No More Learning

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.
It means that the story must be founded deep in the general experience
of men. A decisive campaign is not, for the epic poet, any more real
than a legend full of human truth. All that the name of Caesar suggests
is extremely important for mankind; so is all that the name of Satan
suggests: Satan, in this sense, is as real as Caesar. And, as far as
reality is concerned, there is nothing to choose between the Christians
taking Jerusalem and the Greeks taking Troy; nor between Odysseus
sailing into fairyland and Vasco da Gama sailing round the world. It is
certainly possible that a poet might devise a story of such a kind that
we could easily take it as something which might have been a real human
experience. But that is not enough for the epic poet. He needs something
which everyone knows about, something which indisputably, and
admittedly, _has been_ a human experience; and even Grendel, the fiend
of the marshes, was, we can clearly see, for the poet of _Beowulf_ a
figure profoundly and generally accepted as not only true but real;
what, indeed, can be more real for poetry than a devouring fiend which
lives in pestilent fens? And the reason why epic poetry so imperiously
demands reality of subject is clear; it is because such poetry has
symbolically to re-create the actual fact and the actual particulars of
human existence in terms of a general significance--the reader must feel
that life itself has submitted to plastic imagination. No fiction will
ever have the air, so necessary for this epic symbolism, not merely of
representing, but of unmistakably _being_, human experience.
This might
suggest that history would be the thing for an epic poet; and so it
would be, if history were superior to legend in poetic reality. But,
simply as substance, there is nothing to choose between them; while
history has the obvious disadvantage of being commonly too strict in the
manner of its events to allow of creative freedom. Its details will
probably be so well known, that any modification of them will draw more
attention to discrepancy with the records than to achievement thereby of
poetic purpose. And yet modification, or at least suppression and
exaggeration, of the details of history will certainly be necessary. Not
to declare what happened, and the results of what happened, is the
object of an epic; but to accept all this as the mere material in which
a single artistic purpose, a unique, vital symbolism may be shaped. And
if legend, after passing for innumerable years through popular
imagination, still requires to be shaped at the hands of the epic poet,
how much more must the crude events of history require this! For it is
not in events as they happen, however notably, that man may see symbols
of vital destiny, but in events as they are transformed by plastic
imagination.

Yet it has been possible to use history as the material of great epic
poetry; Camoens and Tasso did this--the chief subject of the _Lusiads_
is even contemporary history. But evidently success in these cases was
due to the exceptional and fortunate fact that the fixed notorieties of
history were combined with a strange and mysterious geography. The
remoteness and, one might say, the romantic possibilities of the places
into which Camoens and Tasso were led by their themes, enable
imagination to deal pretty freely with history. But in a little more
than ten years after Camoens glorified Portugal in an historical epic,
Don Alonso de Ercilla tried to do the same for Spain. He puts his action
far enough from home: the Spaniards are conquering Chili. But the world
has grown smaller and more familiar in the interval: the astonishing
things that could easily happen in the seas of Madagascar cannot now
conveniently happen in Chili. The _Araucana_ is versified history, not
epic. That is to say, the action has no deeper significance than any
other actual warfare; it has not been, and could not have been, shaped
to any symbolic purpose. Long before Tasso and Camoens and Ercilla, two
Scotchmen had attempted to put patriotism into epic form; Barbour had
written his _Bruce_ and Blind Harry his _Wallace_.