istic, existing in a region
remote from life. Art is not a sacred mystery into which only the
initiated can penetrate. It is not concerned with beauties drawn from
a peculiar and exclusive artistic Absolute. Literature deals with
life, but in life in an intense manifestation, with that passionate
life which attains its richness, its breadth, its tremendous lustiness
through the desire for something more than normal life can give.
Nobody can 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 adventitious aid which gives reality to the
persons, sufficiency to their motives, contrast, relief,
atmosphere--all that is expressed by the ordinary jargon of criticism.
To sum up: great creative literature does not deal with things painful
or otherwise merely because they are facts of life. Its business is
the intensification of life, to bring home to us its myriad
finenesses; it achieves this end by presenting persons passing through
the intense experiences which we call passions; and these are
conditions of the spirit in which an idealised object encourages,
thwarts, or tantalises the seeker, and dejects him utterly if the
reality turns out to be less than the ideal. The inquiry opens a
question for the metaphysician--What is the source of this ideal
element which enters into every object passionately sought, and so
transcends realisation that the object cannot be attained without a
sense of loss?

IV

THE POPULAR TASTE

If anything is worse than bad literature it is the tedious Pharisaism
of the "man of culture." How flattering to the self-esteem to cast a
supercilious eye upon the melodramat