The Epic - Lascelles Abercrombie
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:
meter, hepi m hetekes ge minynthadion per heonta,
timen per moi hophellen Olympios engyalixai
Zeus hypsibremetes.[8]
* * * * *
timeson moi yion hos hokymorotatos hallon
heplet'.[9]
Minunthadion--hokymorotatos: 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 hokymorotatos--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--hokymorotatos 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.