else cure mankind,
Who come for help in passionate extremes?

The dramatist and the novelist need no more than the power to create
such a passion; for the greater includes the less; it is not achieved
in art, unless plot, narrative, style, and all the subsidiary devices
have served to expose it in its reality and its intensity. This is
presumably what Dumas _pere_ meant in the lines which Henley quotes
from him: "All _he_ wanted was 'four trestles, 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 sums up the perpetual agony of the human race in its
perpetual striving to rise beyond its limitations. The tragic irony of
the Greeks is but the expression of the tragedy of passion in its
pitiful reaction from hope, the intensity of feeling with which men
see desire defeated and ideal unattainable. So, too, in the most
intense moments the characters of Shakespeare become ironical:

Misery makes Sport to mock itself.

And we can readily understand, what some persons have thought strange,
that Ophelia's language should become coarse, like Lear's, in the full
tide of bitterness. It is the reaction after the perception of a
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,
sees them now as centaurs; he, who had adored their filial devotion,
compares them now to the most obscene things which can besmirch the
sight; nothing is too shameful to express the fall from that ideal.

We see, then, why it is that the highest forms of literature are
necessarily concerned with pain. It is not merely that art requires
intensity of feeling, and that the emotion of pain is the most intense
we know. It is because the highest literature must necessarily be
concerned with human beings in their most profound aspirations, in
their most deeply experienced strivings each after his own ideal,
according to his own conception of what will satisfy him; and it is
because in the nature of things such an ideal is more than experience
can satisfy that the anguish of st