mmon 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."

But let us for a moment examine this matter of passion with which
great creative literature is so evidently concerned. No acute physical
pain or thrilling sensuous delight is ever dignified with the name of
passion, in the significant sense of the word; the essence of passion
is mental, or spiritual; emotion made intense by idealism turned in a
definite direction, that is to say, by the idealising of an object
which a man has set before himself. The meaning the word has 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 a great
passion the mind is set upon an object which it idealises beyond the
possibility of complete satisfaction, and there is suffering because
the will is thwarted and cheated of its ideal. Macbeth's passionate
ambition to be a king, encouraged in him by the witches' chant, is an
ambition for something that no being a king can satisfy; and the
tragedy of his passion lies in the painful effort by which he wins his
object and the painful disillusion when it