No More Learning

Each succeeding bard
would improve, according to his own notions, the material he received
from his teachers; the prowess of the great heroes would become more and
more astonishing, more and more calculated to keep awake the feasted
nobles who listened to the song. In an age when writing, if it exists at
all, is a rare and secret art, the mists of antiquity descend after a
very few generations. There is little chance of the songs of the bards
being checked by recorded actuality; for if anyone could write at all,
it would be the bards themselves, who would use the mystery or purposes
of their own trade. In quite a short time, oral tradition, in keeping of
the bards, whose business is to purvey wonders, makes the champions
perform easily, deeds which "the men of the present time" can only gape
at; and every bard takes over the stock of tradition, not from original
sources, but from the mingled fantasy and memory of the bard who came
just before him. So that when this tradition survives at all, it
survives in a form very different from what it was in the beginning. But
apparently we can mark out several stages in the fortunes of the
tradition. It is first of all court poetry, or perhaps baronial poetry;
and it may survive as that. From this stage it may pass into possession
of the common people, or at least into the possession of bards whose
clients are peasants and not nobles; from being court poetry it becomes
the poetry of cottages and taverns. It may survive as this. Finally, it
may be taken up again by the courts, and become poetry of much greater
sophistication and nicety than it was in either of the preceding stages.
But each stage leaves its sign on the tradition.

All this gives us what is conveniently called "epic material"; the
material out of which epic poetry might be made. But it does not give us
epic poetry. The world knows of a vast stock of epic material scattered
up and down the nations; sometimes its artistic value is as
extraordinary as its archaeological interest, but not always. Instances
are our own Border Ballads and Robin Hood Ballads; the Servian cycles of
the Battle of Kossovo and the prowess of Marko; the modern Greek songs
of the revolt against Turkey (the conditions of which seem to have been
similar to those which surrounded the growth of our riding ballads); the
fragments of Finnish legend which were pieced together into the
_Kalevala_; the Ossianic poetry; and perhaps some of the minor sagas
should be put in here.
Then there are the glorious Welsh stories of
Arthur, Tristram, and the rest, and the not less glorious Irish stories
of Deirdre and Cuchulain; both of these noble masses of legend seem to
have only just missed the final shaping which turns epic material into
epic poetry. For epic material, it must be repeated, is not the same
thing as epic poetry. Epic material is fragmentary, scattered, loosely
related, sometimes contradictory, each piece of comparatively small
size, with no intention beyond hearty narrative. It is a heap of
excellent stones, admirably quarried out of a great rock-face of
stubborn experience. But for this to be worked into some great
structure of epic poetry, the Heroic Age must be capable of producing
individuality of much profounder nature than any of its fighting
champions. Or rather, we should simply say that the production of epic
poetry depends on the occurrence (always an accidental occurrence) of
creative genius. It is quite likely that what Homer had to work on was
nothing superior to the Arthurian legends. But Homer occurred; and the
tales of Troy and Odysseus became incomparable poetry.

An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting
their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative. An epic
is not even a re-creation of old things; it is altogether a new
creation, a new creation in terms of old things. And what else is any
other poetry? The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a
tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him
too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more
strictly compelling. This must not be lost sight of. It is what the
poet does with the tradition he falls in which is, artistically, the
important thing. He takes a mass of confused splendours, and he makes
them into something which they certainly were not before; something
which, as we can clearly see by comparing epic poetry with mere epic
material, the latter scarce hinted at. He makes this heap of matter into
a grand design; he forces it to obey a single presiding unity of
artistic purpose.