turns to dust.

The passions with which literature deals run side by side with actions
that are impelled by ideals. The richest mind is that which can
idealise every kind of activity, which can see what we call poetry in
every commonplace, which can read destiny in apparently petty desires,
which widens the vision of life by seeing in every action man in
relation to the Universe. In art and in life passions are limited by
the bounds of our perceptive imagination; by the extent to which we
are capable of seeing and feeling things intensely. If we only see or
feel ambition as a petty and sordid thing, in a petty and sordid
person, we cannot make 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 an ideal. The great artist
is not confined to this one channel of idealism. He sees branching out
in every direction all the human activities intensified or refined by
a spirituality which the lesser person sees only under the stress of
love. But this fact is to be noticed, that whether it is love of a
woman, whether it is ambition, whether it is love of humanity, whether
it is religious zeal, revenge, or anything else whatsoever on a great
scale, passion implies idealism, an object set before the mind in its
spiritual or imaginative capacity, and that the intensity of the
passion is enhanced by the difficulty of the quest.

Great passion, then, is a kind of critical union, or rather
half-union, of body and soul. It is the perpetual effort of the body
to become soul, the real to 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 its
ideal shattered and its glory reduced to dust and ashes. Its character
is a problem for religion no less than for aesthetics. It is Browning
who declares:

But priests
Should study passion; how