The Epic / An Essay

eds of the society in which it was made. But the development of human society does not go straight forward; and th

e 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 Nibelungenli

not require any manipulation to combine the "literary" epics from both series into a single process. Indeed, if we take Homer, Virgil and Milton as the outstanding events in the whole progress of epic poetry, and group the less important poems appropriately round these three names, we shall not be far from the ideal truth of epic development. We might say, then, that Homer begins the whole business of epic, imperishably fixes its type and, in a way that can never be questioned, declares its artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; and Milton perfects the purpose. Three such poets are not, heaven know

r 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 exerc

i de

baesan ausanton

at his ease; when he exerts

rophaling

losti, lelasmeno

leep sat on a pine tree near by in the likeness of a murmuring night-jar. It is an art so balanced, that when it tells us, with no special emphasis, how the Trojans came on with a din like the clangour of a flock of cranes, but the Achaians came on in silence, the temper of the two hosts is discriminated for the whole poem; or, in the supreme instance, when it tells us how the old men looked at Helen and said, "No wonder the young men fight for her!" then Helen's beauty must be accepted by the faith of all the world. The particulars of such poetry could be enumer

o strangers." All that is one of the accidental qualities of Homer. But the force of the word "enact" in Goethe's epigram will certainly come home to us when we think of those famous speeches in which courage is unforgettably declared-such speeches as that of Sarpedon to Glaukos, or of Glaukos to Diomedes, or of Hektor at his parting with Andromache. What these speeches mean, however, in the whole artistic purpose of Homer, will assuredly be missed if they are detached for consideration; especially we shall miss the deep significance of the fact that in all of these speeches the substantial thought falls, as it were, into two clauses. Courage is in the one clause, a deliberate facing of death; but something equally important is in the other. Is it honour? The Homeric hero makes a great deal of honour; but it is honour paid to himself, living; what he wants above everything is to be admired-"always to be the best"; that is what true heroism is. But he is to go where he knows death will strike at him; and he does not make much of honour after death; for him, the meanest man living

tekes ge minynth

hophellen Olym

psibrem

ion hos h?kym

let

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

at, that the Iliad and the Odyssey and the other early epics were composed. But life is not only short; it is, in itself, valueless. "As the generation of leaves, so is the generation of men." The life of man matters to nobody but himself. It happens incidentally in universal destiny; but beyond just happening it has no function. No function, of course, except for man himself. If man is to find any value in life it is he himself that must create the value. For the sense of the ultimate uselessness of life, of the blankness of imperturbable darkness that surrounds it, Goethe's word "Hell" is not too shocking. But no one has properly lived who has not felt this Hell; and we may

of its "kennings"-the strange device by which early popular poetry (Hesiod is another instance) tries to liberate and master the magic of words. A good deal has been made of these "kennings"; but it does not take us far towards great poetry, to have the sea called "whale-road" or "swan-road" or "gannet's-bath"; though we are getting nearer to it when the sun is called "candle of the firmament" or "heaven's gem." On the whole, the poem is composed in an elaborate, ambitious diction which is not properly governed. Alliteration proves a somewhat dangerous principle; it seems mainly responsible for the way the poet makes his sentences by piling up clauses, like shooting a load of stones out of a cart. You cannot always make out exactly what he means; and it is doubtful whether he always had a clearly-thought meaning. Most of the subsidiary matter is foisted in with monstrous clumsiness. Yet Beowulf has what we do not find, out of Homer, in the other early epics. It has occasionally an unforgettable grandeur of phrasing. And it has other and perhaps deeper poetic qualities. When the warriors are waiting in the haunted hall for the coming of the marsh-fiend Grendel, they fall into untroubled sleep; and the poet adds, with Homeric restraint: "Not one of t

hrough solidly imagined characters. There is splendid characterization, too, in the Song of Roland, together with a fine sense of poetic form; not fine enough, however, to avoid a prodigious deal of conventional gag. The battling is lavish, but always exciting; and in, at least, that section which describes how the dying Oliver, blinded by weariness and wounds, mistakes Roland for a pagan and feebly smites him with his sword, there is real and piercing pathos. But for all his sense of character, the poet has very little discretion in his admiration of his heroes. Christianity, in these two poems, has less effect than one might think. The conspicuous value of life is still the original value, courage; but elaboration and refinement of this begin to appear, espe

ciousness of life, but the duty of "literary" epic has been to develop this function, answerably to the development of life itself, into symbolism of some conscious idea of life-something at once more formalized and more subtilized than the primary virtue of courage. The Greeks, however, were too much overshadowed by the greatness of Homer to do much towards this. The Argonautica, the half-hearted epic of Apollonius Rhodius, is the only attempt that need concern us. It is not a poem that can be read straight through; it is only enjoyable in moments-moments of charming, minute observation, like the description of a sunbeam thrown quivering on the wall from a basin of water "which has just been poured out," lines not only charming in themselves, but finely used as a simile for Medea's agitated heart; or moments of romantic fantasy, as when the Argonauts see the eagle flying towards Prometheus, and then hear the Titan's agonized cry. But it is not in such passages that what Apolloniu

a heroine. But in Virgil they belong to an incomparably greater art; and it is through Virgil that they have become necessities of the epic tradition. More than this, however, was required of him. The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the

dies; breve et i

ae: sed famam e

tutis o

en it is a political idea unequalled in the world, the idea of the Roman Empire. Had Virgil been a good Roman, the Aeneid might have been what no doubt Augustus, and Rome generally, desired, a political epic. But Virgil was not a good Roman; there was something in him that was not Roman at all. It was this strange incalculable element in him that seems for ever making him accomplish something he had not thought of; it was surely this that made him, unintentionally it may be, use the idea of the Roman Empire as a vehicle for a much profounder valuation of life. We must remember here the Virgil of th

do by art married to study what the poet of the Odyssey and the Iliad had done by art married to intuitive experience. But his failure in this does not matter much in comparison with his technical success otherwise. Virgil showed how poetry may be made deliberately adequate to the epic purpose. That does not mean that Virgil is more artistic than Homer. Homer's redundance, wholesale repetition of lines, and stock epithets cannot be altogether dismissed as "faults"; they are characteri

sola sub noc

itis vacuas et

ertam lunam s

vis, ubi caelum

s nox abstulit a

an unworthy theme; and Lucan evidently felt the necessity for development in epic. But he made the mistake, characteristically Roman, of thinking history more real than legend; and, trying

unque vides, quod

t was not on these lines that epic poetry was to develop. Lucan died at an age when most poets have done nothing very remarkable; that he already had achieved a poem lik

power of his imagination is more assured. But the advantage Camoens has over Tasso seems to repeat the advantage Homer has over Virgil; the ostensible subject of the Lusiads glows with the truth of experience. But the real subject is behind these splendid voyagings, just as the real subject of Tasso is behind the battles of Christian and Saracen; and in both poets the inmost theme is broadly the same. It is the consciousness of modern Europe. Jerusalem Delivered and the Lusiads are drenched with the spirit of the Renaissance; and that is chiefly responsible for their lovely poetry. But they reach out towards the new Europe that was then just beginning. Europe making common cause against the peoples that are not Europe; Europe carrying her domination round the world-is that what Tasso and Camoens ultimately mean? It would be too hard and too narrow a matter by itself to make these poems what they are. No; it is not the action of Europe, but the spirit of European consciousness, that gave Tasso and Camoens their deepest inspiration. But what European consciousness really is, these poets rather vaguely suggest than master into clear and irresistible expression, into the supreme symbolism of perfectly adequate art. They still took European consciousness as an affair of geograp

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 grea

s has necessarily become not only a sense of man's rigorously contained nature, but equally a sense of that which contains man-in fact, simultaneously a sense of individual will and of universal necessity. The single sense of these two irreconcilables is what Milton's poetry has to symbolize. Could they be reconciled, the two elements in man's modern consciousness of existence would form a monism. But this consciousness is a dualism; its elements are absolutely opposed. Paradise Lost is inspired by intense consciousness of the eternal contradiction between the general, unlimited, irresistible will of universal destiny, and defined individual will existing within

the meaning of the word poetry. In such a poem as Milton's, whatever is in it is its poetry; the poetry of Paradise Lost is just-Paradise Lost! Its pomp of divine syllables and glorious images is no more the poetry of

ly thinkin

with gust, in

shes, which the

noise rejected:

st constraining

t disrelish wri

and cind

than the

h the fiel

st; the uncon

revenge, im

never to sub

else not to

oetry, and how we appreciate the way they do it-this seems to involve the obscurest processes of the mind: analysis can but fumble at it. But we can compare inspiration-th

ly, through that which is destined. He has to express the sense of destiny immediately, at the same time as he expresses its opponent, the destined will of man. Destiny will appear in poetry as an omnipotent God; Virgil had already prepared poetry for that. But the action at large must clearly consist now, and

ected from Camoens and Tasso, Virgil took a great step in making Jupiter professedly almighty. But compare Virgil's "Tantaene animis celestibus irae?" with Milton's "Evil, be thou my good!" It is the difference between an accidental device and essential substance. That, in order

red; his vast unyielding agony symbolizes the profound antinomy of modern consciousness. And if this is what he is in significance it is worth noting what he is in technique. He is the blending of the poem's human plane with its supernatural plane. The epic hero has always represented humanity by being superhuman; in Satan he has grown into the supernatural. He does not thereby cease to symbolize human

TNO

the ships echoed terribly

st lie, Thy valour lost, forgot thy chivalry.'-O

so short-lived, Olympian Zeus that thunders from on

son for me, for the swif

ll men the period of life is short and not to be recalled:

sty dominyon of Ades; As by an uncertain moonray secretly illumin'd One goeth in the forest, when heav'n

hat is known, all th