No More Learning

For instance, _The Faery Queene_ and _La Divina Commedia_ have been
called epic poems; but I do not think that anyone could fail to admit,
on a little pressure, that the experience of reading _The Faery Queene_
or _La Divina Commedia_ is not in the least like the experience of
reading _Paradise Lost_ or the _Iliad_. But as a poem may have lyrical
qualities without being a lyric, so a poem may have epical qualities
without being an epic. In all the poems which the world has agreed to
call epics, there is a story told, and well told. But Dante's poem
attempts no story at all, and Spenser's, though it attempts several,
does not tell them well--it scarcely attempts to make the reader believe
in them, being much more concerned with the decoration and the
implication of its fables than with the fables themselves. What epic
quality, detached from epic proper, do these poems possess, then, apart
from the mere fact that they take up a great many pages? It is simply a
question of their style--the style of their conception and the style of
their writing; the whole style of their imagination, in fact. They take
us into a region in which nothing happens that is not deeply
significant; a dominant, noticeably symbolic, purpose presides over each
poem, moulds it greatly and informs it throughout.

This takes us some little way towards deciding the nature of epic. It
must be a story, and the story must be told well and greatly; and,
whether in the story itself or in the telling of it, significance must
be implied. Does that mean that the epic must be allegorical? Many have
thought so; even Homer has been accused of constructing allegories. But
this is only a crude way of emphasizing the significance of epic; and
there is a vast deal of difference between a significant story and an
allegorical story. Reality of substance is a thing on which epic poetry
must always be able to rely. Not only because Spenser does not tell his
stories very well, but even more because their substance (not, of
course, their meaning) is deliciously and deliberately unreal, _The
Faery Queene_ is outside the strict sense of the word epic. Allegory
requires material ingeniously manipulated and fantastic; what is more
important, it requires material invented by the poet himself.
That is a
long way from the solid reality of material which epic requires. Not
manipulation, but imaginative transfiguration of material; not
invention, but selection of existing material appropriate to his genius,
and complete absorption of it into his being; that is how the epic poet
works. Allegory is a beautiful way of inculcating and asserting some
special significance in life; but epic has a severer task, and a more
impressive one. It has not to say, Life in the world _ought_ to mean
this or that; it has to show life unmistakably _being_ significant. It
does not gloss or interpret the fact of life, but re-creates it and
charges the fact itself with the poet's own sense of ultimate values.
This will be less precise than the definite assertions of allegory; but
for that reason it will be more deeply felt. The values will be
emotional and spiritual rather than intellectual. And they will be the
poet's own only because he has made them part of his being; in him
(though he probably does not know it) they will be representative of the
best and most characteristic life of his time. That does not mean that
the epic poet's image of life's significance is of merely contemporary
or transient importance. No stage through which the general
consciousness of men has gone can ever be outgrown by men; whatever
happens afterwards does not displace it, but includes it. We could not
do without _Paradise Lost_ nowadays; but neither can we do without the
_Iliad_. It would not, perhaps, be far from the truth, if it were even
said that the significance of _Paradise Lost_ cannot be properly
understood unless the significance of the _Iliad_ be understood.

The prime material of the epic poet, then, must be real and not
invented. But when the story of the poem is safely concerned with some
reality, he can, of course, graft on this as much appropriate invention
as he pleases; it will be one of his ways of elaborating his main,
unifying purpose--and to call it "unifying" is to assume that, however
brilliant his surrounding invention may be, the purpose will always be
firmly implicit in the central subject. Some of the early epics manage
to do without any conspicuous added invention designed to extend what
the main subject intends; but such nobly simple, forthright narrative as
_Beowulf_ and the _Song of Roland_ would not do for a purpose slightly
more subtle than what the makers of these ringing poems had in mind. The
reality of the central subject is, of course, to be understood broadly.