Status Anxiety

II

ART

Introduction

1.

What is art good for? That question was in the air in Britain in the 1860s, and according to many commentators, the answer was, Not much. It was not art, after all, that had built the great industrial towns, laid the railways, dug the canals, expanded the empire and made Britain preeminent among nations. Indeed, art seemed capable of sapping the very qualities that had made such achievements possible, prolonged contact with it appeared to encourage effeminacy, introspection, homosexuality, gout and defeatism. In a speech in 1865, John Bright, member of Parliament for Birmingham, described cultured people as a pretentious cabal whose only claim to distinction was knowing “a smattering of the two dead languages of Greek and Latin.” The Oxford academic Frederic Harrison (who might himself be presumed to boast some competency in the classics) took an equally caustic view of the benefits of prolonged communion with literature, history or painting. “Culture is a desirable quality in a critic of new books, and sits well on a possessor of belles lettres,” he allowed, but “as applied to everyday life or politics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The man of culture is one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him.”

When these practical-minded disparagers cast their nets for a fitting exemplar of art’s many deficiencies, they could find few more tempting potential trophies on the English literary scene than the poet and critic Matthew Arnold, professor of poetry at Oxford and the author of several slim volumes of melancholic verse that had been well received among a highbrow coterie. Not only was Arnold in the habit of walking the streets of London holding a silver-tipped cane, he also spoke in a quiet, high-pitched voice, sported peculiarly elongated sideburns, parted his hair in the middle and, worst of all, had the impudence to keep hinting, in a variety of newspaper articles and public lectures, that art might just be one of life’s most important pursuits. This in an age when for the first time one could travel from London to Birmingham in a single morning, and Britain had earned itself the title of workshop of the world. The editors of the Daily Telegraph, stout upholder of industry and monarchy, were infuriated. They dubbed Arnold an “elegant Jeremiah” and “the high-priest of the kid-gloved persuasion,” and mockingly accused him of trying to lure England’s hardworking, sensible citizens “to leave their shops and duties behind them in order to recite songs, sing ballads and read essays.”

2.

Arnold accepted the ribbing with good grace until finally, in 1869, he was goaded into composing and publishing a systematic, book-length defence of art, detailing what he believed it was for and what crucial functions it served, and must continue to serve, in life—even for a generation that had witnessed the invention of the foldaway umbrella and the steam engine.

Culture and Anarchy began by reviewing some of the charges that had been laid at art’s door. In the eyes of many, Arnold acknowledged, it was nothing more than “a scented salve for human miseries, a religion breathing a spirit of cultivated inaction, making its believers refuse to lend a hand at uprooting evils. It is often summed up as being not practical or—as some critics more familiarly put it—all moonshine.”

But far from being a mere salve, great art was in fact, Arnold argued, an effective antidote for life’s deepest tensions and anxieties. However impractical it might seem to “the young lions of the Daily Te l e graph,” it was capable of presenting its audience with nothing less than an interpretation of and solution to the deficiencies of existence.

Every great work of art, suggested Arnold, was marked (directly or not) by the “desire to remove human error, clear human confusion, and diminish human misery,” just as all great artists were imbued with the “aspiration to leave the world better and happier than they [found] it.” They might not always realise this ambition through overtly political subject matter—indeed, might not even be aware of harbouring it at all—and yet embedded within their work, there was almost always some cry of protest against a status quo, and thus an impulse to correct the viewer’s insight or teach him to perceive beauty, to help him understand pain or to reanimate his sensitivities, to nurture his capacity for empathy or rebalance his moral perspective through sadness or laughter. Arnold concluded his argument with the idea upon which this chapter is built: Art, he insisted, was “the criticism of life.”

3.

What are we to understand by Arnold’s phrase? First, and perhaps most obvious, that life is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art—novels, poems, plays, paintings or films—can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world.

Given that few things are more in need of criticism (or of insight and analysis) than our approach to status and its distribution, it is hardly surprising that so many artists across time should have created works that in some way contest the methods by which people are accorded rank in society. The history of art is filled with challenges—ironic, angry, lyrical, sad or amusing—to the status system.

Art and Snobbery

1.

Jane Austen began writing Mansfield Park in the spring of 1811 and published it three years later. The novel tells the story of Fanny Price, a shy, modest young girl from a penniless family in Portsmouth, who, in order to relieve her parents of some of their burden, agrees to go and live with her aunt and uncle, the plutocratic Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram, at Mansfield Park, their stately home. Standing at the pinnacle of the English county hierarchy, the Bertrams are spoken of with awe and reverence by their neighbours. Their two daughters, Maria and Julia, are coquettish teenagers who enjoy a generous clothes allowance and have their own horses; their eldest son, Tom, is a bumptious and casually insensitive lout who spends most of his time in London clubs, lubricating his friendships with champagne while focusing his hopes for the future on his father’s death and the inheritance of the paternal estate and title. Adept though they are at affecting the self-deprecating manner so beloved of the English upper classes, Sir Thomas Bertram and his family never forget (nor allow others to forget) their superior rank or all the distinction that must naturally accompany their ownership of a large, landscaped garden through which deer wander in the quiet hours between tea and dinner.

Fanny may live under the same roof as the Bertrams, but she cannot be on an equal footing with them. Her privileges have been given to her at the discretion of Sir Thomas; her cousins patronise her; the neighbours regard her with a mixture of suspicion and pity; and she is treated by most of the family like a lady-in-waiting whose company they may take some modest pleasure in but whose feelings they are fortunately never under any prolonged obligation to consider.

Before Fanny’s arrival at Mansfield Park, Austen allows us to eavesdrop on the family’s anxieties about their new charge. “I hope she will not tease my poor pug,” remarks Lady Bertram. The children wonder what Fanny’s clothes will look like and whether she will speak French and know the names of the kings and queens of England. Sir Thomas Bertram, despite having proffered the invitation to Fanny’s parents in the first place, expects the worst: “We shall probably see much to wish altered in her and should prepare ourselves for gross ignorance, some meanness of opinions and a very distressing vulgarity of manner.” His sister-in-law Mrs. Norris insists that Fanny must be told early on that she is not, and never will be, one of them. Sir Thomas avers, “We must make her remember that she is not a Miss Bertram. I should wish to see Fanny and her cousins very good friends but they cannot be equals. Their rank, fortune, rights and expectations will always be different.”

Fanny’s advent seems only to confirm the family’s prejudices against those who have failed to grow up on estates with landscaped gardens. Julia and Maria discover that Fanny owns just one nice dress, speaks no French and doesn’t know anything. “Only think, my cousin cannot put the map of Europe together,” Julia exclaims to her aunt and mother, “nor can she tell the principal rivers in Russia and she has never heard of Asia Minor—How strange! Did you ever hear anything so stupid? Do you know, we asked her last night, which way she would go to get to Ireland and she said, she should cross to the Isle of Wight.” “Yes, my dear,” replies Mrs. Norris, “but you and your sister are blessed with wonderful memories, and your poor cousin has probably none at all. You must make allowances for her and pity her deficiency.”

The novel’s author takes a little longer than Mrs. Norris to make up her mind as to who is deficient, and in what capacity. For a decade or more, Austen follows Fanny patiently down the corridors and into the reception rooms of Mansfield Park; listens to her mutterings in her bedroom and on her walks around the gardens; reads her letters; eavesdrops on her observations about her adoptive family; watches the movements of her eyes and mouth; and peers into her soul. In the process, she picks up on a rare, quiet virtue of her heroine’s.

Unlike Julia and Maria, Fanny does not concern herself with whether every young man she meets has a large house and a title. She is offended by her cousin Tom’s indifferent cruelty and arrogance and flinches from her aunt’s financial considerations of her neighbours. The Bertrams themselves, meanwhile, so highly ranked within the conventional county status hierarchy, are more troublingly placed in that other, even more exacting status system, the novelist’s hierarchy of preference. Maria and her suitor, Mr. Rush-worth, may have horses, houses and inheritances, but Jane Austen sees how they go about falling in love, and she cannot forgive them for it:

“Mr. Rushworth was from the first struck with the beauty of Miss Bertram, and being inclined to marry, soon fancied himself in love. Being now in her twenty-first year, Maria Bertram was beginning to think matrimony a duty; and as a marriage with Mr. Rushworth would give her the enjoyment of a larger income than her father’s, as well as ensure her a house in town, it became her evident duty to marry Mr. Rushworth if she could.”

Who’s Who or Debrett’s Guide to the Top Families of England might have held Maria and Mr. Rushworth in high esteem. After such a paragraph, Austen cannot—nor will she let her readers. The novelist exchanges the standard lens through which people are viewed in society, a lens that magnifies wealth and power, for a moral lens whose focal point is subtler qualities of character. Seen through this lens, the high and mighty may become small, and forgotten and retiring figures loom large. Within the world of the novel, virtue is shown to be distributed without regard to material wealth. The rich and well-mannered are not ipso facto good, nor the poor and unschooled necessarily bad. Goodness may be inherent in the lame, ugly child, the destitute porter, the hunchback in the attic or the girl ignorant of the most basic facts of geography. Certainly Fanny possesses no elegant dresses, has no money and can’t speak French, but by the end of Mansfield Park, she has been revealed as the one member of her extended family endowed with a noble soul, while all the others, despite their titles and accomplishments, have fallen into moral confusion. Sir Thomas Bertram has allowed snobbery to ruin the education of his children, his daughters have married for money and paid an emotional price for that decision, and his wife has let her heart turn to stone. The hierarchical system of Mansfield Park has been turned on its head.

Austen does not, of course, make explicit her concept of true hierarchy, boxing our ears with a preacher’s bluntness; she instead enlists our sympathies and marshals our abhorrence for its opposite with the skill and humour of a great novelist. She does not tell us why her moral priorities are important; she shows us why within the context of a story that also manages to make us laugh and that takes such a strong hold on our imagination that we want to finish supper early so we may read on. As we reach the end of Mansfield Park, we are invited to go back into our own world—the world from which Austen has drawn us aside—and respond to its inhabitants as she has taught us to do, detecting and recoiling from greed, arrogance and pride and seeking out the good in ourselves and in others.

Austen once modestly and famously described her art as “the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour,” but her novels are suffused with greater ambitions. Each one attempts, by examining what she called “three or four families in a country village,” to criticise and so alter our lives.

2.

Austen was not alone in her aspirations. Almost every great novel of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stages an assault on, or at the very least harbours scepticism regarding, the accepted social hierarchy, and each offers some sort of redefinition of precedence according to moral worth rather than financial assets or bloodlines. Only on rare occasions are the heroes and heroines of fiction the type of people to whom Debrett’s or Who’s Who would give priority. In the pages of these works, the first become something like the last, and the last something like the first. For example, in Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834), it is not Madame de Nucingen, with her gilded house, who solicits our sympathies, but the toothless old Goriot, eking out his days in a putrid boardinghouse. Similarly, in Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), it is not the Oxford dons whom we respect, but the impoverished, ill-schooled stonemason who repairs the gargoyles of the university’s colleges.

Standing witness to hidden lives, novels may act as conceptual counterweights to dominant hierarchical realities. They can reveal that the maid now busying herself with lunch is a creature of rare sensitivity and moral greatness, while the baron who laughs raucously and owns a silver mine has a heart both withered and acrid.

If we are inclined to forget the lesson, it may be in part because what is best in other people seldom has a chance to express itself in the sort of external achievements that attract and hold our ordinary, vagabond attention. George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) begins with a discussion of this human tendency to admire only the most obvious exploits, as the author draws an unlikely comparison between her heroine and Saint Theresa of Avila (1512–82). Thanks to good luck and circumstance, because she came from a wealthy and well-connected family, Saint Theresa was able (Eliot reminds us) to embody her goodness and creativity in concrete acts. She founded seventeen convents; communicated with some of the most devout individuals of her day; wrote an autobiography and a number of treatises on prayer and vision; and became not only one of the principal saints of the Roman Catholic Church but perhaps its greatest mystic. By the time of her death, Theresa could claim a status equal to her virtue. In that, she was singularly blessed, Eliot suggests, citing the legions of people in the world who, though no less intelligent or creative than the Spanish saint, nonetheless fail ever to externalise their finer qualities in useful actions. Through a combination of their own errors and unhelpful social conditions, these less fortunate mortals are thereby condemned to a status that bears scant relation to their inner worth. According to the novelist, “Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life; only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with a meanness of opportunity.” It is the life of one such woman, Dorothea Brooke, living in an English town in the first half of the nineteenth century, that Middlemarch sets out to recount, the novel as a whole offering a critique of the world’s habit of neglecting what Eliot calls “spiritual grandeur” whenever it is unlinked to “long-recognised deeds.”

Dorothea may well possess many of the same virtues as Saint Theresa, but they are not apparent to a world attentive only to the symbols of status. Because she first marries a sickly clergyman and then, little more than a year after his death, gives up her estate to wed her late husband’s cousin (who has no property and is not well-born), society insists that she cannot be a “good woman,” and everyone in the village gossips about her and shuns her company. “Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful,” Eliot herself concedes. “They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state.” But then, in some of the most quietly stirring lines in all of nineteenth-century English fiction, Eliot asks us to look beyond

Status in Life vs. Status in Novels

NOVEL

HIGH STATUS

HIGH STATUS

IN NOVEL,LOW STATUSIN LIFE

IN LIFE,LOW STATUSIN NOVEL

Joseph Andrews

(1742) Henry Fielding

Joseph AndrewsParson Adams

Lady BoobyParson Trulliber

Vanity Fair

(1848) William Thackeray

William DobbinAmelia Sedley

Becky SharpJos SedleyGeorge Osborne Sir Pitt Crawley Rawdon Crawley

Bleak House

(1853)Charles Dickens

Esther SummersonJoBucket

The DedlocksMr. ChadbandMrs. Jellyby Richard Carstone

The Woman in White

(1860)Wilkie Collins

Anne CatherickMarian Halcombe

Sir Percival GlydeCount FoscoFrederick Fairlie

The Way We Live Now

(1875)Anthony Trollope

Paul MontagueMr. BrehgertJohn Crumb

Augustus MelmotteMarie MelmotteSir Felix Carbury Dolly Longestaffe Georgiana Longestaffe Lord Nidderdale

Dorothea’s socially unacceptable marriages and her lack of achievements in order to recognise that, in its domestic and circumscribed way, her character is indeed no less saintly than Theresa’s must have been: “Her finely-touched spirit had its fine issues, even though they were not widely visible. Her full nature spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Lines that may be stretched to define a whole conception of the novel: an artistic medium to help us understand and appreciate the value of every hidden life that rests in an unvisited tomb. “If art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally,” knew George Eliot.

In Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000), we meet Samad, a middle-aged Bangladeshi employed as a waiter in an Indian restaurant in London. He is treated roughly by his superiors, works until three in the morning and has to wait upon coarse customers who magnanimously reward him with fifteen-pence tips. Samad dreams of somehow recovering his dignity, of escaping the material and psychological consequences of his status. He longs to alert others to the riches that lie buried within him, unsuspected by patrons who barely look up when he takes their orders (“Go Bye Ello Sag, please” and “Chicken Jail Fret See wiv Chips, fanks”). He imagines wearing a sign around his neck, a white placard that would read, in letters large enough for the whole world to see:

I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIEN-TIST,A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH.I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I’M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND— ARCHIE—AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES.

He never does acquire such a placard, but he gets the next best thing: a novelist who supplies him with a voice. The entire novel in which Samad appears is in a sense a giant placard that will help to make it just that much harder for its readers ever again to order Chicken Jail Fret See in such a casually indifferent, casually dehumanizing manner.

The best novels expand and extend our sympathies. Taken together, they may in fact stand as one long procession of signs that tell the world:

I AM NOT JUST A WAITER, A DIVORCEE, AN ADULTERER, A THIEF, AN UNEDUCATED MAN, A PECULIAR CHILD, A MURDERER, A CONVICT, A FAILURE AT SCHOOL OR A SHY PERSON WITH NOTHING TO SAY FOR HERSELF.

3.

Paintings, too, can challenge society’s normal understanding of who or what matters.

Jean-Baptiste Chardin painted his Meal for a Convalescent in circa 1738. A modestly dressed woman stands in a sparsely furnished room, peeling an egg for a sick person we cannot see. It is an ordinary moment in the life of an ordinary person. Why paint such a thing? For much of Chardin’s career, critics persisted in asking that question. It irked them that this gifted artist devoted all his attention to loaves of bread, broken plates, knives and forks, apples and pears and working- or lower-middle-class characters going about their business in humble kitchens and living rooms.

These were certainly not the sorts of subjects that a great artist was supposed to paint, according to the canons laid down by the French Academy of Fine Arts. Upon the academy’s founding by Louis XIV, in 1648, its officers had ranked the different pictorial genres in a hierarchy of importance. At the very top was history painting, with its canvases expressing the nobility of ancient Greece and Rome or illustrating biblical morality tales. Second came portraiture, especially of kings and queens. Third was landscape, distantly followed by what was dismissively described as “genre painting,” depicting scenes from the domestic lives of commoners. This artistic hierarchy corresponded directly with the social hierarchy of the world beyond the artists’ studios, where a king sitting on a horse and surveying his estates was deemed naturally superior to a plainly dressed woman peeling an egg.

Jean-Baptiste Chardin, Meal for a Convalescent, c. 1738

But within Chardin’s art lies an implicit subversion of any vision of life that could dismiss as valueless a woman’s domestic labours or even a piece of old pottery catching the afternoon sun (“Chardin has taught us that a pear can be as full of life as a woman, that a jug is as beautiful as a precious stone,” observed Marcel Proust).

The history of painting provides Chardin with a tiny coterie of fellow spirits, and us with a handful of great correctives to our customary notions of importance. One of the more notable, for our purposes, was the Welsh painter Thomas Jones, who worked in Italy, first in Rome and then in Naples, between 1776 and 1783. It was in Naples, in early April 1782, that Jones completed what may be two of the finest oils on paper in the whole of Western art, Rooftops, Naples (which hangs in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford) and Buildings in Naples (in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff).

The views captured by Jones remain a familiar feature of many Mediterranean cities and towns, where houses are pressed together along narrow streets and give out onto the naked flanks of neighbouring buildings. On a warm afternoon, the streets tend to be quiet and the windows half shuttered. One may glimpse the outline of a woman moving inside a sitting room or the dark mass of a man asleep on a bed. Occasionally one may hear the cry of a child or the rustle made by an old woman as she hangs laundry on a terrace with a rusting handrail.

Jones shows us how the intense southern light falls on walls of chipped and weathered stucco, bringing out every indentation and fracture, the painted surface evoking the passage of time as effectively as the rough, worn hands of a fisherman. Soon April will give way to May, and then the blank, dead heat of summer to furious winter storms, which themselves, after an apparent eternity, will once again cede their place to tentative spring sunshine. Jones’s stone and stucco are close kin to clay and plaster and to the fragments of pitted rock that stud so many Mediterranean hillsides. The confusion of buildings in these works affords us an impression of a town in which a multiplicity of lives is unfolding in every window—lives no less complicated than those portrayed in the great novels, lives of passion and boredom, playfulness and despair.

Thomas Jones, Rooftops, Naples, 1782

How seldom do we notice rooftops; how easily are our eyes drawn instead to the more flamboyant attractions of a Roman temple or Renaissance church. But Jones has held up the ignored scene for our contemplation and rendered its latent beauty visible, so that never again will southern rooftops count for nothing in our understanding of happiness.

The nineteenth-century Dane Christen Købke was another who strove, through his painting, to subvert conventional notions of what should be considered valuable. Between 1832 and 1838, he tirelessly explored the suburbs, streets and gardens of his native Copenhagen. He painted a couple of cows ruminating in a field on a summer afternoon, and caught two men and their wives disembarking from a small sailing boat on the shore of a lake. (It is evening, but darkness seems in no hurry to settle over the land; an echo of daylight hovers for an apparent eternity in the vast sky, presaging a gentle night on which windows may be left open, and a lucky few will sleep outside on blankets spread across the grass.) He reproduced the view from the roof of Frederiksborg Castle, looking out onto a neat patchwork of fields, gardens and farms, an image of an ordered community content to enjoy the snatched pleasures of daily life.

Thomas Jones, Buildings in Naples, 1782

Christen K0bke, View from the Embankment of Lake Sortedam, 1838

Christen KØbke, The Roof of Frederiksborg Castle, 1834-1835

Collectively, these works by Købke, Jones and Chardin appear to suggest that if such commonplaces as the sky on a summer’s evening, a pitted wall heated by the sun and the face of an unknown woman as she peels an egg for a sick person are truly among the loveliest sights we may hope ever to lay our eyes on, then perhaps we are honour-bound to question the value of much that we have been taught to respect and aspire to.

It may seem far-fetched to hang a quasipolitical programme on a jug placed on a sideboard, or on a cow grazing in a pasture, but the moral of a work by one of these three painters may reach dauntingly far beyond the limited meaning we are generally prepared to attribute to a piece of painted cloth or paper. Like Jane Austen and George Eliot, the great artists of everyday life may help us to correct many of our snobbish preconceptions regarding what there is to esteem and honour in the world.

Christen K0bke, A View in the Neighbourhood of the Lime Kiln, 1834—1835

Tragedy

1.

Our fear of failing at various tasks would likely be much less were it not for our awareness of how harshly failure tends to be viewed and interpreted by others. Fear of the material consequences of failure is thus compounded by fear of the unsympathetic attitude of the world towards those who have failed, exemplified by its haunting proclivity to refer to them as “losers”—a word callously signifying both that they have lost and that they have, at the same time, forfeited any right to sympathy for losing.

So unforgiving is the tone in which the majority of ruined lives are discussed, indeed, that if the protagonists of many works of art— among them Oedipus, Antigone, Lear, Othello, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, Hedda Gabler and Tess—had had their fates chewed over by a cabal of colleagues or old school acquaintances, they almost certainly would not have emerged well from the process. They might have fared even worse if the press had got hold of them:

Othello:

Love-Crazed Immigrant Kills

xx

Senator’s Daughter

Oedipus the King:

Royal in Incest Shocker

Madame Bovary:

Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows

xx

Arsenic after Credit Fraud

If something about these headlines seems incongruous, it may be because we are used to thinking of the subjects to which they refer as being inherently complex and naturally deserving of a solemn and respectful attitude, rather than the prurient and damning one that newspapers all but automatically take vis-à-vis their victims. But in truth, nothing about these figures makes them inevitable objects of concern or respect. That the legendary failed characters of art seem so noble to us has little to do with their individual qualities per se and almost everything to do with how we have been taught to consider them by their creators and chroniclers.

There is one art form in particular that has, since its inception, dedicated itself to recounting stories of great failure without recourse to mockery or judgement. While not absolving its subjects of responsibility for their actions, it has nonetheless succeeded in offering and eliciting for those involved in catastrophes—disgraced statesmen, murderers, the bankrupt, emotional compulsives—a level of sympathy owed, but rarely extended, to every human.

2.

At its inception, in the theatres of ancient Greece in the sixth century B.C., tragic drama followed a hero—usually someone highborn, a king or a famous warrior—from prosperity and acclaim to ruin and shame, a downfall always brought on by some error of his own. The telling of the story—the way it was told—was intended to leave audiences at once hesitant to condemn the protagonist for what had befallen him and humbled by the realisation of how easily they might be ruined if ever they found themselves in a similar situation.

If the newspaper, with its lexicon of perverts and weirdos, failures and losers, lies at one end of the spectrum of understanding, then tragedy lies at the other. In its ambition to build bridges between the guilty and the apparently blameless, in its challenging of ordinary conceptions of responsibility, it stands as the most psychologically sophisticated, most respectful account of how a human being may be dishonoured without at the same time losing his or her right to be heard.

3.

In his Poetics (circa 350 B.C.), Aristotle attempted to define the core constituents of an effective tragedy. There needed to be one central character, he postulated; the action had to unfold in a relatively compressed length of time; and, unsurprisingly, “the change in the hero’s fortunes” must be “not from misery to happiness” but, on the contrary, “from happiness to misery.”

There were two additional, more telling requirements. A tragic hero had to be someone who was neither especially good nor especially bad, an everyday, regular kind of human being at the ethical level, someone to whom the audience could easily relate, whose character combined a range of good qualities with one or more common defects—for example, excessive pride or anger or impulsiveness. And finally, this figure must make a spectacular mistake, not out of any profoundly evil motive, but rather due to what Aristotle termed in Greek a hamartia (an “error in judgement”), a temporary lapse, or a factual or emotional slip. And from this would flow the most terrible peripeteia, or “reversal of fortune,” over the course of which the hero would lose everything he held dear before at last almost certainly paying for his blunder with his life.

Pity for the hero, and fear for oneself based on an identification with him, would be the natural emotional outcome of following such a tale. The tragic work would educate us to acquire modesty about our capacity to avoid disaster and at the same time guide us to feel sympathy for those who had met with it. We were to leave the theatre disinclined ever again to adopt an easy, superior tone towards the fallen and the failed.

Aristotle’s great insight was that the degree of sympathy we will feel regarding another’s fiasco is directly proportional to how easy or difficult it is for us to imagine ourselves, under like circumstances, making a similar mistake. How could sane, normal people do such things, we may wonder upon hearing of real-life lapsers who have married rashly, slept with a member of their own family, murdered their lover in a jealous frenzy, lied to their employer, stolen money or allowed an avaricious streak to ruin their career. Confident that cast-iron walls separate our nature and situation from theirs, comfortable in the well-broken-in saddle of our high horse, we have exchanged our capacity to be tolerant for detachment and derision.

It is the tragedian’s task, then, to force us to confront an almost unbearable truth: every folly or myopia of which any human being in history has been guilty may be traced back to some aspect of our collective nature. Because we each bear within ourselves the whole of the human condition, in its worst and best aspects, any one of us might be capable of doing anything at all, or nothing, under the right—or rather the most horribly wrong—conditions. Once theatregoers have experienced this truism, they may willingly dismount from their high horses and feel their powers of sympathy and humility return, enhanced. They may accept how readily their own lives might be shattered if certain of their more regrettable character traits, which have until now invited no serious trouble, were one day to coincide with a situation that allowed them unlimited and catastrophic dominion, leaving these heretofore innocents no less shamed and wretched than the unfortunate soul suffering beneath the headline “Royal in Incest Shocker.”

4.

The play that most perfectly accorded with Aristotle’s conception of the tragic art form was Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, first performed in Athens at the Festival of Dionysus in the spring of 430 B.C.

Sophocles’ Oedipus, the king of Thebes, is worshipped by his people for his benevolent rule and for the wisdom he displayed many years before in outwitting the Sphinx and driving it from the city— which exploit earned him his throne. For all his good qualities, however, the king is not flawless: most notably, he is impetuous and prone to rage. Long ago, in fact, during one particularly violent outburst on the road to Thebes, he killed an obstinate old man who refused to get out of his way. That incident was largely obscured, though, by subsequent events, as Oedipus’s victory over the Sphinx was followed by a period of prosperity and security for the city. During this time, Oedipus also married the beautiful Jocasta, widow of his predecessor, King Laius, who had died under unexplained circumstances while fighting with a young man just outside Thebes.

As the play opens, a new disaster no less menacing than the Sphinx has descended upon the city: a peculiar plague for which no cure can be found is ravaging the population. Desperate, the people turn to the royal family for help. Oedipus’s brother-in-law, Creon, is dispatched to seek answers from the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, who gnomically explains that Thebes is being forced to pay the price for an unclean thing within its walls. Creon and others at court decide this must be an allusion to the unsolved murder of the previous monarch. Oedipus agrees and vows that he personally will see to it that the killer is found and mercilessly punished.

Jocasta’s face darkens as she hears all this. As if for the first time, she remembers another prophecy from long ago, when King Laius was warned that he would perish by his son’s hand. To avert that outcome, Laius had ordered that the baby boy Jocasta later bore him be taken to a mountainside and left there to die.

But of course, there was no getting around fate: the shepherd charged with the task took pity on the infant and instead, in secret, gave him to the king of Corinth to raise as his own. When this boy reached maturity, yet another oracle revealed to the Corinthian king and queen that he would someday kill his father and marry his mother. Determined to avoid such crimes, Oedipus left his adoptive home and travelled the length of Greece, ending up … on the road leading into Thebes.

Jocasta, the first to comprehend what has happened, retires to her rooms in the royal palace and hangs herself. Oedipus finds her swinging from the rafters, cuts down her body and pierces his own eyes with the brooch from her dress. He embraces his two daughters, Ismene and Antigone, who are yet too young to understand the nightmare that is their parents’ situation, and then sends himself into exile, to wander the earth in shame until his death.

5.

We might, here, offer the rejoinder that patricide and incest are judgement errors of a sort that not many of us are liable to make. But the extraordinary dimensions of Oedipus’s hamartia do not detract from the more universal features of the play. Rather, the story moves us insofar as it reflects shocking aspects of everyman’s character and condition: the way apparently small missteps can result in the gravest of consequences; the blindness we often suffer with regard to the effects of our actions; our fatuous tendency to presume that we are in conscious command of our destiny; the speed and finality with which everything we cherish may be lost to us; and the mysterious and unvanquishable forces—for Sophocles, “fate”—against which our weak powers of reason and foresight are pitted. Oedipus is by no means without fault: he hubristically believes himself to have escaped the oracles’ prophecies and lazily accedes to his subjects’ high opinion of him. His pride and hot temper cause him to pick a fight with King Laius, and his emotional cowardice thereafter prevents him from linking the murder to the earlier prophecies. And his self-righteousness permits him to ignore the crime for many years and then to chide Creon for hinting at his guilt.

Ye t even if Oedipus bears responsibility for his own fate, the tragic art form renders any easy condemnation impossible. It apportions blame to him without denying him sympathy. As Aristotle imagined, the audience must leave the theatre appalled yet compassionate, haunted by the universal implications of the concluding message of the chorus:

People of Thebes, my countrymen, look on Oedipus.

He solved the famous riddle with his brilliance,

He rose to power, a man beyond all power.

Who could behold his greatness without envy?

Now what a black sea of terror has overwhelmed him.

Now as we keep our watch and wait the final day,

Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.

6.

If a tragic work allows us to feel a much greater degree of sympathy for others’ failings than we ordinarily might, it is principally because the form itself seeks to plumb the origins of failure. To know more is, in this context, necessarily to understand and forgive more. Tragedy leads us artfully through the minuscule, often innocent acts that connect heroes’ and heroines’ prosperity to their downfall, disclosing along the way the perverse relationships between intentions and consequences. Thus well informed, we are unlikely to maintain for long the indifferent or vengeful tone we might have clung to had we merely read the bare bones of the very same stories of failure in the popular press.

In the summer of 1848, a terse item appeared in many newspapers across Normandy. A twenty-seven-year-old woman named Delphine Delamare, née Couturier, of Ry, a small town not far from Rouen, had tired of the routines of marriage and, after running up huge debts on extravagant purchases of clothing and household goods, had embarked on an affair. Under emotional and financial pressure, she had at last taken her own life by swallowing arsenic. Madame Delamare had left behind a young daughter and a distraught husband, Eugène, who had once studied medicine in Rouen. In his post as a health officer in Ry, the papers noted, Delamare was loved by his patients and respected by the community.

Among those who saw this item was a twenty-seven-year-old aspiring novelist named Gustave Flaubert. The story of Madame Delamare would stay with him, becoming something of an obsession (it even followed him on a journey around Egypt and Palestine) until, in September 1851, he settled down to work on it. Madame Bovary would be published in Paris six years later.

One of the many things that happened when Madame Delamare, the adulteress from Ry, turned into Madame Bovary, the adulteress from Yonville, was that her life began to expand beyond the dimensions of a black-and-white morality tale. As a newspaper story, the case of Delphine Delamare had been seized upon by conservative provincial commentators as an example of the declining respect for marriage among the young, of the increasing commercialisation of society and of the loss of religious values. But for Flaubert, art was the very antithesis of crass moralism. It was a realm in which human motives and behaviour could for once be explored in real depth, with a sensitivity that would make a mockery of any desire on the part of the reader to construe saints or sinners. Flaubert’s audience would hear of Emma’s naive ideas about love, but they would also learn where these had come from: they would follow her back to her childhood, read over her shoulder at the convent, sit with her and her father through long summer afternoons in their kitchen in Tostes, as the squeals and clucks of pigs and chickens drifted in from the yard. They would watch as she and Charles stumbled into an ill-matched marriage, and then witness Charles’s seduction by his own loneliness and a young woman’s physical charms. They would feel Emma’s need to escape her cloistered life, ironically fuelled by her lack of experience with men outside thirdrate romantic literature. Readers would be able to—would have to—sympathise equally with Charles’s complaints about Emma and with Emma’s about Charles. Flaubert seemed to take an almost deliberate pleasure in everywhere unsettling his readers’ inclination to find comfortable answers: no sooner had he presented Emma in a positive light, for example, than he would undercut her with a mordant remark. And then, just as readers were losing patience with her, just as they began to think her nothing more than a selfish hedonist, he would draw them back to her, tell them something about her inner life that would make them cry. By the time she lost her status in her community, crammed arsenic into her mouth and lay down in her bedroom to await her death, few who knew her history would be disposed to judge her.

We set down Flaubert’s novel feeling a mixture of fear and sad-ness—at how we are all made to live before we can even begin to know how, at how limited is our understanding of ourselves and others, at how great and catastrophic are the consequences of our actions, and how often pitiless and uncompromising the responses of upstanding members of the community when we err.

7.

As members of the audience of any tragic work, whether dramatic or literary, we are as far as it is possible to get from the spirit of the headline Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic, insofar as the genre of tragedy itself will have inspired us to abandon ordinary life’s simplified perspective on failure and defeat, and rendered us infinitely more generous towards the foolishness and transgressions endemic to human nature.

A world in which a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

Comedy

1.

The summer of 1831 found King Louis-Philippe of France in a confident mood. The political and economic chaos of the July Revolution, which had brought him to power the year before, was gradually giving way to prosperity and order. He had in place a competent team of officials led by his prime minister, Casimir Périer, and on tours around the northern and eastern parts of his realm had been given a hero’s welcome by the provincial middle classes. He lived in splendour in the Palais-Royal in Paris; attended weekly banquets in his honour; loved eating (especially foie gras and game) and had a vast personal fortune and a loving wife and children.

But there was one cloud on Louis-Philippe’s otherwise sunny horizon: in late 1830, an unknown twenty-eight-year-old artist by the name of Charles Philipon had launched a satirical magazine, La Caricature, in which he now graphically transformed the head of the king (whom he also accused of corruption and incompetence on a grand scale) into a pear. Unflattering as Philipon’s cartoons were, depicting Louis-Philippe with swollen cheeks and a bulbous forehead, they carried an additional, implied disparagement: the French word poire, meaning not only “pear” but “fathead” or “mug,” neatly conveyed a less-than-respectful sentiment regarding the monarch’s administrative abilities.

Enraged by the dig, Louis-Philippe instructed his agents to stop production of the magazine and to buy up all unsold copies from Parisian kiosks. When these measures failed to deter Philipon, prosecutors in November 1831 charged him with having “caused offence to the person of the king,” and summoned him to appear in court. Speaking before a packed chamber, the caricaturist sardonically thanked the government for arresting such a dangerous man as himself, but then he suggested that the prosecutors had been negligent in their pursuit of the king’s detractors. They should make it their priority, he insisted, to go after anything in the shape of a pear; indeed, even pears themselves should be locked up. There were thousands of them on trees all over France, and every one a criminal fit for incarceration. The court was not amused. Philipon was sentenced to six months in prison, and when he dared to repeat the pear joke in a new magazine, Le Charivari, the following year, he was sent straight back to jail. In all, he spent two years behind bars for drawing the monarch as a piece of fruit.

Three decades earlier, Napoleon Bonaparte, then the most powerful man in Europe, had himself felt no less vulnerable to the prick of satire. On coming to power in 1799, he had ordered the closure of every satirical paper in Paris and told his police chief, Joseph Fouché, that he would not tolerate cartoonists’ taking liberties with his appearance. He preferred to leave his visual representation to Jacques-Louis David. He commissioned the great painter to depict him leading his armies across the Alps, looking heroic on a horse, and so pleased was he with the result—Napoleon Crossing the Saint-Bernard (1801)—that he turned to David again to record the apogee of his triumphs, his coronation in Notre-Dame in December 1804. It was an occasion of high pomp: all the grandees of France were gathered, Pope Pius VII officiated and delegations had been dispatched by most European countries to pay their respects. Jean-François Lesueur had composed a suitably imposing score. Blessing Napoleon, the pope called out across the hushed cathedral, “Vivat imperator in aeternam.”

Upon completing his rendition of the scene, Le Sacre de Joséphine, in November 1807, David offered it “to my illustrious master.” A jubilant Napoleon made the painter an officer of the Legion of Honour in recognition of his “services to art” and proclaimed to him, as he pinned the medal on his chest, “You have brought good taste back to France.”

Not all artists, however, saw Napoleon as David did. A couple of years before the unveiling of Le Sacre de Joséphine, the English caricaturist James Gillray had published a very different view of the event, which he entitled The Grand Coronation Procession of Napoleone the 1st Emperor of France (1805). But there was never any talk of awarding him the Legion of Honour for restoring good taste to France.

Jacques-Louis David, Le Sacre de Joséphine, 1807

Gillray’s drawing shows a preening, swollen, strutting emperor at the head of a parade of flunkies, flatterers and prisoners. Pope Pius VII is pictured, but he is hardly the holy man of David’s version: here, the papal robes shelter a choirboy, who lets slip his mask to reveal the face of the devil. Josephine, far from the fresh-faced damsel David would paint, is an acne-scarred balloon. Carrying the train of the emperor are representatives from the countries already conquered by Napoleon—Prussia, Spain and Holland—whose participation does not appear to be precisely voluntary. Behind them are rows of shackled French soldiers, their condition indicating that this is not an emperor to whom the people have given power willingly. Keeping these last in line is Police Chief Fouché, stepping out smartly and, as Gillray explained in the caption, “bearing the Sword of Justice,” which is coated with blood.

The drawing sent Napoleon into a fury. He instructed Fouché to imprison, without benefit of trial, anyone caught trying to smuggle copies of it into France. He lodged a formal diplomatic complaint against Gillray through his ambassador in London and vowed that if he were ever to succeed in invading England, he would personally go looking for the artist. The reaction was characteristic of the Emperor: when negotiating the Treaty of Amiens with England in 1802, Napoleon had attempted to insert a clause stipulating that all British caricaturists who drew him should be treated in the manner of murderers and forgers, who were subject to extradition and prosecution in France. The English negotiators, puzzled by the request, rejected the amendment.

2.

Louis-Philippe and Napoleon would likely not have responded so vehemently if humour were just a game. In fact, as humourists and their targets have long recognised, jokes are an enormously effective means of anchoring a criticism. At base, they are another way of complaining: about arrogance, cruelty or pomposity, about departures from virtue or good sense.

The most subversive comedy of all may be that which communicates a lesson while seeming only to entertain. Talented comics never deliver sermons outlining abuses of power; instead, they provoke their audiences to acknowledge in a chuckle the aptness of their complaints against authority.

Furthermore (the imprisonment of Philipon notwithstanding), the apparent innocence of jokes enables comics to convey with impunity messages that might be dangerous or impossible to state directly. Historically, for example, court jesters could poke fun at royals over serious matters that could never even be alluded to by other courtiers. (When King James I of England, who presided over a notoriously corrupt clergy, had trouble fattening up one of his horses, Archibald Armstrong, the court fool, is said to have advised him that all he had to do was make the creature a bishop, and it would rapidly gain the necessary pounds.) Noting the same impulse in his Jokes and Their Relationship to the Unconscious (1905), Freud wrote, “A joke will allow us to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously.” Through jokes, Freud suggested, critical messages “can gain a reception with the hearer which they would never have found in a non-joking form … [which is why] jokes are especially favoured in order to make criticism possible against persons in exalted positions.”

James Gillray, The Grand Coronation Procession of Napoleone the 1st Emperor of France, 1805

That said, not every exalted person is ripe for the comic plucking. We rarely laugh, after all, at a doctor who is performing an important surgical operation. Yet we may smile at a surgeon who, after a hard day in the operating room, returns home and tries to intimidate his wife and daughters by talking to them in pompous medical jargon. We laugh at what is outsized and disproportionate. We laugh at kings whose self-image has outgrown their worth, whose goodness has not kept up with their power; we laugh at high-status individuals who have forgotten their humanity and begun abusing their privileges. We laugh at, and through our laughter criticise, evidence of injustice and excess.

At the hands of the best comics, laughter hence acquires a moral purpose, jokes become attempts to cajole others into reforming their character and habits. Jokes are a way of sketching a political ideal, of creating a more equitable and saner world. Wherever there is inequity or delusion, space opens up for humour-clad criticisms. As Samuel Johnson saw it, satire is only another method, and a particularly effectual one, of “censuring wickedness or folly.” In the words of John Dryden, “The true end of satire is the amendment of vices.”

3.

History reveals no shortage of jokes intended to amend the vices of high-status groups and shake the mighty out of their pretensions or dishonesty.

In late-eighteenth-century England, for instance, it became fashionable for wealthy young women to wear colossal wigs. Cartoonists offended by the absurdity of the trend quickly produced drawings that amounted to a safe vehicle for urging these ladies to come to their senses—a message that, as Freud would recognise, would have been risky to convey explicitly, given that the wig-wearers owned, or were related or married to men who owned, large tracts of the realm.

At the same time, a fashion for breast-feeding took hold among high-society women, a group who had never before concerned themselves with babies who now insisted on suckling their infants in order to fit in with progressive notions regarding motherhood. Women who hardly knew where the nursery was in their own house began compulsively exposing their breasts, often between courses at luncheons and dinners. Once again, the cartoonists stepped in to call for moderation.

Engraving from the Oxford Magazine, 1771

James Gillray, The Fashionable Mamma, 1796

By the second half of the nineteenth century, yet another affected habit had seized the English upper classes, whose members took to speaking French, especially in restaurants, to demonstrate their intellect and eminence. The editors of Punch saw in the trend a fresh vice to amend.

Scene- A Restaurant near Leicester Square. Jones. “Oh- er- Garsong, regardez eecee- er- apportez- voo le- la-” Waiter. “Beg pardon. Sir. I dont know French!” Jones. “Then for goodness' sake, send me Somebody who does!”

Illustration from Punch, 1895

A century later in the United States, there was more than enough “wickedness and folly”among Manhattan’s elite to keep the cartoonists of the New Yorker occupied. In business, many chief executives had a new interest in seeming friendly to their employees —seeming being, unfortunately, the operative word here. Instead of changing many of their more brutal practices, they contented themselves with camouflaging them with bland technocratic language, which they hoped might lend some respectability to an exploitation not so very different from that perpetrated by the satanic mills of old. The cartoonists, though, were not fooled. At heart, business remained committed to a starkly utilitarian view of employees, wherein any genuine, rather than ritualistic, talk of those employees’fulfilment, or of their employers’ responsibilities to them, was tantamount to heresy.

Slave galley: “Human resources”

So great were the demands of business that many high-ranking executives, particularly lawyers, permitted the clinically efficient mind-set of their jobs to permeate all areas of their lives, usually at the expense of any spontaneity or sympathy.

“You know what I think folks? What’s important is to be warm, decent human beings… ”

“I consider myself a passionate man, but a lawyer first.”

“Joyce, I’m so madly in love with you, I can’t eat etc. but that’s not why I called…”

Meanwhile, a military class was enjoying unparalleled prestige based on its power to destroy the globe. Cartoonists encouraged their audiences to smile critically at the deathly serious demeanour of the generals.

4.

Beyond being a useful weapon with which to attack the high-status of others, humour may also help us to make sense of, and perhaps even mitigate, our own status anxieties.

A great deal of what we find funny has to do with situations or feelings that, were we to experience them in our own, ordinary lives, would likely cause us either embarrassment or shame. The greatest comics shine a spotlight on vulnerabilities that the rest of us are all too eager to leave in the shadow; they pull us out of our lonely relationship with our most awkward sides. The more private the flaw and the more intense the worry about it, the greater the possibility of laughter—laughter being, in the end, a tribute to the skill with which the unmentionable has been skewered.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, much humour comprises an attempt to name, and thereby contain, anxiety over status. Comedy reassures us that there are others in the world no less envious or socially fragile than ourselves; that other fellow spirits wake up in the early hours feeling every bit as tormented by their financial performance as we do by our own; and that beneath the sober appearance society demands of us, most of us are daily going a little bit out of our minds, which in itself should give us cause to hold out a hand to our comparably tortured neighbours.

“Which Microsoft Millionaire are you thinking about now?”

“I usually wake up screaming at six-thirty, and I’m in the office by nine.”

Rather than mocking us for being so concerned with status, the kindest comics tease us: they criticise us while simultaneously implying that our basic selves are essentially acceptable. If they are both acute and tactful enough, we may acknowledge with an openhearted laugh bitter truths about ourselves from which we might have recoiled in anger or hurt had they been levelled at us in an ordinary—which is to say, accusatory—way.

5.

Comics, no less than other artists, hence fit rewardingly into Matthew Arnold’s definition of art as a discipline offering criticism of life. Their work strives to correct both the injustices of power and the excesses of our envy of those positioned above us in the social hierarchy. Like tragedians, they are motivated by some of the most regrettable aspects of the human condition.

The underlying, unconscious aim of comics may be to bring about, through the adroit use of humour, a world in which there will be a few less things for us to laugh about.

“Of course they’re clever. They have to be clever. They haven’t got any money.”