Chapter 3

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.