The Epic / An Essay

by Lascelles Abercrombie

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.