A. EPIC POETRY

[1]Bildlich,here not so much creative as simply plastic or constructive.

[2]Vorliebe.His interest must be already centred in it.

[3]Bildlichkeit,i.e.their claims as images of something else.

[4]Vertauscht.I have translated "exchanged," but Hegel may mean "mistaken for."

[5]It is not very clear what Hegel means by the wordBezeichnungen."Turns of expression," which first occurred to me, appears to be covered byFlexionsformenlower down.

[6]Gedrungenen.The idea is suppression into a compact mass—a cloud unable to burst save in occasional flashes.

[7]I presume Hegel refers here to the synthetic arrangement of genuine paragraphs rather than phrases, composition generally.

[8]Das eigentliche Wort. The word, that is, which expresses the fact in its immediacy.

[9]More literally, "being remoulded with the life and wealth of Spirit."

[10]Besonnenheit,i.e.,real thought-fullness.

[11]Der künstlerischen Ruhe.The personal predilection of Hegel for classic art here once more asserts itself.

[12]The German word isSinnen, but I think, though the emotional sense is partly implied, the main emphasis is on a presiding mind—or rather a wide-visioned genius.

[13]Eine sprudelnde Anschauung.A view of things that bubbles forth like a fountain.

[14]That is, the medium of literary form.

[15]Ein hartes Band.The idea is not so much difficult as unyielding, unmalleable.

[16]Zum Ernste des Inhalts. That is, the earnestness of a product of mind as such. Hegel seems to contrast with this the spontaneity of an art which, as inspired by genius, comes to us with the freshness of Nature herself, take Shakespeare's songs for example.

[17]Ungebunden.That is, it is contingent.

[18]Hegel calls this theVerstandesaccent, and speaks of this importance (Bedeutsamkeit) as a product of the syllables.

[19]I presume the wordsdas für sich gestaltete Klingenrefer to rhyme.

[20]Eine Sammlung in sich, that is, an independent collection or aggregate.

[21]Anhebenmay possibly mean appearance in the defined series generally.

[22]ByVersenHegel means rather lines than a number of them.

[23]The dative appears to be a misprint. The passage should be readderanddie,instead ofdemandder.

[24]I am not quite sure what Hegel refers to in what he describes asdas Hinübergreifen des Wortes.I presume he means what are known as weak endings to a line.

[25]Gedrungen.I suppose this is the meaning. The entire passage is a difficult one to follow.

[26]Ein allgemeines Hören.

[27]That is, the accent of the syllables as a mere medium of uttered speech.

[28]Lit., has its flank turned,überflügelt.

[29]Die blosse Vergeistigung.

[30]No other means to divert the ears attention. The sentence is rather involved, and I have not seen my way to simplify it.

[31]Abstract unterworfen.Hegel apparently means abstract as detached from the natural medium of language—becoming thereby the abstract symbol of idea exclusively.

[32]As in musical art.

[33]Seelen-tonen,i.e.,the wave and flow of the emotional life itself.

[34]In das Spielen. Hegel repeats his use of the expression above,beiher Spielen, lit., the playing with not as a toy but as something serious.

[35]I suppose this is the meaning here ofSharfsinn,but "subtlety" may be included.

[36]Indifferent, that is, as asserting the creative freedom of the poet, he can select his own rhymes as he wills. Hegel, however, seems rather to miss the essential spontaneity of really good blank verse.

[37]So I translatedie innere Subjectivität, but it may refer perhaps to the entire creative personality.

[38]That is, I presume, their relation to romantic art.

[39]That is, the primary feature changed is that of the validity of natural quantity.

[40]Dem Äusseren Daseyn.That is, of language.

[41]Entfaltung.Such an explication of rhythmical euphony as the previous system discloses.

[42]Geistes.All that pertains to conscious life.

[43]Lit., a blunt or coarse sound,ein plumpes Klingen.

[44]Tonenimplies sound no less than accent. I have rendered it in various ways.

[45]Von Seiten des Geistes.Perhaps rather "as aspects of the poet's intelligence"—that is, with reference to the self-assertion above explained.

[46]More nearly related to the natural medium of language.

[47]Die Verslehre der Isländer v. Rask, verd. von Mohnike, Berlin, 1830, pp. 14-17.

[48]Betonte, see above note onTonen.

[49]Stämme, the stem of verbs, rather than the root of substantives, which would be more correctlystammwort.

[50]"Do we moderns face broad reaches such as these, as did the ancients?"Falten, folds, expatiation of subject-matter. I presume, though I do not recall the context, that the allusion is mainly to elegiacs.

[51]I.e., more related to active intelligence.

The two fundamental aspects, according to which we have hitherto examined the poetical art were, in the first instance, that of poetical significance or contentin the broadest sense, the nature of the outlook of a poetical composition and the creative activity of the poet; secondly, poeticalexpression,not merely respectively to the ideas which have to be embodied inwords,but also to the modes under which they are expressed and the character ofversification.

I. What we, above all, in these respects endeavoured to enforce consisted in this, that poetry has to embrace the ideality of conscious life as its content; yet, in its artistic elaboration of the same, it cannot rest satisfied with the objective form of direct perception as other plastic arts; nor can it accept as its form the emotional ideality which alone reverberates through our soul-life, nor yet that ofthinking and the relations of reflective thought. It has to maintain a mediate position between the extremes of immediate objectivity and the inner life of feeling and thought. This intermediate sphere of conception overlaps both sides. From thought it borrows the aspect of idealuniversality,which binds together the immediate particularity of the senses in more definitive simplicity; while, on the other hand, its mode of envisagement shares with plastic art the haphazard[1]juxtaposition of objects in space. The poetic imagination, moreover, is essentially distinct from thinking in that it permits, under the mode of sensuous apprehension from which it starts, particular ideas to remain in an unrelated series or contiguity; pure thinking, on the other hand, demands and promotes the reciprocal dependence of determinate concepts on each other, an interstructure of relations, consequential or conclusive judgments, and so forth. When, therefore, thepoeticalimagination in its art-products renders necessary an ideal unity of all particularity, such integration may easily meet with obstruction by virtue of the above-mentioned diffuseness[2]which the nature of its content forbids it wholly to eschew; and it is just this which puts it in the power of poetry to embody and present a content in organic and vital inter-connection of successive aspects and divisions, yet impressed at the same time with the apparent independence of these. And by this means it is possible for poetry to extend the selected content at one time rather in the direction of abstract thought, at another rather under the condition of the phenomenal world, and consequently to include within its survey the most sublime thoughts of speculative philosophy, no less than the external objects of Nature, always provided that the former are not put forward in the logical forms of ratiocination and scientific deduction, or the latter as void of all vital or other significance. The function, in short, of poetry is to present a complete world, whose ideal or essential content must be spread before us under the external guise of human actions, events, and other manifestations of soul;life, with all the wealth and directness compatible with such art.

2. This explication, however, does not receive its sensuous embodiment in stone, wood, or colour, but exclusively in language, whose versification, accentuation, and the rest are in fact the trappings[3]of speech, by means of which the ideal content secures an external form. If we ask ourselves now, to put the thing somewhat crudely, where we are to look for thematerialconsistency of this mode of expression, we must reply that language is not essentially on all fours with a work[4]of plastic art, independent, that is, of the artistic creator, but it is thelife of our humanity itselfthe individual speaker alone who is the vehicle of the sensuous presence and actuality of a poetical work. The compositions of poetry must be recited, sung, acted, reproduced, in short, by living people, just as the compositions of music are so reproduced. We are no doubt accustomed to read epic and lyric poetry, and only to hear drama recited and to see the same accompanied by gesture. Poetry, however, is essentially and according to its notion,sonorous expression, and we may, in particular, not dispense with this, if a complete exposition of the art is our aim, for the reason that it is the aspect and the only aspect, under which it comes into genuine contact with objective existence. The printed or written letter is, no doubt, also in a sense objectively present, but it is merely as the indifferent symbol of sounds and words. We no doubt have in a previous passage regarded words as the purely external means which give us the signification of ideas. We must not, however, overlook the fact that poetry, at any rate, so informs the temporal element and sound of these signs, as to ennoble them in amedium suffused with the ideal vitality of that, whereof, in their abstractness, they are the symbols. The printing press merely makes visible to our eyes this form of animation under a mode which, taken by itself, is essentially indifferent and no longer coalescent with the ideal content; it consigns it, in its altered form of visibility, to the element of time-duration and the sound of ordinary speech,[5]instead of giving us in fact the accented word and its determinate time-duration. When we, therefore, content ourselves with mere reading we do so partly owing to the ease with which we can thus picture to ourselves what is real as actually uttered in speech, partly because of the undeniable fact that poetry alone among the arts, in aspects of fundamental importance, is already completely at home in the life of spirit, and neither the impression of it on our sense of sight or hearing give us the root of the matter. Yet for all that, precisely by virtue of this ideality, poetry, as art, ought not wholly to divest itself of this aspect of objective expression, if at least it is anxious to avoid an incompleteness similar to that in which, for instance, the mere outlined drawing attempts to reproduce the picture of famous colourists.

3. As an artistically organic whole referred no longer to a specific type of exclusive execution on account of the onesided character of its medium, the art of poetry accepts in a general way for its determinate form various types of art-production, and it is consequently necessary to borrow thecriteriaof ourclassificationof suchpoetical typesor species from thegeneralnotion of artistic production.[6]

(A) In this respect it is,first,and from one point of view, the form of objective reality, wherein poetry reproduces the evolved content of conscious life in the ideal image, and therewithal essentially repeats the principle of plastic art, which makes the immediate object of fact visible. These plastic figures of the imagination poetry furthermore unveils as determined in the activities of human and divine beings, so that every thing, which takes place, issues in part fromethically self-subsistent human or divine forces, and in part also, by virtue of obstructive agencies, meets with a reaction, and thus, in its external form of manifestation, becomes anevent,in which the facts in question disclose themselves in free independence, and the poet retires into the background. To grasp such events in a consequential whole is the task ofEpicpoetry, inasmuch as its aim is just to declare poetically, and in the form of the actual facts, either an essentially complete action, or the personalities, from which the same proceeds in its substantive worth or its eventful complexity amid the medley of external accidence. And by so doing it represents theobjectivefact itself in its objectivity.

And, moreover, the minstrel does not recite this positive world before conscious sense and feeling in a way that would seem to announce it as his personal phantasy, and his own heart's passion; rather this reciter or rhapsodist recites it by heart, in a mechanical sort of way, and in a metre which, while it repeats something of this monotony with its uniformity of structure, rolls onward in a tranquil and steady stream. What, in short, the minstrel narrates must appear as a part of real life, which, in respect to content no less than presentation, stands in absolute independence aloof from himself, the narrator; he is throughout, in relation that is to the facts of his tale no less than the manner in which he unfolds them, not permitted wholly to identify his own personality with their substance.

(B) In direct contrast to epic poetry we have oursecondtype, that namely oflyricalpoetry. Its content is that within ourselves, the ideal world, the contemplative or emotional life of soul, which instead of following up actions, remains at home with itself in its own ideal realm, and, consequently, is able to acceptself-expressionas its unique and indeed final end. Here we have, therefore, no substantive totality, self-evolved as external fact or event, but the express outlook, emotion and observation of the individual's self-introspective life shares in what is substantive and actual therein as its own, as its passion, mood or reflection; we have here the birth of its own loins. Such a fulfilment and ideal process is not adequately realized in a mechanical delivery such as we saw was conceded as appropriateto epic poetry. On the contrary the singer must give utterance to the ideas and views of lyrical art as though they were the expression of his own soul, his own emotions. And inasmuch as it is thisinnermost world, which the delivery has to animate, the expression of it will above all lean to the musical features of poetical reproduction; whether permitted as an embellishment or a necessity we shall here meet with the varied modulation of the voice, either in recitation or song, and the accompaniment of musical instruments.

(C) Ourthirdand final mode of poetical composition unites the two previous ones in a new totality. In this we not only discover anobjectiveexposition, but also can trace its source in the ideal life of particular people; what is objective here is therefore portrayed as appertinent to the conscious life of individuals.[7]To put the case conversely, the conscious life of individuals is on the one hand unfolded as it passes over into actual life experience, and on the other as involved in the fatality of events, which brings about passion in causal and necessary connection with the individual's own action. We have here, therefore, as in Epic poetry, an action expanded to our view in its conflicts and issues; spiritual forces come to expression and battle; the element of contingency is everywhere involved, and human activity is either brought into contact with the energy of an omnipotent destiny, or a directive and world-ruling Providence. Human action, however, does not here only pass before our vision in the objective form of its actual occurrence, as an event of the Past resuscitated by the narrative alone; on the contrary, it is made to appear as actually realized in the particular volition, morality or immorality of the specific characters depicted, which thereby become central in the principle oflyricpoetry. Add to this, however, that such individuals are not merely disclosed in their inner experience as such; they also declare themselves in the execution of passion directed toends; whereby they offer a criterion—in the way that epic poetry asserts what is substantive in its positive reality[8]for the evaluation of those passions and the aims which are directed to the objective conditions and rational laws of the concrete world; and it is, moreover, by this very test of the worth and conditions, under which such individuals continue in their resolve to abide, that their destiny is discovered by implication. This objective presence, which proceeds from the personality itself, no less than this personal experience,[9]which is reproduced in its active realization and all that declares its worth in the world, is Spirit in its own living totality; it is this which, asaction, supplies both form and content todramatic poetry.

Moreover, inasmuch as this concrete whole is itself no less essentially conscious life than it is, under the aspect of its external realization, also a self-manifestation, quite apart from all question of local or other artistic means of realization, we are bound, in respect to this representation of actual facts, to meet the claim of genuine poetry that we should have theentire personalityof the individual envisaged; only as such the living man himself is actually that which is expressed. For though, on the one hand, in the drama, as in lyric poetry, a character ought to express the content of its own soul-life as a veritable possession, yet, from another point of view, it asserts itself, when, in its entire personality it is confronted with other personalities, as effective in its practical existence, and comes thereby into active contact with the world around it, by means of which it attaches itself immediately to an active disposition,[10]which, quite as truly as articulate speech, is an expression of the soul-life, and requires its artistic treatment. Already we find in lyrical poetry some close approach to the apportionment of various emotions among different individual speakers, and the distribution of its subject-matter in acts or scenes.

In the drama, then, subjective emotion passes on likewise to the expression of action; and, by so doing, renders necessary the manifestation to our senses of the play of gesture which concentrates the universality of language in a closer relation with the expression of personality,[11]and by means of position, demeanour, gesticulation and other ways is individualized and completed. If, however, this aspect of deportment is carried forward by artistic means to a degree of expression, that it can dispense with speech, we have the art of pantomime, which resolves the rhythmical movement of poetry in a harmonious and picturesque motion of limbs, and in this, so to speak, plastic music of bodily position and movement gives animated life in the dance to the tranquil and cold figures of sculpture, that it may essentially unite by such means music and the plastic art.

[1]Gleichgültige, that is, the impressions of sense are received from without, from a manifold indifferent to ourselves.

[2]Losheit.A word coined by Hegel to denote this relation of poetry to external objects in their independence.

[3]Die Gebehrden, lit., gestures, in which sense it is used in a subsequent passage.

[4]We should rather have expected "the material of plastic art." The contrast is rather between the nature of the medium in each case than the finished product. So far as the latter is concerned the musical composition is as dependent, even more dependent for its presentment on human activity as poetical composition.

[5]Des Klingens unseres Gewohnheit.It is not quite clear what the meaning is here. The meaning may be as in the interpretation above. But it is rather difficult to see how, so far as mere print goes, we can be conscious of actual sound at all, unless it is intended here to include at least the act of reading; an alternative interpretation would be the "habitual verbal accent," but we should in that case have rather expected the substantiveNachdrucksforKlingens.

[6]Hegel means of course that as that notion stands midway between the objectivity of sense-perception and the concept of thought, so too this classification will be based on the attitude of the art either to the personal life, or the objects of sense, as the one aspect is more strongly represented or the other.

[7]Dem Subject.That is, I understand, the individual subject generally, not merely the conscious life of the poet or the singer.

[8]In seiner Gediegenheit,i.e.,as concrete.

[9]Dies Subjektive.The realization of self in the world is part of that world regarded as a rational and self-conscious process, Spirit.

[10]Sich die Gebehrde anschliesst,i.e.a practical attitude to the world, involving gesture and other actions.

[11]Hegel's expression is "the personality of expression,"i.e.,the personal aspect of expression.

The Epos, word, saga, states simply what the fact is which is translated into the word. It acquires an essentially self-consistent content in order to express the factthat it isand how it is. What we have here brought before consciousness is the object regarded as object in its relations and circumstances, in their full compass and development, the object, in short, in its determinate existence.

We propose to treat our subject-matter as follows:

First, we shall attempt to describe thegeneralcharacter of what is Epical:

Secondly, we shall proceed to someparticularfeatures, which in respect to the real Epos are of exceptional importance:

Thirdly, we shall enumerate by name certainspecificmethods of treatment, which have been actually in use in particular epic compositions within the historical elaboration of the type.

(a) The most simple, but nevertheless in its abstract concentration, still one-sided and incomplete mode of epic exposition consists in the assertion of that which is essentially fundamental and necessary among the facts of the concreteworld and the wealth of mutable phenomena, and in the expression of such on their own account, as focussed in epic phraseology.

(α) We may begin our consideration of the type with theepigrami, in so far as it really remains an epigram, that is an inscription on columns, effects, monuments, gifts and so forth, and at the same time points with an ideal finger to something else, and by doing so explains through words, inscribed on an object, somewhat otherwise plastic, local, something present outside the words expressed. In such an example the epigram states simply what a definite fact is. The individual does not as yet express his concrete self; he attaches a concise interpretation to the object, the locality, which he has immediate perception of and which claims his interested attention, an interpretation which goes to the heart of the fact in question.

(β) A yet further advance may be discovered in the case where the twofold aspect of the object in its external reality and the fact of inscription disappears, in so far, that is, as poetry, without any actual representation on the object, expresses its idea of the fact. To this class belong the gnomes of the ancients, ethical sayings, which concentrate in concise language that which is more forceable than material objects, more permanent and universal than the monument of some definite action, more perdurable than votive offerings, columns, and temples. Such are duties in human existence, the wisdom of life, the vision of that which constitutes in action and knowledge the firm foundations and stable bonds for human kind. The epic character of such modes of conception consists in this, that such maxims do not declare themselves as exclusively personal emotion and reflection, and also, in the matter of their impression, are quite as little directed with the object even of affecting our emotions, but rather with the purpose to emphasize what is of sterling validity, whether as the object of human obligation or the sense of honour and propriety. The ancient Greek elegiacs have in some measure this epic tone. We have still extant a few verses of Solon of this kind, though the transition here into a hortatory tone and style is easily made. Such include exhortations or warnings with reference to the common social life, its laws and morality. We may also mention the goldsayings, which tradition ascribes to Pythagoras. Yet all such are of a hybrid nature, and referable to this, that though in general we may associate with them the tone of our distinct type, yet, owing to the incompleteness of the object, it is not fully realized, but rather there is a distinct tendency to involve with it that of another poetical type, in the present case the lyrical.

(γ) Such dicta may, however,thirdly, as already suggested, by being divested of this fragmentary and self-exclusive isolation, go to form a larger whole, be rounded off, that is, in a totality, which is altogether of theEpictype; we have here neither a purely lyrical frame of mind nor a dramatic action, but a specific and veritable sphere of the living world whose essential nature, as emphasized in its general characteristics, no less than as situated to particular aspects, points of view, occurrences or obligations, supplies us with an integrating unity and a genuine focal centre. In complete agreement with this type of epical content, which displays what is of permanent and universal import along with, as a rule, a distinct ethical purpose of admonishment, instruction or exhortation to an, in all essentials, ethically stable life, compositions of this kind receive adidacticflavour. Nevertheless, by reason of the novelty of their wise sayings, the freshness of their general outlook and the ingenuousness of their observation we must keep them quite distinct from more recent didactic poetry. They wholly justify, inasmuch as they give the necessary play to matter entirely descriptive, the conclusion that these two aspects taken together, instruction and description, are directly deduced as the substantive summary of facts which have been throughout experienced. As an obvious illustration I will merely mention the "Works and Days" of Hesiod, the teaching and descriptive power of which, in its primitive style and as a poetical composition, exercises a fascination upon us wholly different from the pleasure we experience in the colder elegance, the scientific or systematic conclusions of Virgil's poems on agriculture.

(b) The above described modes of epigram, gnome, and didactive poem accept theirspecificprovinces of Nature or human life as their subject-matter, while endeavouring to fix attention in concise language, with more or less limitationof survey, on that which is of permanent worth and essential truth in this or that object, condition, or activity; and even under the still more restricted condition which the art of poetry imposes on such a task the practical result upon human effort is still maintained. There is, however, a further orsecondtype of such compositions, which is, on the one hand, profounder in its penetration, and, on the other, lays less stress on instruction and reform. Such are the cosmogonies and theogonies, no less than those most ancient works of philosophy, which are still unable entirely to liberate themselves from the poetical form.

(α) In this way the exposition of the Eleatic philosophy in the poems of Xenophanes and Parmenides still remains poetic in form; and this is exceptionally so in the introduction prefaced by the latter to his work. The content is here the One, which, in its contrast to the Becoming or the already Become, all particular phenomena in short, is eternal and imperishable. No particularity is permitted to bring content to the human spirit, which strives after truth, and, in the first instance, is cognizant of the same in its most abstract unity and concreteness. Expatiating in the greatness of this object, and wrestling with the might of the same, the impulse of soul inclines instinctively to the lyrical expression, although the entire explication of the truths into which the writer's thought here penetrates carries on its face a wholly practical and thereby epic character.

(β) It is,secondly, thebecomingof objective things, in particular natural objects, the press and conflict of activities operative in Nature, which supplies the matter of the cosmogonies, and impels the poetic imagination to disclose in the still more concrete and opulent mode of actions and events real eventuality. And the way this faculty does this is by clothing the forces of Nature in relatively more or less personified or figurative images placed in distinct stages, and through the symbolical form of human events and actions. Such a type of epic content and exposition pre-eminently belongs to Oriental Nature-religions; and above all among them the poetry of India is to an excessive degree prolific in the invention and portrayal of such modes of conception, frequently of an unbridled and extravagant type, concerning the origin of the world and the powers that are activetherein.

(γ) We find,thirdly, similar characteristics in theogonies. Such occupy their true position mainly in so far as, on the one hand, the many particular gods are not suffered exclusively to possess the life of Nature as the more essential content of their power and creation, nor, conversely, is it one god that creates the world out of thought and spirit, and who, in the jealous mood of monotheism, will tolerate no other gods beside himself. This fair mean is alone exemplified in the religious outlook of the Greeks. It discovers an imperishable subject-matter for theogony-building in the forceful emancipation of the family of Zeus from the lawlessness of primitive natural forces, no less than in the conflict waged against them. It is a process and a strife which we may indeed affirm gives us the historical origins of the immortal gods of poetry itself. The famous example of such an epic mode of conception we possess in the theogony known to us under the name of Hesiod. In this composition the entire course of event is throughout wedded to the form of human occurrences; it becomes less and less symbolical just to the extent that the gods, who are summoned to a spiritual dominion, are themselves liberated through an intelligent and ethical individuality adequate to their essential nature, and consequently are rightfully claimed and depicted as acting like human beings. What is, however, still absent from this type of Epic composition is, in the first place, a genuinely completeresult[1]as poetry. The acts and events, which are within the scope of the survey of such poems, are no doubt an essentially necessary succession of occurrence, but they are not an individual action which issues as from a centre, wherein it discovers its unity and independence. From a further point of view the content of such poetry does not, and in virtue of its character cannot, present to us an essentiallycomplete whole. It does, and for the above reason must, exclude the real activities of mankind, which are indispensable as the truly concrete material for the active display of the Divine forces. Epic poetry, therefore, is bound to free itself from such defects, if it is to receive its most perfect expression.

In the types hitherto discussed, which as a rule are wholly passed over, what we call the epic tone is unmistakably present, but the content is not as yet poetical in the concrete sense. Particular ethical maxims and philosophemata still persist as part of the material. What is, however, poetical in the full sense is concrete ideality in individual guise; and the epos, inasmuch as it makes what actually exists its object, accepts as such the happening of a definite action, which, in the full compass of its circumstances and relations must be brought with clarity to our vision as an event enriched by its further association with the organically complete world of a nation and an age. It follows from this that the collective world-outlook and objective presence of a national spirit, displayed as an actual event in the form of its self-manifestation, constitutes, and nothing short of this does so, the content and form of the true epic poem. As one aspect of such a totality we have the religious consciousness in every degree of profundity attained by the human spirit; it furthermore embraces the particular concrete life, whether political or domestic, not excluding all the detail of external existence, and the means by which human necessities are satisfied. All such material the epos makes of vital account as a growth in close contact with individuals; and for this reason, that for poetry the universal and substantive is only realized in the living presence of spirit life.

Such a comprehensive world, together with the human characterization it embraces, must then pass before us as real in a tranquil stream, without any undue haste, either as positive history or dramatic action, towards its aim and conclusion. We must thereby be permitted to linger round isolated facts, to penetrate into the different pictures of its movement and to enjoy them in all their detail. And by this means the entire panorama receives in its objective mode of realization the form of an external series of events, the basis and limitations of which must be implied in the essential ideality of the particular epic content, and of which the positive assertion is alone absent. If, consequently, the epic poem is, in its links of connection, more diffuse,and, by virtue of the relatively greater independence of portions of it, inclined to suffer from lack of coherency, we must not allow ourselves the impression that it could ever have been actually sung throughout in this manner. Rather it is an imperative in its case, as in that of any other artistic production, that it should be finished off in an essentially organic whole, which, however, moves forward in apparent tranquillity, in order that the particular fact and the images of actual life it contains may engage our interest.

(α) Such a primitive whole is the epic composition, whether known as the saga, the book, or the bible of a people. We may add every great and important nation can claim to have such primitive books, in which we find a mirror of the original spirit of a folk. To this extent these memorials are nothing less than the real foundations of the national consciousness; and it would be of profound interest to make a collection of such epic bibles. Such a series of Epopees, however much they fell short of artistic compositions in the modern sense, would at least present to us a gallery of the genius of nations. At the same time it is doubtless the fact that it is not every national bible which can claim the poetic form of the epopœa; nor do all nations which have embodied their most sacred memorials, whether in relation to religion or secular life, in the form of comprehensive compositions of the epic type, possess religious books. The Old Testament, for example, contains no doubt much epic narrative and genuine history, no less than incidental poetic compositions; but despite of this the whole is not a work of art. In a similar way the New Testament, as also the Koran, are mainly limited to a religious subject-matter, starting from which the life of the world at large is to some extent and in later times a consequence. Conversely, though the Hellenes have a poetic bible in the poems of Homer, they are without ancient religious books in the sense the Hindoos and the Parsees possess such. Where, however, we meet with the primitive epopoea, we must essentially distinguish between primitive poetic books and the more recent classic compositions of a nation, which do not any longer offer us a mirror of the national spirit in all its compass but do no more than reflect it partially and in particular directions. The dramatic poetry of the Hindoos, for example, or the tragedies of Sophocles present no such exhaustive picture as we find in the Ramajana and the Maha-Bharata, or the Iliad and the Odyssey.

(β) And insomuch as in the genuine Epos the naïve national consciousness is expressed for the first time in poetic guise, the real epic poem will appear for the most part in that midway stage in which, though no doubt a people is aroused from its stupidity, and its life is to that extent essentially strengthened to the point of reproducing its own world and of feeling itself at home therein, yet, for all that, everything which at a later stage becomes fixed religious dogma or civic law and ethical rule, still remains in the fluency of life as mere opinion, inseparable from the individual as such. And along with this volition and feeling are not as yet held distinct from one another.

(αα) It is only after the separation of the individual's personal self from the concrete national whole, with its conditions, modes of opinion, exploits and destiny; it is only, further, after the division in man himself between his emotion and volition, that the lyric and dramatic types of poetry in turn replace the epic type and attain their richest development. This consummation is only reached in the later life-experience of a people, in which the general lines laid down by men for the due regulation of their affairs are no longer inseparable from the sentiments and opinions of the nation as a whole, but already have secured an independent structure as a co-ordinated system of jurisprudence and law, as a prosaic disposition of positive facts, as a political constitution, as a body of ethical or other precepts; and being so, individuals are now confronted with material obligations rather as a necessary force external to themselves than one which their own inner life asserts, and which it compels them to substantiate as its fulfilment. As opposed to such an already actual and independent system, the individual life will seek in part to find expression in an equally independent world and growth of personal vision, reflection and emotion, which are not carried further into the sphere of action, and will further givelyricalutterance to its selfabsorption, its pre-occupation with the content of such a soul-experience.And, in part also, it will make its active passion of main importance, and will seek to assert itself independently in action, in so far as it is able to divest external conditions, the event and its concomitants of any claim to truly epic self-subsistency. It is just this increase to the strength and stability of individual character and aims in their relation to action which opens the way todramaticpoetry. To return, however, to the epic, we repeat that it is the above-mentioned unity of feeling and action which it demands, that unity between the self-fulfilled object of the personal life and the external accident and event; a unity which, as observed, is only present without blemish as it first appears in the earliest periods of the national life or the national poetry.

(ββ) At the same time, we must not yield ourselves, therefore, to the impression that a people in its heroical time simply as such, and as the home of its epos, there and then was in possession of art, or could necessarily depict its life in the mirror of poetry. As a matter of fact, an essentially poetical nationality in its actual world-presence is one thing; the art of poetry regarded as the imaginative consciousness of poetical material, and the artistic presentment of such a world is quite another. The felt want to express oneselfas ideain terms of the latter, the trained knowledge of art, are later acquisitions than the life and spirit itself, which discovers itself in all simplicity at home in its unreservedly poetical existence. Homer and the poems under his name are centuries later than the Trojan war, which is to myself quite as much an historical fact as the personality of Homer. In the same way we may affirm of Ossian, always assuming that the poems ascribed to him are really his, that he celebrates an heroic past, the sunset splendour of which inspires him to recall and reclothe the same in poetical form.

(γγ) Despite, however, such a separation, some intimate bond of association must exist between the poet and his subject-matter. The poet must still stand on even terms with the conditions, the general point of vision, the beliefs which he depicts. All he should find it necessary to do is to attach to these the poetic consciousness and the art capable of portraying them; in other respects they are still essential factors in his own life. If such an affinity as that above described is absent in our poet's epic creation, his poemmust infallibly contain disparate and irreconcilable features. For both these aspects—namely, the content, the epic world, which it is the intention to portray, and the world of the poet's conscious life and imagination, which is in other respects independent of the above—are of spiritual derivation; they each of them possess intrinsically a definite principle, in which particular traits of characterization are involved. If, then, the personal life of the artist is essentially of a different order to that by virtue of which the historical and national life depicted came into actual being, we must necessarily become conscious of a cleft in the artistic result which will disturb and injure its effect. We shall have, in short, scenes placed before us of a previous condition of history, combined with modes of thought, opinions, and views more pertinent to other periods; and, in consequence of this, the configuration of primitive beliefs will, in its contact with the more developed reflection of a later time, lose the warmth of conviction, become, in short, a mere superstition, an empty embellishment of the mere poetical instrumentation, from which all the vitality of its actual life has vanished.

(γ) And this brings us to the general question what position the poet himself of genuine epic poetry really ought to take up.

(αα) Now, however much the Epos ought also to be positive in the sense that it is the objective presentment of a world based upon its own foundations, and realized in virtue of its own necessary laws, a world, moreover, with which the personal outlook of the poet must remain in a connection that enables him to identify himself wholly with it; yet it is equally true that his artistic product, which reproduces this world, is throughout thefree creationof himself. In this connection we shall do well to recall that fine expression of Herodotus: "Homer and Hesiod have created the gods of the Hellenic race." And, in truth, this free and audacious spirit of creation, which Herodotus attaches to the abovementioned poets, already is some testimony to the fact that although the Epopœa belongs to the early age of a nation, it is not its function to depict the most primitive condition of all. In other words, every nation possesses in its earliest origins more or less an alien culture of some kind, is confronted with a religious cult of foreign importation to which it submits, or which it regards as sacrosanct. And, indeed, we find that the minstrelsy, the superstition, the barbarous elements in human life, no less than the most exalted have their source just in this, that instead of being entirely at home with themselves, they are experienced as something aloof from themselves, that is not the natural product of their own national and individual consciousness. In this way, for example, the Hindoos must certainly, long before the date of their great Epopees, have experienced many an important revolution of religious beliefs and secular condition. The Greeks no less, as previously remarked, had to transform much material of an Egyptian, Phrygian, and Asiatic descent. The Romans, in their turn, were confronted with much of a Greek origin; and the barbarians, in the period of national invasion, with Christian or Roman antecedents, and so on. Not until the poet is able with a free hand to cast from him such a yoke, is able to take stock of what he really possesses, is conscious of his own worth, and we are thereby released from all perturbed state of mental vision, will the dawn break of a genuine epic creation. In contrast to such an outlook we have the age and the society modified by a cult abstract in its origin, with its elaborate dogmas, established political and moral maxims, all of which take us away from the concrete life at home with itself. The world of the truly epic poet maintains its opposition to such conditions. Not merely in respect to universal forces, passions, and aims which are operative in the soul-life of individuals, but also in such a poet's attitude to all external facts, be his creation never so independent, he is entirely as one in his own province. In just this way Homer is at home in all that he sings to us of his world, and where we are conscious of such intimacy in another we are infected with a like feeling, for we are here face to face with truth, with that spirit which lives in its world, and discovers therein its true being; and it does us good to feel this, inasmuch as the poet is himself present therein heart and soul. Such a world may, indeed, belong to a less advanced stage of evolution and culture than our own; but at least it does remain faithful to that of a poetry and beauty which is open to all, so that we essentially recognize and understand here everything which our higher life, our humanity in its fundamentaldemands, whether it be the honour, the opinions, the emotions, the exhortation, or the exploits of each and every hero; and we are able to enjoy such characters, in all the detail of their portraiture, as themselves united to such a life and the richness of its actual presence.

(ββ) But on account of the emphasis upon the objective independence of this whole, it is a further necessary contrast that the poet fall into the background and become lost in hissubject. What is to appear is the creation, not the poet; and yet withal, that which the poem expresses belongs to him. He has imagined all in his mind's eye; he has implanted there his soul, his genius. All this, however, is not expressly asserted. So we find, for instance, that at one time a Calchas will give the outline of events; at another, a Nestor. Yet, for all that, such interpretative matter is the gift of the poet himself. Nay, actual changes in the soul-life of his heroes he explains in objective fashion as an entrance of gods upon the scene, as in the case where Athene appears before Achilles in his rage, counselling self-restraint. And inasmuch as the Epos does not disclose the soul-life of the creator, save indirectly, but the positive facts of external life, the subjective aspect of his creations must completely fall into the background, no less than the creator himself vanish behind the world he unfolds to our vision. From this point of view a great epic style makes the work appear to be itself its own minstrel. It seems to pass before us self-begotten, a work of independent birth.

(γγ) Moreover, the epic poem, if a true work of art, is the exclusive creation ofoneartist. However much an epic may express the affairs of the entire nation, it remains the fact that it is the individual who is the poet, not the nation as a whole. The spirit of an age, of a people, is no doubt the essential operative cause; but realization is only secured in the work of art as conceived by the constructive genius of aparticularpoet, who brings before our vision and reproduces this universal spirit and its content as his own experience and his own product. Poetical composition is a real spiritual birth, and spirit or intelligence only exist as this or thatactual and individual conscious and self-conscious life. When we have already an artistic creation in a particular style,[2]we have no doubt something to start from; and others are then able to copy with more or less success something like it, just as we have to listen nowadays to some scores of poems written in the Goethesque manner. To continue to sing many compositions in the same kind of key, however, will never create the unified creation, which is throughout the work ofoneinspiring genius. This is a point of real importance not only in our attitude to the Homeric poems, but also the Niebelungen Lied. For the last-mentioned work we are unable to determine an author with any historical certainty; and as for the Iliad and Odyssey, the opinion of some critics is notorious that the Homer of tradition—that is, the sole author of these books—never existed at all. They are the production in different parts of various authors, parts which have finally been patched together in the two larger works we possess. With regard to such a theory the question of most importance is whether either or both of these extant works constitute an independent organic whole in the epic sense, or, as is the view fashionable nowadays, they possess no inevitable beginning or conclusion, but rather might be continued on present lines for ever. We may, of course, admit that the unity of the Homeric poems is, as part of their essential form, less compact than that we associate with the terse concentration of a dramatic work. Inasmuch as every separate portion may be and may appear as relatively independent, they give free play to many interpolations and abrupt transitions; but, despite of this, they do unquestionably constitute throughout a true, ideally organic, and epic totality. Such a whole can only be the composition ofoneauthor. This notion of a conglomerate without essential unity, of a mere patching together of various rhapsodies composed in a similar strain, is a wild sort of idea opposed to all artistic canons. Of course, if such a view merely amounts to this, that the poet, in his bare individuality, vanishes in his creation, it is the highest form of praise. This is merely a statement that we are unable to recognize any positive traces of wholly personal opinions and feeling. So much is certainly true of the Homeric poems. What we have before us, and we have only this, is the positive fact, the objective outlook of a people. But the song of a people requires a voice, a voice which can sing forth the contents of heart and soul, as harvested from the national granary; and an essentially self-integrated work of art calls for yetmore than this from theuniquegenius of its creator.

We have previously in our consideration of the general character of epic poetry briefly drawn attention to certain incomplete types, which, although of an epical strain, are not epopees in their completeness. They, in short, neither represent a national condition, nor a concrete event, within the boundaries of such a sphere. It is these latter features, which were then excluded, which offer us for the first time a content wholly equal to the perfected Epos, whose fundamental traits and conditions are thus stated.

Having recalled these points it becomes necessary now to investigate more closely what it is we require by way of completing our notion of the epic work of art. We are, however, on the threshold of this enquiry confronted with the difficulty that we have little or nothing to say on features of specific interest, if we confine our attention to generalities; Ave must rivet our attention on historical evidence, and those varied epic and national compositions, works which on account of the extraordinary diversity of the times and peoples to which they refer do not make us very hopeful of securing either a definite or a congruous result. We find, however, some compensation in the fact, that from among all the many epic bibles of the past we can place our finger on one at least, in which we have the clearest evidence of all which it is possible to establish as the true and fundamental character of the genuine epos. Such are the Homeric poems. These, then, above all, will be the source from which I shall borrow the characteristics, which, in my view, essentially determine the nature of such poetry, whether from the point of view of fact or theory. We propose to summarize our enquiry under the following heads:

First, we have to deal with the question, of what structurethe generalworld condition ought to be, on the basis of which the epic event is permitted to receive an adequate reproduction.

Secondly,we shall investigate the quality of this specific type of historical event itself.

Lastly, we shall direct attention to the form in which these two aspects of our subject-matter coalesce and are completed in the unity of a single work of art, that is, in the epic poem.

(a)The General World-condition of the Epic Poem

We have already, when Ave started on this subject, seen that it is not a single isolated action which is accomplished in the true epic event; the subject of the narrative is not, in short, a wholly accidental occurrence, but an action which is dove-tailed into the entire complexus of a particular age and national circumstances, which in consequence can only be placed before us with success as a constituent part of an extensive world, demanding as it does the reflection of such a world in its entirety. In respect to the actual poetical content of this background I shall be brief, inasmuch as I have already indicated the fundamental points of interest when, in the first part of this work, I discussed the general world-condition which the ideal action presupposed. In the present context therefore I shall restrict myself to the question what is of most importance to the Epos simply.

(α) That which is most adapted, as the all-embracing condition of human society, to form the background of the Epos consists in this, that it already possesses for particular individuals the form of a positive condition actually present, and yet continues with them in closest association with the simplicity of primitive life. For if the heroes who are placed as the crowning fact of all, are first to found a collective condition the determination of what is or ought to come into existence falls into the more personal sphere of character to a greater extent than is compatible with the nature of the Epos, and therewith all appearance of the same as objective reality is impossible.

(αα) The relations of ethical life, the aggregate of the family, of the people regarded as a complete nation, not merely with a view to war, but also in their peaceful security, must have become a positive fact in their evolution;yet along with this their organization cannot as yet have assumed the settled form of co-ordinate regulations, obligations, and laws independent in their validity of the direct personal and private activities of individuals, and possessive of the power to maintain themselves against such particular wills. Rather it is theintuitive senseof right and fairness, the moral habit, the temperament, the personality, which supply the support, as they are the source, of such a social order; we have, in short, no theoretic intelligence in its precipitated form of prosaic reality able to establish and secure such a resistance to the heart, the opinions and passions of individuals. We may dismiss the thought that a community with a fully organized constitution and an elaborate system of law, judicial courts, government officials and police, would supply the environment of a really epic action.[3]The conditions of positive morality must, no doubt, be present in the general will and conduct, but the instruments of its realization can only be the action and personality of individuals, and a determinate mode of its existence, of universal application and independent stability, is necessarily absent. We find, in short, in the Epos no doubt the substantive reciprocity of objective life and action, but we find no less a freedom in this world of life and action, which has all the appearance of originating exclusively from the isolated volition of individuals.

(ββ) The same considerations apply to the relation of the individual to thenaturalenvironment, from which he borrows the means tosatisfyhis wants, no less than discovers the best way to do so. In this respect, too, I would refer the reader back to what I have observed at greater length, when discussing the external definition of the Ideal.

What mankind requires in its external life, house and farm, tent, settle, bed, sword, lance, the ship, in which he crosses the sea, the chariot, which bears him into battle, his soup, his roast of meat, and drink—not one of these things need perforce become to him a lifeless instrument; he ought still to communicate to the same something of his entire life and substance, his essential self, and thereby leave the stamp of his own human individuality, by his active association on that which is otherwise wholly external. Our present life with its machinery and factory-made products, no less than the kind of way we seek to satisfy generally the needs of our external life, is in this respect quite as much as that of our political organization, wholly unfit to form the background which the Epos in its primitive guise demands. For just as the scientific faculty with its generalizations, its imperious conclusions, delivered independently of all personal views, can never have asserted its claim under the world-condition of the poetic type we are considering, so, too, we may assume that man did not yet appear divested of his vital connection with Nature, and the fresh and vigorous comradeship, whether as friends or opponents, which is therein implied.

(γγ) Such is the world-condition which, in a previous passage, and in contrast to the idyllic, I have called theheroic.We find it depicted in Homer with the noblest poetry, and with all the wealth of entirely human characterization. We have no more here, whether in domestic or public life, a barbarous state of things, than we have the wholly conventional prose of a regulated family and political organization; what we do find is that primitive mean of poetry much as I have already described it. A fundamental feature in such a condition is unquestionably the free individuality of all the principal personages. In the Iliad, for example, Agamemnon is, no doubt, a king of kings—all other chieftains are subject to his sceptre—but his superiority is no merely formal mutual relation of command and submission of the lord, that is, to his vassals. On the contrary, much circumspection is required of him; he must be shrewd enough to know where he ought to give way, for each particular chieftain is independent even as himself; they are not merely governors or generals summoned by him. They have assembled around him of their own free will, or are induced to follow his lead in a variety of ways. He must take counsel with them; and if they disagree with his judgment they are at liberty, as Achilles did, to remain aloof from the battle. It is this freedom of acceptance, no less than this free right to assert disapproval, which secures the absolute independence of such individuality, and attaches its poetical atmosphere to every situation. We find much the same thing in the poetry of Ossian, as also in the relation of the Cid to the princes, whom this poetical hero of romantic and national chivalry serves as vassal. In Ariosto and Tasso this free relation is still unimpaired; and indeed in Ariosto the individual heroes set forth in practically unqualified independence on their own path of adventure. And the mass of the folk stand in much the same relation to their leaders as that of the separate chieftains to Agamemnon. These too follow voluntarily. There is still no paramount legal obligation by which they are constrained. Honour, reverence, humility in the presence of men more mighty than themselves, ever able to enforce that might, the imposing presence of the heroic character in short and all it implies, such are the essential grounds of their obedience. The order of domestic life is maintained in a similar way. It is not enforced as an accepted rule of service, but as dependent on personal inclination or ethical habit. All is made to appear as though it had grown up spontaneously. Homer, for example, tells us of the Greeks, when narrating one of their battles with the Trojans, that they had lost many valiant fighters, but not so many as the Trojans; and the reason given is that they were always mindful to ward off from one another the extreme of necessity. In other words, they assisted each other. And if we, in our own days, had occasion to define the difference between a well-disciplined and an uncivilized army we could not express it more directly than by laying stress on this very coherence and spirit of cameraderie, this unity enforced by all in a felt association, which distinguished the former. Barbarians are simply human mobs, in which no individual can rely on his neighbour. What, however, in our modern example, being as it is the final result of a stringent and tedious military discipline, rather appears as the exercise and command of an established regime, in Homer's case is still an ethical habit asserted of its own accord, springing from the vital strength of the individual in his private capacity.

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