James's "automatic sweetheart," however plausibly the behavioristic philosophers may have argued that it ought to be "just as good" as the genuine article.
Whenever, from excessively reading the results of the intelligence tests, or the daily newspapers, or the weekly journals of opinion, or the seasonal output of small-town biographical novels—whenever from too long immersion in the turbulent surf of our discontent, one emerges, chilled and despairing of the Republic, one should read as a stimulant and as a restorative the biography of one of our representative men who have "returned to nature" by retiring from office.
The season's biographies and the season's fiction, as fiction is written nowadays, equally recite, with a fair degree of veracity, the adventures of contemporary men; but in the one case the hero is ordinarily a quite insignificant person enmeshed in a Freudian "complex" and depicted with entire disregard of the Aristotelian maxim that "no very minute animal can be beautiful," while, in the other case, the hero is usually a person by nature "of a certain magnitude," increased by his participation in the great affairs of the world. Whenever one wonders why so much of our fiction seems ugly and depressing and why, on the other hand, so much of our biography affects us as stimulating, consolatory and beautiful, one should recall that neglected assertion of Aristotle's: "Whatever is beautiful must be of a certain magnitude." And then one should recklessly thank whatever gods there be that
