THE PROBLEM OF EVIL IN AESTHETICS, AND ITS SOLUTION THROUGH THE TRAGIC,
PATHETIC, AND COMIC
When, in our third chapter, we defined the purpose of art, we indicated
that it was broad enough to include the expression of evil, but we did
not show in detail how this was possible. That is our present theme.
Art is sympathetic representation; the effort not only to reveal an
object to us, but to unite us with it. The artist finds no difficulty
in accomplishing this purpose with reference to one class of
objects--those which, apart from portrayal, we call beautiful. To these
we are drawn immediately because they serve directly the ends of life.
Nature sees to it that we dwell with pleasure on the sight of healthy
children, well-grown women, and bountiful landscapes. And to the
representations of such objects we are attracted by the same instincts
that attract us to the things themselves. No special power of art is
required that we take delight in them; the task of the artist is half
accomplished before he begins. Yet the scope of art is wider than this,
for it represents evil as well as good. Death as well as life, sickness
and deformity as well as health, suffering as well as joy, sin equally
with goodness, come within its purview. And these also it not only
reveals to us but makes good to know, so good in fact that they are
perhaps the preferred objects of artistic representation. But instead
of being able to rely on instincts that would draw us to these objects,
art has to overcome those that would lead us away from them. It has
to conquer our natural horror at death, pain at suffering, and revulsion
against wickedness. How does it? That is the problem of evil in
sthetics.
There are many means by which this problem is solved. In the first
place, the mere fact that art is representation and not reality does
much toward overcoming any feelings of moral or physical repugnance
we might have toward the objects represented. These feelings exist for
the sake of action; hence, when action is impossible--and we cannot
act on the unreal--although they may still persist, they become less
strong. Toward the merely imaginary, the practical and moral attitudes,
which towards the real would lead to condemnation and withdrawal, lose
their relevance and tend to disappear. That is one of the advantages
of art over the more immediate perception of life. It is difficult to
take a purely aesthetic attitude towards all of life, to seek only to
get into sympathetic contact with it for the sake of an inner
realization of what it is; much of it touches us too closely on the
side of our practical and moral interests. A certain man, for example,
does not belong to our set, or his ways are so bohemian that it would
imperil our social position or the safety of our souls to get acquainted
with him; so we reject him and cast him into the outer darkness of our
disapproval--or he rejects us. Such a person, we feel, is to be avoided
or haply, if we be saints, to be saved from himself; but not to be
accepted and understood. And even if we succeed in freeing ourselves
from the moral point of view, we are still preoccupied with the
practical, if the man happens to interest us commercially; we have not
the time nor the desire to see his nature as a whole. Not so in art.
As a character in a novel, a man cannot be employed; nor can it be a
hazard to keep company with him; and his soul is surely beyond our
saving; the only thing left for us to do is to sympathize with and try
to understand him, to enter into communion with his spirit. By freeing
life from the practical and moral, art gives the imagination full sway.
This, to be sure, is only a negative force working in the direction
of beauty, yet is important none the less because it enables the more
positive influences to function easily.
One of these is what I would call "sympathetic curiosity," which may
encompass all images of life. Things which, if met with in life, would
certainly repel, when presented in image, simply excite our curiosity
to know. Of course some are impelled by the same interest to get into
contact with all experience--_Homo sum: humani nihil alienum a me
puto_--yet with the great majority the impulses to withdraw are too
strong. But all have a desire for further knowledge when a mere idea
of human life, however repellent, is presented; for the instinct of
gregariousness, which creates a special interest in our kind, works
with full force in the mind to strengthen curiosity. There is no part
of human experience which it does not embrace. We can well forego
knowledge of stars and trees, but we cannot remain ignorant of anything
human. As the moth to the flame, we are led, even against our will,
into all of life, even the most unpleasant. The charm possessed by the
novel and unplumbed, by such stories as _Jude the Obscure_, or by the
weird imaginings of a Baudelaire, comes from this source. It is no mere
scientific curiosity, because it includes that "consciousness of kind,"
which makes us feel akin to all we know.
Sympathetic curiosity, however, seldom works alone, for other interests,
less worthy and therefore often unavowed, usually cooperate to overcome
our repugnances towards the unpleasant. Many of our repugnances are
not simple and original like those felt towards death, darkness, and
deformity, but highly complex products of education, which may be
dissolved by a strong appeal to the more primitive instincts which
they seek to repress. An artist may, for example, through a vivid
portrayal, so excite the animal lust and cruelty which lurk hidden in
all of us as to make the most morally reprehensible objects acceptable.
Nature has taken many a revenge on civilization through art. Although
no one should demand that these appeals be entirely excluded, yet when
they operate alone, without the sublimation of insight, they are
flagrantly unaesthetic in their influence, because they deprive the
work of art of its freedom.
Another means which the artist may employ in order to win us is the
appeal of sense. However repellent be the objects which he represents,
if he can clothe them in a sensuous material which will charm us, he
will have exerted a powerful countervailing force. We have already had
occasion to observe this in our first chapter. Through the call of
sense we are invited to enter and are made welcome at the very threshold
of the work of art. Engaging lines, winsome colors and tones, and
compelling rhythms can overcome almost any repugnance that we might
otherwise feel for the subject-matter. Their primary appeals are
superior to all the reservations of civilization. No wonder that the
stern moralists who would keep beauty for the clean and holy have been
afraid of art! Yet the delight of sense, because its emotional effect
is diffused, does not interfere with the contemplative serenity of
art, as unbridled passion does; it even quiets passion by diverting
the attention to itself; hence may always be employed by the artist.
A good example of the aesthetic fascination of sensation is Von Stuck's
"Salome" in the Art Institute of Chicago. For all normal feeling,
Salome dancing with the head of John the Baptist is a revolting object;
yet how beautiful the artist has made his picture through the simple
loveliness of gold and red!
It would be a mistake, however, to infer the indifference of the
subject-matter in art. The creation of a work of art is based on a
primary aesthetic experience of nature or human life, and not everything
is capable of producing such an experience in all men. The subject
must be one towards which the artist or spectator is able to take the
sthetic attitude of emotional, yet free, perception. Some people are
unable to lay aside their moral prepossessions towards certain phases
of life or even towards representation of them; the idea affects them
as would the reality. For such people even the genius of a Beardsley
is too feeble to create an experience of beauty out of the material
with which he works. Or again, some people cannot objectify their
sensual egotistic impulses and feelings; for them the reading of a
Boccaccio, for example, is only a substitute for such feelings, not
a means of insight into them. It requires a robust intellectual
attitude, a predominance of mind over feeling and instinct, aesthetically
to appreciate some works of art. But for those who can receive it, the
representation of any phase of life may afford an aesthetic experience,
may create a thing good to know, if only it be mastered by the mind
and embodied in a charming form.
The charm of sense together with the satisfaction of insight are
sufficient to explain the conquest of evil by art. Yet further means
have been employed--the special appeals of the tragic, pathetic, and
comic.
What any one may mean by tragic is largely a matter of personal
definition or tradition; yet there is, I think, a common essence upon
which all would agree. First, tragedy always involves the manful
struggle of a personality in the pursuit of some end, at the cost of
suffering, perhaps of death and failure. The opposition may come from
nature, as in _The Grammarian's Funeral_; from fate, as in the
_Oedipus_; from social and political interests, as in _Antigone_; that
is of little moment; it is important solely that the battle be accepted
and waged unflinchingly to the issue. In this ultimate sense, most of
human life is tragic; because it involves a continual warfare with
circumstances, which the majority of people carry on with a silent
heroism. Originally, only the glorious and spectacular conflicts of
great personalities were deemed worthy of representation in art; but
with the growth of sympathy the range of tragic portrayal has gradually
been extended over almost the whole of human life. The peasant in his
struggle for subsistence against a niggardly soil, or the patient woman
who loses the bloom of her youth in the unremitting effort to maintain
her children, are tragic figures.
Second, it is part of the essence of tragedy that the conflict should
be recognized as necessary and its issue as inevitable. In one form
or another, whether as Greek or Christian or naturalistic, fatality
has remained an abiding element in the idea of tragedy. The purpose
or passion or sentiment which impels the hero to undertake and maintain
the struggle must be a part of his nature so integral that nothing
else is possible for him. "_Ich kann nicht anders_" is the cry
of every tragic personality. And the opposition which he meets from
other persons, from social forces or natural circumstances, must seem
to be equally fateful--must be represented as issuing from a counter
determination or law no less inescapable than the hero's will. Even
when the catastrophe depends upon some so-called accident, it must be
made to appear necessary that our human purposes should sometimes be
caught and strangled in the web of natural fact which envelops them.
The reasons for our acceptance of tragedy are not difficult to find
and have been noted, with more or less clearness, by all students. We
accept it much as the hero accepts his own struggle--he believes in
the values which he is fighting for and we sympathetically make his
will ours. Moreover, we discover a special value in his courage which,
we feel, compensates for the evil of his suffering, defeat, or death.
So long as we set any value on life, it is impossible for us not to
esteem courage; for courage is at once the defense against attack of
all our possessions and the source, in personal initiative and
aggressive action, of newer and larger life. And any shrinking that
we may feel against the sternness of the struggle is quenched both by
the hero's example and by our recognition of its necessity. Since we
are not participants of it, our protest would be futile, and even if
we played a part in it, we should be as foolish as we should be weak,
not to recognize that the will which opposes us is as inflexible as
our own--"such is life"--that is our ultimate comment. An appreciation
of tragedy involves, therefore, a sure discernment of the essential
disharmony of existence, yet at the same time, a feeling for the moral
values which it may create; neither the optimist nor the utilitarian
can enter into its world.
There are, however, works of art in which sheer evil, without any
compensating development of character, is portrayed; where indeed the
struggle may even cause decay of character. In Zola's _The Dram
Shop_, for example, the story is the tale of the moral decline,
through unfortunate circumstances and vicious surroundings, of the
sweet, pliant Gervaise. Instead of developing a resistance to
circumstances which would have made them yield a value even in defeat,
she lets herself go and is spoiled beneath them. She has no friend to
help or guardian angel to save. We do not blame her, for, with her
soft nature, she could not do otherwise than crumble under the hard
press of fate; neither can we admire her, for she lacks the adamantine
stuff of which heroes are made. This is pathos, not tragedy. And just
as most of human life involves tragedy in so far as it develops a
strength to meet the dangers which threaten it, so likewise it involves
pathos, in so far as it seldom resists at every point, but gives way,
blighted without hope. Many a man or woman issues from life's conflicts
weaker, not stronger; broken, not defiant; petulant, not sweetened;
and at the hour of death there are few heroes. Yet there may be beauty
in the story of this human weakness and weariness. Whence comes it?
How can the representation of this sheer evil become a good? The
principle involved is a simple one. Announced first, as far as I know,
by Mendelssohn, it has recently been much more scientifically and
penetratingly analyzed by Lipps, although wrongly applied by him to
the tragic rather than the pathetic.[Footnote: Cf. Lipps: _Der Streit
ber die Tragodie_, and _Aesthetik_, Bd. I, S. 599.]
It is a familiar and generally recognized experience, as Lipps has
observed, that any threat or harm done to a value evokes in us a
heightened appreciation of its worth. Parting is a sweet sorrow because
only then do we fully realize the worth of what we are losing; the
beauty of youth that dies is more beautiful because in death its
radiance shines the brighter in our memory. A good in contemplation
comes to take the place of a lost good in reality. Just as we hold on
the more tightly to things that are slipping away from us in a vain
effort to keep them, so to save ourselves from utter sorrow, we build
up in the imagination a fair image of what we have lost, free of the
dust of the world. This makes the peculiar charm of the delicate and
fragile, of weak things and little things, of the transient and
perishable; they awaken in us the tender, protective impulse while
they last, and when they are gone they suffer at our hands an
idealization which the strong and enduring can never receive. Our pity
for them mediates an increased love of them; we mock at fate which
deprives us of them by keeping them secure and fairer in our memory.
As in life, so in art. Beneath and around the pictured destruction and
ruin there opens up to us a more poignant vision of the loveliness of
what was or might have been. At the end of _The Dram Shop_, when
Gervaise sinks into ruin, we inevitably revert to the beginning and
see again, only more intensely, the gentle girl that she was, or else,
going forward, we imagine what she might have been, if only she had
been given a chance. The form of a possible good rises up from under
the actual evil. The story of oppression becomes the praise of freedom;
the picture of death, a vision of life. I know of no finer example of
this in all literature than Sophocles' _Ajax_. Ajax has offended
Athena, so he, the hero of the Grecian host, is seized with the mad
desire to do battle with cattle and sheep. In lucid intervals he laments
to his wife the shameful fate which has befallen him. How glorious his
former prowess appears lost in so ridiculous a counterfeit! And his
despair creates its magic.
In almost all so-called tragedies, true tragedy and pathos are
intermingled; for we feel both pity and admiration, and the pity
intensifies the admiration. The danger that threatens or the disaster
that overwhelms the values which the hero embodies make us realize
their worth the more. Throughout the _Antigone_ we admire the
heroine's tragic courage of devotion; but it is at the point when,
just before her death, she laments her youth and beauty that shall go
fruitless--
Alechron, anymenaion, oute ton gamon
mepos lachousan oute paideion tpophaes
that we feel the fullness of strength that was needed for the sacrifice.
One might perhaps think this lament a blemish of weakness in a picture
of fortitude; but the impression is just the opposite, I believe; for
force is measured by what it overcomes.
There are so many different theories of tragedy that it would be
impossible, were it worth while, to embark on a criticism of all of
them. There are certain ones, however, which, because of their wide
acceptance, demand some attention at our hands. First, it is often
assumed that a tragedy should represent the good as ultimately
triumphing, despite suffering and failure. But how can the good triumph
when the hero fails and dies? Only, it is answered, if the hero
represents a cause which may win despite or even because of his
individual doom; and it is with this cause, not with him, that we
chiefly sympathize. This was Hegel's view, who demanded that the tragic
hero represent some universal interest which, when purged of the
one-sidedness and uncompromising insistence of the hero's championing,
may nevertheless endure and triumph in its genuine worth. In the
_Antigone_, Hegel's favorite example, the cause of family loyalty
finds recognition through the punishment of Creon for the girl's death;
while at the same time the principle of the sovereignty of the state
is upheld through her sacrifice. There are many tragedies which conform,
at least partially, to this scheme; but not all, hence it cannot be
a universal norm. In _Romeo and Juliet_, for example, although
the death of the young people serves to bring about a reconciliation
of their families, the real principle for which they suffered--the
right of private choice in matters of love--is in no way furthered by
the outcome of the play. And, although it is always possible to
universalize the good which is sought by any will, it is not possible
to deflect upon a principle the full intensity of our sympathy, away
from the individual, concrete passion and action. Whenever a great
personality is represented, it is his personal suffering and fortitude
that win at once our pity and our admiration. For private sorrows, for
the ruin of character, for the death of those whom we are made to love,
there can be no complete atonement in the universal; because it is
with the individual that we are chiefly concerned. No; the
reconciliation lies where we have placed it--in tragedy, in the personal
heroism of the strong character; in pathos, in the vision, not in the
triumph, of the good.
The ordinary Protestant theological theory of tragedy is even more
inadequate than the Hegelian. For, by assuming that there is no genuine
loss in the world, that every evil is compensated for in the future
lives of the heroes, it takes away the sting from their sacrifice and
so deprives them of their crown of glory. It makes every adventure a
calculation of prudence and every despair a farce. It is remote from
the reality of experience where men stake all on a chance and, instead
of receiving the good by an act of grace, wring it by blood and tears
from evil.
On much the same level of thinking is the moralistic theory which
requires that the misfortunes of the hero should be the penalty for
some fault or weakness. This view, which has the authority of Aristotle,
is also based on the doctrine of the justice of the world-order. It
was pretty consistently carried out in the classical Greek drama;
although there suffering is not exacted as an external retribution,
but as the inevitable consequence of the turbulent passions of the
characters; for even the punishment for offenses against the gods is
of the nature of a personal revenge which they take. Later, of course,
when the gods retreated into the background of human life, retributive
justice was conceived more abstractly. Now, it must be admitted, I
think, that this idea, so deeply rooted in the popular mind, has exerted
a profound influence on the drama; yet it cannot be applied universally
without sophistry. To be sure, in _Romeo and Juliet_, the young
people were disobedient and headstrong; in _Lear_, the old father
was foolishly trustful of his wicked daughters; these frailties brought
about their ruin. But did they deserve so hard a fate as theirs? Did
not Lear suffer as much for his folly as his daughters for their
wickedness? This is always true in life, and Shakespeare holds the
mirror up to nature--but is it consistent with the theory of retributive
justice? One can usually trace back to some element of his nature,
physical or moral, the misfortunes that befall an individual; even
those which we call accidents, as Galton claimed, are often due to
some inherent defect of attention which makes us fail to respond
protectively at the right moment. If we take the self to include the
entire organism, then it remains true that we cooperate as a partial
cause in all that happens to us. Ophelia's weak and unresisting brain
must share with the stresses which surrounded her the responsibility
for her madness. In this sense, and in this sense only, do we deserve
our fate, be it good or ill. Yet, when interpreted in this broadest
meaning, retributive justice loses all ethical significance. And the
cosmic disharmony appears all the more glaring. It ceases to be
chargeable to an external fate or God, to the environment or convention,
which might perhaps be mastered and remolded; and is seen pervading
the nature of reality itself, no accidental circumstance, but essential
evil, ineradicable. The greatest tragic poets see it thus. And then
blame turns to understanding and resentment into pity.
Retributive justice, as the motive force of tragedy, has for us lost
its meaning. We no longer feel the necessity of justifying the ways
of God to man, because we have ceased to believe that there exists any
single, responsible power. The good is not a preordained and
automatically accomplished fact, but an achievement of finite effort,
appearing here and there in the world when individuals, instead of
contending against each other, cooperate for their mutual advantage.
In addition to the comic, there is much artistic representation of
evil which can be classed neither as pathetic nor as tragic. Neither
moral admiration nor idealization are aroused by the characters
portrayed. They may be great criminals like Lady Macbeth or Iago, or
the undistinguished and disorderly people of modern realistic
literature, yet in either case we find them good to know. And we do
so, not merely because we enjoy, as disinterested onlookers, the
spectacle of human existence, but because the artist makes us enter
into it and realize its values. For even that which from the moral
point of view we pronounce evil is, so long as it maintains itself,
a good thing from its own point of view. Every will, however blind and
careless, seeks a good and finds it, if only in hope and the effort
to attain. Through the intimacy of his descriptions and often against
our resistance, the artist may compel us to adopt the attitude of the
life which he is portraying, constraining us to feel the inner necessity
of its choices, the compulsion of its delights. It is difficult to
abandon ourselves thus to sympathy with what is wrong in life itself,
because we have in mind the consequences and relations which make it
wrong; yet we all do so at times, whenever we let ourselves go, charmed
by its momentary offering. But in the world of art this is easier,
because there the values, being merely represented, can have no sinister
effects. When great personalities are portrayed, this abandon is
readiest; for the strength or poignancy of their natures carries us
away as by a whirlwind. Witness Lady Macbeth when she summons the
powers of hell to unsex her for her murderous task, or Vanni Fucci in
the _Inferno_,[Footnote: _Inferno_, Canto 25, 1-3.] who mocks
at God. For the instant, we become as they and feel their ecstasy of
pride and power as our own. Yet the great artist can awaken this
sympathy even for characters that are small and weak. In Gogol's _Dead
Souls_, for example, there are no heroes. The most interesting
characters are the country gentlemen who return to their estates
planning to write books which will regenerate Russia. But the old
habits of life in the remote district are too strong. So, instead of
writing, they fall back into the routine of their ancestors and merely
smoke and dream. Here are failure and mediocrity; yet so intimate is
the artist's story that we not only understand it all, but feel how
good it is--to dream our lives away. I do not doubt that in this story
there are elements of pathos and comedy; yet, in general, the
delineation is too objective for either; we neither laugh nor cry, but
are simply borne on, unresisting, ourselves become a part of the silent
tide of Russian life.
The problem of evil in aesthetics may finally be solved by the use of
the comic. For in comedy we take pleasure in an object which, in the
broadest sense, is evil. In order for an object to be comical there
must be a standard or norm, an accepted system, within which the object
pretends but fails to fit, and with reference to which, therefore, it
is evil. There must be some points of contact between the object and
the standard in order that there may be pretense, but not enough points
for fulfillment. If we never had any definite expectations with
reference to things, never made any demands upon them; if instead of
judging them by our preconceived ideas, we took them just as they came
and changed our ideas to meet them,--there would be nothing comical.
Or, if everything fitted into our expectations and was as we planned
it, then again there would be nothing comical. In a world without
ideas, the comic could not exist. The comic depends upon our
apperceiving an object in terms of some idea and finding it incongruous.
The most elementary illustrations demonstrate this. The unusual is the
original comic; to the child all strange things are comical--the
Chinaman with his pigtail, the negro with his black skin, the new
fashion in dress, the clown with his paint and his antics. As we get
used to things, and that means as we come to form ideas of them into
which they will fit, adjusting the mind to them, rather than seeking
to adjust them to the mind, they cease to be comical. So fashions in
dress or manners which were comical once, become matters of course and
we laugh no longer. Enduringly comic are only those objects that
persistently create expectations and as persistently violate them.
Such objects are few indeed; but they exist, and constitute the
perennial, yet never wearying, stock in trade of comedy. But the comic
spirit does not have to depend upon them exclusively, for, as life
changes, it constantly raises new expectations and offers new objects
which at once provoke and fail to meet them. Everything, therefore,
is potentially comical and, in the course of human history, few things
can escape a laugh; some curious mind is sure, sooner or later, to
bring them under a new idea against which they will be shown up to be
absurd. The sanctities of religion, love, and political allegiance
have not been exempt.
Why, if the comical object is always opposed to our demands, should
we take pleasure in it? How can we be reconciled to things that are
admittedly incongruous with our standards? Why are we not rather
displeased and angry with them? Investigators have usually looked for
a single source of pleasure in the comic, but of those which have been
suggested at least two, I think, contribute something. First, by
adopting the point of view of the standard as our own, identifying
ourselves with it, and through the contrast of ourselves with the
object, we may take pleasure in the resulting exaltation of ourselves.
The pleasure in the comic is often closely akin to that which we feel
in distinction of any kind. We feel ourselves superior to the object
at which we laugh. There is pride in much of laughter and not
infrequently cruelty, a delight in the absurdities of other men because
they exalt ourselves as the representatives of the rational and normal.
There is often a touch of malice even in the laughter of the child.
Nevertheless, the pleasure in the comic is still contemplative, and
so far aesthetic, because it is a pleasure in perception, not in action.
No matter how evil be the comic object, we do not seek to destroy or
remodel it; action is sublimated into laughter.
But the pleasure in the comic may arise through our taking the opposite
point of view--that of the funny thing itself. Instead of upholding
the point of view of the standard, we may identify ourselves with the
object. If the comic spirit is oftentimes the champion of the normal
and conventional, it is as often the mischief-maker and rebel. Whenever
the maintaining of a standard involves strain through the inhibition
of instinctive tendencies, to relax and give way to impulse causes a
pleasure which centers itself upon the object that breaks the tension.
The intrusive animal that interrupts the solemn occasion, the child
that wittingly or not scoffs at our petty formalities through his naive
behavior, win our gratitude, not our scorn. They provide an opportunity
for the welcome release of nature from convention. And the greater the
strain of the tension, the greater the pleasure and the more
insignificant the object or event that will bring relief and cause
laughter. The perennial comic pleasure in the risque is derived from
this source. There is an element of comic pleasure in the perpetration
of any mischievous or unconventional act. Those things which men take
most seriously, Schopenhauer has said, namely, love and religion, and
we might add, morality, are the most abundant sources of the comic,
because they involve the most strain and therefore offer the easiest
chances for a playful release. Even utter and absolute nonsense is
comical because it undoes all Kant's categories of mind.
Hence, contrary to the theory of Bergson, the spontaneous as well as
the mechanical and rigid may be comical. Sometimes the same object may
be comical from both the points of view which we have specified; this
is always true, as we shall see, in the most highly developed comedy.
For example, we may laugh at the child's prank because it is so absurd
from the point of view of our grown-up expectations as to reasonable
conduct, and at the same time, taking the part of the child, rejoice
at the momentary relief from them which it offers us. Our scorn is
mixed with sympathy. And oftentimes the child himself will hold both
points of view at once, laughing at his own absurdity and exulting
nevertheless in his own freedom. This is the essence of slyness. It
follows, moreover, that a thing which was comical for one of the reasons
assigned may become comical for the other, by a simple change in the
point of view regarding it. For the behavior which first pleased us
because it was unconventional tends itself to become a new convention,
with reference to which the old convention then becomes the object of
a laughter which is scornful. The tables are turned: the rebel laughs
at the king.
The foregoing explanation of why we find the comical pleasant also
explains why so many of our other pleasures are intermixed with the
comical--why so often we not only smile when we are pleased, but laugh.
For, in the case of all except the most elementary enjoyments, our
pleasures are connected with the satisfaction of definite expectations
regarding the actions or events of our daily lives. But, owing to the
dulling effect of habit, the pleasure attendant upon these satisfactions
gradually becomes smaller and smaller or even negligible; until, as
a result, only the novel and surprising events which surpass our
expectations give us large pleasure; but these are comical. With the
child, whose expectations are rigid and few in number because of his
lack of discrimination and small experience, almost all pleasures,
like almost all events, are of the nature of surprises. The child
almost always laughs when he is pleased. The slang phrase "to be highly
tickled" expresses with precision this close connection between laughter
and pleasure. Moreover, as the complexity of life increases, its strains
and repressions are multiplied, with the result that any giving way
to an impulse contains a slight element of the mischievous or
ridiculous; whence, for this reason too, the pleasant is also the
comical. In fact, most of the pleasures of highly complex and reflective
persons are tinged with laughter.
We expect art to accomplish three great results--reconciliation,
revelation, and sympathy. So far we have shown how comic art may
accomplish the first; we have yet to prove how it may accomplish the
rest. In his book _Le Rire_, Bergson has expressed the view that
comedy is explicitly falsifying and unsympathetic. As to the former
charge, we can, I think, convince ourselves of the opposite if we
examine certain of the more obvious methods of comedy, particularly
those which might seem at first sight to lend support to his contention.
One of the most common of these is exaggeration. The simplest example
is caricature, where certain features of an object are purposely
exaggerated. The effect is, of course, comical, because we expect the
normal and duly-proportioned. What a manifest falsification, one might
assert! Yet just the opposite is the actual result. For every good
caricaturist selects for exaggeration prominent and characteristic
traits, through which by the very emphasis that is placed upon them,
the nature of the individual is better understood. Another favorite
method is abstraction. Certain traits are presented as if they were
the whole man. We get the typical comic figures of the novel and drama;
the physician who is only a physician; the lawyer who injects the legal
point of view into every circumstance of life; the lover or the miser
who is just love or greed; the people who, as in Dickens, meet every
situation with the same phrase or attitude, This, too, looks like a
plain falsification of human nature, because, however strong be the
professional bias or however overmastering the ruling passion, real
people are always more complex and many-sided, having other modifying
and counteracting elements of character which prevent their speech and
actions from being completely monotonous and mechanical. Nevertheless,
we can again acquit the comic writer of falsification, because we
understand the method which he is employing, the trick of his trade.
He deceives no one. On the contrary, he enables us to perceive the
logic of certain elementary springs of character. Following the method
of the experimentalist, he selects certain aspects from the total
complexity of a phenomenon and shows how they work when isolated from
the rest. And, like the man of science, he provides insight into the
normal, because we can accept his results as at least partially or
approximately true. Art of this kind is abstract and therefore less
valuable than the portrayal of the concrete; yet only the dogmatist
who insists on the restriction of art to the individual can reject it.
There is, however, a third common method of comical representation
which neither exaggerates nor abstracts, but preserves the concreteness
of the finest art--we may call it the method of contrast. It consists
in exhibiting the contrast between the actual conduct of men and women
and the standard,--either that which they themselves profess to live
up to or our own, which we impose upon them. Their pretenses are
unmasked or their absurdities shown up against the ideal of
reasonableness. We behold the _bourgeois_ who would be a gentleman
remain _bourgeois_ and the women who would be scholars remain
women. Success in comedy of this kind depends upon possessing the
ability to formulate the implicit assumptions underlying the behavior
of the people portrayed or to make one's own standards with reference
to them valid for the spectator. Here is no falsification, but, on the
contrary, a vivid revelation of the truth; because, just as by placing
two colors in contrast with one another the hue of each is intensified,
so by setting man in relief against the background of what he ought
to be, we perceive his real nature more sharply. As the child dressed
like a grown-up appears all the more childish for his garb, so man
appears the more human for his pretenses. To be sure, in order to
increase the comical effect, this method is often employed in
conjunction with that of exaggeration. The Athenian democracy was
probably not quite so stupid as Aristophanes represents it; the average
Britisher is not so philistine as Shaw paints him. Yet the measure of
exaggeration may be small and we readily discount it. And finally,
whereas in simple representation there is a revelation of the object
only, in comical representation there is a two-fold revelation,--of
the ideal and of the incongruous reality. The former is always
indirectly revealed; for, as we know, the very existence of the comic
depends upon it. The man who laughs, his notion of the right and the
reasonable, his attitude towards the world and life, become manifest
through the things which he laughs at. Only a man of a certain kind,
with a certain sympathy and antipathy, could laugh as he laughs. The
comic writer, however much of a scoffer and a skeptic, and however
much he may deny it, is always an idealist. And it is for the revelation
of themselves as much as for the revelation of the people whom they
portray that we value the work of a Swift, a Voltaire, or a Thackeray.
Another charge which has been brought against the comic is that it is
unsympathetic. Its attitude, it is said, is one of externality, opposed
therefore to the intimacy necessary for the complete aesthetic reaction.
Whereas simple aesthetic representation places us within the object
itself, comical representation only exhibits a relation between it and
an idea. We judge it from our point of view, not from its own. The
pleasure in pride and superiority which we feel towards the comical
object seems also inconsistent with sympathy; for sympathy would create
a fellow feeling with it, and place us not above, but on a level with
it. If we do sympathize, the comic object ceases to be comical and
becomes pathetic. We can find the follies and sins of men comical just
so long as we do not sympathize with the sufferings which they entail.
There is nothing comical that may not also become pathetic; and the
difference depends exactly on the presence or absence of sympathy.
Nothing, for example, is more pathetic than death; yet if you keep
yourself free of its sorrow, there is nothing more comical--that man,
a little lower in his own estimation than the angels, should come to
this, a lump of clay.
It is unquestionably true that a free, disinterested attitude is
essential to comedy. You must not let yourself be carried away by any
feeling; if you are over-serious you cannot laugh; you must keep to
reflection and comparison. Yet this attitude is not utterly destructive
of all feeling. Man is complex enough at once to feel and to reflect.
He can pity as well as laugh. The pathetic and the comic are constantly
conjoined--witness our feeling towards Don Quixote or towards any of
the great characters of Thackeray--we do not know whether to laugh or
to cry. And in the most effective comedy, the standard applied to the
comical object is not foreign, but rather, as we have observed, the
implicit standard of the object itself, discernible only by the most
intimate acquaintance with it. The sting of laughter comes from our
acceptance of it as valid for ourselves; we blush and join in the laugh
at ourselves. The mischievous-comic, moreover, depends directly upon
sympathy; for it requires that we take the point of view of the funny
thing; our pleasure in it implies a secret sympathy for it--we hold
it up to a standard, yet all the time are in sympathy with its
rebellion. When we laugh at the prank of the child, love is mixed with
the laugh. The dual nature of man as at once a partisan of convention
and of the impulses that it seeks to regulate, is nowhere better
illustrated than in the comic. Finally, disinterestedness is not
peculiar to comedy; for it pervades all art. Feeling must be dominated
by reflection; even pathos demands this, for, if we lose ourselves in
sorrowful feeling, no fair image can arise and steady us.
There is, however, much comedy that is obviously unsympathetic, even
hostile. There is satire, which condemns, as well as humor which
pardons. The one blames the unexpected and unconventional, the other
sympathizes with it. Comedy is either biting or kindly. The one is
moralistic and reformatory in its aim, the other is aesthetic and
contemplative. Because of its failure in sympathy, satirical comedy
is incomplete as art. It provides insight and pleasure in the object,
but no union with it. It does not attain to beauty, which is free and
reconciling. Kindly comedy or humor, on the other hand, is full beauty,
combining sympathy with judgment, abandon with reflection. Nevertheless,
satire tends inevitably towards humor. For what we laugh at gives us
pleasure, and what pleases us we must inevitably come to like, and
what we like cannot long fail to win our sympathy. I do not think that
even a Swift or a Voltaire could have been irreconcilably opposed to
a world which offered them so much merriment. The satire, which begins
in moral fervor, must end in understanding. The bond that binds us to
our fellows is too strong to be broken by the aloofness of our
condemnation. The same intelligence that discerns the incongruity
between what men ought to be and what they are, cannot fail to penetrate
the impelling reasons for the failure. Only in humor is sympathetic
insight complete. Satire has the temporal usefulness of a practical
expedient, humor the eternal value of beauty.