Chapter 2

The effect of the excellence or the inferiority of the character on the book was long ago observed by Aristotle, when he said that tragedy and the epic—that is, all serious literature—will aim at representing men as better than in actual life, and that comedy and satire will represent them as worse. In this second kind of writing, he added, satire came first, and it was Homer who laid down the principles of comedy, by dramatizing the ludicrous instead of composing personal satire. This famous observation of the ancient critic has been too often read as doctrine, as though Aristotle were telling us what should take place in literature, whereas he is recording what actually does take place. If you wish to write a story or a play in which the reader can lose himself with delight, you must portray character better than the reader, character which in some degree satisfies and strengthens his aspirations. If you wish the reader to laugh at the world, or to scorn it, or to feel the need of improving it, you portray for him character in a condition inferior to his estimate of himself; if you wish him to profit by that wholesome self-observation which we call the comic-spirit, you mingle satire with tragedy—you show him character which satisfies his aspirations, so that he will identify himself with it, and which at the same time is inferior in some respects to what he would prefer to be, so that he must laugh at himself. He will have a tendency to save the day for self-respect by laughing, not at himself, but at human nature, and the universal comic spirit will then have come to birth, akin to both satire and tragedy, but more nearly a dramatizing of the ludicrous, as Aristotle said, than a scoring of personal faults.

These principles, it goes without saying, are not accepted by writers today; the average author is not aware of them, or if he is, he takes refuge in another remark of Aristotle’s, that perhaps tragedy was destined to develop into something different from the type of poetry produced by Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; perhaps new principles, we say, in the too familiar formula, are needed for new material. So think many of our poets and novelists who give us sordid and wretched characters to contemplate, yet invite us to feel toward them not the satiric regret, but the old pity and terror of noble tragedy. That the principles do persist, however, very much as Aristotle described them, is evidenced by the difficulty the readers still have with such books; the authors argue their case, or critics argue it for them, but common humanity remains unconvinced that misery is a proper subject for permanent contemplation. In our age especially, when the impulse to social good works is highly developed, it is a curious paradox that writers should expect us to associate in art, as habitual companions, with types of character which in real life we should hasten to rescue and to change. It is generous of the writers to suppose that in a humane age the reader will be ready to discern the heroic even beneath handicaps and afflictions, and probably the reader is thus ready, but the writers forget that in any age, particularly in a humane one, we do not like to contemplate, in the permanence of art, heroic character smothered beneath handicaps and afflictions. And in justice to the embarrassed reader it should be added that often the character is not heroic at all, and the only claim put forth for it is that it might have been attractive if it had not been smothered.

Perhaps it is the influence of Wordsworth that still spreads this confusion in our writing. The effect of many of his best known poems has never been wholly satisfactory, not even to his admirers; he drew moral lessons from objects humble or mean, and since his own interest was in the moral lesson, he sometimes was careless of the emotional appeal which the object, left standing as it were in the poem, might make on the reader. In one sense he was not a nature-lover, though he had recourse to nature for ethical wisdom; it was only the wisdom he cared about, and we have an unpleasant impression, which perhaps does him injustice, that when he had got a moral idea out of the primrose by the river’s brim, he was through with the primrose for the day. The same impression, unfortunately, is made by his portrayal of humble or mean characters. He obviously does not identify his better fortunes with their misery, nor does he enter dramatically or imaginatively into their lives; he is content to draw a moral from them, and the reader, in his day and still in ours, is surprised that misery in the picture, having produced a moral, is promptly dropped as though of no further concern. The old leech-gatherer serves a purpose when his courage against frightful odds cheers up a moodish poet; the old beggar at the door moves us to gratitude that another man’s poverty keeps fresh in us our springs of charity. Much good this does the leech-gatherer or the beggar! And if there is to be no help for them, their presence is a bit disturbing in the background of so much complacence. We wish there were more tenderness in these poems that talk so much of feeling. And when Wordsworth deliberately sets out to enlist our admiration for the heroic, we may find ourselves facing such dumb human misery as we have in Michael, the heroism of a wrecked family and an abandoned farm. With relief we turn to the passages in the Prelude where the poet no longer looks down benignly on the wretched, but gives expression to the ideal life which he himself desires to attain; there, where he shows life better than it is, we can go with him and lose ourselves in the vision.

It is our poets who chiefly defy Aristotle’s wise warning, and try with Wordsworth to convert into a theme for meditation what is really a subject for philanthropy. Our novelists tend more and more to give us an inferior world, but not for our admiration; we may smile at it, or despise it, or try to cure it. This is satire, an achievement in morals rather than in art, and from the advertisements on the book covers it is clear that the publisher at least knows that the author is revealing something medicinal, something unpleasant but good for us. If we prefer to write satires, we are at least achieving our ambition. But the reader of the American novel today, whether he reads Mrs. Wharton, or Sinclair Lewis, or whether he goes back to an earlier period and reads W. D. Howells, is usually reading about other people, rarely about himself; he has noticed those faults in his neighbors before. We have to go far back in our literature to find a novel in which the American future is implicit, a story into which we can enter as into a world we are glad is ours. Perhaps we must go back as far as the Scarlet Letter, in which a modern audacity of thought seems breaking through an antique repression, and we can identify profound speculations of our own with the wisdom in Hester’s heart or Arthur Dimmesdale’s. It has been pointed out before how much Hawthorne gained by making his chief characters noble in the Greek way, tragic characters better than in actual life; for the sin of the woman and the minister was common enough in the world among weak or vulgar characters, and the impulse even in Hawthorne’s time might well have been to keep the story, for purposes of edification or realism, in the low tone in which it first occurred. But we cannot easily take to heart the sins of people who are obviously our inferiors; only the sins of good people rouse in us tragic pity or terror, for that is the kind of sin, if any, we should commit. Hawthorne therefore makes the minister a saint, and if Hester is not a saint at the beginning, she is so at the end of her ordeal, and in the sufferings of both our own heart has been wrung. In the House of the Seven Gables, however, the reader is a looker-on rather than an actor, for the characters are not better than life, their experience is therefore not ours, and since we cannot cure their unhappiness, we are sorry to watch it. In that story our greatest romancer was on the road toward the modern habit of satire, a road which he had marked out for us clearly enough in some of his early sketches and tales.

The trend away from the literature of art to the literature of satire is all the more remarkable in our day because the exigencies of satire compel the American to deny wholesale his better self. There might be some apparent reason for not writing in the epic or the tragic tone if in order to do so we had to assume virtues we all knew we lacked; but why make a religion of writing satire, when to do so we must conceal the few virtues we are sure we have? Mr. Howells took it to be his duty to tell the unvarnished truth about human society as he knew it, but you would not guess from his novels that America ever produced so charming a man as Mr. Howells and those literary friends of his of whom, outside his novels, he wrote lovingly. So Mr. Lewis pictures America today—leaving out of the picture the satirical criticism of America in which he leads, and so Mrs. Wharton shows us the narrower world of fashion, with no one in it so gifted, so admirably trained, as Mrs. Wharton. The best of us is hard enough to express, as Rabbi Ben Ezra knew, but how odd that we prefer not to express it, whether difficult or easy—that we deliberately conceal what we have set our hearts on. We name half a dozen characters from his plays in whom Shakespeare seems to be portraying himself, and without too subtle a discrimination we recognize ideals of our own in all of them. Pendennis seems to be Thackeray himself, and so seems Henry Esmond and Clive Newcome, and we flatter ourselves that the great novelist incorporated in those portraits some of our own best features. We—and Cervantes—are incarnated in Don Quixote.

The contrast between information and art in our books, and the tendency to stress information with a moral bent, are both thrown into sharper relief by the success of American architecture in expressing more and more a significant and lasting beauty. Nothing might seem at first more utilitarian than a building, and few things in our country seem less permanent, we have such a passion for altering. Yet art has made its greatest progress with us in architecture, and the stages of the progress have been accompanied by just such a selection and choice of subject as Aristotle’s remarks about character would imply. In our cities a genuine impulse toward beauty began to show itself two decades ago in shop-windows. Where else should beauty appear but in the enterprises we care most about? Since we were lovers of business, we began to indicate the beauty that business has in our eyes. The shop-window ceased to be, what in country hardware stores it still often is, a place where samples of all the merchandise were displayed, an order card from which you could plan your purchases; it became rather a scene of loveliness to contemplate for its own sake, an attraction to hold you rooted to the spot rather than a stimulus to hurry you inside to buy. Probably the shop-windows in our great streets could not be justified now on a purely economic basis; they have been lifted into the realm of beauty and are things to remember. But for this kind of shop-window not every article the store sells is “proper”, in the Aristotelian sense; nothing ridiculous is shown, though ridiculous things are bought and sold, nothing trivial is shown, and nothing that discloses too publicly the animal conditions in which we lead our spiritual life. With a different selection of articles which the store for our convenience must sell, we might have a comic window, the sight of which would cause us to smile at ourselves, or a satiric one, which would teach us to laugh at our fellowman.

The buildings themselves, moreover, have become beautiful by expressing 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.