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 LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
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 Mgcvj , ICj2°. 
 
 Ex Libris 
 ISAAC FOOT
 
 THE ART AND CRAFT OF LETTERS 
 
 THE EPIC
 
 UNIFORM Willi THIS VOLUME 
 
 COMEDY 
 
 By John I'ai.mlr 
 
 SATIRE 
 
 By Gilbert Canmam 
 
 HISTORY 
 
 By R. H. Gretton 
 
 PARODY 
 
 By Christopher Stone 
 
 THE BALLAD 
 
 By Frank Sidgwicic
 
 THE ART AND CRAFT OF LETTERS 
 
 THE EPIC 
 
 BY 
 
 LASCELLES 
 ABERCROMBIE 
 
 LONDON : MARTIN SECKER 
 
 NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI
 
 rN\303
 
 PREFACE 
 
 As this essay is disposed to consider epic poetry 
 as a species of literature, and not as a department 
 of sociology or archaeology or ethnology, the 
 reader will not find in it anything material to the 
 discussion which may be typified in those very 
 interesting works, Gilbert Murray's The Rise of 
 the Greek Epic and Andrew Lang's The World 
 of Homer. The distinction between a literary 
 and a scientific attitude to Homer (and all 
 other " authentic " epic) is, I think, finally 
 summed up in Mr. Mackail's Lectures on Greek 
 Poetry ; the following pages, at any rate, assume 
 that this is so. Theories about epic origins were 
 therefore indifferent to my purpose. Besides, 
 I do not see the need for any theories ; I think 
 it need only be said, of any epic poem whatever, 
 that it was composed by a man and transmitted 
 by men. But this is not to say that investigation 
 of the " authentic " epic poet's milieu may not 
 be extremely profitable ; and for settling the 
 preliminaries of this essay, I owe a great deal to 
 Mr. Chadwick's profoundly interesting study, 
 The Heroic Age ; though I dare say Mr. Chadwick 
 would repudiate some of my conclusions. I 
 must also acknowledge suggestions taken from
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 ray 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 con- 
 spicuous instances of epic poetry. They have 
 been discussed often enough ; but not often, 
 so far as I know, primarily as stages of one con- 
 tinuous artistic development.
 
 I 
 
 BEGINNINGS 
 
 THE invention of epic poetry corre- 
 sponds with a definite and, in the 
 history of the world, often recurring 
 state of society. That is to say, epic 
 poetry has been invented many times and 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. Be- 
 fore their hot racial elements have been thor- 
 oughly compounded, and thence have cooled into 
 the stable convenience of routine which is the 
 material shape of civilization — before this has 
 firmly occurred, there has usually been what is 
 called an " Heroic Age." It is apt to be the 
 hottest and most glowing stage of the process. 
 So much is commonplace. Exactly what causes 
 the racial elements of a nation, with all their 
 varying properties, to flash suddenly (as it seems) 
 into the splendid incandescence of an Heroic Age, 
 and thence to shift again into a comparatively 
 rigid and perhaps comparatively lustreless civil- 
 ization — this difficult matter has been very 
 nicely investigated of late, and to interesting, 
 
 7
 
 The Epic 
 
 though not decided, result. But I may not 
 concern myself with this ; nor even with the 
 detailed characteristics, alleged or ascertained, of 
 the Heroic Age of nations. It is enough for the 
 purpose of this book that the name " Heroic 
 Age " is a good one for this stage of the business ; 
 it is obviously, and on the whole rightly, de- 
 scriptive. For the stage displays the first vigorous 
 expression, as the natural thing and without con- 
 spicuous restraint, of private individuality. In 
 savagery, thought, sentiment, religion and social 
 organization may be exceedingly complicated, 
 full of the most subtle and strange relationships ; 
 but they exist as complete and determined wholes, 
 each part absolutely bound up with the rest. 
 Analysis has never come near them. The savage 
 is blinded to the glaring incongruities of his tribal 
 ideas not so much by habit or reverence ; it is 
 simply that the mere possibility of such a thing 
 as analysis has never occurred to him. He thinks, 
 he feels, he lives, all in a whole. Each person is 
 the tribe in little. This may make everyone an 
 astoundingly complex character ; but it makes 
 strong individuality impossible in savagery, since 
 everyone accepts the same elaborate unanalysed 
 whole of tribal existence. That existence, indeed, 
 would find in the assertion of private individu- 
 ality a serious danger ; and tribal organization 
 guards against this so efficiently that it is doubt- 
 less impossible, so long as there is no interruption 
 from outside. In some obscure manner, however, 
 8
 
 The Epic 
 
 savage existence has been constantly interrupted ; 
 and it seems as if the long-repressed forces of 
 individuality then burst out into exaggerated 
 vehemence ; for the result (if it is not slavery) is, 
 that a people passes from its savage to its heroic 
 age, on its way to some permanence of civiliza- 
 tion. 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 inde- 
 pendent vigour, compelled to flow together 1 ; or 
 it might be the migration, due to economic 
 stress, from one tract of country to which the 
 tribal existence was perfectly adapted to another 
 for which it was quite unsuited, with the added 
 necessity of conquering the peoples found in 
 possession. Whatever the cause may have been, 
 the result is obvious : a sudden liberation, a de- 
 lighted expansion, of numerous private indi- 
 vidualities. 
 
 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 
 
 1 ws 5' tire xeifiappoi ""ora/xot Arar' 6pea<j)i ptovrts 
 i j /JLHTydyKeiav ^v/j-fiaWeroi' 6^pi/xov i'ldwp 
 KpovvQv £k fMeyaktov koIXtjs tvToaOe x a P^PV^- 
 
 Iliad, IV, 452. 
 9
 
 The Epic 
 
 Northern poems are what most people have in 
 their minds when they speak of " authentic " 
 epic. But decidedly Heroic Ages have occurred 
 much later than the latest of these cases ; and 
 they arose out of a state of society which cannot 
 roundly be called savagery. Europe, for instance, 
 had its unmistakable Heroic Age when it was 
 fighting with the Moslem, whether that warfare 
 was a cause or merely an accompaniment. And 
 the period which preceded it, the period after 
 the failure of Roman civilization, was sufficiently 
 " dark " and devoid of individuality, to make the 
 sudden plenty of potent and splendid individuals 
 seem a phenomenon of the same sort as that 
 which has been roughly described ; it can 
 scarcely be doubted that the age which is exhi- 
 \ bited in the Poem of the Cid, the Song of Roland, 
 and the lays of the Crusaders (la Chanson d'An- 
 tioche, for instance), was similar in all essentials 
 to the age we find in Homer and the Nibelungen- 
 lied. Servia, too, has its ballad-cycles of Christian 
 and Mahometan warfare, which suppose an age 
 obviously heroic. But it hardly falls in with our 
 scheme ; Servia, at this time, might have been 
 expected to have gone well past its Heroic Age. 
 Either, then, it was somehow unusually prolonged, 
 or else the clash of the Ottoman war revived it. 
 The case of Servia is interesting in another way. 
 The songs about the battle of Kossovo describe 
 Servian defeat — defeat so overwhelming that 
 poetry cannot possibly translate it, and does not
 
 The Epic 
 
 attempt to translate it, into anything that looks 
 like victory. Even the splendid courage of its 
 hero Milos, who counters an imputation of 
 treachery by riding in full daylight into the 
 Ottoman camp and murdering the Sultan, even 
 this courage is rather near to desperation. The 
 Marko cycle — Marko whose betrayal of his 
 country seems wiped out by his immense prowess 
 — has in a less degree this utter defeat of Servia 
 as its background. But Servian history before 
 all this has many glories, which, one would think, 
 would serve the turn of heroic song better than 
 appalling defeat and, indeed, enslavement. Why 
 is the latter celebrated and not the former ? 
 The reason can only be this : heroic poetry 
 depends on an heroic age, and an age is heroic 
 because of what it is, not because of what it does. 
 Servia's defeat by the armies of Amurath came 
 at a time when its people was too strongly pos- 
 sessed by the heroic spirit to avoid uttering 
 itself in poetry. And from this it appears, too, 
 that when the heroic age sings, it primarily sings 
 of itself, even when that means singing of its 
 own humiliation. — One other exceptional kind 
 of heroic age must just be mentioned, in this 
 professedly inadequate summary. It is the kind 
 which occurs quite locally and on a petty scale, 
 with causes obscurer than ever. The Border 
 Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood 
 Ballads, clearly suppose a state of society which is 
 nothing but a very circumscribed and not very
 
 The Epic 
 
 important heroic age. Here the households of 
 gentry take the place of courts, and the poetry 
 in vogue there is perhaps instantly taken up by 
 the taverns ; or perhaps this is a case in which the 
 heroes are so little removed from common folk, 
 that celebration of individual prowess begins 
 among the latter, not, as seems usually to have 
 happened, among the social equals of the heroes. 
 But doubtless there are infinite grades in the 
 structure of the Heroic Age. 
 
 The note of the Heroic Age, then, is vehement 
 private individuality freely and greatly asserting 
 itself. The assertion is not always what we should 
 call noble ; but it is always forceful and unmis- 
 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 organiza- 
 tion and strong private individuality are com- 
 patible — mutually helpful instead of destroying 
 one another, as they do, in opposite ways, in 
 savagery and in the Heroic Age — before the state 
 called civilization can arrive, there has commonly 
 been a long passage of dark obscurity, which 
 throws up into exaggerated brightness the 
 radiance of the Heroic Age. The balance of 
 private good and general welfare is at the bottom 
 of civilized morals ; but the morals of the Heroic 
 Age are founded on individuality, and on nothing 
 12
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 an inefficient, undistinguished man — 
 probably, too, like Thersites, ugly. It is, in fact, 
 an absolutely aristocratic age — an age in which 
 he who rules is thereby proven the " best." And 
 from its nature it must be an age very heartily 
 engaged in something ; usually in fighting who- 
 ever is near enough to be fought with, though in 
 Beowulf it seems to be doing something more 
 profitable to the civilization which is to follow 
 it — taming the fierceness of surrounding cir- 
 cumstance and man's primitive kind. But in 
 any case it has a good deal of leisure ; and the 
 best way to prevent this from dragging heavily is 
 (after feasting) to glory in the things it has done ; 
 or perhaps in the things it would like to have 
 done. Hence heroic poetry. But exactly what 
 heroic poetry was in its origin, probably we shall 
 never know. It would scarcely be history, and it 
 
 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 
 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. 
 
 13
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 be- 
 comes both more exciting and more easily re- 
 membered. Each succeeding bard would im- 
 prove, 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 for purposes of their own 
 trade. In quite a short time, oral tradition, in 
 keeping of the bards, whose business is to purvey 
 wonders, makes the champions perform easily 
 deeds which " the men of the present time " can 
 only gape at ; and every bard takes over the stock 
 of tradition, not from original sources, but from 
 the mingled fantasy and memory of the bard who 
 came just before him. So that when this tradi- 
 tion survives at all, it survives in a form very 
 different from what it was in the beginning. 
 But apparently we can mark out several stages 
 in the fortunes of the tradition. It is first of all 
 court poetry, or perhaps baronial poetry ; and 
 
 14
 
 The Epic 
 
 it may survive as that. From this stage it may 
 pass into possession of the common people, or at 
 least into the possession of bards whose clients 
 are peasants and not nobles ; from being court 
 poetry it becomes the poetry of cottages and 
 taverns. It may survive as this. Finally, it may 
 be taken up again by the courts, and become 
 poetry of much greater sophistication and 
 nicety than it was in either of the preceding 
 stages. But each stage leaves its sign on the 
 tradition. 
 
 All this gives us what is conveniently called 
 " epic material " ; the material out of which 
 epic poetry might be made. But it does not 
 give us epic poetry. The world knows of a vast 
 stock of epic material scattered up and down the 
 nations ; sometimes its artistic value is as 
 extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but 
 not always. Instances are our own Border 
 Ballads and Robin Hood Ballads ; the Servian 
 cycles of the Battle of Kossovo and the prowess 
 of Marko ; the modern Greek songs of the 
 revolt against Turkey (the conditions of which 
 seem to have been similar to those which sur- 
 rounded 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 
 
 15
 
 The Epic 
 
 Cuchulain ; both of these noble masses of 
 legend seem to have only just missed the 
 final shaping which turns epic material into 
 epic poetry. For epic material, it must be 
 repeated, is not the same thing as epic poetry. 
 Epic material is fragmentary, scattered, loosely 
 related, sometimes contradictory, each piece 
 of comparatively small size, with no intention 
 beyond hearty narrative. It is a heap of excellent 
 stones, admirably quarried out of a great rock- 
 face of stubborn experience. But for this 
 to be worked into some great structure of epic 
 poetry, the Heroic Age must be capable of 
 producing individuality of much profounder, 
 nature than any of its fighting champions. Or| 
 rather, we should simply say that the production 
 of epic poetry depends on the occurrence (always i 
 an accidental occurrence) of creative genius. It 
 is quite likely that what Homer had to work on 
 was nothing superior to the Arthurian legends. 
 But Homer occurred ; and the tales of Troy 
 and Odysseus became incomparable poetry. 
 
 An epic is not made by piecing together a set 
 of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies 
 and making them into a continuous narrative. - 
 An epic is not even a re-creation of old things ; 
 
 ] it is altogether a new creation, a new creation in . 
 
 / terms of old things. And what else is any other 
 
 poetry ? The epic poet has behind him a 
 
 tradition of matter and a tradition of style ; 
 
 and that is what every other poet has behind him 
 
 16
 
 The Epic 
 
 too ; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather 
 narrower, rather more strictly compelling. 
 This must not be lost sight of. It is what the 
 poet does with the tradition he falls in which is, 
 artistically, the important thing. He takes a mass 
 of confused splendours, and he makes them into 
 something which they certainly were not before ; 
 something which, as we can clearly see by com- 
 paring epic poetry with mere epic material, 
 the latter scarce hinted at. He makes this heap 
 of matter into a grand design ; he forces it to 
 obey a single presiding unity of artistic purpose. 
 Obviously, something much more potent is 
 required for this than a fine skill in narrative 
 and poetic ornament. Unity is not merely an 
 external affair. There is only one thing which 
 can master the perplexed stuff of epic material 
 into unity ; and that is, an ability to see in 
 particular human experience some significant 
 symbolism of man's general destiny. 
 
 It is natural that, after the epic poet has 
 arrived, the crude epic material in which he 
 worked should scarcely be heard of. It could 
 only be handed on by the minstrels themselves ; 
 and their audiences would not be likely to listen 
 comfortably to the old piecemeal songs after 
 they had heard the familiar events fall into the 
 magnificent ordered pomp of the genuine epic 
 poet. The tradition, indeed, would start afresh 
 with him ; but how the novel tradition fared 
 as it grew old with his successors, is difficult guess- 
 b 17
 
 The Epic 
 
 work. We can tell, however, sometimes, in what 
 stage of the epic material's development the 
 great unifying epic poet occurred. Three 
 roughly defined stages have been mentioned. 
 Homer perhaps came when the epic material was 
 still in its first stage of being court-poetry. Al- 
 most 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 character- 
 istically does for conscious human life, and to 
 find out whether this species and this function 
 have shown, and are likely to show, any develop- 
 ment. 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. 
 
 1 Scarcely what tve call epic. "Epos" might include Hesiod 
 at well as epic material ; "epopee" is the business that Homer 
 started.
 
 The Epic 
 
 They are epic enough in primary intention, 
 but they are not poetry ; and I am among those 
 who believe that there is a difference between 
 poetry and prose. If epic poetry is a definite 
 species, the sagas do not fall within it. But this 
 will leave me more of the " authentic " epic 
 poetry than I can possibly deal with ; and I shall 
 have to confine myself to its greatest examples. 
 Before, however, proceeding to consider epic 
 poetry as a whole, as a constantly recurring 
 form of art, continually responding to the 
 new needs of man's developing consciousness, 
 I must go, rapidly and generally, over the 
 " literary epic " ; and especially I must question 
 whether it is really justifiable or profitable to 
 divide epic poetry into the two contrasted 
 departments of " authentic " and " literary." 
 
 >9
 
 II 
 
 LITERARY EPIC 
 
 Epic poetry, then, was invented to supply the 
 artistic demands of society in a certain definite 
 and recognizable state. Or rather, it was the epic 
 material which supplied that ; the first epic poets 
 gave their age, as genius always does, something 
 which the age had never thought of asking for ; 
 which, nevertheless, when it was given, the age 
 took good hold of, and found that, after all, 
 this, too, it had wanted without knowing it. 
 But as society went on towards civilization, the 
 need for epic grew less and less ; and its pre- 
 servation, if not accidental, was an act of con- 
 scious aesthetic admiration rather than of un- 
 conscious 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 neces- 
 sity than they were, it was found that, in the man- 
 ner and purpose of epic poetry, something was 
 given which was not given elsewhere ; something 
 of extraordinary value. Epic poetry would there- 
 fore be undertaken again ; but now, of course, 
 deliberately. With several different kinds of 
 poetry to choose from, a man would decide that 
 20
 
 The Epic 
 
 he would like best to be an epic poet, and he 
 would set out, in conscious determination, on an 
 epic poem. The result, good or bad, of such a 
 determination is called " literary " epic. The 
 poems of Apollonius Rhodius, Virgil, Lucan, 
 Camoens, Tasso and Milton are " literary " epics. 
 But such poetry as the Odyssey, the Iliad, Beo- 
 wulf, the Song of Roland, and the Nibelungenlied, 
 poetry which seems an immediate response to 
 some general and instant need in its surround- 
 ing community — such poetry is " authentic " 
 epic. 
 
 A great deal has been made of this distinction ; 
 it has almost been taken to divide epic poetry 
 into two species. And, as the names commonly 
 given to the two supposed species suggest, there 
 is some notion that " literary " epic must be in a 
 way inferior to " authentic " epic. The super- 
 stition of antiquity has something to do with this; 
 but the presence of Homer among the " authen- 
 tic " 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 character- 
 istics of Homer seem to be the marks of " authen- 
 tic " epic as a species. It is, of course, quite true, 
 that, for sustained grandeur and splendour, no 
 poet can be put beside Homer except Dante and 
 Milton ; but it is also quite clear that in Homer, 
 as in Dante and Milton, such conspicuous char- 
 acteristics are simply the marks of peculiar poetic 
 21
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 /Eneid. 
 Then there is the curious modern feeling — which 
 is sometimes buttressed up by erroneous aesthetic 
 theory (the worship of a quite notional 
 " lyricism," for instance) but which is really 
 nothing but a sign of covert barbarism — that 
 lengthy poetic composition is somehow undesir- 
 able ; and Homer is thought to have had a 
 better excuse for composing a long poem than 
 Milton. 
 
 But doubtless the real reason for the hard 
 division of epic poetry into two classes, and for 
 the presumed inferiority of " literary " to 
 " authentic," lies in the application of that 
 curiosity among false ideas, the belief in a " folk- 
 spirit." This notion that such a thing as a " folk- 
 spirit " can create art, and that the art which it 
 does create must be somehow better than other 
 art, is, I suppose, the offspring of democratic 
 ideas in politics. The chief objection to it is 
 that there never has been and never can be any- 
 thing in actuality corresponding to the " folk- 
 spirit " which this notion supposes. Poetry is 
 the work of poets, not of peoples or communities ; 
 artistic creation can never be anything but the 
 production of an individual mind. We may, if 
 we like, think that poetry would be more 
 " natural " if it were composed by the folk as the 
 
 22
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 think- 
 ing in this way, except a very illusory kind of 
 pleasure ; since it is impossible that the folk 
 should ever be a poet. This indisputable axiom 
 has been ignored more in theories about ballads — 
 about epic material — than in theories about the 
 epics themselves. But the belief in a real folk- 
 origin for ballads, untenable though it be in a 
 little examination, has had a decided effect on the 
 common opinion of the authentic epics. In the 
 first place, a poem constructed out of ballads 
 composed, somehow or other, by the folk, ought 
 to be more " natural " than a work of deliberate 
 art — a " literary " epic ; that is to say, these 
 Rousseau-ish notions will admire it for being 
 further from civilization and nearer to the noble 
 savage ; civilization being held, by some mys- 
 terious argument, to be deficient in " natural- 
 ness." In the second place, this belief has made 
 it credible that the plain corruption of authentic 
 epic by oral transmission, or very limited trans- 
 mission through script, might be the sign of 
 multiple authorship ; for if you believe that a 
 whole folk can compose a ballad, you may easily 
 believe that a dozen poets can compose an epic. 
 
 But all this rests on simple ignoring of the 
 nature of poetic composition. The folk-origin 
 of ballads and the multiple authorship of epics 
 
 23
 
 T/ic Epic 
 
 are heresies worse than the futilities of the 
 Baconians ; at any rate, they are based on the 
 same resolute omission, and build on it a wilder 
 fantasy. They omit to consider what poetry is. 
 Those who think Bacon wrote Hamlet, and those 
 who think several poets wrote the Iliad, can make 
 out a deal of ingenious evidence for their doc- 
 trines. But it is all useless, because the first 
 assumption in each case is unthinkable. It is 
 psychologically impossible that the mind of 
 Bacon should have produced Hamlet ; but the 
 impossibility is even more clamant when it comes 
 to supposing that several poets, not in collabora- 
 tion, but in haphazard succession, could produce a 
 poem of vast sweeping unity and superbly con- 
 sistent splendour of style. So far as mere author- 
 ship goes, then, we cannot make any real differ- 
 ence between " authentic " and " literary " epic. 
 We cannot say that, while this is written by an 
 individual genius, that is the work of a com- 
 munity. Individual genius, of whatever quality, 
 is responsible for both. The folk, however, 
 cannot be ruled out. Genius does the work ; 
 but the folk is the condition in which genius does 
 it. And here we may find a genuine difference 
 between " literary " and " authentic " ; not so 
 much in the nature of the condition as in its 
 closeness and insistence. 
 
 The kind of folk-spirit behind the poet is, in- 
 deed, different in the Iliad, and Beozvulf and the 
 Song of Roland from what it is in Milton and 
 
 24
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 Beozvulf with Homer in your 
 mind, without becoming conscious that the 
 difference in individual genius is by no means the 
 whole difference. Both poets maintain a similar 
 ideal in life ; but they maintain it within con- 
 ditions altogether unlike. The folk-spirit behind 
 Beowulf is cloudy and tumultuous, finding 
 grandeur in storm and gloom and mere mass — 
 in the misty lack of shape. Behind Homer it is, 
 on the contrary, radiant and, however vehement, 
 always delighting in measure, finding grandeur in 
 brightness and clarity and shining outline. So, 
 again, we may very easily see how Tasso's poetry 
 implies the Italy of his time, and Milton's the 
 England of his time. But where Homer and 
 Beowulf together differ from Tasso and Milton is 
 in the way the surrounding folk-spirit contains 
 the poet's mind. It would be a very idle piece 
 of work, to choose between the potency of 
 Homer's genius and of Milton's ; but it is clear 
 that the immediate circumstance of the poet's 
 life presses much more insistently on the Iliad 
 and the Odyssey than on Paradise Lost. It is th.t\ 
 difference between the contracted, precise, but 
 vigorous tradition of an heroic age, and the 
 diffused, eclectic, complicated culture of a 
 civilization. And if it may be said that the 
 insistence of racial circumstance in Homer gives 
 
 25 
 
 *
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 social 
 conditions within which it is composed ; but the 
 conditions contract and intensify the conduct of 
 the poem, or allow it to dilate and absorb larger 
 matter, according as the narrow primitive tor- 
 rents of man's spirit broaden into the greater 
 but slower volume of civilized life. The change 
 is neither desirable nor undesirable ; it is merely 
 inevitable. It means that epic poetry has kept 
 up with the development of human life. 
 
 It is because of all this that we have heard a 
 good deal about the " authentic " epic getting 
 "closer to its subject" than "literary" epic. 
 It seems, on the face of it, very improbable that 
 there should be any real difference here. No 
 great poetry, of whatever kind, is conceivable 
 unless the subject has become integrated with 
 the poet's mind and mood. Milton is as close to 
 his subject, Virgil to his, as Homer to Achilles 
 or the Saxon poet to Beowulf. What is really 
 meant can be nothing but the greater insistence 
 of racial tradition in the " authentic " epics. 
 The subject of the Iliad is the fighting of heroes, 
 with all its implications and consequences ; the 
 subject of the Odyssey is adventure and its 
 opposite, the longing for safety and home ; in 
 26
 
 The Epic 
 
 Beowulf it is kingship — the ability to show man 
 how to conquer the monstrous forces of his 
 world ; and so on. Such were the subjects which 
 an imperious racial tradition pressed on the early 
 epic poet, who delighted to be so governed. 
 These were the matters which his people could 
 understand, of which they could easily perceive 
 the significance. For him, then, there could be 
 no ether matters than these, or the like of these. 
 But it is not in such matters that a poet living 
 in a time of less primitive and more expanded 
 consciousness would find the highest importance. 
 For a Roman, the chief matter for an epic poem 
 would be Roman civilization ; for a Puritan, it 
 would be the relations of God and man. When, 
 therefore, we consider how close to his subject an 
 epic poet is, we must be careful to be quite 
 clear what his subject is. And if he has gone 
 beyond the immediate experiences of primitive 
 society, we need not expect him to be as close 
 as the early poets were to the fury of battle 
 and the agony of wounds and the desolation of 
 widows ; or to the sensation of exploring beyond 
 the familiar regions ; or to the marsh-fiends and 
 fire-drakes into which primitive imagination 
 naturally translated the terrible unknown powers 
 of the world. We need not, in a word, expect the 
 " literary " epic to compete with the " authen- 
 tic " epic ; for the fact is, that the purpose of 
 epic poetry, and therefore the nature of its 
 subject, must continually develop. It is quite 
 27
 
 The Epic 
 
 true that the later epics take over, to a very great 
 extent, the methods and manners of the earlier 
 poems ; just as architecture hands on the style 
 of wooden structure to an age that builds in 
 stone, and again imposes the manners of stone 
 construction on an age that builds in concrete 
 and steel. But, in the case of epic at any rate, 
 this is not merely the inertia of artistic conven- 
 tion. With the development of epic intention, 
 and the consequent 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 /Eneid, 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 con- 
 venient and pleasant solvent for the novel in- 
 tention. It is what has been done in all the 
 great " literary " epics. But hasty criticism, 
 finding that where they resembled Homer they 
 seemed not so close to their matter, has taken 
 this as a pervading and unfortunate characteristic. 
 It has not perceived that what in Homer was the 
 main business of the epic, has become in later 
 epic a device. Having so altered, it has naturally 
 lost in significance ; but in the greatest instances of 
 later epic, that for which the device was used has 
 been as profoundly absorbed into the poet's being 
 as Homer's matter was into his being. It may be 
 noted, too, that a corresponding change has also 
 28
 
 The Epic 
 
 taken place in the opposite direction. As Homer's 
 chief substance becomes a device in later epic, 
 so a device of Homer's becomes in later epic the 
 chief substance. Homer's supernatural ma- 
 chinery may be reckoned as a device — a device 
 to heighten the general style and action of his 
 poems ; the significance of Homer must be 
 found among his heroes, not among his gods. 
 But with Milton, it has become necessary to 
 entrust to the supernatural action the whole aim 
 and purport of the poem. 
 
 On the whole, then, there is no reason why 
 " literary " epic should not be as close to its 
 subject as " authentic " epic ; there is every 
 reason why both kinds should be equally close. 
 But in testing whether they actually are equally 
 close, we have to remember that in the later epic 
 it has become necessary to use the ostensible 
 subject as a vehicle for the real subject. And 
 who, with any active sympathy for poetry, can 
 say that Milton felt his theme with less intensity 
 than Homer ? Milton is not so close to his 
 fighting angels as Homer isToliis fighting men*; 
 but the war in heaven is an incident in Milton's 
 figurative expression of something that has be- 
 come altogether himself — the mystery of indi- 
 vidual existence in universal existence, and the 
 accompanying mystery of sin, of individual will 
 inexplicably allowed to tamper with the divinely 
 universal will. Milton, of course, in closeness 
 to his subject andTn everything else, stands as 
 29
 
 The Epic 
 
 supreme above the other poets of literary epic 
 as Homer does above the poets of authentic epic. 
 But what is true of Milton is true, in less degree, 
 of the others. If there is any good in them, it is 
 primarily because they have got very close to 
 their subjects : that is required not only for epic, 
 but for all poetry. Coleridge, in a famous 
 estimate, put twenty years for the shortest 
 period in which an epic could be composed ; 
 and of this, ten years were to be for preparation. 
 He meant that not less than ten years would do 
 for the poet to fill all his being with his theme ; 
 and nothing else will serve. It is well known how 
 Milton brooded over his subject, how Virgil 
 lingered over his, how Camoens carried the 
 Lusiads 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 some- 
 what easier task. There was no need for them 
 to be " long choosing and beginning late." The 
 pressure of racial tradition would see that they 
 chose the right sort of subject ; would see, too, 
 that they lived right in the heart of their subject. 
 For the poet of " literary " epic, however, it is 
 his own consciousness that must select the kind 
 of theme which will fulfil the epic intention for 
 his own day ; it is his own determination and 
 studious endurance that will draw the theme 
 into the secrets of his being. If he is not capable 
 of getting close to his subject, we should not 
 30
 
 The Epic 
 
 for that reason call his work " literary " epic. 
 It would put him in the class of Milton, the most 
 literary of all poets. We must simply call his 
 stuff bad epic. There is plenty of it. Southey 
 is the great instance. Southey would decide to 
 write an epic about Spain, or India, or Arabia, or 
 America. Next he would read up, in several 
 languages, about his proposed subject ; that 
 would take him perhaps a year. Then he would 
 versify as much strange information as he could 
 remember ; that might take a few months. 
 The result is deadly ; and because he was never 
 anywhere near his subject. It is for the same 
 reason that the unspeakable labours of Blackmore, 
 Glover and Wilkie, and Voltaire's ridiculous 
 Henriade, have gone to pile up the rubbish-heaps 
 of literature. 
 
 So far, supposed differences between " authen- 
 tic " and " literary " epic have resolved them- 
 selves into little more than signs of development 
 in epic intention ; the change has not been 
 found to produce enough artistic difference be- 
 tween early and later epic to warrant anything 
 like a division into two distinct species. The 
 epic, whether " literary " or " authentic," is 
 a single form of art ; but it is a form capable of 
 adapting itself to the altering requirements of 
 prevalent consciousness. In addition, however, 
 to differences in general conception, there are 
 certain mechanical differences which should be 
 just noticed. The first epics were intended for 
 
 3'
 
 The Epic 
 
 recitation ; the literary epic is meant to be read. 
 it is more difficult to keep the attention of 
 hearers than of readers. This in itself would be 
 enough to rule out themes remote from common 
 experience, supposing any such were to suggest 
 themselves to the primitive epic poet. Perhaps, 
 indeed, we should not be far wrong if we saw 
 a chief reason for the pressure of surrounding 
 tradition on the early epic in this very fact, that 
 it is poetry meant for recitation. Traditional 
 matter must be glorified, since it would be easier 
 to listen to the re-creation of familiar stories 
 than to quite new and unexpected things ; the 
 listeners, we must remember, needed poetry 
 chiefly as the recreation of tired hours. Tradi- 
 tional manner would be equally difficult to avoid ; 
 for it is a tradition that plainly embodies the 
 requirements, fixed by experience, of recited 
 poetry. Those features of it which make for 
 tedium when it is read — repetition, stock epi- 
 thets, set phrases for given situations — are the 
 very things best suited, with their recurring well- 
 known syllables, to fix the attention of listeners 
 more firmly, or to stir it when it drowses ; at 
 the least they provide a sort of recognizable 
 scaffolding for the events, and it is remarkable 
 how easily the progress of events may be missed 
 when poetry is declaimed. Indeed, if the 
 primitive epic poet could avoid some of the 
 anxieties peculiar to the composition of literary 
 epic, he had others to make up for it. He had
 
 The Epic 
 
 to study closely the delicate science of holding 
 auricular attention when once he had got it ; 
 and probably he would have some difficulty in 
 getting it at all. The really great poet challenges 
 it, like Homer, with some tremendous, irresistible 
 opening ; and in this respect the magnificent 
 prelude to Beozvulf may almost be put beside 
 Homer. But lesser poets have another way. 
 That prolixity at the beginning of many primi- 
 tive epics, their wordy deliberation in getting 
 under way, is probably intentional. The Song of 
 Roland, for instance, begins with a long series 
 of exceedingly dull stanzas ; to a reader, the 
 preliminaries of the story seem insufferably drawn 
 out. But by the time the reciter had got through 
 this unimportant dreariness, no doubt his audi- 
 ence had settled down to listen. The Chanson 
 d'Antioche contains perhaps the most illumina- 
 ting admission of this difficulty. In the first 
 " Chant," the first section opens :* 
 
 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 quercllcs ! 
 Je vous dirai une tres-belle chanson. 
 
 1 From the version of the Marquise de Sninte-Aulaire. 
 C 33
 
 The Epic 
 
 And after some further prelude, the section 
 ends : 
 
 Ici commence la chanson oh il y a tant a apprendre. 
 
 The " chanson " does, indeed, make some show 
 of beginning in the third section, but it still 
 moves with a cautious and prelusive air, as if 
 anxious not to launch out too soon. And this 
 was evidently prudent, for when the fourth 
 section opens, direct exhortation to the audience 
 has again become necessary : 
 
 Maintenant, seigneurs, ecoutez ce que dit l'Ecriture ; 
 
 And once more in the fifth section : 
 
 Barons, ecoutez un excellent couplet. 
 
 In the sixth, the jongleur is getting desperate : 
 
 Seigneurs, pour l'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 difficulties in the art of rhapsodic 
 poetry. 
 
 34
 
 The 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 of making verbal beauty tell. 
 Vigorous but controlled imagination, formative 
 power, insight into the significance of things — 
 these are qualities which a poet must eminently 
 possess ; but these are qualities which may also 
 be eminently possessed by men who cannot claim 
 the title of poet. The real differentia of the 
 poet is his command over the secret magic of 
 words. Others may have as delighted a sense 
 of this magic, but it is only the poet who can 
 master it and do what he likes with it. And next 
 to the invention of speaking itself, the most 
 important invention for the poet has been the 
 invention of writing and reading ; for this has 
 added immensely to the scope of his mastery 
 over words. No poet will ever take the written 
 word as a substitute for the spoken word ; he 
 knows that it is on the spoken word, and the 
 spoken word only, that his art is founded. But 
 he trusts his reader to do as he himself does — 
 to receive written words always as the code of 
 spoken words. To do so has wonderfully enlarged 
 his technical opportunities ; for apprehension is 
 quicker and finer through the eye than through 
 the ear. After the invention of reading, even 
 p~oetry designed primarily for declamation (like 
 drama or lyric) has depths and subtleties of art 
 which were not possible for the primitive poet. 
 
 35
 
 The Ep 
 
 ic 
 
 Accordingly we find that, on the whole, in 
 comparison with " literary " epic, the texture 01 
 <k 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 ex- 
 quisiteness of Virgil, or the deliciousness of 
 Tasso. Indeed, if we are to say what is the real 
 difference between Beowulf and Paradise Lost, W£ 
 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. Com- 
 pare Homer's ambrosial glory with the decent 
 tap-water of Hesiod ; compare his continuous 
 burnished gleam of wrought metal with the 
 sparse grains that lie in the sandy diction of all 
 the " authentic " epics of the other nations. 
 And, by all ancient accounts, the other early 
 Greek epics would not fare much better in the 
 comparison. Homer's singularity in this respect 
 is overwhelming ; but it is frequently forgotten, 
 and especially by those who think to help in the 
 Homeric question by comparing him with other 
 " authentic " epics. Supposing (we can only 
 just suppose it) a case were made out for the 
 growth rather than the individual authorship 
 of some " authentic " epic other than Homer ; 
 it could never have any bearing on the question 
 
 36
 
 The Epic 
 
 of Homeric authorship, because no early epic 
 is comparable with the •poetry of 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 Homer was not as 
 deliberate a craftsman in words as Milton himself. 
 The scope of his craft was more restricted, as his 
 repetitions and stock epithets show ; he was 
 restricted by the fact that he composed for 
 recitation, and the auricular appreciation of 
 diction is limited, the nature of poetry obeying, 
 in the main, the nature of those for whom it is 
 composed. But this is just a case in which genius 
 transcends technical scope. The effects Homer 
 produced with his methods were as great as any 
 effects produced by later and more elaborate 
 methods, after poetry began to be read as well 
 as heard. But neither must we say that the other 
 poets of " authentic " epic were not deliberate 
 craftsmen in words. Poets will always get as 
 much beauty out of words as they can. The fact 
 that so often in the early epics a magnificent 
 subject is told, on the whole, in a lumpish and 
 tedious diction, is not to be explained by any 
 contempt for careful art, as though it were 
 a thing unworthy of such heroic singers ; it 
 is simply to be explained by lack of such 
 genius as is capable of transcending the severe 
 limitations of auricular poetry. And we may 
 well believe that only the rarest and most 
 
 37
 
 The Epic 
 
 potent kind of genius could transcend such 
 limitations. 
 
 In summary, then, we find certain conceptual 
 differences and certain mechanical differences 
 between " authentic " and " literary " epic. 
 But these are not such as to enable us to say that 
 there is, artistically, any real difference between 
 the two kinds. Rather, the differences exhibit 
 the changes we might expect in an art that 
 has kept up with consciousness developing, 
 and civilization becoming more intricate. 
 " Literary " epic is as close to its subject as 
 " authentic " ; but, as a general rule, " authen- 
 tic " epic, in response to its surrounding needs, 
 has a simple and concrete subject, and the close- 
 ness of the poet to this is therefore more 
 obvious than in " literary " epic, which (again 
 in response to surrounding needs) has been 
 driven to take for subject some great abstract 
 idea and display this in a concrete but only 
 ostensible subject. Then in craftsmanship, the 
 two kinds of epic are equally deliberate, equally 
 concerned with careful art ; but " literary " 
 epic has been able to take such advantage of the 
 habit of reading that, with the single exception 
 of Homer, it has achieved a diction much more 
 answerable to the greatness of epic matter than 
 the " authentic " poems. We may, then, in 
 a general survey, regard epic poetry as being in 
 all ages essentially the same kind of art, fulfilling 
 always a similar, though constantly developing, 
 
 38
 
 The Epic 
 
 intention. Whatever sort of society he lives in, 
 whether he be surrounded by illiterate heroism 
 or placid culture, the epic poet has a definite 
 function to perform. We see him accepting, 
 and with his genius transfiguring, the general 
 circumstance of his time ; we see him sym- 
 bolizing, in some appropriate form, whatever 
 sense of the significance of life he feels acting 
 as the accepted unconscious metaphysic of his 
 age. To do this, he takes some great story which 
 has been absorbed into the prevailing conscious- 
 ness of his people. As a rule, though not quite 
 invariably, the story will be of things which are, 
 or seem, so far back in the past, that anything 
 may credibly happen in it ; so imagination has 
 its freedom, and so significance is displayed. 
 But quite invariably, the materials of the story 
 will have an unmistakable air of actuality ; that 
 is, they come profoundly out of human experi- 
 ence, whether they declare legendary heroism, 
 as in Homer and Virgil, or myth, as in Beowulf 
 and Paradise Lost, or actual history, as in Lucan 
 and Camoens and Tasso. And he sets out this 
 story and its significance in poetry as lofty and as 
 elaborate as he can compass. That, roughly, 
 is what we see the epic poets doing, whether they 
 be " literary " or " authentic " ; and if this can 
 be agreed on, we should now have come tolerably 
 close to a definition of epic poetry. 
 
 39
 
 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, classi- 
 fication in literature rests on that least tangible, 
 least definable matter, style ; for style is the 
 sign of the poem's spirit, and it is the spirit that 
 we feel. If we can get some notion of how those 
 poems, which we call epic, agree with one 
 another in style, it is likely we shall be as close 
 as may be to a definition of epic. I use the word 
 " style," of course, in its largest sense — manner 
 of conception as well as manner of composi- 
 tion. 
 
 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 
 40
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 a general acknowledgment that they are 
 clearly separable from other kinds of poetry ; and 
 this although the word epic has been rather badly 
 abused. For instance, The Faery Queene and La 
 Divina Commedia have been called epic poems ; 
 but I do not think that anyone could fail to 
 admit, on a little pressure, that the experience 
 of reading The Faery Queene or La Divina 
 Commedia is not in the least like the experience 
 of reading Paradise Lost or the Iliad. But as a 
 poem may have lyrical qualities without being 
 a lyric, so a poem may have epical qualities 
 without being an epic. In all the poems which 
 the world has agreed to call epics, there is a story 
 told, and well told. But Dante's poem attempts 
 no story at all, and Spenser's, though it attempts 
 several, does not tell them well — it scarcely 
 attempts to make the reader believe in them, 
 being much more concerned with the decoration 
 and the implication of its fables than with the 
 fables themselves. What epic quality, detached 
 from epic proper, do these poems possess, then, 
 apart from the mere fact that they take up a 
 great many pages ? It is simply a question of 
 
 4i
 
 The Epic 
 
 their style — the style of their conception and 
 the style of their writing ; the whole style 
 of their imagination, in fact. They take us into 
 a region in which nothing happens that is not 
 deeply significant ; a dominant, noticeably 
 symbolic, purpose presides over each poem, 
 moulds it greatly and informs it throughout. 
 
 This takes us some little way towards deciding 
 the nature of epic. It must be a story, and the 
 story must be told - well and greatly ; and, 
 whether in the story itseli or in the telling of it, 
 significance must be implied. Does that mean 
 that the epic must be allegorical ? Many have 
 thought so ; even Homer has been accused of 
 constructing allegories. But this is only a crude 
 way of emphasizing the significance of epic ; 
 and there is a vast deal of difference between a 
 significant story and an allegorical story. Reality 
 of substance is a thing on which epic poetry must 
 always be able to rely. Not only because Spenser 
 does not tell his stories very well, but even more 
 because their substance (not, of course, their 
 meaning) is deliciously and deliberately unreal, 
 The Faery Oucene is outside the strict sense of the 
 word epic. Allegory requires material ingeni- 
 ously 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 
 42
 
 The Epic 
 
 existing material appropriate to his genius, and 
 complete absorption of it into his being ; that 
 is how the epic poet works. Allegory is a beauti- 
 ful way of inculcating and asserting some special 
 significance in life ; but epic has a severer task, 
 and a more impressive one. It has not to say, 
 Life in the world ought to mean this or that ; 
 it has to show life u nmistakably bein° significant. 
 It does not gloss or interpret the fact of life, but 
 re-creates it and charges the fact itself with the 
 poet's own sense of ultimate values. This will be 
 less precise than the definite assertions of allegory; 
 but for that reason it will be more deeply felt. 
 The values will be emotional and spiritual rather 
 than intellectual. And they will be the poet's 
 own only because he has made them part of his 
 being ; in him (though he probably does not 
 know it) they will be representative of the best 
 and most characteristic life of his time. That 
 does not mean that the epic poet's image of life's 
 significance is of merely contemporary or transient 
 importance. No stage through which the general 
 consciousness of men has gone can ever be out- 
 grown by men ; whatever happens afterwards 
 does not displace it, but includes it. We could 
 not do without Paradise Lost nowadays ; but 
 neither can we do without the Iliad. It would 
 not, perhaps, be far from the truth, if it were 
 even said that the significance of Paradise Lost 
 cannot be properly understood unless the sig- 
 nificance of the Iliad be understood. 
 
 43
 
 The Epic 
 
 The prime material of the epic poet, then, 
 must be real and not invented. But when the 
 story of the poem is safely concerned with some 
 reality, he can, of course, graft on this as much 
 appropriate invention as he pleases ; it will be 
 one of his ways of elaborating his main, unifying 
 purpose — and to call it " unifying " is to assume 
 that, however brilliant his surrounding invention 
 may be, the purpose will always be firmly implicit 
 in the central subject. Some of the early epics 
 manage to do without any conspicuous added 
 invention designed to extend what the main sub- 
 ject intends ; but such nobly simple, forthright 
 narrative as Beowulf and the Song of Roland would 
 not do for a purpose slightly more subtle than 
 what the makers of these ringing poems had in 
 mind. The reality of the central subject is, 
 of course, to be understood broadly. It means 
 that the story must be founded deep in the 
 general experience of men. A decisive campaign 
 is not, for the epic poet, any more real than a 
 legend full of human truth. All that the name 
 of Caesar suggests is extremely important for 
 mankind ; so is all that the name of Satan 
 suggests : Satan, in this sense, is as real as Caesar. 
 And, as far as reality is concerned, there is 
 nothing to choose between the Christians taking 
 Jerusalem and the Greeks taking Troy ; nor 
 between Odysseus sailing into fairyland and 
 Vasco da Gama sailing round the world. It is 
 certainly possible that a poet might devise a story 
 
 44
 
 The Epic 
 
 of such a kind that we could easily take it as 
 something which might have been a real human 
 experience. But that is not enough for the 
 epic poet. He needs something which everyone 
 knows about, something which indisputably, and 
 admittedly, has been a human experience ; and 
 even Grendel, the fiend of the marshes, was, we 
 can clearly see, for the poet of Beowulf a figure 
 profoundly and generally accepted as not only 
 true but real ; what, indeed, can be more real 
 for poetry than a devouring fiend which lives 
 in pestilent fens ? And the reason why epic 
 poetry so imperiously demands reality of subject 
 is clear ; it is because such poetry has symboli- 
 cally 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 
 
 45
 
 The Ep 
 
 ic 
 
 records than to achievement thereby of poetic 
 purpose. And yet modification, or at least sup- 
 pression and exaggeration, of the details of 
 history will certainly be necessary. Not to 
 declare what happened, and the results of what 
 happened, is the object of an epic ; but to accept 
 all this as the mere material in which a single 
 artistic purpose, a unique, vital symbolism 
 may be shaped. And if legend, after passing for 
 innumerable years through popular imagination, 
 still requires to be shaped at the hands of the epic 
 poet, how much more must the crude events of 
 history require this ! For it is not in events as 
 they happen, however notably, that man may 
 see symbols of vital destiny, but in events as 
 they are transformed by plastic imagination. 
 Yet it has been possible to use history as the 
 material of great epic poetry ; Camoens and 
 Tasso did this — the chief subject of the Lusiads 
 is even contemporary history. But evidently 
 success in these cases was due to the exceptional 
 and fortunate fact that the fixed notorieties of 
 history were combined with a strange and mys- 
 terious geography. The remoteness and, one 
 might say, the romantic possibilities of the places 
 into which Camoens and Tasso were led by their 
 themes, enable imagination to deal pretty freely 
 with history. But in a little more than ten years 
 after Camoens glorified Portugal in an historical 
 epic, Don Alonso de Ercilla tried to do the same 
 for Spain. He puts his action far enough from 
 46
 
 The Epic 
 
 home : the Spaniards are conquering Chili. 
 But the world has grown smaller and more 
 familiar in the interval : the astonishing things 
 that could easily happen in the seas of Madagascar 
 cannot now conveniently happen in Chili. The 
 Araucana is versified history, not epic. That is 
 to say, the action has no deeper significance than 
 any other actual warfare ; it has not been, and 
 could not have been, shaped to any symbolic 
 purpose. Long before Tasso and Camoens and 
 Ercilla, two Scotchmen had attempted to put 
 patriotism into epic form ; Barbour had written 
 his Bruce and Blind Harry his Wallace. But what 
 with the nearness of their events, and what with 
 the rusticity of their authors, these tolerable, 
 ambling poems are quite unable to get the better 
 of the hardness of history. Probably the boldest 
 attempt to make epic of well-known, documented 
 history is Lucan's Pharsalia. It is a brilliant 
 performance, and a deliberate effort to carry 
 on the development of epic. At the very least 
 it has enriched the thought of humanity with 
 some imperishable lines. But it is true, what the 
 great critic said of it : the Pharsalia partakes 
 more of the nature of oratory than of poetry. 
 It means that Lucan, in choosing history, chose 
 something which he had to declaim about, some- 
 thing 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 
 
 47
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 surpris- 
 ingly short time, into legend. Thus, an unim- 
 portant, probably unpunished, attack by Basque 
 mountaineers on the Emperor's rear-guard has 
 become, in the Song of Roland, a great infamy 
 of Saracenic treachery, which must be greatly 
 avenged. 
 
 Such, in a broad description, is the nature of 
 epic poetry. To define it with any narrower 
 nicety would probably be rash. We have not 
 been discovering what an epic poem ought to 
 be, but roughly examining what similarity of 
 quality there is in all those poems which we feel, 
 strictly attending to the emotional experience of 
 reading them, can be classed together and, for 
 convenience, termed epic. But it is not much 
 good having a name for this species of poetry if it 
 is given as well to poems of quite a different 
 nature. It is not much good agreeing to call by 
 the name of epic such poems as the Iliad and the 
 Odyssey, Beozvulf and the Song of Roland, Paradise 
 Lost and Gerusalemme Liber ata, if epic is also to be 
 the title for The Faery Oueene and La Divina 
 Commedia, The Idylls of the King and The Ring 
 and the Book. But I believe most of the impor- 
 tance 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, 
 
 48
 
 The Epic 
 
 it shares much of its ultimate intention with the 
 greatest kind of drama (though not with all 
 drama). And just as drama, whatever grandeur 
 of purpose it may attempt, must be a good play, 
 so epic must be a good story. It will tell its tale 
 both largely and intensely, and the diction will 
 be carried on the volume of a powerful, flowing 
 metre. To distinguish, however, between merely 
 narrative poetry, and poetry which goes beyond 
 being mere narrative into the being of epic, 
 must often be left to feeling which can scarcely 
 be precisely analysed. A curious instance of the 
 difficulty in exactly defining epic (but not in 
 exactly deciding what is epic) may be found in 
 the work of William Morris. Morris left two 
 long narrative poems, The Life and Death of 
 Jason, and The Story of Sigurd the Volsung. I do 
 not think anyone need hesitate to put Sigurd 
 among the epics ; but I do not think anyone who 
 will scrupulously compare the experience of read- 
 ing Jason with the experience of reading Sigurd, 
 can help agreeing that Jason should be kept out of 
 the epics. There is nothing to choose between 
 the subjects of the two poems. For an English- 
 man, 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 
 
 D 49
 
 The Epic 
 
 it with the epics and apart from 'Jason ; for 
 style goes beyond metre and diction, beyond exe- 
 cution, into conception. The whole imagination 
 of Sigurd is incomparably larger than that of 
 Jason. In Sigurd, you feel that the fashioning 
 grasp of imagination has not only seized on the 
 show of things, and not only on the physical 
 or moral unity of things, but has somehow 
 brought into the midst of all this, and has kneaded 
 into the texture of it all, something of the ulti- 
 mate and metaphysical significance of life. You 
 scarcely feel that in Jason. 
 
 Yes, epic poetry must be an affair of evident 
 largeness. It was well said, that " the praise 
 of an epic poem is to feign a person exceeding 
 Nature." " Feign " here means to imagine ; 
 and imagine does not mean to invent. But, like 
 most of the numerous epigrams that have been 
 made about epic poetry, the remark does not 
 describe the nature of epic, but rather one of the 
 conspicuous signs that that nature is fulfilling 
 itself. A poem which is, in some sort, a sum- 
 mation for its time of the values of life, will 
 inevitably concern itself with at least one figure, 
 and probably with several, in whom the whole 
 virtue, and perhaps also the whole failure, of 
 living seems superhumanly concentrated. A 
 story weighted with the epic purpose could not 
 proceed at all, unless it were expressed in persons 
 big enough to support it. The subject, then, as 
 the epic poet uses it, will obviously be an 
 
 5°
 
 The Epic 
 
 important one. Whether, apart from the way 
 the poet uses it, the subject ought to be an 
 important one, would not start a very profitable 
 discussion. Homer has been praised for making, 
 in the Iliad, a first-rate poem out of a second-rate 
 subject. It is a neat saying ; but it seems unlikely 
 that anything really second-rate should turn into 
 first-rate epic. I imagine Homer would have 
 been considerably surprised, if anyone had told 
 him that the vast train of tragic events caused 
 by the gross and insupportable insult put by 
 Agamemnon, the mean mind in authority, on 
 Achilles, the typical hero — that this noble and 
 profoundly human theme was a second-rate 
 subject. At any rate, the subject must be of 
 capital importance in its treatment. It must 
 symbolize — not as a particular and separable 
 assertion, but at large and generally — some great 
 aspect of vital destiny, without losing the air 
 of recording some accepted reality of human 
 experience, and without failing to be a good 
 story ; and the pressure of high purpose will 
 inform diction and metre, as far, at least, as the I 
 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 
 
 5i
 
 The Epic 
 
 is essentially epic because something inessential is 
 lacking. It has, for instance, been seriously 
 debated, whether an epic should not contain a 
 catalogue of heroes. Other things, which 
 epics have been required to contain, besides much 
 that is not worth mentioning, 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 main 
 scheme of the greatest of non-epical poems, as 
 Milton elaborated the other Homeric device 
 into the main scheme of the greatest of literary 
 epics. But a visit to the ghosts is, of course, 
 like games or single combat or a set debate, 
 merely an incident which may or may not be 
 useful. Supernatural machinery, however, is 
 worth some short discussion here, though it 
 must be alluded to further in the sequel. The 
 first and obvious thing to remark is, that an 
 unquestionably epic effect can be given without 
 any supernatural machinery at all. The poet 
 of Beowulf has no need of it, for instance. A 
 Christian redactor has worked over the poem, 
 with more piety than skill ; he can always be 
 detected, and his clumsy little interjections have 
 nothing to do with the general tenour of the 
 
 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. 
 
 52
 
 The Epic 
 
 poem. The human world ends off, as it were, 
 precipitously ; and beyond there is an endless, 
 impracticable abyss in which dwells the secret 
 governance of things, an unknowable and im- 
 placable fate — " Wyrd " — neither malign nor 
 benevolent, but simply inscrutable. The pecu- 
 liar cast of noble and desolate courage which this 
 bleak conception gives to the poem is perhaps 
 unique among the epics. 
 
 But very few epic poets have ventured to do 
 without supernatural machinery of some sort. 
 And it is plain that it must greatly assist the epic- 
 purpose to surround the action with immortals 
 who are not only interested spectators of the 
 event, but are deeply implicated in it ; nothing 
 could more certainly liberate, or at least more 
 appropriately decorate, the significant force of 
 the subject. We may leave Milton out, for there 
 can be no question about Paradise Lost here ; the 
 significance of the subject is not only liberated by, 
 it entirely exists in, the supernatural machinery. 
 But with the other epic poets, we should cer- 
 tainly 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 de- 
 clare, 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 
 
 53
 
 The Epic 
 
 obligation to believe in their concern for the sub- 
 ject, and all that that implies ? Homer begins 
 this paradox. Think of that lovely and ex- 
 quisitely mischievous passage in the Iliad called 
 The Cheating of Zeus. The Salvationist school of 
 commentators calls this an interpolation ; but 
 the spirit of it is implicit throughout the whole 
 of Homer's dealing with the gods ; whenever, at 
 least, he deals with them at length, and not 
 merely incidentally. Not to accept that spirit is 
 not to accept Homer. The manner of describing 
 the Olympian family at the end of the first book 
 is quite continuous throughout, and simply 
 reaches its climax in the fourteenth book. No- 
 body 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 Mneid. ? 
 The supernatural machinery of Camoens and 
 Tasso is frankly absurd ; they are not only 
 careless of credibility, but of sanity. Lucan tried 
 to do without gods ; but his witchcraft engages 
 belief even more faintly than the mingled 
 Paganism and Christianity of Camoens, and 
 merely shows how strongly the most rationalistic 
 of epic poets felt the value of some imaginary 
 relaxation in the limits of human existence. Is 
 it, then, only as such a relaxation that super- 
 
 54
 
 The Epic 
 
 natural machinery is valuable ? Or only as a 
 superlative kind of ornament ? It is surely more 
 than that. In spite of the fact that we are not 
 seriously asked to believe in it, it does beautifully 
 and strikingly crystallize the poet's determination 
 to show us things that go past the reach of com- 
 mon knowledge. But by putting it, whether 
 instinctively or deliberately, on a lower plane 
 of credibility than the main action, the poet 
 obeys his deepest and gravest necessity : the 
 necessity of keeping his poem emphatically an 
 affair of recognizable human events. It is of man, 
 and man's purpose in the world, that the epic 
 poet has to sing ; not of the purpose of gods. 
 The gods must only illustrate man's destiny ; 
 and they must be kept within the bounds of 
 beautiful illustration. But it requires a finer 
 genius than most epic poets have possessed, to 
 keep supernatural machinery just sufficiently 
 fanciful without missing its function. Perhaps 
 only Homer and Virgil have done that perfectly. 
 Milton's revolutionary development marks a 
 crisis in the general process of epic so important, 
 that it can only be discussed when that process 
 is considered, in the following chapter, as a 
 whole. 
 
 55
 
 IV 
 THE EPIC SERIES 
 
 By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the 
 way this form of art has constantly responded to 
 the profound needs of the society in which it was 
 made. But the development of human society 
 does not go straight forward ; and the epic 
 process will therefore be a recurring process, the 
 series a recurring series — though not in exact 
 repetition. Thus, the Homeric poems, the 
 Argonautica, the Mneid, 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 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 
 
 56
 
 The Epic 
 
 development. It has already appeared that the 
 duties of all " authentic " epic are broadly the 
 same, and the poems of this kind, though two 
 thousand years may separate their occurrence, 
 may be properly brought together as varieties of 
 one sub-species. " Literary " epic differs much 
 more in the specific purpose of its art, as civilized 
 societies differ much more than heroic, and also 
 as the looser milieu of a civilization allows a less 
 strictly traditional exercise of personal genius 
 than an heroic age. Still, it does not require 
 any manipulation to combine the " literary " 
 epics from both series into a single process. 
 Indeed, if we take Homer, Virgil and Milton 
 as the outstanding events in the whole progress 
 of epic poetry, and group the less important 
 poems appropriately round these three names, 
 we shall not be far from the ideal truth of epic 
 development. We might say, then, that Homer 
 begins the whole business of epic, imperishably 
 fixes its type and, in a way that can never be 
 questioned, declares its artistic purpose ; Virgil 
 perfects the type ; and Milton perfects the 
 purpose. Three such poets are not, heaven 
 knows, summed up in a phrase ; I mean merely 
 to indicate how they are related one to another 
 in the general scheme of epic poetry. For 
 discriminating their merits, deciding their 
 comparative eminence, I have no inclination ; 
 and fortunately it does not come within the 
 requirements of this essay. Indeed, I think the 
 
 57
 
 The Epic 
 
 reader will easily excuse me, if I touch very 
 slightly on the poetic manner, in the common and 
 narrow sense, of the poets whom I shall have to 
 mention ; since these qualities have been so 
 often and sometimes so admirably dealt with. It 
 is at the broader aspects of artistic purpose that 
 I wish to look. 
 
 " From Homer," said Goethe, " I learn every 
 day more clearly, that in our life here above 
 ground we have, properly speaking, to enact 
 Hell." It is rather a startling sentence at first. 
 That poetry which, for us, in Thoreau's excellent 
 words, " lies in the east of literature," scarcely 
 suggests, in the usual opinion of it, Hell. We 
 are tempted to think of Homer as the most 
 fortunate of poets. It seems as if he had but 
 to open his mouth and speak, to create divine 
 poetry ; and it does not lessen our sense of his 
 good fortune when, on looking a little closer, 
 we see that this is really the result of an unerring 
 and unfailing art, an extraordinarily skilful 
 technique. He had it entirely at his command ; 
 and he exercised it in a language in which, 
 though it may be singularly artificial and con- 
 ventional, we can still feel the wonder of its 
 sensuous beauty and the splendour of its ex- 
 pressive 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 : 
 
 58
 
 The Epic 
 
 crfitpSaXeov Kovdj3rj(rav dvadvTOiv vtt' 'A^aiwi/. 1 
 
 That, you might say, is Homer at his ease ; when 
 he exerts himself you get a miracle like : 
 
 <rv 8'iv crrpo<f)d\iyyi kovitjs 
 K€i(ro fxeyas ficyaXwa-rl, AcAarjyxevos i7r7rocrvvaa)v. 2 
 
 It seems the art of one who walked through the 
 world of things endowed with the senses of a god, 
 and able, with that perfection of effort that looks 
 as if it were effortless, to fashion his experience 
 into incorruptible song ; whether it be the dance 
 of flies round a byre at milking-time, or a forest- 
 fire on the mountains at night. The shape and 
 clamour of waves breaking on the beach in a 
 storm is as irresistibly recorded by Homer as the 
 gleaming flowers which earth put forth to be the 
 bed of Zeus and Hera in Gargaros, when a golden 
 cloud was their coverlet, and Sleep sat on a pine 
 tree near by in the likeness of a murmuring 
 night-jar. It is an art so balanced, that when it 
 tells us, with no special emphasis, how the Tro- 
 jans 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 dis- 
 criminated for the whole poem ; or, in the 
 supreme instance, when it tells us how the old 
 
 1 'And all round the ships echoed terribly to the shouting 
 Achaians.' 
 
 2 'When in a dusty whirlwind thou didst lie, 
 Thy valour lost, forgot thy chivalry.' — Ogilby. 
 (The version leaves out n^yas fieyaXwarl.) 
 
 59
 
 The Epic 
 
 men looked at Helen and said, " No wonder 
 the young men fight for her ! " then Helen's 
 beauty must be accepted by the faith of all 
 the world. The particulars of such poetry could 
 be enumerated for pages ; and this is the poetry 
 which is filled, more than any other literature, 
 in the Ilia d with the nobility of men and women, 
 in the Odyssey with the light of natural magic. 
 And think of those gods of Homer's ; he is the 
 one poet who has been able to make the dark 
 terrors of religion beautiful, harmless and quietly 
 entertaining. It is easy to read this poetry and 
 simply enjoy it ; it is easy to say, the man whose 
 spirit held this poetry must have been divinely 
 happy. But this is the poetry whence Goethe 
 learnt that the function of man is "to enact Hell." 
 Goethe is profoundly right ; though possibly 
 he puts it in a way to which Homer himself 
 might have demurred. For the phrase inevitably 
 has its point in the word " Hell " ; Homer, we 
 may suppose, would have preferred the point 
 to come in the word " enact." In any case, the 
 details of Christian eschatology must not engage 
 us much in interpreting Goethe's epigram. There 
 is truth in it, not simply because the two poems 
 take place in a theatre of calamity ; not simply, 
 for instance, because of the beloved Hektor's 
 terrible agony of death, and the woes of Andro- 
 mache and Priam. Such things are the partial, 
 incidental expressions of the whole artistic 
 purpose. Still less is it because of a strain of 
 60
 
 The Epic 
 
 latent savagery in, at any rate, the Iliad ; as 
 when the sage and reverend Nestor urges that 
 not one of the Greeks should go home until he 
 has lain with the wife of a slaughtered Trojan, 
 or as in the tremendous words of the oath : 
 " Whoever first offend against this oath, may 
 their brains be poured out on the ground like 
 this wine, their own and their children's, and may 
 their wives be made subject to strangers." All 
 that is one of the accidental qualities of Homer. 
 But the force of the word " enact " in Goethe's 
 epigram will certainly come home to us when we 
 think of those famous speeches in which courage 
 is unforgettably declared — such speeches as that 
 of Sarpedon to Glaukos, or of Glaukos to Dio- 
 medes, or of Hektor at his parting with Andro- 
 mache. What these speeches mean, however, 
 in the whole artistic purpose of Homer, will 
 assuredly be missed if they are detached for con- 
 sideration ; especially we shall miss the deep sig- 
 nificance 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 deli- 
 berate 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 — " al- 
 ways 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 
 61
 
 The Epic 
 
 honour after death ; for him, the meanest man 
 living is better than a dead hero. Death ends 
 everything, as far as he is concerned, honour and 
 all ; his courage looks for no reward hereafter. 
 No ; but since ten thousand fates of death 
 are always instant round us ; since the generations 
 of men are of no more account than leaves of a 
 tree ; since Troy and all its people will soon be 
 destroyed — he will stand in death's way. Sarpe- 
 don emphasizes this with its converse : There 
 would be no need of daring and fighting, he says, 
 of " man-ennobling battle," if we could be for 
 ever ageless and deathless. That is the heroic 
 age ; any other would say, If only we could not 
 be killed, how pleasant to run what might have 
 been risks ! For the hero, that would simply not 
 be worth while. Does he find them pleasant, 
 then, just because they are risky ? Not quite ; 
 that, again, is to detach part of the meaning from 
 the whole. If anywhere, we shall, perhaps, 
 find the whole meaning of Homer most clearly 
 indicated in such words as those given (without 
 any enforcement) to Achilles and Thetis near 
 the beginning of the Iliad, as if to sound the 
 pitch of Homer's poetry : 
 
 firjrep, «r€t p.' erexes ye p.ivvvddSi6v rrtp eovTa, 
 Ti/x?yv irkp fxoL o<peXX€U 'OXvfJiTrios eyyuaAi^ai 
 Zers vipiftpeixtT-qs. 1 
 
 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.' 
 
 62
 
 The Epic 
 
 Tifirjaov fx.0L vlov, 09 ojKVfMopoJTaro'i uAA.ojv 
 e7rAeT.' * 
 
 bliwvdaSiov — wKUfiopurTaTOs : those are the im- 
 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 acknow- 
 ledgment 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 sub- 
 ject. The significance of the poem is not in the 
 incidents surrounding the "Achilleis "; the whole 
 significance is centred in the Wrath of Achilles, 
 and thence made to impregnate every part. 
 
 Life is short ; we must make the best of it. 
 How trite that sounds ! But it is not trite at all 
 really. It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe 
 that there was a time when sentiments now be- 
 come habitual, sentiments that imply not only 
 the original imperative of conduct, but the 
 original metaphysic of living, were by no means 
 altogether habitual. It is difficult toimagine back- 
 wards into the time when self-consciousness was 
 still so fresh from its emergence out of the mere 
 tribal consciousness of savagery, that it must not 
 only accept the fact, but first intensely realize', 
 that man is wicvfxopdoTaTOS — a thing of swiftest 
 
 1 ' Honour my son for me, for the swiftest doom of all is 
 his.' 
 
 63
 
 The Epic 
 
 doom. And it was for men who were able, and 
 forced, to do that, that the Iliad and the Odyssey 
 and the other early epics were composed. But 
 life is not only short ; it is, in itself, valueless. 
 " As the generation of leaves, so is the generation 
 of men." The life of man matters to nobody 
 but himself. It happens incidentally in universal 
 destiny ; but beyond just happening it has no 
 function. No function, of course, except for 
 man himself. If man is to find any value in life 
 it is he himself that must create the value. 
 For the sense of the ultimate uselessness of life, 
 of the blankness of imperturbable darkness that 
 surrounds it, Goethe's word " Hell " is not too 
 shocking. But no one has properly lived who has 
 not felt this Hell ; and we may easily believe 
 that in an heroic age, the intensity of this feeling 
 was the secret of the intensity of living. For 
 where will the primitive instinct of man, where 
 will the hero, find the chance of creating a value 
 for life ? In danger, and in the courage that 
 welcomes danger. That not only evaluates life ; 
 it derives the value from the very fact that forces 
 man to create value — the fact of his swift and 
 instant doom — coKu/mopcoTaTO? 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 
 
 64
 
 The Ep 
 
 ic 
 
 Homer. And all this, barely stated, is a very 
 different matter from what it is when it is 
 poetically symbolized in the vast and shapely 
 substance of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is 
 quite possible, of course, to appreciate, pleasantly 
 and externally, the Iliad with its pressure of 
 thronging life and its daring unity, and the 
 Odyssey with its serener life and its superb 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 appreciate the spirit of his music, unless we 
 see the warfare and the adventure as symbols of 
 the primary courage of life ; and there is more in 
 those words than seems when they are baldly 
 written. And it is not his morals, but Homer's 
 art that does that for us. And what Homer's art 
 does supremely, the other early epics do in their 
 way too. Their way is not to be compared with 
 Homer's way. They are very much nearer than 
 he is to the mere epic material — to the moderate 
 accomplishment of the primitive ballad. Apart 
 from their greatness, and often successful great- 
 ness, of intention, perhaps the only one that has 
 an answerable greatness in the detail of its 
 technique is Beowulf. That is not on account of 
 its " kennings " — the strange device by which 
 early popular poetry (Hesiod is another instance) 
 tries to liberate and master the magic of words. 
 A good deal has been made of these " kennings " ; 
 but it does not take us far towards great poetry, 
 e 65
 
 The Epic 
 
 to have the sea called " whale-road " or " swan- 
 road " or " gannet's-bath " ; though we arc- 
 getting nearer to it when the sun is called 
 " candle of the firmament " or " heaven's gem." 
 On the whole, the poem is composed in an 
 elaborate, ambitious diction which is not properly 
 governed. Alliteration proves a somewhat 
 dangerous principle ; it seems mainly responsible 
 for the way the poet makes his sentences by piling 
 up clauses, like shooting a load of stones out of a 
 cart. You cannot always make out exactly what 
 he means ; and it is doubtful whether he always 
 had a clearly-thought meaning. Most of the 
 subsidiary matter is foisted in with monstrous 
 clumsiness. Yet Beowulf has what we do not 
 find, out of Homer, in the other early epics. It 
 has occasionally an unforgettable grandeur of 
 phrasing. And it has other and perhaps deeper 
 poetic qualities. When the warriors are waiting 
 in the haunted hall for the coming of the marsh- 
 fiend Grendel, they fall into untroubled sleep ; 
 and the poet adds, with Homeric restraint : 
 " Not one of them thought that he should thence 
 be ever seeking his loved home again, his people 
 or free city, where he was nurtured." The 
 opening is magnificent, one of the noblest things 
 that have been done in language. There is some 
 wonderful grim landscape in the poem ; towards 
 the middle there is a great speech on deteriora- 
 tion through prosperity, a piece of sustained 
 intensity that reads like an ^Eschylean chorus ; 
 66
 
 The Epic 
 
 and there is some admirable fighting, especially 
 the fight with Grendel in the hall, and with 
 Grendel's mother under the waters, while Beo- 
 wulf's companions anxiously watch the troubled 
 surface of the mere. The fact that the action 
 of the poem is chiefly made of single combat 
 with supernatural creatures and that there is no 
 tapestry figured with radiant gods drawn between 
 the life of men and the ultimate darkness, gives 
 a peculiar and notable character to the way 
 Beowulf symbolizes the primary courage of life. 
 One would like to think, with some enthusiasts, 
 that this great poem, composed in a language 
 totally unintelligible to the huge majority of 
 Englishmen — further from English than Latin 
 is from Italian — and perhaps not even composed 
 in England, certainly not concerned either with 
 England or Englishmen, might nevertheless be 
 called an English epic. 
 
 But of course the early epics do not, any of 
 them, merely repeat the significance of Homer 
 in another form. They might do that, if poetry 
 had to inculcate a moral, as some have supposed. 
 But however nicely we may analyse it, we shall 
 never find in poetry a significance which is 
 really detachable, and expressible in another way. 
 The significance is the poetry. What Beowulf 
 or the Iliad or the Odyssey means is simply what 
 it is in its whole nature ; we can but roughly 
 indicate it. And as poetry is never the same, so 
 its significance is never quite the same. Courage 
 
 67
 
 The Epic 
 
 as the first necessary value of life is most naively 
 and simply expressed, perhaps, in the Poem of the 
 Cid ; but even here the expression is, as in all art, 
 unique, and chiefly because it is contrived 
 through solidly imagined characters. There is 
 splendid characterization, too, in the Song of 
 Roland, together with a fine sense of poetic form ; 
 not fine enough, however, to avoid a prodigious 
 deal of conventional gag. The battling is lavish, 
 but always exciting ; and in, at least, that section 
 which describes how the dying Oliver, blinded 
 by weariness and wounds, mistakes Roland for a 
 pagan and feebly smites him with his sword, 
 there is real and piercing pathos. But for all 
 his sense of character, the poet has very little 
 discretion in his admiration of his heroes. 
 Christianity, in these two poems, has less effect 
 than one might think. The conspicuous value 
 of life is still the original value, courage ; but 
 elaboration and refinement of this begin to 
 appear, especially in the Song of Roland, as pas- 
 sionately conscious patriotism and loyalty. The 
 chief contribution of the Nibelungenlied to the 
 main process of epic poetry is plot in narrative ; 
 a contribution, that is, to the manner rather 
 than to the content of epic symbolism. There 
 is something that can be called plot in Homer ; 
 but with him, as in all other early epics, it is of 
 no great account compared with the straight- 
 forward linking of incidents into a direct chain 
 of narrative. The story of the Nibelungenlied, 
 68
 
 The Epic 
 
 however, is not a chain but a web. Events and 
 the influence of characters are woven closely 
 and intricately together into one tragic pattern ; 
 and this requires not only characterization, but 
 also the adding to the characters of persistent 
 and dominant motives. 
 
 Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic 
 attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize 
 life itself, but always some manner of life. But 
 life as courage — the turning of the dark, hard 
 condition of life into something which can be 
 exulted in — this, which is the deep significance 
 of the art of the first epics, is the absolutely 
 necessary foundation for any subsequent valua- 
 tion of life ; Man can achieve nothing until he 
 has first achieved courage. And this, much more 
 than any inheritance of manner, is what makes 
 all the writers of deliberate or "literary" epic 
 imply the existence of Homer. If Homer had not 
 done his work, they could not have done theirs. 
 But " literary " epics are as necessary as Homer. 
 We cannot go on with courage as the solitary 
 valuation of life. We must have the foundation, 
 but we must also have the superstructure. 
 Speaking comparatively, it may be said that the 
 function of Homeric epic has been to create im- 
 perishable symbolism for the actual courageous 
 consciousness of life, but the duty of " literary " 
 epic has been to develop this function, answer- 
 ably to the development of life itself, into sym- 
 bolism of some conscious idea of life — something 
 
 69
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 ob- 
 servation, 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 Prome- 
 theus, and then hear the Titan's agonized cry. 
 But it is not in such passages that what Apollonius 
 did for epic abides. A great deal of his third book 
 is a real contribution to the main process, to 
 epic content as well as to epic manner. To the 
 manner of epic he added analytic psychology. 
 No one will ever imagine character more deeply 
 or more firmly than Homer did in, say, Achilles ; 
 but Apollonius was the man who showed how 
 epic as well as drama may use the nice minutiae 
 of psychological imagination. Through Virgil, 
 this contribution to epic manner has pervaded 
 subsequent literature. Apollonius, too, in his 
 fumbling way, as though he did not quite know 
 what he was doing, has yet done something very 
 70
 
 The Epic 
 
 important for the development of epic signi- 
 ficance. Love has been nothing but a subordinate 
 incident, almost one might say an ornament, 
 in the early epics ; in Apollonius, though working 
 through a deal of gross and lumbering mytho- 
 logical machinery, love becomes for the first time 
 one of the primary values of life. The love of 
 Jason and Medea is the vital symbolism of the 
 Argonautica. 
 
 But it is Virgil who really begins the develop- 
 ment of epic art. He took over from Apollonius 
 love as part of the epic symbolism of life, and 
 delicate psychology as part of the epic method. 
 And, like Apollonius, he used these novelties chiefly 
 in the person of a heroine. But in Virgil they 
 belong to an incomparably greater art ; and 
 it is through Virgil that they have become 
 necessities of the epic tradition. More than this, 
 however, was required of him. The epic poet 
 collaborates with the spirit of his time in the 
 composition of his work. That is, if he is 
 successful ; the time may refuse to work with 
 him, but he may not refuse to work with his 
 time. Virgil not only implies, he often clearly 
 states, the original epic values of life, the 
 Homeric values ; as in the famous 
 
 Stat sua cuique dies ; breve et inreparabile tempus 
 
 Omnibus est vitae : sed famam extendere factis, 
 
 Hoc virtutis opus. 1 
 
 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." 
 
 71
 
 The Epic 
 
 But to write a poem chiefly to symbolize this 
 simple, heroic metaphysic would scarcely have 
 done for Virgil ; it would certainly not have 
 done for his time. It was eminently a time 
 of social organization, one might perhaps 
 say of social consciousness. After Sylla and 
 Marius and Caesar, life as an affair of sheer 
 individualism would not very strongly appeal 
 to a thoughtful Roman. Accordingly, as has 
 so often been remarked, the JEneid celebrates the 
 Roman Empire. A political idea does not seem 
 a very likely subject for a kind of poetry which 
 must declare greatly the fundamentals of living ; 
 not even when it is a political idea unequalled 
 in the world, the idea of the Roman Empire. 
 Had Virgil been a good Roman, the JEneid might 
 have been what no doubt Augustus, and Rome 
 generally, desired, a political epic. But Virgil 
 was not a good Roman ; there was something in 
 him that was not Roman at all. It was this 
 strange incalculable element in him that seems 
 for ever making him accomplish something 
 he had not thought of ; it was surely this that 
 made him, unintentionally it may be, use the 
 idea of the Roman Empire as a vehicle for a 
 much profounder valuation of life. We must 
 remember here the Virgil of the Fourth Eclogue 
 — that extraordinary, impassioned poem in 
 which he dreams of man attaining to some per- 
 fection of living. It is still this Virgil, though 
 saddened and resigned, who writes the JEneid. 
 72
 
 The Epic 
 
 Man creating his own destiny, man, however 
 wearied with the long task of resistance, achieving 
 some conscious community of aspiration, and 
 dreaming of the perfection of himself : the 
 poet whose lovely and noble art makes us a great 
 symbol of that, is assuredly carrying on the work 
 of Homer. This was the development in epic 
 intention required to make epic poetry answer 
 to the widening needs of civilization. 
 
 But even more important, in the whole process 
 of epic, than what Virgil's art does, is the way 
 it does it. And this in spite of the fact which 
 everyone has noticed, that Virgil does not 
 compare with Homer as a poet of seafaring and 
 warfaring. He is not, indeed, very interested 
 in either ; and it is unfortunate that, in manag- 
 ing 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 the 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 deliber- 
 ately adequate to the epic purpose. That does 
 not mean that Virgil is more artistic than Homer. 
 Homer's redundance, wholesale repetition of 
 lines, and stock epithets cannot be altogether 
 dismissed as " faults " ; they are characteristics 
 of a wonderfully accomplished and efficient 
 
 73
 
 The Epic 
 
 technique. But epic poetry cannot be written 
 as Homer composed it ; whereas it must be 
 written something as Virgil wrote it ; yes, if 
 epic poetry is to be written, Virgil must show 
 how that is to be done. The superb Virgilian 
 economy is the thing for an epic poet now ; the 
 concision, the scrupulousness, the loading of every 
 word with something appreciable of the whole 
 significance. After the /Eneid, the epic style 
 must be of this fashion : 
 
 Ibant obscuri sola sub nocte per umbram 
 Perquc 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 development in epic. But he made 
 the mistake, characteristically Roman, of think- 
 ing history more real than legend ; and, trying 
 to lead epic in this direction, supernatural 
 machinery would inevitably go too. That, 
 
 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 illumin'd 
 One goeth in the forest, when heav'n is gloomily clouded, 
 And black night hath robb'd the colours and beauty from all 
 things." — Robert Bridges. 
 
 74
 
 The Epic 
 
 perhaps, was fortunate, for it enabled Lucan 
 safely to introduce one of his great and memor- 
 able lines : 
 
 Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris; 1 
 
 which would certainly explode any supernatural 
 machinery that could be invented. The Phar- 
 salia could not be anything more than an in- 
 teresting but unsuccessful attempt ; it was not 
 on these lines that epic poetry was to develop. 
 Lucan died at an age when most poets have done 
 nothing very remarkable ; that he already had 
 achieved a poem like the Pharsalia, would make 
 us think he might have gone to incredible heights, 
 were it not that the mistake of the Pharsalia 
 seems to belong incurably to his temperament. 
 
 Lucan's determined stoicism may, philo- 
 sophically, be more consistent than the dubious 
 stoicism of Virgil. But Virgil knew that, in epic, 
 supernatural imagination is better than con- 
 sistency. It was an important step when he made 
 Jupiter, though a personal god, a power to which 
 no limits are assigned ; when he also made the 
 other divinities but shadows, or, at most, func- 
 tions, 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 back- 
 ward in this respect ; we seem to come upon 
 
 1 "All that is known, all that is felt, is God." 
 
 75
 
 The Epic 
 
 poetry in which supernatural machinery is in a 
 state of chronic insubordination. But that, too, 
 was perhaps necessary. In comparison with 
 the Mneid, Gerusalemme Liberata and Os 
 Lusiadas lack intellectual control and spiritual 
 depth ; but in comparison with the Roman, the 
 two modern poems thrill with a new passion of 
 life, a new wine of life, heady, as it seems, with 
 new significance — a significance as yet only felt, 
 not understood. Both Tasso and Camoens 
 clearly join on to the main epic tradition : Tasso 
 derives chiefly from the Mneid and the Iliad, 
 Camoens from the Mneid and the Odyssey. 
 Tasso is perhaps more Virgilian than Camoens ; 
 the plastic power of his imagination is more 
 assured. But the advantage Camoens has over 
 Tasso seems to repeat the advantage Homer has 
 over Virgil ; the ostensible subject of the 
 Lusiads glows with the truth of experience. But 
 the real subject is behind these splendid voyag- 
 ings, 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 
 76
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 European consciousness 
 really is, these poets rather vaguely suggest than 
 master into clear and irresistible expression, into 
 the supreme symbolism of perfectly adequate 
 art. They still took European consciousness 
 as an affair of geography and race rather than 
 simply as a triumphant stage in the general 
 progress of man's knowledge of himself. Their 
 time imposed a duty on them ; that they clearly 
 understood. But they did not clearly 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. Supernaturalism 
 was emphasized, because they instinctively felt 
 that this was the means epic poetry must use to 
 accomplish its new duties ; it was disorderly, 
 because they did not quite know what use these 
 duties required. Tasso and Camoens, for all the 
 
 77
 
 The Epic 
 
 splendour and loveliness of their work, leave epic 
 poetry, as it were, consciously dissatisfied — 
 knowing that its future must achieve some 
 significance larger and deeper than anything it 
 had yet done, and knowing that this must 
 be done somehow through imagined super- 
 naturalism. 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 par- 
 ticular sense of human existence which has not 
 yet definitely appeared in the epic series, but 
 which the process of life in Europe made it 
 absolutely necessary that epic poetry should 
 symbolize. In Milton, the poet arose who was 
 supremely adequate to the greatest task laid on 
 epic poetry since its beginning with Homer ; 
 Milton's task was perhaps even more exacting 
 than that original one. " His work is not the 
 greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not 
 the first." The epigram might just as reasonably 
 have been the other way round. But nothing 
 would be more unprofitable than a discussion 
 in which Homer and Milton compete for su- 
 premacy of genius. Our business here is quite 
 otherwise. 
 
 With the partial exception of Tasso and 
 Camoens, all epic poetry before Milton is some 
 symbolism of man's sense of his own will. It is 
 
 73
 
 The Epic 
 
 simply this in Homer ; and the succeeding poets 
 developed this intention but remained well 
 within it. Not even Virgil, with his metaphysic 
 of individual merged into social will — not even 
 Virgil went outside it. In fact, it is a sort of 
 monism of consciousness that inspires all pre- 
 Miltonic epic. But in Milton, it has become a 
 dualism. Before him, the primary impulse of 
 epic is an impassioned sense of man's nature 
 being contained — by his destiny : his only be- 
 cause he is in it and belongs to it, as we say 
 " my country." With Milton, this has neces- 
 sarily 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 irre- 
 concilables is what Milton's poetry has to sym- 
 bolize. Could they be reconciled, the two 
 elements in man's modern consciousness of 
 existence would form a monism. But this con- 
 sciousness is a dualism ; its elements are abso- 
 lutely opposed. Paradise Lost is inspired by 
 intense consciousness of the eternal contradiction 
 between the general, unlimited, irresistible will 
 of universal destiny, and defined individual will 
 existing within this, and inexplicably capable of 
 acting on it, even against it. Or, if that seems 
 too much of an antinomy to some philosophies 
 (and it is perhaps possible to make it look more 
 apparent than real), the dualism can be un- 
 
 79
 
 The Epic 
 
 avoidably declared by putting it entirely in 
 terms of consciousness : destiny creating within 
 itself an existence which stands against and 
 apart from destiny by being conscious of it. In 
 Milton's poetry the spirit of man is equally con- 
 scious of its own limited reality and of the un- 
 limited reality of that which contains him and 
 drives him with its motion — of his own will 
 striving in the midst of destiny : destiny irre- 
 sistible, yet his will unmastered. 
 
 This is not to examine the development of 
 epic poetry by looking at that which is not poetry. 
 In this kind of art, more perhaps than in any 
 other, we must ignore the wilful theories of those 
 who would set boundaries to the meaning of 
 the word poetry. In such a poem as Milton's, 
 whatever is in it is its poetry ; the poetry of 
 Paradise Lost is just — Paradise Lost ! Its pomp 
 of divine syllables and glorious images is no more 
 the poetry of Milton than the idea of man 
 which he expressed. But the general manner 
 of an art is for ever similar ; it is its inspiration 
 that is for ever changing. We need never expect 
 words and metre to do more than they do here : 
 
 they, fondly thinking to allay 
 Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit 
 Chewed bitter ashes, which the offended taste 
 With spattering noise rejected : oft they assayed, 
 Hunger and thirst constraining ; drugged as oft, 
 With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws, 
 With soot and cinders filled ; 
 
 80
 
 The Epic 
 
 or more than they do here : 
 
 What though the field be lost ? 
 All is not lost ; the unconquerable will, 
 And study of revenge, immortal hate, 
 And courage never to submit or yield, 
 And what is else not to be overcome. 
 
 But what Homer's words, and perhaps what 
 Virgil's words, set out to do, they do just as mar- 
 vellously. There is no sure way of comparison 
 here. How words do their work in poetry, and 
 how we appreciate the way they do it — this seems 
 to involve the obscurest processes of the mind : 
 analysis can but fumble at it. But we can com- 
 pare 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 concep- 
 tion. 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 
 F Si
 
 The Epic 
 
 that. But the action at large must clearly consist 
 now, and for the first time, overwhelmingly of 
 supernatural imagination. Milton has been 
 foolishly blamed for making his supernaturalism 
 too human. But nothing can come into poetry 
 that is not shaped and recognizable ; how else 
 but in anthropomorphism could destiny, or 
 (its poetic equivalent) deity, exist in Paradise 
 Lost ? We may see what a change has come over 
 epic poetry, if we compare this supernatural 
 imagination of Milton's with the supernatural 
 machinery of any previous epic poet. Virgil is 
 the most scrupulous in this respect ; and towards 
 the inevitable change, which Milton completed 
 and perfected from Camoens and Tasso, Virgil 
 took a great step in making Jupiter professedly 
 almighty. But compare Virgil's " Tantaene 
 animis celestibus irae ? " with Milton's " Evil, 
 be thou my good ! " It is the difference between 
 an accidental device and essential substance. 
 That, in order to symbolize in epic form — that 
 is to say, in narrative form — the dualistic sense 
 of destiny and the destined, and both imme- 
 diately — Milton had to dissolve his human action 
 completely in a supernatural action, is the sign 
 not merely of a development, but of a re- 
 creation, of epic art. 
 
 It has been said that Satan is the hero of 
 
 Paradise Lost. The offence which the remark 
 
 has caused is due, no doubt, to injudicious use 
 
 of the word " hero." It is surely the simple fact 
 
 82
 
 The Epic 
 
 that if Paradise Lost exists for any one figure, 
 that is Satan ; just as the Iliad exists for 
 Achilles, and the Odyssey for Odysseus. It is 
 in the figure of Satan that the imperishable 
 significance of Paradise Lost is centred ; his 
 vast unyielding agony symbolizes the profound 
 antinomy of modern consciousness. And if this 
 is what he is in significance it is worth noting 
 what he is in technique. He is the blending of 
 the poem's human plane with its supernatural 
 plane. The epic hero has always represented 
 humanity by being superhuman ; in Satan he 
 has grown into the supernatural. He does not 
 thereby cease to symbolize human existence ; but 
 he is thereby able to symbolize simultaneously 
 the sense of its irreconcilable condition, of the 
 universal destiny that contains it. Out of Satan's 
 colossal figure, the single urgency of inspiration, 
 which this dualistic consciousness of existence 
 makes, radiates through all the regions of Milton's 
 vast and rigorous imagination. " Milton," says 
 Landor, " even Milton rankt with living men ! " 
 
 83
 
 V 
 AFTER MILTON 
 
 And after Milton, what is to happen ? First, 
 briefly, for a few instances of what has happened. 
 We may leave out experiments in religious senti- 
 ment 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 some- 
 times called the epic unity — and this is what we 
 can always discover in any poetry which gives us 
 the peculiar experience we must associatewith the 
 word epic, if it is to have any precision of mean- 
 ing. What applies to Scott, will apply still more 
 to Byron's poems ; Byron is one of the greatest 
 of modern poets, but that does not make him 
 an epic poet. We must keep our minds on epic 
 intention. Shelley's Revolt of Islam has something 
 of it, but too vaguely and too fantastically ; the 
 generality of human experience had little to do 
 with this glittering poem. Keats's Hyperion is 
 
 84
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 remark- 
 able ; poems which look superficially like epic 
 turn out to have scarce anything of real epic in- 
 tention ; 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 con- 
 tent were trying for a divorce. If this be so, 
 the traditional epic manner will scarcely sur- 
 vive 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 satis- 
 factory partner. 
 
 But there are one or two poems in which the 
 
 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 poetrythan the spectroscopic examinationof fire 
 affects the single nature of actual flame. For the purposes of this 
 book, it has been necessary to look, chiefly at the contribution 
 of intellect to epic poetry ; for it is in that contribution that the 
 development of poetry, so far as there is any development at all, 
 really consists. This being so, it might be thought that Keats 
 could hardly have done anything for the real progress of epic. 
 But Keats's apparent (it is only apparent) rejection of intellect in 
 his poetry was the result of youthful theory ; his letters show 
 that, in fact, intellect was a thing unusually vigorous in his 
 nature. If the Keats of the letters be added to the Keats of the 
 poems, a personality appears that seems more likely than any of 
 his contemporaries, or than anyone who has come alter him, tor 
 the work of carrying Miltonic epic forward without forsaking 
 Mittonic form. 
 
 85
 
 The Epic 
 
 old union seems still happy. Most noteworthy is 
 Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea. You may say 
 that it does not much matter whether such 
 poetry should be called epic or, as some hold, 
 idyllic. But it is interesting to note, first, that 
 the poem is deliberately written with epic styJe 
 and epic intention ; and, second, that, though 
 singularly beautiful, it makes no attempt to add 
 anything to epic development. It is interesting, 
 too, to see epic poetry trying to get away from 
 its heroes, and trying to use material the poetic 
 importance of which seems to depend solely on 
 the treatment, not on itself. This was a natural 
 and, for some things, a laudable reaction. But it 
 inevitably meant that epic must renounce the 
 triumphs which Milton had won for it. William 
 Morris saw no reason for abandoning either the 
 heroes or anything else of the epic tradition. The 
 chief personages of Sigurd the Volsung are ad- 
 mittedly more than human, the events frankly 
 marvellous. The poem is an impressive one, and 
 in one way or another fulfils all the main quali- 
 fications of epic. But perhaps no great poem 
 ever had so many faults. These have nothing to 
 do with its management of supernaturalism ; 
 those who object to this simply show ignorance 
 of the fundamental necessities of epic poetry. 
 The first book is magnificent ; everything that 
 epic narrative should be ; but after this the poem 
 grows long-winded, and that is the last thing 
 epic poetry should be. It is written with a 
 86
 
 The Epic 
 
 running pen ; so long as the verse keeps going on, 
 Morris seems satisfied, though it is very often 
 going on about unimportant things, and in an 
 uninteresting manner. After the first book, in- 
 deed, 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 at- 
 tempt 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 in- 
 tellect ; 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 
 
 87
 
 The Epic 
 
 beauties and dignities, indeed by incomparable 
 lines, but because the poem as a whole does, as it 
 goes on, accumulate an immense pressure of 
 significance. All the great epics of the world 
 have, however, perfectly clearly a significance in 
 close relation with the spirit of their time ; 
 the intense desire to symbolize the consciousness 
 of man as far as it has attained, is what vitally 
 inspires an epic poet, and the ardour of this 
 infects his whole style. Morris, in this sense, 
 was not vitally inspired. Sigurd the Volsung is a 
 kind of set exercise in epic poetry. It is 
 great, but it is not needed,. It is, in fact, 
 an attempt to write epic poetry as it might 
 have been written, and to make epic poetry 
 mean what it might have meant, in the days 
 when the tale of Sigurd and the Niblungs was 
 newly come among men's minds. Mr. Doughty, 
 in his surprising poem The Dawn in Britain, also 
 seems trying to compose an epic exercise, rather 
 than to be obeying a vital necessity of inspiration. 
 For all that, it is a great poem, full of irresistible 
 vision and memorable diction. But it is written 
 in a revolutionary syntax, which, like most revo- 
 lutions 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 ; 
 88
 
 The Epic 
 
 and it has learned the lessons in manner which 
 Virgil and Milton so nobly taught. It has 
 perhaps learned them too well ; never were con- 
 cision, and the loading of each word with heavy- 
 duties, so thoroughly practised. The action is 
 so compressed that it is difficult to make out 
 exactly what is going on ; we no sooner realize 
 that an incident has begun than we find ourselves 
 in the midst of another. Apart from these 
 idiosyncrasies, the poetry of Gebir is a curious 
 mixture of splendour and commonplace. If 
 fiction could ever be wholly, and not only par- 
 tially, epic, it would be in Gebir. 
 
 In all these poems, we see an epic intention 
 still combined with a recognizably epic manner. 
 But what is quite evident is, that in all of them 
 there is no attempt to carry on the development 
 of epic, to take up its symbolic power where 
 Milton left it. On the contrary, this seems to be 
 deliberately avoided. For any tentative advance 
 on Miltonic significance, even for any real 
 acceptance of it, we must go to poetry which 
 tries to put epic intention into a new form. Some 
 obvious peculiarities of epic style are sufficiently 
 definite to be detachable. Since Theocritus, a 
 perverse kind of pleasure has often been obtained 
 by putting some of the peculiarities of epic — 
 peculiarities really required by a very long poem — 
 into the compass of a very short poem. An epic 
 idyll cannot, of course, contain any considerable 
 epic intention ; it is wrought out of the mere 
 89
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 Siecles : " Comme dans une 
 mosaique, chaque pierre a sa couleur et sa forme 
 propre ; l'ensemble donne une figure. La figure 
 de ce livre," he goes on, " c'est l'homme." To 
 get an epic design or figure through a sequence of 
 small idylls need not be the result of mere 
 technical curiosity. It may be a valuable method 
 for the future of epic. Tennyson attempted 
 this method in Idylls of the King ; not, as is now 
 usually admitted, with any great success. The 
 sequence is admirable for sheer craftsmanship, 
 for astonishing craftsmanship ; but it did not 
 manage to effect anything like a conspicuous 
 symbolism. You have but to think of Paradise 
 Lost to see what Idylls of the King lacks. Victor 
 Hugo, however, did better in La Legende des 
 Siecles. " La figure, c'est l'homme " ; there, at 
 any rate, is the intention of epic symbolism. 
 And, however pretentious the poem may be, 
 it undoubtedly does make a passionate effort to 
 develop the significance which Milton had 
 achieved ; chiefly to enlarge the scope of this 
 significance. 1 Browning's The Ring and the Book 
 
 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 
 influence of Milton has intensified the consciousness of them in 
 
 90
 
 The Epic 
 
 also uses this notion of an idyllic sequence ; but 
 without any semblance of epic purpose, purely 
 for the exhibition of human character. 
 
 It has already been remarked that the ultimate 
 significance of great drama is the same as that 
 of epic. Since the vital epic purpose — the kind 
 of epic purpose which answers to the spirit of the 
 time — is evidently looking for some new form 
 to inhabit, it is not surprising, then, that it should 
 have occasionally tried on dramatic form. And, 
 unquestionably, for great poetic symbolism of 
 the depths of modern consciousness, for such 
 symbolism as Milton's, we must go to two such 
 invasions of epic purpose into dramatic manner — 
 to Goethe's Faust and Hardy's The Dynasts. 
 But dramatic significance and epic significance 
 have been admitted to be broadly the same ; 
 to take but one instance, ^Eschylus's Prometheus 
 is closely related to Milton's Satan (though I 
 think Prometheus really represents a monism 
 of consciousness — that which is destined — as 
 Satan represents a dualism — at once the destined 
 
 thousands who think they know nothing of Paradise Lea. 
 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. 
 
 91
 
 ,' 
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 ex- 
 patiates. 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 posi- 
 tively, we may say that epic has taken over drama 
 and adapted it to its peculiar needs. In any case, 
 with one exception to be mentioned presently, 
 it is only in Faust and The Dynasts that we find 
 any great development of Miltonic significance. 
 These are the poems that give us immense and 
 shapely symbols of the spirit of man, conscious 
 not only of the sense of his own destined being, 
 but also of some sense of that which destines. 
 In fact, these two are the poems that develop 
 and elaborate, in their own way, the Miltonic 
 significance, as all the epics in between Homer 
 and Milton develop and elaborate Homeric 
 significance. And yet, in spite of Faust and The 
 Dynasts, it may be doubted whether the union 
 of epic and drama is likely to be permanent. The 
 peculiar effects which epic intention, in whatever 
 manner, must aim at, seem to be as much hin- 
 dered as helped by dramatic form ; and possibly 
 it is because the detail is necessarily too much 
 enforced for the broad perfection of epic effect. 
 The real truth seems to be, that there is an 
 92
 
 The Epic 
 
 inevitable and profound difficulty in carrying 
 on the Miltonic significance in anything like 
 a story. Regular epic having reached its climax 
 in Paradise Lost, the epic purpose must find 
 some other way of going on. Hugo saw this, 
 when he strung his huge epic sequence together 
 not on a connected story but on a single idea : 
 " la figure, c'est l'homme." If we are to have, 
 as we must have, direct symbolism of the way 
 man is conscious of his being nowadays, which 
 means direct symbolism both of man's spirit 
 and of the (philosophical) opponent of this, the 
 universal fate of things — if we are to have all 
 this, it is hard to see how any story can be 
 adequate to such symbolic requirements, unless 
 it is a story which moves in some large region of 
 imagined supernaturalism. And it seems ques- 
 tionable whether we have enough formal " be- 
 lief " 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 impossible would be the naivete 
 of Homer and the quite different but equally 
 
 93
 
 The Epic 
 
 impracticable naivete of Tasso and Camoens. 
 The conclusion seems to be, that the epic pur- 
 pose will have to abandon the necessity of telling 
 a story. 
 
 Hugo's way may prove to be the right one. But 
 there may be another ; and what has happened 
 in the past may suggest what may happen in the 
 future. Epic poetry in the regular epic form has 
 before now seemed unlikely. It seemed unlikely 
 after the Alexandrians had made such poor at- 
 tempts at standing upright under the immensity 
 of Homer ; it seemed so, until, after several efforts, 
 Latin poetry became triumphantly epic in Virgil. 
 And again, when the mystical prestige of Virgil 
 was domineering everything, regular epic seemed 
 unlikely ; until, after the doubtful attempts 
 of Boiardo and Ariosto, Tasso arrived. But in 
 each case, while the occurrence of regular epic 
 was seeming so improbable, it nevertheless 
 happened that poetry was written which was 
 certainly nothing like epic in form, but which 
 was strongly charged with a profound pressure 
 of purpose closely akin to epic purpose ; and 
 De Rerum Natura and La Divina Commedia are 
 very suggestive to speculation now. Of course, 
 the fact that, in both these cases, regular epic 
 did eventually occur, must warn us that in 
 artistic development anything may happen ; but 
 it does seem as if there were a deeper im- 
 probability for the occurrence of regular epic 
 now than in the times just before Virgil and 
 
 94
 
 The Epic 
 
 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 con- 
 nected 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 didac- 
 tic poetry ; it was at least responsible for some 
 tedium. Epic poetry will certainly never be 
 didactic. What we may imagine — who knows 
 
 95
 
 The Epic 
 
 how vainly imagine ? — is, then, a sequence of 
 odes expressing, in the image of some fortunate 
 and lofty mind, as much of the spiritual signi- 
 ficance which the epic purpose, must continue 
 from Milton, as is possible, in the style of 
 Lucretius and Wordsworth, for subjective 
 symbolism. A pregnant experiment towards 
 something like this has already been seen — in 
 George Meredith's magnificent set of Odes in 
 Contribution to the Song of French History. The 
 subject is ostensibly concrete ; but France in 
 her agonies and triumphs has been personified 
 into a superb symbol of Meredith's own reading 
 of human fate. The series builds up a decidedly 
 epic significance, and its manner is extraordinarily 
 suggestive of a new epic method. Nevertheless, 
 something more Lucretian in central imagin- 
 ation, something less bound to concrete and 
 particular event, seems required for the com- 
 plete development of epic purpose. 
 
 WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD. 
 PRINTERS. PLYMOUTH
 
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