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 common usage of words--of the major portion of modern society.
Needless to say, I am not wishing to disparage the literature of love, whether it be poetry, fiction, or of any other kind. English people least of all can afford to belittle it, for if we eliminated it half of our best lyrical poetry would go. For we count it a distinction in English poetry that upon this theme the changes have been rung so finely and to such exquisite effect. But much of the fineness of love poetry is to be distinguished from the fineness of the emotion of love. Lovelace declares to his Lucasta:
True, a new mistress now I chase, The first foe in the field; And with a stronger faith embrace A sword, a horse, a shield.
That is in the true spirit of English love poetry, which does not so idealise the amorous passion as to make it, in the modern emasculate manner, a substitute for valour, faith, honour; it is not opposed to the manly virtues; it may be the song which a warrior sings to the clank of "a sword, a horse, a shield."