No More Learning

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.