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Call No. 0^ ''^^ Accession No. '
Author
Title IV <-- f ( C A vi L S ^- ^ ' fcu
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This book should be returned on or before the date last marked below
The Epic
By the same Author
Towards a Theory of Art
Speculative Dialogues
Four Short Plays
Thomas Hardy : A Critical Study
Principles of English Prosody
The Epic: an Essay
By Lascelles Abercrombie
London : Martin Seeker
Number Five John Street
Adelphi m c m x x i i
First published 1914
New Edition, reset 1922
CONDON: MARTIN BECKER (LTD.) 1922
PREFACE
As this essay is disposed to consider epic poetry as a
species of literature, and not as a department of
sociology or archeology or ethnology, the reader will
not find it anything material to the Discussion which
may be typified in those very interesting wofks, Gilbert
Murray's " The Rise of the Greek Epic "nhd Andrew
Lang's " The World of Hontfr" The distinction
between a literary and a scientific attitude to Homer
(and all other " authentic " epic) is, I think , finally
summed up in Mr. MackaiVs " Lectures on Greek
Poetry " ; the following pages, at any rate, assume
that this is so. Theories about epic origins were there-
fore 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
5
Preface
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.
BEGINNINGS
invention of epic poetry corresponds with
A 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 inde-
pendently ; 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 com-
pounded, 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 commonplao^ Exactly
7
The Epic
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 civil-
ization this difficult matter has been very nicely
investigated of late, and to interesting, though not
decided, result. But I may not concern myself with
thisj 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 individu-
ality. 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 isj)linded
to the glaring incongruities of his tribal ideas rnot
8
Beginnings
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 individu-
ality 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 per-
manence 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
9
The Epic
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 exist-
ence was perfectly adapted to another for which
it was quite unsuited, with the added necessity of
conquering the peoples found in possession. What-
ever 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 de-
cidedly Heroic Ages have occurred much later than
TTOTtt/IOt KttT
3dX\TOv oB
CK /.tcAaAwv KOiXrjs tvToa-O
Iliad, IV, 452.
10
Beginnings
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_jhat warfare was_a_cause, ,Q . 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 y the Song of Roland, and the
lays of the Crusaders (la Chanson cTAntioche, 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 Mahotaelan
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, i
how unusually prolonge<l^flr_else the clash
Ottoman, war revived it._ The case of Servia is
i
The Epic
interesting in another way. The songs about the
Battle of Kossovo describe Servian defeat defeat
so overwhelming that poetry cannot possibly trans-
late 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 Otto-
man 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,,. Servians 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,
Beginnings
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 inade-
quate 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 circym-
scribed 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 struc-
ture 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 unmis-
13
The Epic
takable. 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 mutu-
ally 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 bright-
ness 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 1 ; a " bad man is
1 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
Beginnings
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 some-
thing ; usually fighting whoever is near enough
to be fought with, though in Beowulf it seems to
be doing something more profitable to the civiliza-
tion which is to follow it taming the fierceness of
surrounding circumstance and jnan'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
it had been said to Homer, that his gods cannot be " good "
because their behaviour is consistently cynical, cruel, unscrupu-
lous 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.
15
The Epic
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
Beginnings
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 sur-
vives 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
tavenfe\ 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 ;
B 17
The Epic
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 CucHulaiqt ;
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
18
Beginnings
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
n epic is not made by piecing together a set
of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and
naking them into a continuous narrative. An epic
is not even a re-creation of old things ; it is al-
together a new creation, a new creation in terms
af 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 cgmpellingi This must not be lost sieht
19
The Epic
of. It is what the poet does with the tiadition 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. Ob-
viously, 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 per-
plexed stuff of epic material into unity ; and that
is, an ability to see in particular hurjian 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 ftftpr they _hfl.d heard tfre familiar
20
Beginnings
events fall into the magnificent ordered pomp of
the genuine epicgoet^ The tradition, indeed,
would start atresh 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 men-
tioned. 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 inten-
tion 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
21
The Epic
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. 1 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 m\self to its greatest examples. Before,
however, proceeding to consider epic poetry as a
whole, as a constantly recurring form of art, con-
tinually responding to the new needs of man's
developing consciousness, I must go, rapidly and
1 Scarcely what we call epic. " Epos " might include Hesiod
as well as epic material ; " epopee " is the business that Homer
started,
22
Beginnings
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."
II
LITERARY EPIC
EPIC poetry, JLhen, was invented to supply the
artistic demands of society in a certain de-
finitejmd recognizable state. Or rather, it was the
epic material which supplied that ; the first epic
poets gave their age, as genius always does, some-
thing 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,
24
Literary Epic
it was found that, in the manner and purpose of
epic poetry, something was given which was not
jiven elsewhere ; something of extraordinary value,
ipic poetry would therefore be undertaken again ;
nit now, of course, deliberately. With several
lifferent kinds ofpoetry to choose from, a man would
lecide ; that _he_ would like best to be an epic poet,
ind he would set out, in conscious determination,
>n an epic poem. The result, goo J or bad, of such
1 determination is called " literary " epic.^ The
3oems of Apollonius Rhodius^ Virgil, jLucan~
Zlamoens, Tasso"lmid~Tvlilton are " literary " epics,
But such~poeEy as t^USyssey, the Iliad, Beowulf,
:he Sqn^o/JR^ldnd, and the Nibelungenlied, poetry
ivhich seems an immediate response to some general
ma instant need in its surrounding community
such poetry is u ..aulbentic,_" epic A
IM^^gA,- w*~- ~ __' ' ~- ltf*l*HU**mf*Mpu\ | I .MIH "* J?
^ great deal has been made of this distinction
it has almost been taken to divide epic poetry intc
two species. And, as the names commonly giver
to the two supposed species suggest, there is some
notion that " literary " epic must be in a way in-
ferior to " authentic " epic. The superstition o
25
The Epic
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 sus-
tained 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 JEneid. \ Then there is the
curious modern feeling which is sometimes but-
tressed up by erroneous aesthetic theory (the worship
of a quite national " lyricism," for instance) but
which is really nothing but a sign of covert bar-
barism that lengthy poetic composition is some-
how undesirable ; and Homer is thought to have
36
Literary Epic
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 pre-
sumed 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 some-
how better than other art, is, I suppose^ the off-
spring of democratic ideas in politics. yThe 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 pro-
duction of an individual mind. j 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
27
The Epic
very illusory kind of pleasure ; since it is impossible
that the folk should ever be a poet. This indis-
putable 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, untenabl^ th^ugioLbeTn 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 com-
* , . -- ~ - "^
posed, somehpwj)r m qther, by the folk, ought to be
more " natural " than a work of deliberate art
aj* literary " epic ;l that is to say, these Rousseau-
ish notions will rfdmire it for being further from
civilization and nearer to the noble savage ; civil-
ization 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.
28
Literary Epic
Jmit all this rests on simE^jgnoniig 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.
consider what poetry is. Those who think Bacon
wrote Hamfetl 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 unthink-
able. 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 stylet So far as mere authorship goes,
then, we cannot make any real difference between
" authentic " and " literary " epic. We cannot sa>
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
29
The Epic
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 " au-
thentic " ; not so much in the nature of the condi-
tion as in its closeness and insistence Kdte'
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
paaintain it within conditions altogether unlike.
Xhe folk-spirit behind Beowulf is cloudy and tumult-
uous, 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,
30
Literary Epic
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 Beo-
wulf 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 iHs 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 rsfcial circumstance in Homer
gives him a greater intensity of cordial, human in-
spiration, 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 sottfal conditions within
which it is composed ; but the conditions contract
and intensify the conduct of the poem,\>r allow it
The Epic
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 " au-
thentic " epics. The subject of the Iliad is the fight-
ing of heroes, with all its implications and conse-
quences ; /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
htfw to conquer the monstrous forces of his world ;
Literary Epic
and so on. Such were the subjects which an im-
perious racial tradition pressed on the e^rly 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 manT~) 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 experi-
ences 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 natur-
ally translated the terrible unknown powers of the
c 33
The Epic
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 con-
tinually 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 architec-
ture 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 con-
vention. ; 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 JEneid, 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
34
Literary Epic
criticism, finding that where they resembled Homer
they seemed not so close to their matter, has taken
jfhis 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. jHaving 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 ifr" 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
35
The Epic
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 some-
thing that has become altogether himself the
mystery of individual existence in universal exist-
ence, 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. \f 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,
36
Literary 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
37
The Epic
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 any-
where 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 " authen-
tic " and " literary " epic have resolved themselves
into little more than signs of development in epic
intention ; the change has not been found to pro-
duce enough artistic difference between early and
later epic to warrant anything like a division into
two distinct species. The epic, whether " literary "
38
Literary Epic
or " authentic/' is a single form of art j but it is a
form capable of adapting itself to ihe altering
requirements of prevalent consciousness. \ In addi-
tion, however, to differences in general conception,
there are certain mechanical differences which
should be just noticed. The first epics were in-
tended 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 tradi-
tion 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
39
The Epic
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 scaf-
folding 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 compositioa x 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 wpuld 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 HomerT^jl^ut 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
40
Literary Epic
Roland, for instance/) begins with a long series of
exceedingly dull stanzas ; to a reader, the pre-
liminaries 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 : 1
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, ecoutez-moi, et cessez vos querelles !
Je vous dirai une tres-belle chanson.
And after some further prelude, the section ends :
Ici commence la chanson ou il y a tant a apprendre.
The " Chanson " does, indeed, make some show
of beginning in the third section, but it still moves
1 From the version of the Marquise de Sainte-Aulaire.
4 1
The Epic
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 neces-
sary :
Maintenant, seigneurs, ecoutez ce que dit I'ficriture.
And once more in the fifth section :
Barons, ecoutez un excellent couplet.
In the sixth, the jongleur is getting desperate :
Seigneurs, pour 1'amour de Dieu, faites silence, ecoutez-
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 diffi-
culties in the art of rhapsodic poetry.
42
Literary Epic
But the gravest difficulty, and perhaps the most
important, in poetry meant solely for recitation, is
the difficulty of achieving verbal beauty, or rather
&f* making verbal beauty tell. Vigorous but con-
trolled 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 pqet is his command x>ver the
secret magic of words. ^ Others may have as delighted
i sense of this magic,^but it is only the poet who can
naster it and do what he likes with it. And next
,o the invention of speaking itself, the most import -
mt invention for the poet has been the invention
}f writing and reading ; for this has added im-
nensely to the scope of his mastery over words.
No poet will ever take the written word as a sub-
stitute for the spoken word ; he knows that it is
sn the spoken word, ^and the spoken word only,
that his art is foundedN 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
43
The Epic
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 designecfprimarily for declama-
tion (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 TassoA 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
44
Literary Epic
with the sparse grains that lie in the sandy diction
of all the " authentic " epics of the other nations.
And, by all ancient accounts, th^ ; other early Greek
epics would not fare much better tlFfEe comparison,
Homer's singularity in this respect is overwhelm-
ing ; 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 individuai
authorship of some " authentic " epic other than
Homer ; it could never have any bearing on the
question of Homeric authorship^ because no earl}
epic is comparable with thepoetrytyf Homer. Noth-
ing, indeed, is comparable with the poetry of Homer
except poetry for whose individual authorship
history unmistakably vouches.
So we cannot say that (tlomer was not as deliberate
a craftsman in words as Milton himself. The scop*
of his craft was more restricted, as his repetitions
and stock epithets show ; he was restricted by th(
fact that he composed for recitation, and th<
auricular appreciation of diction is limited, the natun
45
The Epic
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 vCfere 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 limita-
tions.
| In summary, then, we find certain conceptual
differences and certain mechanical differences be-
tween " authentic " and " literary " epic. But
Literary Epic
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. " Liteiary " 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/N We may,
then, in a general survey, regard epic poetry as
being in all ages essentially the same kind of art,
The Epic
fulfilling always a similar, though constantly de-
veloping, 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. yVVe see him accepting, and
with his genius transfiguring, the general circum-
stance of his time ; we see him symbolizing, in
some appropriate form, whatever sense of the signifi-
cance of life he feels acting as the accepted un-
conscious metaphysic of his age.ff 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 actu-
ality ; 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
Literary Epic
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.
49
Ill
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
5
The Nature of Epic
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 compo-
sition.
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 separ-
able from other kinds of poetry ; and this although
the word epic has been rather badly abused. For
instance, The Faery Oueene and La Divina Corn-
media 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
The Epic
Iliad. But as a poem may have lyrical qualities with-
out 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 through-
out.
This takes us some little way towards deciding
the nature of epic, lit must be a story, and the
story must be told well and greatly ; and, whether
52
The Nature of Epic
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 alle-
gorical storyt Reality of substance is a thing on
which epic jjoetry must always be able to relyj
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 de-
liberately 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. \A^ e g or y * s a beautiful way of incul-
53
The Epic
eating and asserting some special significance in
life ; but epic has a severer task, and a more impres-
sive one. It has not to say, Life in the world ought
to mean this or that ; it has to show life unmis-
takably being significant. It does not gloss or inter-
pret 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
54
" r __^^~
The Nature of Epic
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 pur-
pose will always be firmly implicit in the central
subject. Some of the early epics manage to do with-
out 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
The Epic
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 pro-
foundly 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 de-
mands reality of subject is clear ; it is because such
56
The Nature of Epic
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
57
The Epic
F 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 imagina-
tion.
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 com-
bined 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
58
The Nature of Epic
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 at-
tempted 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 per-
formance, and a deliberate effort to carry on the
development of epic. At the very least it has en-
riched the thought of humanity with some imperish-
able lines. But it is true, what the great critic said
of it ; the Pharsalia partakes more of the nature of
59
The Epic
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 un-
punished, 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 examin-
ing 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.
60
The Nature of 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 agree-
ing 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.
61
The Epic
A curious instance of the difficulty in exactly de-
fining 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 sub-
jects 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 sj^legoes beyond metre and
Action, beyond execution, into conception. The
whole imagination of Sigurd is incomparably larger
62
The Nature of Epic
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 meta-
physical significance of life. You scarcely feel that
m Jason.
I 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 numer-
ous 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 |ts 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
63
The Epic
at all, unless it were expressed in persons big
enough to support it. IThe 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 import-
ance in its treatment. It must symbolize not as a
particular and separable assertion, but at large and
generally some great aspect of vital destiny, with-
out 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
The Nature of Epic
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 con-
tain a catalogue of heroes. Other things, which
epics have been required to contain, besides much
that is not worth mentioning, 1 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 m^in scheme of the
greatest of non-epical poems, a^ Milton elaborated
1 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 .
E 65
The Epic
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/ 4 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 interjec-
tions 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, im-
practicable abyss in which dwells the secret govern-
ance 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. }
66
The Nature of Epic
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 cer-
tainly liberate, or at least more appropriately deco-
rate, the significant force of the subject. We may
jleave 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 A 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 sub-
ject, and all that that implies ? Homer begins this
6?
The Epic
paradox. Think of that lovely and exquisitely mis-
chievous 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 sEneid ? The
supernatural machinery of Camoens and Tasso is
frankly absurd ; they a^e not only careless of credi-
bility, but of sanity. Lucan tried to do without
gods ; but his witchcraft engages belief even more
faintly than the mingled Paganism and Christianity
68
The Nature of Epic
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 exist-
ence. '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 seri-
ously 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 beau-
tiful illustration! But it requires a finer genius than
most epic poets nave possessed, to keep supernatural
machinery just sufficiently fanciful without missing
its function. Perhaps only Homer and Virgil have
69
The Epic
done that perfectly. Milton's revolutionary de-
velopment marks a crisis in the general process of
epic so important, that it can only be discussed when
that proces^ is considered, in the following chapter,
as a whole.
70
IV
THE EPIC SERIES
BY the general process of epic poetry, I mean
the way this form of art has constantly re-
sponded 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 repe-
tition. Thus, the Homeric poems, the Argonautica,
the JEneid, the Pharsalia, and the later Latin epics,
form one series : the Mneid 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
7 1
The Epic
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 develop-
ment. 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 outstand-
ing 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,
72
The Epic Series
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
73
The Epic
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 :
l Se
That, you might say, is Homer at his ease ; when
he exerts himself you get a miracle like :
1 ' And all round the ships echoed terribly to the shouting
Achaians/
74
The Epic Series
crv S'ev err po<pa\iyy i
Kt<ro fjieyas [JLeyaXwcm, XeAatr/uei/o? t
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 irresis-
tibly 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
' When in a dusty whirlwind thou didst lie,
Thy valour lost, forgot thy chivalry/ OGILBY.
(The version leaves out
75
The Epic
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 par-
ticulars 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
The Epic Series
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 tre-
mendous 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 chil-
dren'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 Dio-
medes, or of Hektor at his parting with Andromache.
77
The Epic
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 con-
cerned, 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
78
The Epic Series
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 :
, end IJL tVe/ceV yc fjiivvvQdSiov Trcp eoVra,
Trep JULOI o(f>e\\V 'OAu/xTno? eyyva\icu
v JULOI vidv, 69 co/ayxopcoraTO? XXa>y
1 ' 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.'
2 * Honour my son for me, for the swiftest doom of all is
his.'
79
The Epic
those are the impor-
portant 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 sginificance 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 impreg-
nate 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 impera-
tive 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 emer-
80
The Epic Series
gence out of the mere tribal consciousness of
savagery, that it must not only accept the fact, but
first intensely realize, that man is avciy/xo/oarraro? 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 com-
posed. 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 usclcssness of life, of the blank-
ness 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
F Si
The Epic
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 wKv/uLopdoraro? once more ;
it makes this dreadful fact enjoyable. And so, with
courage as the value of life, and man thence de-
lightedly 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 appre-
ciate, 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 con-
struction, 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 appre-
ciate the spirit of his music, unless we see thefyvarfare
and the adventure as symbols of the primary
courage of life ; and there is more in those words
82
The Epic Series
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 in-
stance) tries to liberate and master the magic of
words. A good deal has been made of these " ken-
nings " ; 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 ;
83
The Epic
it seems mainly responsible for the way the poet
makes his sentences by piling up clauses, like shoot-
ing 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
^Eschylean chorus ; and there is some admirable
The Epic Series
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 super-
natural 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 incul-
cate 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
85
The Epic
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 de-
scribes 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
86
The Epic Series
elaboration and refinement of this begin to appear,
especially in the Song of Roland, as passionately
conscious patriotism and loyalty. The chief con-
tribution 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 intri-
cately 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
87
The Epic
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 valua-
tion of life. We must have the foundation, but we
must also have the superstructure. Speaking com-
paratively, it may be said that the function of
Homeric epic has been to create imperishable sym-
bolism for the actual courageous consciousness of
life, but the duty of " literary " epic has been to
develop this function, answerably to the develop-
ment 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.
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The Epic Series
It is not a poem that can be read straight through ;
it is only enjoyable in moments moments of charm-
ing, 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 subse-
quent 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 Epic
the development of epic significance. Love has
been nothing but a subordinate incident, almost one
might say an ornament, in the early epics ; in Apol-
lonius, though working through a deal of gross and
lumbering mythological machinery, love becomes
for the first time one of the pirmary values of life.
The love of Jason and Medea is the vital symbolism
of the Argonautica.
I 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 tradi-
tion. 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,
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The Epic Series
the original epic values of life, the Homeric values ;
as in the famous
Stat sua cuiquc dies ; breve et inreparabile tempus
Omnibus est vitae : sed famam extendere factis,
Hoc virtutis opus. 1
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 organiza-
tion, 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 lEneid celebrates tliej
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
1 " 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."
9 1
The Epic
good Roman, the dEneid 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 some-
thing 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 pro-
founder valuation of life. We must remember here
the Virgil of the Fourth Eclogue that extraordi-
nary, 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 lEneid. Man creating his own destiny,
man, however wearied with the long task of resist-
ance, achieving some conscious community of
aspiration, and dreaming of the perfection of him-
self : 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.
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The Epic Series
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 every-
one 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 un-
fortunate that, in managing the story of /Eneas (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 tKe Iliad
had done by art married to intuitive experience.
But his failure in this does not matter much in com-
parison 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 accom-
plished and efficient technique. But epic poetry
cannot be written as Homer composed it ; whereas
it must be written something as Virgil wrote it ; yes,
93
The Epic
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 &neid, the epic style must be of this
fashion :
Ibant ovscuri sola sub noctc 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. 1
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
1 " 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 illumined
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.
94
The Epic Series
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 ; 1
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 remark-
able ; 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, philosophic-
ally, be more consistent than the dubious stoicism
1 " All that is known, all that is felt, is God."
95
The Epic
of Virgil. But Virgil knew that, in epic, super-
natural 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 divini-
ties 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 per-
haps necessary. In comparison with the Mneid,
Gerusalemme Liberata and Os Lusiadas lack intel-
lectual control and spiritual depth ; but in com-
parison 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 signifi-
cance as yet only felt, not understood. Both Tasso
and Camoens clearly join on to the main epic
tradition : Tasso derives chiefly from the Mneid
and the Iliad, Camoens from the JEmid and the
The Epic Series
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 con-
sciousness of modern Europe. Jerusalem Delivered
and the Lusiads arc 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 ulti-
mately 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
G 97
The Epic
European consciousness really is, these poets rather
vaguely suggest than master into clear and irresis-
tible 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 under-
stand 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. Super-
naturalism was emphasized, because they instinc-
tively 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
The Epic Series
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 know-
ing that this must be done somehow through im-
agined 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 ap-
peared 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 un-
profitable than a discussion in which Homer and
99
The Epic
Milton compete for supremacy of geriius. 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 in-
spires 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, simul-
taneously a sense of individual will and of universal
necessity. The single sense of these two irrecon-
cilables 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
100
The Epic Series
monism. But this consciousness ip a dualism ; its
elements are absolutely opposed./ Paradise Lost is
inspired by intense consciousness of the eternal con-
tradiction between the general, unlimited, irresis-
tible 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. fin 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 unmasteredA
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
101
The Epic
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 ! i 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 inspir-
ation 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.
I O2
The Epic Series
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 appre-
ciate 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. 1 But the action at
103
The Epic
large must clearly consist now, and for the first time,
overwhelmingly of supernatural imagination. Milton
has been foolishly blamed for making his super-
naturalism 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 ^ great step in making Jupiter
professedly almighty. ^But compare Virgil's " Tan-
taene 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 tc
dissolve his human action completely in a super-
104
The Epic Series
natural action, is the sign not merely of a develop-
ment, but of a re-creation, of epic art. v
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 im-
perishable 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 sym-
bolize human existence ; but he is thereby able to
symbolize simultaneously the sense of its irrecon-
cilable condition, of the universal destiny that con-
tains it. Out of Satan's colossal figure, the single
urgency of inspiration, which thisjdualistic con-
I0 5
The Epic
sciousness of existence makes, radiates through all
the regions of Milton's vast and rigorous imagina-
tion. " Milton," says Landor, " even Milton rankt
with living men !
1 06
AFTER MILTON
A^D after Milton, what is to happen ? First,
briefly, for a few instances of what has hap-
pened. 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 ie
107
The Epic
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 fan-
tastically ; 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. 1 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.
1 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 com-
pounded 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,
108
After Milton
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 de-
liberately written with epic style and epic intention ;
and, second, that, though singularly beautiful, it
makes no attempt to add anything to epic develop-
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.
109
The Epic
ment. It is interesting, too, to see epic poetry try-
ing 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 re-
action. 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 tradi-
tion. 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 qualifica-
tions 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 mag-
nificent ; 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
no
After Milton
going on about unimportant things, and in an un-
interesting 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, de-
scribing the death of Guttorm two noble oppor-
tunities simply not perceived) and tirelessly expa-
tiates 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 super-
human 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
in
The Epic
Volsung, with all these faults, is not to be con-
demned ; 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 incom-
parable 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
112
After Milton
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. Landor'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 load-
ing 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
H 113
The Epic
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 consider-
able epic intention ; it is wrought out of the mere
sBell 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 Sticks : " Comme dans une mosalque, chaque
pierre a sa couleur et sa forme propre ; Pensemble
donne une figure. La figure de ce livre," he goes
114
After Milton
on, " c'est 1'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 sym-
bolism. You have but to think of Paradise Lost to
see what Idylls of the King lacks. Victor Hugo, how-
ever, did better in La Legende des Si&les. " La
figure, c'est Thomme " ; there, at any rate, is the
intention of epic symbolism. And, however pre-
tentious 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. 1 Browning's The Ring and the
1 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 in-
fluence of Milton has intensified the consciousness of them in
"5
The Epic
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 occasion-
ally 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
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,
116
After Milton
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, /Eschylus's Prome-
theus 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 be-
come 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
pf the spirit of man, conscious not only of the sense
"7
The Epic
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 be-
cause the detail is necessarily too much enforced for
the broad perfection of epic effect.
The real truth seems to be, that there is an in-
evitable 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 Phomme." If
we are to have, as we must have, direct symbolism
pf the way man is conscious of his being nowadays,
u8
After Milton
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 super-
naturalism. 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 super-
naturalism 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 impos-
sible would be the naivete of Homer and the quite
Different but equally impracticable naivete of Tasso
and Camoens. The conclusion seems to be, that
thejepic purpose will have to abandon the necessity
of telling a story.
9
The Epic
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 stand-
ing 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 domineer-
ing everything, regular epic seemed unlikely ; until,
after the doubtful attempts of Boiardo and Ariosto,
Tasso arrived. But in each case, while the occur-
rence 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
1 20
After Milton
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 neces-
sary 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
ill
The Epic
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 some-
thing 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
pew epic method. Nevertheless, something more
122,
After Milton
Lucretian in central imagination, something less
bound to concrete and particular event, seems
required for the complete development of epic
purpose.
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