SPIN TH

by that "energetic experience "which a work of art can give us. For the sake of simplicity I will confine myself to a single issue-to that kind of energetic experience invariably afforded by that small body of imaginative literature which the world has a

present emotions which can still move us; without Homer, the society which they describe would have vanished from human knowledge; through Homer, it is an intimate and cherished part of our experience. This kind of supremacy belongs, I think, to ?schylus and Sophocles, and might perhaps be attributed to the Gospel of S. Mark

in large measure achieved what they set out to do (lesser artists have done that), but that they have set out to do a big thing, to give us the most intense kind of experience that we can have.

is the only intense feeling of many jaded moderns. Humanity, however devitalised, however incapable of varied passions, does not lose the love passion so long as it has the animal instinct of the fly and the rudimentary human instinct to idealise. But a race

e it, for if we eliminated it half of our best lyrical poetry would go. For we count it a distinction in English poetry that upon this theme the changes have been rung so fi

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foe in t

stronger fa

a horse,

make it, in the modern emasculate manner, a substitute for valour, faith, honour; it is not opposed to t

acquired is almost the opposite of passivity; it implies a state of the soul in unrest, a state requiring action. Passion is a suffering where the mind assails the body and torments it with an ideal imperative; and it is the double tragedy of passion that the will may not be strong enough, as in the case of Hamlet, to translate that imperative into action; and second, as we have it in Faust, that the object, when attained, proves to be not the thing that was desired. In

ake a tragic passion of ambition; if jealousy is a little vice with no more than small results it cannot be the theme of imaginative literature; if the religious ideal cannot be conceived as possessing the whole soul, we cannot appreciate the religious passion of a John Inglesant; if revenge is no more than spite there can be no Hamlet, nor a Lear if arrogance is unmixed with love and honour. If, to-day, the passion of love is treated more often than any other emotion, that is probably because the one capacity for intense experience, which never seems to desert the human race, is the capacity to identify the sex impulse with

become ideal; the painful and ever frustrated effort of the individual to become universal; or conversely, the painful condition of the human soul which sees

pr

assion; how el

help in passi

les, four boards, two actors, and a passion.'" The passionate hero either strains towards an idealised object, or he still proclaims his yearning after the ideal by the lamentations with which he curses his ill-fate. Throughout Greek tragedy there is an undercurrent of protest against inexorable Fate which is set against the realisation of the ideal. The passion of Prometheus sum

s Sport to

spiritual beauty. The beauty seems broken; the earth and its foulness remain, and the anguished spirit sees the foulness exaggerated by contrast with its ideal. Lear, who had seen his daughters as paragons

ence can satisfy that the anguish of striving and the anguish of failure are the subjects of art. A play such as Marlowe's Tamburlaine can never be regarded as great drama. Amid scenes of magnificence and splendid savage rhetoric Tamburlaine passes on from triumph to triumph, the incarnation of the conquering will. There are numberless detached passages of what we may call lyrical poetry-for a lyrical poem expresses no more than a moment's mood, a single phase of the sequence which is passion. But there is no passionate sequence i

ause they are "painful" or "grim." If it had been because these books or plays were "passionate" that the public had refused to attend, I should have understood the complaint. Pain without passion may be scientifically interesting, but it has no artistic content, no high emotional significance. Indeed, it is not true to suppose that the public dislikes the spectacle of the painful or the ugly. All know something of the fascination which disturbed Leontius, the son of Aglaion, who, coming up from the Pir?us, observed dead bodies on the ground; and desir

oduce art it is sufficient merely to reproduce fact. The word "Truth" has been introduced in the most shameless fashion. It is true that there are men without arms and legs and noses, but to delineate such a creature with exquisite accuracy is not to produce a faithful rendering of life. It is true that there are drab, sordid, expressionless lives, without happiness, without hope, without ideals. To describe these lives in all their miserable detail may be of infinite value for social and reforming purposes. It may be the duty of every one of us to study these sores in the body politic for the existence of which we are collectively responsible. It may be craven cowardice not to open our eyes wide to these painful and hideous facts, which cry out to be removed and prevented. And if any person whose enthusiasm in

s dependent upon singleness of aim and enthusiasm. It is true that there is no subject whatsoever that may not lend itself to treatment. But it must be treated for its own sake, disinterestedly. Literature will not move us greatly unless it is concerned with great emotions. It will not

for Art's sake," or for that typically French view the expressi

tisfaire, vous n'auriez qu'à mouler un beau modèle de la tête aux pieds, pour faire un chef d'?uvre. Ou, si vous exécutiez cette idée, vous ne produiriez qu'un grotesque. Le talent consiste à compléter la nat

n object that these ideals are not real, that they are not true to life, and indeed the most vital part of life. The passions they call forth in men are the most real, the most vivid, the most illuminating; they widen and refine experience; they bring us into a larger universe, they add to the stature of personality, they are the means of growth. Literature is an expansion of the mind out of the narrower truth into the larger. It despises no experience, but drags to light its hidden resources, its unexpected wealth. It is profoundly interested in experience on its intense, that is to say, its passionate side. The original mind, not content to find poetic value in a single emotion such as that of love, finds it on all sides, discovering interests here, there, and everywhere. If it concentrates on one of these for the purposes of a poem, a play, a novel, it neglects, of course, no adventitio