Title: The Epic - An Essay
Author: Abercrombie, Lascelles, 1881-1938
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Epic - An Essay" ***


The Epic: an Essay

By Lascelles Abercrombie



1914.



By the same Author:


Towards a Theory of Art
Speculative Dialogues
Four Short Plays
Thomas Hardy: A Critical Study
Principles of English Prosody



PREFACE

_As this essay is disposed to consider epic poetry as a species of
literature, and not as a department of sociology or archaeology or
ethnology, the reader will not find it anything material to the
discussion which may be typified in those very interesting works,
Gilbert Murray's "The Rise of the Greek Epic" and Andrew Lang's "The
World of Homer." The distinction between a literary and a scientific
attitude to Homer (and all other "authentic" epic) is, I think, finally
summed up in Mr. Mackail's "Lectures on Greek Poetry"; the following
pages, at any rate, assume that this is so. Theories about epic origins
were therefore indifferent to my purpose. Besides, I do not see the need
for any theories; I think it need only be said, of any epic poem
whatever, that it was composed by a man and transmitted by men. But this
is not to say that investigation of the "authentic" epic poet's_ milieu
_may not be extremely profitable; and for settling the preliminaries of
this essay, I owe a great deal to Mr. Chadwick's profoundly
interesting study, "The Heroic Age"; though I daresay Mr. Chadwick would
repudiate some of my conclusions. I must also acknowledge suggestions
taken from Mr. Macneile Dixon's learned and vigorous "English Epic and
Heroic Poetry"; and especially the assistance of Mr. John Clark's
"History of Epic Poetry." Mr. Clark's book is so thorough and so
adequate that my own would certainly have been superfluous, were it not
that I have taken a particular point of view which his method seems to
rule out--a point of view which seemed well worth taking. This is my
excuse, too, for considering only the most conspicuous instances of epic
poetry. They have been discussed often enough; but not often, so far as
I know, primarily as stages of one continuous artistic development_.



I.


BEGINNINGS

The invention of epic poetry corresponds with a definite and, in the
history of the world, often recurring state of society. That is to say,
epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the
needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the
invention itself has been. Most nations have passed through the same
sort of chemistry. Before their hot racial elements have been thoroughly
compounded, and thence have cooled into the stable convenience of
routine which is the material shape of civilization--before this has
firmly 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. So
much is commonplace. Exactly what causes the racial elements of a
nation, with all their varying properties, to flash suddenly (as it
seems) into the splendid incandescence of an Heroic Age, and thence to
shift again into a comparatively rigid and perhaps comparatively
lustreless civilization--this difficult matter has been very nicely
investigated of late, and to interesting, though not decided, result.
But I may not concern myself with this; nor even with the detailed
characteristics, alleged or ascertained, of the Heroic Age of nations.
It is enough for the purpose of this book that the name "Heroic Age" is
a good one for this stage of the business; it is obviously, and on the
whole rightly, descriptive. For the stage displays the first vigorous
expression, as the natural thing and without conspicuous restraint, of
private individuality. In savagery, thought, sentiment, religion and
social organization may be exceedingly complicated, full of the most
subtle and strange relationships; but they exist as complete and
determined _wholes_, each part absolutely bound up with the rest.
Analysis has never come near them. The savage is blinded to the glaring
incongruities of his tribal ideas not so much by habit or reverence; it
is simply that the mere possibility of such a thing as analysis has
never occurred to him. He thinks, he feels, he lives, all in a whole.
Each person is the tribe in little. This may make everyone an
astoundingly complex character; but it makes strong individuality
impossible in savagery, since everyone accepts the same elaborate
unanalysed whole of tribal existence. That existence, indeed, would find
in the assertion of private individuality a serious danger; and tribal
organization guards against this so efficiently that it is doubtless
impossible, so long as there is no interruption from outside. In some
obscure manner, however, savage existence has been constantly
interrupted; and it seems as if the long-repressed forces of
individuality then burst out into exaggerated vehemence; for the result
(if it is not slavery) is, that a people passes from its savage to its
heroic age, on its way to some permanence of civilization. It must
always have taken a good deal to break up the rigidity of savage
society. It might be the shock of enforced mixture with a totally alien
race, the two kinds of blood, full of independent vigour, compelled to
flow together;[1] or it might be the migration, due to economic stress,
from one tract of country to which the tribal existence was perfectly
adapted to another for which it was quite unsuited, with the added
necessity of conquering the peoples found in possession. Whatever the
cause may have been, the result is obvious: a sudden liberation, a
delighted expansion, of numerous private individualities.

But the various appearances of the Heroic Age cannot, perhaps, be
completely generalized. What has just been written will probably do for
the Heroic Age which produced Homer, and for that which produced the
_Nibelungenlied, Beowulf_, and the Northern Sagas. It may, therefore
stand as the typical case; since Homer and these Northern poems are what
most people have in their minds when they speak of "authentic" epic. But
decidedly Heroic Ages have occurred much later than the latest of these
cases; and they arose out of a state of society which cannot roundly be
called savagery. Europe, for instance, had its unmistakable Heroic Age
when it was fighting with the Moslem, whether that warfare was a cause
or merely an accompaniment. And the period which preceded it, the period
after the failure of Roman civilization, was sufficiently "dark" and
devoid of individuality, to make the sudden plenty of potent and
splendid individuals seem a phenomenon of the same sort as that which
has been roughly described; it can scarcely be doubted that the age
which is exhibited in the _Poem of the Cid_, the _Song of Roland_, and
the lays of the Crusaders (_la Chanson d'Antioche_, for instance), was
similar in all essentials to the age we find in Homer and the
_Nibelungenlied_. Servia, too, has its ballad-cycles of Christian and
Mahometan warfare, which suppose an age obviously heroic. But it hardly
falls in with our scheme; Servia, at this time, might have been expected
to have gone well past its Heroic Age. Either, then, it was somehow
unusually prolonged, or else the clash of the Ottoman war revived it.
The case of Servia is interesting in another way. The songs about the
battle of Kossovo describe Servian defeat--defeat so overwhelming that
poetry cannot possibly translate it, and does not attempt it, into
anything that looks like victory. Even the splendid courage of its hero
Milos, who counters an imputation of treachery by riding in full
daylight into the Ottoman camp and murdering the Sultan, even this
courage is rather near to desperation. The Marko cycle--Marko whose
betrayal of his country seems wiped out by his immense prowess--has in a
less degree this utter defeat of Servia as its background. But Servian
history before all this has many glories, which, one would think, would
serve the turn of heroic song better than appalling defeat and, indeed,
enslavement. Why is the latter celebrated and not the former? The reason
can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is
heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does. Servia's
defeat by the armies of Amurath came at a time when its people was too
strongly possessed by the heroic spirit to avoid uttering itself in
poetry. And from this it appears, too, that when the heroic age sings,
it primarily sings of itself, even when that means singing of its own
humiliation.--One other exceptional kind of heroic age must just be
mentioned, in this professedly inadequate summary. It is the kind which
occurs quite locally and on a petty scale, with causes obscurer than
ever. The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads,
clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very
circumscribed and not very important heroic age. Here the households of
gentry take the place of courts, and the poetry in vogue there is
perhaps instantly taken up by the taverns; or perhaps this is a case in
which the heroes are so little removed from common folk that celebration
of individual prowess begins among the latter, not, as seems usually to
have happened, among the social equals of the heroes. But doubtless
there are infinite grades in the structure of the Heroic Age.

The note of the Heroic Age, then, is vehement private individuality
freely and greatly asserting itself. The assertion is not always what we
should call noble; but it is always forceful and unmistakable. There
would be, no doubt, some social and religious scheme to contain the
individual's self-assertion; but the latter, not the former, is the
thing 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 and
strong private individuality are compatible--mutually helpful instead of
destroying one another, as they do, in opposite ways, in savagery and in
the Heroic Age--before the state called civilization can arrive, there
has commonly been a long passage of dark obscurity, which throws up into
exaggerated brightness the radiance of the Heroic Age. The balance of
private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals;
but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on
nothing else. In Homer, for instance, it can be seen pretty clearly that
a "good" man is simply a man of imposing, active individuality[2]; a
"bad" man is an inefficient, undistinguished man--probably, too, like
Thersites, ugly. It is, in fact, an absolutely aristocratic age--an age
in which he who rules is thereby proven the "best." And from its nature
it must be an age very heartily engaged in something; usually fighting
whoever is near enough to be fought with, though in _Beowulf_ it seems
to be doing something more profitable to the civilization which is to
follow it--taming the fierceness of surrounding circumstance and man's
primitive kind. But in any case it has a good deal of leisure; and the
best way to prevent this from dragging heavily is (after feasting) to
glory in the things it has done; or perhaps in the things it would like
to have done. Hence heroic poetry. But exactly what heroic poetry was
in its origin, probably we shall never know. It would scarcely be
history, and it would scarcely be very ornate poetry. The first thing
required would be to translate the prowess of champions into good and
moving narrative; and this would be metrified, because so it becomes
both more exciting and more easily remembered. Each succeeding bard
would improve, according to his own notions, the material he received
from his teachers; the prowess of the great heroes would become more and
more astonishing, more and more calculated to keep awake the feasted
nobles who listened to the song. In an age when writing, if it exists at
all, is a rare and secret art, the mists of antiquity descend after a
very few generations. There is little chance of the songs of the bards
being checked by recorded actuality; for if anyone could write at all,
it would be the bards themselves, who would use the mystery or purposes
of their own trade. In quite a short time, oral tradition, in keeping of
the bards, whose business is to purvey wonders, makes the champions
perform easily, deeds which "the men of the present time" can only gape
at; and every bard takes over the stock of tradition, not from original
sources, but from the mingled fantasy and memory of the bard who came
just before him. So that when this tradition survives at all, it
survives in a form very different from what it was in the beginning. But
apparently we can mark out several stages in the fortunes of the
tradition. It is first of all court poetry, or perhaps baronial poetry;
and it may survive as that. From this stage it may pass into possession
of the common people, or at least into the possession of bards whose
clients are peasants and not nobles; from being court poetry it becomes
the poetry of cottages and taverns. It may survive as this. Finally, it
may be taken up again by the courts, and become poetry of much greater
sophistication 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"; the
material out of which epic poetry might be made. But it does not give us
epic poetry. The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered
up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as
extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always. Instances
are our own Border Ballads and Robin Hood Ballads; the Servian cycles of
the Battle of Kossovo and the prowess of Marko; the modern Greek songs
of the revolt against Turkey (the conditions of which seem to have been
similar to those which surrounded the growth of our riding ballads); the
fragments of Finnish legend which were pieced together into the
_Kalevala_; the Ossianic poetry; and perhaps some of the minor sagas
should be put in here. Then there are the glorious Welsh stories of
Arthur, Tristram, and the rest, and the not less glorious Irish stories
of Deirdre and Cuchulain; both of these noble masses of legend seem to
have only just missed the final shaping which turns epic material into
epic poetry. For epic material, it must be repeated, is not the same
thing as epic poetry. Epic material is fragmentary, scattered, loosely
related, sometimes contradictory, each piece of comparatively small
size, with no intention beyond hearty narrative. It is a heap of
excellent stones, admirably quarried out of a great rock-face of
stubborn experience. But for this to be worked into some great
structure of epic poetry, the Heroic Age must be capable of producing
individuality of much profounder nature than any of its fighting
champions. Or rather, we should simply say that the production of epic
poetry depends on the occurrence (always an accidental occurrence) of
creative genius. It is quite likely that what Homer had to work on was
nothing superior to the Arthurian legends. But Homer occurred; and the
tales of Troy and Odysseus became incomparable poetry.

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

It is natural that, after the epic poet has arrived, the crude epic
material in which he worked should scarcely be heard of. It could only
be handed on by the minstrels themselves; and their audiences would not
be likely to listen comfortably to the old piecemeal songs after they
had heard the familiar events fall into the magnificent ordered pomp of
the genuine epic poet. The tradition, indeed, would start afresh with
him; but how the novel tradition fared as it grew old with his
successors, is difficult guesswork. We can tell, however, sometimes, in
what stage of the epic material's development the great unifying epic
poet occurred. Three roughly defined stages have been mentioned. Homer
perhaps came when the epic material was still in its first stage of
being court-poetry. Almost certainly this is when the poets of the
Crusading lays, of the _Song of Roland_, and the _Poem of the Cid_, set
to work. Hesiod is a clear instance of the poet who masters epic
material after it has passed into popular possession; and the
_Nibelungenlied_ is thought to be made out of matter that has passed
from the people back again to the courts.

Epic poetry, then, as distinct from mere epic material, is the concern
of this book. The intention is, to determine wherein epic poetry is a
definite species of literature, what it characteristically does for
conscious human life, and to find out whether this species and this
function have shown, and are likely to show, any development. It must be
admitted, that the great unifying poet who worked on the epic material
before him, did not always produce something which must come within the
scope of this intention. Hesiod has just been given as an instance of
such 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 not
poetry; and I am among those who believe that there is a difference
between poetry and prose. If epic poetry is a definite species, the
sagas 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 have
to confine myself to its greatest examples. Before, however, proceeding
to consider epic poetry as a whole, as a constantly recurring form of
art, continually responding to the new needs of man's developing
consciousness, I must go, rapidly and generally, over the "literary
epic"; and especially I must question whether it is really justifiable
or profitable to divide epic poetry into the two contrasted departments
of "authentic" and "literary."

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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



II.


LITERARY EPIC

Epic poetry, then, was invented to supply the artistic demands of
society in a certain definite and recognizable state. Or rather, it was
the epic material which supplied that; the first epic poets gave their
age, as genius always does, something which the age had never thought of
asking for; which, nevertheless, when it was given, the age took good
hold of, and found that, after all, this, too, it had wanted without
knowing it. But as society went on towards civilization, the need for
epic grew less and less; and its preservation, if not accidental, was an
act of conscious aesthetic admiration rather than of unconscious
necessity. It was preserved somehow, however; and after other kinds of
literature had arisen as inevitably and naturally as epic, and had
become, in their turn, things of less instant necessity than they were,
it was found that, in the manner and purpose of epic poetry, something
was given which was not given elsewhere; something of extraordinary
value. Epic poetry would therefore be undertaken again; but now, of
course, deliberately. With several different kinds of poetry to choose
from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and
he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem. The
result, good or bad, of such a determination is called "literary" epic.
The poems of Apollonius Rhodius, Virgil, Lucan, Camoens, Tasso and
Milton 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 instant
need in its surrounding community--such poetry is "authentic" epic.

A great deal has been made of this distinction; it has almost been taken
to divide epic poetry into two species. And, as the names commonly given
to the two supposed species suggest, there is some notion that
"literary" epic must be in a way inferior to "authentic" epic. The
superstition of antiquity has something to do with this; but the
presence of Homer among the "authentic" epics has probably still more to
do with it. For Homer is the poet who is usually chosen to stand for
"authentic" epic; and, by a facile association of ideas, the conspicuous
characteristics of Homer seem to be the marks of "authentic" epic as a
species. It is, of course, quite true, that, for sustained grandeur and
splendour, no poet can be put beside Homer except Dante and Milton; but
it is also quite clear that in Homer, as in Dante, and Milton, such
conspicuous characteristics are simply the marks of peculiar poetic
genius. If we leave Homer out, and consider poetic greatness only (the
only important thing to consider), there is no "authentic" epic which
can stand against _Paradise Lost_ or the _Aeneid_. Then there is the
curious modern feeling--which is sometimes but dressed up by erroneous
aesthetic theory (the worship of a quite national "lyricism," for
instance) but which is really nothing but a sign of covert
barbarism--that lengthy poetic composition is somehow undesirable; and
Homer is thought to have had a better excuse for composing a long poem
than Milton.

But doubtless the real reason for the hard division of epic poetry into
two classes, and for the presumed inferiority of "literary" to
"authentic," lies in the application of that curiosity among false
ideas, 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 must
be somehow better than other art, is, I suppose, the offspring of
democratic ideas in politics. The chief objection to it is that there
never has been and never can be anything in actuality corresponding to
the "folk-spirit" which this notion supposes. Poetry is the work of
poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be
anything but the production of an individual mind. We may, if we like,
think that poetry would be more "natural" if it were composed by the
folk as the folk, and not by persons peculiarly endowed; and to think so
is doubtless agreeable to the notion that the folk is more important
than the individual. But there is nothing gained by thinking in this
way, except a very illusory kind of pleasure; since it is impossible
that the folk should ever be a poet. This indisputable axiom has been
ignored more in theories about ballads--about epic material--than in
theories about the epics themselves. But the belief in a real
folk-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, somehow
or other, by the folk, ought to be more "natural" than a work of
deliberate art--a "literary" epic; that is to say, these Rousseau-ish
notions will admire it for being further from civilization and nearer to
the noble savage; civilization being held, by some mysterious argument,
to be deficient in "naturalness." In the second place, this belief has
made it credible that the plain corruption of authentic epic by oral
transmission, or very limited transmission through script, might be the
sign of multiple authorship; for if you believe that a whole folk can
compose a ballad, you may easily believe that a dozen poets can compose
an epic.

But all this rests on simple ignoring of the nature of poetic
composition. The folk-origin of ballads and the multiple authorship of
epics are heresies worse than the futilities of the Baconians; at any
rate, they are based on the same resolute omission, and build on it a
wilder fantasy. They omit to consider what poetry is. Those who think
Bacon 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 is
unthinkable. It is psychologically impossible that the mind of Bacon
should have produced _Hamlet_; but the impossibility is even more
clamant when it comes to supposing that several poets, not in
collaboration, but in haphazard succession, could produce a poem of vast
sweeping unity and superbly consistent splendour of style. So far as
mere authorship goes, then, we cannot make any real difference between
"authentic" and "literary" epic. We cannot say that, while this is
written by an individual genius, that is the work of a community.
Individual genius, of whatever quality, is responsible for both. The
folk, however, cannot be ruled out. Genius does the work; but the folk
is the condition in which genius does it. And here we may find a genuine
difference between "literary" and "authentic"; not so much in the nature
of 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 Milton
and Tasso and Virgil. But there is also as much difference here between
the members of each class as between the two classes themselves. You
cannot read much of _Beowulf_ with Homer in your mind, without becoming
conscious that the difference in individual genius is by no means the
whole difference. Both poets maintain a similar ideal in life; but they
maintain it within conditions altogether unlike. The folk-spirit behind
_Beowulf_ is cloudy and tumultuous, finding grandeur in storm and gloom
and mere mass--in the misty _lack_ of shape. Behind Homer it is, on the
contrary, 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 of
his time, and Milton's the England of his time. But where Homer and
Beowulf together differ from Tasso and Milton is in the way the
surrounding folk-spirit contains the poet's mind. It would be a very
idle piece of work, to choose between the potency of Homer's genius and
of Milton's; but it is clear that the immediate circumstance of the
poet's life presses much more insistently on the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_ than on _Paradise Lost_. It is the difference between the
contracted, precise, but vigorous tradition of an heroic age, and the
diffused, eclectic, complicated culture of a civilization. And if it may
be said that the insistence of racial circumstance in Homer gives him a
greater intensity of cordial, human inspiration, it must also be said
that the larger, less exacting conditions of Milton's mental life allow
his art to go into greater scope and more subtle complexity of
significance. Great epic poetry will always frankly accept the social
conditions within which it is composed; but the conditions contract and
intensify the conduct of the poem, or allow it to dilate and absorb
larger matter, according as the narrow primitive torrents of man's
spirit broaden into the greater but slower volume of civilized life. The
change is neither desirable nor undesirable; it is merely inevitable. It
means 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 any
real difference here. No great poetry, of whatever kind, is conceivable
unless 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 Achilles
or the Saxon poet to Beowulf. What is really meant can be nothing but
the greater insistence of racial tradition in the "authentic" epics. The
subject of the _Iliad_ is the fighting of heroes, with all its
implications and consequences; the subject of the _Odyssey_ is adventure
and its opposite, the longing for safety and home; in _Beowulf_ it is
kingship--the ability to show man how to conquer the monstrous forces of
his world; and so on. Such were the subjects which an imperious racial
tradition pressed on the early epic poet, who delighted to be so
governed. These were the matters which his people could understand, of
which they could easily perceive the significance. For him, then, there
could be no other matters than these, or the like of these. But it is
not in such matters that a poet living in a time of less primitive and
more expanded consciousness would find the highest importance. For a
Roman, 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 must
be careful to be quite clear what his subject is. And if he has gone
beyond the immediate experiences of primitive society, we need not
expect him to be as close as the early poets were to the fury of battle
and the agony of wounds and the desolation of widows; or to the
sensation of exploring beyond the familiar regions; or to the
marsh-fiends and fire-drakes into which primitive imagination naturally
translated the terrible unknown powers of the world. We need not, in a
word, expect the "literary" epic to compete with the "authentic" epic;
for the fact is, that the purpose of epic poetry, and therefore the
nature of its subject, must continually develop. It is quite true that
the later epics take over, to a very great extent, the methods and
manners of the earlier poems; just as architecture hands on the style of
wooden structure to an age that builds in stone, and again imposes the
manners of stone construction on an age that builds in concrete and
steel. But, in the case of epic at any rate, this is not merely the
inertia of artistic convention. With the development of epic intention,
and the subsequent choosing of themes larger and subtler than what
common experience is wont to deal in, a certain duplicity becomes
inevitable. The real intention of the _Aeneid_, and the real intention
of _Paradise Lost_, are not easily brought into vivid apprehension. The
natural thing to do, then, would be to use the familiar substance of
early epic, but to use it as a convenient and pleasant solvent for the
novel intention. It is what has been done in all the great "literary"
epics. But hasty criticism, finding that where they resembled Homer
they seemed not so close to their matter, has taken this as a pervading
and unfortunate characteristic. It has not perceived that what in Homer
was the main business of the epic, has become in later epic a device.
Having so altered, it has naturally lost in significance; but in the
greatest instances of later epic, that for which the device was used has
been as profoundly absorbed into the poet's being as Homer's matter was
into his being. It may be noted, too, that a corresponding change has
also taken place in the opposite direction. As Homer's chief substance
becomes a device in later epic, so a device of Homer's becomes in later
epic the chief substance. Homer's supernatural machinery may be reckoned
as a device--a device to heighten the general style and action of his
poems; the _significance_ of Homer must be found among his heroes, not
among his gods. But with Milton, it has become necessary to entrust to
the supernatural action the whole aim and purport of the poem.

On the whole, then, there is no reason why "literary" epic should not be
as close to its subject as "authentic" epic; there is every reason why
both kinds should be equally close. But in testing whether they actually
are equally close, we have to remember that in the later epic it has
become necessary to use the ostensible subject as a vehicle for the real
subject. And who, with any active sympathy for poetry, can say that
Milton felt his theme with less intensity than Homer? Milton is not so
close to his fighting angels as Homer is to his fighting men; but the
war in heaven is an incident in Milton's figurative expression of
something that has become altogether himself--the mystery of individual
existence in universal existence, and the accompanying mystery of sin,
of individual will inexplicably allowed to tamper with the divinely
universal will. Milton, of course, in closeness to his subject and in
everything else, stands as supreme above the other poets of literary
epic as Homer does above the poets of authentic epic. But what is true
of Milton is true, in less degree, of the others. If there is any good
in them, it is primarily because they have got very close to their
subjects: that is required not only for epic, but for all poetry.
Coleridge, in a famous estimate put twenty years for the shortest period
in which an epic could be composed; and of this, ten years were to be
for preparation. He meant that not less than ten years would do for the
poet to fill all his being with the theme; and nothing else will serve,
It is well known how Milton brooded over his subject, how Virgil
lingered over his, how Camoen. carried the _Luisads_ round the world
with 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 them
to be "long choosing and beginning late." The pressure of racial
tradition would see that they chose the right sort of subject; would
see, too, that they lived right in the heart of their subject. For the
poet of "literary" epic, however, it is his own consciousness that must
select the kind of theme which will fulfil the epic intention for his
own day; it is his own determination and studious endurance that will
draw the theme into the secrets of his being. If he is not capable of
getting close to his subject, we should not for that reason call his
work "literary" epic. It would put him in the class of Milton, the most
literary of all poets. We must simply call his stuff bad epic. There is
plenty of it. Southey is the great instance. Southey would decide to
write an epic about Spain, or India, or Arabia, or America. Next he
would read up, in several languages, about his proposed subject; that
would take him perhaps a year. Then he would versify as much strange
information as he could remember; that might take a few months. The
result is deadly; and because he was never anywhere near his subject. It
is for the same reason that the unspeakable labours of Blackmore, Glover
and Wilkie, and Voltaire's ridiculous _Henriade_, have gone to pile up
the rubbish-heaps of literature.

So far, supposed differences between "authentic" and "literary" epic
have resolved themselves into little more than signs of development in
epic intention; the change has not been found to produce enough artistic
difference between early and later epic to warrant anything like a
division into two distinct species. The epic, whether "literary" or
"authentic," is a single form of art; but it is a form capable of
adapting itself to the altering requirements of prevalent consciousness.
In addition, however, to differences in general conception, there are
certain mechanical differences which should be just noticed. The first
epics were intended for recitation; the literary epic is meant to be
read. It is more difficult to keep the attention of hearers than of
readers. This in itself would be enough to rule out themes remote from
common experience, supposing any such were to suggest themselves to the
primitive epic poet. Perhaps, indeed, we should not be far wrong if we
saw a chief reason for the pressure of surrounding tradition on the
early epic in this very fact, that it is poetry meant for recitation.
Traditional matter must be glorified, since it would be easier to listen
to the re-creation of familiar stories than to quite new and unexpected
things; the listeners, we must remember, needed poetry chiefly as the
re-creation of tired hours. Traditional manner would be equally
difficult to avoid; for it is a tradition that plainly embodies the
requirements, fixed by experience, of _recited_ poetry. Those features
of it which make for tedium when it is read--repetition, stock epithets,
set phrases for given situations--are the very things best suited, with
their recurring well-known syllables, to fix the attention of listeners
more firmly, or to stir it when it drowses; at the least they provide a
sort of recognizable scaffolding for the events, and it is remarkable
how easily the progress of events may be missed when poetry is
declaimed. Indeed, if the primitive epic poet could avoid some of the
anxieties peculiar to the composition of literary epic, he had others to
make up for it. He had to study closely the delicate science of holding
auricular attention when once he had got it; and probably he would have
some difficulty in getting it at all. The really great poet challenges
it, like Homer, with some tremendous, irresistible opening; and in this
respect the magnificent prelude to _Beowulf_ may almost be put beside
Homer. But lesser poets have another way. That prolixity at the
beginning of many primitive epics, their wordy deliberation in getting
under way, is probably intentional. The _Song of Roland_, for instance,
begins with a long series of exceedingly dull stanzas; to a reader, the
preliminaries of the story seem insufferably drawn out. But by the time
the reciter had got through this unimportant dreariness, no doubt his
audience had settled down to listen. The _Chanson d'Antioche_ contains
perhaps 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 quite
ready 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 third
section, but it still moves with a cautious and prelusive air, as if
anxious not to launch out too soon. And this was evidently prudent, for
when the fourth section opens, direct exhortation to the audience has
again 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 is
still a good way off. Perhaps not all of these hortatory stanzas were
commonly used; any or all of them could certainly be omitted without
damaging the poem. But they were there to be used, according to the
judgment of the jongleur and the temper of his audience, and their
presence in the poem is very suggestive of the special difficulties in
the art of rhapsodic poetry.

But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most important, in poetry
meant solely for recitation, is the difficulty of achieving verbal
beauty, or rather of making verbal beauty tell. Vigorous but controlled
imagination, formative power, insight into the significance of
things--these are qualities which a poet must eminently possess; but
these are qualities which may also be eminently possessed by men who
cannot claim the title of poet. The real differentia of the poet is his
command over the secret magic of words. Others may have as delighted a
sense of this magic, but it is only the poet who can master it and do
what he likes with it. And next to the invention of speaking itself, the
most important invention for the poet has been the invention of writing
and reading; for this has added immensely to the scope of his mastery
over words. No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for
the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken
word only, that his art is founded. But he trusts his reader to do as he
himself does--to receive written words always as the code of spoken
words. To do so has wonderfully enlarged his technical opportunities;
for apprehension is quicker and finer through the eye than through the
ear. After the invention of reading, even poetry designed primarily for
declamation (like drama or lyric) has depths and subtleties of art which
were not possible for the primitive poet. Accordingly we find that, on
the whole, in comparison with "literary" epic, the texture of
"authentic" epic is flat and dull. The story may be superb, and its
management may be superb; but the words in which the story lives do not
come near the grandeur of Milton, or the exquisiteness of Virgil, or the
deliciousness of Tasso. Indeed, if we are to say what is the real
difference between _Beowulf_ and _Paradise Lost_, we must simply say
that _Beowulf_ is not such good poetry. There is, of course, one
tremendous exception; Homer is the one poet of authentic epic who had
sufficient genius to make unfailingly, nobly beautiful poetry within the
strict and hard conditions of purely auricular art. Compare Homer's
ambrosial glory with the descent tap-water of Hesiod; compare his
continuous burnished gleam of wrought metal with the sparse grains that
lie in the sandy diction of all the "authentic" epics of the other
nations. And, by all ancient accounts, the other early Greek epics would
not fare much better in the comparison. Homer's singularity in this
respect is overwhelming; but it is frequently forgotten, and especially
by those who think to help in the Homeric question by comparing him with
other "authentic" epics. Supposing (we can only just suppose it) a case
were made out for the growth rather than the individual authorship of
some "authentic" epic other than Homer; it could never have any bearing
on the question of Homeric authorship, because no early epic is
comparable with the _poetry_ of Homer. Nothing, indeed, is comparable
with the poetry of Homer, except poetry for whose individual authorship
history unmistakably vouches.

So we cannot say that Homer was not as deliberate a craftsman in words
as Milton himself. The scope of his craft was more restricted, as his
repetitions and stock epithets show; he was restricted by the fact that
he composed for recitation, and the auricular appreciation of diction is
limited, the nature of poetry obeying, in the main, the nature of those
for whom it is composed. But this is just a case in which genius
transcends technical scope. The effects Homer produced with his methods
were as great as any effects produced by later and more elaborate
methods, after poetry began to be read as well as heard. But neither
must we say that the other poets of "authentic" epic were not deliberate
craftsmen in words. Poets will always get as much beauty out of words as
they can. The fact that so often in the early epics a magnificent
subject is told, on the whole, in a lumpish and tedious diction, is not
to be explained by any contempt for careful art, as though it were a
thing unworthy of such heroic singers; it is simply to be explained by
lack of such genius as is capable of transcending the severe limitations
of auricular poetry. And we may well believe that only the rarest and
most potent kind of genius could transcend such limitations.

In summary, then, we find certain conceptual differences and certain
mechanical differences between "authentic" and "literary" epic. But
these are not such as to enable us to say that there is, artistically,
any real difference between the two kinds. Rather, the differences
exhibit the changes we might expect in an art that has kept up with
consciousness developing, and civilization becoming more intricate.
"Literary" epic is as close to its subject as "authentic"; but, as a
general rule, "authentic" epic, in response to its surrounding needs,
has a simple and concrete subject, and the closeness of the poet to this
is therefore more obvious than in "literary" epic, which (again in
response to surrounding needs) has been driven to take for subject some
great abstract idea and display this in a concrete but only ostensible
subject. Then in craftsmanship, the two kinds of epic are equally
deliberate, equally concerned with careful art; but "literary" epic has
been able to take such advantage of the habit of reading that, with the
single exception of Homer, it has achieved a diction much more
answerable to the greatness of epic matter than the "authentic" poems.
We may, then, in a general survey, regard epic poetry as being in all
ages essentially the same kind of art, fulfilling always a similar,
though constantly developing, intention. Whatever sort of society he
lives in, whether he be surrounded by illiterate heroism or placid
culture, the epic poet has a definite function to perform. We see him
accepting, and with his genius transfiguring, the general circumstance
of his time; we see him symbolizing, in some appropriate form, whatever
sense of the significance of life he feels acting as the accepted
unconscious metaphysic of his age. To do this, he takes some great story
which has been absorbed into the prevailing consciousness of his people.
As a rule, though not quite invariably, the story will be of things
which are, or seem, so far back in the past, that anything may credibly
happen in it; so imagination has its freedom, and so significance is
displayed. But quite invariably, the materials of the story will have an
unmistakable air of actuality; that is, they come profoundly out of
human experience, whether they declare legendary heroism, as in Homer
and Virgil, or myth, as in _Beowulf_ and _Paradise Lost_, or actual
history, as in Lucan and Camoens and Tasso. And he sets out this story
and its significance in poetry as lofty and as elaborate as he can
compass. That, roughly, is what we see the epic poets doing, whether
they be "literary" or "authentic"; and if this can be agreed on, we
should 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, it
is what we feel, not what we think, that makes us put certain poems
together and apart from others; and feelings cannot be defined, but only
related. If we define a poem, we say what we think about it; and that
may not sufficiently imply the essential thing the poem does for us.
Hence the definition is liable either to be too strict, or to admit work
which does not properly satisfy the criterion of feeling. It seems
probable that, in the last resort, classification in literature rests on
that least tangible, least definable matter, style; for style is the
sign of the poem's spirit, and it is the spirit that we feel. If we can
get some notion of how those poems, which we call epic, agree with one
another in style, it is likely we shall be as close as may be to a
definition of epic. I use the word "style," of course, in its largest
sense--manner of conception as well as manner of composition.

An easy way to define epic, though not a very profitable way, would be
to say simply, that an epic is a poem which produces feelings similar to
those produced by _Paradise Lost_ or the _Iliad_, _Beowulf_ or the _Song
of Roland_. Indeed, you might include all the epics of Europe in this
definition without losing your breath; for the epic poet is the rarest
kind of artist. And while it is not a simple matter to say off-hand what
it is that is common to all these poems, there seems to be general
acknowledgment that they are clearly separable from other kinds of
poetry; and this although the word epic has been rather badly abused.
For instance, _The Faery Queene_ and _La Divina Commedia_ have been
called 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 of
reading _Paradise Lost_ or the _Iliad_. But as a poem may have lyrical
qualities without being a lyric, so a poem may have epical qualities
without being an epic. In all the poems which the world has agreed to
call epics, there is a story told, and well told. But Dante's poem
attempts no story at all, and Spenser's, though it attempts several,
does not tell them well--it scarcely attempts to make the reader believe
in them, being much more concerned with the decoration and the
implication of its fables than with the fables themselves. What epic
quality, detached from epic proper, do these poems possess, then, apart
from the mere fact that they take up a great many pages? It is simply a
question of their style--the style of their conception and the style of
their writing; the whole style of their imagination, in fact. They take
us into a region in which nothing happens that is not deeply
significant; a dominant, noticeably symbolic, purpose presides over each
poem, moulds it greatly and informs it throughout.

This takes us some little way towards deciding the nature of epic. It
must 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 must
be implied. Does that mean that the epic must be allegorical? Many have
thought so; even Homer has been accused of constructing allegories. But
this is only a crude way of emphasizing the significance of epic; and
there is a vast deal of difference between a significant story and an
allegorical story. Reality of substance is a thing on which epic poetry
must always be able to rely. Not only because Spenser does not tell his
stories very well, but even more because their substance (not, of
course, their meaning) is deliciously and deliberately unreal, _The
Faery Queene_ is outside the strict sense of the word epic. Allegory
requires material ingeniously manipulated and fantastic; what is more
important, it requires material invented by the poet himself. That is a
long way from the solid reality of material which epic requires. Not
manipulation, but imaginative transfiguration of material; not
invention, but selection of existing material appropriate to his genius,
and complete absorption of it into his being; that is how the epic poet
works. Allegory is a beautiful way of inculcating and asserting some
special significance in life; but epic has a severer task, and a more
impressive one. It has not to say, Life in the world _ought_ to mean
this or that; it has to show life unmistakably _being_ significant. It
does not gloss or interpret the fact of life, but re-creates it and
charges the fact itself with the poet's own sense of ultimate values.
This will be less precise than the definite assertions of allegory; but
for that reason it will be more deeply felt. The values will be
emotional and spiritual rather than intellectual. And they will be the
poet'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 the
best and most characteristic life of his time. That does not mean that
the epic poet's image of life's significance is of merely contemporary
or transient importance. No stage through which the general
consciousness of men has gone can ever be outgrown by men; whatever
happens afterwards does not displace it, but includes it. We could not
do without _Paradise Lost_ nowadays; but neither can we do without the
_Iliad_. It would not, perhaps, be far from the truth, if it were even
said that the significance of _Paradise Lost_ cannot be properly
understood unless the significance of the _Iliad_ be understood.

The prime material of the epic poet, then, must be real and not
invented. But when the story of the poem is safely concerned with some
reality, he can, of course, graft on this as much appropriate invention
as he pleases; it will be one of his ways of elaborating his main,
unifying purpose--and to call it "unifying" is to assume that, however
brilliant his surrounding invention may be, the purpose will always be
firmly implicit in the central subject. Some of the early epics manage
to do without any conspicuous added invention designed to extend what
the main subject intends; but such nobly simple, forthright narrative as
_Beowulf_ and the _Song of Roland_ would not do for a purpose slightly
more subtle than what the makers of these ringing poems had in mind. The
reality of the central subject is, of course, to be understood broadly.
It means that the story must be founded deep in the general experience
of men. A decisive campaign is not, for the epic poet, any more real
than a legend full of human truth. All that the name of Caesar suggests
is extremely important for mankind; so is all that the name of Satan
suggests: Satan, in this sense, is as real as Caesar. And, as far as
reality is concerned, there is nothing to choose between the Christians
taking Jerusalem and the Greeks taking Troy; nor between Odysseus
sailing into fairyland and Vasco da Gama sailing round the world. It is
certainly possible that a poet might devise a story of such a kind that
we could easily take it as something which might have been a real human
experience. But that is not enough for the epic poet. He needs something
which everyone knows about, something which indisputably, and
admittedly, _has been_ a human experience; and even Grendel, the fiend
of the marshes, was, we can clearly see, for the poet of _Beowulf_ a
figure profoundly and generally accepted as not only true but real;
what, indeed, can be more real for poetry than a devouring fiend which
lives in pestilent fens? And the reason why epic poetry so imperiously
demands reality of subject is clear; it is because such poetry has
symbolically to re-create the actual fact and the actual particulars of
human existence in terms of a general significance--the reader must feel
that life itself has submitted to plastic imagination. No fiction will
ever have the air, so necessary for this epic symbolism, not merely of
representing, but of unmistakably _being_, human experience. This might
suggest that history would be the thing for an epic poet; and so it
would be, if history were superior to legend in poetic reality. But,
simply as substance, there is nothing to choose between them; while
history has the obvious disadvantage of being commonly too strict in the
manner of its events to allow of creative freedom. Its details will
probably be so well known, that any modification of them will draw more
attention to discrepancy with the records than to achievement thereby of
poetic purpose. And yet modification, or at least suppression and
exaggeration, of the details of history will certainly be necessary. Not
to declare what happened, and the results of what happened, is the
object of an epic; but to accept all this as the mere material in which
a single artistic purpose, a unique, vital symbolism may be shaped. And
if legend, after passing for innumerable years through popular
imagination, 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 is
not in events as they happen, however notably, that man may see symbols
of vital destiny, but in events as they are transformed by plastic
imagination.

Yet it has been possible to use history as the material of great epic
poetry; Camoens and Tasso did this--the chief subject of the _Lusiads_
is even contemporary history. But evidently success in these cases was
due to the exceptional and fortunate fact that the fixed notorieties of
history were combined with a strange and mysterious geography. The
remoteness and, one might say, the romantic possibilities of the places
into which Camoens and Tasso were led by their themes, enable
imagination to deal pretty freely with history. But in a little more
than ten years after Camoens glorified Portugal in an historical epic,
Don Alonso de Ercilla tried to do the same for Spain. He puts his action
far enough from home: the Spaniards are conquering Chili. But the world
has grown smaller and more familiar in the interval: the astonishing
things that could easily happen in the seas of Madagascar cannot now
conveniently happen in Chili. The _Araucana_ is versified history, not
epic. That is to say, the action has no deeper significance than any
other actual warfare; it has not been, and could not have been, shaped
to any symbolic purpose. Long before Tasso and Camoens and Ercilla, two
Scotchmen had attempted to put patriotism into epic form; Barbour had
written his _Bruce_ and Blind Harry his _Wallace_. But what with the
nearness of their events, and what with the rusticity of their authors,
these tolerable, ambling poems are quite unable to get the better of the
hardness of history. Probably the boldest attempt to make epic of
well-known, documented history is Lucan's _Pharsalia_. It is a brilliant
performance, and a deliberate effort to carry on the development of
epic. At the very least it has enriched the thought of humanity with
some imperishable lines. But it is true, what the great critic said of
it: the _Pharsalia_ partakes more of the nature of oratory than of
poetry. It means that Lucan, in choosing history, chose something which
he had to declaim about, something which, at best, he could
imaginatively realize; but not something which he could imaginatively
re-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; an
age, that is to say, when the idea of history has not arisen, when
anything that happens turns inevitably, and in a surprisingly short
time, into legend. Thus, an unimportant, probably unpunished, attack by
Basque mountaineers on the Emperor's rear-guard has become, in the _Song
of Roland_, a great infamy of Saracenic treachery, which must be greatly
avenged.

Such, in a broad description, is the nature of epic poetry. To define it
with any narrower nicety would probably be rash. We have not been
discovering what an epic poem ought to be, but roughly examining what
similarity of quality there is in all those poems which we feel,
strictly attending to the emotional experience of reading them, can be
classed together and, for convenience, termed epic. But it is not much
good having a name for this species of poetry if it is given as well to
poems of quite a different nature. It is not much good agreeing to call
by the name of epic such poems as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_,
_Beowulf_ and the _Song of Roland_, _Paradise Lost_ and _Gerusalemme
Liberata_, 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 the
Book_. But I believe most of the importance in the meaning of the word
epic, when it is reasonably used, will be found in what is written
above. Apart from the specific form of epic, it shares much of its
ultimate intention with the greatest kind of drama (though not with all
drama). 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 tale
both largely and intensely, and the diction will be carried on the
volume of a powerful, flowing metre. To distinguish, however, between
merely narrative poetry, and poetry which goes beyond being mere
narrative into the being of epic, must often be left to feeling which
can scarcely be precisely analysed. A curious instance of the
difficulty in exactly defining epic (but not in exactly deciding what is
epic) may be found in the work of William Morris. Morris left two long
narrative poems, _The Life and Death of Jason_, and _The Story of Sigurd
the Volsung_.

I do not think anyone need hesitate to put _Sigurd_ among the epics; but
I do not think anyone who will scrupulously compare the experience of
reading _Jason_ with the experience of reading _Sigurd_, can help
agreeing that _Jason_ should be kept out of the epics. There is nothing
to choose between the subjects of the two poems. For an Englishman,
Greek mythology means as much as the mythology of the North. And I
should say that the bright, exact diction and the modest metre of
_Jason_ are more interesting and attractive than the diction, often
monotonous and vague, and the metre, often clumsily vehement, of
_Sigurd_. Yet for all that it is the style of _Sigurd_ that puts it with
the epics and apart from _Jason_; for style goes beyond metre and
diction, beyond execution, into conception. The whole imagination of
_Sigurd_ is incomparably larger than that of _Jason_. In _Sigurd_, you
feel that the fashioning grasp of imagination has not only seized on the
show 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 into
the texture of it all, something of the ultimate and metaphysical
significance of life. You scarcely feel that in _Jason_.

Yes, epic poetry must be an affair of evident largeness. It was well
said, that "the praise of an epic poem is to feign a person exceeding
Nature." "Feign" here means to imagine; and imagine does not mean to
invent. But, like most of the numerous epigrams that have been made
about epic poetry, the remark does not describe the nature of epic, but
rather one of the conspicuous signs that that nature is fulfilling
itself. A poem which is, in some sort, a summation for its time of the
values of life, will inevitably concern itself with at least one figure,
and probably with several, in whom the whole virtue, and perhaps also
the whole failure, of living seems superhumanly concentrated. A story
weighted with the epic purpose could not proceed at all, unless it were
expressed in persons big enough to support it. The subject, then, as the
epic poet uses it, will obviously be an important one. Whether, apart
from 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 for
making, in the _Iliad_, a first-rate poem out of a second-rate subject.
It is a neat saying; but it seems unlikely that anything really
second-rate should turn into first-rate epic. I imagine Homer would have
been considerably surprised, if anyone had told him that the vast train
of tragic events caused by the gross and insupportable insult put by
Agamemnon, the mean mind in authority, on Achilles, the typical
hero--that this noble and profoundly human theme was a second-rate
subject. At any rate, the subject must be of capital importance in its
treatment. It must symbolize--not as a particular and separable
assertion, but at large and generally--some great aspect of vital
destiny, without losing the air of recording some accepted reality of
human experience, and without failing to be a good story; and the
pressure of high purpose will inform diction and metre, as far, at
least, as the poet's verbal art will let it.

The usual attempts at stricter definition of epic than anything this
chapter contains, are either, in spite of what they try for, so vague
that they would admit almost any long stretch of narrative poetry; or
else they are based on the accidents or devices of epic art; and in that
case they are apt to exclude work which is essentially epic because
something inessential is lacking. It has, for instance, been seriously
debated, whether an epic should not contain a catalogue of heroes. Other
things, which epics have been required to contain, besides much that is
not worth mentioning,[5] are a descent into hell and some supernatural
machinery. Both of these are obviously devices for enlarging the scope
of the action. The notion of a visit to the ghosts has fascinated many
poets, and Dante elaborated this Homeric device into the main scheme of
the greatest of non-epical poems, as Milton elaborated the other
Homeric 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 or
a 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 and
obvious thing to remark is, that an unquestionably epic effect can be
given without any supernatural machinery at all. The poet of _Beowulf_
has no need of it, for instance. A Christian redactor has worked over
the poem, with more piety than skill; he can always be detected, and his
clumsy little interjections have nothing to do with the general tenour
of the poem. The human world ends off, as it were, precipitously; and
beyond there is an endless, impracticable abyss in which dwells the
secret governance of things, an unknowable and implacable
fate--"Wyrd"--neither malign nor benevolent, but simply inscrutable. The
peculiar cast of noble and desolate courage which this bleak conception
gives to the poem is perhaps unique among the epics.

But very few epic poets have ventured to do without supernatural
machinery of some sort. And it is plain that it must greatly assist the
epic purpose to surround the action with immortals who are not only
interested spectators of the event, but are deeply implicated in it;
nothing could more certainly liberate, or at least more appropriately
decorate, the significant force of the subject. We may leave Milton out,
for there can be no question about _Paradise Lost_ here; the
significance of the subject is not only liberated by, it entirely exists
in, the supernatural machinery. But with the other epic poets, we should
certainly expect them to ask us for our belief in their immortals. That,
however, is just what they seem curiously careless of doing. The
immortals are there, they are the occasion of splendid poetry; they do
what they are intended to do--they declare, namely, by their speech and
their action, the importance to the world of what is going on in the
poem. Only--there is no obligation to believe in them; and will not that
mean, no obligation to believe in their concern for the subject, and all
that that implies? Homer begins this paradox. Think of that lovely and
exquisitely mischievous passage in the _Iliad_ called _The Cheating of
Zeus_. The salvationist school of commentators calls this an
interpolation; but the spirit of it is implicit throughout the whole of
Homer's dealing with the gods; whenever, at least, he deals with them at
length, and not merely incidentally. Not to accept that spirit is not to
accept Homer. The manner of describing the Olympian family at the end of
the first book is quite continuous throughout, and simply reaches its
climax in the fourteenth book. Nobody ever believed in Homer's gods, as
he must believe in Hektor and Achilles. (Puritans like Xenophanes were
annoyed not with the gods for being as Homer described them, but with
Homer for describing them as he did.) Virgil is more decorous; but can
we imagine Virgil praying, or anybody praying, to the gods of the
_Aeneid_? The supernatural machinery of Camoens and Tasso is frankly
absurd; they are not only careless of credibility, but of sanity. Lucan
tried to do without gods; but his witchcraft engages belief even more
faintly than the mingled Paganism and Christianity of Camoens, and
merely shows how strongly the most rationalistic of epic poets felt the
value of some imaginary relaxation in the limits of human existence. Is
it, then, only as such a relaxation that supernatural machinery is
valuable? Or only as a superlative kind of ornament? It is surely more
than that. In spite of the fact that we are not seriously asked to
believe in it, it does beautifully and strikingly crystallize the poet's
determination to show us things that go past the reach of common
knowledge. But by putting it, whether instinctively or deliberately, on
a lower plane of credibility than the main action, the poet obeys his
deepest and gravest necessity: the necessity of keeping his poem
emphatically an affair of recognizable _human_ events. It is of man, and
man's purpose in the world, that the epic poet has to sing; not of the
purpose of gods. The gods must only illustrate man's destiny; and they
must be kept within the bounds of beautiful illustration. But it
requires a finer genius than most epic poets have possessed, to keep
supernatural machinery just sufficiently fanciful without missing its
function. Perhaps only Homer and Virgil have done that perfectly.
Milton's revolutionary development marks a crisis in the general process
of epic so important, that it can only be discussed when that process is
considered, in the following chapter, as a whole.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: Such as similes and episodes. It is as if a man were to
say, 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 art
has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which
it was made. But the development of human society does not go straight
forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the
series a recurring series--though not in exact repetition. Thus, the
Homeric poems, the _Argonautica_, the _Aeneid_, the _Pharsalia_, and the
later Latin epics, form one series: the _Aeneid_ would be the climax of
the series, which thence declines, were it not that the whole originates
with the incomparable genius of Homer--a fact which makes it seem to
decline from start to finish. Then the process begins again, and again
fulfils itself, in the series which goes from _Beowulf_, the _Song of
Roland_, and the _Nibelungenlied_, through Camoens and Tasso up to
Milton. And in this case Milton is plainly the climax. There is nothing
like _Paradise Lost_ in the preceding poems, and epic poetry has done
nothing since but decline from that towering glory.

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

"From Homer," said Goethe, "I learn every day more clearly, that in our
life here above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell." It is
rather a startling sentence at first. That poetry which, for us, in
Thoreau's excellent words, "lies in the east of literature," scarcely
suggests, in the usual opinion of it, Hell. We are tempted to think of
Homer as the most fortunate of poets. It seems as if he had but to open
his mouth and speak, to create divine poetry; and it does not lessen our
sense of his good fortune when, on looking a little closer, we see that
this is really the result of an unerring and unfailing art, an
extraordinarily skilful technique. He had it entirely at his command;
and he exercised it in a language in which, though it may be singularly
artificial and conventional, we can still feel the wonder of its
sensuous beauty and the splendour of its expressive power. It is a
language that seems alive with eagerness to respond to imagination. Open
Homer anywhere, and the casual grandeur of his untranslatable language
appears; 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 you
get 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 endowed
with the senses of a god, and able, with that perfection of effort that
looks as if it were effortless, to fashion his experience into
incorruptible song; whether it be the dance of flies round a byre at
milking-time, or a forest-fire on the mountains at night. The shape and
clamour of waves breaking on the beach in a storm is as irresistibly
recorded by Homer as the gleaming flowers which earth put forth to be
the bed of Zeus and Hera in Gargaros, when a golden cloud was their
coverlet, and Sleep sat on a pine tree near by in the likeness of a
murmuring 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 the
clangour of a flock of cranes, but the Achaians came on in silence, the
temper of the two hosts is discriminated for the whole poem; or, in the
supreme instance, when it tells us how the old men looked at Helen and
said, "No wonder the young men fight for her!" then Helen's beauty must
be accepted by the faith of all the world. The particulars of such
poetry could be enumerated for pages; and this is the poetry which is
filled, more than any other literature, in the _Iliad_ with the nobility
of men and women, in the _Odyssey_ with the light of natural magic. And
think of those gods of Homer's; he is the one poet who has been able to
make the dark terrors of religion beautiful, harmless and quietly
entertaining. It is easy to read this poetry and simply _enjoy_ it; it
is easy to say, the man whose spirit held this poetry must have been
divinely happy. But this is the poetry whence Goethe learnt that the
function of man is "to enact Hell."

Goethe is profoundly right; though possibly he puts it in a way to which
Homer himself might have demurred. For the phrase inevitably has its
point in the word "Hell"; Homer, we may suppose, would have preferred
the point to come in the word "enact." In any case, the details of
Christian eschatology must not engage us much in interpreting Goethe's
epigram. There is truth in it, not simply because the two poems take
place in a theatre of calamity; not simply, for instance, because of the
beloved Hektor's terrible agony of death, and the woes of Andromache and
Priam. Such things are the partial, incidental expressions of the whole
artistic purpose. Still less is it because of a strain of latent
savagery in, at any rate, the _Iliad_; as when the sage and reverend
Nestor urges that not one of the Greeks should go home until he has lain
with the wife of a slaughtered Trojan, or as in the tremendous words of
the oath: "Whoever first offend against this oath, may their brains be
poured 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 of
the accidental qualities of Homer. But the force of the word "enact" in
Goethe's epigram will certainly come home to us when we think of those
famous speeches in which courage is unforgettably declared--such
speeches as that of Sarpedon to Glaukos, or of Glaukos to Diomedes, or
of Hektor at his parting with Andromache. What these speeches mean,
however, in the whole artistic purpose of Homer, will assuredly be
missed if they are _detached_ for consideration; especially we shall
miss the deep significance of the fact that in all of these speeches the
substantial thought falls, as it were, into two clauses. Courage is in
the one clause, a deliberate facing of death; but something equally
important is in the other. Is it honour? The Homeric hero makes a great
deal of honour; but it is honour paid to himself, living; what he wants
above everything is to be admired--"always to be the best"; that is what
true heroism is. But he is to go where he knows death will strike at
him; and he does not make much of honour after death; for him, the
meanest man living is better than a dead hero. Death ends everything, as
far as he is concerned, honour and all; his courage looks for no reward
hereafter. No; but _since_ ten thousand fates of death are always
instant round us; _since_ the generations of men are of no more account
than leaves of a tree; _since_ Troy and all its people will soon be
destroyed--he will stand in death's way. Sarpedon emphasizes this with
its converse: There would be no need of daring and fighting, he says,
of "man-ennobling battle," if we could be for ever ageless and
deathless. That is the heroic age; any other would say, If only we could
not be killed, how pleasant to run what might have been risks! For the
hero, that would simply not be worth while. Does he find them pleasant,
then, just because they are risky? Not quite; that, again, is to detach
part of the meaning from the whole. If anywhere, we shall, perhaps, find
the whole meaning of Homer most clearly indicated in such words as those
given (without any enforcement) to Achilles and Thetis near the
beginning 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, if
we see in them what it is that Agamemnon's insult has deprived Achilles
of--the sign and acknowledgment of his fellows' admiration while he is
still living among them, the one thing which makes a hero's life worth
living, which enables him to enact his Hell--we shall scarcely complain
that the _Iliad_ is composed on a second-rate subject. The significance
of the poem is not in the incidents surrounding the "Achilleis"; the
whole significance is centred in the Wrath of Achilles, and thence made
to impregnate every part.

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

We need not say that this is the lesson of Homer. And all this, barely
stated, is a very different matter from what it is when it is poetically
symbolized in the vast and shapely substance of the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_. It is quite possible, of course, to appreciate, pleasantly
and externally, the _Iliad_ with its pressure of thronging life and its
daring unity, and the _Odyssey_ with its serener life and its superb
construction, though much more sectional unity. But we do not appreciate
what Homer did for his time, and is still doing for all the world, we do
not appreciate the spirit of his music, unless we see the warfare and
the adventure as symbols of the primary courage of life; and there is
more in those words than seems when they are baldly written. And it is
not his morals, but Homer's art that does that for us. And what Homer's
art does supremely, the other early epics do in their way too. Their way
is not to be compared with Homer's way. They are very much nearer than
he is to the mere epic material--to the moderate accomplishment of the
primitive ballad. Apart from their greatness, and often successful
greatness, of intention, perhaps the only one that has an answerable
greatness in the detail of its technique is _Beowulf_. That is not on
account of its "kennings"--the strange device by which early popular
poetry (Hesiod is another instance) tries to liberate and master the
magic of words. A good deal has been made of these "kennings"; but it
does not take us far towards great poetry, to have the sea called
"whale-road" or "swan-road" or "gannet's-bath"; though we are getting
nearer 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 a
somewhat dangerous principle; it seems mainly responsible for the way
the poet makes his sentences by piling up clauses, like shooting a load
of stones out of a cart. You cannot always make out exactly what he
means; and it is doubtful whether he always had a clearly-thought
meaning. Most of the subsidiary matter is foisted in with monstrous
clumsiness. Yet _Beowulf_ has what we do not find, out of Homer, in the
other early epics. It has occasionally an unforgettable grandeur of
phrasing. And it has other and perhaps deeper poetic qualities. When the
warriors are waiting in the haunted hall for the coming of the
marsh-fiend Grendel, they fall into untroubled sleep; and the poet adds,
with Homeric restraint: "Not one of them thought that he should thence
be ever seeking his loved home again, his people or free city, where he
was nurtured." The opening is magnificent, one of the noblest things
that have been done in language. There is some wonderful grim landscape
in the poem; towards the middle there is a great speech on deterioration
through prosperity, a piece of sustained intensity that reads like an
Aeschylean chorus; and there is some admirable fighting, especially the
fight with Grendel in the hall, and with Grendel's mother under the
waters, while Beowulf's companions anxiously watch the troubled surface
of the mere. The fact that the action of the poem is chiefly made of
single combat with supernatural creatures and that there is not tapestry
figured with radiant gods drawn between the life of men and the ultimate
darkness, gives a peculiar and notable character to the way Beowulf
symbolizes the primary courage of life. One would like to think, with
some enthusiasts, that this great poem, composed in a language totally
unintelligible to the huge majority of Englishmen--further from English
than Latin is from Italian--and perhaps not even composed in England,
certainly not concerned either with England or Englishmen, might
nevertheless be called an English epic.

But of course the early epics do not, any of them, merely repeat the
significance of Homer in another form. They might do that, if poetry had
to inculcate a moral, as some have supposed. But however nicely we may
analyse it, we shall never find in poetry a significance which is really
detachable, and expressible in another way. The significance _is_ the
poetry. What _Beowulf_ or the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_ means is simply
what it is in its whole nature; we can but roughly indicate it. And as
poetry is never the same, so its significance is never quite the same.
Courage as the first necessary value of life is most naively and simply
expressed, perhaps, in the _Poem of the Cid_; but even here the
expression is, as in all art, unique, and chiefly because it is
contrived through solidly imagined characters. There is splendid
characterization, too, in the _Song of Roland_, together with a fine
sense of poetic form; not fine enough, however, to avoid a prodigious
deal 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 feebly
smites him with his sword, there is real and piercing pathos. But for
all his sense of character, the poet has very little discretion in his
admiration of his heroes. Christianity, in these two poems, has less
effect than one might think. The conspicuous value of life is still the
original value, courage; but elaboration and refinement of this begin
to appear, especially in the _Song of Roland_, as passionately conscious
patriotism and loyalty. The chief contribution of the _Nibelungenlied_
to the main process of epic poetry is _plot_ in narrative; a
contribution, that is, to the manner rather than to the content of epic
symbolism. There is something that can be called plot in Homer; but with
him, as in all other early epics, it is of no great account compared
with the straightforward linking of incidents into a direct chain of
narrative. The story of the _Nibelungenlied_, however, is not a chain
but a web. Events and the influence of characters are woven closely and
intricately together into one tragic pattern; and this requires not only
characterization, but also the adding to the characters of persistent
and dominant motives.

Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot
strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of
life. But life as courage--the turning of the dark, hard condition of
life into something which can be exulted in--this, which is the deep
significance of the art of the first epics, is the absolutely necessary
foundation for any subsequent valuation of life; Man can achieve nothing
until he has first achieved courage. And this, much more than any
inheritance of manner, is what makes all the writers of deliberate or
"literary" epic imply the existence of Homer. If Homer had not done his
work, they could not have done theirs. But "literary" epics are as
necessary as Homer. We cannot go on with courage as the solitary
valuation of life. We must have the foundation, but we must also have
the superstructure. Speaking comparatively, it may be said that the
function of Homeric epic has been to create imperishable symbolism for
the actual courageous consciousness of life, but the duty of "literary"
epic has been to develop this function, answerably to the development of
life itself, into symbolism of some conscious _idea_ of life--something
at once more formalized and more subtilized than the primary virtue of
courage. The Greeks, however, were too much overshadowed by the
greatness of Homer to do much towards this. The _Argonautica_, the
half-hearted epic of Apollonius Rhodius, is the only attempt that need
concern us. It is not a poem that can be read straight through; it is
only enjoyable in moments--moments of charming, minute observation, like
the description of a sunbeam thrown quivering on the wall from a basin
of water "which has just been poured out," lines not only charming in
themselves, but finely used as a simile for Medea's agitated heart; or
moments of romantic fantasy, as when the Argonauts see the eagle flying
towards Prometheus, and then hear the Titan's agonized cry. But it is
not in such passages that what Apollonius did for epic abides. A great
deal of his third book is a real contribution to the main process, to
epic content as well as to epic manner. To the manner of epic he added
analytic psychology. No one will ever imagine character more deeply or
more firmly than Homer did in, say, Achilles; but Apollonius was the man
who showed how epic as well as drama may use the nice minutiae of
psychological imagination. Through Virgil, this contribution to epic
manner has pervaded subsequent literature. Apollonius, too, in his
fumbling way, as though he did not quite know what he was doing, has yet
done something very important for the development of epic significance.
Love has been nothing but a subordinate incident, almost one might say
an ornament, in the early epics; in Apollonius, though working through a
deal of gross and lumbering mythological machinery, love becomes for the
first time one of the primary values of life. The love of Jason and
Medea is the vital symbolism of the _Argonautica_.

But it is Virgil who really begins the development of epic art. He took
over from Apollonius love as part of the epic symbolism of life, and
delicate psychology as part of the epic method. And, like Apollonius, he
used these novelties chiefly in the person of a heroine. But in Virgil
they belong to an incomparably greater art; and it is through Virgil
that they have become necessities of the epic tradition. More than this,
however, was required of him. The epic poet collaborates with the spirit
of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is
successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse
to 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 metaphysic
would scarcely have done for Virgil; it would certainly not have done
for his time. It was eminently a time of social organization, one might
perhaps say of social consciousness. After Sylla and Marius and Caesar,
life as an affair of sheer individualism would not very strongly appeal
to a thoughtful Roman. Accordingly, as has so often been remarked, the
_Aeneid_ celebrates the Roman Empire. A political idea does not seem a
very likely subject for a kind of poetry which must declare greatly the
fundamentals of living; not even when it is a political idea unequalled
in the world, the idea of the Roman Empire. Had Virgil been a _good
Roman_, the _Aeneid_ might have been what no doubt Augustus, and Rome
generally, desired, a political epic. But Virgil was not a good Roman;
there was something in him that was not Roman at all. It was this
strange incalculable element in him that seems for ever making him
accomplish something he had not thought of; it was surely this that made
him, unintentionally it may be, use the idea of the Roman Empire as a
vehicle for a much profounder valuation of life. We must remember here
the Virgil of the Fourth Eclogue--that extraordinary, impassioned poem
in which he dreams of man attaining to some perfection of living. It is
still this Virgil, though saddened and resigned, who writes the
_Aeneid_. Man creating his own destiny, man, however wearied with the
long task of resistance, achieving some conscious community of
aspiration, and dreaming of the perfection of himself: the poet whose
lovely and noble art makes us a great symbol of _that_, is assuredly
carrying on the work of Homer. This was the development in epic
intention required to make epic poetry answer to the widening needs of
civilization.

But even more important, in the whole process of epic, than what
Virgil's art does, is the way it does it. And this in spite of the fact
which everyone has noticed, that Virgil does not compare with Homer as a
poet of seafaring and warfaring. He is not, indeed, very interested in
either; and it is unfortunate that, in managing the story of Aeneas (in
itself an excellent medium for his symbolic purpose) he felt himself
compelled to try for some likeness to the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_--to
do by art married to study what the poet of the _Odyssey_ and the
_Iliad_ had done by art married to intuitive experience. But his failure
in this does not matter much in comparison with his technical success
otherwise. Virgil showed how poetry may be made deliberately adequate to
the epic purpose. That does not mean that Virgil is more artistic than
Homer. Homer's redundance, wholesale repetition of lines, and stock
epithets cannot be altogether dismissed as "faults"; they are
characteristics of a wonderfully accomplished and efficient technique.
But epic poetry cannot be written as Homer composed it; whereas it must
be 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 Virgilian
economy is the thing for an epic poet now; the concision, the
scrupulousness, the loading of every word with something appreciable of
the whole significance. After the _Aeneid_, the epic style must be of
this 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 far
as it is not an historical epic, is a political one; the idea of
political liberty is at the bottom of it. That is not an unworthy theme;
and Lucan evidently felt the necessity for development in epic. But he
made the mistake, characteristically Roman, of thinking history more
real than legend; and, trying to lead epic in this direction,
supernatural machinery would inevitably go too. That, perhaps, was
fortunate, for it enabled Lucan safely to introduce one of his great and
memorable lines:

  Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris;[12]

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

Lucan's determined stoicism may, philosophically, be more consistent
than the dubious stoicism of Virgil. But Virgil knew that, in epic,
supernatural imagination is better than consistency. It was an important
step when he made Jupiter, though a personal god, a power to which no
limits are assigned; when he also made the other divinities but shadows,
or, at most, functions, of Jupiter. This answers to his conviction that
spirit universally and singly pervades matter; but, what is more, it
answers to the needs of epic development. When we come to Tasso and
Camoens, we seem to have gone backward in this respect; we seem to come
upon poetry in which supernatural machinery is in a state of chronic
insubordination. But that, too, was perhaps necessary. In comparison
with the _Aeneid, Gerusalemme Liberata_ and _Os Lusiadas_ lack
intellectual control and spiritual depth; but in comparison with the
Roman, the two modern poems thrill with a new passion of life, a new
wine of life, heady, as it seems, with new significance--a significance
as yet only felt, not understood. Both Tasso and Camoens clearly join on
to the main epic tradition: Tasso derives chiefly from the _Aeneid_ and
the _Iliad_, Camoens from the _Aeneid_ and the _Odyssey_. Tasso is
perhaps more Virgilian than Camoens; the plastic power of his
imagination is more assured. But the advantage Camoens has over Tasso
seems to repeat the advantage Homer has over Virgil; the ostensible
subject of the _Lusiads_ glows with the truth of experience. But the
real subject is behind these splendid voyagings, just as the real
subject of Tasso is behind the battles of Christian and Saracen; and in
both poets the inmost theme is broadly the same. It is the consciousness
of modern Europe. _Jerusalem Delivered_ and the _Lusiads_ are drenched
with the spirit of the Renaissance; and that is chiefly responsible for
their lovely poetry. But they reach out towards the new Europe that was
then just beginning. Europe making common cause against the peoples that
are not Europe; Europe carrying her domination round the world--is that
what Tasso and Camoens ultimately mean? It would be too hard and too
narrow a matter by itself to make these poems what they are. No; it is
not the action of Europe, but the spirit of European consciousness, that
gave Tasso and Camoens their deepest inspiration. But what European
consciousness really is, these poets rather vaguely suggest than master
into clear and irresistible expression, into the supreme symbolism of
perfectly adequate art. They still took European consciousness as an
affair of geography and race rather than simply as a triumphant stage in
the general progress of man's knowledge of himself. Their time imposed a
duty on them; that they clearly understood. But they did not clearly
understand what the duty was; partly, no doubt, because they were both
strongly influenced by mediaeval religion. And so it is atmosphere, in
Tasso and Camoens, that counts much more than substance; both poets seem
perpetually thrilled by something they cannot express--the _non so che_
of Tasso. And what chiefly gives this sense of quivering, uncertain
significance to their poetry is the increase of freedom and decrease of
control in the supernatural. Supernaturalism was emphasized, because
they instinctively felt that this was the means epic poetry must use to
accomplish its new duties; it was disorderly, because they did not quite
know what use these duties required. Tasso and Camoens, for all the
splendour and loveliness of their work, leave epic poetry, as it were,
consciously dissatisfied--knowing that its future must achieve some
significance larger and deeper than anything it had yet done, and
knowing that this must be done somehow through imagined supernaturalism.
It waited nearly a hundred years for the poet who understood exactly
what was to be done and exactly how to do it.

In _Paradise Lost_, the development of epic poetry culminates, as far as
it has yet gone. The essential inspiration of the poem implies a
particular sense of human existence which has not yet definitely
appeared in the epic series, but which the process of life in Europe
made it absolutely necessary that epic poetry should symbolize. In
Milton, the poet arose who was supremely adequate to the greatest task
laid on epic poetry since its beginning with Homer; Milton's task was
perhaps even more exacting than that original one. "His work is not the
greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the first." The epigram
might just as reasonably have been the other way round. But nothing
would be more unprofitable than a discussion in which Homer and Milton
compete for supremacy of genius. Our business here is quite otherwise.

With the partial exception of Tasso and Camoens, all epic poetry before
Milton is some symbolism of man's sense of his own will. It is simply
this in Homer; and the succeeding poets developed this intention but
remained well within it. Not even Virgil, with his metaphysic of
individual merged into social will--not even Virgil went outside it. In
fact, it is a sort of _monism_ of consciousness that inspires all
pre-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 and
belongs to it, as we say "_my_ country." With Milton, this has
necessarily become not only a sense of man's rigorously contained
nature, 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 poetry
has to symbolize. Could they be reconciled, the two elements in man's
modern consciousness of existence would form a monism. But this
consciousness is a dualism; its elements are absolutely opposed.
_Paradise Lost_ is inspired by intense consciousness of the eternal
contradiction between the general, unlimited, irresistible will of
universal destiny, and defined individual will existing within this, and
inexplicably capable of acting on it, even against it. Or, if that seems
too much of an antinomy to some philosophies (and it is perhaps possible
to make it look more apparent than real), the dualism can be unavoidably
declared by putting it entirely in terms of consciousness: destiny
creating within itself an existence which stands against and apart from
destiny by being _conscious_ of it. In Milton's poetry the spirit of man
is equally conscious of its own limited reality and of the unlimited
reality of that which contains him and drives him with its motion--of
his own will striving in the midst of destiny: destiny irresistible, yet
his will unmastered.

This is not to examine the development of epic poetry by looking at that
which is not _poetry_. In this kind of art, more perhaps than in any
other, we must ignore the wilful theories of those who would set
boundaries to the meaning of the word poetry. In such a poem as
Milton's, whatever is in it is its poetry; the poetry of _Paradise Lost_
is just--_Paradise Lost_! Its pomp of divine syllables and glorious
images is no more the poetry of Milton than the idea of man which he
expressed. But the general manner of an art is for ever similar; it is
its inspiration that is for ever changing. We need never expect words
and 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 do
it--this seems to involve the obscurest processes of the mind: analysis
can but fumble at it. But we can compare inspiration--the nature of the
inmost urgent motive of poetry. And it is not irrelevant to add (it
seems to me mere fact), that Milton had the greatest motive that has
ever ruled a poet.

For the vehicle of this motive, a fable of purely human action would
obviously not suffice. What Milton has to express is, of course,
altogether human; destiny is an entirely human conception. But he has to
express 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 as
he expresses its opponent, the destined will of man. Destiny will appear
in poetry as an omnipotent God; Virgil had already prepared poetry for
that. But the action at large must clearly consist now, and for the
first time, overwhelmingly of supernatural imagination. Milton has been
foolishly blamed for making his supernaturalism too human. But nothing
can come into poetry that is not shaped and recognizable; how else but
in 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 this
supernatural imagination of Milton's with the supernatural machinery of
any previous epic poet. Virgil is the most scrupulous in this respect;
and towards the inevitable change, which Milton completed and perfected
from Camoens and Tasso, Virgil took a great step in making Jupiter
professedly almighty. But compare Virgil's "Tantaene animis celestibus
irae?" with Milton's "Evil, be thou my good!" It is the difference
between an accidental device and essential substance. That, in order to
symbolize in epic form--that is to say, in _narrative_ form--the
dualistic sense of destiny and the destined, and both immediately
--Milton had to dissolve his human action completely in a
supernatural action, is the sign not merely of a development, but of a
re-creation, of epic art.

It has been said that Satan is the hero of _Paradise Lost_. The offence
which the remark has caused is due, no doubt, to injudicious use of the
word "hero." It is surely the simple fact that if _Paradise Lost_ exists
for any one figure, that is Satan; just as the _Iliad_ exists for
Achilles, and the _Odyssey_ for Odysseus. It is in the figure of Satan
that the imperishable significance of _Paradise Lost_ is centred; his
vast unyielding agony symbolizes the profound antinomy of modern
consciousness. And if this is what he is in significance it is worth
noting what he is in technique. He is the blending of the poem's human
plane with its supernatural plane. The epic hero has always represented
humanity by being superhuman; in Satan he has grown into the
supernatural. He does not thereby cease to symbolize human existence;
but he is thereby able to symbolize simultaneously the sense of its
irreconcilable condition, of the universal destiny that contains it. Out
of Satan's colossal figure, the single urgency of inspiration, which
this dualistic consciousness of existence makes, radiates through all
the regions of Milton's vast and rigorous imagination. "Milton," says
Landor, "even Milton rankt with living men!"

FOOTNOTES:

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

[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 bestowed
honour on me.']

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

[Footnote 10: "For everyone his own day is appointed; for all men the
period of life is short and not to be recalled: but to spread glory by
deeds, 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 instances
of what has happened. We may leave out experiments in religious
sentiment like Klopstock's _Messiah_. We must leave out also poems which
have something of the look of epic at first glance, but have nothing of
the scope of epic intention; such as Scott's longer poems. These might
resemble the "lays" out of which some people imagine "authentic" epic to
have been made. But the lays are not the epic. Scott's poems have not
the depth nor the definiteness of symbolic intention--what is sometimes
called the epic unity--and this is what we can always discover in any
poetry which gives us the peculiar experience we must associate with the
word epic, if it is to have any precision of meaning. What applies to
Scott, will apply still more to Byron's poems; Byron is one of the
greatest of modern poets, but that does not make him an epic poet. We
must keep our minds on epic intention. Shelley's _Revolt of Islam_ has
something of it, but too vaguely and too fantastically; the generality
of 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 form
any judgment of it appropriate to the present purpose.[13] Our search
will not take us far before we notice something very remarkable; poems
which look superficially like epic turn out to have scarce anything of
real epic intention; whereas epic intention is apt to appear in poems
that do not look like epic at all. In fact, it seems as if epic manner
and epic content were trying for a divorce. If this be so, the
traditional epic manner will scarcely survive the separation. Epic
content, however, may very well be looking out for a match with a new
manner; though so far it does not seem to have found an altogether
satisfactory 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 it
does not much matter whether such poetry should be called epic or, as
some hold, idyllic. But it is interesting to note, first, that the poem
is deliberately written with epic style and epic intention; and, second,
that, though singularly beautiful, it makes no attempt to add anything
to epic development. It is interesting, too, to see epic poetry trying
to get away from its heroes, and trying to use material the poetic
importance of which seems to depend solely on the treatment, not on
itself. This was a natural and, for some things, a laudable reaction.
But it inevitably meant that epic must renounce the triumphs which
Milton had won for it. William Morris saw no reason for abandoning
either the heroes or anything else of the epic tradition. The chief
personages of _Sigurd the Volsung_ are admittedly more than human, the
events frankly marvellous. The poem is an impressive one, and in one way
or another fulfils all the main qualifications of epic. But perhaps no
great poem ever had so many faults. These have nothing to do with its
management of supernaturalism; those who object to this simply show
ignorance of the fundamental necessities of epic poetry. The first book
is magnificent; everything that epic narrative should be; but after this
the poem grows long-winded, and that is the last thing epic poetry
should be. It is written with a running pen; so long as the verse keeps
going on, Morris seems satisfied, though it is very often going on
about unimportant things, and in an uninteresting manner. After the
first book, indeed, as far as Morris's epic manner is concerned, Virgil
and Milton might never have lived. It attempts to be the grand manner by
means of vagueness. In an altogether extraordinary way, the poem slurs
over the crucial incidents (as in the inept lines describing the death
of Fafnir, and those, equally hollow, describing the death of
Guttorm--two noble opportunities simply not perceived) and tirelessly
expatiates on the mere surroundings of the story. Yet there is no
attempt to make anything there credible: Morris seems to have mixed up
the effects of epic with the effects of a fairy-tale. The poem lacks
intellect; it has no clear-cut thought. And it lacks sensuous images; it
is full of the sentiment, not of the sense of things, which is the wrong
way round. Hence the protracted conversations are as a rule amazingly
windy and pointless, as the protracted descriptions are amazingly
useless and tedious. And the superhuman virtues of the characters are
not shown in the poem so much as energetically asserted. It says much
for the genius of Morris that _Sigurd the Volsung_, with all these
faults, is not to be condemned; that, on the contrary, to read it is
rather a great than a tiresome experience; and not only because the
faults are relieved, here and there, by exquisite beauties and
dignities, indeed by incomparable lines, but because the poem as a whole
does, as it goes on, accumulate an immense pressure of significance. All
the great epics of the world have, however, perfectly clearly a
significance in close relation with the spirit of their time; the
intense desire to symbolize the consciousness of man as far as it has
attained, is what vitally inspires an epic poet, and the ardour of this
infects his whole style. Morris, in this sense, was not vitally
inspired. _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 write
epic poetry as it might have been written, and to make epic poetry mean
what it might have meant, in the days when the tale of Sigurd and the
Niblungs was newly come among men's minds. Mr. Doughty, in his
surprising poem _The Dawn in Britain_, also seems trying to compose an
epic exercise, rather than to be obeying a vital necessity of
inspiration. For all that, it is a great poem, full of irresistible
vision and memorable diction. But it is written in a revolutionary
syntax, which, like most revolutions of this kind, achieves nothing
beyond the fact of being revolutionary; and Mr. Doughty often uses the
unexpected effects of his queer syntax instead of the unexpected effects
of poetry, which makes the poem even longer psychologically than it is
physically. Lander's _Gebir_ has much that can truly be called epic in
it; and it has learned the lessons in manner which Virgil and Milton so
nobly taught. It has perhaps learned them too well; never were
concision, and the loading of each word with heavy duties, so thoroughly
practised. The action is so compressed that it is difficult to make out
exactly what is going on; we no sooner realize that an incident has
begun than we find ourselves in the midst of another. Apart from these
idiosyncrasies, the poetry of _Gebir_ is a curious mixture of splendour
and commonplace. If fiction could ever be wholly, and not only
partially, epic, it would be in _Gebir_.

In all these poems, we see an epic intention still combined with a
recognizably epic manner. But what is quite evident is, that in all of
them there is no attempt to carry on the development of epic, to take up
its symbolic power where Milton left it. On the contrary, this seems to
be deliberately avoided. For any tentative advance on Miltonic
significance, even for any real acceptance of it, we must go to poetry
which tries to put epic intention into a new form. Some obvious
peculiarities of epic style are sufficiently definite to be detachable.
Since Theocritus, a perverse kind of pleasure has often been obtained by
putting some of the peculiarities of epic--peculiarities really required
by a very long poem--into the compass of a very short poem. An epic
idyll cannot, of course, contain any considerable epic intention; it is
wrought out of the mere shell of epic, and avoids any semblance of epic
scope. But by devising somehow a connected sequence of idylls, something
of epic scope can be acquired again. As Hugo says, in his preface to _La
Legende des Siècles_: "Comme dans une mosaïque, chaque pierre a sa
couleur et sa forme propre; l'ensemble donne une figure. La figure de ce
livre," 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 mere
technical curiosity. It may be a valuable method for the future of epic.
Tennyson attempted this method in _Idylls of the King_; not, as is now
usually admitted, with any great success. The sequence is admirable for
sheer craftsmanship, for astonishing craftsmanship; but it did not
manage to effect anything like a conspicuous symbolism. You have but to
think of _Paradise Lost_ to see what _Idylls of the King_ lacks. Victor
Hugo, however, did better in _La Legende des Siècles_. "La figure, c'est
l'homme"; there, at any rate, is the intention of epic symbolism. And,
however pretentious the poem may be, it undoubtedly does make a
passionate effort to develop the significance which Milton had achieved;
chiefly to enlarge the scope of this significance.[14] Browning's _The
Ring and the Book_ also uses this notion of an idyllic sequence; but
without any semblance of epic purpose, purely for the exhibition of
human character.

It has already been remarked that the ultimate significance of great
drama is the same as that of epic. Since the vital epic purpose--the
kind of epic purpose which answers to the spirit of the time--is
evidently 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 modern
consciousness, for such symbolism as Milton's, we must go to two such
invasions of epic purpose into dramatic manner--to Goethe's _Faust_ and
Hardy's _The Dynasts_. But dramatic significance and epic significance
have been admitted to be broadly the same; to take but one instance,
Aeschylus's Prometheus is closely related to Milton's Satan (though I
think Prometheus really represents a monism of consciousness--that which
is destined--as Satan represents a dualism--at once the destined and the
destiny). How then can we speak of epic purpose invading drama? Surely
in this way. Drama seeks to present its significance with narrowed
intensity, but epic in a large dilatation: the one contracts, the other
expatiates. When, therefore, we find drama setting out its significance
in such a way as to become epically dilated, we may say that dramatic
has grown into epic purpose. Or, even more positively, we may say that
epic has taken over drama and adapted it to its peculiar needs. In any
case, with one exception to be mentioned presently, it is only in
_Faust_ and _The Dynasts_ that we find any great development of Miltonic
significance. These are the poems that give us immense and shapely
symbols of the spirit of man, conscious not only of the sense of his
own destined being, but also of some sense of that which destines. In
fact, these two are the poems that develop and elaborate, in their own
way, the Miltonic significance, as all the epics in between Homer and
Milton develop and elaborate Homeric significance. And yet, in spite of
_Faust_ and _The Dynasts_, it may be doubted whether the union of epic
and drama is likely to be permanent. The peculiar effects which epic
intention, in whatever manner, must aim at, seem to be as much hindered
as helped by dramatic form; and possibly it is because the detail is
necessarily too much enforced for the broad perfection of epic effect.

The real truth seems to be, that there is an inevitable and profound
difficulty in carrying on the Miltonic significance in anything like a
story. Regular epic having reached its climax in _Paradise Lost_, the
epic purpose must find some other way of going on. Hugo saw this, when
he strung his huge epic sequence together not on a connected story but
on a single idea: "la figure, c'est l'homme." If we are to have, as we
must have, direct symbolism of the way man is conscious of his being
nowadays, which means direct symbolism both of man's spirit and of the
(philosophical) opponent of this, the universal fate of things--if we
are to have all this, it is hard to see how any story can be adequate to
such symbolic requirements, unless it is a story which moves in some
large region of imagined supernaturalism. And it seems questionable
whether we have enough _formal_ "belief" nowadays to allow of such a
story appearing as solid and as vividly credible as epic poetry needs.
It is a decided disadvantage, from the purely epic point of view, that
those admirable "Intelligences" in Hardy's _The Dynasts_ are so
obviously abstract ideas disguised. The supernaturalism of epic, however
incredible it may be in the poem, must be worked up out of the material
of some generally accepted belief. I think it would be agreed, that what
was possible for Milton would scarcely be possible to-day; and even more
impossible would be the naïveté of Homer and the quite different but
equally impracticable naïveté of Tasso and Camoens. The conclusion seems
to be, that the epic purpose will have to abandon the necessity of
telling a story.

Hugo's way may prove to be the right one. But there may be another; and
what 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. It
seemed unlikely after the Alexandrians had made such poor attempts at
standing 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 domineering
everything, regular epic seemed unlikely; until, after the doubtful
attempts of Boiardo and Ariosto, Tasso arrived. But in each case, while
the occurrence of regular epic was seeming so improbable, it
nevertheless happened that poetry was written which was certainly
nothing like epic in form, but which was strongly charged with a
profound pressure of purpose closely akin to epic purpose; and _De Rerum
Natura_ and _La Divina Commedia_ are very suggestive to speculation now.
Of course, the fact that, in both these cases, regular epic did
eventually occur, must warn us that in artistic development anything may
happen; but it does seem as if there were a deeper improbability for
the occurrence of regular epic now than in the times just before Virgil
and Tasso--of regular epic, that is, inspired by some vital import, not
simply, like _Sigurd the Volsung_, by archaeological import. Lucretius is
a good deal more suggestive than Dante; for Dante's form is too exactly
suited to his own peculiar genius and his own peculiar time to be
adaptable. But the method of Lucretius is eminently adaptable. That
amazing image of the sublime mind of Lucretius is exactly the kind of
lofty symbolism that the continuation of epic purpose now seems to
require--a subjective symbolism. I believe Wordsworth felt this, when he
planned his great symbolic poem, and partly executed it in _The Prelude_
and _The Excursion_: for there, more profoundly than anywhere out of
Milton himself, Milton's spiritual legacy is employed. It may be, then,
that Lucretius and Wordsworth will preside over the change from
objective to subjective symbolism which Milton has, perhaps, made
necessary for the continued development of the epic purpose: after
Milton, it seems likely that there is nothing more to be done with
objective epic. But Hugo's method, of a connected sequence of separate
poems, instead of one continuous poem, may come in here. The
determination to keep up a continuous form brought both Lucretius and
Wordsworth at times perilously near to the odious state of didactic
poetry; it was at least responsible for some tedium. Epic poetry will
certainly never be didactic. What we may imagine--who knows how vainly
imagine?--is, then, a sequence of odes expressing, in the image of some
fortunate and lofty mind, as much of the spiritual significance which
the epic purpose must continue from Milton, as is possible, in the style
of Lucretius and Wordsworth, for subjective symbolism. A pregnant
experiment towards something like this has already been seen--in George
Meredith's magnificent set of _Odes in Contribution to the Song of the
French History_. The subject is ostensibly concrete; but France in her
agonies and triumphs has been personified into a superb symbol of
Meredith's own reading of human fate. The series builds up a decidedly
epic significance, and its manner is extraordinarily suggestive of a new
epic method. Nevertheless, something more Lucretian in central
imagination, 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 nature
are burning in a single flame. The artifice of criticism is to detect
what peculiar radiance each element contributes to the whole light; but
this no more affects the singleness of the compounded energy in poetry
than the spectroscopic examination of fire affects the single nature of
actual flame. For the purposes of this book, it has been necessary to
look chiefly at the contribution of intellect to epic poetry; for it is
in that contribution that the development of poetry, so far as there is
any development at all, really consists. This being so, it might be
thought that Keats could hardly have done anything for the real progress
of epic. But Keats's apparent (it is only apparent) rejection of
intellect in his poetry was the result of youthful theory; his letters
show that, in fact, intellect was a thing unusually vigorous in his
nature. If the Keats of the letters be added to the Keats of the poems,
a personality appears that seems more likely than any of his
contemporaries, or than anyone who has come after him, for the work of
carrying Miltonic epic forward without forsaking Miltonic form.]

[Footnote 14: For all I know, Hugo may never have read Milton; judging
by some silly remarks of his, I should hope not. But Hugo could feel the
things in the spirit of man that Milton felt; not only because they were
still there, but because the secret influence of Milton has intensified
the consciousness of them in thousands who think they know nothing of
_Paradise Lost_. Modern literary history will not be properly understood
until it is realized that Milton is one of the dominating minds of
Europe, whether Europe know it or not. There are scarcely half a dozen
figures that can be compared with Milton for irresistible
influence--quite apart from his unapproachable supremacy in the
technique of poetry. When Addison remarked that _Paradise Lost_ is
universally and perpetually interesting, he said what is not to be
questioned; though he did not perceive the real reason for his
assertion. Darwin no more injured the significance of _Paradise Lost_
than air-planes have injured Homer.]





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Epic - An Essay" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.