CHRIST IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
411
Other literatures besides the American, notably the Russian, have
humanized and animated the person of Christ, though in altogether
different ways determined by their own cultural traditions. Among
the Russians it is most often the perfect, the entirely good or entirely
selfless man, who finds his supreme ideal in Christ. In American
literature, Christ has become an emblem for the man who suffers
in spite, or perhaps because, of his innocence. He thus serves a special
function, resulting from the curious predicament in which the tragic
hero finds himself in America.
To speak of the "tragic American hero" implies a paradox. Is
there, or can there be, true tragic feeling, candidly confessed, in
American literature? Does the American writer regard tragic exper–
ience as an unavoidable and necessary part of life? The answer, to
all appearances,
is
no; and
this
is what fundamentally distinguishes
the American from many European writers. The acceptance of tragic
experience poses a crucial problem for an affirmatively democratic
literature, and in American writing has resulted in a curiously twisted
state of affairs which calls for a redeemer such as appears in the
figure of Christ. Basically-and this
is
grossly simplified for the pur–
poses of demonstration-the American hero is the essentially inno–
cent man, the new Adam of the New World, living within the best
of conceivable societies, a society he himself has made according to
his ideals, intent on the pursuit of some sort of happiness and as–
sured in his belief that happiness is what he has a right to expect.
There can, of course, be something wrong with society; it is pos–
sible for it to fall short of its ideals and expose the hero to suffering.
That happened in the later course of the nineteenth century, and
the resulting complications were vigorously exploited by the natural–
istic and social-critical writers. Henry James explored another pos–
sibility by sending his innocent heroes, or heroines, to old and evil
Europe in order to involve them in tragic or nearly tragic experience,
even if only as its innocent victims. But the novelists we are here con–
cerned with discharge their task on another level of experience. They
present the essentially innocent man who meets an inexplicable and
irredeemable adversity ("irredeemable" and "irremediable" are favor–
ite words of Faulkner) in the very condition of life-an evil exceeding
any social
ill
and something for which nothing in the man's view of
life has prepared him. In that sense Billy Budd is really the prototype
