But this fact is to be noticed, that whether it is love of a woman, whether it is ambition, whether it is love of humanity, whether it is religious zeal, revenge, or anything else whatsoever on a great scale, passion implies idealism, an object set before the mind in its spiritual or imaginative capacity, and that the intensity of the passion is enhanced by the difficulty of the quest. Great passion, then, is a kind of critical union, or rather half-union, of body and soul. It is the perpetual effort of the body to become soul, the real to become ideal; the painful and ever frustrated effort of the individual to become universal; or conversely, the painful condition of the human soul which sees its ideal shattered and its glory reduced to dust and ashes. Its character is a problem for religion no less than for æsthetics. It is Browning who declares: But priests Should study passion; how 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 _père_ 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.