riving and the anguish of failure
are the subjects of art. A play such as Marlowe's _Tamburlaine_ can
never be regarded as great drama. Amid scenes of magnificence and
splendid savage rhetoric Tamburlaine passes on from triumph to
triumph, the incarnation of the conquering will. There are numberless
detached passages of what we may call lyrical poetry--for a lyrical
poem expresses no more than a moment's mood, a single phase of the
sequence which is passion. But there is no passionate sequence in
_Tamburlaine_; it is a monotonous record of much-vaunted triumphs. We
do not feel the painful struggle; there is no prospect of defeat;
there is no storm and stress of an ideal at stake, a human being
battered by circumstance. We may, if we are brutal enough, bow down
before Tamburlaine's Juggernaut car; but he does not touch our
emotions; he is not a tragic hero. Tragedy has no interest in
supermen; unless, indeed, like Chapman's Bussy d'Ambois, the hero has
the courage of the superman with the limitations of the rest of
humanity.

But if the superman is not a possible subject for great art, neither
is the crawling earthworm. Many modern authors and critics seem to
consider that because tragic passion is always painful, therefore pain
is the essential thing in tragedy. It is this grossly false assumption
that is responsible for many disasters in contemporary literature; it
is the deep-lying error in much of our so-called "intellectual drama"
and "intellectual fiction." I have heard authors and critics complain
that the public will not read certain books or go to certain plays
because they are "painful" or "grim." If it had been because these
books or plays were "_passionate_" that the public had refused to
attend, I should have understood the complaint. Pain without passion
may be scientifically interesting, but it has no artistic content, no
high emotional significance. Indeed, it is not true to suppose that
the public dislikes the spectacle of the painful or the ugly. All know
something of the fascination which disturbed Leontius, the son of
Aglaion, who, coming up from the Piraeus, observed dead bodies on the
ground; and desiring to look at them and loathing the thought opened
his eyes wide, exclaiming, "There, you wretches, take your fill of the
horrid sight!" If anyone doubts this let him recall that a painful and
sordid episode in the law-courts fascinates the public just as it is
fascinated by the crude villainies of E