No More Learning

The real truth seems to be, that there is an inevitable and profound
difficulty in carrying on the Miltonic significance in anything like a
story. Regular epic having reached its climax in _Paradise Lost_, the
epic purpose must find some other way of going on. Hugo saw this, when
he strung his huge epic sequence together not on a connected story but
on a single idea: "la figure, c'est l'homme. " If we are to have, as we
must have, direct symbolism of the way man is conscious of his being
nowadays, which means direct symbolism both of man's spirit and of the
(philosophical) opponent of this, the universal fate of things--if we
are to have all this, it is hard to see how any story can be adequate to
such symbolic requirements, unless it is a story which moves in some
large region of imagined supernaturalism. And it seems questionable
whether we have enough _formal_ "belief" nowadays to allow of such a
story appearing as solid and as vividly credible as epic poetry needs.
It is a decided disadvantage, from the purely epic point of view, that
those admirable "Intelligences" in Hardy's _The Dynasts_ are so
obviously abstract ideas disguised. The supernaturalism of epic, however
incredible it may be in the poem, must be worked up out of the material
of some generally accepted belief. I think it would be agreed, that what
was possible for Milton would scarcely be possible to-day; and even more
impossible would be the naivete of Homer and the quite different but
equally impracticable naivete of Tasso and Camoens. The conclusion seems
to be, that the epic purpose will have to abandon the necessity of
telling a story.

Hugo's way may prove to be the right one. But there may be another; and
what has happened in the past may suggest what may happen in the future.
Epic poetry in the regular epic form has before now seemed unlikely. It
seemed unlikely after the Alexandrians had made such poor attempts at
standing upright under the immensity of Homer; it seemed so, until,
after several efforts, Latin poetry became triumphantly epic in Virgil.
And again, when the mystical prestige of Virgil was domineering
everything, regular epic seemed unlikely; until, after the doubtful
attempts of Boiardo and Ariosto, Tasso arrived. But in each case, while
the occurrence of regular epic was seeming so improbable, it
nevertheless happened that poetry was written which was certainly
nothing like epic in form, but which was strongly charged with a
profound pressure of purpose closely akin to epic purpose; and _De Rerum
Natura_ and _La Divina Commedia_ are very suggestive to speculation now.
Of course, the fact that, in both these cases, regular epic did
eventually occur, must warn us that in artistic development anything may
happen; but it does seem as if there were a deeper improbability for
the occurrence of regular epic now than in the times just before Virgil
and Tasso--of regular epic, that is, inspired by some vital import, not
simply, like _Sigurd the Volsung_, by archaeological import. Lucretius is
a good deal more suggestive than Dante; for Dante's form is too exactly
suited to his own peculiar genius and his own peculiar time to be
adaptable. But the method of Lucretius is eminently adaptable. That
amazing image of the sublime mind of Lucretius is exactly the kind of
lofty symbolism that the continuation of epic purpose now seems to
require--a subjective symbolism. I believe Wordsworth felt this, when he
planned his great symbolic poem, and partly executed it in _The Prelude_
and _The Excursion_: for there, more profoundly than anywhere out of
Milton himself, Milton's spiritual legacy is employed. It may be, then,
that Lucretius and Wordsworth will preside over the change from
objective to subjective symbolism which Milton has, perhaps, made
necessary for the continued development of the epic purpose: after
Milton, it seems likely that there is nothing more to be done with
objective epic. But Hugo's method, of a connected sequence of separate
poems, instead of one continuous poem, may come in here. The
determination to keep up a continuous form brought both Lucretius and
Wordsworth at times perilously near to the odious state of didactic
poetry; it was at least responsible for some tedium. Epic poetry will
certainly never be didactic. What we may imagine--who knows how vainly
imagine? --is, then, a sequence of odes expressing, in the image of some
fortunate and lofty mind, as much of the spiritual significance which
the epic purpose must continue from Milton, as is possible, in the style
of Lucretius and Wordsworth, for subjective symbolism. A pregnant
experiment towards something like this has already been seen--in George
Meredith's magnificent set of _Odes in Contribution to the Song of the
French History_. The subject is ostensibly concrete; but France in her
agonies and triumphs has been personified into a superb symbol of
Meredith's own reading of human fate. The series builds up a decidedly
epic significance, and its manner is extraordinarily suggestive of a new
epic method. Nevertheless, something more Lucretian in central
imagination, something less bound to concrete and particular event,
seems required for the complete development of epic purpose.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 13: In the greatest poetry, all the elements of human nature
are burning in a single flame.