No More Learning

They are very much nearer than
he is to the mere epic material--to the moderate accomplishment of the
primitive ballad. Apart from their greatness, and often successful
greatness, of intention, perhaps the only one that has an answerable
greatness in the detail of its technique is _Beowulf_. That is not on
account of its "kennings"--the strange device by which early popular
poetry (Hesiod is another instance) tries to liberate and master the
magic of words. A good deal has been made of these "kennings"; but it
does not take us far towards great poetry, to have the sea called
"whale-road" or "swan-road" or "gannet's-bath"; though we are getting
nearer to it when the sun is called "candle of the firmament" or
"heaven's gem. " On the whole, the poem is composed in an elaborate,
ambitious diction which is not properly governed. Alliteration proves a
somewhat dangerous principle; it seems mainly responsible for the way
the poet makes his sentences by piling up clauses, like shooting a load
of stones out of a cart. You cannot always make out exactly what he
means; and it is doubtful whether he always had a clearly-thought
meaning. Most of the subsidiary matter is foisted in with monstrous
clumsiness. Yet _Beowulf_ has what we do not find, out of Homer, in the
other early epics. It has occasionally an unforgettable grandeur of
phrasing. And it has other and perhaps deeper poetic qualities. When the
warriors are waiting in the haunted hall for the coming of the
marsh-fiend Grendel, they fall into untroubled sleep; and the poet adds,
with Homeric restraint: "Not one of them thought that he should thence
be ever seeking his loved home again, his people or free city, where he
was nurtured. " The opening is magnificent, one of the noblest things
that have been done in language. There is some wonderful grim landscape
in the poem; towards the middle there is a great speech on deterioration
through prosperity, a piece of sustained intensity that reads like an
Aeschylean chorus; and there is some admirable fighting, especially the
fight with Grendel in the hall, and with Grendel's mother under the
waters, while Beowulf's companions anxiously watch the troubled surface
of the mere. The fact that the action of the poem is chiefly made of
single combat with supernatural creatures and that there is not tapestry
figured with radiant gods drawn between the life of men and the ultimate
darkness, gives a peculiar and notable character to the way Beowulf
symbolizes the primary courage of life.
One would like to think, with
some enthusiasts, that this great poem, composed in a language totally
unintelligible to the huge majority of Englishmen--further from English
than Latin is from Italian--and perhaps not even composed in England,
certainly not concerned either with England or Englishmen, might
nevertheless be called an English epic.

But of course the early epics do not, any of them, merely repeat the
significance of Homer in another form. They might do that, if poetry had
to inculcate a moral, as some have supposed. But however nicely we may
analyse it, we shall never find in poetry a significance which is really
detachable, and expressible in another way. The significance _is_ the
poetry. What _Beowulf_ or the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_ means is simply
what it is in its whole nature; we can but roughly indicate it. And as
poetry is never the same, so its significance is never quite the same.
Courage as the first necessary value of life is most naively and simply
expressed, perhaps, in the _Poem of the Cid_; but even here the
expression is, as in all art, unique, and chiefly because it is
contrived through solidly imagined characters. There is splendid
characterization, too, in the _Song of Roland_, together with a fine
sense of poetic form; not fine enough, however, to avoid a prodigious
deal of conventional gag. The battling is lavish, but always exciting;
and in, at least, that section which describes how the dying Oliver,
blinded by weariness and wounds, mistakes Roland for a pagan and feebly
smites him with his sword, there is real and piercing pathos. But for
all his sense of character, the poet has very little discretion in his
admiration of his heroes. Christianity, in these two poems, has less
effect than one might think. The conspicuous value of life is still the
original value, courage; but elaboration and refinement of this begin
to appear, especially in the _Song of Roland_, as passionately conscious
patriotism and loyalty. The chief contribution of the _Nibelungenlied_
to the main process of epic poetry is _plot_ in narrative; a
contribution, that is, to the manner rather than to the content of epic
symbolism. There is something that can be called plot in Homer; but with
him, as in all other early epics, it is of no great account compared
with the straightforward linking of incidents into a direct chain of
narrative. The story of the _Nibelungenlied_, however, is not a chain
but a web.