FOOTNOTES:
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 4: From the version of the Marquise de Sainte-Aulaire.]
THE NATURE OF EPIC
THE NATURE OF EPIC
Rigid definitions in literature are, however, dangerous. At bottom, it is what we feel, not what we think, that makes us put certain poems together and apart from others; and feelings cannot be defined, but only related. If we define a poem, we say what we think about it; and that may not sufficiently imply the essential thing the poem does for us. Hence the definition is liable either to be too strict, or to admit work which does not properly satisfy the criterion of feeling. It seems probable that, in the last resort, classification in literature rests on that least tangible, least definable matter, style; for style is the sign of the poem's spirit, and it is the spirit that we feel. If we can get some notion of how those poems, which we call epic, agree with one another in style, it is likely we shall be as close as may be to a definition of epic. I use the word "style," of course, in its largest sense—manner of conception as well as manner of composition.
An easy way to define epic, though not a very profitable way, would be to say simply, that an epic is a poem which produces feelings similar to those produced byParadise Lostor theIliad,Beowulfor theSong of Roland. Indeed, you might include all the epics of Europe in this definition without losing your breath; for the epic poet is the rarest kind of artist. And while it is not a simple matter to say off-hand what it is that is common to all these poems, there seems to be general acknowledgment that they are clearly separable from other kinds of poetry; and this although the word epic has been rather badly abused. For instance,The Faery QueeneandLa Divina Commediahave been called epic poems; but I do not think that anyone could fail to admit, on a little pressure, that the experience of readingThe Faery QueeneorLa Divina Commediais not in the least like the experience of readingParadise Lostor theIliad. But as a poem may have lyrical qualities without being a lyric, so a poem may have epical qualities without being an epic. In all the poems which the world has agreed to call epics, there is a story told, and well told. But Dante's poem attempts no story at all, and Spenser's, though it attempts several, does not tell them well—it scarcely attempts to make the reader believe in them, being much more concerned with the decoration and the implication of its fables than with the fables themselves. What epic quality, detached from epic proper, do these poems possess, then, apart from the mere fact that they take up a great many pages? It is simply a question of their style—the style of their conception and the style of their writing; the whole style of their imagination, in fact. They take us into a region in which nothing happens that is not deeply significant; a dominant, noticeably symbolic, purpose presides over each poem, moulds it greatly and informs it throughout.
This takes us some little way towards deciding the nature of epic. It must be a story, and the story must be told well and greatly; and, whether in the story itself or in the telling of it, significance must be implied. Does that mean that the epic must be allegorical? Many have thought so; even Homer has been accused of constructing allegories. But this is only a crude way of emphasizing the significance of epic; and there is a vast deal of difference between a significant story and an allegorical story. Reality of substance is a thing on which epic poetry must always be able to rely. Not only because Spenser does not tell his stories very well, but even more because their substance (not, of course, their meaning) is deliciously and deliberately unreal,The Faery Queeneis outside the strict sense of the word epic. Allegory requires material ingeniously manipulated and fantastic; what is more important, it requires material invented by the poet himself. That is a long way from the solid reality of material which epic requires. Not manipulation, but imaginative transfiguration of material; not invention, but selection of existing material appropriate to his genius, and complete absorption of it into his being; that is how the epic poet works. Allegory is a beautiful way of inculcating and asserting some special significance in life; but epic has a severer task, and a more impressive one. It has not to say, Life in the worldoughtto mean this or that; it has to show life unmistakablybeingsignificant. It does not gloss or interpret the fact of life, but re-creates it and charges the fact itself with the poet's own sense of ultimate values. This will be less precise than the definite assertions of allegory; but for that reason it will be more deeply felt. The values will be emotional and spiritual rather than intellectual. And they will be the poet's own only because he has made them part of his being; in him (though he probably does not know it) they will be representative of the best and most characteristic life of his time. That does not mean that the epic poet's image of life's significance is of merely contemporary or transient importance. No stage through which the general consciousness of men has gone can ever be outgrown by men; whatever happens afterwards does not displace it, but includes it. We could not do withoutParadise Lostnowadays; but neither can we do without theIliad. It would not, perhaps, be far from the truth, if it were even said that the significance ofParadise Lostcannot be properly understood unless the significance of theIliadbe understood.
The prime material of the epic poet, then, must be real and not invented. But when the story of the poem is safely concerned with some reality, he can, of course, graft on this as much appropriate invention as he pleases; it will be one of his ways of elaborating his main, unifying purpose—and to call it "unifying" is to assume that, however brilliant his surrounding invention may be, the purpose will always be firmly implicit in the central subject. Some of the early epics manage to do without any conspicuous added invention designed to extend what the main subject intends; but such nobly simple, forthright narrative asBeowulfand theSong of Rolandwould not do for a purpose slightly more subtle than what the makers of these ringing poems had in mind. The reality of the central subject is, of course, to be understood broadly. It means that the story must be founded deep in the general experience of men. A decisive campaign is not, for the epic poet, any more real than a legend full of human truth. All that the name of Caesar suggests is extremely important for mankind; so is all that the name of Satan suggests: Satan, in this sense, is as real as Caesar. And, as far as reality is concerned, there is nothing to choose between the Christians taking Jerusalem and the Greeks taking Troy; nor between Odysseus sailing into fairyland and Vasco da Gama sailing round the world. It is certainly possible that a poet might devise a story of such a kind that we could easily take it as something which might have been a real human experience. But that is not enough for the epic poet. He needs something which everyone knows about, something which indisputably, and admittedly,has beena human experience; and even Grendel, the fiend of the marshes, was, we can clearly see, for the poet ofBeowulfa figure profoundly and generally accepted as not only true but real; what, indeed, can be more real for poetry than a devouring fiend which lives in pestilent fens? And the reason why epic poetry so imperiously demands reality of subject is clear; it is because such poetry has symbolically to re-create the actual fact and the actual particulars of human existence in terms of a general significance—the reader must feel that life itself has submitted to plastic imagination. No fiction will ever have the air, so necessary for this epic symbolism, not merely of representing, but of unmistakablybeing, human experience. This might suggest that history would be the thing for an epic poet; and so it would be, if history were superior to legend in poetic reality. But, simply as substance, there is nothing to choose between them; while history has the obvious disadvantage of being commonly too strict in the manner of its events to allow of creative freedom. Its details will probably be so well known, that any modification of them will draw more attention to discrepancy with the records than to achievement thereby of poetic purpose. And yet modification, or at least suppression and exaggeration, of the details of history will certainly be necessary. Not to declare what happened, and the results of what happened, is the object of an epic; but to accept all this as the mere material in which a single artistic purpose, a unique, vital symbolism may be shaped. And if legend, after passing for innumerable years through popular imagination, still requires to be shaped at the hands of the epic poet, how much more must the crude events of history require this! For it is not in events as they happen, however notably, that man may see symbols of vital destiny, but in events as they are transformed by plastic imagination.
Yet it has been possible to use history as the material of great epic poetry; Camoens and Tasso did this—the chief subject of theLusiadsis even contemporary history. But evidently success in these cases was due to the exceptional and fortunate fact that the fixed notorieties of history were combined with a strange and mysterious geography. The remoteness and, one might say, the romantic possibilities of the places into which Camoens and Tasso were led by their themes, enable imagination to deal pretty freely with history. But in a little more than ten years after Camoens glorified Portugal in an historical epic, Don Alonso de Ercilla tried to do the same for Spain. He puts his action far enough from home: the Spaniards are conquering Chili. But the world has grown smaller and more familiar in the interval: the astonishing things that could easily happen in the seas of Madagascar cannot now conveniently happen in Chili. TheAraucanais 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 hisBruceand Blind Harry hisWallace. 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'sPharsalia. 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: thePharsaliapartakes more of the nature of oratory than of poetry. It means that Lucan, in choosing history, chose something which he had to declaim about, something which, at best, he could imaginatively realize; but not something which he could imaginatively re-create. It is quite different with poems like theSong of Roland. They are composed in, or are drawn immediately out of, an heroic age; an age, that is to say, when the idea of history has not arisen, when anything that happens turns inevitably, and in a surprisingly short time, into legend. Thus, an unimportant, probably unpunished, attack by Basque mountaineers on the Emperor's rear-guard has become, in theSong 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 theIliadand theOdyssey,Beowulfand theSong of Roland,Paradise LostandGerusalemme Liberata, if epic is also to be the title forThe Faery QueeneandLa Divina Commedia,The Idylls of the KingandThe Ring and the Book. But I believe most of the importance in the meaning of the word epic, when it is reasonably used, will be found in what is written above. Apart from the specific form of epic, it shares much of its ultimate intention with the greatest kind of drama (though not with all drama). And just as drama, whatever grandeur of purpose it may attempt, must be a good play, so epic must be a good story. It will tell its tale both largely and intensely, and the diction will be carried on the volume of a powerful, flowing metre. To distinguish, however, between merely narrative poetry, and poetry which goes beyond being mere narrative into the being of epic, must often be left to feeling which can scarcely be precisely analysed. A curious instance of the difficulty in exactly defining epic (but not in exactly deciding what is epic) may be found in the work of William Morris. Morris left two long narrative poems,The Life and Death of Jason, andThe Story of Sigurd the Volsung.
I do not think anyone need hesitate to putSigurdamong the epics; but I do not think anyone who will scrupulously compare the experience of readingJasonwith the experience of readingSigurd, can help agreeing thatJasonshould be kept out of the epics. There is nothing to choose between the subjects of the two poems. For an Englishman, Greek mythology means as much as the mythology of the North. And I should say that the bright, exact diction and the modest metre ofJasonare more interesting and attractive than the diction, often monotonous and vague, and the metre, often clumsily vehement, ofSigurd. Yet for all that it is the style ofSigurdthat puts it with the epics and apart fromJason; for style goes beyond metre and diction, beyond execution, into conception. The whole imagination ofSigurdis incomparably larger than that ofJason. InSigurd, you feel that the fashioning grasp of imagination has not only seized on the show of things, and not only on the physical or moral unity of things, but has somehow brought into the midst of all this, and has kneaded into the texture of it all, something of the ultimate and metaphysical significance of life. You scarcely feel that inJason.
Yes, epic poetry must be an affair of evident largeness. It was well said, that "the praise of an epic poem is to feign a person exceeding Nature." "Feign" here means to imagine; and imagine does not mean to invent. But, like most of the numerous epigrams that have been made about epic poetry, the remark does not describe the nature of epic, but rather one of the conspicuous signs that that nature is fulfilling itself. A poem which is, in some sort, a summation for its time of the values of life, will inevitably concern itself with at least one figure, and probably with several, in whom the whole virtue, and perhaps also the whole failure, of living seems superhumanly concentrated. A story weighted with the epic purpose could not proceed at all, unless it were expressed in persons big enough to support it. The subject, then, as the epic poet uses it, will obviously be an important one. Whether, apart from the way the poet uses it, the subject ought to be an important one, would not start a very profitable discussion. Homer has been praised for making, in theIliad, a first-rate poem out of a second-rate subject. It is a neat saying; but it seems unlikely that anything really second-rate should turn into first-rate epic. I imagine Homer would have been considerably surprised, if anyone had told him that the vast train of tragic events caused by the gross and insupportable insult put by Agamemnon, the mean mind in authority, on Achilles, the typical hero—that this noble and profoundly human theme was a second-rate subject. At any rate, the subject must be of capital importance in its treatment. It must symbolize—not as a particular and separable assertion, but at large and generally—some great aspect of vital destiny, without losing the air of recording some accepted reality of human experience, and without failing to be a good story; and the pressure of high purpose will inform diction and metre, as far, at least, as the poet's verbal art will let it.
The usual attempts at stricter definition of epic than anything this chapter contains, are either, in spite of what they try for, so vague that they would admit almost any long stretch of narrative poetry; or else they are based on the accidents or devices of epic art; and in that case they are apt to exclude work which is essentially epic because something inessential is lacking. It has, for instance, been seriously debated, whether an epic should not contain a catalogue of heroes. Other things, which epics have been required to contain, besides much that is not worth mentioning,[5] are a descent into hell and some supernatural machinery. Both of these are obviously devices for enlarging the scope of the action. The notion of a visit to the ghosts has fascinated many poets, and Dante elaborated this Homeric device into the main scheme of the greatest of non-epical poems, as Milton elaborated the other Homeric device into the main scheme of the greatest of literary epics. But a visit to the ghosts is, of course, like games or single combat or a set debate, merely an incident which may or may not be useful. Supernatural machinery, however, is worth some short discussion here, though it must be alluded to further in the sequel. The first and obvious thing to remark is, that an unquestionably epic effect can be given without any supernatural machinery at all. The poet ofBeowulfhas no need of it, for instance. A Christian redactor has worked over the poem, with more piety than skill; he can always be detected, and his clumsy little interjections have nothing to do with the general tenour of the poem. The human world ends off, as it were, precipitously; and beyond there is an endless, impracticable abyss in which dwells the secret governance of things, an unknowable and implacable fate—"Wyrd"—neither malign nor benevolent, but simply inscrutable. The peculiar cast of noble and desolate courage which this bleak conception gives to the poem is perhaps unique among the epics.
But very few epic poets have ventured to do without supernatural machinery of some sort. And it is plain that it must greatly assist the epic purpose to surround the action with immortals who are not only interested spectators of the event, but are deeply implicated in it; nothing could more certainly liberate, or at least more appropriately decorate, the significant force of the subject. We may leave Milton out, for there can be no question aboutParadise Losthere; the significance of the subject is not only liberated by, it entirely exists in, the supernatural machinery. But with the other epic poets, we should certainly expect them to ask us for our belief in their immortals. That, however, is just what they seem curiously careless of doing. The immortals are there, they are the occasion of splendid poetry; they do what they are intended to do—they declare, namely, by their speech and their action, the importance to the world of what is going on in the poem. Only—there is no obligation to believe in them; and will not that mean, no obligation to believe in their concern for the subject, and all that that implies? Homer begins this paradox. Think of that lovely and exquisitely mischievous passage in theIliadcalledThe Cheating of Zeus. The salvationist school of commentators calls this an interpolation; but the spirit of it is implicit throughout the whole of Homer's dealing with the gods; whenever, at least, he deals with them at length, and not merely incidentally. Not to accept that spirit is not to accept Homer. The manner of describing the Olympian family at the end of the first book is quite continuous throughout, and simply reaches its climax in the fourteenth book. Nobody ever believed in Homer's gods, as he must believe in Hektor and Achilles. (Puritans like Xenophanes were annoyed not with the gods for being as Homer described them, but with Homer for describing them as he did.) Virgil is more decorous; but can we imagine Virgil praying, or anybody praying, to the gods of theAeneid? The supernatural machinery of Camoens and Tasso is frankly absurd; they are not only careless of credibility, but of sanity. Lucan tried to do without gods; but his witchcraft engages belief even more faintly than the mingled Paganism and Christianity of Camoens, and merely shows how strongly the most rationalistic of epic poets felt the value of some imaginary relaxation in the limits of human existence. Is it, then, only as such a relaxation that supernatural machinery is valuable? Or only as a superlative kind of ornament? It is surely more than that. In spite of the fact that we are not seriously asked to believe in it, it does beautifully and strikingly crystallize the poet's determination to show us things that go past the reach of common knowledge. But by putting it, whether instinctively or deliberately, on a lower plane of credibility than the main action, the poet obeys his deepest and gravest necessity: the necessity of keeping his poem emphatically an affair of recognizablehumanevents. It is of man, and man's purpose in the world, that the epic poet has to sing; not of the purpose of gods. The gods must only illustrate man's destiny; and they must be kept within the bounds of beautiful illustration. But it requires a finer genius than most epic poets have possessed, to keep supernatural machinery just sufficiently fanciful without missing its function. Perhaps only Homer and Virgil have done that perfectly. Milton's revolutionary development marks a crisis in the general process of epic so important, that it can only be discussed when that process is considered, in the following chapter, as a whole.
FOOTNOTES:
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 5: Such as similes and episodes. It is as if a man were to say, the essential thing about a bridge is that it should be painted.]
THE EPIC SERIES
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, theArgonautica, theAeneid, thePharsalia, and the later Latin epics, form one series: theAeneidwould 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 fromBeowulf, theSong of Roland, and theNibelungenlied, through Camoens and Tasso up to Milton. And in this case Milton is plainly the climax. There is nothing likeParadise Lostin the preceding poems, and epic poetry has done nothing since but decline from that towering glory.
But it will be convenient not to make too much of chronology, in a general account of epic development. It has already appeared that the duties of all "authentic" epic are broadly the same, and the poems of this kind, though two thousand years may separate their occurrence, may be properly brought together as varieties of one sub-species. "Literary" epic differs much more in the specific purpose of its art, as civilized societies differ much more than heroic, and also as the loosermilieuof 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 theideal truthof epic development. We might say, then, that Homer begins the whole business of epic, imperishably fixes its type and, in a way that can never be questioned, declares its artistic purpose; Virgil perfects the type; and Milton perfects the purpose. Three such poets are not, heaven knows, summed up in a phrase; I mean merely to indicate how they are related one to another in the general scheme of epic poetry. For discriminating their merits, deciding their comparative eminence, I have no inclination; and fortunately it does not come within the requirements of this essay. Indeed, I think the reader will easily excuse me, if I touch very slightly on the poetic manner, in the common and narrow sense, of the poets whom I shall have to mention; since these qualities have been so often and sometimes so admirably dealt with. It is at the broader aspects of artistic purpose that I wish to look.
"From Homer," said Goethe, "I learn every day more clearly, that in our life here above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell." It is rather a startling sentence at first. That poetry which, for us, in Thoreau's excellent words, "lies in the east of literature," scarcely suggests, in the usual opinion of it, Hell. We are tempted to think of Homer as the most fortunate of poets. It seems as if he had but to open his mouth and speak, to create divine poetry; and it does not lessen our sense of his good fortune when, on looking a little closer, we see that this is really the result of an unerring and unfailing art, an extraordinarily skilful technique. He had it entirely at his command; and he exercised it in a language in which, though it may be singularly artificial and conventional, we can still feel the wonder of its sensuous beauty and the splendour of its expressive power. It is a language that seems alive with eagerness to respond to imagination. Open Homer anywhere, and the casual grandeur of his untranslatable language appears; such lines as:
amphi de naeessmerdaleon konabaesan ausanton hup' Achaion.[6]
That, you might say, is Homer at his ease; when he exerts himself you get a miracle like:
su den strophalingi koniaeskeiso megas megalosti, lelasmenos hipposunaon.[7]
It seems the art of one who walked through the world of things endowed with the senses of a god, and able, with that perfection of effort that looks as if it were effortless, to fashion his experience into incorruptible song; whether it be the dance of flies round a byre at milking-time, or a forest-fire on the mountains at night. The shape and clamour of waves breaking on the beach in a storm is as irresistibly recorded by Homer as the gleaming flowers which earth put forth to be the bed of Zeus and Hera in Gargaros, when a golden cloud was their coverlet, and Sleep sat on a pine tree near by in the likeness of a murmuring night-jar. It is an art so balanced, that when it tells us, with no special emphasis, how the Trojans came on with a din like the clangour of a flock of cranes, but the Achaians came on in silence, the temper of the two hosts is discriminated for the whole poem; or, in the supreme instance, when it tells us how the old men looked at Helen and said, "No wonder the young men fight for her!" then Helen's beauty must be accepted by the faith of all the world. The particulars of such poetry could be enumerated for pages; and this is the poetry which is filled, more than any other literature, in theIliadwith the nobility of men and women, in theOdysseywith 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 simplyenjoyit; it is easy to say, the man whose spirit held this poetry must have been divinely happy. But this is the poetry whence Goethe learnt that the function of man is "to enact Hell."
Goethe is profoundly right; though possibly he puts it in a way to which Homer himself might have demurred. For the phrase inevitably has its point in the word "Hell"; Homer, we may suppose, would have preferred the point to come in the word "enact." In any case, the details of Christian eschatology must not engage us much in interpreting Goethe's epigram. There is truth in it, not simply because the two poems take place in a theatre of calamity; not simply, for instance, because of the beloved Hektor's terrible agony of death, and the woes of Andromache and Priam. Such things are the partial, incidental expressions of the whole artistic purpose. Still less is it because of a strain of latent savagery in, at any rate, theIliad; as when the sage and reverend Nestor urges that not one of the Greeks should go home until he has lain with the wife of a slaughtered Trojan, or as in the tremendous words of the oath: "Whoever first offend against this oath, may their brains be poured out on the ground like this wine, their own and their children's, and may their wives be made subject to strangers." All that is one of the accidental qualities of Homer. But the force of the word "enact" in Goethe's epigram will certainly come home to us when we think of those famous speeches in which courage is unforgettably declared—such speeches as that of Sarpedon to Glaukos, or of Glaukos to Diomedes, or of Hektor at his parting with Andromache. What these speeches mean, however, in the whole artistic purpose of Homer, will assuredly be missed if they aredetachedfor consideration; especially we shall miss the deep significance of the fact that in all of these speeches the substantial thought falls, as it were, into two clauses. Courage is in the one clause, a deliberate facing of death; but something equally important is in the other. Is it honour? The Homeric hero makes a great deal of honour; but it is honour paid to himself, living; what he wants above everything is to be admired—"always to be the best"; that is what true heroism is. But he is to go where he knows death will strike at him; and he does not make much of honour after death; for him, the meanest man living is better than a dead hero. Death ends everything, as far as he is concerned, honour and all; his courage looks for no reward hereafter. No; butsinceten thousand fates of death are always instant round us;sincethe generations of men are of no more account than leaves of a tree;sinceTroy and all its people will soon be destroyed—he will stand in death's way. Sarpedon emphasizes this with its converse: There would be no need of daring and fighting, he says, of "man-ennobling battle," if we could be for ever ageless and deathless. That is the heroic age; any other would say, If only we could not be killed, how pleasant to run what might have been risks! For the hero, that would simply not be worth while. Does he find them pleasant, then, just because they are risky? Not quite; that, again, is to detach part of the meaning from the whole. If anywhere, we shall, perhaps, find the whole meaning of Homer most clearly indicated in such words as those given (without any enforcement) to Achilles and Thetis near the beginning of theIliad, as if to sound the pitch of Homer's poetry:
mêter, hepi m hetekes ge minynthadion per heonta,timên per moi hophellen Olympios engyalixaiZeus hypsibremetês.[8]
timêson moi yion hos hôkymorôtatos hallonheplet'.[9]
Minunthadion—hôkymorôtatos: those are the imporportant words; key-words, they might be called. If we really understand these lines, if we see in them what it is that Agamemnon's insult has deprived Achilles of—the sign and acknowledgment of his fellows' admiration while he is still living among them, the one thing which makes a hero's life worth living, which enables him to enact his Hell—we shall scarcely complain that theIliadis composed on a second-rate subject. The significance of the poem is not in the incidents surrounding the "Achilleis"; the whole significance is centred in the Wrath of Achilles, and thence made to impregnate every part.
Life is short; we must make the best of it. How trite that sounds! But it is not trite at all really. It seems difficult, sometimes, to believe that there was a time when sentiments now become habitual, sentiments that imply not only the original imperative of conduct, but the original metaphysic of living, were by no means altogether habitual. It is difficult to imagine backwards into the time when self-consciousness was still so fresh from its emergence out of the mere tribal consciousness of savagery, that it must not only accept the fact, but first intenselyrealize, that man is hôkymorôtatos—a thing of swiftest doom. And it was for men who were able, and forced, to do that, that theIliadand theOdysseyand the other early epics were composed. But life is not only short; it is, in itself,valueless. "As the generation of leaves, so is the generation of men." The life of man matters to nobody but himself. It happens incidentally in universal destiny; but beyond just happening it has no function. No function, of course, except for man himself. If man is to find any value in life it is he himself that must create the value. For the sense of the ultimate uselessness of life, of the blankness of imperturbable darkness that surrounds it, Goethe's word "Hell" is not too shocking. But no one has properly lived who has not felt this Hell; and we may easily believe that in an heroic age, the intensity of this feeling was the secret of the intensity of living. For where will the primitive instinct of man, where will the hero, find the chance of creating a value for life? In danger, and in the courage that welcomes danger. That not only evaluates life; it derives the value from the very fact that forces man to create value—the fact of his swift and instant doom—hôkymorôtatos once more; it makes this dreadful factenjoyable. And so, with courage as the value of life, and man thence delightedly accepting whatever can be made of his passage, the doom of life is not simply suffered; man enacts his own life; he has mastered it.
We need not say that this is the lesson of Homer. And all this, barely stated, is a very different matter from what it is when it is poetically symbolized in the vast and shapely substance of theIliadand theOdyssey. It is quite possible, of course, to appreciate, pleasantly and externally, theIliadwith its pressure of thronging life and its daring unity, and theOdysseywith its serener life and its superb construction, though much more sectional unity. But we do not appreciate what Homer did for his time, and is still doing for all the world, we do not appreciate the spirit of his music, unless we see the warfare and the adventure as symbols of the primary courage of life; and there is more in those words than seems when they are baldly written. And it is not his morals, but Homer's art that does that for us. And what Homer's art does supremely, the other early epics do in their way too. Their way is not to be compared with Homer's way. They are very much nearer than he is to the mere epic material—to the moderate accomplishment of the primitive ballad. Apart from their greatness, and often successful greatness, of intention, perhaps the only one that has an answerable greatness in the detail of its technique isBeowulf. That is not on account of its "kennings"—the strange device by which early popular poetry (Hesiod is another instance) tries to liberate and master the magic of words. A good deal has been made of these "kennings"; but it does not take us far towards great poetry, to have the sea called "whale-road" or "swan-road" or "gannet's-bath"; though we are getting nearer to it when the sun is called "candle of the firmament" or "heaven's gem." On the whole, the poem is composed in an elaborate, ambitious diction which is not properly governed. Alliteration proves a somewhat dangerous principle; it seems mainly responsible for the way the poet makes his sentences by piling up clauses, like shooting a load of stones out of a cart. You cannot always make out exactly what he means; and it is doubtful whether he always had a clearly-thought meaning. Most of the subsidiary matter is foisted in with monstrous clumsiness. YetBeowulfhas what we do not find, out of Homer, in the other early epics. It has occasionally an unforgettable grandeur of phrasing. And it has other and perhaps deeper poetic qualities. When the warriors are waiting in the haunted hall for the coming of the marsh-fiend Grendel, they fall into untroubled sleep; and the poet adds, with Homeric restraint: "Not one of them thought that he should thence be ever seeking his loved home again, his people or free city, where he was nurtured." The opening is magnificent, one of the noblest things that have been done in language. There is some wonderful grim landscape in the poem; towards the middle there is a great speech on deterioration through prosperity, a piece of sustained intensity that reads like an Aeschylean chorus; and there is some admirable fighting, especially the fight with Grendel in the hall, and with Grendel's mother under the waters, while Beowulf's companions anxiously watch the troubled surface of the mere. The fact that the action of the poem is chiefly made of single combat with supernatural creatures and that there is not tapestry figured with radiant gods drawn between the life of men and the ultimate darkness, gives a peculiar and notable character to the way Beowulf symbolizes the primary courage of life. One would like to think, with some enthusiasts, that this great poem, composed in a language totally unintelligible to the huge majority of Englishmen—further from English than Latin is from Italian—and perhaps not even composed in England, certainly not concerned either with England or Englishmen, might nevertheless be called an English epic.
But of course the early epics do not, any of them, merely repeat the significance of Homer in another form. They might do that, if poetry had to inculcate a moral, as some have supposed. But however nicely we may analyse it, we shall never find in poetry a significance which is really detachable, and expressible in another way. The significanceisthe poetry. WhatBeowulfor theIliador theOdysseymeans is simply what it is in its whole nature; we can but roughly indicate it. And as poetry is never the same, so its significance is never quite the same. Courage as the first necessary value of life is most naively and simply expressed, perhaps, in thePoem 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 theSong 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 theSong of Roland, as passionately conscious patriotism and loyalty. The chief contribution of theNibelungenliedto the main process of epic poetry isplotin narrative; a contribution, that is, to the manner rather than to the content of epic symbolism. There is something that can be called plot in Homer; but with him, as in all other early epics, it is of no great account compared with the straightforward linking of incidents into a direct chain of narrative. The story of theNibelungenlied, however, is not a chain but a web. Events and the influence of characters are woven closely and intricately together into one tragic pattern; and this requires not only characterization, but also the adding to the characters of persistent and dominant motives.
Epic poetry exhibits life in some great symbolic attitude. It cannot strictly be said to symbolize life itself, but always some manner of life. But life as courage—the turning of the dark, hard condition of life into something which can be exulted in—this, which is the deep significance of the art of the first epics, is the absolutely necessary foundation for any subsequent valuation of life; Man can achieve nothing until he has first achieved courage. And this, much more than any inheritance of manner, is what makes all the writers of deliberate or "literary" epic imply the existence of Homer. If Homer had not done his work, they could not have done theirs. But "literary" epics are as necessary as Homer. We cannot go on with courage as the solitary valuation of life. We must have the foundation, but we must also have the superstructure. Speaking comparatively, it may be said that the function of Homeric epic has been to create imperishable symbolism for the actual courageous consciousness of life, but the duty of "literary" epic has been to develop this function, answerably to the development of life itself, into symbolism of some consciousideaof life—something at once more formalized and more subtilized than the primary virtue of courage. The Greeks, however, were too much overshadowed by the greatness of Homer to do much towards this. TheArgonautica, the half-hearted epic of Apollonius Rhodius, is the only attempt that need concern us. It is not a poem that can be read straight through; it is only enjoyable in moments—moments of charming, minute observation, like the description of a sunbeam thrown quivering on the wall from a basin of water "which has just been poured out," lines not only charming in themselves, but finely used as a simile for Medea's agitated heart; or moments of romantic fantasy, as when the Argonauts see the eagle flying towards Prometheus, and then hear the Titan's agonized cry. But it is not in such passages that what Apollonius did for epic abides. A great deal of his third book is a real contribution to the main process, to epic content as well as to epic manner. To the manner of epic he added analytic psychology. No one will ever imagine character more deeply or more firmly than Homer did in, say, Achilles; but Apollonius was the man who showed how epic as well as drama may use the nice minutiae of psychological imagination. Through Virgil, this contribution to epic manner has pervaded subsequent literature. Apollonius, too, in his fumbling way, as though he did not quite know what he was doing, has yet done something very important for the development of epic significance. Love has been nothing but a subordinate incident, almost one might say an ornament, in the early epics; in Apollonius, though working through a deal of gross and lumbering mythological machinery, love becomes for the first time one of the primary values of life. The love of Jason and Medea is the vital symbolism of theArgonautica.
But it is Virgil who really begins the development of epic art. He took over from Apollonius love as part of the epic symbolism of life, and delicate psychology as part of the epic method. And, like Apollonius, he used these novelties chiefly in the person of a heroine. But in Virgil they belong to an incomparably greater art; and it is through Virgil that they have become necessities of the epic tradition. More than this, however, was required of him. The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time. Virgil not only implies, he often clearly states, the original epic values of life, the Homeric values; as in the famous:
Stat sua cuique dies; breve et inreparabile tempusOmnibus est vitae: sed famam extendere factis,Hoc virtutis opus.[10]
But to write a poem chiefly to symbolize this simple, heroic metaphysic would scarcely have done for Virgil; it would certainly not have done for his time. It was eminently a time of social organization, one might perhaps say of social consciousness. After Sylla and Marius and Caesar, life as an affair of sheer individualism would not very strongly appeal to a thoughtful Roman. Accordingly, as has so often been remarked, theAeneidcelebrates 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 agood Roman, theAeneidmight have been what no doubt Augustus, and Rome generally, desired, a political epic. But Virgil was not a good Roman; there was something in him that was not Roman at all. It was this strange incalculable element in him that seems for ever making him accomplish something he had not thought of; it was surely this that made him, unintentionally it may be, use the idea of the Roman Empire as a vehicle for a much profounder valuation of life. We must remember here the Virgil of the Fourth Eclogue—that extraordinary, impassioned poem in which he dreams of man attaining to some perfection of living. It is still this Virgil, though saddened and resigned, who writes theAeneid. 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 ofthat, is assuredly carrying on the work of Homer. This was the development in epic intention required to make epic poetry answer to the widening needs of civilization.
But even more important, in the whole process of epic, than what Virgil's art does, is the way it does it. And this in spite of the fact which everyone has noticed, that Virgil does not compare with Homer as a poet of seafaring and warfaring. He is not, indeed, very interested in either; and it is unfortunate that, in managing the story of Aeneas (in itself an excellent medium for his symbolic purpose) he felt himself compelled to try for some likeness to theOdysseyand theIliad—to do by art married to study what the poet of theOdysseyand theIliadhad done by art married to intuitive experience. But his failure in this does not matter much in comparison with his technical success otherwise. Virgil showed how poetry may be made deliberately adequate to the epic purpose. That does not mean that Virgil is more artistic than Homer. Homer's redundance, wholesale repetition of lines, and stock epithets cannot be altogether dismissed as "faults"; they are characteristics of a wonderfully accomplished and efficient technique. But epic poetry cannot be written as Homer composed it; whereas it must be written something as Virgil wrote it; yes, if epic poetry is to bewritten, 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 theAeneid, the epic style must be of this fashion: