“I don’t know who it was that said it, but it may be that the creation of the United States is the greatest political act in the history of mankind.” Charlton Heston
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QUESTION: Could you address the question of how the arts can assist us in strengthening our national character?
CHARLTON HESTON: Shakespeare is the outstanding example of how that can be done. In all of Shakespeare’s plays, no matter what tragic events occur, no matter what rises and falls, we return to stability in the end. Society mends its wounds. And that’s invariably true in all the tragedies, in the comedies as well. And certainly in the histories.
I think you see it less clearly in painting, though there, too … the paintings up through the 19th century tended to be paintings of great events which came to a successful conclusion, but not invariably: We see paintings of the flood, and so forth … the destruction of the Golden Calf. But those too came out satisfactorily in the end … the Lord sets his rainbow in the sky and says, “Never again will I cause a flood to come upon the earth.”
To a lesser extent that’s true in the novel. But again, through the 19th century, given extraordinary and undeniably great exceptions like Moby Dick, which has a tragic ending, most great novels close with a somewhat benign view of the world, not so when you get into Theodore Dreiser, when it begins to change. I suppose you see it more and more in our times now, with … well, I can describe it more securely and in greater detail in film, which obviously I’ve been more intimately involved with than 19th century novels, except as a consumer of them.
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