The Epic: an Essay

By Lascelles Abercrombie

1914. 

By the same Author:

Towards a Theory of ArtSpeculative DialoguesFour Short PlaysThomas Hardy: A Critical StudyPrinciples of English Prosody

PREFACE

_As this essay is disposed to consider epic poetry as a species ofliterature, and not as a department of sociology or archaeology orethnology, the reader will not find it anything material to thediscussion which may be typified in those very interesting works, Gilbert Murray's "The Rise of the Greek Epic" and Andrew Lang's "TheWorld of Homer. " The distinction between a literary and a scientificattitude to Homer (and all other "authentic" epic) is, I think, finallysummed up in Mr. Mackail's "Lectures on Greek Poetry"; the followingpages, at any rate, assume that this is so. Theories about epic originswere therefore indifferent to my purpose. Besides, I do not see the needfor any theories; I think it need only be said, of any epic poemwhatever, that it was composed by a man and transmitted by men. But thisis not to say that investigation of the "authentic" epic poet's_ milieu_may not be extremely profitable; and for settling the preliminaries ofthis essay, I owe a great deal to Mr. Chadwick's profoundlyinteresting study, "The Heroic Age"; though I daresay Mr. Chadwick wouldrepudiate some of my conclusions. I must also acknowledge suggestionstaken from Mr. Macneile Dixon's learned and vigorous "English Epic andHeroic Poetry"; and especially the assistance of Mr. John Clark's"History of Epic Poetry. " Mr. Clark's book is so thorough and soadequate that my own would certainly have been superfluous, were it notthat I have taken a particular point of view which his method seems torule out--a point of view which seemed well worth taking. This is myexcuse, too, for considering only the most conspicuous instances of epicpoetry. They have been discussed often enough; but not often, so far asI know, primarily as stages of one continuous artistic development_. 

I. 

BEGINNINGS

The invention of epic poetry corresponds with a definite and, in thehistory of the world, often recurring state of society. That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as theneeds which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so theinvention itself has been. Most nations have passed through the samesort of chemistry. Before their hot racial elements have been thoroughlycompounded, and thence have cooled into the stable convenience ofroutine which is the material shape of civilization--before this hasfirmly occurred, there has usually been what is called an "Heroic Age. "It is apt to be the hottest and most glowing stage of the process. Somuch is commonplace. Exactly what causes the racial elements of anation, with all their varying properties, to flash suddenly (as itseems) into the splendid incandescence of an Heroic Age, and thence toshift again into a comparatively rigid and perhaps comparativelylustreless civilization--this difficult matter has been very nicelyinvestigated of late, and to interesting, though not decided, result. But I may not concern myself with this; nor even with the detailedcharacteristics, alleged or ascertained, of the Heroic Age of nations. It is enough for the purpose of this book that the name "Heroic Age" isa good one for this stage of the business; it is obviously, and on thewhole rightly, descriptive. For the stage displays the first vigorousexpression, as the natural thing and without conspicuous restraint, ofprivate individuality. In savagery, thought, sentiment, religion andsocial organization may be exceedingly complicated, full of the mostsubtle and strange relationships; but they exist as complete anddetermined _wholes_, each part absolutely bound up with the rest. Analysis has never come near them. The savage is blinded to the glaringincongruities of his tribal ideas not so much by habit or reverence; itis simply that the mere possibility of such a thing as analysis hasnever occurred to him. He thinks, he feels, he lives, all in a whole. Each person is the tribe in little. This may make everyone anastoundingly complex character; but it makes strong individualityimpossible in savagery, since everyone accepts the same elaborateunanalysed whole of tribal existence. That existence, indeed, would findin the assertion of private individuality a serious danger; and tribalorganization guards against this so efficiently that it is doubtlessimpossible, so long as there is no interruption from outside. In someobscure manner, however, savage existence has been constantlyinterrupted; and it seems as if the long-repressed forces ofindividuality then burst out into exaggerated vehemence; for the result(if it is not slavery) is, that a people passes from its savage to itsheroic age, on its way to some permanence of civilization. It mustalways have taken a good deal to break up the rigidity of savagesociety. It might be the shock of enforced mixture with a totally alienrace, the two kinds of blood, full of independent vigour, compelled toflow together;[1] or it might be the migration, due to economic stress, from one tract of country to which the tribal existence was perfectlyadapted to another for which it was quite unsuited, with the addednecessity of conquering the peoples found in possession. Whatever thecause may have been, the result is obvious: a sudden liberation, adelighted expansion, of numerous private individualities. 

But the various appearances of the Heroic Age cannot, perhaps, becompletely generalized. What has just been written will probably do forthe Heroic Age which produced Homer, and for that which produced the_Nibelungenlied, Beowulf_, and the Northern Sagas. It may, thereforestand as the typical case; since Homer and these Northern poems are whatmost people have in their minds when they speak of "authentic" epic. Butdecidedly Heroic Ages have occurred much later than the latest of thesecases; and they arose out of a state of society which cannot roundly becalled savagery. Europe, for instance, had its unmistakable Heroic Agewhen it was fighting with the Moslem, whether that warfare was a causeor merely an accompaniment. And the period which preceded it, the periodafter the failure of Roman civilization, was sufficiently "dark" anddevoid of individuality, to make the sudden plenty of potent andsplendid individuals seem a phenomenon of the same sort as that whichhas been roughly described; it can scarcely be doubted that the agewhich is exhibited in the _Poem of the Cid_, the _Song of Roland_, andthe lays of the Crusaders (_la Chanson d'Antioche_, for instance), wassimilar in all essentials to the age we find in Homer and the_Nibelungenlied_. Servia, too, has its ballad-cycles of Christian andMahometan warfare, which suppose an age obviously heroic. But it hardlyfalls in with our scheme; Servia, at this time, might have been expectedto have gone well past its Heroic Age. Either, then, it was somehowunusually prolonged, or else the clash of the Ottoman war revived it. The case of Servia is interesting in another way. The songs about thebattle of Kossovo describe Servian defeat--defeat so overwhelming thatpoetry cannot possibly translate it, and does not attempt it, intoanything that looks like victory. Even the splendid courage of its heroMilos, who counters an imputation of treachery by riding in fulldaylight into the Ottoman camp and murdering the Sultan, even thiscourage is rather near to desperation. The Marko cycle--Marko whosebetrayal of his country seems wiped out by his immense prowess--has in aless degree this utter defeat of Servia as its background. But Servianhistory before all this has many glories, which, one would think, wouldserve the turn of heroic song better than appalling defeat and, indeed, enslavement. Why is the latter celebrated and not the former? The reasoncan only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age isheroic because of what it is, not because of what it does. Servia'sdefeat by the armies of Amurath came at a time when its people was toostrongly possessed by the heroic spirit to avoid uttering itself inpoetry. And from this it appears, too, that when the heroic age sings, it primarily sings of itself, even when that means singing of its ownhumiliation. --One other exceptional kind of heroic age must just bementioned, in this professedly inadequate summary. It is the kind whichoccurs quite locally and on a petty scale, with causes obscurer thanever. The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a verycircumscribed and not very important heroic age. Here the households ofgentry take the place of courts, and the poetry in vogue there isperhaps instantly taken up by the taverns; or perhaps this is a case inwhich the heroes are so little removed from common folk that celebrationof individual prowess begins among the latter, not, as seems usually tohave happened, among the social equals of the heroes. But doubtlessthere are infinite grades in the structure of the Heroic Age. 

The note of the Heroic Age, then, is vehement private individualityfreely and greatly asserting itself. The assertion is not always what weshould call noble; but it is always forceful and unmistakable. Therewould be, no doubt, some social and religious scheme to contain theindividual's self-assertion; but the latter, not the former, is thething that counts. It is not an age that lasts for very long as a rule;and before there comes the state in which strong social organization andstrong private individuality are compatible--mutually helpful instead ofdestroying one another, as they do, in opposite ways, in savagery and inthe Heroic Age--before the state called civilization can arrive, therehas commonly been a long passage of dark obscurity, which throws up intoexaggerated brightness the radiance of the Heroic Age. The balance ofprivate good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals;but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and onnothing else. In Homer, for instance, it can be seen pretty clearly thata "good" man is simply a man of imposing, active individuality[2]; a"bad" man is an inefficient, undistinguished man--probably, too, likeThersites, ugly. It is, in fact, an absolutely aristocratic age--an agein which he who rules is thereby proven the "best. " And from its natureit must be an age very heartily engaged in something; usually fightingwhoever is near enough to be fought with, though in _Beowulf_ it seemsto be doing something more profitable to the civilization which is tofollow it--taming the fierceness of surrounding circumstance and man'sprimitive kind. But in any case it has a good deal of leisure; and thebest way to prevent this from dragging heavily is (after feasting) toglory in the things it has done; or perhaps in the things it would liketo have done. Hence heroic poetry. But exactly what heroic poetry wasin its origin, probably we shall never know. It would scarcely behistory, and it would scarcely be very ornate poetry. The first thingrequired would be to translate the prowess of champions into good andmoving narrative; and this would be metrified, because so it becomesboth more exciting and more easily remembered. Each succeeding bardwould improve, according to his own notions, the material he receivedfrom his teachers; the prowess of the great heroes would become more andmore astonishing, more and more calculated to keep awake the feastednobles who listened to the song. In an age when writing, if it exists atall, is a rare and secret art, the mists of antiquity descend after avery few generations. There is little chance of the songs of the bardsbeing checked by recorded actuality; for if anyone could write at all, it would be the bards themselves, who would use the mystery or purposesof their own trade. In quite a short time, oral tradition, in keeping ofthe bards, whose business is to purvey wonders, makes the championsperform easily, deeds which "the men of the present time" can only gapeat; and every bard takes over the stock of tradition, not from originalsources, but from the mingled fantasy and memory of the bard who camejust before him. So that when this tradition survives at all, itsurvives in a form very different from what it was in the beginning. Butapparently we can mark out several stages in the fortunes of thetradition. It is first of all court poetry, or perhaps baronial poetry;and it may survive as that. From this stage it may pass into possessionof the common people, or at least into the possession of bards whoseclients are peasants and not nobles; from being court poetry it becomesthe poetry of cottages and taverns. It may survive as this. Finally, itmay be taken up again by the courts, and become poetry of much greatersophistication and nicety than it was in either of the preceding stages. But each stage leaves its sign on the tradition. 

All this gives us what is conveniently called "epic material"; thematerial out of which epic poetry might be made. But it does not give usepic poetry. The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scatteredup and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is asextraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always. Instancesare our own Border Ballads and Robin Hood Ballads; the Servian cycles ofthe Battle of Kossovo and the prowess of Marko; the modern Greek songsof the revolt against Turkey (the conditions of which seem to have beensimilar to those which surrounded the growth of our riding ballads); thefragments of Finnish legend which were pieced together into the_Kalevala_; the Ossianic poetry; and perhaps some of the minor sagasshould be put in here. Then there are the glorious Welsh stories ofArthur, Tristram, and the rest, and the not less glorious Irish storiesof Deirdre and Cuchulain; both of these noble masses of legend seem tohave only just missed the final shaping which turns epic material intoepic poetry. For epic material, it must be repeated, is not the samething as epic poetry. Epic material is fragmentary, scattered, looselyrelated, sometimes contradictory, each piece of comparatively smallsize, with no intention beyond hearty narrative. It is a heap ofexcellent stones, admirably quarried out of a great rock-face ofstubborn experience. But for this to be worked into some greatstructure of epic poetry, the Heroic Age must be capable of producingindividuality of much profounder nature than any of its fightingchampions. Or rather, we should simply say that the production of epicpoetry depends on the occurrence (always an accidental occurrence) ofcreative genius. It is quite likely that what Homer had to work on wasnothing superior to the Arthurian legends. But Homer occurred; and thetales of Troy and Odysseus became incomparable poetry. 

An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjustingtheir discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative. An epicis not even a re-creation of old things; it is altogether a newcreation, a new creation in terms of old things. And what else is anyother poetry? The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and atradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind himtoo; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather morestrictly compelling. This must not be lost sight of. It is what thepoet does with the tradition he falls in which is, artistically, theimportant thing. He takes a mass of confused splendours, and he makesthem into something which they certainly were not before; somethingwhich, as we can clearly see by comparing epic poetry with mere epicmaterial, the latter scarce hinted at. He makes this heap of matter intoa grand design; he forces it to obey a single presiding unity ofartistic purpose. Obviously, something much more potent is required forthis than a fine skill in narrative and poetic ornament. Unity is notmerely an external affair. There is only one thing which can master theperplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability tosee in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man'sgeneral destiny. 

It is natural that, after the epic poet has arrived, the crude epicmaterial in which he worked should scarcely be heard of. It could onlybe handed on by the minstrels themselves; and their audiences would notbe likely to listen comfortably to the old piecemeal songs after theyhad heard the familiar events fall into the magnificent ordered pomp ofthe genuine epic poet. The tradition, indeed, would start afresh withhim; but how the novel tradition fared as it grew old with hissuccessors, is difficult guesswork. We can tell, however, sometimes, inwhat stage of the epic material's development the great unifying epicpoet occurred. Three roughly defined stages have been mentioned. Homerperhaps came when the epic material was still in its first stage ofbeing court-poetry. Almost certainly this is when the poets of theCrusading lays, of the _Song of Roland_, and the _Poem of the Cid_, setto work. Hesiod is a clear instance of the poet who masters epicmaterial after it has passed into popular possession; and the_Nibelungenlied_ is thought to be made out of matter that has passedfrom the people back again to the courts. 

Epic poetry, then, as distinct from mere epic material, is the concernof this book. The intention is, to determine wherein epic poetry is adefinite species of literature, what it characteristically does forconscious human life, and to find out whether this species and thisfunction have shown, and are likely to show, any development. It must beadmitted, that the great unifying poet who worked on the epic materialbefore him, did not always produce something which must come within thescope of this intention. Hesiod has just been given as an instance ofsuch a poet; but his work is scarcely an epic. [3] The great sagas, too, I must omit. They are epic enough in primary intention, but they are notpoetry; and I am among those who believe that there is a differencebetween poetry and prose. If epic poetry is a definite species, thesagas do not fall within it. But this will leave me more of the"authentic" epic poetry than I can possibly deal with; and I shall haveto confine myself to its greatest examples. Before, however, proceedingto consider epic poetry as a whole, as a constantly recurring form ofart, continually responding to the new needs of man's developingconsciousness, I must go, rapidly and generally, over the "literaryepic"; and especially I must question whether it is really justifiableor profitable to divide epic poetry into the two contrasted departmentsof "authentic" and "literary. "

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: hos d' ote cheimarroi potamoi kat opesthi rheontes esmisgagkeian xumballeton obrimon udor krounon ek melalon koilaes entosthecharadraes. _Iliad_, IV, 452. ]

[Footnote 2: Etymologically, the "good" man is the "admirable" man. Inthis sense, Homer's gods are certainly "good"; every epithet he givesthem--Joyous-Thunderer, Far-Darter, Cloud-Gatherer and therest--proclaims their unapproachable "goodness. " If it had been said toHomer, that his gods cannot be "good" because their behaviour isconsistently cynical, cruel, unscrupulous and scandalous, he wouldsimply think he had not heard aright: Zeus is an habitual liar, ofcourse, but what has that got to do with his "goodness"?--Only those whowould have Homer a kind of Salvationist need regret this. Just becausehe could only make his gods "good" in this primitive style, he was ableto treat their discordant family in that vein of exquisite comedy whichis one of the most precious things in the world. ]

[Footnote 3: Scarcely what _we_ call epic. "Epos" might include Hesiodas well as epic material; "epopee" is the business that Homer started. ]

II. 

LITERARY EPIC

Epic poetry, then, was invented to supply the artistic demands ofsociety in a certain definite and recognizable state. Or rather, it wasthe epic material which supplied that; the first epic poets gave theirage, as genius always does, something which the age had never thought ofasking for; which, nevertheless, when it was given, the age took goodhold of, and found that, after all, this, too, it had wanted withoutknowing it. But as society went on towards civilization, the need forepic grew less and less; and its preservation, if not accidental, was anact of conscious aesthetic admiration rather than of unconsciousnecessity. It was preserved somehow, however; and after other kinds ofliterature had arisen as inevitably and naturally as epic, and hadbecome, in their turn, things of less instant necessity than they were, it was found that, in the manner and purpose of epic poetry, somethingwas given which was not given elsewhere; something of extraordinaryvalue. Epic poetry would therefore be undertaken again; but now, ofcourse, deliberately. With several different kinds of poetry to choosefrom, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, andhe would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem. Theresult, good or bad, of such a determination is called "literary" epic. The poems of Apollonius Rhodius, Virgil, Lucan, Camoens, Tasso andMilton are "literary" epics. But such poetry as the _Odyssey_, the_Iliad, _ _Beowulf_, the _Song of Roland_, and the _Nibelungenlied_, poetry which seems an immediate response to some general and instantneed in its surrounding community--such poetry is "authentic" epic. 

A great deal has been made of this distinction; it has almost been takento divide epic poetry into two species. And, as the names commonly givento the two supposed species suggest, there is some notion that"literary" epic must be in a way inferior to "authentic" epic. Thesuperstition of antiquity has something to do with this; but thepresence of Homer among the "authentic" epics has probably still more todo with it. For Homer is the poet who is usually chosen to stand for"authentic" epic; and, by a facile association of ideas, the conspicuouscharacteristics of Homer seem to be the marks of "authentic" epic as aspecies. It is, of course, quite true, that, for sustained grandeur andsplendour, no poet can be put beside Homer except Dante and Milton; butit is also quite clear that in Homer, as in Dante, and Milton, suchconspicuous characteristics are simply the marks of peculiar poeticgenius. If we leave Homer out, and consider poetic greatness only (theonly important thing to consider), there is no "authentic" epic whichcan stand against _Paradise Lost_ or the _Aeneid_. Then there is thecurious modern feeling--which is sometimes but dressed up by erroneousaesthetic theory (the worship of a quite national "lyricism, " forinstance) but which is really nothing but a sign of covertbarbarism--that lengthy poetic composition is somehow undesirable; andHomer is thought to have had a better excuse for composing a long poemthan Milton. 

But doubtless the real reason for the hard division of epic poetry intotwo classes, and for the presumed inferiority of "literary" to"authentic, " lies in the application of that curiosity among falseideas, the belief in a "folk-spirit. " This notion that such a thing as a"folk-spirit" can create art, and that the art which it does create mustbe somehow better than other art, is, I suppose, the offspring ofdemocratic ideas in politics. The chief objection to it is that therenever has been and never can be anything in actuality corresponding tothe "folk-spirit" which this notion supposes. Poetry is the work ofpoets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never beanything but the production of an individual mind. We may, if we like, think that poetry would be more "natural" if it were composed by thefolk as the folk, and not by persons peculiarly endowed; and to think sois doubtless agreeable to the notion that the folk is more importantthan the individual. But there is nothing gained by thinking in thisway, except a very illusory kind of pleasure; since it is impossiblethat the folk should ever be a poet. This indisputable axiom has beenignored more in theories about ballads--about epic material--than intheories about the epics themselves. But the belief in a realfolk-origin for ballads, untenable though it be in a little examination, has had a decided effect on the common opinion of the authentic epics. In the first place, a poem constructed out of ballads composed, somehowor other, by the folk, ought to be more "natural" than a work ofdeliberate art--a "literary" epic; that is to say, these Rousseau-ishnotions will admire it for being further from civilization and nearer tothe noble savage; civilization being held, by some mysterious argument, to be deficient in "naturalness. " In the second place, this belief hasmade it credible that the plain corruption of authentic epic by oraltransmission, or very limited transmission through script, might be thesign of multiple authorship; for if you believe that a whole folk cancompose a ballad, you may easily believe that a dozen poets can composean epic. 

But all this rests on simple ignoring of the nature of poeticcomposition. The folk-origin of ballads and the multiple authorship ofepics are heresies worse than the futilities of the Baconians; at anyrate, they are based on the same resolute omission, and build on it awilder fantasy. They omit to consider what poetry is. Those who thinkBacon wrote _Hamlet_, and those who think several poets wrote the_Iliad_, can make out a deal of ingenious evidence for their doctrines. But it is all useless, because the first assumption in each case isunthinkable. It is psychologically impossible that the mind of Baconshould have produced _Hamlet_; but the impossibility is even moreclamant when it comes to supposing that several poets, not incollaboration, but in haphazard succession, could produce a poem of vastsweeping unity and superbly consistent splendour of style. So far asmere authorship goes, then, we cannot make any real difference between"authentic" and "literary" epic. We cannot say that, while this iswritten by an individual genius, that is the work of a community. Individual genius, of whatever quality, is responsible for both. Thefolk, however, cannot be ruled out. Genius does the work; but the folkis the condition in which genius does it. And here we may find a genuinedifference between "literary" and "authentic"; not so much in the natureof the condition as in its closeness and insistence. 

The kind of folk-spirit behind the poet is, indeed, different in the_Iliad_ and _Beowulf_ and the _Song of Roland_ from what it is in Miltonand Tasso and Virgil. But there is also as much difference here betweenthe members of each class as between the two classes themselves. Youcannot read much of _Beowulf_ with Homer in your mind, without becomingconscious that the difference in individual genius is by no means thewhole difference. Both poets maintain a similar ideal in life; but theymaintain it within conditions altogether unlike. The folk-spirit behind_Beowulf_ is cloudy and tumultuous, finding grandeur in storm and gloomand mere mass--in the misty _lack_ of shape. Behind Homer it is, on thecontrary, radiant and, however vehement, always delighting in measure, finding grandeur in brightness and clarity and shining outline. So, again, we may very easily see how Tasso's poetry implies the Italy ofhis time, and Milton's the England of his time. But where Homer andBeowulf together differ from Tasso and Milton is in the way thesurrounding folk-spirit contains the poet's mind. It would be a veryidle piece of work, to choose between the potency of Homer's genius andof Milton's; but it is clear that the immediate circumstance of thepoet's life presses much more insistently on the _Iliad_ and the_Odyssey_ than on _Paradise Lost_. It is the difference between thecontracted, precise, but vigorous tradition of an heroic age, and thediffused, eclectic, complicated culture of a civilization. And if it maybe said that the insistence of racial circumstance in Homer gives him agreater intensity of cordial, human inspiration, it must also be saidthat the larger, less exacting conditions of Milton's mental life allowhis art to go into greater scope and more subtle complexity ofsignificance. Great epic poetry will always frankly accept the socialconditions within which it is composed; but the conditions contract andintensify the conduct of the poem, or allow it to dilate and absorblarger matter, according as the narrow primitive torrents of man'sspirit broaden into the greater but slower volume of civilized life. Thechange is neither desirable nor undesirable; it is merely inevitable. Itmeans that epic poetry has kept up with the development of human life. 

It is because of all this that we have heard a good deal about the"authentic" epic getting "closer to its subject" than "literary" epic. It seems, on the face of it, very improbable that there should be anyreal difference here. No great poetry, of whatever kind, is conceivableunless the subject has become integrated with the poet's mind and mood. Milton is as close to his subject, Virgil to his, as Homer to Achillesor the Saxon poet to Beowulf. What is really meant can be nothing butthe greater insistence of racial tradition in the "authentic" epics. Thesubject of the _Iliad_ is the fighting of heroes, with all itsimplications and consequences; the subject of the _Odyssey_ is adventureand its opposite, the longing for safety and home; in _Beowulf_ it iskingship--the ability to show man how to conquer the monstrous forces ofhis world; and so on. Such were the subjects which an imperious racialtradition pressed on the early epic poet, who delighted to be sogoverned. These were the matters which his people could understand, ofwhich they could easily perceive the significance. For him, then, therecould be no other matters than these, or the like of these. But it isnot in such matters that a poet living in a time of less primitive andmore expanded consciousness would find the highest importance. For aRoman, the chief matter for an epic poem would be Roman civilization;for a Puritan, it would be the relations of God and man. When, therefore, we consider how close to his subject an epic poet is, we mustbe careful to be quite clear what his subject is. And if he has gonebeyond the immediate experiences of primitive society, we need notexpect him to be as close as the early poets were to the fury of battleand the agony of wounds and the desolation of widows; or to thesensation of exploring beyond the familiar regions; or to themarsh-fiends and fire-drakes into which primitive imagination naturallytranslated the terrible unknown powers of the world. We need not, in aword, expect the "literary" epic to compete with the "authentic" epic;for the fact is, that the purpose of epic poetry, and therefore thenature of its subject, must continually develop. It is quite true thatthe later epics take over, to a very great extent, the methods andmanners of the earlier poems; just as architecture hands on the style ofwooden structure to an age that builds in stone, and again imposes themanners of stone construction on an age that builds in concrete andsteel. But, in the case of epic at any rate, this is not merely theinertia of artistic convention. With the development of epic intention, and the subsequent choosing of themes larger and subtler than whatcommon experience is wont to deal in, a certain duplicity becomesinevitable. The real intention of the _Aeneid_, and the real intentionof _Paradise Lost_, are not easily brought into vivid apprehension. Thenatural thing to do, then, would be to use the familiar substance ofearly epic, but to use it as a convenient and pleasant solvent for thenovel intention. It is what has been done in all the great "literary"epics. But hasty criticism, finding that where they resembled Homerthey seemed not so close to their matter, has taken this as a pervadingand unfortunate characteristic. It has not perceived that what in Homerwas the main business of the epic, has become in later epic a device. Having so altered, it has naturally lost in significance; but in thegreatest instances of later epic, that for which the device was used hasbeen as profoundly absorbed into the poet's being as Homer's matter wasinto his being. It may be noted, too, that a corresponding change hasalso taken place in the opposite direction. As Homer's chief substancebecomes a device in later epic, so a device of Homer's becomes in laterepic the chief substance. Homer's supernatural machinery may be reckonedas a device--a device to heighten the general style and action of hispoems; the _significance_ of Homer must be found among his heroes, notamong his gods. But with Milton, it has become necessary to entrust tothe supernatural action the whole aim and purport of the poem. 

On the whole, then, there is no reason why "literary" epic should not beas close to its subject as "authentic" epic; there is every reason whyboth kinds should be equally close. But in testing whether they actuallyare equally close, we have to remember that in the later epic it hasbecome necessary to use the ostensible subject as a vehicle for the realsubject. And who, with any active sympathy for poetry, can say thatMilton felt his theme with less intensity than Homer? Milton is not soclose to his fighting angels as Homer is to his fighting men; but thewar in heaven is an incident in Milton's figurative expression ofsomething that has become altogether himself--the mystery of individualexistence in universal existence, and the accompanying mystery of sin, of individual will inexplicably allowed to tamper with the divinelyuniversal will. Milton, of course, in closeness to his subject and ineverything else, stands as supreme above the other poets of literaryepic as Homer does above the poets of authentic epic. But what is trueof Milton is true, in less degree, of the others. If there is any goodin them, it is primarily because they have got very close to theirsubjects: that is required not only for epic, but for all poetry. Coleridge, in a famous estimate put twenty years for the shortest periodin which an epic could be composed; and of this, ten years were to befor preparation. He meant that not less than ten years would do for thepoet to fill all his being with the theme; and nothing else will serve, It is well known how Milton brooded over his subject, how Virgillingered over his, how Camoen. Carried the _Luisads_ round the worldwith him, with what furious intensity Tasso gave himself to writing_Jerusalem Delivered_. We may suppose, perhaps, that the poets of"authentic" epic had a somewhat easier task. There was no need for themto be "long choosing and beginning late. " The pressure of racialtradition would see that they chose the right sort of subject; wouldsee, too, that they lived right in the heart of their subject. For thepoet of "literary" epic, however, it is his own consciousness that mustselect the kind of theme which will fulfil the epic intention for hisown day; it is his own determination and studious endurance that willdraw the theme into the secrets of his being. If he is not capable ofgetting close to his subject, we should not for that reason call hiswork "literary" epic. It would put him in the class of Milton, the mostliterary of all poets. We must simply call his stuff bad epic. There isplenty of it. Southey is the great instance. Southey would decide towrite an epic about Spain, or India, or Arabia, or America. Next hewould read up, in several languages, about his proposed subject; thatwould take him perhaps a year. Then he would versify as much strangeinformation as he could remember; that might take a few months. Theresult is deadly; and because he was never anywhere near his subject. Itis for the same reason that the unspeakable labours of Blackmore, Gloverand Wilkie, and Voltaire's ridiculous _Henriade_, have gone to pile upthe rubbish-heaps of literature. 

So far, supposed differences between "authentic" and "literary" epichave resolved themselves into little more than signs of development inepic intention; the change has not been found to produce enough artisticdifference between early and later epic to warrant anything like adivision into two distinct species. The epic, whether "literary" or"authentic, " is a single form of art; but it is a form capable ofadapting itself to the altering requirements of prevalent consciousness. In addition, however, to differences in general conception, there arecertain mechanical differences which should be just noticed. The firstepics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to beread. It is more difficult to keep the attention of hearers than ofreaders. This in itself would be enough to rule out themes remote fromcommon experience, supposing any such were to suggest themselves to theprimitive epic poet. Perhaps, indeed, we should not be far wrong if wesaw a chief reason for the pressure of surrounding tradition on theearly epic in this very fact, that it is poetry meant for recitation. Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listento the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpectedthings; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as there-creation of tired hours. Traditional manner would be equallydifficult to avoid; for it is a tradition that plainly embodies therequirements, fixed by experience, of _recited_ poetry. Those featuresof it which make for tedium when it is read--repetition, stock epithets, set phrases for given situations--are the very things best suited, withtheir recurring well-known syllables, to fix the attention of listenersmore firmly, or to stir it when it drowses; at the least they provide asort of recognizable scaffolding for the events, and it is remarkablehow easily the progress of events may be missed when poetry isdeclaimed. Indeed, if the primitive epic poet could avoid some of theanxieties peculiar to the composition of literary epic, he had others tomake up for it. He had to study closely the delicate science of holdingauricular attention when once he had got it; and probably he would havesome difficulty in getting it at all. The really great poet challengesit, like Homer, with some tremendous, irresistible opening; and in thisrespect the magnificent prelude to _Beowulf_ may almost be put besideHomer. But lesser poets have another way. That prolixity at thebeginning of many primitive epics, their wordy deliberation in gettingunder way, is probably intentional. The _Song of Roland_, for instance, begins with a long series of exceedingly dull stanzas; to a reader, thepreliminaries of the story seem insufferably drawn out. But by the timethe reciter had got through this unimportant dreariness, no doubt hisaudience had settled down to listen. The _Chanson d'Antioche_ containsperhaps the most illuminating admission of this difficulty. In the first"Chant, " the first section opens:[4]

 Seigneurs, faites silence; et que tout bruit cesse, Si vous voulez entendre une glorieuse chanson. Aucun jongleur ne vous en dira une meilleure. 

Then some vaguely prelusive lines. But the audience is clearly not quiteready yet, for the second section begins:

 Barons, écoutez-moi, et cessez vos querelles! Je vous dirai une très-belle chanson. 

And after some further prelude, the section ends:

 Ici commence la chanson où il y a tant à apprendre. 

The "Chanson" does, indeed, make some show of beginning in the thirdsection, but it still moves with a cautious and prelusive air, as ifanxious not to launch out too soon. And this was evidently prudent, forwhen the fourth section opens, direct exhortation to the audience hasagain become necessary:

 Maintenant, seigneurs, écoutez ce que dit l'Écriture. 

And once more in the fifth section:

 Barons, écoutez un excellent couplet. 

In the sixth, the jongleur is getting desperate:

 Seigneurs, pour l'amour de Dieu, faites silence, écoutez-moi, Pour qu'en partant de ce monde vous entriez dans un meilleur;

but after this exclamation he has his way, though the story proper isstill a good way off. Perhaps not all of these hortatory stanzas werecommonly used; any or all of them could certainly be omitted withoutdamaging the poem. But they were there to be used, according to thejudgment of the jongleur and the temper of his audience, and theirpresence in the poem is very suggestive of the special difficulties inthe art of rhapsodic poetry. 

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetrymeant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbalbeauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell. Vigorous but controlledimagination, formative power, insight into the significance ofthings--these are qualities which a poet must eminently possess; butthese are qualities which may also be eminently possessed by men whocannot claim the title of poet. The real differentia of the poet is hiscommand over the secret magic of words. Others may have as delighted asense of this magic, but it is only the poet who can master it and dowhat he likes with it. And next to the invention of speaking itself, themost important invention for the poet has been the invention of writingand reading; for this has added immensely to the scope of his masteryover words. No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute forthe spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spokenword only, that his art is founded. But he trusts his reader to do as hehimself does--to receive written words always as the code of spokenwords. To do so has wonderfully enlarged his technical opportunities;for apprehension is quicker and finer through the eye than through theear. After the invention of reading, even poetry designed primarily fordeclamation (like drama or lyric) has depths and subtleties of art whichwere not possible for the primitive poet. Accordingly we find that, onthe whole, in comparison with "literary" epic, the texture of"authentic" epic is flat and dull. The story may be superb, and itsmanagement may be superb; but the words in which the story lives do notcome near the grandeur of Milton, or the exquisiteness of Virgil, or thedeliciousness of Tasso. Indeed, if we are to say what is the realdifference between _Beowulf_ and _Paradise Lost_, we must simply saythat _Beowulf_ is not such good poetry. There is, of course, onetremendous exception; Homer is the one poet of authentic epic who hadsufficient genius to make unfailingly, nobly beautiful poetry within thestrict and hard conditions of purely auricular art. Compare Homer'sambrosial glory with the descent tap-water of Hesiod; compare hiscontinuous burnished gleam of wrought metal with the sparse grains thatlie in the sandy diction of all the "authentic" epics of the othernations. And, by all ancient accounts, the other early Greek epics wouldnot fare much better in the comparison. Homer's singularity in thisrespect is overwhelming; but it is frequently forgotten, and especiallyby those who think to help in the Homeric question by comparing him withother "authentic" epics. Supposing (we can only just suppose it) a casewere made out for the growth rather than the individual authorship ofsome "authentic" epic other than Homer; it could never have any bearingon the question of Homeric authorship, because no early epic iscomparable with the _poetry_ of Homer. Nothing, indeed, is comparablewith the poetry of Homer, except poetry for whose individual authorshiphistory unmistakably vouches. 

So we cannot say that Homer was not as deliberate a craftsman in wordsas Milton himself. The scope of his craft was more restricted, as hisrepetitions and stock epithets show; he was restricted by the fact thathe composed for recitation, and the auricular appreciation of diction islimited, the nature of poetry obeying, in the main, the nature of thosefor whom it is composed. But this is just a case in which geniustranscends technical scope. The effects Homer produced with his methodswere as great as any effects produced by later and more elaboratemethods, after poetry began to be read as well as heard. But neithermust we say that the other poets of "authentic" epic were not deliberatecraftsmen in words. Poets will always get as much beauty out of words asthey can. The fact that so often in the early epics a magnificentsubject is told, on the whole, in a lumpish and tedious diction, is notto be explained by any contempt for careful art, as though it were athing unworthy of such heroic singers; it is simply to be explained bylack of such genius as is capable of transcending the severe limitationsof auricular poetry. And we may well believe that only the rarest andmost potent kind of genius could transcend such limitations. 

In summary, then, we find certain conceptual differences and certainmechanical differences between "authentic" and "literary" epic. Butthese are not such as to enable us to say that there is, artistically, any real difference between the two kinds. Rather, the differencesexhibit the changes we might expect in an art that has kept up withconsciousness developing, and civilization becoming more intricate. "Literary" epic is as close to its subject as "authentic"; but, as ageneral rule, "authentic" epic, in response to its surrounding needs, has a simple and concrete subject, and the closeness of the poet to thisis therefore more obvious than in "literary" epic, which (again inresponse to surrounding needs) has been driven to take for subject somegreat abstract idea and display this in a concrete but only ostensiblesubject. Then in craftsmanship, the two kinds of epic are equallydeliberate, equally concerned with careful art; but "literary" epic hasbeen able to take such advantage of the habit of reading that, with thesingle exception of Homer, it has achieved a diction much moreanswerable to the greatness of epic matter than the "authentic" poems. We may, then, in a general survey, regard epic poetry as being in allages essentially the same kind of art, fulfilling always a similar, though constantly developing, intention. Whatever sort of society helives in, whether he be surrounded by illiterate heroism or placidculture, the epic poet has a definite function to perform. We see himaccepting, and with his genius transfiguring, the general circumstanceof his time; we see him symbolizing, in some appropriate form, whateversense of the significance of life he feels acting as the acceptedunconscious metaphysic of his age. To do this, he takes some great storywhich has been absorbed into the prevailing consciousness of his people. As a rule, though not quite invariably, the story will be of thingswhich are, or seem, so far back in the past, that anything may crediblyhappen in it; so imagination has its freedom, and so significance isdisplayed. But quite invariably, the materials of the story will have anunmistakable air of actuality; that is, they come profoundly out ofhuman experience, whether they declare legendary heroism, as in Homerand Virgil, or myth, as in _Beowulf_ and _Paradise Lost_, or actualhistory, as in Lucan and Camoens and Tasso. And he sets out this storyand its significance in poetry as lofty and as elaborate as he cancompass. That, roughly, is what we see the epic poets doing, whetherthey be "literary" or "authentic"; and if this can be agreed on, weshould now have come tolerably close to a definition of epic poetry. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 4: From the version of the Marquise de Sainte-Aulaire. ]

III. 

THE NATURE OF EPIC

Rigid definitions in literature are, however, dangerous. At bottom, itis what we feel, not what we think, that makes us put certain poemstogether and apart from others; and feelings cannot be defined, but onlyrelated. If we define a poem, we say what we think about it; and thatmay not sufficiently imply the essential thing the poem does for us. Hence the definition is liable either to be too strict, or to admit workwhich does not properly satisfy the criterion of feeling. It seemsprobable that, in the last resort, classification in literature rests onthat least tangible, least definable matter, style; for style is thesign of the poem's spirit, and it is the spirit that we feel. If we canget some notion of how those poems, which we call epic, agree with oneanother in style, it is likely we shall be as close as may be to adefinition of epic. I use the word "style, " of course, in its largestsense--manner of conception as well as manner of composition. 

An easy way to define epic, though not a very profitable way, would beto say simply, that an epic is a poem which produces feelings similar tothose produced by _Paradise Lost_ or the _Iliad_, _Beowulf_ or the _Songof Roland_. Indeed, you might include all the epics of Europe in thisdefinition without losing your breath; for the epic poet is the rarestkind of artist. And while it is not a simple matter to say off-hand whatit is that is common to all these poems, there seems to be generalacknowledgment that they are clearly separable from other kinds ofpoetry; and this although the word epic has been rather badly abused. For instance, _The Faery Queene_ and _La Divina Commedia_ have beencalled epic poems; but I do not think that anyone could fail to admit, on a little pressure, that the experience of reading _The Faery Queene_or _La Divina Commedia_ is not in the least like the experience ofreading _Paradise Lost_ or the _Iliad_. But as a poem may have lyricalqualities without being a lyric, so a poem may have epical qualitieswithout being an epic. In all the poems which the world has agreed tocall epics, there is a story told, and well told. But Dante's poemattempts no story at all, and Spenser's, though it attempts several, does not tell them well--it scarcely attempts to make the reader believein them, being much more concerned with the decoration and theimplication of its fables than with the fables themselves. What epicquality, detached from epic proper, do these poems possess, then, apartfrom the mere fact that they take up a great many pages? It is simply aquestion of their style--the style of their conception and the style oftheir writing; the whole style of their imagination, in fact. They takeus into a region in which nothing happens that is not deeplysignificant; a dominant, noticeably symbolic, purpose presides over eachpoem, moulds it greatly and informs it throughout. 

This takes us some little way towards deciding the nature of epic. Itmust be a story, and the story must be told well and greatly; and, whether in the story itself or in the telling of it, significance mustbe implied. Does that mean that the epic must be allegorical? Many havethought so; even Homer has been accused of constructing allegories. Butthis is only a crude way of emphasizing the significance of epic; andthere is a vast deal of difference between a significant story and anallegorical story. Reality of substance is a thing on which epic poetrymust always be able to rely. Not only because Spenser does not tell hisstories very well, but even more because their substance (not, ofcourse, their meaning) is deliciously and deliberately unreal, _TheFaery Queene_ is outside the strict sense of the word epic. Allegoryrequires material ingeniously manipulated and fantastic; what is moreimportant, it requires material invented by the poet himself. That is along way from the solid reality of material which epic requires. Notmanipulation, but imaginative transfiguration of material; notinvention, but selection of existing material appropriate to his genius, and complete absorption of it into his being; that is how the epic poetworks. Allegory is a beautiful way of inculcating and asserting somespecial significance in life; but epic has a severer task, and a moreimpressive one. It has not to say, Life in the world _ought_ to meanthis or that; it has to show life unmistakably _being_ significant. Itdoes not gloss or interpret the fact of life, but re-creates it andcharges the fact itself with the poet's own sense of ultimate values. This will be less precise than the definite assertions of allegory; butfor that reason it will be more deeply felt. The values will beemotional and spiritual rather than intellectual. And they will be thepoet's own only because he has made them part of his being; in him(though he probably does not know it) they will be representative of thebest and most characteristic life of his time. That does not mean thatthe epic poet's image of life's significance is of merely contemporaryor transient importance. No stage through which the generalconsciousness of men has gone can ever be outgrown by men; whateverhappens afterwards does not displace it, but includes it. We could notdo without _Paradise Lost_ nowadays; but neither can we do without the_Iliad_. It would not, perhaps, be far from the truth, if it were evensaid that the significance of _Paradise Lost_ cannot be properlyunderstood unless the significance of the _Iliad_ be understood. 

The prime material of the epic poet, then, must be real and notinvented. But when the story of the poem is safely concerned with somereality, he can, of course, graft on this as much appropriate inventionas he pleases; it will be one of his ways of elaborating his main, unifying purpose--and to call it "unifying" is to assume that, howeverbrilliant his surrounding invention may be, the purpose will always befirmly implicit in the central subject. Some of the early epics manageto do without any conspicuous added invention designed to extend whatthe main subject intends; but such nobly simple, forthright narrative as_Beowulf_ and the _Song of Roland_ would not do for a purpose slightlymore subtle than what the makers of these ringing poems had in mind. Thereality of the central subject is, of course, to be understood broadly. It means that the story must be founded deep in the general experienceof men. A decisive campaign is not, for the epic poet, any more realthan a legend full of human truth. All that the name of Caesar suggestsis extremely important for mankind; so is all that the name of Satansuggests: Satan, in this sense, is as real as Caesar. And, as far asreality is concerned, there is nothing to choose between the Christianstaking Jerusalem and the Greeks taking Troy; nor between Odysseussailing into fairyland and Vasco da Gama sailing round the world. It iscertainly possible that a poet might devise a story of such a kind thatwe could easily take it as something which might have been a real humanexperience. But that is not enough for the epic poet. He needs somethingwhich everyone knows about, something which indisputably, andadmittedly, _has been_ a human experience; and even Grendel, the fiendof the marshes, was, we can clearly see, for the poet of _Beowulf_ afigure profoundly and generally accepted as not only true but real;what, indeed, can be more real for poetry than a devouring fiend whichlives in pestilent fens? And the reason why epic poetry so imperiouslydemands reality of subject is clear; it is because such poetry hassymbolically to re-create the actual fact and the actual particulars ofhuman existence in terms of a general significance--the reader must feelthat life itself has submitted to plastic imagination. No fiction willever have the air, so necessary for this epic symbolism, not merely ofrepresenting, but of unmistakably _being_, human experience. This mightsuggest that history would be the thing for an epic poet; and so itwould be, if history were superior to legend in poetic reality. But, simply as substance, there is nothing to choose between them; whilehistory has the obvious disadvantage of being commonly too strict in themanner of its events to allow of creative freedom. Its details willprobably be so well known, that any modification of them will draw moreattention to discrepancy with the records than to achievement thereby ofpoetic purpose. And yet modification, or at least suppression andexaggeration, of the details of history will certainly be necessary. Notto declare what happened, and the results of what happened, is theobject of an epic; but to accept all this as the mere material in whicha single artistic purpose, a unique, vital symbolism may be shaped. Andif legend, after passing for innumerable years through popularimagination, still requires to be shaped at the hands of the epic poet, how much more must the crude events of history require this! For it isnot in events as they happen, however notably, that man may see symbolsof vital destiny, but in events as they are transformed by plasticimagination. 

Yet it has been possible to use history as the material of great epicpoetry; Camoens and Tasso did this--the chief subject of the _Lusiads_is even contemporary history. But evidently success in these cases wasdue to the exceptional and fortunate fact that the fixed notorieties ofhistory were combined with a strange and mysterious geography. Theremoteness and, one might say, the romantic possibilities of the placesinto which Camoens and Tasso were led by their themes, enableimagination to deal pretty freely with history. But in a little morethan ten years after Camoens glorified Portugal in an historical epic, Don Alonso de Ercilla tried to do the same for Spain. He puts his actionfar enough from home: the Spaniards are conquering Chili. But the worldhas grown smaller and more familiar in the interval: the astonishingthings that could easily happen in the seas of Madagascar cannot nowconveniently happen in Chili. The _Araucana_ is versified history, notepic. That is to say, the action has no deeper significance than anyother actual warfare; it has not been, and could not have been, shapedto any symbolic purpose. Long before Tasso and Camoens and Ercilla, twoScotchmen had attempted to put patriotism into epic form; Barbour hadwritten his _Bruce_ and Blind Harry his _Wallace_. But what with thenearness of their events, and what with the rusticity of their authors, these tolerable, ambling poems are quite unable to get the better of thehardness of history. Probably the boldest attempt to make epic ofwell-known, documented history is Lucan's _Pharsalia_. It is a brilliantperformance, and a deliberate effort to carry on the development ofepic. At the very least it has enriched the thought of humanity withsome imperishable lines. But it is true, what the great critic said ofit: the _Pharsalia_ partakes more of the nature of oratory than ofpoetry. It means that Lucan, in choosing history, chose something whichhe had to declaim about, something which, at best, he couldimaginatively realize; but not something which he could imaginativelyre-create. It is quite different with poems like the _Song of Roland_. They are composed in, or are drawn immediately out of, an heroic age; anage, that is to say, when the idea of history has not arisen, whenanything that happens turns inevitably, and in a surprisingly shorttime, into legend. Thus, an unimportant, probably unpunished, attack byBasque mountaineers on the Emperor's rear-guard has become, in the _Songof Roland_, a great infamy of Saracenic treachery, which must be greatlyavenged. 

Such, in a broad description, is the nature of epic poetry. To define itwith any narrower nicety would probably be rash. We have not beendiscovering what an epic poem ought to be, but roughly examining whatsimilarity of quality there is in all those poems which we feel, strictly attending to the emotional experience of reading them, can beclassed together and, for convenience, termed epic. But it is not muchgood having a name for this species of poetry if it is given as well topoems of quite a different nature. It is not much good agreeing to callby the name of epic such poems as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_, _Beowulf_ and the _Song of Roland_, _Paradise Lost_ and _GerusalemmeLiberata_, if epic is also to be the title for _The Faery Queene_ and_La Divina Commedia_, _The Idylls of the King_ and _The Ring and theBook_. But I believe most of the importance in the meaning of the wordepic, when it is reasonably used, will be found in what is writtenabove. Apart from the specific form of epic, it shares much of itsultimate intention with the greatest kind of drama (though not with alldrama). And just as drama, whatever grandeur of purpose it may attempt, must be a good play, so epic must be a good story. It will tell its taleboth largely and intensely, and the diction will be carried on thevolume of a powerful, flowing metre. To distinguish, however, betweenmerely narrative poetry, and poetry which goes beyond being merenarrative into the being of epic, must often be left to feeling whichcan scarcely be precisely analysed. A curious instance of thedifficulty in exactly defining epic (but not in exactly deciding what isepic) may be found in the work of William Morris. Morris left two longnarrative poems, _The Life and Death of Jason_, and _The Story of Sigurdthe Volsung_. 

I do not think anyone need hesitate to put _Sigurd_ among the epics; butI do not think anyone who will scrupulously compare the experience ofreading _Jason_ with the experience of reading _Sigurd_, can helpagreeing that _Jason_ should be kept out of the epics. There is nothingto choose between the subjects of the two poems. For an Englishman, Greek mythology means as much as the mythology of the North. And Ishould say that the bright, exact diction and the modest metre of_Jason_ are more interesting and attractive than the diction, oftenmonotonous and vague, and the metre, often clumsily vehement, of_Sigurd_. Yet for all that it is the style of _Sigurd_ that puts it withthe epics and apart from _Jason_; for style goes beyond metre anddiction, beyond execution, into conception. The whole imagination of_Sigurd_ is incomparably larger than that of _Jason_. In _Sigurd_, youfeel that the fashioning grasp of imagination has not only seized on theshow of things, and not only on the physical or moral unity of things, but has somehow brought into the midst of all this, and has kneaded intothe texture of it all, something of the ultimate and metaphysicalsignificance of life. You scarcely feel that in _Jason_. 

Yes, epic poetry must be an affair of evident largeness. It was wellsaid, that "the praise of an epic poem is to feign a person exceedingNature. " "Feign" here means to imagine; and imagine does not mean toinvent. But, like most of the numerous epigrams that have been madeabout epic poetry, the remark does not describe the nature of epic, butrather one of the conspicuous signs that that nature is fulfillingitself. A poem which is, in some sort, a summation for its time of thevalues of life, will inevitably concern itself with at least one figure, and probably with several, in whom the whole virtue, and perhaps alsothe whole failure, of living seems superhumanly concentrated. A storyweighted with the epic purpose could not proceed at all, unless it wereexpressed in persons big enough to support it. The subject, then, as theepic poet uses it, will obviously be an important one. Whether, apartfrom the way the poet uses it, the subject ought to be an important one, would not start a very profitable discussion. Homer has been praised formaking, in the _Iliad_, a first-rate poem out of a second-rate subject. It is a neat saying; but it seems unlikely that anything reallysecond-rate should turn into first-rate epic. I imagine Homer would havebeen considerably surprised, if anyone had told him that the vast trainof tragic events caused by the gross and insupportable insult put byAgamemnon, the mean mind in authority, on Achilles, the typicalhero--that this noble and profoundly human theme was a second-ratesubject. At any rate, the subject must be of capital importance in itstreatment. It must symbolize--not as a particular and separableassertion, but at large and generally--some great aspect of vitaldestiny, without losing the air of recording some accepted reality ofhuman experience, and without failing to be a good story; and thepressure of high purpose will inform diction and metre, as far, atleast, as the poet's verbal art will let it. 

The usual attempts at stricter definition of epic than anything thischapter contains, are either, in spite of what they try for, so vaguethat they would admit almost any long stretch of narrative poetry; orelse they are based on the accidents or devices of epic art; and in thatcase they are apt to exclude work which is essentially epic becausesomething inessential is lacking. It has, for instance, been seriouslydebated, whether an epic should not contain a catalogue of heroes. Otherthings, which epics have been required to contain, besides much that isnot worth mentioning, [5] are a descent into hell and some supernaturalmachinery. Both of these are obviously devices for enlarging the scopeof the action. The notion of a visit to the ghosts has fascinated manypoets, and Dante elaborated this Homeric device into the main scheme ofthe greatest of non-epical poems, as Milton elaborated the otherHomeric device into the main scheme of the greatest of literary epics. But a visit to the ghosts is, of course, like games or single combat ora set debate, merely an incident which may or may not be useful. Supernatural machinery, however, is worth some short discussion here, though it must be alluded to further in the sequel. The first andobvious thing to remark is, that an unquestionably epic effect can begiven without any supernatural machinery at all. The poet of _Beowulf_has no need of it, for instance. A Christian redactor has worked overthe poem, with more piety than skill; he can always be detected, and hisclumsy little interjections have nothing to do with the general tenourof the poem. The human world ends off, as it were, precipitously; andbeyond there is an endless, impracticable abyss in which dwells thesecret governance of things, an unknowable and implacablefate--"Wyrd"--neither malign nor benevolent, but simply inscrutable. Thepeculiar cast of noble and desolate courage which this bleak conceptiongives to the poem is perhaps unique among the epics. 

But very few epic poets have ventured to do without supernaturalmachinery of some sort. And it is plain that it must greatly assist theepic purpose to surround the action with immortals who are not onlyinterested spectators of the event, but are deeply implicated in it;nothing could more certainly liberate, or at least more appropriatelydecorate, the significant force of the subject. We may leave Milton out, for there can be no question about _Paradise Lost_ here; thesignificance of the subject is not only liberated by, it entirely existsin, the supernatural machinery. But with the other epic poets, we shouldcertainly expect them to ask us for our belief in their immortals. That, however, is just what they seem curiously careless of doing. Theimmortals are there, they are the occasion of splendid poetry; they dowhat they are intended to do--they declare, namely, by their speech andtheir action, the importance to the world of what is going on in thepoem. Only--there is no obligation to believe in them; and will not thatmean, no obligation to believe in their concern for the subject, and allthat that implies? Homer begins this paradox. Think of that lovely andexquisitely mischievous passage in the _Iliad_ called _The Cheating ofZeus_. The salvationist school of commentators calls this aninterpolation; but the spirit of it is implicit throughout the whole ofHomer's dealing with the gods; whenever, at least, he deals with them atlength, and not merely incidentally. Not to accept that spirit is not toaccept Homer. The manner of describing the Olympian family at the end ofthe first book is quite continuous throughout, and simply reaches itsclimax in the fourteenth book. Nobody ever believed in Homer's gods, ashe must believe in Hektor and Achilles. (Puritans like Xenophanes wereannoyed not with the gods for being as Homer described them, but withHomer for describing them as he did. ) Virgil is more decorous; but canwe imagine Virgil praying, or anybody praying, to the gods of the_Aeneid_? The supernatural machinery of Camoens and Tasso is franklyabsurd; they are not only careless of credibility, but of sanity. Lucantried to do without gods; but his witchcraft engages belief even morefaintly than the mingled Paganism and Christianity of Camoens, andmerely shows how strongly the most rationalistic of epic poets felt thevalue of some imaginary relaxation in the limits of human existence. Isit, then, only as such a relaxation that supernatural machinery isvaluable? Or only as a superlative kind of ornament? It is surely morethan that. In spite of the fact that we are not seriously asked tobelieve in it, it does beautifully and strikingly crystallize the poet'sdetermination to show us things that go past the reach of commonknowledge. But by putting it, whether instinctively or deliberately, ona lower plane of credibility than the main action, the poet obeys hisdeepest and gravest necessity: the necessity of keeping his poememphatically an affair of recognizable _human_ events. It is of man, andman's purpose in the world, that the epic poet has to sing; not of thepurpose of gods. The gods must only illustrate man's destiny; and theymust be kept within the bounds of beautiful illustration. But itrequires a finer genius than most epic poets have possessed, to keepsupernatural machinery just sufficiently fanciful without missing itsfunction. Perhaps only Homer and Virgil have done that perfectly. Milton's revolutionary development marks a crisis in the general processof epic so important, that it can only be discussed when that process isconsidered, in the following chapter, as a whole. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: Such as similes and episodes. It is as if a man were tosay, the essential thing about a bridge is that it should be painted. ]

IV. 

THE EPIC SERIES

By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of arthas constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in whichit was made. But the development of human society does not go straightforward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, theseries a recurring series--though not in exact repetition. Thus, theHomeric poems, the _Argonautica_, the _Aeneid_, the _Pharsalia_, and thelater Latin epics, form one series: the _Aeneid_ would be the climax ofthe series, which thence declines, were it not that the whole originateswith the incomparable genius of Homer--a fact which makes it seem todecline from start to finish. Then the process begins again, and againfulfils itself, in the series which goes from _Beowulf_, the _Song ofRoland_, and the _Nibelungenlied_, through Camoens and Tasso up toMilton. And in this case Milton is plainly the climax. There is nothinglike _Paradise Lost_ in the preceding poems, and epic poetry has donenothing since but decline from that towering glory. 

But it will be convenient not to make too much of chronology, in ageneral account of epic development. It has already appeared that theduties of all "authentic" epic are broadly the same, and the poems ofthis kind, though two thousand years may separate their occurrence, maybe properly brought together as varieties of one sub-species. "Literary"epic differs much more in the specific purpose of its art, as civilizedsocieties differ much more than heroic, and also as the looser _milieu_of a civilization allows a less strictly traditional exercise ofpersonal genius than an heroic age. Still, it does not require anymanipulation to combine the "literary" epics from both series into asingle process. Indeed, if we take Homer, Virgil and Milton as theoutstanding events in the whole progress of epic poetry, and group theless important poems appropriately round these three names, we shall notbe far from the _ideal truth_ of epic development. We might say, then, that Homer begins the whole business of epic, imperishably fixes itstype and, in a way that can never be questioned, declares its artisticpurpose; Virgil perfects the type; and Milton perfects the purpose. Three such poets are not, heaven knows, summed up in a phrase; I meanmerely to indicate how they are related one to another in the generalscheme of epic poetry. For discriminating their merits, deciding theircomparative eminence, I have no inclination; and fortunately it does notcome within the requirements of this essay. Indeed, I think the readerwill easily excuse me, if I touch very slightly on the poetic manner, inthe common and narrow sense, of the poets whom I shall have to mention;since these qualities have been so often and sometimes so admirablydealt with. It is at the broader aspects of artistic purpose that I wishto look. 

"From Homer, " said Goethe, "I learn every day more clearly, that in ourlife here above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell. " It israther a startling sentence at first. That poetry which, for us, inThoreau's excellent words, "lies in the east of literature, " scarcelysuggests, in the usual opinion of it, Hell. We are tempted to think ofHomer as the most fortunate of poets. It seems as if he had but to openhis mouth and speak, to create divine poetry; and it does not lessen oursense of his good fortune when, on looking a little closer, we see thatthis is really the result of an unerring and unfailing art, anextraordinarily skilful technique. He had it entirely at his command;and he exercised it in a language in which, though it may be singularlyartificial and conventional, we can still feel the wonder of itssensuous beauty and the splendour of its expressive power. It is alanguage that seems alive with eagerness to respond to imagination. OpenHomer anywhere, and the casual grandeur of his untranslatable languageappears; such lines as:

 amphi de naees smerdaleon konabaesan ausanton hup' Achaion. [6]

That, you might say, is Homer at his ease; when he exerts himself youget a miracle like:

 su den strophalingi koniaes keiso megas megalosti, lelasmenos hipposunaon. [7]

It seems the art of one who walked through the world of things endowedwith the senses of a god, and able, with that perfection of effort thatlooks as if it were effortless, to fashion his experience intoincorruptible song; whether it be the dance of flies round a byre atmilking-time, or a forest-fire on the mountains at night. The shape andclamour of waves breaking on the beach in a storm is as irresistiblyrecorded by Homer as the gleaming flowers which earth put forth to bethe bed of Zeus and Hera in Gargaros, when a golden cloud was theircoverlet, and Sleep sat on a pine tree near by in the likeness of amurmuring night-jar. It is an art so balanced, that when it tells us, with no special emphasis, how the Trojans came on with a din like theclangour of a flock of cranes, but the Achaians came on in silence, thetemper of the two hosts is discriminated for the whole poem; or, in thesupreme instance, when it tells us how the old men looked at Helen andsaid, "No wonder the young men fight for her!" then Helen's beauty mustbe accepted by the faith of all the world. The particulars of suchpoetry could be enumerated for pages; and this is the poetry which isfilled, more than any other literature, in the _Iliad_ with the nobilityof men and women, in the _Odyssey_ with the light of natural magic. Andthink of those gods of Homer's; he is the one poet who has been able tomake the dark terrors of religion beautiful, harmless and quietlyentertaining. It is easy to read this poetry and simply _enjoy_ it; itis easy to say, the man whose spirit held this poetry must have beendivinely happy. But this is the poetry whence Goethe learnt that thefunction of man is "to enact Hell. "

Goethe is profoundly right; though possibly he puts it in a way to whichHomer himself might have demurred. For the phrase inevitably has itspoint in the word "Hell"; Homer, we may suppose, would have preferredthe point to come in the word "enact. " In any case, the details ofChristian eschatology must not engage us much in interpreting Goethe'sepigram. There is truth in it, not simply because the two poems takeplace in a theatre of calamity; not simply, for instance, because of thebeloved Hektor's terrible agony of death, and the woes of Andromache andPriam. Such things are the partial, incidental expressions of the wholeartistic purpose. Still less is it because of a strain of latentsavagery in, at any rate, the _Iliad_; as when the sage and reverendNestor urges that not one of the Greeks should go home until he has lainwith the wife of a slaughtered Trojan, or as in the tremendous words ofthe oath: "Whoever first offend against this oath, may their brains bepoured out on the ground like this wine, their own and their children's, and may their wives be made subject to strangers. " All that is one ofthe accidental qualities of Homer. But the force of the word "enact" inGoethe's epigram will certainly come home to us when we think of thosefamous speeches in which courage is unforgettably declared--suchspeeches as that of Sarpedon to Glaukos, or of Glaukos to Diomedes, orof Hektor at his parting with Andromache. What these speeches mean, however, in the whole artistic purpose of Homer, will assuredly bemissed if they are _detached_ for consideration; especially we shallmiss the deep significance of the fact that in all of these speeches thesubstantial thought falls, as it were, into two clauses. Courage is inthe one clause, a deliberate facing of death; but something equallyimportant is in the other. Is it honour? The Homeric hero makes a greatdeal of honour; but it is honour paid to himself, living; what he wantsabove everything is to be admired--"always to be the best"; that is whattrue heroism is. But he is to go where he knows death will strike athim; and he does not make much of honour after death; for him, themeanest man living is better than a dead hero. Death ends everything, asfar as he is concerned, honour and all; his courage looks for no rewardhereafter. No; but _since_ ten thousand fates of death are alwaysinstant round us; _since_ the generations of men are of no more accountthan leaves of a tree; _since_ Troy and all its people will soon bedestroyed--he will stand in death's way. Sarpedon emphasizes this withits converse: There would be no need of daring and fighting, he says, of "man-ennobling battle, " if we could be for ever ageless anddeathless. That is the heroic age; any other would say, If only we couldnot be killed, how pleasant to run what might have been risks! For thehero, that would simply not be worth while. Does he find them pleasant, then, just because they are risky? Not quite; that, again, is to detachpart of the meaning from the whole. If anywhere, we shall, perhaps, findthe whole meaning of Homer most clearly indicated in such words as thosegiven (without any enforcement) to Achilles and Thetis near thebeginning of the _Iliad_, as if to sound the pitch of Homer's poetry:

 mêter, hepi m hetekes ge minynthadion per heonta, timên per moi hophellen Olympios engyalixai Zeus hypsibremetês. [8] * * * * * timêson moi yion hos hôkymorôtatos hallon heplet'. [9]

Minunthadion--hôkymorôtatos: those are the imporportant words;key-words, they might be called. If we really understand these lines, ifwe see in them what it is that Agamemnon's insult has deprived Achillesof--the sign and acknowledgment of his fellows' admiration while he isstill living among them, the one thing which makes a hero's life worthliving, which enables him to enact his Hell--we shall scarcely complainthat the _Iliad_ is composed on a second-rate subject. The significanceof the poem is not in the incidents surrounding the "Achilleis"; thewhole significance is centred in the Wrath of Achilles, and thence madeto impregnate every part. 

Life is short; we must make the best of it. How trite that sounds! Butit is not trite at all really. It seems difficult, sometimes, to believethat there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentimentsthat imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the originalmetaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual. It isdifficult to imagine backwards into the time when self-consciousness wasstill so fresh from its emergence out of the mere tribal consciousnessof savagery, that it must not only accept the fact, but first intensely_realize_, that man is hôkymorôtatos--a thing of swiftest doom. And itwas for men who were able, and forced, to do that, that the _Iliad_ andthe _Odyssey_ and the other early epics were composed. But life is notonly short; it is, in itself, _valueless_. "As the generation of leaves, so is the generation of men. " The life of man matters to nobody buthimself. It happens incidentally in universal destiny; but beyond justhappening it has no function. No function, of course, except for manhimself. If man is to find any value in life it is he himself that mustcreate the value. For the sense of the ultimate uselessness of life, ofthe blankness of imperturbable darkness that surrounds it, Goethe's word"Hell" is not too shocking. But no one has properly lived who has notfelt this Hell; and we may easily believe that in an heroic age, theintensity of this feeling was the secret of the intensity of living. Forwhere will the primitive instinct of man, where will the hero, find thechance of creating a value for life? In danger, and in the courage thatwelcomes danger. That not only evaluates life; it derives the value fromthe very fact that forces man to create value--the fact of his swift andinstant doom--hôkymorôtatos once more; it makes this dreadful fact_enjoyable_. And so, with courage as the value of life, and man thencedelightedly accepting whatever can be made of his passage, the doom oflife is not simply suffered; man enacts his own life; he has masteredit. 

We need not say that this is the lesson of Homer. And all this, barelystated, is a very different matter from what it is when it is poeticallysymbolized in the vast and shapely substance of the _Iliad_ and the_Odyssey_. It is quite possible, of course, to appreciate, pleasantlyand externally, the _Iliad_ with its pressure of thronging life and itsdaring unity, and the _Odyssey_ with its serener life and its superbconstruction, though much more sectional unity. But we do not appreciatewhat Homer did for his time, and is still doing for all the world, we donot appreciate the spirit of his music, unless we see the warfare andthe adventure as symbols of the primary courage of life; and there ismore in those words than seems when they are baldly written. And it isnot his morals, but Homer's art that does that for us. And what Homer'sart does supremely, the other early epics do in their way too. Their wayis not to be compared with Homer's way. They are very much nearer thanhe is to the mere epic material--to the moderate accomplishment of theprimitive ballad. Apart from their greatness, and often successfulgreatness, of intention, perhaps the only one that has an answerablegreatness in the detail of its technique is _Beowulf_. That is not onaccount of its "kennings"--the strange device by which early popularpoetry (Hesiod is another instance) tries to liberate and master themagic of words. A good deal has been made of these "kennings"; but itdoes not take us far towards great poetry, to have the sea called"whale-road" or "swan-road" or "gannet's-bath"; though we are gettingnearer to it when the sun is called "candle of the firmament" or"heaven's gem. " On the whole, the poem is composed in an elaborate, ambitious diction which is not properly governed. Alliteration proves asomewhat dangerous principle; it seems mainly responsible for the waythe poet makes his sentences by piling up clauses, like shooting a loadof stones out of a cart. You cannot always make out exactly what hemeans; and it is doubtful whether he always had a clearly-thoughtmeaning. Most of the subsidiary matter is foisted in with monstrousclumsiness. Yet _Beowulf_ has what we do not find, out of Homer, in theother early epics. It has occasionally an unforgettable grandeur ofphrasing. And it has other and perhaps deeper poetic qualities. When thewarriors are waiting in the haunted hall for the coming of themarsh-fiend Grendel, they fall into untroubled sleep; and the poet adds, with Homeric restraint: "Not one of them thought that he should thencebe ever seeking his loved home again, his people or free city, where hewas nurtured. " The opening is magnificent, one of the noblest thingsthat have been done in language. There is some wonderful grim landscapein the poem; towards the middle there is a great speech on deteriorationthrough prosperity, a piece of sustained intensity that reads like anAeschylean chorus; and there is some admirable fighting, especially thefight with Grendel in the hall, and with Grendel's mother under thewaters, while Beowulf's companions anxiously watch the troubled surfaceof the mere. The fact that the action of the poem is chiefly made ofsingle combat with supernatural creatures and that there is not tapestryfigured with radiant gods drawn between the life of men and the ultimatedarkness, gives a peculiar and notable character to the way Beowulfsymbolizes the primary courage of life. One would like to think, withsome enthusiasts, that this great poem, composed in a language totallyunintelligible to the huge majority of Englishmen--further from Englishthan Latin is from Italian--and perhaps not even composed in England, certainly not concerned either with England or Englishmen, mightnevertheless be called an English epic. 

But of course the early epics do not, any of them, merely repeat thesignificance of Homer in another form. They might do that, if poetry hadto inculcate a moral, as some have supposed. But however nicely we mayanalyse it, we shall never find in poetry a significance which is reallydetachable, and expressible in another way. The significance _is_ thepoetry. What _Beowulf_ or the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_ means is simplywhat it is in its whole nature; we can but roughly indicate it. And aspoetry is never the same, so its significance is never quite the same. Courage as the first necessary value of life is most naively and simplyexpressed, perhaps, in the _Poem of the Cid_; but even here theexpression is, as in all art, unique, and chiefly because it iscontrived through solidly imagined characters. There is splendidcharacterization, too, in the _Song of Roland_, together with a finesense of poetic form; not fine enough, however, to avoid a prodigiousdeal of conventional gag. The battling is lavish, but always exciting;and in, at least, that section which describes how the dying Oliver, blinded by weariness and wounds, mistakes Roland for a pagan and feeblysmites him with his sword, there is real and piercing pathos. But forall his sense of character, the poet has very little discretion in hisadmiration of his heroes. Christianity, in these two poems, has lesseffect than one might think. The conspicuous value of life is still theoriginal value, courage; but elaboration and refinement of this beginto appear, especially in the _Song of Roland_, as passionately consciouspatriotism and loyalty. The chief contribution of the _Nibelungenlied_to the main process of epic poetry is _plot_ in narrative; acontribution, that is, to the manner rather than to the content of epicsymbolism. There is something that can be called plot in Homer; but withhim, as in all other early epics, it is of no great account comparedwith the straightforward linking of incidents into a direct chain ofnarrative. The story of the _Nibelungenlied_, however, is not a chainbut a web. Events and the influence of characters are woven closely andintricately together into one tragic pattern; and this requires not onlycharacterization, but also the adding to the characters of persistentand dominant motives. 

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannotstrictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner oflife. But life as courage--the turning of the dark, hard condition oflife into something which can be exulted in--this, which is the deepsignificance of the art of the first epics, is the absolutely necessaryfoundation for any subsequent valuation of life; Man can achieve nothinguntil he has first achieved courage. And this, much more than anyinheritance of manner, is what makes all the writers of deliberate or"literary" epic imply the existence of Homer. If Homer had not done hiswork, they could not have done theirs. But "literary" epics are asnecessary as Homer. We cannot go on with courage as the solitaryvaluation of life. We must have the foundation, but we must also havethe superstructure. Speaking comparatively, it may be said that thefunction of Homeric epic has been to create imperishable symbolism forthe actual courageous consciousness of life, but the duty of "literary"epic has been to develop this function, answerably to the development oflife itself, into symbolism of some conscious _idea_ of life--somethingat once more formalized and more subtilized than the primary virtue ofcourage. The Greeks, however, were too much overshadowed by thegreatness of Homer to do much towards this. The _Argonautica_, thehalf-hearted epic of Apollonius Rhodius, is the only attempt that needconcern us. It is not a poem that can be read straight through; it isonly enjoyable in moments--moments of charming, minute observation, likethe description of a sunbeam thrown quivering on the wall from a basinof water "which has just been poured out, " lines not only charming inthemselves, but finely used as a simile for Medea's agitated heart; ormoments of romantic fantasy, as when the Argonauts see the eagle flyingtowards Prometheus, and then hear the Titan's agonized cry. But it isnot in such passages that what Apollonius did for epic abides. A greatdeal of his third book is a real contribution to the main process, toepic content as well as to epic manner. To the manner of epic he addedanalytic psychology. No one will ever imagine character more deeply ormore firmly than Homer did in, say, Achilles; but Apollonius was the manwho showed how epic as well as drama may use the nice minutiae ofpsychological imagination. Through Virgil, this contribution to epicmanner has pervaded subsequent literature. Apollonius, too, in hisfumbling way, as though he did not quite know what he was doing, has yetdone something very important for the development of epic significance. Love has been nothing but a subordinate incident, almost one might sayan ornament, in the early epics; in Apollonius, though working through adeal of gross and lumbering mythological machinery, love becomes for thefirst time one of the primary values of life. The love of Jason andMedea is the vital symbolism of the _Argonautica_. 

But it is Virgil who really begins the development of epic art. He tookover from Apollonius love as part of the epic symbolism of life, anddelicate psychology as part of the epic method. And, like Apollonius, heused these novelties chiefly in the person of a heroine. But in Virgilthey belong to an incomparably greater art; and it is through Virgilthat they have become necessities of the epic tradition. More than this, however, was required of him. The epic poet collaborates with the spiritof his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he issuccessful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuseto work with his time. Virgil not only implies, he often clearly states, the original epic values of life, the Homeric values; as in the famous:

 Stat sua cuique dies; breve et inreparabile tempus Omnibus est vitae: sed famam extendere factis, Hoc virtutis opus. [10]

But to write a poem chiefly to symbolize this simple, heroic metaphysicwould scarcely have done for Virgil; it would certainly not have donefor his time. It was eminently a time of social organization, one mightperhaps say of social consciousness. After Sylla and Marius and Caesar, life as an affair of sheer individualism would not very strongly appealto a thoughtful Roman. Accordingly, as has so often been remarked, the_Aeneid_ celebrates the Roman Empire. A political idea does not seem avery likely subject for a kind of poetry which must declare greatly thefundamentals of living; not even when it is a political idea unequalledin the world, the idea of the Roman Empire. Had Virgil been a _goodRoman_, the _Aeneid_ might have been what no doubt Augustus, and Romegenerally, desired, a political epic. But Virgil was not a good Roman;there was something in him that was not Roman at all. It was thisstrange incalculable element in him that seems for ever making himaccomplish something he had not thought of; it was surely this that madehim, unintentionally it may be, use the idea of the Roman Empire as avehicle for a much profounder valuation of life. We must remember herethe Virgil of the Fourth Eclogue--that extraordinary, impassioned poemin which he dreams of man attaining to some perfection of living. It isstill this Virgil, though saddened and resigned, who writes the_Aeneid_. Man creating his own destiny, man, however wearied with thelong task of resistance, achieving some conscious community ofaspiration, and dreaming of the perfection of himself: the poet whoselovely and noble art makes us a great symbol of _that_, is assuredlycarrying on the work of Homer. This was the development in epicintention required to make epic poetry answer to the widening needs ofcivilization. 

But even more important, in the whole process of epic, than whatVirgil's art does, is the way it does it. And this in spite of the factwhich everyone has noticed, that Virgil does not compare with Homer as apoet of seafaring and warfaring. He is not, indeed, very interested ineither; and it is unfortunate that, in managing the story of Aeneas (initself an excellent medium for his symbolic purpose) he felt himselfcompelled to try for some likeness to the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_--todo by art married to study what the poet of the _Odyssey_ and the_Iliad_ had done by art married to intuitive experience. But his failurein this does not matter much in comparison with his technical successotherwise. Virgil showed how poetry may be made deliberately adequate tothe epic purpose. That does not mean that Virgil is more artistic thanHomer. Homer's redundance, wholesale repetition of lines, and stockepithets cannot be altogether dismissed as "faults"; they arecharacteristics of a wonderfully accomplished and efficient technique. But epic poetry cannot be written as Homer composed it; whereas it mustbe written something as Virgil wrote it; yes, if epic poetry is to be_written_, Virgil must show how that is to be done. The superb Virgilianeconomy is the thing for an epic poet now; the concision, thescrupulousness, the loading of every word with something appreciable ofthe whole significance. After the _Aeneid_, the epic style must be ofthis fashion:

 Ibant ovscuri sola sub nocte per umbram Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna: Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna Est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra Jupiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem. [11]

Lucan is much more of a Roman than Virgil; and the _Pharsalia_, so faras it is not an historical epic, is a political one; the idea ofpolitical liberty is at the bottom of it. That is not an unworthy theme;and Lucan evidently felt the necessity for development in epic. But hemade the mistake, characteristically Roman, of thinking history morereal than legend; and, trying to lead epic in this direction, supernatural machinery would inevitably go too. That, perhaps, wasfortunate, for it enabled Lucan safely to introduce one of his great andmemorable lines:

 Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris;[12]

which would certainly explode any supernatural machinery that could beinvented. The _Pharsalia_ could not be anything more than an interestingbut unsuccessful attempt; it was not on these lines that epic poetry wasto develop. Lucan died at an age when most poets have done nothing veryremarkable; that he already had achieved a poem like the _Pharsalia_, would make us think he might have gone to incredible heights, were itnot that the mistake of the _Pharsalia_ seems to belong incurably to histemperament. 

Lucan's determined stoicism may, philosophically, be more consistentthan the dubious stoicism of Virgil. But Virgil knew that, in epic, supernatural imagination is better than consistency. It was an importantstep when he made Jupiter, though a personal god, a power to which nolimits are assigned; when he also made the other divinities but shadows, or, at most, functions, of Jupiter. This answers to his conviction thatspirit universally and singly pervades matter; but, what is more, itanswers to the needs of epic development. When we come to Tasso andCamoens, we seem to have gone backward in this respect; we seem to comeupon poetry in which supernatural machinery is in a state of chronicinsubordination. But that, too, was perhaps necessary. In comparisonwith the _Aeneid, Gerusalemme Liberata_ and _Os Lusiadas_ lackintellectual control and spiritual depth; but in comparison with theRoman, the two modern poems thrill with a new passion of life, a newwine of life, heady, as it seems, with new significance--a significanceas yet only felt, not understood. Both Tasso and Camoens clearly join onto the main epic tradition: Tasso derives chiefly from the _Aeneid_ andthe _Iliad_, Camoens from the _Aeneid_ and the _Odyssey_. Tasso isperhaps more Virgilian than Camoens; the plastic power of hisimagination is more assured. But the advantage Camoens has over Tassoseems to repeat the advantage Homer has over Virgil; the ostensiblesubject of the _Lusiads_ glows with the truth of experience. But thereal subject is behind these splendid voyagings, just as the realsubject of Tasso is behind the battles of Christian and Saracen; and inboth poets the inmost theme is broadly the same. It is the consciousnessof modern Europe. _Jerusalem Delivered_ and the _Lusiads_ are drenchedwith the spirit of the Renaissance; and that is chiefly responsible fortheir lovely poetry. But they reach out towards the new Europe that wasthen just beginning. Europe making common cause against the peoples thatare not Europe; Europe carrying her domination round the world--is thatwhat Tasso and Camoens ultimately mean? It would be too hard and toonarrow a matter by itself to make these poems what they are. No; it isnot the action of Europe, but the spirit of European consciousness, thatgave Tasso and Camoens their deepest inspiration. But what Europeanconsciousness really is, these poets rather vaguely suggest than masterinto clear and irresistible expression, into the supreme symbolism ofperfectly adequate art. They still took European consciousness as anaffair of geography and race rather than simply as a triumphant stage inthe general progress of man's knowledge of himself. Their time imposed aduty on them; that they clearly understood. But they did not clearlyunderstand what the duty was; partly, no doubt, because they were bothstrongly influenced by mediaeval religion. And so it is atmosphere, inTasso and Camoens, that counts much more than substance; both poets seemperpetually thrilled by something they cannot express--the _non so che_of Tasso. And what chiefly gives this sense of quivering, uncertainsignificance to their poetry is the increase of freedom and decrease ofcontrol in the supernatural. Supernaturalism was emphasized, becausethey instinctively felt that this was the means epic poetry must use toaccomplish its new duties; it was disorderly, because they did not quiteknow what use these duties required. Tasso and Camoens, for all thesplendour and loveliness of their work, leave epic poetry, as it were, consciously dissatisfied--knowing that its future must achieve somesignificance larger and deeper than anything it had yet done, andknowing that this must be done somehow through imagined supernaturalism. It waited nearly a hundred years for the poet who understood exactlywhat was to be done and exactly how to do it. 

In _Paradise Lost_, the development of epic poetry culminates, as far asit has yet gone. The essential inspiration of the poem implies aparticular sense of human existence which has not yet definitelyappeared in the epic series, but which the process of life in Europemade it absolutely necessary that epic poetry should symbolize. InMilton, the poet arose who was supremely adequate to the greatest tasklaid on epic poetry since its beginning with Homer; Milton's task wasperhaps even more exacting than that original one. "His work is not thegreatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the first. " The epigrammight just as reasonably have been the other way round. But nothingwould be more unprofitable than a discussion in which Homer and Miltoncompete for supremacy of genius. Our business here is quite otherwise. 

With the partial exception of Tasso and Camoens, all epic poetry beforeMilton is some symbolism of man's sense of his own will. It is simplythis in Homer; and the succeeding poets developed this intention butremained well within it. Not even Virgil, with his metaphysic ofindividual merged into social will--not even Virgil went outside it. Infact, it is a sort of _monism_ of consciousness that inspires allpre-Miltonic epic. But in Milton, it has become a _dualism_. Before him, the primary impulse of epic is an impassioned sense of man's nature_being contained_--by his destiny: _his_ only because he is in it andbelongs to it, as we say "_my_ country. " With Milton, this hasnecessarily become not only a sense of man's rigorously containednature, but equally a sense of that which contains man--in fact, simultaneously a sense of individual will and of universal necessity. The single sense of these two irreconcilables is what Milton's poetryhas to symbolize. Could they be reconciled, the two elements in man'smodern consciousness of existence would form a monism. But thisconsciousness is a dualism; its elements are absolutely opposed. _Paradise Lost_ is inspired by intense consciousness of the eternalcontradiction between the general, unlimited, irresistible will ofuniversal destiny, and defined individual will existing within this, andinexplicably capable of acting on it, even against it. Or, if that seemstoo much of an antinomy to some philosophies (and it is perhaps possibleto make it look more apparent than real), the dualism can be unavoidablydeclared by putting it entirely in terms of consciousness: destinycreating within itself an existence which stands against and apart fromdestiny by being _conscious_ of it. In Milton's poetry the spirit of manis equally conscious of its own limited reality and of the unlimitedreality of that which contains him and drives him with its motion--ofhis own will striving in the midst of destiny: destiny irresistible, yethis will unmastered. 

This is not to examine the development of epic poetry by looking at thatwhich is not _poetry_. In this kind of art, more perhaps than in anyother, we must ignore the wilful theories of those who would setboundaries to the meaning of the word poetry. In such a poem asMilton's, whatever is in it is its poetry; the poetry of _Paradise Lost_is just--_Paradise Lost_! Its pomp of divine syllables and gloriousimages is no more the poetry of Milton than the idea of man which heexpressed. But the general manner of an art is for ever similar; it isits inspiration that is for ever changing. We need never expect wordsand metre to do more than they do here:

 they, fondly thinking to allay Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit Chewed bitter ashes, which the offended taste With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayed, Hunger and thirst constraining; drugged as oft, With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws, With soot and cinders filled;

or more than they do here:

 What though the field be lost? All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield, And what is else not to be overcome. 

But what Homer's words, and perhaps what Virgil's words, set out to do, they do just as marvellously. There is no sure way of comparison here. How words do their work in poetry, and how we appreciate the way they doit--this seems to involve the obscurest processes of the mind: analysiscan but fumble at it. But we can compare inspiration--the nature of theinmost urgent motive of poetry. And it is not irrelevant to add (itseems to me mere fact), that Milton had the greatest motive that hasever ruled a poet. 

For the vehicle of this motive, a fable of purely human action wouldobviously not suffice. What Milton has to express is, of course, altogether human; destiny is an entirely human conception. But he has toexpress not simply the sense of human existence occurring in destiny;that brings in destiny only mediately, through that which is destined. He has to express the sense of destiny immediately, at the same time ashe expresses its opponent, the destined will of man. Destiny will appearin poetry as an omnipotent God; Virgil had already prepared poetry forthat. But the action at large must clearly consist now, and for thefirst time, overwhelmingly of supernatural imagination. Milton has beenfoolishly blamed for making his supernaturalism too human. But nothingcan come into poetry that is not shaped and recognizable; how else butin anthropomorphism could destiny, or (its poetic equivalent) deity, exist in _Paradise Lost_?

We may see what a change has come over epic poetry, if we compare thissupernatural imagination of Milton's with the supernatural machinery ofany previous epic poet. Virgil is the most scrupulous in this respect;and towards the inevitable change, which Milton completed and perfectedfrom Camoens and Tasso, Virgil took a great step in making Jupiterprofessedly almighty. But compare Virgil's "Tantaene animis celestibusirae?" with Milton's "Evil, be thou my good!" It is the differencebetween an accidental device and essential substance. That, in order tosymbolize in epic form--that is to say, in _narrative_ form--thedualistic sense of destiny and the destined, and both immediately--Milton had to dissolve his human action completely in asupernatural action, is the sign not merely of a development, but of are-creation, of epic art. 

It has been said that Satan is the hero of _Paradise Lost_. The offencewhich the remark has caused is due, no doubt, to injudicious use of theword "hero. " It is surely the simple fact that if _Paradise Lost_ existsfor any one figure, that is Satan; just as the _Iliad_ exists forAchilles, and the _Odyssey_ for Odysseus. It is in the figure of Satanthat the imperishable significance of _Paradise Lost_ is centred; hisvast unyielding agony symbolizes the profound antinomy of modernconsciousness. And if this is what he is in significance it is worthnoting what he is in technique. He is the blending of the poem's humanplane with its supernatural plane. The epic hero has always representedhumanity by being superhuman; in Satan he has grown into thesupernatural. He does not thereby cease to symbolize human existence;but he is thereby able to symbolize simultaneously the sense of itsirreconcilable condition, of the universal destiny that contains it. Outof Satan's colossal figure, the single urgency of inspiration, whichthis dualistic consciousness of existence makes, radiates through allthe regions of Milton's vast and rigorous imagination. "Milton, " saysLandor, "even Milton rankt with living men!"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 6: 'And all round the ships echoed terribly to the shoutingAchaians. ']

[Footnote 7: 'When in a dusty whirlwind thou didst lie, Thy valour lost, forgot thy chivalry. '--OGILBY. (The version leaves out megas megalosti. )]

[Footnote 8: 'Mother, since thou didst bear me to be so short-lived, Olympian Zeus that thunders from on high should especially have bestowedhonour on me. ']

[Footnote 9: 'Honour my son for me, for the swiftest doom of all ishis. ']

[Footnote 10: "For everyone his own day is appointed; for all men theperiod of life is short and not to be recalled: but to spread glory bydeeds, that is what valour can do. "]

[Footnote 11: "They wer' amid the shadows by night in loneliness obscure Walking forth i' the void and vasty dominyon of Ades; As by an uncertain moonray secretly illumin'd One goeth in the forest, when heav'n is gloomily clouded, And black night hath robb'd the colours and beauty from all things. "--ROBERT BRIDGES. ]

[Footnote 12: "All that is known, all that is felt, is God. "]

V. 

AFTER MILTON

And after Milton, what is to happen? First, briefly, for a few instancesof what has happened. We may leave out experiments in religioussentiment like Klopstock's _Messiah_. We must leave out also poems whichhave something of the look of epic at first glance, but have nothing ofthe scope of epic intention; such as Scott's longer poems. These mightresemble the "lays" out of which some people imagine "authentic" epic tohave been made. But the lays are not the epic. Scott's poems have notthe depth nor the definiteness of symbolic intention--what is sometimescalled the epic unity--and this is what we can always discover in anypoetry which gives us the peculiar experience we must associate with theword epic, if it is to have any precision of meaning. What applies toScott, will apply still more to Byron's poems; Byron is one of thegreatest of modern poets, but that does not make him an epic poet. Wemust keep our minds on epic intention. Shelley's _Revolt of Islam_ hassomething of it, but too vaguely and too fantastically; the generalityof human experience had little to do with this glittering poem. Keats's_Hyperion_ is wonderful; but it does not go far enough to let us formany judgment of it appropriate to the present purpose. [13] Our searchwill not take us far before we notice something very remarkable; poemswhich look superficially like epic turn out to have scarce anything ofreal epic intention; whereas epic intention is apt to appear in poemsthat do not look like epic at all. In fact, it seems as if epic mannerand epic content were trying for a divorce. If this be so, thetraditional epic manner will scarcely survive the separation. Epiccontent, however, may very well be looking out for a match with a newmanner; though so far it does not seem to have found an altogethersatisfactory partner. 

But there are one or two poems in which the old union seems still happy. Most noteworthy is Goethe's _Hermann und Dorothea_. You may say that itdoes not much matter whether such poetry should be called epic or, assome hold, idyllic. But it is interesting to note, first, that the poemis deliberately written with epic style and epic intention; and, second, that, though singularly beautiful, it makes no attempt to add anythingto epic development. It is interesting, too, to see epic poetry tryingto get away from its heroes, and trying to use material the poeticimportance of which seems to depend solely on the treatment, not onitself. This was a natural and, for some things, a laudable reaction. But it inevitably meant that epic must renounce the triumphs whichMilton had won for it. William Morris saw no reason for abandoningeither the heroes or anything else of the epic tradition. The chiefpersonages of _Sigurd the Volsung_ are admittedly more than human, theevents frankly marvellous. The poem is an impressive one, and in one wayor another fulfils all the main qualifications of epic. But perhaps nogreat poem ever had so many faults. These have nothing to do with itsmanagement of supernaturalism; those who object to this simply showignorance of the fundamental necessities of epic poetry. The first bookis magnificent; everything that epic narrative should be; but after thisthe poem grows long-winded, and that is the last thing epic poetryshould be. It is written with a running pen; so long as the verse keepsgoing on, Morris seems satisfied, though it is very often going onabout unimportant things, and in an uninteresting manner. After thefirst book, indeed, as far as Morris's epic manner is concerned, Virgiland Milton might never have lived. It attempts to be the grand manner bymeans of vagueness. In an altogether extraordinary way, the poem slursover the crucial incidents (as in the inept lines describing the deathof Fafnir, and those, equally hollow, describing the death ofGuttorm--two noble opportunities simply not perceived) and tirelesslyexpatiates on the mere surroundings of the story. Yet there is noattempt to make anything there credible: Morris seems to have mixed upthe effects of epic with the effects of a fairy-tale. The poem lacksintellect; it has no clear-cut thought. And it lacks sensuous images; itis full of the sentiment, not of the sense of things, which is the wrongway round. Hence the protracted conversations are as a rule amazinglywindy and pointless, as the protracted descriptions are amazinglyuseless and tedious. And the superhuman virtues of the characters arenot shown in the poem so much as energetically asserted. It says muchfor the genius of Morris that _Sigurd the Volsung_, with all thesefaults, is not to be condemned; that, on the contrary, to read it israther a great than a tiresome experience; and not only because thefaults are relieved, here and there, by exquisite beauties anddignities, indeed by incomparable lines, but because the poem as a wholedoes, as it goes on, accumulate an immense pressure of significance. Allthe great epics of the world have, however, perfectly clearly asignificance in close relation with the spirit of their time; theintense desire to symbolize the consciousness of man as far as it hasattained, is what vitally inspires an epic poet, and the ardour of thisinfects his whole style. Morris, in this sense, was not vitallyinspired. _Sigurd the Volsung_ is a kind of set exercise in epic poetry. It is great, but it is not _needed_. It is, in fact, an attempt to writeepic poetry as it might have been written, and to make epic poetry meanwhat it might have meant, in the days when the tale of Sigurd and theNiblungs was newly come among men's minds. Mr. Doughty, in hissurprising poem _The Dawn in Britain_, also seems trying to compose anepic exercise, rather than to be obeying a vital necessity ofinspiration. For all that, it is a great poem, full of irresistiblevision and memorable diction. But it is written in a revolutionarysyntax, which, like most revolutions of this kind, achieves nothingbeyond the fact of being revolutionary; and Mr. Doughty often uses theunexpected effects of his queer syntax instead of the unexpected effectsof poetry, which makes the poem even longer psychologically than it isphysically. Lander's _Gebir_ has much that can truly be called epic init; and it has learned the lessons in manner which Virgil and Milton sonobly taught. It has perhaps learned them too well; never wereconcision, and the loading of each word with heavy duties, so thoroughlypractised. The action is so compressed that it is difficult to make outexactly what is going on; we no sooner realize that an incident hasbegun than we find ourselves in the midst of another. Apart from theseidiosyncrasies, the poetry of _Gebir_ is a curious mixture of splendourand commonplace. If fiction could ever be wholly, and not onlypartially, epic, it would be in _Gebir_. 

In all these poems, we see an epic intention still combined with arecognizably epic manner. But what is quite evident is, that in all ofthem there is no attempt to carry on the development of epic, to take upits symbolic power where Milton left it. On the contrary, this seems tobe deliberately avoided. For any tentative advance on Miltonicsignificance, even for any real acceptance of it, we must go to poetrywhich tries to put epic intention into a new form. Some obviouspeculiarities of epic style are sufficiently definite to be detachable. Since Theocritus, a perverse kind of pleasure has often been obtained byputting some of the peculiarities of epic--peculiarities really requiredby a very long poem--into the compass of a very short poem. An epicidyll cannot, of course, contain any considerable epic intention; it iswrought out of the mere shell of epic, and avoids any semblance of epicscope. But by devising somehow a connected sequence of idylls, somethingof epic scope can be acquired again. As Hugo says, in his preface to _LaLegende des Siècles_: "Comme dans une mosaïque, chaque pierre a sacouleur et sa forme propre; l'ensemble donne une figure. La figure de celivre, " he goes on, "c'est l'homme. " To get an epic design or _figure_through a sequence of small idylls need not be the result of meretechnical curiosity. It may be a valuable method for the future of epic. Tennyson attempted this method in _Idylls of the King_; not, as is nowusually admitted, with any great success. The sequence is admirable forsheer craftsmanship, for astonishing craftsmanship; but it did notmanage to effect anything like a conspicuous symbolism. You have but tothink of _Paradise Lost_ to see what _Idylls of the King_ lacks. VictorHugo, however, did better in _La Legende des Siècles_. "La figure, c'estl'homme"; there, at any rate, is the intention of epic symbolism. And, however pretentious the poem may be, it undoubtedly does make apassionate effort to develop the significance which Milton had achieved;chiefly to enlarge the scope of this significance. [14] Browning's _TheRing and the Book_ also uses this notion of an idyllic sequence; butwithout any semblance of epic purpose, purely for the exhibition ofhuman character. 

It has already been remarked that the ultimate significance of greatdrama is the same as that of epic. Since the vital epic purpose--thekind of epic purpose which answers to the spirit of the time--isevidently looking for some new form to inhabit, it is not surprising, then, that it should have occasionally tried on dramatic form. And, unquestionably, for great poetic symbolism of the depths of modernconsciousness, for such symbolism as Milton's, we must go to two suchinvasions of epic purpose into dramatic manner--to Goethe's _Faust_ andHardy's _The Dynasts_. But dramatic significance and epic significancehave been admitted to be broadly the same; to take but one instance, Aeschylus's Prometheus is closely related to Milton's Satan (though Ithink Prometheus really represents a monism of consciousness--that whichis destined--as Satan represents a dualism--at once the destined and thedestiny). How then can we speak of epic purpose invading drama? Surelyin this way. Drama seeks to present its significance with narrowedintensity, but epic in a large dilatation: the one contracts, the otherexpatiates. When, therefore, we find drama setting out its significancein such a way as to become epically dilated, we may say that dramatichas grown into epic purpose. Or, even more positively, we may say thatepic has taken over drama and adapted it to its peculiar needs. In anycase, with one exception to be mentioned presently, it is only in_Faust_ and _The Dynasts_ that we find any great development of Miltonicsignificance. These are the poems that give us immense and shapelysymbols of the spirit of man, conscious not only of the sense of hisown destined being, but also of some sense of that which destines. Infact, these two are the poems that develop and elaborate, in their ownway, the Miltonic significance, as all the epics in between Homer andMilton develop and elaborate Homeric significance. And yet, in spite of_Faust_ and _The Dynasts_, it may be doubted whether the union of epicand drama is likely to be permanent. The peculiar effects which epicintention, in whatever manner, must aim at, seem to be as much hinderedas helped by dramatic form; and possibly it is because the detail isnecessarily too much enforced for the broad perfection of epic effect. 

The real truth seems to be, that there is an inevitable and profounddifficulty in carrying on the Miltonic significance in anything like astory. Regular epic having reached its climax in _Paradise Lost_, theepic purpose must find some other way of going on. Hugo saw this, whenhe strung his huge epic sequence together not on a connected story buton a single idea: "la figure, c'est l'homme. " If we are to have, as wemust have, direct symbolism of the way man is conscious of his beingnowadays, which means direct symbolism both of man's spirit and of the(philosophical) opponent of this, the universal fate of things--if weare to have all this, it is hard to see how any story can be adequate tosuch symbolic requirements, unless it is a story which moves in somelarge region of imagined supernaturalism. And it seems questionablewhether we have enough _formal_ "belief" nowadays to allow of such astory appearing as solid and as vividly credible as epic poetry needs. It is a decided disadvantage, from the purely epic point of view, thatthose admirable "Intelligences" in Hardy's _The Dynasts_ are soobviously abstract ideas disguised. The supernaturalism of epic, howeverincredible it may be in the poem, must be worked up out of the materialof some generally accepted belief. I think it would be agreed, that whatwas possible for Milton would scarcely be possible to-day; and even moreimpossible would be the naïveté of Homer and the quite different butequally impracticable naïveté of Tasso and Camoens. The conclusion seemsto be, that the epic purpose will have to abandon the necessity oftelling a story. 

Hugo's way may prove to be the right one. But there may be another; andwhat has happened in the past may suggest what may happen in the future. Epic poetry in the regular epic form has before now seemed unlikely. Itseemed unlikely after the Alexandrians had made such poor attempts atstanding upright under the immensity of Homer; it seemed so, until, after several efforts, Latin poetry became triumphantly epic in Virgil. And again, when the mystical prestige of Virgil was domineeringeverything, regular epic seemed unlikely; until, after the doubtfulattempts of Boiardo and Ariosto, Tasso arrived. But in each case, whilethe occurrence of regular epic was seeming so improbable, itnevertheless happened that poetry was written which was certainlynothing like epic in form, but which was strongly charged with aprofound pressure of purpose closely akin to epic purpose; and _De RerumNatura_ and _La Divina Commedia_ are very suggestive to speculation now. Of course, the fact that, in both these cases, regular epic dideventually occur, must warn us that in artistic development anything mayhappen; but it does seem as if there were a deeper improbability forthe occurrence of regular epic now than in the times just before Virgiland Tasso--of regular epic, that is, inspired by some vital import, notsimply, like _Sigurd the Volsung_, by archaeological import. Lucretius isa good deal more suggestive than Dante; for Dante's form is too exactlysuited to his own peculiar genius and his own peculiar time to beadaptable. But the method of Lucretius is eminently adaptable. Thatamazing image of the sublime mind of Lucretius is exactly the kind oflofty symbolism that the continuation of epic purpose now seems torequire--a subjective symbolism. I believe Wordsworth felt this, when heplanned his great symbolic poem, and partly executed it in _The Prelude_and _The Excursion_: for there, more profoundly than anywhere out ofMilton himself, Milton's spiritual legacy is employed. It may be, then, that Lucretius and Wordsworth will preside over the change fromobjective to subjective symbolism which Milton has, perhaps, madenecessary for the continued development of the epic purpose: afterMilton, it seems likely that there is nothing more to be done withobjective epic. But Hugo's method, of a connected sequence of separatepoems, instead of one continuous poem, may come in here. Thedetermination to keep up a continuous form brought both Lucretius andWordsworth at times perilously near to the odious state of didacticpoetry; it was at least responsible for some tedium. Epic poetry willcertainly never be didactic. What we may imagine--who knows how vainlyimagine?--is, then, a sequence of odes expressing, in the image of somefortunate and lofty mind, as much of the spiritual significance whichthe epic purpose must continue from Milton, as is possible, in the styleof Lucretius and Wordsworth, for subjective symbolism. A pregnantexperiment towards something like this has already been seen--in GeorgeMeredith's magnificent set of _Odes in Contribution to the Song of theFrench History_. The subject is ostensibly concrete; but France in heragonies and triumphs has been personified into a superb symbol ofMeredith's own reading of human fate. The series builds up a decidedlyepic significance, and its manner is extraordinarily suggestive of a newepic method. Nevertheless, something more Lucretian in centralimagination, something less bound to concrete and particular event, seems required for the complete development of epic purpose. 

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 13: In the greatest poetry, all the elements of human natureare burning in a single flame. The artifice of criticism is to detectwhat peculiar radiance each element contributes to the whole light; butthis no more affects the singleness of the compounded energy in poetrythan the spectroscopic examination of fire affects the single nature ofactual flame. For the purposes of this book, it has been necessary tolook chiefly at the contribution of intellect to epic poetry; for it isin that contribution that the development of poetry, so far as there isany development at all, really consists. This being so, it might bethought that Keats could hardly have done anything for the real progressof epic. But Keats's apparent (it is only apparent) rejection ofintellect in his poetry was the result of youthful theory; his lettersshow that, in fact, intellect was a thing unusually vigorous in hisnature. If the Keats of the letters be added to the Keats of the poems, a personality appears that seems more likely than any of hiscontemporaries, or than anyone who has come after him, for the work ofcarrying Miltonic epic forward without forsaking Miltonic form. ]

[Footnote 14: For all I know, Hugo may never have read Milton; judgingby some silly remarks of his, I should hope not. But Hugo could feel thethings in the spirit of man that Milton felt; not only because they werestill there, but because the secret influence of Milton has intensifiedthe consciousness of them in thousands who think they know nothing of_Paradise Lost_. Modern literary history will not be properly understooduntil it is realized that Milton is one of the dominating minds ofEurope, whether Europe know it or not. There are scarcely half a dozenfigures that can be compared with Milton for irresistibleinfluence--quite apart from his unapproachable supremacy in thetechnique of poetry. When Addison remarked that _Paradise Lost_ isuniversally and perpetually interesting, he said what is not to bequestioned; though he did not perceive the real reason for hisassertion. Darwin no more injured the significance of _Paradise Lost_than air-planes have injured Homer. ]