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