Shakespeare is remembered for his tragedies; otherwise, we would hear less of Shakespeare and more of Congreve. Chaucer, too, was a great writer but wrote no tragedies. The Canterbury Tales contains one or two dark stories but they are too few, and not his metier. And Chaucer, with his greatness, is not the father of English literature.
I am less familiar with Spanish literature than I would like to be. But it seems to me that the Spanish literary genius has traditionally lain in satire, in comedy. It has, to my knowledge, no Macbeth or Crime and Punishment. And its success among English-speakers, at least, is somewhat less than that of both the French and the German.
As for Crime and Punishment, if it is not Dostoyevsky's greatest work, it is among his darkest. The Brothers Karamazov also does well among readers; better than The Idiot, which has no murder, or none of sufficient dramatic importance to be remembered.
Borges wrote many fine fictions, but his best-anthologized stories, "Death and the Compass" and "The Garden of Forking Paths" contain murder.
Some may argue that Mark Twain was as great a writer as Poe; some will argue that he was greater. But his genius was satire; and the best-remembered of his novels is best-loved for its darkness. It must content his reputation to be less than Poe's, although his work may be preferred by those whose tastes are otherwise than of the popular character.
"The Overcoat" may be the greatest Russian short story of all time; or not. But "The Queen of Spades" is more popularly anthologized.
Goethe's works are far more numerous than most readers familiar with his name suspect. But they remember the suicide of Werther and the satanic bargain of Faust.
France has produced a galaxy of literary greats. But from my vantage, I think that no works are so popularly received as "The Horla" and the bleak novels of the existentialists.
I have made these disparate observations in the hope of gaining credence for an opinion that I am not inclined to belabor with systematic proof: namely, that the most popular, enduring and cosmopolitan power of literary work consists in works of darkness. This is not a phenomenon limited to fiction alone, but it applies also to poetry and essays. Are "The Garden of Cyrus" and "Religio Medici" inferior in skill or raw inspiration to "Hydriotaphia", and to its fifth part so particularly? But the fifth part is a concentrated meditation on death, and so is better remembered and more frequently read.
Wordsworth may or may not have been greater than Coleridge, but Coleridge wrote the "Ancient Mariner", which is remembered where every poem of Wordsworth's is forgotten. I am not sure either that "Don Juan" is not better than "Childe Harold" but "Childe Harold" is darker. The greatest lyrics are elegies, whether Milton's, Gray's or Tennyson's. Villon's greatest ballad was "The Ballad of the Hanged". Pope was brilliant but is generally less admired than a sloppier, though darker, romantic.
The exceptions to this rule will usually, if not invariably, be found to be not such. Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year has a darker subject perhaps than Robinson Crusoe; it certainly has a grimmer title. But I am not sure that the story itself is darker; and it is, unlike Crusoe, put forward in a more quasi-historical than dramatic manner. For that reason, it may be more cause to wonder that the Journal is remembered at all.
Lysistrata is remembered, but Oedipus has become a colloquialism. Dante wrote of three worlds but readers are drawn to the nethermost.
E.F. Benson is an interesting case. He wrote many horror stories but he also wrote the much lighter Lucia novels. I have not read them, and cannot judge them. But, sight unseen, I suspect that the best of the latter will be outlasted by the best of the former. W.W. Jacobs was primarily a writer of comic tales, and they were very good; but he is remembered mainly for "The Monkey's Paw" and other tales similarly dark. P.G. Wodehouse wrote no dark stories, and so his work cannot allow similar comparison. But his stories continue in fine popularity because (what some are curiously reluctant to admit) he was a genius. Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray suffers a somewhat confused comparison with his comedies; Dorian Gray is great but adulterated, mixed with humor and essay, while his comedies are purely comedies. And the novel and the plays may continue in their unnatural parity of success.
In a satire or comedy, it is not surprising and often appropriate for the writer to treat of trivial matters. But trivial matters are often local and transient. The very things that most bear caricature are the most changeable, while to treat of matters more universal necessarily draws the subject from manners to morals, and thus from what is complained of to what is killed for. This is a fact testified to by the peculiar character of Gulliver's Travels.
But dark stories resist triviality and transience by their nature; resist in practice and forbid in success. The weakest point of Macbeth is the lightest and least frequently remembered—the porter's scene. Moby Dick is not without lightness but the lightness is rarely quoted, and quotation is a form of judgment.
A mundane object may be an agent of horror, but so far as it is trivial, it becomes absurd. A dead man's house may be terrible; his shoes, somewhat less so; we will try not to think of the terror of his toothbrush.
The advantage of these differences to dark literature is the universal appeal of its characteristic concerns. Hamlet may well satirize the pretentious manner of a messenger; and we indeed recognize pretension. But pretension is an annoyance, and we are not so easily drawn into sympathy by an annoyance as we are by a grave offence. Fear, horror, murder, madness, monstrosity—these are more portable, more easily and universally grasped and sympathetic.
There are undoubtedly peoples among whom comedies are or were preferred; a certain Persian prince and his court may have had no patience for anything but levity. But such a national preference is as transient as the excellent good fortune that enables the condescension; and even the most materially easy of men find reason in time to dwell on darkness. Every revelry comes to an end, and even so little a thing as the end of revelry is suggestive, in its falling away, of the literature here under consideration.
There are some palates that may seem resistant to tales of darkness, but this is only conditionally true. A grave matter can succeed against coarse sense when it is carried with conviction, clarity and inexorable purpose. The dark tale that fails against such hearers may fail miserably, but success will be correspondingly profound.
This is not an essay on the worthlessness of comedy, much less on that of humor. Everything, anyway, tends to become false when overemphasized or exaggerated. I mention these points merely because they seem significant both of practical and spiritual realities, and thus of ordering principles.
Our society is, or has been, one that resists constriction, and hence resists strict catagorizations. And it may appear in the light of narrow-mindedness to divide literature two ways and give prominence to the darker part. But as the dark and light are distinguished by properties from which they derive the distinction of names, and as properties properly called must have effects, so the effects differ and are of unequal power and usage. The distinction may be viewed in the light of practicality, little or not at all different from the qualities of velocity or depth, and suffering in fact a multitude of mixtures and concentrations.
In sum, the darkness which bespeaks destruction has a power in art that cannot be supplied by any amount of skill in a lighter vein. Its power is weakened by an excess either of triviality or vehemence. Excessively particularized cruelties, violence and perversion deplete its strength just as much as excess of pleasantry; they are both forms of frivolity. True darkness is immobile and disinterested. If it is expressive of movement, of emotion, it will not be on account of the means or mode of destruction. Its emphasis is on absolute result. Its dignity and darkness are inseparable to the extent that they are pure. And if it is satirized, it waits, and engulfs the satirist.
