The Epic / An Essay

tock'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

ur minds on epic intention. Shelley's Revolt of Islam has something of it, but too vaguely and too fantastically; the generality of human experience had little to do with this glittering poem. Keats's Hyperion is wonderful; but it does not go far enough to let us form any judgment of it appropriate to the present purpose.[13] Our search will not take us far before we notice something very remarkable; poems which look superficially like epic turn out

e first book, indeed, as far as Morris's epic manner is concerned, Virgil and Milton might never have lived. It attempts to be the grand manner by means of vagueness. In an altogether extraordinary way, the poem slurs over the crucial incidents (as in the inept lines describing the death of Fafnir, and those, equally hollow, describing the death of Guttorm-two noble opportunities simply not perceived) and tirelessly expatiates on the mere surroundings of the story. Yet there is no attempt to make anything there credible: Morris seems to have mixed up the effects of epic with the effects of a fairy-tale. The poem lacks intellect; it has no clear-cut thought. And it lacks sensuous images; it is full of the sentiment, not of the sense of things, which is the wrong way round. Hence the protracted conversations are as a rule amazingly windy and pointless, as the protracted descriptions are amazingly useless and tedious. And the superhuman virtues of the characters are not shown in the poem so much as energetically asserted. It says much for the genius of Morris that Sigurd the Volsung, with all these faults, is not to be condemned; that, on the contrary, to read it is rather a great than a tiresome experience; and not only because the faults are relieved, here and there, by exquisite beauties and dignities, indeed by incomparable lines, but because the poem as a whole does, as it goes on, accumulate an immense pressure of significance. All the great epics of the world have, however, perfectly clearly a significance in close relation with the spirit of their time; the intense desire to symbolize the consciousness of man as far as it has attained, is wha

poem. An epic idyll cannot, of course, contain any considerable epic intention; it is wrought out of the mere shell of epic, and avoids any semblance of epic scope. But by devising somehow a connected sequence of idylls, something of epic scope can be acquired again. As Hugo says, in his preface to La Legende des Siècles: "Comme dans une mosa?que, chaque pierre a sa couleur et sa forme propre; l'ensemble donne une figure. La figure de ce livre," he goes on, "c'est l'homme." To get an epic design or figure through a sequence of small idylls need not be the result of mere technical curiosity. It may be a valuable method for the future of epic. Tennyson attempted this method in Idylls of the King; not, as is now usually admitted, with any gre

etheus really represents a monism of consciousness-that which is destined-as Satan represents a dualism-at once the destined and the destiny). How then can we speak of epic purpose invading drama? Surely in this way. Drama seeks to present its significance with narrowed intensity, but epic in a large dilatation: the one contracts, the other expatiates. When, therefore, we find drama setting out its significance in such a way as to become epically dilated, we may say that dramatic has grown into epic purpose. Or, even more positively, we may say that epic has taken over drama and adapted it to its peculiar needs. In any case, with one exception to be mentioned presently, it is only in Faust and The Dynasts that we find any great development of Miltonic s

spirit and of the (philosophical) opponent of this, the universal fate of things-if we are to have all this, it is hard to see how any story can be adequate to such symbolic requirements, unless it is a story which moves in some large region of imagined supernaturalism. And it seems questionable whether we have enough formal "belief" nowadays to allow of such a story appearing as solid and as vividly credible as epic poetry needs. It is a decided disadvantage, from the purely epic point of view, that those admirable "Intelligences" in

ular epic now than in the times just before Virgil and Tasso-of regular epic, that is, inspired by some vital import, not simply, like Sigurd the Volsung, by archaeological import. Lucretius is a good deal more suggestive than Dante; for Dante's form is too exactly suited to his own peculiar genius and his own peculiar time to be adaptable. But the method of Lucretius is eminently adaptable. That amazing image of the sublime mind of Lucretius is exactly the kind of lofty symbolism that the continuation of epic purpose now seems to require-a subjective symbolism. I believe Wordsworth felt this, when he planned his great symbolic poem, and partly executed it in The Prelude and The Excursion: for there, more profoundly than anywhere out of Milton himself, Milton's spiritual legacy is employed. It may be, then, that Lucretius and Wordsworth will preside over the change from objective to subjective symbolism which Milton has, perhaps, made necessary for the continued development of the epic purpose: after Milton, it seems likely that there is nothing more to be done with objective epic. But Hugo's method, of a connected sequence of separate poems, instead of one continuous poem,

TNO

book, it has been necessary to look chiefly at the contribution of intellect to epic poetry; for it is in that contribution that the development of poetry, so far as there is any development at all, really consists. This being so, it might be thought that Keats could hardly have done anything for the real progress of epic. But Keats's apparent (it is only apparent) rejection of intellect in

ho 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 u