Chapter 1

“The end of playing”, said Hamlet, “both at the first and now, was and is, to show the very age and body of the time, his form and presence.” It would seem that Hamlet thought the business of art was to portray the age in which the artist lived, not only to address his contemporaries, but to speak to them about themselves. The cult of the contemporary, then, in our own day could ask for no better text than this phrase of the Prince of Denmark; what a pity he uttered it so long ago!

Shakespeare did not agree with Hamlet—at least, he made some pretence to show his Elizabethan audience the form and presence of remote times and far-away countries, Rome and Athens, Denmark itself, Italy, Scotland, Bohemia, the age of King John and the Richards and the Henrys, the time and place, whatever they were, of Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Tempest, Cymbeline, the Winter’s Tale. And Hamlet himself, be it noted, is hardly faithful to his theory, for when he asks the players to repeat a favorite speech of his, it turns out to be Æneas’s tale to Dido. It was from a piece, he said, that pleased not the million, perhaps never had a second performance, but in the judgment of the competent and in his own opinion it was an excellent play. Perhaps the million were at the moment bred exclusively to appreciate contemporary themes; costume plays were not the fashion. Hamlet’s other choice in drama is poor evidence of his esthetic theory; the murder of Gonzaga seems to have been already ancient history, but he chose it to catch the conscience of the king, since the story fitted his own household tragedy. Shall we follow the hint, and suggest that Hamlet, like Shakespeare, really had nothing in common with those who would make contemporary life the proper subject for art? Perhaps he would not have mentioned the age and body of the time, if he had not just said that the end of playing is to show scorn her own image, if indeed the purpose of his meddling with the drama at all, at that moment, had not been to sting the royal murderer into a confession of his guilt.

The cult of the contemporary follows logically from the cult of the natural. If we are to write of a life untouched with art, we can write only of life about us, as our fathers left it to us—our best of nature, the talent buried in a napkin; and if we are to use the ordinary language of men, we must use today’s language, the only speech that to us is ordinary. And if it is possible to understand the search for the natural as an effort to correct the generalizing tendency in literature, we may also find a sympathetic explanation of the insistence on the contemporary, when we recall how many writers have reasoned themselves into a determination to walk in the ways of their heart and in the sight of their eyes. Did not Homer celebrate the glory of Hellenism? Did not Virgil celebrate the empire of Rome? Well, then, we ought to celebrate the United States, our United States, rather than the country of Washington or Jefferson; we ought to celebrate the hour and the place we know, for we ought to love what we know—New York, Boston, Chicago or the Middle West. This conclusion seems rational, but the desired enthusiasm does not follow; the celebration of the contemporary in our literature is as dreary in its results as the worship of the natural, inspired merely by the sense of some duty rather than by delight in what is portrayed. Homer’s zest for Hellenism is undeniable, and the instinct is right that we, too, must love life as he loved it before we can write as he wrote. For the moment we postpone the question, whether we must not also live a life as noble in kind as he portrayed. Virgil, writing in a more complicated, a sadder age, none the less loved imperial Rome, and we are right to think that before we shall be worthy to sing of our own land, in its own grave and complex era, we must take it to heart, problems and all. “The proof of a poet”, said Whitman, “shall be sternly deferred till his country absorbs him as affectionately as he absorbed it.” But Whitman’s own practise is a provoking comment on his saying; he succeeded remarkably in loving his land under an eternal form; the form and presence of his day he did not leave us. His poems are no guide-books to Manhattan and Long Island in 1855; even his beloved ferry-boats are dateless.

In what sense, then, would Whitman have us love our country, the home of our own times, and how did Homer and Virgil, as artists, love the Greece or the Rome they knew? To be of one’s age, yet to be immortal, is a problem more subtle perhaps than to achieve an art that seems natural, but it can be solved in the same way, by defining the terms of our esthetic, and by referring them, as to a touchstone, to what we know of our common human nature. The question can also be narrowed at the start, and very profitably, by pressing home our reflections on Hamlet’s remark to the players. There is one kind of writing which does confine itself to the feature of virtue and the image of scorn, and which does indeed, for that very reason, limit itself always to giving the form and presence of the time—the kind of writing, that is, which indicts human nature instead of portraying it. Our better selves, our ideals, are of no time, but our faults are personal responsibilities and strictly contemporary. Satire, therefore, which holds up to merriment or to scorn what is ridiculous or base, must always take a present subject, and in general any art that leans toward the consideration of our shortcomings will lean also toward the life enacted at the moment. If Hamlet meant to trap the king, of course he would write into the old play the very murder the king had committed only three or four months ago; this would not be satire in the usual sense, but it would serve the same end, to convict the guilty and to reform the world. The cult of the contemporary, then, is proper quite literally for satire; it remains only to ask how far it is proper for art.

But is satire not art? Did not Martial and Juvenal, Dryden and Pope write highly artistic satires? There is an art of satire, we must answer, as there is an art of preaching and an art of prosecuting a criminal case. But if there is a distinction between art and morals, then satire belongs to the world of ethics, and of ethics on the grim side, rather than to the world of beauty and delight. To survey and judge the morals of one’s age is a serious office that no thoughtful and sensitive person seems altogether to neglect; if the purpose of art is to make such a survey, as Hamlet seems to say, then Twelfth Night is hardly a masterpiece in art, and Sandford and Merton is certainly one. If art, on the other hand, has for its purpose to salvage out of our crude days the truth which can be translated into beauty, and which so translated may be a joy for ever, then art will have as little as possible to do with men’s faults—what faults are joys for ever?—and the kind of writing which confines itself to our frailties or our sins will be as far removed as possible from art. Moreover, the moralist desires a cure of souls, and when the fault is remedied, who will care for the satire or even understand it? It is easy enough, without taking thought, to perish with our own time, but it is one of the oldest hopes art has held out to natural man, that being purified into art he should not altogether die. But mortality is germane to satire. When we read Dryden’s terrible excoriations of Og and Doeg, we can only wonder who were the human beings he hated so, and when we come to know something of their lives and characters, we are more confused to name the moral impulse in him which made it necessary to fix them in so warm a hell. In art, loving your own times does not mean loving to find fault with them.