The Pleasant and the Unpleasant

The Appeal of the Wicked to a Respectable but Somewhat Timid Society

ALDOUS HUXLEY

THE life of a newspaper editor resembles the discouraging eternity of those who, in hell, try to fill sieves with water. Twelve pages, twenty-four pages—and as, with every advance of civilization, every acquisition of leisure, universal boredom and the urgent need of distraction grow and grow, the number will gradually increase—must daily be filled with reading matter. Every day, every damned day, from forty thousand to a quarter of a million words have to be poured into the bottomless waste-paper baskets, the dustbins, the insatiable sewers of the world. And there is no respite; there can be no slackening off. However little there is to say, the page' must be filled.

Sisyphus had to push a stone up a hill; when it got to the top, the stone rolled irresistibly down and he had to begin again. But at any rate the 'tone was always there; Sisyphus was not expected to produce it and re-produce it each time, like a rabbit, out of his empty hat. The newspaper man has to push just as hard as Sisyphus and just as hopelessly; he must also conjure up his stone, every day, out of nothing. Hence the silliness that is in newspapers. Reading it, we should feel, not irritation, but pity for the miserable wretches who have been reduced to such desperate shifts.

I CAUGHT a pathetic note of desperation in recent comments in England on Mr. Noel Coward's play "Fallen Angels." Here was a little dramatic anecdote, skilfully and amusingly told; a trifle scabrous, perhaps—but after all, since ladies have taken to tobacco, the smoking-room story, as we all know, has found its way into the drawing-room; why pretend that it hasn't: And in any case, "Fallen Angels" is very mild smoking indeed— hardly tobacco even; the merest grass; but very pleasantly scented withal, and of an indubitably contemporary flavour. Nobody but a harassed journalist, driven to his wit's end to find food for our waste-paper baskets, would have dreamed of making much ado about this graceful nothing. But the waste-paper baskets gaped; desperately, the ado was made. Mr. Coward was reproached for having falsified life by presenting nothing but its sordid side, for having libelled humanity by showing only unpleasant characters. (As if it were necessary, or even possible, to put the whole of life and every sort of humanity into a brief and witty anecdote! But let that pass.) His taste and his morals were impugned; he was accused of sapping the foundations of society. And so on and so on. A lot of space was easily filled.

In the circumstances, the fuss was ridiculous; for Mr. Coward's play is not in the least unpleasant. Fhe professional moralists of the evening papers made a bad choice. If they had hit on something that was really unpleasant, a fuss might have been worth making. Or rather, not a fuss; for fusses don't get anyone anywhere; a critical enquiry, shall we saw for the subject, after all, is an interesting one. Should plays and novels always be pleasant? Do readers and spectators in general want their

entertainments to be pleasant? Do they object to unpleasantness?

It we are to believe the evening papers, the public doesn't like unpleasantness. It wants the characters in its books and plays to be good; or if unpleasant people must be brought in, it demands that they shall be counterbalanced, conquered and put to shame by the virtuous. And if it doesn't want these things —well, it ought to. Are these papers right?

IT will be as well to leave the moral question out of account; people ought, no doubt, to do a great many things that they don't do. Let us confine ourselves to facts. Do people, as a matter of fact, like unpleasantness? Or don't they" To me it seems sufficiently obvious that they do, if not exactly like it, at least take a profound interest in unpleasantness. We are interested in the hundredth straying sheep, not merely because we want to bring it back into the fold with the other ninety-nine, but for its own sake, just because it has strayed. Evil fascinates us as such. (And don't the journalists know it? What sells their paper is not the grave, more-sorrowful-than-angry denunciation of unpleasant authors; it is the lively and lengthy descriptions of murder, fraud, lust and cruelty on the other pages.) We like police news and unpleasant fiction for the same reason as we like chatty items about actresses and the Prince of Wales, happv endings and the lives of saints. We like them because they show us what we might he, potentially or ideally, but in dull fact are not. Actresses and the Prince of Wales, unbelievably happy endings and holiness—what are they but our dramas made actual? We would all like to be popular, rich, powerful, extraordinarily lucky and—the longing is quite as intense—extraordinarily good. There are other moments, however, when, tired of being respectable, we wish that we had the courage of our instincts, when we long to carry everv vclleity of vice in us to its logical conclusion in action. Stavrogin and Leopold and Loeb, Nero and Mine. Marncffc are as much fulfilments of our dreams as Prince Mishkin and St. Francis, Alexander the Great and the heroes and heroines of all the fairy tales. Even the lowest, the most disgusting villains arc dream fulfilments of a part of our potential selves. 'True, we may never actually desire to be like the hero of Dostoievsky's "Letters from the Underworld" the most repulsively unpleasant character, with the possible exception of Little Judas in Shchedrin's "Golovieff Family," in all fiction; but the fact that we can recognize in him certain of our own weaknesses makes us take the deepest interest in him. We see what, but for the grace of God, we might be. We are excused, by this vicarious actualization of our worst potentialities, from making the personal experiment of total depravity. Little Judas and his kind arc scapegoats. We live respectable lives and they sin for us. And since we also live dull lives, worldly and perhaps furtively vicious lives, we must have Prince Charming and actresses to lead us out of the drabness into fairylands, we must have saints to shame us into going heavenwards.

WE like unpleasant characters, then; we are deeply interested in them. But there is much truth in thecontention of the evening paper moralists that we don't like them alone and bv themselves. Things exist only in virtue of their opposites. Significance is begotten by the coupling of extremes. A single extreme, isolated, has no meaning. True, we can and do mcntallv supply the deficiencies of a book or play which isolates a single moral extreme from the opposite that gives it its meaning. But it would be better if the work had no deficiencies. The painter of a complete picture illuminates unpleasantness by pleasantness, and vice versa. Moreover, the uniformly unpleasant work, like the uniformly pleasant, tends to be dull, because it suppresses that element of conflict which is the soul of all drama. It is impossible for us, being what we are, to envisage the material world except in terms of space and time; and similarly, being what we arc, we cannot think of that other world—the world of the spirit—except in terms of conflicting good and evil. Unpretentious little anecdotes, like "Fallen Angels" or the novelle of Boccacio, can bombinate gracefully in the moral void; all that is required of them is that they should lie self-consistent and deftly told. But serious drama ought in some sort to represent symbolically our view—our uncscapably, inevitably moral view—of life. A play, a novel, in which there is no conflict, no crucial alternative between good and evil, strikes us as dull. Mr. Joyce's Ulysses is an obvious example.

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In spite of its very numerous qualities—it is, among other things, a kind of technical handbook, in which the young novelist can study all the possible and many of the quite impossible ways of telling a story—Ulysses is one of the dullest books ever written, and one of the least significant. This is due to the total absence from the hook of any sort of conflict and to the absolutely static nature of the characters. Bloom is consistently and statically unpleasant. At no point in the course of that interminable narrative does he make anything in the nature of a choice between pleasantness and unpleasantness. He is just a Theophrastian character: "The Nasty Man." Theophrastus would have described him in a page. Mr. Joyce has taken six or seven hundred to produce a portrait no more significant.

The unrelievedly pleasant, obviously enough, is as unsatisfactory from the point of view of completeness and significance as the unrelievedly unpleasant. To those who find actual life too overwhelmingly depressing it may be medicinally valuable as a sedative and restorative—just as unrelieved unpleasantness may be good for those who live too shelteredly and comfortablv.

So far, I have looked at the matter only from the reader's point of view. Writers are also readers (sometimes) and they have the same general reasons for taking an interest in unpleasantness. But it seems to me that they have a further reason—a special, almost technical reason—for liking bad characters. For it is a curious, hut undeniable fact, that, just as joy is far harder to express in words than grief or pain, so goodness is more difficult to describe than evil. Of the well-drawn, completely realized characters of fiction, more are on ihe whole unpleasant than pleasant. Convincing examples of positively holy characters are exceedingly rare. Dostoyevsky's "Idiot" and "Alyosha" are among the very few of them who really live.

Why should it be so hard to express pure joy without sinking into insipidity, or to describe unalloyed and perfect virtue without seeming to cant and snuffle through the nose and tell lies? It is not easy to say. The difficulty of achieving these things in art seems to he exactly proportional to the difficulty of achieving them in life.