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: