By Rev. EDWARD P. SPRAGUE.
Abundant evidence is afforded in nature that, beside the familiar forms of life of the present, there have been earlier forms, such as are now no longer seen. Each great epoch of the earth’s history, as, to a less degree, each great continent on the earth’s surface, has had certain prevalent and characteristic types; of which some still endure; some have wholly disappeared, and some are just now passing out of sight. And among all these extinct, persistent, vanishing and recent types, there are perhaps none more full of interest, or more worthy of our careful study than the ones that are just now passing away.
Something similar to this is to be recognized also in the varying phases of human life. There are styles of men, habits of life, peculiarities of character, customs, occupations, and conditions which belong almost wholly to the present; others which are common to the present and the past; and still others which are as strictly part of the long ago, as are the megatherium and the plesiosaurus. There are no corresponding forms now, and probably never again will be. There can never more be the old feudal baron, the chivalrous knight errant, or the trouveres and troubadours of mediæval Europe, any more than there can be again the ancient worshipers of Jupiter or devotees of Bacchus. Old forms of government, old ideas of the divine right of kings, old faith in auguries, the old search for the philosopher’s stone and for the elixir of life have passed away, never to return.
More recent, however, than these, and more closely related to the present, are certain types of life with which our fathers were daily conversant, but which promise to seem to our children very strange and remote. Not merely does the regular succession of the generations bring us at length to the last Revolutionary soldier, and to the last survivor of the seemingly exhaustless supply of Washington’s body servants; but at the same time the changes which transpire in local and social life do serve to make rare, and then wholly to remove, the types of men that were only lately distinctively common and prominent. We do well therefore to stop in the midst of our hurrying, driving, self-glorifying age, and study some of these Vanishing Types of life, character, occupation, with varied accompaniments and experiences, which to-day have become or are fast becoming things of the past.
A recent writer in one of our great metropolitan dailies comments in a pleasant strain on the survival in only humorous papers and poor plays of the typical Englishman and typical Yankee, as so long and commonly represented. What has become of the John Bull and the Brother Jonathan of a few years ago? Were they not true characters at all? If not, who will explain the hold they took on the popular fancy, a hold so strong that they are not quite abandoned to-day? They must have been fairly faithful representatives of certain actual types. Are Englishmen and Americans growing different, then, from what they were, or growing like each other, that now these two illustrious characterizations have largely disappeared?
As the writer remarks: Punch still has John Bull as a national type; but shows a great reserve in the use of him, and continually resorts to Britannia as a substitute. Our old friend John, the bluff, stout, honest, red-faced, irascible, rural person, has really been supplanted by a more modern, thinner, nervous, intellectual, astute type. 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. But he is gone, or is going, and the time is coming when we shall regard him as only a survival, a tradition of the past.
And so for English use the Yankee type of Uncle Sam may still serve to represent America, although he belongs to the past as much as slavery does, or the stage coach. He would be a bold man who would attempt to say what our 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.” In fact, if Mr. Lowell were to write “Biglow Papers” now, Uncle Sam would hardly serve his purpose as he did during the war.
Not only are differences between national types rapidly vanishing into the past, so that Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen and Americans no longer seem strikingly unlike; but along with these international, the more domestic and home types are disappearing also. The distinctive kinds of men, and the distinctions which attached themselves inseparably to various classes and occupations are passing away.
Take the men to-day of any one town, village or farming district, and I fully believe you will find fewer odd and strange characters among them than was the case among their predecessors or fathers of a generation ago.