman is Mr. Asquith. Probably his opponents would angrily deny that even Mr. Asquith is a typical Englishman; and it may be that the quality of his temper and his intellect is too excellent for him to be regarded as a typical figure in any community. But his coolness, his readiness to acknowledge events, his sense of tradition, his team play, his desire to speak well (even uncritically well) of his colleagues and of official persons, are

all characteristics upon which many Englishmen pride themselves more than upon being the countrymen of Shakespeare.

By a curious chance, the person whom the typical Englishman — at least, the best type of Englishman is most unlike is John Bull. That stupid and irascible figure of plethora where is he to be found? One might walk the streets of London all day and never meet him once. He does not frequent fairs or markets. One never sees him driving a motor 'bus. There may be a few elderly gentlemen of a John Bull figure in clubs-men so naturally healthy that they have even survived their eating and drinking habits- but they are mere commentators without influence on events. They talk a great deal of politics, but they might as well talk racing for all the effect they have. They are not important but self-important. They are outside the national life. They could not get a seat even in the present Cabinet; they could not get a seat even in the present Parliament.

We suspect John Bull of being the invention of an anti-Englishman. If John Bull is an Englishman, he is the sort of Englishman intelligent Englishmen slip out of the room to avoid. He is arrogant, brainless, humorless (apart from bawdy and practical jokes), unsympathetic, a creature without imagination or any lovable quality. John Bull could never have done a single one of those things that have made the name of England renowned through the world. He could neither have written Hamlet nor have gone with Scott in search of the South Pole.

The three great contributions of England to the world, it seems to us, have been made in the spheres of poetry, adventure, and political liberty.

John Bull would have scorned the first, hated the last, and been much too dull and fond of his food even to dream of quitting England in search of the impossible. The only fine quality he possesses and it is undoubtedly a great quality is dogged courage. John Bull may be as stupid as a stone wall, but he is also as unshakable. We have no doubt that it is this quality in him- that has kept him alive in the popular imagination. Human beings, aware of the chase of hopes and fears that sweeps over them at times with so unsettling an effect, are led to worship an ideal of unflinching steadiness as though it were one of the primary virtues. It is certainly a virtue for lack of which the primary virtues are of little or, at least, lessened account. Thus it may be that John Bull, though he is not typical of Englishmen in general, either in his features or in his character as a whole, does typify the English love of doggedness and stability. One would like to believe that dogged courage is consistent with a little more charm of manner. But perhaps the average Englishman prefers his doggedness 'neat.'

John Bull, we may take it then, is neither the Englishman seen through English eyes nor the Englishman seen through foreign eyes, but a symbolic figure of one of the qualities which Englishmen most admire. How, on the other hand, does the Englishman see his average fellow countryman? Does he see him as a being like Viscount Chaplin or as a being like Mr. Herbert Fisher? He probably does not call up a visual image of him at all. He thinks of him chiefly as a blunt, honest man, whose word is his bond, who has a sort of schoolmaster's mission to the inferior and ungrateful outer world, the chivalrous protector of women, a moderate drinker with a hatred of teetotalers, with a touch of

unimaginative stupidity that keeps the pure gold of his nature from being too soft, not a perfect man but a better man than any other man. The Englishman would not go further than that: he never boasts.

We have recently seen it stated somewhere that it was the hostile critics of the Englishman who describe him as stupid and unimaginative. We suspect, however, that it was the Englishman himself who first invented this description of himself. It seems odd that he should do so, seeing that he is not given to self-abasement. Mr. Shaw, if we remember right, attributes it to protective mimicry. The Englishman sits down, politically speaking, to play cards with the Irishman, and he at once begins telling the Irishman how brilliant he (the Irishman) is and what a blundering idiot he (the Englishman) is. The Irishman is only too ready to believe it is all true, and he shows his pleasure by the easy-going recklessness of his play Then, when the game comes to an end, and it is time to count one's winnings, the Irishman notices that there are no winnings for him to count, while the Englishman needs a bag in which to carry his away. Happy is the nation that can pretend to be stupid. Were we a wolf, we should say to the lamb: 'What a dazzling creature you are! How beautiful and how perfectly clever!' There could be no better way of insuring against hunger.

The national type which a people invents for its own composite portrait, however, is seldom the national type that the foreigner sees. The foreign eye is as a rule more destructive than the home eye. It is more inclined to judge of a nation by its worst types than by its best or even its average. Most foreigners (even in these days of intercourse among nations) still seem

a little wicked to the ordinary eye.

An Englishman can believe more easily in the criminality of a quite commonlooking Frenchman than in that of a quite common-looking Englishman. One instinctively distrusts the stranger. In times of war this distrust becomes intensified into hatred, and hatred invents new national types. We saw this happening recently as regards Germany.

The German before the war had the name of being a stolid, philosophic beer-drinker, fat and fatherly, and reeking with tobacco fumes. He was suddenly transformed into a monster who would mutilate the dead and crucify the living. We heard a British officer the other day talking as though the unspeakable mutilation of the dead were a typical German act. He obviously believed what he said, but he was equally clearly generalizing from exceptional instances. And that is how all the most hostile portraits of national types are drawn. Some people, if they see a single drunken man in the streets during a visit to Edinburgh, will immediately form a generalization in their minds and imagine the drunken Scotsman as the national type.

Americans hear of a negro assaulting a white woman, and a generalized negro at once comes to birth in their imaginations, a racial type much addicted to that sort of crime. Statistics are of no avail against these products of the heated imagination. Nine hundred and ninety-nine negroes who behave well count as nothing in the balance against one negro who behaves ill. It is proved, we believe, that assaults on women by negroes are proportionately fewer than assaults by any other of the races inhabiting America. But racial generalizations are proof-proof.

izations about Irishmen reviving in this country. The Anglo-Irish quarrel is, we believe, producing fewer bloody crimes than a similar quarrel would produce in any other two countries in the world. Both the Irish and English are, in contrast to most races, humane and respecters of life. Yet many Englishmen are beginning to regard the typical Irishman once more as something of a monster- an assassin, cattle maimer, and all the rest of it; while many Irishmen regard the typical Englishman as equally a monster man anxious for a pious excuse to shed blood, unscrupulous, cruel, and false. Anyone who knows both races knows that these 'national types' simply do not exist except in the excited brains of politicians.

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There are men both in England and in Ireland who would gladly defeat the other side at the expense of an abundant flow of blood. But neither the typical Englishman nor the typical Irishman is anxious to commit mon

strous crimes against the other. Murders in Ireland are exceedingly rare. All the murderers in Ireland could be packed into a lift and have plenty of room to move about. Similarly, Irishmen are mistaken when they imagine that the young English lieutenant, who was responsible for getting Father O'Donnell thrown into prison and out of Ireland, was a typical Englishman. We fear, however, that in Ireland he will be generally so regarded. And, indeed, his reckless and insane misunderstanding of what he heard which Irishmen will put down to deliberate falsehood-is symbolical of the government of Ireland, though it does not give us a typical Englishman.

Passion, however, makes its own types. Neither Jew nor Christian can escape the net of the angry generalizer. That is why every man who makes a fool of himself in the presence of foreigners is doing an injury to his country. He ceases to be himself and becomes a national type.

[The Athenæum, December 5, 1919] COTERIES

BY FRANK SWINNERTON

WHEN I am as old as Mr. Edmund Gosse, and the young authors of that far-off time are brought before me for benediction, I shall perform a great service to letters. I shall be the doyen of the age. And my service will consist in the presentation to each aspirant of a simple West-Country inkpot, such as I have myself, bearing the inscription: 'Daunt 'ee keep on talkin' 'bout it, but du 'ee tak' an' write.' For if there is one thing upon earth that justifies young men and maidens in taking to the pen it is the assiduous exercise of their craft.

The present age wastes half its energies in talk, and especially in the assessment and rejection of rival contemporary talent. Its literary section hurries from place to place, like the hysterical crowd of distraction seekers in another monde; and it takes with it endlessly and always the same small talk of the coterie. The coterie is the sworn enemy of the commonwealth of letters, because the business of the coterie is to puff up its own members and to decry the members of all other coteries whatsoever. Coterie begets self-protective coterie; and the ring of coteries makes for general slander and fracas. The coterie is thus anti-social, and it also, by creating acute selfconsciousness in its members, hampers them in their production of personally original work. This is its principal fault, and it is one of singular and unhappy importance at the present time.

A coterie many arise in many ways. It may be the result of a common vapidity or of a common ill-success, or it may follow the success of some one man and form around his personality. In the latter case, the per

sonality is dwarfed by the surrounding disciples, both because it is subject to the vagaries of their taste, and because it is through some weakness in the personality that the constant association with others has become a necessity to the leader. It is the old story, in fact, of the desire of the star for the moth. The coterie, once formed, has its meetings at which nothing is talked but 'shop,' either in the discussion of work just produced or in the dissection of character or the relation of personal anecdote. Insensibly, the tone of a coterie grows mean and splenetic. It is soon, apart from applause of its own members, given over to destructive comments upon the work and character of those outside the circle. Its anecdotes become serious attempts at ridicule. For it must be remembered that a coterie is a serious organization, a place for thin laughter, and not a place where nonsense can be talked for fun. The jokes current in a coterie are jokes rising from the talkers' sense of superiority to the rest of the world. They are horrid little jokes, trivial and malicious. Because that is the result of the atmosphere of a coterie.

Whatever the honesty which has led to its formation, a coterie always grows into a secret and deformed thing. It will be driven back upon itself, to a kind of perverted egoism. Comparisons will be its odious material, and comparisons create every unpleasant reaction possible among jealous men and women. It will suggest an opinion, will harden it into a dogma, will seek to make that dogma an accepted creed. Instead of disinterestedly loving literature, it will have opinions about it. It will attempt to proselytize. It may come at length to believe that there lies within its power the administration of the rewards and punishments of contemporary criticism. This is an illusion.