AMUSEMENT FROM HUMANITY.

A Book of " Characters." Compiled by Richard Aldington. (Routledge. 12s. 6d. net.) - - •

WHY should TheOphraitus, who succeeded to the most awe- inspiring chair of philosophy the world has known, lecturing

where his master, Aristotle, and his master's master, Plato, had lectured. turn at the end of his learned life to writing those light-handed and witty " characters," sketches of typical men to be seen in the streets of Athens ? Philo- sophy in Athens had never been that , battle of abstracts with which we are now familiar ; it always sought to enrich' and clarify common and intelligible problems, and no doubt Theophrastus thought that he was writing a genuine philo- sophical, moral and psychological treatise. He probably intended to set out for his pupils a scheme of the universal types of mankind, so that they could observe in their fellows the working of the unalterable principles of behaviour. And he possessed as a model an incidental passage of Aristotle, one of the best of " characters " because it combines observa- tion with a personal judgment whose correctness we ourselves can assess as we please. It seems paradoxical to us now, Nietzschean almost ; but still provocative and valuable. Here

is part of Aristotle's analysis of The Magnanimous Man :- " Now the Magnanimous Man despises others justly. . . . It is of his nature to confer benefits, but ho is ashamed to receive them. . . . He will be inactive and dilatory, save where there is a question of great honour or of a great work ; he will engage in few things, but these shall be great and famous.. He must: needs be frank, too, in his hatings and his likings, for disguise belongs to fear. . . . He will be ironical to the many. . . . Again, he is apt to possess beautiful and unfruitful things rather than those which yield fruit and profit, for this better becomes an independent man. Slow movement, also, deep tones, deliberate speech, seem to become the man of a great soul."

Now, whatever his purpose, and however enviable his education, Theophrastus was not the man to produce a permanent school book on the principles of human conduct.

But he certainly had a shrewd mind and an alert eye, and he- composed a notable gallery of realistic portraits. One fact.

will attest the lack of seriousness and depth in his writing —though he catalogued both Virtues and Vices, the Virtues all vanished and only the Vices have been preserved as so much the more entertaining. On this plane of amusement and quick, vivid analysis he is a master, and he has contrived to fix for our delight those details of behaviour that show the Athenian so similar to the " Englishman or Jew." Most of the pleasure of reading him is in recognition : " There goes.

So-and-so in a chiton,!' we feel. But judge from an extract how much of a pleasure it is. Theophrastus is describing The Unscrupulous Man :- "Unscrupulousness may be described as disregard of reputation for the sake of base gain. The unscrupulous man will go and borrow more money from a creditor he has never paid. When marketing he reminds the butcher of some service he has rendered him and, standing near the scales, throvis in some meat, if he' can, and a soup-bone. If he succeeds, so much the better ; if not, he will snatch a piece of tripe and go off laughing. If you have made a good bargain, he claims a share in it. If he goes to borrow barley or bran for the neighbour, he insists on the lender sending it to his house for him. In the baths he goes up to the hot water. tubs, plunges the ladle in and, in spite of the bath-man's protest, pours it over himself. ` Now I'm clean,' says he, as he departs, no thanks to ycru ! ' " . _ And how near to our days the description of The Loquacious Man brings us :-- " He will put up with the jokes of his own children who say to him when they feel sleepy : ' Tell us a story, papa, to send us to sleep ! ' " Between the death of Theophrastus and the time of James I. there was no deliberate " character-writing " ; but Mr. Aldington, in his excellent survey of the art, traces those natural examples of it which spring from nothing but interest in human nature, and often they seem almost exactly to type. There are Chaucer's Tales, of course, the completest and

best gallery of " characters " ever written, yet not to be confined to that narrow title. There are all the Elizabethan

fictitious accounts of rogues and thieves, from one. of which Mr. Aldington quotes the neat miniature : " Richard IlorwoOd, well near eighty years old ; he will bite a sixpenny nail asunder with his teeth, and a bawdy drunkard." The drama and the immature novel, too, contained single Studies that might with liberality be counted " characters." But theift

are strictly to the purpose only because when character- writing revived, with Casaubon's translation of Theophrastus, it derived as much from English influences as from the classical model, and had only the barest formal similarity to Theo- phrastus.

Ben Janson was the first, it seems, to read and imitate Theophrastus, and even with him we can see that new turn which was to develop so wildly. There is more verbal wit, more epigram ; the character is more an exercise in writing than in analysis :- " Philautia. She admires not herself for any one peculiarity, but for all ; she is fair, and she knows it ; she has a light, pretty wit, too, and she knows it ; she can dance, and she knows that, too ; no quality she has but she shall take a very particular knowledge of, and most lady-like commend it to you. You shall have her at any time read you the history of herself, and very subtly run over another lady's sufficiencies, to come to her own. She has a good superficial judgment in painting, and would seem to have so in poetry. A most complete lady in the opinion of some three beside herself."

In Joseph Hall, poor good man, who was seriously occupied in cauterizing evil and lauding the virtuous, we are still further from that transcript from life, that definite attempt

to classify men as they are, with which the character began. We have still more antithesis and attempted wit to sugar his morality. It is obviously not informative, though it is a neat string of phrases, when he ends his sketch of the hypo- crite " In brief, he is the stranger's saint ; the neighbour's disease ; the blot of goodness ; a rotten stick in a dark night ; a poppy in a cornfield ; an ill-tempered candle with

a great snuff that in going out smells ill ; an angel abroad, a devil at home ; and worse when an angel than when a devil." " In brief," he said !

But in the Characters of " Sir Thomas Overbury and others " we run straight into that riot and cireumfluence of ingenuity, high spirits, fantasy and prodigality of point that was to mark the form for a hundred years. No one was much concerned

with truth to psychology, but all attempted a burlesque truth to manners, and they took for their very definition of a " character " " wit's descant on any plain song." Their

phrases are often incredibly neat ; A Serving-Man " is commonly proud of his master's horses : he sleeps when he is sleepy, is of his religion, only the clock of his stomach is set to go an hour after his." The fashion ran to seed in a short time, and we get trivialities such as " A Drunkard is a noun-adjective, for he cannot stand alone by himself " ; but throughout, from Overbury to Fuller and Butler, we have a collection of brilliant passages which no other vein of writing can parallel. Butler is a fitting representative, for he is not ostentatious nor tortuous, but pure good fun. A 'Juggler, he remarks, " does his feat§ behind a table, like a Presbyterian

in a conventicle, but with much more dexterity and cleanliness, and therefore all sorts of people are better pleased with hini."

The best of the seventeenth-century school was John Earle, for he has no less wit than his fellows, and far more

psychology. Of that wit we can bring his Young Gentleman of the University as evidence ; he " is one that comes there to wear a gown, and to say hereafter, he has been at the University. His father sent him hither because he heard there were the best fencing and dancing schools. . . . The first element of his knowledge is to be shown the colleges and initiated in a tavern by the way, which hereafter he will learn of himself. . . . His main loitering is at the library, where he studies aims and books of honour, and turns a gentleman critic in pedigrees. Of all things he endures not to be mistaken for a scholar, and bates a black suit though it be made of satin."

Of his analysis of motive the best witness is A Sceptic in Religion, where he does not engage, as the other character- writers engaged, in delighted abuse, but enters into the ground-motives of that type of scepticism which is mere

indecision of mind.

The most worthy part of Mr. Aldington's anthology is that

which shows us how La Bruyere, in France, rescued the " character " from wit and gave it over to sense ; and how

it reached a full mellowness and sobriety with Addison and Steele. We see, there, too, how inevitably and rightly the " character " should have sunk into the novel, should have

been absorbed in it, and have given it more body and value than it could possess when it was mainly devoted to plot, to action and interest. And what is left of it is now divided and specialized ; for what is Jung's Psychological Types but an attempt .to fulfil, with scientific knowledge, the task to which Theonhrastus, with naive genius. set himself ? The other, less technical, half of the character still emerges in. the middle articles, or the sub-leaders, of our weeklies ; and we see from time to time the small perfection of the form, and realize anew the permanent excitement of analysing