III
PASSIONS SPIN THE PLOT[ToC]
If the reader has borne with my audacity in generalising about the main functions of imaginative literature, he will be willing to pursue a further and plainer question concerning its subject-matter. It is time to discuss a little more fully what I mean 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 agreed to regard as supreme. If we can understand how literature in its greatest examples provides us with an "addition to life," we can, if we are in the mind to do so, extend the inquiry to the lighter and less intense experiences of secondary literature.
By "supreme" literature I mean the literature which has proved itself to be supreme—supreme by virtue of its conquest over time and over changes in thought and environment. The Iliad and the Odyssey are in a language which we should have to learn if only for the sake of these two epics; they still profoundly interest us, they 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 Æschylus and Sophocles, and might perhaps be attributed to the Gospel of S. Mark, if that book may be considered as imaginative literature. Virgil and Dante—in part at least—are of this order, as also are Milton, in Samson Agonistes and the earlier books of Paradise Lost, and Goethe in the first part of Faust. And there are few besides Mr. Shaw who would deny such supremacy to the tragedies of Shakespeare.
Now these authors have survived, and are likely to survive, for a variety of reasons. But what is common to them all, and what makes us set especial store on them, is not merely that they have 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. In other words, they have produced the fineness which emerges through the intensity of human passion, and it is in proportion to their fine realisation of passion that we find them most moving.
I am not, of course, using the word "passion" in its modern vulgarised sense. For just as the word "romance" is often degraded to signify no more than a petty love affair, so the word "passion" has been appropriated to the amorous, sexual pre-occupation which 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 must be strangely incurious if the only romance it can conceive is the romance of a youth and a maid, and its only passion the passion of sexual desire. Yet such is the state of mind—to judge by the common usage of words—of the major portion of modern society.
Needless to say, I am not wishing to disparage the literature of love, whether it be poetry, fiction, or of any other kind. English people least of all can afford to belittle 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 finely and to such exquisite effect. But much of the fineness of love poetry is to be distinguished from the fineness of the emotion of love. Lovelace declares to his Lucasta:
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
That is in the true spirit of English love poetry, which does not so idealise the amorous passion as to make it, in the modern emasculate manner, a substitute for valour, faith, honour; it is not opposed to the manly virtues; it may be the song which a warrior sings to the clank of "a sword, a horse, a shield."