The effect of the excellence or the inferiority of the character on the book was long ago observed by Aristotle, when he said that tragedy and the epic—that is, all serious literature—will aim at representing men as better than in actual life, and that comedy and satire will represent them as worse. In this second kind of writing, he added, satire came first, and it was Homer who laid down the principles of comedy, by dramatizing the ludicrous instead of composing personal satire. This famous observation of the ancient critic has been too often read as doctrine, as though Aristotle were telling us what should take place in literature, whereas he is recording what actually does take place. If you wish to write a story or a play in which the reader can lose himself with delight, you must portray character better than the reader, character which in some degree satisfies and strengthens his aspirations. If you wish the reader to laugh at the world, or to scorn it, or to feel the need of improving it, you portray for him character in a condition inferior to his estimate of himself; if you wish him to profit by that wholesome self-observation which we call the comic-spirit, you mingle satire with tragedy—you show him character which satisfies his aspirations, so that he will identify himself with it, and which at the same time is inferior in some respects to what he would prefer to be, so that he must laugh at himself. He will have a tendency to save the day for self-respect by laughing, not at himself, but at human nature, and the universal comic spirit will then have come to birth, akin to both satire and tragedy, but more nearly a dramatizing of the ludicrous, as Aristotle said, than a scoring of personal faults.