Can we find anywhere an acceptable opinion about what may be called the ideal governing the hard-boiled story? Do any of its practitioners give us an inkling (apart from the example their work provides) of what they require of their hero? Here again I must turn to Mr. Chandler; 'In everything that can be called art', he says, 'there is a quality of redemption.' I must pause here and ask you to observe that we have now come upon another instance of a writer describing the phenomenon Aristotle called catharsis. Like Keats and Wordsworth, Mr. Chandler was probably not thinking of Aristotle and was making for himself a discovery Aristotle made for criticism generally over two thousand years ago. Mr. Chandler may, however, be deeply read in his Aristotle, and this possibility ruled out his observations from the earlier discussion, although I permitted myself the use of his term 'redemption'. Whatever the exact relation of Mr. Chandler and Aristotle the modern writer places the experience he calls 'redemption' as centrally in his reflections on his art as did Aristotle catharsis in his observations on tragedy:

     In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honour, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honour in one thing, he is that in all things.
     He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
     The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you. . . .
      If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

     Did time permit I should like to enter a demurrer on behalf of duchesses and then draw out the similarities between Chandler's hero and Hamlet. Unfortunately, there are still a number of topics that must somehow be fumbled up into however loose a conclusion, and I can take the comparison only a little way, but far enough, I hope, to persuade you to take it farther. 'He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness' as Hamlet does to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to the grave-diggers, to Osric. 'He has a range of awareness that startles you' as does Hamlet in his soliloquies or with the actors or Horatio. 'He must be a man of honour . . . and certainly without saying it' -- and it is one of the stumbling-blocks that critics fall over when they argue that Hamlet cannot be a man of honour because so far is he from claiming to be so that he regularly represents himself as a rogue or peasant slave or a coward or a brute. And I need not add that those who failed to treat Hamlet as a proud man would be sorry, if they could still be sorry for themselves, that they ever saw him.     (173-176)

   The Hamlet story in Saxo and Belleforest, whatever the intermediate stages may have done, presents the reader with a type of human perfection. . . . Hamlet's is a perfection in keeping with the circumstances of the times in which he lived. Hamlet was an example to men in a world where no quarter need be asked, and Hamlet neither expected nor begged it. He is a worthy son of his famous hard-fighting father.
   It is this relation between father and son, hardly touched on in the original, that Shakespeare has so wonderfully developed in the first act of his play. A network of relations, and the awareness that goes with this more complicated and integrated system, are created before our eyes. This is the nervous system as it were which provides the possibility of a new and more developed form of perfection, if on the heels of one generation a fresh perfection may tread. In Shakespeare, as we suggested earlier, Hamlet's father belongs to the heroic age; he inhabits the world in which Saxo places his son. When we come to Shakespeare, Hamlet has had time to study at Wittenberg; he belongs to a later world, but his task is not lighter than his father's. Where his father had wrestled with flesh and blood, the son has now an adversary of a more metaphysical and spectral kind. He must still carry the sword but he knows it may well be a sword that will not save.   (168-169)