These principles, it goes without saying, are not accepted by writers today; the average author is not aware of them, or if he is, he takes refuge in another remark of Aristotle’s, that perhaps tragedy was destined to develop into something different from the type of poetry produced by Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides; perhaps new principles, we say, in the too familiar formula, are needed for new material. So think many of our poets and novelists who give us sordid and wretched characters to contemplate, yet invite us to feel toward them not the satiric regret, but the old pity and terror of noble tragedy. That the principles do persist, however, very much as Aristotle described them, is evidenced by the difficulty the readers still have with such books; the authors argue their case, or critics argue it for them, but common humanity remains unconvinced that misery is a proper subject for permanent contemplation. In our age especially, when the impulse to social good works is highly developed, it is a curious paradox that writers should expect us to associate in art, as habitual companions, with types of character which in real life we should hasten to rescue and to change. It is generous of the writers to suppose that in a humane age the reader will be ready to discern the heroic even beneath handicaps and afflictions, and probably the reader is thus ready, but the writers forget that in any age, particularly in a humane one, we do not like to contemplate, in the permanence of art, heroic character smothered beneath handicaps and afflictions. And in justice to the embarrassed reader it should be added that often the character is not heroic at all, and the only claim put forth for it is that it might have been attractive if it had not been smothered.