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
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Senator’s Daughter
Oedipus the King:
Royal in Incest Shocker
Madame Bovary:
Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows
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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.