But it is Virgil who really begins the
development
of epic art.
Lascelles Abercrombie - The Epic
A curious instance of the
difficulty in exactly defining epic (but not in exactly deciding what is
epic) may be found in the work of William Morris. Morris left two long
narrative poems, _The Life and Death of Jason_, and _The Story of Sigurd
the Volsung_.
I do not think anyone need hesitate to put _Sigurd_ among the epics; but
I do not think anyone who will scrupulously compare the experience of
reading _Jason_ with the experience of reading _Sigurd_, can help
agreeing that _Jason_ should be kept out of the epics. There is nothing
to choose between the subjects of the two poems. For an 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 of
_Jason_ are more interesting and attractive than the diction, often
monotonous and vague, and the metre, often clumsily vehement, of
_Sigurd_. Yet for all that it is the style of _Sigurd_ that puts it with
the epics and apart from _Jason_; for style goes beyond metre and
diction, beyond execution, into conception. The whole imagination of
_Sigurd_ is incomparably larger than that of _Jason_. In _Sigurd_, you
feel that the fashioning grasp of imagination has not only seized on the
show of things, and not only on the physical or moral unity of things,
but has somehow brought into the midst of all this, and has kneaded into
the texture of it all, something of the ultimate and metaphysical
significance of life. You scarcely feel that in _Jason_.
Yes, epic poetry must be an affair of evident largeness. It was well
said, that "the praise of an epic poem is to feign a person exceeding
Nature. " "Feign" here means to imagine; and imagine does not mean to
invent. But, like most of the numerous epigrams that have been made
about epic poetry, the remark does not describe the nature of epic, but
rather one of the conspicuous signs that that nature is fulfilling
itself. A poem which is, in some sort, a 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 the _Iliad_, a first-rate poem out of a second-rate subject.
It is a neat saying; but it seems unlikely that anything really
second-rate should turn into first-rate epic. I imagine Homer would have
been considerably surprised, if anyone had told him that the vast train
of tragic events caused by the gross and insupportable insult put by
Agamemnon, the mean mind in authority, on Achilles, the typical
hero--that this noble and profoundly human theme was a second-rate
subject. At any rate, the subject must be of capital importance in its
treatment. It must symbolize--not as a particular and separable
assertion, but at large and generally--some great aspect of vital
destiny, without losing the air of recording some accepted reality of
human experience, and without failing to be a good story; and the
pressure of high purpose will inform diction and metre, as far, at
least, as the 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 of _Beowulf_
has no need of it, for instance. A Christian redactor has worked over
the poem, with more piety than skill; he can always be detected, and his
clumsy little interjections have nothing to do with the general tenour
of the 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 about _Paradise Lost_ here; the
significance of the subject is not only liberated by, it entirely exists
in, the supernatural machinery. But with the other epic poets, we should
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 the _Iliad_ called _The Cheating of
Zeus_. The salvationist school of commentators calls this an
interpolation; but the spirit of it is implicit throughout the whole of
Homer's dealing with the gods; whenever, at least, he deals with them at
length, and not merely incidentally. Not to accept that spirit is not to
accept Homer. The manner of describing the Olympian family at the end of
the first book is quite continuous throughout, and simply reaches its
climax in the fourteenth book. 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 the
_Aeneid_? 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 recognizable _human_ events. It is of man, and
man's purpose in the world, that the epic poet has to sing; not of the
purpose of gods. The gods must only illustrate man's destiny; and they
must be kept within the bounds of beautiful illustration. But it
requires a finer genius than most epic poets have possessed, to keep
supernatural machinery just sufficiently fanciful without missing its
function. Perhaps only Homer and Virgil have done that perfectly.
Milton's revolutionary development marks a crisis in the general process
of epic so important, that it can only be discussed when that process is
considered, in the following chapter, as a whole.
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. ]
IV.
THE EPIC SERIES
By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art
has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which
it was made. But the development of human society does not go straight
forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the
series a recurring series--though not in exact repetition. Thus, the
Homeric poems, the _Argonautica_, the _Aeneid_, the _Pharsalia_, and the
later Latin epics, form one series: the _Aeneid_ would be the climax of
the series, which thence declines, were it not that the whole originates
with the incomparable genius of Homer--a fact which makes it seem to
decline from start to finish. Then the process begins again, and again
fulfils itself, in the series which goes from _Beowulf_, the _Song of
Roland_, and the _Nibelungenlied_, through Camoens and Tasso up to
Milton. And in this case Milton is plainly the climax. There is nothing
like _Paradise Lost_ in the preceding poems, and epic poetry has done
nothing since but decline from that towering glory.
But it will be convenient not to make too much of chronology, in a
general account of epic development. It has already appeared that the
duties of all "authentic" epic are broadly the same, and the poems of
this kind, though two thousand years may separate their occurrence, may
be properly brought together as varieties of one sub-species. "Literary"
epic differs much more in the specific purpose of its art, as civilized
societies differ much more than heroic, and also as the looser _milieu_
of a civilization allows a less strictly traditional exercise of
personal genius than an heroic age. Still, it does not require any
manipulation to combine the "literary" epics from both series into a
single process. Indeed, if we take Homer, Virgil and Milton as the
outstanding events in the whole progress of epic poetry, and group the
less important poems appropriately round these three names, we shall not
be far from the _ideal truth_ of epic development. We might say, then,
that Homer begins the whole business of epic, imperishably fixes its
type and, in a way that can never be questioned, declares its artistic
purpose; Virgil perfects the type; and Milton perfects the purpose.
Three such poets are not, heaven knows, summed up in a phrase; I mean
merely to indicate how they are related one to another in the general
scheme of epic poetry. For discriminating their merits, deciding their
comparative eminence, I have no inclination; and fortunately it does not
come within the requirements of this essay. Indeed, I think the 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 naees
smerdaleon 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 koniaes
keiso 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 the _Iliad_ with the nobility
of men and women, in the _Odyssey_ with the light of natural magic. And
think of those gods of Homer's; he is the one poet who has been able to
make the dark terrors of religion beautiful, harmless and quietly
entertaining. It is easy to read this poetry and simply _enjoy_ it; it
is easy to say, the man whose spirit held this poetry must have been
divinely happy. But this is the poetry whence Goethe learnt that the
function of man is "to enact Hell. "
Goethe is profoundly right; though possibly he puts it in a way to which
Homer himself might have demurred. For the phrase inevitably has its
point in the word "Hell"; Homer, we may suppose, would have preferred
the point to come in the word "enact. " In any case, the details of
Christian eschatology must not engage us much in interpreting Goethe's
epigram. There is truth in it, not simply because the two poems take
place in a theatre of calamity; not simply, for instance, because of the
beloved Hektor's terrible agony of death, and the woes of 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, the _Iliad_; as when the sage and reverend
Nestor urges that not one of the Greeks should go home until he has lain
with the wife of a slaughtered Trojan, or as in the tremendous words of
the oath: "Whoever first offend against this oath, may their brains be
poured out on the ground like this wine, their own and their children's,
and may their wives be made subject to strangers. " All that is one of
the accidental qualities of Homer. But the force of the word "enact" in
Goethe's epigram will certainly come home to us when we think of those
famous speeches in which courage is unforgettably declared--such
speeches as that of Sarpedon to Glaukos, or of Glaukos to Diomedes, or
of Hektor at his parting with Andromache. What these speeches mean,
however, in the whole artistic purpose of Homer, will assuredly be
missed if they are _detached_ for consideration; especially we shall
miss the deep significance of the fact that in all of these speeches the
substantial thought falls, as it were, into two clauses. Courage is in
the one clause, a deliberate facing of death; but something equally
important is in the other. Is it honour? The Homeric hero makes a great
deal of honour; but it is honour paid to himself, living; what he wants
above everything is to be admired--"always to be the best"; that is what
true heroism is. But he is to go where he knows death will strike at
him; and he does not make much of honour after death; for him, the
meanest man living is better than a dead hero. Death ends everything, as
far as he is concerned, honour and all; his courage looks for no reward
hereafter. No; but _since_ ten thousand fates of death are always
instant round us; _since_ the generations of men are of no more account
than leaves of a tree; _since_ Troy and all its people will soon be
destroyed--he will stand in death's way. 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 the _Iliad_, as if to sound the pitch of Homer's poetry:
mêter, hepi m hetekes ge minynthadion per heonta,
timên per moi hophellen Olympios engyalixai
Zeus hypsibremetês. [8]
* * * * *
timêson moi yion hos hôkymorôtatos hallon
heplet'. [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 the _Iliad_ is 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 intensely
_realize_, that man is hôkymorôtatos--a thing of swiftest doom. And it
was for men who were able, and forced, to do that, that the _Iliad_ and
the _Odyssey_ and the other early epics were composed. But life is not
only short; it is, in itself, _valueless_. "As the generation of leaves,
so is the generation of men. " The life of man matters to nobody but
himself. It happens incidentally in universal destiny; but beyond just
happening it has no function. No function, of course, except for man
himself. If man is to find any value in life it is he himself that must
create the value. For the sense of the ultimate uselessness of life, of
the blankness of imperturbable darkness that surrounds it, Goethe's word
"Hell" is not too shocking. But no one has properly lived who has not
felt this Hell; and we may easily believe that in an heroic age, the
intensity of this feeling was the secret of the intensity of living. For
where will the primitive instinct of man, where will the hero, find the
chance of creating a value for life? In danger, and in the courage that
welcomes danger. That not only evaluates life; it derives the value from
the very fact that forces man to create value--the fact of his swift and
instant doom--hôkymorôtatos once more; it makes this dreadful fact
_enjoyable_. 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 the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_. It is quite possible, of course, to appreciate, pleasantly
and externally, the _Iliad_ with its pressure of thronging life and its
daring unity, and the _Odyssey_ with its serener life and its superb
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 is _Beowulf_. That is not on
account of its "kennings"--the strange device by which early popular
poetry (Hesiod is another instance) tries to liberate and master the
magic of words. A good deal has been made of these "kennings"; but it
does not take us far towards great poetry, to have the sea called
"whale-road" or "swan-road" or "gannet's-bath"; though we are getting
nearer to it when the sun is called "candle of the firmament" or
"heaven's gem. " On the whole, the poem is composed in an elaborate,
ambitious diction which is not properly governed. Alliteration proves a
somewhat dangerous principle; it seems mainly responsible for the way
the poet makes his sentences by piling up clauses, like shooting a load
of stones out of a cart. You cannot always make out exactly what he
means; and it is doubtful whether he always had a clearly-thought
meaning. Most of the subsidiary matter is foisted in with monstrous
clumsiness. Yet _Beowulf_ has what we do not find, out of Homer, in the
other early epics. It has occasionally an unforgettable grandeur of
phrasing. And it has other and perhaps deeper poetic qualities. When the
warriors are waiting in the haunted hall for the coming of the
marsh-fiend Grendel, they fall into untroubled sleep; and the poet adds,
with Homeric restraint: "Not one of 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 significance _is_ the
poetry. What _Beowulf_ or the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_ means is simply
what it is in its whole nature; we can but roughly indicate it. And as
poetry is never the same, so its significance is never quite the same.
Courage as the first necessary value of life is most naively and simply
expressed, perhaps, in the _Poem of the Cid_; but even here the
expression is, as in all art, unique, and chiefly because it is
contrived through solidly imagined characters. There is splendid
characterization, too, in the _Song of Roland_, together with a fine
sense of poetic form; not fine enough, however, to avoid a prodigious
deal of conventional gag. The battling is lavish, but always exciting;
and in, at least, that section which describes how the dying Oliver,
blinded by weariness and wounds, mistakes Roland for a pagan and feebly
smites him with his sword, there is real and piercing pathos. But for
all his sense of character, the poet has very little discretion in his
admiration of his heroes. Christianity, in these two poems, has less
effect than one might think. The conspicuous value of life is still the
original value, courage; but elaboration and refinement of this begin
to appear, especially in the _Song of Roland_, as passionately conscious
patriotism and loyalty. The chief contribution of the _Nibelungenlied_
to the main process of epic poetry is _plot_ in narrative; a
contribution, that is, to the manner rather than to the content of epic
symbolism. There is something that can be called plot in Homer; but with
him, as in all other early epics, it is of no great account compared
with the straightforward linking of incidents into a direct chain of
narrative. The story of the _Nibelungenlied_, 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 conscious _idea_ of life--something
at once more formalized and more subtilized than the primary virtue of
courage. The Greeks, however, were too much overshadowed by the
greatness of Homer to do much towards this. The _Argonautica_, the
half-hearted epic of Apollonius Rhodius, is the only attempt that need
concern us. It is not a poem that can be read straight through; it is
only enjoyable in moments--moments of charming, minute observation, like
the description of a sunbeam thrown quivering on the wall from a basin
of water "which has just been poured out," lines not only charming in
themselves, but finely used as a simile for Medea's agitated heart; or
moments of romantic fantasy, as when the Argonauts see the eagle flying
towards Prometheus, and then hear the Titan's agonized cry. But it is
not in such passages that what 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 the _Argonautica_.
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 tempus
Omnibus 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, the
_Aeneid_ celebrates the Roman Empire. A political idea does not seem a
very likely subject for a kind of poetry which must declare greatly the
fundamentals of living; not even when it is a political idea unequalled
in the world, the idea of the Roman Empire. Had Virgil been a _good
Roman_, the _Aeneid_ might have been what no doubt Augustus, and Rome
generally, desired, a political epic. But Virgil was not a good Roman;
there was something in him that was not Roman at all. It was this
strange incalculable element in him that seems for ever making him
accomplish something he had not thought of; it was surely this that made
him, unintentionally it may be, use the idea of the Roman Empire as a
vehicle for a much profounder valuation of life. We must remember here
the Virgil of 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 the
_Aeneid_. Man creating his own destiny, man, however wearied with the
long task of resistance, achieving some conscious community of
aspiration, and dreaming of the perfection of himself: the poet whose
lovely and noble art makes us a great symbol of _that_, is assuredly
carrying on the work of Homer. This was the development in epic
intention required to make epic poetry answer to the widening needs of
civilization.
But even more important, in the whole process of epic, than what
Virgil's art does, is the way it does it. And this in spite of the fact
which everyone has noticed, that Virgil does not compare with Homer as a
poet of seafaring and warfaring. He is not, indeed, very interested in
either; and it is unfortunate that, in managing the story of Aeneas (in
itself an excellent medium for his symbolic purpose) he felt himself
compelled to try for some likeness to the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_--to
do by art married to study what the poet of the _Odyssey_ and the
_Iliad_ had done by art married to intuitive experience. But his failure
in this does not matter much in 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 be
_written_, Virgil must show how that is to be done. The superb Virgilian
economy is the thing for an epic poet now; the concision, the
scrupulousness, the loading of every word with something appreciable of
the whole significance. After the _Aeneid_, the epic style must be of
this fashion:
Ibant ovscuri sola sub nocte per umbram
Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna:
Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna
Est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra
Jupiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem. [11]
Lucan is much more of a Roman than Virgil; and the _Pharsalia_, so far
as it is not an historical epic, is a political one; the idea of
political liberty is at the bottom of it. That is not an unworthy theme;
and Lucan evidently felt the necessity for development in epic. But he
made the mistake, characteristically Roman, of thinking history more
real than legend; and, trying to lead epic in this direction,
supernatural machinery would inevitably go too. That, perhaps, was
fortunate, for it enabled Lucan safely to introduce one of his great and
memorable lines:
Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris;[12]
which would certainly explode any supernatural machinery that could be
invented. The _Pharsalia_ could not be anything more than an interesting
but unsuccessful attempt; it was not on these lines that epic poetry was
to develop. Lucan died at an age when most poets have done nothing very
remarkable; that he already had achieved a poem like the _Pharsalia_,
would make us think he might have gone to incredible heights, were it
not that the mistake of the _Pharsalia_ seems to belong incurably to his
temperament.
Lucan's determined stoicism may, philosophically, be more consistent
than the dubious stoicism of Virgil. But Virgil knew that, in epic,
supernatural imagination is better than consistency. It was an important
step when he made Jupiter, though a personal god, a power to which no
limits are assigned; when he also made the other divinities but shadows,
or, at most, functions, of Jupiter. This answers to his conviction that
spirit universally and singly pervades matter; but, what is more, it
answers to the needs of epic development. When we come to Tasso and
Camoens, we seem to have gone backward in this respect; we seem to come
upon poetry in which supernatural machinery is in a state of chronic
insubordination. But that, too, was perhaps necessary. In comparison
with the _Aeneid, Gerusalemme Liberata_ and _Os Lusiadas_ lack
intellectual control and spiritual depth; but in comparison with the
Roman, the two modern poems thrill with a new passion of life, a new
wine of life, heady, as it seems, with new significance--a significance
as yet only felt, not understood. Both Tasso and Camoens clearly join on
to the main epic tradition: Tasso derives chiefly from the _Aeneid_ and
the _Iliad_, Camoens from the _Aeneid_ and the _Odyssey_. Tasso is
perhaps more Virgilian than Camoens; the plastic power of his
imagination is more assured. But the advantage Camoens has over Tasso
seems to repeat the advantage Homer has over Virgil; the ostensible
subject of the _Lusiads_ glows with the truth of experience. But the
real subject is behind these splendid voyagings, just as the real
subject of Tasso is behind the battles of Christian and Saracen; and in
both poets the inmost theme is broadly the same. It is the consciousness
of modern Europe. _Jerusalem Delivered_ and the _Lusiads_ are drenched
with the spirit of the Renaissance; and that is chiefly responsible for
their lovely poetry. But they reach out towards the new Europe that was
then just beginning. Europe making common cause against the peoples that
are not Europe; Europe carrying her domination round the world--is that
what Tasso and Camoens ultimately mean? It would be too hard and too
narrow a matter by itself to make these poems what they are. No; it is
not the action of Europe, but the spirit of European consciousness, that
gave Tasso and Camoens their deepest inspiration. But what European
consciousness really is, these poets rather vaguely suggest than master
into clear and irresistible expression, into the supreme symbolism of
perfectly adequate art. They still took European consciousness as an
affair of geography and race rather than simply as a triumphant stage in
the general progress of man's knowledge of himself. Their time imposed a
duty on them; that they clearly understood. But they did not clearly
understand what the duty was; partly, no doubt, because they were both
strongly influenced by mediaeval religion. And so it is atmosphere, in
Tasso and Camoens, that counts much more than substance; both poets seem
perpetually thrilled by something they cannot express--the _non so che_
of Tasso. And what chiefly gives this sense of quivering, uncertain
significance to their poetry is the increase of freedom and decrease of
control in the supernatural. Supernaturalism was emphasized, because
they instinctively felt that this was the means epic poetry must use to
accomplish its new duties; it was disorderly, because they did not quite
know what use these duties required. Tasso and Camoens, for all the
splendour and loveliness of their work, leave epic poetry, as it were,
consciously dissatisfied--knowing that its future must achieve some
significance larger and deeper than anything it had yet done, and
knowing that this must be done somehow through imagined supernaturalism.
It waited nearly a hundred years for the poet who understood exactly
what was to be done and exactly how to do it.
In _Paradise Lost_, the development of epic poetry culminates, as far as
it has yet gone. The essential inspiration of the poem implies a
particular sense of human existence which has not yet definitely
appeared in the epic series, but which the process of life in Europe
made it absolutely necessary that epic poetry should symbolize. In
Milton, the poet arose who was supremely adequate to the greatest task
laid on epic poetry since its beginning with Homer; Milton's task was
perhaps even more exacting than that original one. "His work is not the
greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the first. " The epigram
might just as reasonably have been the other way round. But nothing
would be more unprofitable than a discussion in which Homer and Milton
compete for supremacy of genius. Our business here is quite otherwise.
With the partial exception of Tasso and Camoens, all epic poetry before
Milton is some symbolism of man's sense of his own will. It is simply
this in Homer; and the succeeding poets developed this intention but
remained well within it. Not even Virgil, with his metaphysic of
individual merged into social will--not even Virgil went outside it. In
fact, it is a sort of _monism_ of consciousness that inspires all
pre-Miltonic epic. But in Milton, it has become a _dualism_. Before him,
the primary impulse of epic is an impassioned sense of man's nature
_being contained_--by his destiny: _his_ only because he is in it and
belongs to it, as we say "_my_ country. " With Milton, this has
necessarily become not only a sense of man's rigorously contained
nature, but equally a sense of that which contains man--in fact,
simultaneously a sense of individual will and of universal necessity.
The single sense of these two irreconcilables is what Milton's poetry
has to symbolize. Could they be reconciled, the two elements in man's
modern consciousness of existence would form a monism. But this
consciousness is a dualism; its elements are absolutely opposed.
_Paradise Lost_ is inspired by intense consciousness of the eternal
contradiction between the general, unlimited, irresistible will of
universal destiny, and defined individual will existing within this, and
inexplicably capable of acting on it, even against it. Or, if that seems
too much of an antinomy to some philosophies (and it is perhaps possible
to make it look more apparent than real), the dualism can be unavoidably
declared by putting it entirely in terms of consciousness: destiny
creating within itself an existence which stands against and apart from
destiny by being _conscious_ of it. In Milton's poetry the spirit of man
is equally conscious of its own limited reality and of the unlimited
reality of that which contains him and drives him with its motion--of
his own will striving in the midst of destiny: destiny irresistible, yet
his will unmastered.
This is not to examine the development of epic poetry by looking at that
which is not _poetry_. In this kind of art, more perhaps than in any
other, we must ignore the wilful theories of those who would set
boundaries to the meaning of the word poetry. In such a poem as
Milton's, whatever is in it is its poetry; the poetry of _Paradise Lost_
is just--_Paradise Lost_! Its pomp of divine syllables and glorious
images is no more the poetry of Milton than the idea of man which he
expressed. But the general manner of an art is for ever similar; it is
its inspiration that is for ever changing. We need never expect words
and metre to do more than they do here:
they, fondly thinking to allay
Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit
Chewed bitter ashes, which the offended taste
With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayed,
Hunger and thirst constraining; drugged as oft,
With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws,
With soot and cinders filled;
or more than they do here:
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.
But what Homer's words, and perhaps what Virgil's words, set out to do,
they do just as marvellously. There is no sure way of comparison here.
How words do their work in poetry, and how we appreciate the way they do
it--this seems to involve the obscurest processes of the mind: analysis
can but fumble at it. But we can compare inspiration--the nature of the
inmost urgent motive of poetry. And it is not irrelevant to add (it
seems to me mere fact), that Milton had the greatest motive that has
ever ruled a poet.
For the vehicle of this motive, a fable of purely human action would
obviously not suffice. What Milton has to express is, of course,
altogether human; destiny is an entirely human conception. But he has to
express not simply the sense of human existence occurring in destiny;
that brings in destiny only mediately, through that which is destined.
He has to express the sense of destiny immediately, at the same time as
he expresses its opponent, the destined will of man. Destiny will appear
in poetry as an omnipotent God; Virgil had already prepared poetry for
that. But the action at large must clearly consist now, and for the
first time, overwhelmingly of supernatural imagination. Milton has been
foolishly blamed for making his supernaturalism too human. But nothing
can come into poetry that is not shaped and recognizable; how else but
in anthropomorphism could destiny, or (its poetic equivalent) deity,
exist in _Paradise Lost_?
We may see what a change has come over epic poetry, if we compare this
supernatural imagination of Milton's with the supernatural machinery of
any previous epic poet. Virgil is the most scrupulous in this respect;
and towards the inevitable change, which Milton completed and perfected
from Camoens and Tasso, Virgil took a great step in making Jupiter
professedly almighty. But compare Virgil's "Tantaene animis celestibus
irae? " with Milton's "Evil, be thou my good! " It is the difference
between an accidental device and essential substance. That, in order to
symbolize in epic form--that is to say, in _narrative_ form--the
dualistic sense of destiny and the destined, and both immediately
--Milton had to dissolve his human action completely in a
supernatural action, is the sign not merely of a development, but of a
re-creation, of epic art.
It has been said that Satan is the hero of _Paradise Lost_. The offence
which the remark has caused is due, no doubt, to injudicious use of the
word "hero. " It is surely the simple fact that if _Paradise Lost_ exists
for any one figure, that is Satan; just as the _Iliad_ exists for
Achilles, and the _Odyssey_ for Odysseus. It is in the figure of Satan
that the imperishable significance of _Paradise Lost_ is centred; his
vast unyielding agony symbolizes the profound antinomy of modern
consciousness. And if this is what he is in significance it is worth
noting what he is in technique. He is the blending of the poem's human
plane with its supernatural plane. The epic hero has always represented
humanity by being superhuman; in Satan he has grown into the
supernatural. He does not thereby cease to symbolize human existence;
but he is thereby able to symbolize simultaneously the sense of its
irreconcilable condition, of the universal destiny that contains it. Out
of Satan's colossal figure, the single urgency of inspiration, which
this dualistic consciousness of existence makes, radiates through all
the regions of Milton's vast and rigorous imagination. "Milton," says
Landor, "even Milton rankt with living men! "
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: 'And all round the ships echoed terribly to the shouting
Achaians. ']
[Footnote 7:
'When in a dusty whirlwind thou didst lie,
Thy valour lost, forgot thy chivalry. '--OGILBY.
(The version leaves out megas megalosti. )
]
[Footnote 8: 'Mother, since thou didst bear me to be so short-lived,
Olympian Zeus that thunders from on high should especially have bestowed
honour on me. ']
[Footnote 9: 'Honour my son for me, for the swiftest doom of all is
his. ']
[Footnote 10: "For everyone his own day is appointed; for all men the
period of life is short and not to be recalled: but to spread glory by
deeds, that is what valour can do. "]
[Footnote 11:
"They wer' amid the shadows by night in loneliness obscure
Walking forth i' the void and vasty dominyon of Ades;
As by an uncertain moonray secretly illumin'd
One goeth in the forest, when heav'n is gloomily clouded,
And black night hath robb'd the colours and beauty from all things. "
--ROBERT BRIDGES.
]
[Footnote 12: "All that is known, all that is felt, is God. "]
V.
AFTER MILTON
And after Milton, what is to happen? First, briefly, for a few instances
of what has happened. We may leave out experiments in religious
sentiment like Klopstock's _Messiah_. We must leave out also poems which
have something of the look of epic at first glance, but have nothing of
the scope of epic intention; such as Scott's longer poems. These might
resemble the "lays" out of which some people imagine "authentic" epic to
have been made. But the lays are not the epic. Scott's poems have not
the depth nor the definiteness of symbolic intention--what is sometimes
called the epic unity--and this is what we can always discover in any
poetry which gives us the peculiar experience we must associate with the
word epic, if it is to have any precision of meaning. What applies to
Scott, will apply still more to Byron's poems; Byron is one of the
greatest of modern poets, but that does not make him an epic poet. We
must keep our minds on epic intention. Shelley's _Revolt of Islam_ has
something of it, but too vaguely and too fantastically; the generality
of human experience had little to do with this glittering poem. Keats's
_Hyperion_ is wonderful; but it does not go far enough to let us form
any judgment of it appropriate to the present purpose. [13] Our search
will not take us far before we notice something very remarkable; poems
which look superficially like epic turn out to have scarce anything of
real epic intention; whereas epic intention is apt to appear in poems
that do not look like epic at all. In fact, it seems as if epic manner
and epic content were trying for a divorce. If this be so, the
traditional epic manner will scarcely survive the separation. Epic
content, however, may very well be looking out for a match with a new
manner; though so far it does not seem to have found an altogether
satisfactory partner.
But there are one or two poems in which the old union seems still happy.
Most noteworthy is Goethe's _Hermann und Dorothea_. You may say that it
does not much matter whether such poetry should be called epic or, as
some hold, idyllic. But it is interesting to note, first, that the poem
is deliberately written with epic style and epic intention; and, second,
that, though singularly beautiful, it makes no attempt to add anything
to epic development. It is interesting, too, to see epic poetry trying
to get away from its heroes, and trying to use material the poetic
importance of which seems to depend solely on the treatment, not on
itself. This was a natural and, for some things, a laudable reaction.
But it inevitably meant that epic must renounce the triumphs which
Milton had won for it. William Morris saw no reason for abandoning
either the heroes or anything else of the epic tradition. The chief
personages of _Sigurd the Volsung_ are admittedly more than human, the
events frankly marvellous. The poem is an impressive one, and in one way
or another fulfils all the main qualifications of epic. But perhaps no
great poem ever had so many faults. These have nothing to do with its
management of supernaturalism; those who object to this simply show
ignorance of the fundamental necessities of epic poetry. The first book
is magnificent; everything that epic narrative should be; but after this
the poem grows long-winded, and that is the last thing epic poetry
should be. It is written with a running pen; so long as the verse keeps
going on, Morris seems satisfied, though it is very often going on
about unimportant things, and in an uninteresting manner. After the
first book, indeed, as far as Morris's epic manner is concerned, Virgil
and Milton might never have lived. It attempts to be the grand manner by
means of vagueness. In an altogether extraordinary way, the poem slurs
over the crucial incidents (as in the inept lines describing the death
of Fafnir, and those, equally hollow, describing the death of
Guttorm--two noble opportunities simply not perceived) and tirelessly
expatiates on the mere surroundings of the story. Yet there is no
attempt to make anything there credible: Morris seems to have mixed up
the effects of epic with the effects of a fairy-tale. The poem lacks
intellect; it has no clear-cut thought. And it lacks sensuous images; it
is full of the sentiment, not of the sense of things, which is the wrong
way round. Hence the protracted conversations are as a rule amazingly
windy and pointless, as the protracted descriptions are amazingly
useless and tedious. And the superhuman virtues of the characters are
not shown in the poem so much as energetically asserted. It says much
for the genius of Morris that _Sigurd the Volsung_, with all these
faults, is not to be condemned; that, on the contrary, to read it is
rather a great than a tiresome experience; and not only because the
faults are relieved, here and there, by exquisite beauties and
dignities, indeed by incomparable lines, but because the poem as a whole
does, as it goes on, accumulate an immense pressure of significance. All
the great epics of the world have, however, perfectly clearly a
significance in close relation with the spirit of their time; the
intense desire to symbolize the consciousness of man as far as it has
attained, is what vitally inspires an epic poet, and the ardour of this
infects his whole style. Morris, in this sense, was not vitally
inspired. _Sigurd the Volsung_ is a kind of set exercise in epic poetry.
It is great, but it is not _needed_. It is, in fact, an attempt to write
epic poetry as it might have been written, and to make epic poetry mean
what it might have meant, in the days when the tale of Sigurd and the
Niblungs was newly come among men's minds. Mr. Doughty, in his
surprising poem _The Dawn in Britain_, also seems trying to compose an
epic exercise, rather than to be obeying a vital necessity of
inspiration. For all that, it is a great poem, full of irresistible
vision and memorable diction. But it is written in a revolutionary
syntax, which, like most revolutions of this kind, achieves nothing
beyond the fact of being revolutionary; and Mr. Doughty often uses the
unexpected effects of his queer syntax instead of the unexpected effects
of poetry, which makes the poem even longer psychologically than it is
physically. Lander's _Gebir_ has much that can truly be called epic in
it; and it has learned the lessons in manner which Virgil and Milton so
nobly taught. It has perhaps learned them too well; never were
concision, and the loading of each word with heavy duties, so thoroughly
practised. The action is so compressed that it is difficult to make out
exactly what is going on; we no sooner realize that an incident has
begun than we find ourselves in the midst of another. Apart from these
idiosyncrasies, the poetry of _Gebir_ is a curious mixture of splendour
and commonplace. If fiction could ever be wholly, and not only
partially, epic, it would be in _Gebir_.
In all these poems, we see an epic intention still combined with a
recognizably epic manner. But what is quite evident is, that in all of
them there is no attempt to carry on the development of epic, to take up
its symbolic power where Milton left it. On the contrary, this seems to
be deliberately avoided. For any tentative advance on Miltonic
significance, even for any real acceptance of it, we must go to poetry
which tries to put epic intention into a new form. Some obvious
peculiarities of epic style are sufficiently definite to be detachable.
Since Theocritus, a perverse kind of pleasure has often been obtained by
putting some of the peculiarities of epic--peculiarities really required
by a very long poem--into the compass of a very short poem. An epic
idyll cannot, of course, contain any considerable epic intention; it is
wrought out of the mere shell of epic, and avoids any semblance of epic
scope. But by devising somehow a connected sequence of idylls, something
of epic scope can be acquired again. As Hugo says, in his preface to _La
Legende des Siècles_: "Comme dans une mosaïque, chaque pierre a sa
couleur et sa forme propre; l'ensemble donne une figure. La figure de ce
livre," he goes on, "c'est l'homme. " To get an epic design or _figure_
through a sequence of small idylls need not be the result of mere
technical curiosity. It may be a valuable method for the future of epic.
Tennyson attempted this method in _Idylls of the King_; not, as is now
usually admitted, with any great success. The sequence is admirable for
sheer craftsmanship, for astonishing craftsmanship; but it did not
manage to effect anything like a conspicuous symbolism. You have but to
think of _Paradise Lost_ to see what _Idylls of the King_ lacks. Victor
Hugo, however, did better in _La Legende des Siècles_. "La figure, c'est
l'homme"; there, at any rate, is the intention of epic symbolism. And,
however pretentious the poem may be, it undoubtedly does make a
passionate effort to develop the significance which Milton had achieved;
chiefly to enlarge the scope of this significance. [14] Browning's _The
Ring and the Book_ also uses this notion of an idyllic sequence; but
without any semblance of epic purpose, purely for the exhibition of
human character.
difficulty in exactly defining epic (but not in exactly deciding what is
epic) may be found in the work of William Morris. Morris left two long
narrative poems, _The Life and Death of Jason_, and _The Story of Sigurd
the Volsung_.
I do not think anyone need hesitate to put _Sigurd_ among the epics; but
I do not think anyone who will scrupulously compare the experience of
reading _Jason_ with the experience of reading _Sigurd_, can help
agreeing that _Jason_ should be kept out of the epics. There is nothing
to choose between the subjects of the two poems. For an 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 of
_Jason_ are more interesting and attractive than the diction, often
monotonous and vague, and the metre, often clumsily vehement, of
_Sigurd_. Yet for all that it is the style of _Sigurd_ that puts it with
the epics and apart from _Jason_; for style goes beyond metre and
diction, beyond execution, into conception. The whole imagination of
_Sigurd_ is incomparably larger than that of _Jason_. In _Sigurd_, you
feel that the fashioning grasp of imagination has not only seized on the
show of things, and not only on the physical or moral unity of things,
but has somehow brought into the midst of all this, and has kneaded into
the texture of it all, something of the ultimate and metaphysical
significance of life. You scarcely feel that in _Jason_.
Yes, epic poetry must be an affair of evident largeness. It was well
said, that "the praise of an epic poem is to feign a person exceeding
Nature. " "Feign" here means to imagine; and imagine does not mean to
invent. But, like most of the numerous epigrams that have been made
about epic poetry, the remark does not describe the nature of epic, but
rather one of the conspicuous signs that that nature is fulfilling
itself. A poem which is, in some sort, a 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 the _Iliad_, a first-rate poem out of a second-rate subject.
It is a neat saying; but it seems unlikely that anything really
second-rate should turn into first-rate epic. I imagine Homer would have
been considerably surprised, if anyone had told him that the vast train
of tragic events caused by the gross and insupportable insult put by
Agamemnon, the mean mind in authority, on Achilles, the typical
hero--that this noble and profoundly human theme was a second-rate
subject. At any rate, the subject must be of capital importance in its
treatment. It must symbolize--not as a particular and separable
assertion, but at large and generally--some great aspect of vital
destiny, without losing the air of recording some accepted reality of
human experience, and without failing to be a good story; and the
pressure of high purpose will inform diction and metre, as far, at
least, as the 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 of _Beowulf_
has no need of it, for instance. A Christian redactor has worked over
the poem, with more piety than skill; he can always be detected, and his
clumsy little interjections have nothing to do with the general tenour
of the 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 about _Paradise Lost_ here; the
significance of the subject is not only liberated by, it entirely exists
in, the supernatural machinery. But with the other epic poets, we should
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 the _Iliad_ called _The Cheating of
Zeus_. The salvationist school of commentators calls this an
interpolation; but the spirit of it is implicit throughout the whole of
Homer's dealing with the gods; whenever, at least, he deals with them at
length, and not merely incidentally. Not to accept that spirit is not to
accept Homer. The manner of describing the Olympian family at the end of
the first book is quite continuous throughout, and simply reaches its
climax in the fourteenth book. 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 the
_Aeneid_? 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 recognizable _human_ events. It is of man, and
man's purpose in the world, that the epic poet has to sing; not of the
purpose of gods. The gods must only illustrate man's destiny; and they
must be kept within the bounds of beautiful illustration. But it
requires a finer genius than most epic poets have possessed, to keep
supernatural machinery just sufficiently fanciful without missing its
function. Perhaps only Homer and Virgil have done that perfectly.
Milton's revolutionary development marks a crisis in the general process
of epic so important, that it can only be discussed when that process is
considered, in the following chapter, as a whole.
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. ]
IV.
THE EPIC SERIES
By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art
has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which
it was made. But the development of human society does not go straight
forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the
series a recurring series--though not in exact repetition. Thus, the
Homeric poems, the _Argonautica_, the _Aeneid_, the _Pharsalia_, and the
later Latin epics, form one series: the _Aeneid_ would be the climax of
the series, which thence declines, were it not that the whole originates
with the incomparable genius of Homer--a fact which makes it seem to
decline from start to finish. Then the process begins again, and again
fulfils itself, in the series which goes from _Beowulf_, the _Song of
Roland_, and the _Nibelungenlied_, through Camoens and Tasso up to
Milton. And in this case Milton is plainly the climax. There is nothing
like _Paradise Lost_ in the preceding poems, and epic poetry has done
nothing since but decline from that towering glory.
But it will be convenient not to make too much of chronology, in a
general account of epic development. It has already appeared that the
duties of all "authentic" epic are broadly the same, and the poems of
this kind, though two thousand years may separate their occurrence, may
be properly brought together as varieties of one sub-species. "Literary"
epic differs much more in the specific purpose of its art, as civilized
societies differ much more than heroic, and also as the looser _milieu_
of a civilization allows a less strictly traditional exercise of
personal genius than an heroic age. Still, it does not require any
manipulation to combine the "literary" epics from both series into a
single process. Indeed, if we take Homer, Virgil and Milton as the
outstanding events in the whole progress of epic poetry, and group the
less important poems appropriately round these three names, we shall not
be far from the _ideal truth_ of epic development. We might say, then,
that Homer begins the whole business of epic, imperishably fixes its
type and, in a way that can never be questioned, declares its artistic
purpose; Virgil perfects the type; and Milton perfects the purpose.
Three such poets are not, heaven knows, summed up in a phrase; I mean
merely to indicate how they are related one to another in the general
scheme of epic poetry. For discriminating their merits, deciding their
comparative eminence, I have no inclination; and fortunately it does not
come within the requirements of this essay. Indeed, I think the 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 naees
smerdaleon 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 koniaes
keiso 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 the _Iliad_ with the nobility
of men and women, in the _Odyssey_ with the light of natural magic. And
think of those gods of Homer's; he is the one poet who has been able to
make the dark terrors of religion beautiful, harmless and quietly
entertaining. It is easy to read this poetry and simply _enjoy_ it; it
is easy to say, the man whose spirit held this poetry must have been
divinely happy. But this is the poetry whence Goethe learnt that the
function of man is "to enact Hell. "
Goethe is profoundly right; though possibly he puts it in a way to which
Homer himself might have demurred. For the phrase inevitably has its
point in the word "Hell"; Homer, we may suppose, would have preferred
the point to come in the word "enact. " In any case, the details of
Christian eschatology must not engage us much in interpreting Goethe's
epigram. There is truth in it, not simply because the two poems take
place in a theatre of calamity; not simply, for instance, because of the
beloved Hektor's terrible agony of death, and the woes of 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, the _Iliad_; as when the sage and reverend
Nestor urges that not one of the Greeks should go home until he has lain
with the wife of a slaughtered Trojan, or as in the tremendous words of
the oath: "Whoever first offend against this oath, may their brains be
poured out on the ground like this wine, their own and their children's,
and may their wives be made subject to strangers. " All that is one of
the accidental qualities of Homer. But the force of the word "enact" in
Goethe's epigram will certainly come home to us when we think of those
famous speeches in which courage is unforgettably declared--such
speeches as that of Sarpedon to Glaukos, or of Glaukos to Diomedes, or
of Hektor at his parting with Andromache. What these speeches mean,
however, in the whole artistic purpose of Homer, will assuredly be
missed if they are _detached_ for consideration; especially we shall
miss the deep significance of the fact that in all of these speeches the
substantial thought falls, as it were, into two clauses. Courage is in
the one clause, a deliberate facing of death; but something equally
important is in the other. Is it honour? The Homeric hero makes a great
deal of honour; but it is honour paid to himself, living; what he wants
above everything is to be admired--"always to be the best"; that is what
true heroism is. But he is to go where he knows death will strike at
him; and he does not make much of honour after death; for him, the
meanest man living is better than a dead hero. Death ends everything, as
far as he is concerned, honour and all; his courage looks for no reward
hereafter. No; but _since_ ten thousand fates of death are always
instant round us; _since_ the generations of men are of no more account
than leaves of a tree; _since_ Troy and all its people will soon be
destroyed--he will stand in death's way. 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 the _Iliad_, as if to sound the pitch of Homer's poetry:
mêter, hepi m hetekes ge minynthadion per heonta,
timên per moi hophellen Olympios engyalixai
Zeus hypsibremetês. [8]
* * * * *
timêson moi yion hos hôkymorôtatos hallon
heplet'. [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 the _Iliad_ is 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 intensely
_realize_, that man is hôkymorôtatos--a thing of swiftest doom. And it
was for men who were able, and forced, to do that, that the _Iliad_ and
the _Odyssey_ and the other early epics were composed. But life is not
only short; it is, in itself, _valueless_. "As the generation of leaves,
so is the generation of men. " The life of man matters to nobody but
himself. It happens incidentally in universal destiny; but beyond just
happening it has no function. No function, of course, except for man
himself. If man is to find any value in life it is he himself that must
create the value. For the sense of the ultimate uselessness of life, of
the blankness of imperturbable darkness that surrounds it, Goethe's word
"Hell" is not too shocking. But no one has properly lived who has not
felt this Hell; and we may easily believe that in an heroic age, the
intensity of this feeling was the secret of the intensity of living. For
where will the primitive instinct of man, where will the hero, find the
chance of creating a value for life? In danger, and in the courage that
welcomes danger. That not only evaluates life; it derives the value from
the very fact that forces man to create value--the fact of his swift and
instant doom--hôkymorôtatos once more; it makes this dreadful fact
_enjoyable_. 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 the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_. It is quite possible, of course, to appreciate, pleasantly
and externally, the _Iliad_ with its pressure of thronging life and its
daring unity, and the _Odyssey_ with its serener life and its superb
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 is _Beowulf_. That is not on
account of its "kennings"--the strange device by which early popular
poetry (Hesiod is another instance) tries to liberate and master the
magic of words. A good deal has been made of these "kennings"; but it
does not take us far towards great poetry, to have the sea called
"whale-road" or "swan-road" or "gannet's-bath"; though we are getting
nearer to it when the sun is called "candle of the firmament" or
"heaven's gem. " On the whole, the poem is composed in an elaborate,
ambitious diction which is not properly governed. Alliteration proves a
somewhat dangerous principle; it seems mainly responsible for the way
the poet makes his sentences by piling up clauses, like shooting a load
of stones out of a cart. You cannot always make out exactly what he
means; and it is doubtful whether he always had a clearly-thought
meaning. Most of the subsidiary matter is foisted in with monstrous
clumsiness. Yet _Beowulf_ has what we do not find, out of Homer, in the
other early epics. It has occasionally an unforgettable grandeur of
phrasing. And it has other and perhaps deeper poetic qualities. When the
warriors are waiting in the haunted hall for the coming of the
marsh-fiend Grendel, they fall into untroubled sleep; and the poet adds,
with Homeric restraint: "Not one of 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 significance _is_ the
poetry. What _Beowulf_ or the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_ means is simply
what it is in its whole nature; we can but roughly indicate it. And as
poetry is never the same, so its significance is never quite the same.
Courage as the first necessary value of life is most naively and simply
expressed, perhaps, in the _Poem of the Cid_; but even here the
expression is, as in all art, unique, and chiefly because it is
contrived through solidly imagined characters. There is splendid
characterization, too, in the _Song of Roland_, together with a fine
sense of poetic form; not fine enough, however, to avoid a prodigious
deal of conventional gag. The battling is lavish, but always exciting;
and in, at least, that section which describes how the dying Oliver,
blinded by weariness and wounds, mistakes Roland for a pagan and feebly
smites him with his sword, there is real and piercing pathos. But for
all his sense of character, the poet has very little discretion in his
admiration of his heroes. Christianity, in these two poems, has less
effect than one might think. The conspicuous value of life is still the
original value, courage; but elaboration and refinement of this begin
to appear, especially in the _Song of Roland_, as passionately conscious
patriotism and loyalty. The chief contribution of the _Nibelungenlied_
to the main process of epic poetry is _plot_ in narrative; a
contribution, that is, to the manner rather than to the content of epic
symbolism. There is something that can be called plot in Homer; but with
him, as in all other early epics, it is of no great account compared
with the straightforward linking of incidents into a direct chain of
narrative. The story of the _Nibelungenlied_, 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 conscious _idea_ of life--something
at once more formalized and more subtilized than the primary virtue of
courage. The Greeks, however, were too much overshadowed by the
greatness of Homer to do much towards this. The _Argonautica_, the
half-hearted epic of Apollonius Rhodius, is the only attempt that need
concern us. It is not a poem that can be read straight through; it is
only enjoyable in moments--moments of charming, minute observation, like
the description of a sunbeam thrown quivering on the wall from a basin
of water "which has just been poured out," lines not only charming in
themselves, but finely used as a simile for Medea's agitated heart; or
moments of romantic fantasy, as when the Argonauts see the eagle flying
towards Prometheus, and then hear the Titan's agonized cry. But it is
not in such passages that what 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 the _Argonautica_.
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 tempus
Omnibus 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, the
_Aeneid_ celebrates the Roman Empire. A political idea does not seem a
very likely subject for a kind of poetry which must declare greatly the
fundamentals of living; not even when it is a political idea unequalled
in the world, the idea of the Roman Empire. Had Virgil been a _good
Roman_, the _Aeneid_ might have been what no doubt Augustus, and Rome
generally, desired, a political epic. But Virgil was not a good Roman;
there was something in him that was not Roman at all. It was this
strange incalculable element in him that seems for ever making him
accomplish something he had not thought of; it was surely this that made
him, unintentionally it may be, use the idea of the Roman Empire as a
vehicle for a much profounder valuation of life. We must remember here
the Virgil of 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 the
_Aeneid_. Man creating his own destiny, man, however wearied with the
long task of resistance, achieving some conscious community of
aspiration, and dreaming of the perfection of himself: the poet whose
lovely and noble art makes us a great symbol of _that_, is assuredly
carrying on the work of Homer. This was the development in epic
intention required to make epic poetry answer to the widening needs of
civilization.
But even more important, in the whole process of epic, than what
Virgil's art does, is the way it does it. And this in spite of the fact
which everyone has noticed, that Virgil does not compare with Homer as a
poet of seafaring and warfaring. He is not, indeed, very interested in
either; and it is unfortunate that, in managing the story of Aeneas (in
itself an excellent medium for his symbolic purpose) he felt himself
compelled to try for some likeness to the _Odyssey_ and the _Iliad_--to
do by art married to study what the poet of the _Odyssey_ and the
_Iliad_ had done by art married to intuitive experience. But his failure
in this does not matter much in 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 be
_written_, Virgil must show how that is to be done. The superb Virgilian
economy is the thing for an epic poet now; the concision, the
scrupulousness, the loading of every word with something appreciable of
the whole significance. After the _Aeneid_, the epic style must be of
this fashion:
Ibant ovscuri sola sub nocte per umbram
Perque domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna:
Quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna
Est iter in silvis, ubi caelum condidit umbra
Jupiter, et rebus nox abstulit atra colorem. [11]
Lucan is much more of a Roman than Virgil; and the _Pharsalia_, so far
as it is not an historical epic, is a political one; the idea of
political liberty is at the bottom of it. That is not an unworthy theme;
and Lucan evidently felt the necessity for development in epic. But he
made the mistake, characteristically Roman, of thinking history more
real than legend; and, trying to lead epic in this direction,
supernatural machinery would inevitably go too. That, perhaps, was
fortunate, for it enabled Lucan safely to introduce one of his great and
memorable lines:
Jupiter est quodcunque vides, quodcunque moveris;[12]
which would certainly explode any supernatural machinery that could be
invented. The _Pharsalia_ could not be anything more than an interesting
but unsuccessful attempt; it was not on these lines that epic poetry was
to develop. Lucan died at an age when most poets have done nothing very
remarkable; that he already had achieved a poem like the _Pharsalia_,
would make us think he might have gone to incredible heights, were it
not that the mistake of the _Pharsalia_ seems to belong incurably to his
temperament.
Lucan's determined stoicism may, philosophically, be more consistent
than the dubious stoicism of Virgil. But Virgil knew that, in epic,
supernatural imagination is better than consistency. It was an important
step when he made Jupiter, though a personal god, a power to which no
limits are assigned; when he also made the other divinities but shadows,
or, at most, functions, of Jupiter. This answers to his conviction that
spirit universally and singly pervades matter; but, what is more, it
answers to the needs of epic development. When we come to Tasso and
Camoens, we seem to have gone backward in this respect; we seem to come
upon poetry in which supernatural machinery is in a state of chronic
insubordination. But that, too, was perhaps necessary. In comparison
with the _Aeneid, Gerusalemme Liberata_ and _Os Lusiadas_ lack
intellectual control and spiritual depth; but in comparison with the
Roman, the two modern poems thrill with a new passion of life, a new
wine of life, heady, as it seems, with new significance--a significance
as yet only felt, not understood. Both Tasso and Camoens clearly join on
to the main epic tradition: Tasso derives chiefly from the _Aeneid_ and
the _Iliad_, Camoens from the _Aeneid_ and the _Odyssey_. Tasso is
perhaps more Virgilian than Camoens; the plastic power of his
imagination is more assured. But the advantage Camoens has over Tasso
seems to repeat the advantage Homer has over Virgil; the ostensible
subject of the _Lusiads_ glows with the truth of experience. But the
real subject is behind these splendid voyagings, just as the real
subject of Tasso is behind the battles of Christian and Saracen; and in
both poets the inmost theme is broadly the same. It is the consciousness
of modern Europe. _Jerusalem Delivered_ and the _Lusiads_ are drenched
with the spirit of the Renaissance; and that is chiefly responsible for
their lovely poetry. But they reach out towards the new Europe that was
then just beginning. Europe making common cause against the peoples that
are not Europe; Europe carrying her domination round the world--is that
what Tasso and Camoens ultimately mean? It would be too hard and too
narrow a matter by itself to make these poems what they are. No; it is
not the action of Europe, but the spirit of European consciousness, that
gave Tasso and Camoens their deepest inspiration. But what European
consciousness really is, these poets rather vaguely suggest than master
into clear and irresistible expression, into the supreme symbolism of
perfectly adequate art. They still took European consciousness as an
affair of geography and race rather than simply as a triumphant stage in
the general progress of man's knowledge of himself. Their time imposed a
duty on them; that they clearly understood. But they did not clearly
understand what the duty was; partly, no doubt, because they were both
strongly influenced by mediaeval religion. And so it is atmosphere, in
Tasso and Camoens, that counts much more than substance; both poets seem
perpetually thrilled by something they cannot express--the _non so che_
of Tasso. And what chiefly gives this sense of quivering, uncertain
significance to their poetry is the increase of freedom and decrease of
control in the supernatural. Supernaturalism was emphasized, because
they instinctively felt that this was the means epic poetry must use to
accomplish its new duties; it was disorderly, because they did not quite
know what use these duties required. Tasso and Camoens, for all the
splendour and loveliness of their work, leave epic poetry, as it were,
consciously dissatisfied--knowing that its future must achieve some
significance larger and deeper than anything it had yet done, and
knowing that this must be done somehow through imagined supernaturalism.
It waited nearly a hundred years for the poet who understood exactly
what was to be done and exactly how to do it.
In _Paradise Lost_, the development of epic poetry culminates, as far as
it has yet gone. The essential inspiration of the poem implies a
particular sense of human existence which has not yet definitely
appeared in the epic series, but which the process of life in Europe
made it absolutely necessary that epic poetry should symbolize. In
Milton, the poet arose who was supremely adequate to the greatest task
laid on epic poetry since its beginning with Homer; Milton's task was
perhaps even more exacting than that original one. "His work is not the
greatest of heroic poems, only because it is not the first. " The epigram
might just as reasonably have been the other way round. But nothing
would be more unprofitable than a discussion in which Homer and Milton
compete for supremacy of genius. Our business here is quite otherwise.
With the partial exception of Tasso and Camoens, all epic poetry before
Milton is some symbolism of man's sense of his own will. It is simply
this in Homer; and the succeeding poets developed this intention but
remained well within it. Not even Virgil, with his metaphysic of
individual merged into social will--not even Virgil went outside it. In
fact, it is a sort of _monism_ of consciousness that inspires all
pre-Miltonic epic. But in Milton, it has become a _dualism_. Before him,
the primary impulse of epic is an impassioned sense of man's nature
_being contained_--by his destiny: _his_ only because he is in it and
belongs to it, as we say "_my_ country. " With Milton, this has
necessarily become not only a sense of man's rigorously contained
nature, but equally a sense of that which contains man--in fact,
simultaneously a sense of individual will and of universal necessity.
The single sense of these two irreconcilables is what Milton's poetry
has to symbolize. Could they be reconciled, the two elements in man's
modern consciousness of existence would form a monism. But this
consciousness is a dualism; its elements are absolutely opposed.
_Paradise Lost_ is inspired by intense consciousness of the eternal
contradiction between the general, unlimited, irresistible will of
universal destiny, and defined individual will existing within this, and
inexplicably capable of acting on it, even against it. Or, if that seems
too much of an antinomy to some philosophies (and it is perhaps possible
to make it look more apparent than real), the dualism can be unavoidably
declared by putting it entirely in terms of consciousness: destiny
creating within itself an existence which stands against and apart from
destiny by being _conscious_ of it. In Milton's poetry the spirit of man
is equally conscious of its own limited reality and of the unlimited
reality of that which contains him and drives him with its motion--of
his own will striving in the midst of destiny: destiny irresistible, yet
his will unmastered.
This is not to examine the development of epic poetry by looking at that
which is not _poetry_. In this kind of art, more perhaps than in any
other, we must ignore the wilful theories of those who would set
boundaries to the meaning of the word poetry. In such a poem as
Milton's, whatever is in it is its poetry; the poetry of _Paradise Lost_
is just--_Paradise Lost_! Its pomp of divine syllables and glorious
images is no more the poetry of Milton than the idea of man which he
expressed. But the general manner of an art is for ever similar; it is
its inspiration that is for ever changing. We need never expect words
and metre to do more than they do here:
they, fondly thinking to allay
Their appetite with gust, instead of fruit
Chewed bitter ashes, which the offended taste
With spattering noise rejected: oft they assayed,
Hunger and thirst constraining; drugged as oft,
With hatefullest disrelish writhed their jaws,
With soot and cinders filled;
or more than they do here:
What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield,
And what is else not to be overcome.
But what Homer's words, and perhaps what Virgil's words, set out to do,
they do just as marvellously. There is no sure way of comparison here.
How words do their work in poetry, and how we appreciate the way they do
it--this seems to involve the obscurest processes of the mind: analysis
can but fumble at it. But we can compare inspiration--the nature of the
inmost urgent motive of poetry. And it is not irrelevant to add (it
seems to me mere fact), that Milton had the greatest motive that has
ever ruled a poet.
For the vehicle of this motive, a fable of purely human action would
obviously not suffice. What Milton has to express is, of course,
altogether human; destiny is an entirely human conception. But he has to
express not simply the sense of human existence occurring in destiny;
that brings in destiny only mediately, through that which is destined.
He has to express the sense of destiny immediately, at the same time as
he expresses its opponent, the destined will of man. Destiny will appear
in poetry as an omnipotent God; Virgil had already prepared poetry for
that. But the action at large must clearly consist now, and for the
first time, overwhelmingly of supernatural imagination. Milton has been
foolishly blamed for making his supernaturalism too human. But nothing
can come into poetry that is not shaped and recognizable; how else but
in anthropomorphism could destiny, or (its poetic equivalent) deity,
exist in _Paradise Lost_?
We may see what a change has come over epic poetry, if we compare this
supernatural imagination of Milton's with the supernatural machinery of
any previous epic poet. Virgil is the most scrupulous in this respect;
and towards the inevitable change, which Milton completed and perfected
from Camoens and Tasso, Virgil took a great step in making Jupiter
professedly almighty. But compare Virgil's "Tantaene animis celestibus
irae? " with Milton's "Evil, be thou my good! " It is the difference
between an accidental device and essential substance. That, in order to
symbolize in epic form--that is to say, in _narrative_ form--the
dualistic sense of destiny and the destined, and both immediately
--Milton had to dissolve his human action completely in a
supernatural action, is the sign not merely of a development, but of a
re-creation, of epic art.
It has been said that Satan is the hero of _Paradise Lost_. The offence
which the remark has caused is due, no doubt, to injudicious use of the
word "hero. " It is surely the simple fact that if _Paradise Lost_ exists
for any one figure, that is Satan; just as the _Iliad_ exists for
Achilles, and the _Odyssey_ for Odysseus. It is in the figure of Satan
that the imperishable significance of _Paradise Lost_ is centred; his
vast unyielding agony symbolizes the profound antinomy of modern
consciousness. And if this is what he is in significance it is worth
noting what he is in technique. He is the blending of the poem's human
plane with its supernatural plane. The epic hero has always represented
humanity by being superhuman; in Satan he has grown into the
supernatural. He does not thereby cease to symbolize human existence;
but he is thereby able to symbolize simultaneously the sense of its
irreconcilable condition, of the universal destiny that contains it. Out
of Satan's colossal figure, the single urgency of inspiration, which
this dualistic consciousness of existence makes, radiates through all
the regions of Milton's vast and rigorous imagination. "Milton," says
Landor, "even Milton rankt with living men! "
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: 'And all round the ships echoed terribly to the shouting
Achaians. ']
[Footnote 7:
'When in a dusty whirlwind thou didst lie,
Thy valour lost, forgot thy chivalry. '--OGILBY.
(The version leaves out megas megalosti. )
]
[Footnote 8: 'Mother, since thou didst bear me to be so short-lived,
Olympian Zeus that thunders from on high should especially have bestowed
honour on me. ']
[Footnote 9: 'Honour my son for me, for the swiftest doom of all is
his. ']
[Footnote 10: "For everyone his own day is appointed; for all men the
period of life is short and not to be recalled: but to spread glory by
deeds, that is what valour can do. "]
[Footnote 11:
"They wer' amid the shadows by night in loneliness obscure
Walking forth i' the void and vasty dominyon of Ades;
As by an uncertain moonray secretly illumin'd
One goeth in the forest, when heav'n is gloomily clouded,
And black night hath robb'd the colours and beauty from all things. "
--ROBERT BRIDGES.
]
[Footnote 12: "All that is known, all that is felt, is God. "]
V.
AFTER MILTON
And after Milton, what is to happen? First, briefly, for a few instances
of what has happened. We may leave out experiments in religious
sentiment like Klopstock's _Messiah_. We must leave out also poems which
have something of the look of epic at first glance, but have nothing of
the scope of epic intention; such as Scott's longer poems. These might
resemble the "lays" out of which some people imagine "authentic" epic to
have been made. But the lays are not the epic. Scott's poems have not
the depth nor the definiteness of symbolic intention--what is sometimes
called the epic unity--and this is what we can always discover in any
poetry which gives us the peculiar experience we must associate with the
word epic, if it is to have any precision of meaning. What applies to
Scott, will apply still more to Byron's poems; Byron is one of the
greatest of modern poets, but that does not make him an epic poet. We
must keep our minds on epic intention. Shelley's _Revolt of Islam_ has
something of it, but too vaguely and too fantastically; the generality
of human experience had little to do with this glittering poem. Keats's
_Hyperion_ is wonderful; but it does not go far enough to let us form
any judgment of it appropriate to the present purpose. [13] Our search
will not take us far before we notice something very remarkable; poems
which look superficially like epic turn out to have scarce anything of
real epic intention; whereas epic intention is apt to appear in poems
that do not look like epic at all. In fact, it seems as if epic manner
and epic content were trying for a divorce. If this be so, the
traditional epic manner will scarcely survive the separation. Epic
content, however, may very well be looking out for a match with a new
manner; though so far it does not seem to have found an altogether
satisfactory partner.
But there are one or two poems in which the old union seems still happy.
Most noteworthy is Goethe's _Hermann und Dorothea_. You may say that it
does not much matter whether such poetry should be called epic or, as
some hold, idyllic. But it is interesting to note, first, that the poem
is deliberately written with epic style and epic intention; and, second,
that, though singularly beautiful, it makes no attempt to add anything
to epic development. It is interesting, too, to see epic poetry trying
to get away from its heroes, and trying to use material the poetic
importance of which seems to depend solely on the treatment, not on
itself. This was a natural and, for some things, a laudable reaction.
But it inevitably meant that epic must renounce the triumphs which
Milton had won for it. William Morris saw no reason for abandoning
either the heroes or anything else of the epic tradition. The chief
personages of _Sigurd the Volsung_ are admittedly more than human, the
events frankly marvellous. The poem is an impressive one, and in one way
or another fulfils all the main qualifications of epic. But perhaps no
great poem ever had so many faults. These have nothing to do with its
management of supernaturalism; those who object to this simply show
ignorance of the fundamental necessities of epic poetry. The first book
is magnificent; everything that epic narrative should be; but after this
the poem grows long-winded, and that is the last thing epic poetry
should be. It is written with a running pen; so long as the verse keeps
going on, Morris seems satisfied, though it is very often going on
about unimportant things, and in an uninteresting manner. After the
first book, indeed, as far as Morris's epic manner is concerned, Virgil
and Milton might never have lived. It attempts to be the grand manner by
means of vagueness. In an altogether extraordinary way, the poem slurs
over the crucial incidents (as in the inept lines describing the death
of Fafnir, and those, equally hollow, describing the death of
Guttorm--two noble opportunities simply not perceived) and tirelessly
expatiates on the mere surroundings of the story. Yet there is no
attempt to make anything there credible: Morris seems to have mixed up
the effects of epic with the effects of a fairy-tale. The poem lacks
intellect; it has no clear-cut thought. And it lacks sensuous images; it
is full of the sentiment, not of the sense of things, which is the wrong
way round. Hence the protracted conversations are as a rule amazingly
windy and pointless, as the protracted descriptions are amazingly
useless and tedious. And the superhuman virtues of the characters are
not shown in the poem so much as energetically asserted. It says much
for the genius of Morris that _Sigurd the Volsung_, with all these
faults, is not to be condemned; that, on the contrary, to read it is
rather a great than a tiresome experience; and not only because the
faults are relieved, here and there, by exquisite beauties and
dignities, indeed by incomparable lines, but because the poem as a whole
does, as it goes on, accumulate an immense pressure of significance. All
the great epics of the world have, however, perfectly clearly a
significance in close relation with the spirit of their time; the
intense desire to symbolize the consciousness of man as far as it has
attained, is what vitally inspires an epic poet, and the ardour of this
infects his whole style. Morris, in this sense, was not vitally
inspired. _Sigurd the Volsung_ is a kind of set exercise in epic poetry.
It is great, but it is not _needed_. It is, in fact, an attempt to write
epic poetry as it might have been written, and to make epic poetry mean
what it might have meant, in the days when the tale of Sigurd and the
Niblungs was newly come among men's minds. Mr. Doughty, in his
surprising poem _The Dawn in Britain_, also seems trying to compose an
epic exercise, rather than to be obeying a vital necessity of
inspiration. For all that, it is a great poem, full of irresistible
vision and memorable diction. But it is written in a revolutionary
syntax, which, like most revolutions of this kind, achieves nothing
beyond the fact of being revolutionary; and Mr. Doughty often uses the
unexpected effects of his queer syntax instead of the unexpected effects
of poetry, which makes the poem even longer psychologically than it is
physically. Lander's _Gebir_ has much that can truly be called epic in
it; and it has learned the lessons in manner which Virgil and Milton so
nobly taught. It has perhaps learned them too well; never were
concision, and the loading of each word with heavy duties, so thoroughly
practised. The action is so compressed that it is difficult to make out
exactly what is going on; we no sooner realize that an incident has
begun than we find ourselves in the midst of another. Apart from these
idiosyncrasies, the poetry of _Gebir_ is a curious mixture of splendour
and commonplace. If fiction could ever be wholly, and not only
partially, epic, it would be in _Gebir_.
In all these poems, we see an epic intention still combined with a
recognizably epic manner. But what is quite evident is, that in all of
them there is no attempt to carry on the development of epic, to take up
its symbolic power where Milton left it. On the contrary, this seems to
be deliberately avoided. For any tentative advance on Miltonic
significance, even for any real acceptance of it, we must go to poetry
which tries to put epic intention into a new form. Some obvious
peculiarities of epic style are sufficiently definite to be detachable.
Since Theocritus, a perverse kind of pleasure has often been obtained by
putting some of the peculiarities of epic--peculiarities really required
by a very long poem--into the compass of a very short poem. An epic
idyll cannot, of course, contain any considerable epic intention; it is
wrought out of the mere shell of epic, and avoids any semblance of epic
scope. But by devising somehow a connected sequence of idylls, something
of epic scope can be acquired again. As Hugo says, in his preface to _La
Legende des Siècles_: "Comme dans une mosaïque, chaque pierre a sa
couleur et sa forme propre; l'ensemble donne une figure. La figure de ce
livre," he goes on, "c'est l'homme. " To get an epic design or _figure_
through a sequence of small idylls need not be the result of mere
technical curiosity. It may be a valuable method for the future of epic.
Tennyson attempted this method in _Idylls of the King_; not, as is now
usually admitted, with any great success. The sequence is admirable for
sheer craftsmanship, for astonishing craftsmanship; but it did not
manage to effect anything like a conspicuous symbolism. You have but to
think of _Paradise Lost_ to see what _Idylls of the King_ lacks. Victor
Hugo, however, did better in _La Legende des Siècles_. "La figure, c'est
l'homme"; there, at any rate, is the intention of epic symbolism. And,
however pretentious the poem may be, it undoubtedly does make a
passionate effort to develop the significance which Milton had achieved;
chiefly to enlarge the scope of this significance. [14] Browning's _The
Ring and the Book_ also uses this notion of an idyllic sequence; but
without any semblance of epic purpose, purely for the exhibition of
human character.
