what we genuinely love to contemplate, and not all kinds of buildings
were proper to that happy end. For mere sale and barter, any shed in
the market-place might serve, but if we think of traffic in the large
way that Ruskin suggested, as something potentially heroic and noble,
as a feeding of the hungry and a clothing of the naked, as a soldierly
occupying of outposts against poverty and wretchedness, as a campaign of
conquest against nature, and as an exchange at last of spiritual hungers
and satisfactions among men, then our houses of business should look
like temples. So they begin to look, and only a very blind critic here
and there still fails to see that so they should look. With our love of
traffic goes our love of travel. In this country travel is necessary, but
it is also an ideal. Any sort of railway station will serve as a place
to buy a ticket or board a train, and until recently almost any kind of
barracks did serve for those purposes. But the haphazard building could
not express our delight in travel, our enjoyment of distance and speed
and punctilious arrivings and departings. The pleasant casualness of the
stage-coach and the road-side inn does not really appeal to us, except
in exotic moments; our religion of travel is uttered in the Pennsylvania
Station in New York, and in other such structures fast rising throughout
the country, where the ritualistic atmosphere, produced by carefully
selected elements from the buildings of antiquity, have little to do with
buying your ticket and a great deal to do with the American spirit. We
breathe more freely as we enter them, and enjoy the space and the height;
our instinctive comment is, “This is something like!” as though some part
of us had found expression at last. And if this success in architecture
is as yet in the field of business and travel, among public buildings,
the reason probably is that in those fields we know what our aspirations
are. In ecclesiastical architecture, by way of contrast, we are less
clear. We feel that if the Woolworth building is so lovely, it is but
respectable to improve the appearance of our churches, so we put up very
wonderful Gothic chapels and cathedrals—only to find, perhaps, that they
are a sort of weight on our conscience rather than an expression of our
desires; we sometimes try to cultivate the religion that produced them,
in order that so eloquent a language may have more content in its words.
When we turn back from our architecture to our books, we have the right
to ask why poetry and the novel address themselves exclusively to what is
in essence satire, to the portrayal of us as worse than we are, or with
our aspirations left out; why we as readers must be invited to absorb
mere information about ourselves and our country; why we so seldom meet
in the pages offered to us the kind of men and women we admire or ought
to admire. The arts all express the same thing, at any given moment,
and if we are equally proficient in them, they ought to achieve the same
grandeur and the same beauty. Against the trivial and drab contents of
much of our poetry and the condescending realism of much of our prose
American architecture now stands, a reproach and an indictment; for the
imaginative power and sweep of our buildings is hardly discernible in
our books. The architects have followed old wisdom, by making their work
ideal, better than life. The writers, in a stubborn wrong-headedness, in
defiance of the readers’ psychology, portray characters worse than in
actual life, and sometimes ask us to admire them.
III
To ask what characters are proper to literature as an art, and to point
out that the character better than life will express our ideals, and
that the character worse than life will invite our satire, is only to
raise in another way the old problems of the universal as against the
particular in art, of the contemporary as against the eternal. To be
strictly personal is in the end to be contemporary, and to be strictly
contemporary is to give, whether or not we intend it, the effect of
satire. If our picture of life is to appeal to the reader, and to many
readers, as their own world, not simply as their neighbors’ private house
into which they are prying, it must have general human truth beyond
what is strictly personal; and if it is to be read with that sense of
proprietorship by many people over a stretch of time, it must not limit
itself to the peculiarities of any one moment. It is true that the writer
himself lives but one life and is circumscribed by time and place; if
there were no such thing as imagination he would only record what he
is, for the enlightenment of others who are just like him; without
imagination he would not know of a better character than his, or of a
worse one, and we should be spared the discipline of satire, but at the
price of art. The problem for the writer, as for any other artist, is
to imagine the lives of other men, and the lives that he and other men
aspire to; his business is to select from personal adventure what is
generally important, and to see it against the background of universal
experience. Can any one imagine universal experience? Perhaps not, but
the nearer he comes to this difficult success the more readers the world
over will find meaning in what he writes. To have a personal career is no
ground for conceit in an artist—every one has as much; the achievement is
to state our experience so that it is the experience of other people too.
If we portray characters as better than in actual life, there is no
great difficulty in making them seem universal; for it is a radical gift
in human conceit to fancy that anything admirable or desirable has a
possible connection with ourselves. If we do not at first discover what
there is in common between Romeo or Lincoln or Achilles or General Lee
and ourselves, yet if we admire them we shall find the resemblance, or
try to create it. This is the power of great imaginative art, that the
admirable things in it generate a kind of universal emulation, and the
story or statue which has been said to imitate nature succeeds at last
in persuading men and women quite naturally to imitate it. The power of
a great book over human conduct, even its influence at last upon what
might seem instinctive conduct, is immeasurable. In the troubadour art of
love before Dante’s time, a true lover was taught to turn pale at sight
of his lady, and at the unexpected sight of her to faint; Dante loved
that literature, and he grew pale and fainted by second nature—just as
women once learned to blush at certain things, and afterward learned not
to blush. How many lives were affected, for good or evil, throughout
Europe and America, by the alluring power of Byron’s heroes and heroines?
The poet, then, who represents character as better than actual life, as
possessing, that is, something that we desire but have not, has already
made his hero universal, and must some day accept the responsibility of
having dedicated his readers to that general ideal. We may question Byron
on moral grounds by asserting that his hero, after whom so many lives
were patterned, was really not deserving of any imitation; just as an
Oriental reformer from India might tell us that the traffic and travel
of which our architecture is an expression are both of them trivial
enterprises, mere distractions from the contemplative ends of life.
But such criticism lies outside of art. To understand the discipline
which art imposes on us it is enough to observe the kind of character
which does make an ideal effective in literature, and the kind that
precipitates us into satire.
The real difficulty for the writer is not, then, in generalizing the
characters which embody his ideal, and which therefore are better than in
actual life; what he will chiefly need for his success is to have the
ideals. But even with a consciousness of deep aspiration he may wish to
include in the picture whole characters or parts of character which are
not what they should be, and which yet are likable, even lovable; and
to give this double effect of inferiority in some sense, together with
charm in some sense, is, it seems, very difficult, for this is the effect
of comedy, and comedy is rare in any literature, almost entirely absent
from our own. If you represent a character as worse than in actual life,
the condescending attitude of the reader will not automatically draw the
portrait into some universal relation; the writer must add something
universally admirable to the particular weakness we look down on.
Beatrice and Benedick have exhausted their wit, and they are the victims
of a plot to marry them off to each other; for such inferiority to their
companions we cannot admire them. But Shakespeare makes them both loyal
to their friends and generous in their delight in life, and Beatrice has
the good sense to know innocence when she sees it; these qualities we
can identify with our own virtues, and for these we admire the hero and
heroine. The poet further generalizes both characters by reminding us
through their meditations that to fall in love is not the work of reason,
and that even the wittiest scoffers succumb; here too we gladly recognize
our own experience. We can therefore smile at the foibles of the young
people, partly because these foibles are incident to all human nature,
and partly because, even with the foibles, we like to identify ourselves
in imagination with the supplementary virtues. Socrates was trying to
persuade Aristophanes and Agathon, in the gray dawn after the Symposium,
that the art of comedy and the art of tragedy are the same; and so far
at least he was right, in that the universal rendering which character
must receive in both, gives to the comic effect some of the pity, though
none of the terror, which tragedy evokes. But Socrates did not say that
the art of tragedy is identical with the art of satire.
When comedy is at its best—that is, when we have made the inferior
character universal by showing that its faults are natural, or by adding
to it some general virtues—we may indeed go further and say that comedy
produces perhaps the terror as well as the pity of tragedy, and that
the two kinds of writing are, as Socrates said, but one. The tragic or
epic hero, portrayed as better than in actual life, may have faults,
but so far from despising him on that account, we may not even smile;
we like him so much that the faults seem his misfortune. Moreover, if
we refer the weakness of the comic character to nature itself, how can
we be hard on the individual? And if we add to the faults positive and
lovable virtues, will not the comic character seem at last to be tragic?
In English drama Falstaff is perhaps the prince of comic characters,
so vitally imagined that he lives on the stage apart from any plot; he
is a living person, with no virtues at all, yet infinitely likable. He
can be played to make the groundlings laugh, but most of us after we
have laughed taste profound tragedy in what we have laughed at. He is
almost majestic in those moments of cowardice when he portrays himself
exactly as he is—when he sees himself, as it were, from outside, and
points to those aspects of his frailty which belong to mankind. An
actor might play the scenes on the battle-field in _Henry IV_ so as to
inspire, not laughter at the fat knight’s depravity, but a pitiful and
self-accusing silence. When he finds the corpse of Sir Walter Blunt,
just slain—“Soft! who are you? Sir Walter Blunt!—There’s Honour for you!
Here’s no vanity!... I have led my ragamuffins where they are peppered;
there’s but three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for
the town’s end, to beg during life.... I like not such grinning honour as
Sir Walter hath. Give me life; which if I can save, so; if not, honour
comes unlooked for.”
In French drama Molière brought comedy to an excellence not matched,
perhaps, in any other literature, and no imaginative writing is richer
than his in general ideas. We laugh at the amusing situation, or delight
in the frankly artificial balancing of the plot, but on second thoughts
we fall silent, contemplating the universal sweep of humanity, ourselves
included, which he has uncovered for us.
The most obvious example for American readers is in _Tartuffe_, where
the unhappy Elmire has difficulty in proving to her husband Orgon that
Tartuffe, whom he greatly admires, is a treacherous friend and is
actually making love to her. She finally admits Tartuffe to her room,
having first hidden her husband under the table, from which he has
promised to emerge if Tartuffe should go beyond the bounds of decency.
Tartuffe, of course, makes love in the clearest terms to his friend’s
wife, but Orgon remains concealed. “Before we go any further”, says
Elmire, “just look down the hall to make sure my husband isn’t coming.”
“Why worry about him?” says Tartuffe, “we can lead him around by the
nose.” Then Orgon comes from under the table. Where has the comedy
brought us? Is it not to a contemplation of our own vanity, the source of
the sense of honor in us all? Are we laughing at Tartuffe and Orgon, or
are we thinking of ourselves?
Falstaff and Tartuffe illustrate the generalizing of inferior characters
by the ascribing of their faults to human nature. A good illustration of
the comic character which enlists our admiration and is a genuine ideal
is Huckleberry Finn. His ignorance, his poverty, and his lack of humor
would seem to disqualify him for any heroic career in literature, yet he
is a veritable hero, in the sense that we gladly put ourselves in his
point of view and return again and again to live for an hour or so in his
experience. The reason is that along with his inferior qualities he has
characteristics and he has a fortune which seem better than ours; he is
loyal to Tom and the negro Jim, he has a simple faith and zest in life,
and he has exciting adventures and gets romance out of scenes we should
otherwise find dull. He flatters us too by admiring people and things
which from his praise we know we should treat satirically. To know what
comedy is, as opposed to satire, we have but to read his story again
and compare it with any current indictment of the scene in which his
adventure was laid.
IV
If the principles of tragedy, comedy and satire are as implicit in our
psychology now as when Aristotle described them, and if the principles
of decorum, of art, and of the timeless and the impersonal in art, are
as rooted in life as they are declared to be, there might seem to be no
great need to preach them; the practice of literature would disclose them
in spite of our ignorance. Try as we might to make a lovable hero out of
an inferior character, he would still emerge a figure in satire or, if
we generalized his faults, a figure in comedy; in serious literature,
only a character better than in real life would give satisfaction. Though
we do not doubt that the principles of art will thus be rediscovered
pragmatically by the unescapable discipline of literature, yet it is
something of a pity to go through such lengths of experiment in order to
find out what was known before. And the great danger in our country is
that we may not push the experiment to the tedious but profitable end at
which sound knowledge awaits us; we may grow weary of the discipline, and
take refuge in parody or in sentimentality. These two avenues of escape
from the problem have cursed American literature before, and signs are
not wanting that they now are the temptations of those who yesterday were
our “new” writers and promised brave things. Face to face with characters
worse than in actual life, we may find our own satiric attitude
monotonous, but to handle such material otherwise than satirically, we
must master the art of comedy, and comedy is an art too difficult. What
Bret Harte and Riley and Eugene Field did in such circumstances was
to obscure the meanness of the subject by sentimentality, instead of
illuminating it by the comic spirit. Spoon River has been celebrated
before, though we may not have recognized the subject with the old
sentimental surface removed; much of our contemporary satire has been the
kind of surgical operation necessary to separate the American reader from
the sentimentality which in his heart he likes. Since it is in his heart,
he may express it again quite shamelessly, this time as a protest against
too much satire, and we may have another welter of old oaken buckets and
old swimming holes and little boy blues—the literature that provides the
satisfaction of a good cry, without the over-exertion of tragic pity or
terror. Already we have again the familiar and dilettante essay, the
imitation of eighteenth-century style, even in newspaper columns, the
interminable parodies of Horace, which in this country have been the
advance signals of the sentimental wave.
We can but hope that the signs may prove deceptive, and that literature
in America will not wait much longer for the characters and subjects
proper to it, and proper to the dramatic hour we live in—characters and
subjects expressing that better part of us which has given our land its
direction and its power, and expressing also that other world of the
spirit which man builds for elbow-room to exercise his genuine ideals in,
and carries it around with him, and sets it up to be a tabernacle in the
wilderness of this natural world.