s 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 AEschylus 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 co