Personality in LiteratureScott-James, R. A. (Rolfe Arnold)
Philosophy
Personality in Literature
Scott-James, R. A. (Rolfe Arnold)
English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Literature
We see, then, why it is that the highest forms of literature are
necessarily concerned with pain. It is not merely that art requires
intensity of feeling, and that the emotion of pain is the most intense
we know. It is because the highest literature must necessarily be
concerned with human beings in their most profound aspirations, in
their most deeply experienced strivings each after his own ideal,
according to his own conception of what will satisfy him; and it is
because in the nature of things such an ideal is more than experience
can satisfy that the anguish of striving 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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