Chapter III · (continued 4)

(ββ) With regard to the particular end, the carrying out of which the Epos unfolds under the mode of the event, it follows from our previous conclusions that it must be no mere mental abstraction, but on the contrary of wholly concrete definition. At the same time, inasmuch as it is realized within the substantive actuality of the national unity, such a process must exclude the notion of merely capricious activity. The political state as such—the fatherland, let us say—or the history of a State and country, are essentially something universal, which, regarded in the light of such universality, does not appear under the mode of a subjectively individual existence, or, in other words, in inseparable and exclusive coalition with one definite living individual. For this reason the history of a country, the development of its political life, its constitution and destiny may also no doubt be narrated as event; if, however, the facts thus described are not placed before us as the concrete deed, the conscious aim, the passion, the suffering and accomplishment of particular heroes, whose individuality supplies the form and content of the realization in all its parts, the event merely assumes the rigid form of its independent forward movement in the prosaic history of a people or an empire. In this respect no doubt the most exalted action of Spirit would be the history of the world itself. We can conceive it possible that our poet might in this sense undertake to elaborate in what we may call the absolute Epos this universal achievement on the battlefield of the universal spirit, whose hero would be the spirit of man, the humanus, who is drawn up and exalted from the clouded levels[13] of conscious existence into the clearer region of universal history. But in virtue of the very fact of its universality a subject-matter of this kind would so be quite unfitted for artistic treatment. It would not adapt itself sufficiently to individualization. For on the one hand we fail altogether to find in such a subject a clearly fixed background and world-condition, not merely in relation to external locale, but also in that of morality and custom. In other words, the only basis for all we could possibly presuppose would be the universal World-Spirit or intelligence, whom we are unable to bring visibly before us as a particular condition, and who is possessed of the entire Earth as his local environment. And in like manner too the one end fulfilled in such an Epos could only be the end proposed by the World-Spirit himself,[14] who can only be apprehended and explicitly disclosed in his true significance through the processes of thought. If he is, however, to be represented in the form of poetry, or, at least, if the whole is to receive its proper meaning and coalescence from such a source, it is necessary that his presence should be expressed as that which acts independently from its own resources. This could only be possible for poetry, in so far as the ideal Taskmaster of history, the eternal and absolute Idea, which is realized in humanity, either was envisioned as a directive, active, perfecting individual person, or was merely made effective under the concealing veil of an ever-operative Necessity. In the first case, however, the infinity of such a content must shatter the necessarily limited artistic vessel of determinate individuality, or, as the only way of avoiding such a defect, must assume the inadequate form of a dispassionate allegory of general reflections over the destination of the human race and its education, over the final purpose of mankind, its moral consummation, or over whatever result the end of this World-history might establish. In the alternative case it is the genius of the various peoples which has in each example to be presented (in the heroic figure) in the conflicting existence of whom history expands and moves forward in progressive evolution. If, however, the genius of nations is really to appear in poetical form this can be carried out in only one way, namely, by placing before us the actual world-historical figures as operative through their deeds. We should, however, then merely have a series of particular characters, which emerged and again disappeared in a wholly external succession, the objects of which lacked individual unity and connection; and this would be so for the reason that the controlling World-Spirit, under our conception of it, as the ideal essence and destiny, could not, in the case supposed, be set forth as itself an active individual and the culminating agent in the process. And if, further, anyone was desirous of appropriating the spirits of different nationalities in their universality, and of displaying them as agents in such a substantive form, we should still only have a similar series, the individuals whereof, apart from the fact that they would merely possess an appearance of positive existence similar to Hindoo incarnations, would, in the fictitious form of the imagination they received pale into nothingness when contrasted with the truth of the World-Spirit as realized in actual history.

(γγ) We may consequently lay it down as a general principle that the particular epic event is only able to secure a vital form in poetry when it is united in the closest state of fusion with one individual. Precisely as it is one poet who thinks out and executes the whole, so too one individual must crown the edifice, with whom the event is associated and in connection with whose single identity it is continued and completed.

We must point out, however, that here too we are limited by essential conditions. For just as in our previous discussion it was the world-history, so too now, from the converse point of view, it is possible that the biographical treatment in a poetic composition of a definite life-history may appear to supply the most complete and adequate subject-matter of the Epos. This, however, is not the case. No doubt in biography the individual is one and the same throughout; but the events, through which the life-development proceeds, may entirely fall apart, and only retain the subject of the same in a wholly formal and accidental bond of relation. If, on the other hand, the Epos is essentially homogeneous, the event also, in the form of which the content of the poem is disclosed, must itself possess intrinsic unity. Both aspects, in short, the unity of the individual and that of the objective event, as it is evolved, must coalesce and be united. In the life and exploits of the Cid it is unquestionably true that on the field of the Fatherland it is only one great personality which without intermission remains true to himself, and in his development, chivalry and end constitutes the interest. His deeds pass before him, much as if he were the sculptured god; and finally all is gone and vanished for us, no less than for himself.[15] But the poems of the Cid are also as rhymed chronicles no genuine example of the Epos; and, in their later form of romances, they are, as their specific type necessitates, merely isolated situations split off from this national hero's life, which do not necessarily coalesce in the unity of a particular event.

The finest examples, however, of the observance of the above rule are to be met with in the Iliad and Odyssey, where Achilles and Odysseus are respectively the prominent figures. The Ramajana, too, resembles these poems in this respect. Dante's "Divine Comedy" is an illustration, but in quite a unique way. In other words, it is the Epic poet himself with whose single personality, in his wanderings through hell, purgatory, and paradise, all and everything is so associated that he is able to recount the picture of his imagination as a personal experience, and is consequently entitled to interweave with the general substance of his composition his private emotions and reflections to a larger extent than is possible for other epic poets.

(β) However much then, speaking generally, epic poetry informs us of actual fact and its occurrence, and thereby makes the objective world its content and form, yet on the other hand, inasmuch as what happens is an action, which passes in successive views before us, it is rather, and for this reason, to individuals, and their deed and suffering that the main emphasis is attached. For it is only individuals, be they gods or men, who can veritably act; and just in proportion as they are interwoven in the vividness of life with such a panorama, to that extent they are entitled to attract the main interest to the fulness of their exposition. From this point of view epic poetry stands on level terms with lyric no less than dramatic poetry. It is therefore of some importance that we attempt to define more closely what the specific features are which distinguish the portrayal of personality in the epic composition.

(αα) Now, first, what is essential to the objective aspect of an epic character—I am speaking mainly of the leading personages—is that they should be themselves essentially a totality of such traits, in other words complete men, and thereby display in themselves all aspects of emotional life, or to put it better, should represent in a typical way, national opinion and its active pursuits. In this respect I have already in the first part drawn attention to the heroic characters of Homer; and, in particular, to the variety of genuinely human and truly national qualities which Achilles unites in himself so vitally, the hero of the Odyssey supplying an admirable companion picture. The Cid is similarly presented us with much variety of characterization and situation, as son, hero, lover, husband, father, householder, and in his relations to king, friends, and foes. Other Epopees of the Middle Ages are a great contrast, far more abstract in their type of personification, particularly so where their heroes merely champion the cause of chivalry as such, and are removed from the sphere of the true and actual life of the nation.

It is then the fundamental characteristic of the exposition of epic personality that it should unfold itself as such a totality in the most diverse scenes and situations. The characters of tragedy and comedy may no doubt also possess a similar wealth of ideality; for the reason, however, that in their case the sharp contrast between a pathos that is never other than one-sided and a passion opposed to it is within very definable limits and ends the thing of most importance, such a varied character is in part, where it is not entirely superfluous, at least more in the nature of a prodigality which is incidental, and in part is also, as a rule, overpowered by the one passion, its motives and ethical considerations, and thus forced by the type of presentation into the background. In the whole of the epic composition, on the contrary, all aspects assert an equal right to assert themselves, and expand with freedom and breadth. That they should do so is indeed fundamental to the principle of epic composition; and from a further point of view the personality here, in virtue of the entire world-condition he presupposes, possesses a right to be, and to make all that valid wherein his existence is realized, and for the good reason that he lives in an age to which precisely this objective being, this immediate individuality is appropriate. It is, of course, for instance, quite possible for us, with regard to the wrath of Achilles, to point out, as moral reflection may suggest, the injury and loss which that wrath entailed, and therefrom to conclude that the superiority and greatness of Achilles is very appreciably removed from any approach to ideal perfection, whether as hero or man, having no power apparently on a single occasion to moderate his anger or exercise self-restraint. But for all that we do wrong in blaming Achilles. And this is not because we may overlook the wrath in virtue of his other great qualities. Achilles is, in other words, simply nothing more or less than this portrait. So far as Epic poetry is concerned, that is the end of the matter. The same observations apply to his ambition and his love of glory. The main justification of these great characters is the energy of their achievement; they carry, in fact, a universal principle in their particularity. Conversely, ordinary morality tends to depreciate its native personality, and hold in reserve the resources of its life-force, and discovers its essential being in this attitude. What an astonishing self-esteem, for instance, an Alexander asserted over his friends and the life of I know not how many thousands. Self-revenge, even traits of brutality, testify to an energy of the same type in heroic times; and even in this respect Achilles, in his rôle of epic hero, has little to learn.

(ββ) And it is just on account of this fact that such preeminent figures are complete individuals, who have in resplendent degree all that concentrated in them which otherwise is diffused and separate in the national character, and thereby are throughout great, free, and humanly beautiful characters that they are rightly set in the chief place; and we find that the event of most significance is inviolably linked with such individuality. The nation is, as it were, focussed as a single living soul in them, and as such they fight out its main enterprise, and suffer the hazards of its resulting experience. In this respect Gottfried von Bouillon, in Tasso's "Jerusalem Liberated," is no such overpowering figure as Achilles, this typical youthful bloom and perfection of the entire Grecian host; nor is he even an Odysseus, although he is selected as the wisest, bravest, and most just of leaders to command the entire army. The Achæans are unable to win a victory if Achilles stands aloof from the contest; it is he alone who, by means of his triumph over Hector, carries victory into Troy itself; and in the return home of Odysseus we find a mirror of the return of all the Greeks from Troy, only with the difference that it is just in that which it is his destiny to endure we have placed exhaustively before our vision the entire compass of the sufferings, life experience, and conditions which are implied in the whole subject-matter. The characters of the drama, on the other hand, are not so represented as in themselves the absolute crowning point of all the rest, which becomes objective in and through them. They rather are set forth independently and for themselves in their purpose, which they accept as the outcome of their character, or as the result of definite principles which have grown up in conjunction with their more isolate personality.

(γγ) There is a third distinguishing feature in epic characterization due to the fact that the Epos does not portray an action simply as action, but an event. In drama the matter of importance is that the individual manifests himself as operative for his specific purpose, and is expressly represented in such activity and its consequences. This undeviating consideration for the realization of a distinct purpose is absent in the Epic. No doubt in this case, too, heroes have desires and aims, but the main thing here is all that they may happen to experience while fulfilling it, not the nature of their conduct in the carrying it out. The circumstances are just as active as themselves, frequently more active. The return to Ithaca, for example, is the actual project of Odysseus. The Odyssey, however, does not merely display this character in the active execution of his predetermined end, but expands its account into all the variety of occurrence which he happens to experience in his wanderings, what he suffers, what obstructions meet him in the way, what dangers he has to overcome, and all, in fact, that moves him. And this varied experience is not, as would be necessary in the drama, a direct result of his action, but is in great measure rather incidental to his journey, in the main even independent of the concurrent action of the hero. After his adventures with the Lotophagi, Polyphemus, and the Laestrygones, the godlike Circe detains him for a full year. Further, after he has visited the lower world and suffered shipwreck, he dallies with Calypso, until he falls into home-sickness, wearies of the damsel, and stares with tearful eyes over the solitary sea. Thereupon it is Calypso herself who finally provides him with the means wherewith he builds his boat, who provides him with food, wine and raiment, and takes her right anxious and kindly farewell of him. Finally, after his sojourn among the Phæacians, he is carried in sleep—he knows not how—to the shores of his island. To carry out a purposed end in this sort of way would not be possible for dramatic poetry. Again, in the Iliad, the wrath of Achilles, which, along with all else that results from this compelling force, constitutes the specific object of the narrative, is throughout not an end, but rather an emotional state. When Achilles is insulted he rages. In this condition, so far from doing anything truly dramatic, he withdraws apart, does nothing with Patroclus by the ships on the seashore, sullenly angry that he is not honoured by the lord of the folk. Then follow the consequences of his retirement, and only at last, when his friend has been slain by Hector, do we find Achilles once more plunge into the conflict. In another way, again, is the end prescribed to Æneas, which he has to carry out, where Virgil recounts all the events as the result of which its realization is in such varied ways postponed.

(γ) We have just one further important feature to mention in respect to the form of the event in the Epos. I have already observed that in the drama the conscious will, and that which the same demands and wills, is essentially the determining factor, and constitutes the permanent foundation of the entire presentation. All that is carried out appears throughout as posited already by the personal character and its aims; and the main interest above all turns upon the justification or its absence of what is done within the situations presupposed and the conflicts they bring about. If consequently it so happens also that in the drama the external conditions are themselves active, they nevertheless only retain their validity by virtue of that which conscious feeling and volition makes of them, and the ways and means under which character reacts upon them. In the Epos, however, the circumstances and external accidents are effective on level terms with the personal will itself. All that man accomplishes passes before us precisely as any other event of the world outside him, so that the human exploit is in this case likewise and equally conditioned, and must be shown to be carried forward by the development of such an environment. The individual, in short, in epic poetry does not merely act freely of himself and independently. He is placed in the midst of an assemblage of facts, whose end and actuality in its wide correlation with an essentially unified world of conscious life or objective existence supplies the irremovable foundation of the life of each separate individual. This typical system is, in fact, predominant in the Epos through all its content, whether in that of passion, determined result, or general achievement. It is true that at first sight we might expect that, on account of an equal cogency being accorded to external condition in its independent eventualities, we should find indisputable opportunity given for every shade of contingency. And yet we have seen that it is the function of the Epos to present what is truly objective—what is, in short, essentially substantive existence. The solution of this contradiction is to be found in this, that the principle of necessity is involved in the events, whether taken in detail or generally.

(αα) In this connection we may affirm of the Epos—not, however, as is generally assumed of the drama—that Destiny is a predominant force. No doubt the dramatic character by the kind of end accepted, which he endeavours to carry out despite all obstruction under the circumstances given and recognized, makes of himself his Destiny; but in the Epos, on the contrary, it is made for him, and this force of circumstances, which stamp their particular form on the deed, apportions to each individual his lot, determines the result of his actions—is, in short, the genuine control of Destiny. What happens is appertinent to itself. It is so, and only thus; it is the fiat of necessity. In lyric poetry we are conscious of emotion, reflection, the personal interest, and yearning. The drama converts the ideal claim of human action into an objective presence. The presentation of epic poetry, on the other hand, moves, as it were, within the element itself of essentially necessary existence. Therefore, the individual has no choice but to follow this particular substantive condition; and, in its process of being, to adapt himself to it or not, and then to suffer as he is able and is forced to suffer. Destiny, in short, defines what is and inevitably must be, and in the result success, misadventure, life, and death are plastic precisely in the sense that individuals are plastic. What does actually unfold before us is a condition of universal expanse, in which the actions and destinies of mankind appear as something isolated and evanescent. This fatality is the great justice, and is not tragic in the dramatic sense of the term, in which the individual appears judged as a personality, but in the epic sense in which judgment is passed on man in all that concerns him.[16] The tragic Nemesis consists in this, that the greatness of his concerns is too great for the individual concerned. Consequently a certain tone of sadness[17] prevails over the whole. What is most glorious is seen very early to pass away. In the fulness of his life Achilles mourns over his death; and at the conclusion of the Odyssey we view him and Agamemnon as spirits that have passed away as shades, with the consciousness that they are shades. Troy, too, falls; old Priam is slain hard by the altar of the home; women and maidens become slaves. Æneas, in obedience to the divine command, departs to found a new kingdom in Latium, and the victorious heroes only return after manifold suffering to the happiness or bitterness that awaits them at home.

(ββ) This necessity of events may, however, be represented in very different ways.

The most obvious and least elaborate is the bare exhibition of such events without any further explanation of the poet of a necessary element existing in the particular occurrences and their general consequence by his addition of a controlling world of gods disclosed in the decision, interference, and co-operation of eternal powers. In such a case we must, however, have the feeling brought home from the entire atmosphere of the exposition, that in the recounted events and great life-destinies of single individuals and entire families or races, we are not merely confronted with what is mutable and contingent in human existence, but with destinies which have an essential foundation, whose necessity remains, however, the obscure operation of a power which is not placed before us poetically as such a power in its divine controlling energy to the point of defined individualization and in its explicit activity. The Niebelungenlied retains this general tone strongly, albeit it does not ascribe the direction of the blood-stained final result of all committed deed either to Christian Providence or the pagan world of gods. For in regard to Christendom, we merely hear of churchgoing and mass. We have, indeed, the remark of the bishop of Spejevs to the beautiful Ute, when the heroes withdraw into king Etzel's country: "Please God, He will keep them there!" We have also no doubt dreams of warning, the prophecy of the Danube maidens to Hagen, and other examples of a similar kind, but no really conclusive witness to the control and interference of gods. This leaves an impression on this poetry as of a something unriddled, unyielding, a mournfulness that is at the same time objective, and consequently wholly epic in its tone. It is a great contrast to the poems of Ossian, in which in the same way no gods appear, yet in which, on the other hand, we find lamentation over the death and downfall of the entire heroic stock presented under the form of the private sorrow of the dismayed minstrel, and as the yearning of a woe-begone recollection.

Essentially distinct from the above type of conception is the complete interlacement of all human destiny and natural event with the resolution, volition and action of a many-sided world of gods such as we find in the great Hindoo Epopees, and in Homer, Virgil, and others. I have already expressly drawn attention to the varied poetic interpretation which the poet himself supplies of events, which are apparently accidental, through his assumption of the co-operation and apparition of gods, and attempted to enforce the same by particular examples from the Iliad and the Odyssey. Here we may observe that the condition of most importance to the poetry in question is that in this reciprocal action of gods and men the relative independence of both aspects is maintained, so that neither the gods fall into lifeless abstractions, nor the human individuals become purely subservient vassals. How such a danger is to be avoided I have already discussed at length in a previous passage. The Hindoo Epos is in this respect unable to force its way fully to the truly ideal relation between gods and mankind; on such a stage of imaginative symbolism the human aspect still remains aloof in its free and beautiful actuality, and the activity of individuals in part appears as the incarnation of gods, and in part, as something of more incidental merit, vanishes, or is depicted under the guise of ascetic exaltation to the condition and power of gods. Conversely the variously personified powers, passions, genii, angels, and so forth, that we meet with in Christendom possess for the most part too little individual independence, and consequently tend only to affect us in a cold and abstract sort of way. The case is much the same in Mohammedanism. Through the deification of Nature and the world of mankind, through the conception of a prosaic co-ordination of reality, it is hardly possible to avoid the danger, more particularly where we enter a region of fairyland, wherein a miraculous interpretation is given to that which is essentially contingent and indifferent in external circumstances, which are themselves only present as a simple occasion for human action and as the ordeal of individual character, without possessing therewith an ideal consistency and foundation. By reason of this no doubt the infinitely extensible connection of cause and effect is broken, and the many sections in this prosaic concatenation of circumstances, which cannot be throughout made clearly distinct, are brought all of a sudden into one union. If, however, such a result is secured without the principle of necessity and ideal reasonableness, such a mode of elucidation, as, for example, frequently in "The Thousand and one Nights," appears as little more than the sport of an imagination, which endeavours to unfold as causality possible and actual, by means of such inventions, what is otherwise incredible.

The fairest mean, on the other hand, in this respect is that retained by Greek poetry, inasmuch as it is able to bestow both on gods and men a reciprocally indestructible power and freedom of independent individuality. And such is harmonious with its fundamental standpoint.

(ββ) There is, however, particularly in the epic conception of it, a point of view relative to the collective world of gods, which I have already referred to above in another connection. This is the contrast which the primitive Epopee presents to the artificial composition of later times. This difference is very pronounced if we compare Homer and Virgil. The level of education, from which the Homeric poems originated, still continues in a fair harmony with the poetic subject-matter. With Virgil, on the contrary, we are reminded by every single hexameter that the general outlook of the poet is totally different from the world, which it is his endeavour to depict; and the gods more particularly have lost the freshness of their original vitality. Instead of being living persons in their own selves, actual witnesses to us of their existence, they have rather the appearance of being mere creations of the poet and external instruments, which it is neither possible for the poet or his audience to take quite seriously, although there is an open pretence made that they have been taken thus seriously. Throughout the whole of the Virgilian Epic we feel ourselves in the atmosphere of ordinary life; the old tradition, the saga, the fairyland of poetry enters with prosaic distinctness into the frame of our common-sense faculties. What we have in the Æneid is very much what we find in the Roman history of Livy, where ancient kings and consuls make speeches, precisely as an orator made his speech in the Agora of Rome, or the school of the rhetoricians in the days of Livy himself. And, on the other hand, in what is really retained from tradition, as an example of primitive speech, such as the fable of Menenius Agrippa[18] about the functions of the belly, we find a contrast which is almost repulsive. In Homer, however, the gods are wafted in a magical light between poetry and reality: they are not permitted to approach the imagination so nearly, that the apparition of them confronts us with all the detail of ordinary life; nor are they left so undefined, that they lose all appearance of vital reality as we look at them. All that they do is readily explained by the soul-life and activities of men; and that which supports our faith in them is the substance and content upon which they essentially repose. From this point of view the poet, too, is thoroughly in earnest with his creations, though he treats with irony their form and external reality. In agreement with this it appears that the ancients themselves believed in this external form merely as works of art, which receive their confirmation and significance as a gift of the poet. This light-hearted and human freshness of presentment, in virtue of which the gods appear human and natural, is one of the pre-eminent qualities of the Homeric poems. The divine figures of Virgil float before our vision as so many invented wonders, as members of an artificial system. Virgil has not wholly escaped the charge of mere travesty, despite his earnestness; nay, this earnest mien of his is rather the cause of it, and Blumauer's Mercury with his boots and spurs and riding-whip is not without its justification. There is no necessity for any one else to make the Homeric gods ridiculous. His own picture of them makes them quite ridiculous enough. Nay, in his own story the gods themselves have their laugh over the lame Hephestus, and over the cunning net in which Mars lies in company with Venus, to say nothing of the box on the ear that Venus gets, and the howl of Mars as he collapses. By means of these touches of natural lustiness and gaiety the poet at once liberates us from the external form which he set up, and enforces all the more emphatically our common human nature, which he values, and which suffers, however, the necessary and substantive power involved therein, and the faith in the same, to remain. But one or two more examples of similar detail. The tragic episode of Dido is so entirely to the modern colour, that it was able to inspire a Tasso with emulation, nay, even in part to a literal translation. Even nowadays the French are moved to something like ecstasy over it. And yet how totally different in their human naïveté, simplicity and truth are the Homeric narratives of Circe and Calypso. The contrast is the same in Homer's account of the descent of Odysseus into Hades. This obscure and twilight like retreat of the shades is shown us through a dusky cloud, in an intermingling of imagination and reality, which takes hold of us with astonishing force. Homer does not suffer his hero to descend into any Underworld ready to hand. Odysseus himself digs a pit, and pours therein the blood of a ram he has killed; he summons the shades, which are then under constraint to circle round him, and bids some of them drink fresh blood that they may address him, and give him news, and drives away others with the sword as they throng round him in their thirst for life. Everything that happens here is bound up with the life of the hero, whose general demeanour is the reverse of the humble attitude of Æneas and Dante. In Virgil's account Æneas descends in the ordinary way; and the flight of steps, Cerberus, Tantalus, and all the rest leaves us with the impression of a definitely organized family establishment, quite to the pattern of an orthodox compendium of mythology.

With yet more force will this artificial compôte of the poet appear as such rather than a work that springs naturally from the subject where we are already cognisant of the substance of the tale that is told us in its fresh and primitive form, or as actual history. Examples of this are Milton's "Paradise Lost," the "Noachid" of Bodmer, Klopstock's "Messias," Voltaire's "Henriade," and others. In all these poems we cannot fail to detect a real cleft between the content and the reflection of the poet which modifies his description of the events, characters and circumstances. In Milton's case, for example, we find emotions and observations obviously the growth of an imagination and ethical ideas inseparable from his own age. In the same way with Klopstock we have God the Father, the history of Jesus Christ, patriarchs and angels combined with our German education of the eighteenth century, and the ideas of Wölffian metaphysic. This twofold aspect asserts itself in every line. No doubt in these cases the content itself offers many difficulties. For God the Father, the heaven of the angels, and the angelic host are far less adapted to the individualization of a free imagination than are the Homeric gods, which, in a manner similar to the in part fantastic creations in Ariosto, in their external mode of appearance, and so far as they do not epitomize[19] human action, but rather independently confront each other as individuals, do of themselves suggest the gibe over such a presentment.[20] Moreover Klopstock, so far as a religious outlook is concerned, introduces us to a world devoid of foundation, which he crowds with the brilliant effects of a rather exhausting imagination, and compels us to take everything as seriously as he means it himself. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of his angels and devils. Such creations only really have substance and can be brought home to us in their individuality in so far as the material of their actions, as with the Homeric gods, is rooted in the spiritual experience of humanity, or in a reality already known to us, as in cases where they claim importance as being the guardian spirits or angels of men or cities, but who, apart from such a concrete significance, assert what is just so much the more merely the vacancy of imagination in proportion as a serious actuality is ascribed to them. Abbadona, for instance, the repentant devil,[21] possesses neither a truly allegorical meaning—for in the abstract notion of devil there can be no inconsistency of guilt which can be converted into virtue—nor is such a figure one that is essentially and truly concrete. If Abbadona were a man, a conversion to God would no doubt be reasonable; but where we have evil regarded as something independently substantive, which is not an individual human evil, such a conversion is merely a triviality of sentimental emotion. It is in fact a distinguishing characteristic of Klopstock's invention that it creates such unreal personages, conditions and events, which have nothing in common with the actual world and its poetical content. And he fares no better in the machinery of his judicial condemnation of riotous living in high places, least of all in the contrast he presents to Dante, who condemns the famous personalities of his time to hell with a power of detailed realization of another type altogether. Equally destitute of real content as poetry is the joy of the resurrection among the assembled spirits of Adam, Noah, Shem, Japhet, and the rest, as depicted by Klopstock, who, in the 11th canto of the Messias, at the command of Gabriel, once more revisit their graves. Reason and rational ground are alike absent here. The souls have lived in the Divine Presence; they now behold the Earth, but they enter into no renewed relation with it. We may presume that they could not do better than appear to men; but of this there is not a single example. No doubt we find here beautiful emotions, endearing situations; and above all the moment in which the soul is once more united to a body is depicted in a way that arrests us; but the content remains none the less an invention that possesses no real claim to credibility. In contrast to such abstract ideas the blood-drinking of the phantoms in Homer, their reanimation in memory and speech, possess for us infinitely more the truth and realization of ideal poetry. And though from the point of view of imaginative resource these pictures of Klopstock are decorative enough, what is most essential in them is throughout the lyrical rhetoric of angels, who appear merely as instruments of service, or of patriarchs and other Biblical figures whose speeches and harangues have little in harmony with their historical characters as we have received the same from tradition. Mars, Apollo, War, Knowledge, and so forth—powers of this kind are neither in respect to their content wholly inventions, as the angels are, nor are they simply historical persons borrowed from historical sources, as are the patriarchs; they are on the contrary permanent forces, whose form and mode of appearance is alone the poet's creation. In the "Messias," however, admitting its excellence in certain directions—its purity of feeling, the brilliancy of its phantasy—yet it cannot be denied that by reason of the very type of such a phantasy we have here very, very much indeed that is hollow, without definite substance, and utilized simply as machinery for something else, all of which, combined with the absence of continuity in the content and its mode of conception, has even already covered the entire poem with oblivion. Things only live and remain green, which, essentially vital in themselves, unfold to us original life and activity in their pristine mould. For this reason we must hold fast to the primitive Epopees, and keep aloof, not only from modes of conception which are antagonistic to the actual presence which is vindicated in such, but also and above all from false aesthetic theory and predilection, at least if we are really anxious to enjoy and study the original world-outlook of nations, that great and spiritual[22] natural history. We have every reason to congratulate recent times, and our German nation in particular, that it is now on the road to the attainment of this object; that it has, in short, broken through the former obtuseness, of ordinary methods of thinking, and by its liberation of the mind from restricted views made it more receptive to ideas of the world which it is imperative that we as individuals enter into, and which alone are able to restore to us, to the full extent of their claim, the resurrected spirits of nations, whose ideal significance and deed thus appear struck into life in these their own Epopees.

(c) The Epos as Unified Totality

Hitherto, in considering the necessary qualifications of a genuine Epos, we have on the one hand discussed the general world-environment and from a further point of view the nature of the particularized event transacted on such a background by individuals either acting under the direction of gods or subject to destiny. These two fundamental aspects have yet further to coalesce in one and the same epic totality. In respect to this I will merely confine the reader's attention to the following points of interest:

In the first place we propose to consider the collective aggregate of objects, a satisfactory exposition of which is necessary to disclose the connection between the particular action and the substantive ground referred to.

Secondly, we have to examine the nature of the difference which obtains between the epic mode of disclosure and that of lyric or dramatic poetry.

Thirdly we have to deal with the unity in which an epic composition is rounded off despite all its breadth of extension.

(α) The content of the Epos, as already observed, is the entirety of a world in which an individual action is eventuated. In such a world the greatest variety of objects appear necessarily appertinent to the general views, deeds, and conditions of such a world.

(αα) Lyrical poetry is, no doubt, involved in definite situations, within which the subject of the lyric is permitted to import a great variety of content into its emotion and reflection. In this type of poetry, however, it is throughout the form of conscious life itself which characterizes such content; and for this reason excludes the outlook on the objective world in all its breadth of extension. Conversely the dramatic composition presents us characters and the carrying out of the action itself with all the animated appearance of life, so that here, too, the portrayal of local accessories, the external form of the active personages and all that happens, in the nature of the case tends to disappear. As a rule, what we have to express is the soul-motive and purpose rather than its extensive relations with the surrounding world of objects, or a description of individuals in their positive appearance as part of them. In the Epos, however, quite apart from the national actuality in the widest sense, upon which the action is based, we must find room for the ideal or soul aspect no less than the external or world aspect. We have in this type, therefore, under review and in coalescence the entire totality of all that we may reckon as comprised in the poetic presentation of our human existence. In this content we must not merely include on the one side the natural environment in the sense of this or that specific locality in which the action takes place, but also the more universal objective outlook such as I have already pointed out is a feature we find illustrated in the Odyssey, enabling us to understand how the Greeks in the times of Homer regarded the shape of the Earth, the configuration of the seas, and similar geographical facts. At the same time these natural aspects are not the object of most importance in the poem; they are merely the foundation; there is, in short, the further and more essential aspect of the composition unfolded in the existence, activities, and co-operation of the entire world of divinities; and between these two extremes we have humanity simply as such in its collective relation to domestic, public, peaceful, and warlike situations, ethical habit, customs, characters and events. And, moreover, throughout we have to assume in both directions, whether that is from the point of view of the individual event, or the general condition, the all-embracing national and other actual complexus.

Finally, if we consider the nature of this intelligible content it is not merely an external événement that is presented us, but in conjunction with such we must have, too, placed before us the ideal world of emotion, the aims and purposes of mind, all that may contribute to justify or condemn a deliberate line of conduct. In short, the real subject-matter of lyric and dramatic poetry is not wholly excluded, although in the epic type these aspects merely are valid as subordinate features; they do not, as in the former cases, constitute the essential form of the exposition, nor do they deprive the Epos of its distinctive character. We may consequently affirm that the distinctive note of the Epic is absent, when lyric expression determines both tone and colour, as is the case, for example, in Ossian, or when passages are emphasized in which the execution of the poet is made as consummate as possible, as is to some extent the case with Tasso, and to a still more marked degree characteristic of Milton and Klopstock. Emotions and reflections ought rather, no less than the portrayal of objective fact, to be transmitted as something done, already spoken and thought, and not interrupt the tranquil course of the Epic narrative. The incoherent exclamation of emotion, the direct outcry of the soul mainly intent with its utterance upon self-revelation, is out of place in such poetry. It will for the same reason and as strongly abstain from an imitation of the animation of dramatic dialogue, in which individuals carry on a conversation as though face to face with each other, where the aspect of most importance throughout is the contrast presented by different types of character in their interchange of speech as they strive to convince, command, impose upon, or passionately unravel their motives to one another.

(ββ) And, secondly, the Epos has not merely to bring before our vision the manifold content above described in its actually independent and subsistent objective form, but also the form in which it essentially becomes the Epos is, as I have more than once already described it, an individual event. If this essentially limited action is to remain united with all other material introduced, this additional accretion of fact, must throughout be brought into definite relation with the course of the individual event, that is to say, it must not fall outside it as independent. We could not find a more perfect illustration of this interweaving of all threads than that of the Odyssey. The domestic arrangements of the Greeks, for instance, no less than the ideas we get of foreign and barbarous folk and countries, or of the realm of the shades, and much else, are so closely interwoven with the personal wanderings of the home-returning Odysseus and the fortunes of Telemachus on his journey after his father, that not one of these aspects of the tale is held in a loose and independent position apart from the main event, or, as with the chorus of tragedy, which does not usually enter into the action and merely deals with generalized reflections, is able to relapse inactive into retrospection, but co-operates in the actual progress of the event. In a similar manner Nature also and the world of gods for the first time receives, not so much on their own account as in their relation to the particular events, which it is the function of the godlike to direct, an individual representation and one of rich vitality. Only when such a condition is fulfilled, or, in other words, when the narrative throughout informs us of the progressive movement of the event, which the poet has selected as the unifying material of his composition, can it never appear as a mere portrayal of independent objects. On the other hand, the particular event for its part should not be involved in and absorb the substantive national basis and totality upon which it moves forward to such a degree, that these are themselves divested of all independent existence, and fall by necessity into a relation simply of service. In this respect the expedition of Alexander against the East would not supply satisfactory subject-matter for the true Epopee. An heroic exploit of this kind not merely in respect to the original resolve, but also to its manner of execution, depends so entirely on this one single individual, his personality and character is so exclusively that which supports it, that we lose altogether the independent existence and self-assertion of the national basis, the host and its leaders, which we have shown to be a necessary condition. Alexander's army is his people, wholly bound up with him and his command: it follows him rather in the relation of vassalage than that of free will. In contrast to this the true vitality of the epic consists in this, that both these fundamental aspects, the particular action with its individual agents and the general world-condition, while no doubt continuing under a mediated relation, yet in this relation of reciprocity no less preserve their necessary independence and thereby enforce themselves as one existing whole, at the same time securing and possessing an independent entity.

(γγ) In a previous passage we laid it down generally that in order to have an individual action the substantive basis of epic poetry must offer the opportunity of collisions, and furthermore observed, that the general foundation must not appear as wholly independent but under the form of a specific event; we may now add that it is in this individual événement that we must seek the point of departure for the entire epic poem. This is pre-eminently of importance for the situations connected with its commencement. Here, too, we may take the Iliad and Odyssey for models. In the first the Trojan war is placed before us as the general background of contemporary life, but only so far as it comprises the particular events connected with the wrath of Achilles. And for this reason the poem commences without any possible confusion with situations which excite the passion of the principal hero against Agamemnon. In the Odyssey there are two classes of subject-matter which determine the content of its opening, that is to say, the wanderings of Odysseus and the domestic complications at Ithaca. Homer brings them together by giving us briefly information concerning Odysseus on his home-journey to the effect that he is detained by Calypso, and then at once passes to the sorrows of Penelope and the voyage of Telemachus. We are, consequently, able to review at one glance what obstacle stands in way of the return, and what is consequently rendered necessary for those left behind at home.

(β) The advance, then, of the epic poem from a commencement such as this is totally different from that of lyric or dramatic poetry.

(αα) In the first place we should draw attention to the possibilities of extension within the range of the Epos. These are quite as much due to the form as they are to the content. We have already seen what a variety of objects may be comprised in the world of the Epic as fully elaborated, not merely in its ideal capacities, motives, and aim, but also in respect to its objective situation and environment. Inasmuch as all these aspects assume an objective form, an appearance of reality, each one of them takes to itself a form of essentially independent ideality and externality, in which the epic poet, either in his exposition or description, is permitted freely to linger, and to disclose in its positive appearance. The lyric, on the contrary, concentrates all that it lays hold of within the ideal realm of the emotions, or refines it away in the generalized vision of reflection. In the objective world it is the immediate complex in juxtaposition, or the varied wealth of manifold characteristics, which is presented us. In this respect we find that in no other type of poetry is the claim to introduce episodical matter, even to the point of to all appearance absolute independence, more indisputable than in the Epos. The delight, however, in actual fact for its own sake and in its natural form must, as already observed, not be carried so far as to import into the poem circumstances and facts which have no real connection with the important action. Such episodes must assert themselves as effective in the advance of such action, whether as events which are obstructive to its course, or assistant in their mediation. Yet, despite of this, the particular portions of the epic poem will be somewhat loosely bound together. This is a necessary result of the mode of its objectivity. For in what is objective mediation persists as the ideal essence; what in contrast to this confronts the external aspect is the independent existence of particular aspects. This defect in the direction of a stringent unity and the emphasized relation of specific portions of the epic poem, which, according to its primitive form, possesses moreover a primitive period of origination, has this result, that it lends itself more readily than lyric or dramatic compositions to subsequent additions and continuations; and, further, it is enabled to appropriate under its more recent and embracing whole even examples of the saga which have already received artistic expression of a definite, if not so exalted character.

(ββ)Secondly, if we look at the way in which epic poetry may be justified in its motivisation of the progress and course of events, we shall find that it ought not either exclusively to take the ground of what happens from the individual mood, nor yet from what is purely personal character. In other words, it should not encroach upon what is the proper sphere of the lyric and drama; it must, in this respect too, adhere to the form of objectivity which constitutes the fundamental epic type. We have, in fact, seen more than once previously that external conditions were of no less importance, for an exposition that takes the form of narrative, than states of soul which revealed character. In the Epos character and the necessary rational condition coalesce completely on terms of equality, and the epic character may therefore give way to external conditions, without impairing his poetic individuality, may be, in short, in his action, the result of relations in such a way that these appear as the predominant factor rather than the exclusively effective character as we find it in the drama. We find in the Odyssey that the progress of events is almost entirely motived in this way. We find the same thing in the adventures of Ariosto and other Epopees, where the material of the song is borrowed from the the Middle Ages. The divine command, too, which induces Æneas to found Rome, no less than the varied episodes which extend its embrace over a wide field, would involve a type of motivisation wholly uncongenial to the drama. A further illustration of this is Tasso's "Jerusalem Delivered," in which, quite apart from the brave antagonism of the Saracens, many a natural event is opposed to the object of the Christian host. Such examples might be indefinitely multiplied from almost all the more famous Epopees. And, indeed, it is precisely material of this kind, in which an exposition of this type is possible and necessary, that the epic poet ought to select.

The same thing is effected where it is bound to appear as the result of the actual decision of individuals. Here, too, we have neither to assert nor to express that which the character in the dramatic sense of the term—that is, according to his aim and the individual passion which uniquely animates him—makes of the circumstances and relations, in order to maintain his personality against this external resistance no less than against other individuals. Rather the epic character excludes this action viewed simply in reference to its personal character, just as it excludes the tumult of purely subjective states and feelings. Instead of this it cleaves fast, on the one hand, to the circumstances and their reality; and on the other that, whereby its movement is effected, must necessarily render explicit all that is essentially valid, universal, and ethical. In Homer, as in no other writer, we shall find inexhaustible material for pertinent thought on this head. The lament of Hecuba over Hector, for instance, or of Achilles over the death of Patroclus—episodes which, so far as content is concerned, would lend themselves admirably to lyric treatment—are in Homer held throughout within the epic temper. And to quite as little extent do we find this poet handle in dramatic style situations which would primarily adapt themselves to dramatic exposition, such as the conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles in the council of the chiefs, or the parting of Hector and Andromache. Only to glance at the last-mentioned scene, this belongs unquestionably to one of the finest conceivable efforts of epic poetry. Even in Schiller's dialogue between Amalia and Carl in "The Robbers," where the same subject ought to be treated in the lyric vein throughout, we distinctly hear an epic reverberation from the Iliad. How consummately epic in its effect, however, is Homer's description in the sixth book of the Iliad of the way in which Hector vainly seeks for Andromache at home, then at last meets her on the way to the Scæan gate, how she hurries toward him, and when close to him, as he looks with a peaceful smile on his little boy lying on the arm of his nurse, exclaims: "Amazing man, thy courage will destroy thee, and thou compassionest neither thy infant boy nor me, hapless wight, who will soon be widowed of thee. Ay, for soon the Achaeans will slay thee, storming against thee together. And if I lose thee it were better for myself to pass beneath the earth. No other comfort is left for me, but only sorrow, if thou art stricken by fate! Neither have I my father any more, nor yet my lady mother." After which she narrates at length all the story about her father and the death of her seven brothers, all of whom Achilles had slain, also the captivity, ransom, and decease of her mother. Then at length she turns with earnest plea to Hector, who is henceforward to her father and mother, brothers, and spouse in the bloom of life, and implores him to remain on the walls, and not to make his son an orphan and his wife a widow. Hector replies in much the same spirit: "All this is also a care to me, wife; but I fear too much the Trojans, if I avoid the battle here, like a coward; the eddy, too, of the moment worries me not, who am wont to be ever dauntless, and to fight in the foremost ranks of the Trojans, protecting the high fame of my father and mine own. Ay, well indeed I wot, both in mind and soul, that the day will come in which sacred Troy shall fall, as also Priam and the folk of the king cunning with the spear. But I sorrow not so much for the Trojans, nor yet for Hecuba herself and Priam, nor the brothers of my flesh, who shall fall beneath the foe, as for thee, when some bronze-greaved Achæan shall bear thee away, robbing thee of thy day of freedom, and thou shalt spin from the flax of another in Argos, or wearily draw water, loth indeed, but the might of necessity will be upon thee; and I doubt not there will be someone who will say, as he sees thee weeping: 'See yonder Hector's wife, the bravest of all who fought among the Trojans when the fight was over Ilium.' Thus perchance shall someone speak; and woe will come upon thee, that thou hast no longer such a husband, to fend thee from such serfdom. As for myself, may the earth cover me, or ever I hear thy bitter cry and thy carrying off." All that Hector says here is full of feeling, pathetic enough, yet not merely expressed in a lyrical or dramatic manner, but in the epic vein, inasmuch as the picture which he outlines of suffering, and which brings pain to himself, in the first place depicts circumstantially objective conditions as such, and in the second place because all that affects and moves him does not appear as personal volition, or individual resolve, but rather as a necessity which is not at the same time his own aim and will. Of much the same epic effect are the pleas with which the vanquished plead, as they may on various grounds, for their life with their victors; for a movement of the soul, which proceeds merely from circumstances, and only attempts to affect us through the causative effect of objective relations and situations, is not dramatic, although modern tragedians from time to time also make use of such a type of effect. The scene, for example, in Schiller's "Maid of Orleans," on the battle-field between the English knight Montgomery and Joan,[23] is, as others have already justly observed, rather epic than dramatic. In the moment of danger all courage forsakes the knight; yet, for all that, when pressed by the fierce Talbot, who punishes cowardice with death, and the Maid, who conquers even the bravest, he is unable to have recourse to flight, and exclaims:

O, wär ich nimmer über Meer hieher geschifft, Ich unglücksel'ger! Eitler Wahn bethörte mich, Wohlfeilen Ruhm zu suchen in dem Frankenkrieg, Und jetzo führt mich das verderbliche Geschick In diese blut'ge Mordschlacht. Wär ich weit von hier Daheim noch an der Savern' bluhendem Gestad Im sichern Vaterhause, we die Mutter mir. In Gram zurückblieb und die zarte süsse Braut.[24]

Expressions such as these are unmanly, and make the figure of this knight neither fit for the genuine Epos nor the tragic drama, are in fact rather suggestive of comedy. And when Joan, after exclaiming,

Du bist des Todes! Eine britt'sche Mutter zeugte dich![25]

advances towards him, he throws away sword and shield and pleads at her feet for his life. The reasons he gives at length in order to arouse her sympathy: his defencelessness; the wealth of his father, who would ransom him with gold; the gentleness of the sex to which Joan belongs as maid; the love of his sweet bride, who waits for his return home in tears; the grief of the parents whom he has left at home; the grievous fate of death unwept for in a foreign land—all these motives are themselves, in one aspect of them, essentially objective conditions, effective and of value as such, and on the other hand, the tranquil exposition of them is itself in the epic vein. In the same way the poet motives the condition, that Joan must hearken to him, through the external circumstance of the defencelessness of the pleader, although from the dramatic point of view she ought without delay and at the bare sight to have slain him, being as she was the relentless foe of all Englishmen, and in fact expresses such destructive hatred with every resource of rhetoric, justifying her action by the statement that she is bound with most fearful vow to the spirit-world.

Mit dem Schwert zu tödten alles Lebende, das ihr Der Schlachten Gott verhängnissvoll entgegenschickt.[26]

If the point of importance to the maid were merely that Montgomery ought not to die defenceless, he possessed apparently an excellent means in his grasp of retaining his life; in other words he had merely to refuse to take up his weapons. This view is supported by the fact that Joan has already listened to him so long. Yet when she demands that he should fight for his life with her, of mortal flesh like himself, he again takes up his sword and falls by her hand. Such a development of the scene had been more in keeping with the drama had it dispensed with all this varied epic exposition.

(γγ) In general, then, we may characterize the type in which we have the poetic passage of epic events set before us in the following way, namely, that the epic presentation does not merely linger over the picture of objective reality and ideal conditions, but over and above this provides obstacles to a final solution. This not only applies to its relation to the wide field of external condition, to which the more immediate vision enforces us, but also in respect to the culminating movement of the action, more especially in its contrast to dramatic poetry. For this reason above all it diverts us from the execution of the fundamental purpose, the connected course of whose evolved conflict a dramatic poet ought never to lose sight of, into much digressive matter; and, moreover, by this means avails itself of the opportunity, to bring before our vision the complex unity of a world of circumstances, which otherwise could not have been expressed in speech. We have an illustration of such an obstacle in the beginning of the Iliad. Homer here at once tells us about the fatal sickness, which Apollo had spread throughout the Greek camp, and connects with it the strife between Achilles and Agamemnon. This wrath is the second impediment. Even more obviously in the Odyssey is every adventure that Odysseus has to pass through, a delay to his home return. More particularly, however, the distinct episode serves to interrupt the unimpaired progression of the story, and is to a great extent an obstacle to this. Such, for instance, is the shipwreck of Æneas, his love for Dido, the appearance of Armida in Tasso, and we may add as a rule the many independent love affairs of particular heroes in the romantic Epos, which, in the poetry of Ariosto, accumulate and interlace with such profusion, that the conflict between Christian and Saracen is thereby entirely hidden. In the "Divine Comedy" of Dante we do not find such definite examples of obstruction to the plot or narrative. In this case we must associate the slow advance of the Epic denouement partly with the generally pausing manner of the description, and in part with the many little episodical histories and conversations with particular characters, whether damned or otherwise, about whom the poet permits himself more detailed information.

In this connection it is above all things necessary that impediments of this description, which interfere with the flow of narrative to its final end, should not be presented as though they were merely means directed to objects of an objective character. For inasmuch as already the general condition, on the basis of which the movement of the epic world is carried forward, is only truly poetical where it appears as a self-constructed growth, so too its entire course, either in virtue of circumstances or the inherent destiny, must also appear self-originated without our being able to detect thereby the personal views of the poet; and this is all the more so because, in the form of its objectivity—not merely under its aspects of phenomenal reality, but also in respect to the substantive character of its content—it claims for the whole no less than its divisible content that it is a positive growth, spontaneous in its origin and independent. If, however, a directive world of gods is its apex, controlling the course of events, it is even more necessary that the poet himself should possess a lively and vivid faith in them, because in that case it is generally through the instrumentality of these that obstructions such as we have referred to are asserted; consequently where these divine forces are treated merely as some lifeless mechanism, it is inevitable that everything for which they are responsible must equally become so in a poetic composition which is artificial even in intention.

(γ) Having thus briefly adverted to the totality of objects, which the Epos is able to unfold by interweaving a particular event with a universal national world-condition, and, further, having discussed the manner in which the course of events is developed, we have now, thirdly, and in conclusion, to examine the problem as to the nature of the unity and rounding off of an epic composition.

(αα) This is a point all the more important for the reason that in our own day people are ready to take up the view that we may end an Epic as we like, or continue it just as capriciously. Although this is the opinion of men of talent and learning—it is in fact the contention of F. N. Wolff—it remains none the less a crude and illiterate view. It in fact amounts to nothing less than excluding from the finest ethic compositions any genuine character of artistic composition. For it is only in virtue of the fact that an Epos depicts an essentially exclusive, and thereby, for the firs time independent world, that it is at all a work of fine art in contrast to what is, in part, the diffuse, and, in part, the finite, series of independent sections, causes, effects, and other modes of self-causative reality. One can, of course, so far admit that for the genuine and primitive Epos the wholly aesthetic review of the design and organization of the parts, of the position and completion of the episodes, of the kind of similes employed, and so forth, this is not the point of most importance, inasmuch as here, more than in lyrical poetry of a later date, and its artificial elaboration of the drama, the general world-outlook, the faith in divine beings, and, in a word, what is most essential in such national Bibles, must be expressed as the aspect of most weight. Nevertheless, these great national books, such as are the Ramajana, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and even the "Song of the Nibelings," ought not to lose that quality which alone, in respect to both their beauty and their art, can endow them with the worth and freedom of artistic works, the quality, that is, whereby they bring before our vision a complete sphere of action. What we have simply to do, therefore, is to discover the appropriate form of this exclusive unity.

(ββ) The term Unity, if employed in this general sense, has become a very commonplace one even for tragedy, one capable of much misuse. For every event, in its causes and effects, creates an infinite chain, which, in the direction of the past no less than the future, and in a way that is in both directions incalculable, leads to a further series of particular circumstances and actions, it being impossible to determine all that may form part of the circumstances and detail in other respects, or the mode of their coalescence. If we merely confine our attention to this series, no doubt an Epos may be extended backwards and forwards indefinitely; and, over and above this such always offers opportunity for digression. But it is just such a series as this which makes the composition prosaic. To adduce an example the Greek cyclic poets have celebrated the entire cyclus of the Trojan war, and in doing so continue at the point where Homer stops, with a beginning, too, from the egg of Leda. But it is precisely on account of this that they degenerate into prose, if we contrast them with Homer's compositions. Just as little—I have already drawn attention to this—can an individual as such surrender the central focus of his unity, inasmuch as it is from this that the most varied events issue, and are able to effect a union in the same, though they may be entirely without connection regarded simply as events. We have consequently to seek for another type of unity. In this respect we must briefly determine the distinction between a mere event, and a definite action, which accepts the form of event in the epic narrative. We may define a mere event as the external aspect and realization of every human action, without involving with it the execution of a particular end; or, in general terms, we may call it every external modification in the form and appearance of what actually exists. When anyone is struck by lightning, that is a mere event, an external occurrence. More is implied in the sack of a hostile city; we have here the fulfilment of a predeterminate purpose. An essentially distinct object of this kind, such as the liberation of the Holy Land from the yoke of the Saracens and heathen, or better still the satisfaction of a specific impulse, such as the wrath of Achilles, must, under the mode of the epic eventuality, constitute the synthetic unity of the Epopaea; and by this I mean that the poetic narrative must restrict itself to that which is uniquely the effect of this conceived purpose or specific impulse, and in this co-operation be rounded off in an essentially exclusive unity. Action and execution of this type is, however, only possible to human agency; so that, as the culminating point of our composition, we must have in progressive conjunction with purpose and impulse a human personality. Furthermore, if the action and satisfaction of the entire heroic character, from which both purpose and impulse proceed, are merely the result of wholly definite situations and motives, which are dissipated as we look back in an extensive complexity of relation, and if, further, the execution of the purpose, as we look forward, carries with it a variety of result, then in that case on the one hand no doubt a large number of presuppositions will be involved with such a specific action, and on the other hand we shall have many effects of reaction, which, however, will not be placed in any more intimate poetic connection with just this determinate character of the end under exposition. In this sense, for instance, the wrath of Achilles has as little connection with the rape of Helen or the judgment of Paris, although the one fact is presupposed in the other, as it has with the actual sack of Troy. When, therefore, it is contended that the Iliad neither possesses a necessary beginning, nor an appropriate conclusion, such a verdict is due to an inability to see distinctly that it is the wrath of Achilles which is the main subject of the Iliad, and which consequently should supply the focus-point of unity. If, on the contrary, we form a stable conception of the heroic figure of Achilles, and assume that this, as asserted in the wrath aroused in him by Agamemnon, is the connecting thread of the whole, we shall be unable to conceive either a beginning or termination of greater beauty. It is, as I have already pointed out, the direct motive of this anger, which forms the poem's commencement; the consequences of the same are comprised in all that follows. Against this critics have attempted to enforce the view that in such a case the last cantos are irrelevant, and might just as well be omitted. Such an opinion, if we look at the poem itself, is untenable. For just as the dallying of Achilles himself by the ships and his abstinence from the conflict are purely the result of his indignant wrath, and are in this inactivity bound up closely with the almost immediate success of the Trojans over the Grecian host, no less than with the fight and death of Patroclus, so, too, the lament and revenge of the noble Achilles and his victory over Hector is closely linked with this fall of his brave friend. If in the previous opinion it is implied that death is the end of everything, and after that we may as well pack and be off, such a view merely indicates extreme crudity of imaginative conception. With the idea of death it is merely Nature that is brought to a standstill; man is not so, nor yet are the obligations of his ethical life and habit,[27] with their claim of honourable recognition for the fallen hero. In this sense the sports that form part of the funeral rites of Patroclus, the heartrending pleas of Priam, the reconciliation of Achilles, who returns the father the corpse of his son, in order that in this case, too, honour to the dead may not be absent, each and all are connected with the previous events, and contribute to the supreme and satisfying beauty of the narrative's conclusion.

(γγ) Inasmuch, however, as we have attempted above to make a specifically individual action, which issues in accordance with a deliberate purpose or heroic impulses, conform to the type of an epic whole in which focal points are ascertainable that bind it together and round off its completeness, the view is at least possible that we have made the unity of the Epos too nearly identical with that of the drama. For in the drama also it is one particular line of action issuing from self-conceived purpose and character with its conflict which constitutes the focal centre. In order, therefore, not to involve these two types of poetry, the epos, that is, and the drama, in confusion, though the confusion merely appear to be such, I will yet again draw the reader's attention emphatically to my previous explanation of the distinction between human action and event. And quite apart from this the epic interest is not simply confined to those characters, objects, and situations which have their ground in the particular action as such, whose progress is the subject of the epic narrative, but this action possesses the further stimulus to its opposed factors and their resolution, and in fact is directed throughout its course and exclusively within a national and collective whole, or substantive content, which claims on its own account to assert a variety of characters, conditions, and events. In this respect the final consummation of the Epos does not merely consist in the particular content of the predominant action selected, but quite as much in the entire synthesis of the general world-survey whose objective reality it undertakes to depict; in fact, the epic unity is only then fully complete when the particular action, from one point of view no doubt, in its independent character, but also from another, regarded in its progression as the essentially rounded world within the sphere of which it moves, is placed before us as one indissoluble totality; and both of these spheres, or aspects of one sphere, repose together in the mediating fulness and unimpaired unity of very life.

Such, then, are the most essential characteristics we find it possible, within the limits accepted, to draw attention to in respect to the genuine Epos.

It is, however, possible to apply the same form of objectivity to other subject-matter, whose content does not carry with it the true significance of genuine objectivity. It is very possible that a theorist in Art will feel embarrassment when, with such modes of speech before him, he is asked to make a classification adapted to all poems without distinction; and we must not forget that under the generic term of poem these hybrid forms have also to be reckoned. In any really just classification, however, we ought only to include that which only conforms with a definition of the generic notion.[28] All that is, on the contrary, incomplete in content or form, or both, precisely for the reason that it is not as it ought to be, is only subsumed defectively under the notion, or in other words under the definition, which gives us the thing as it ought to be, and in truth actually is. I only propose, therefore, in conclusion and by way of supplement, to add a few observations upon such subordinate and collateral branches of the true epic composition.

To this class of poetry above all the idyll belongs in the modern sense of that term, viz., that in which poetry stands aloof from the profounder interests of spiritual and ethical life, and depicts mankind in its innocence. Innocent life in this sense amounts to little more than an ignorance of everything except eating and drinking. We may add that what we eat and drink here is extremely simple, it is goat's milk merely, or sheep's milk, or at the most cow's milk, roots, acorns, vegetables, and cheese made from milk. I should say that bread is no longer in the truly idyllic sphere; we must, however, allow to it flesh-eating; for it is hardly possible that our idyllic shepherds and shepherdesses could have wished to sacrifice their herds exclusively to the gods. Their occupation will consist in looking the whole day long after their beloved herds with their faithful hound, in providing their food and drink, and along with this giving vent, with as much sentimental feeling as possible, to every kind of mood which does not disturb this condition of repose and contentment. In a word, they are satisfied with their peculiar piety and gentleness, piping away on their reed or oat-pipes, warbling to each other, and above all making love with the greatest tenderness and innocence.

The Greeks, on the contrary, possessed in their plastic representations a more jubilant world, with its attendants of Bacchus, Satyrs and Fauns, who, in their harmless service of a god, stimulated animal life and human joviality with a vivacity and truth totally different from the above pretentious innocence, piety, and emptiness. We may also recognize the same essentially animated outlook on the world as illustrated in lively pictures of national condition, in the Greek Bucolic poets such as Theocritus; this is so whether our poet lingers over actual situations of the life of fisher-folk, or shepherds, or extends the mode in which he expresses this, or similar spheres of life, to a yet wider circle, either depicting such states in an epic form, or treating them in lyric form and that of the objective drama. Virgil already sings to us with less warmth in his Eclogues. Most tedious of all, however, is Gessner, so tedious that I suppose no one reads him nowadays. We can only wonder that the French ever had so much taste for him that they even ranked him highest among German poets. Their morbid sensibility on the one hand, which evades the tumult and changes of life, while yearning also for some kind of movement, and on the other the absence of all true interest in such poetry, so that the otherwise disturbing influences of our culture were not represented—both of these factors, no doubt, contributed to this preference.

We may reckon as a further class of this hybrid type of Epic those poems which are half description and half lyrics, a favourite type with the English, and one which for the most part accepts for its subject-matter Nature, the Seasons, and similar subjects. We may also associate with this type the various didactic poems concerned with physical science, astronomy, medicine, chess, fishing, and hunting—in short, the art which loves to elaborate in a poetic form what is really the content of prose, an art which has been cultivated with much talent in later Greek poetry, and after that by the Romans, and, in our time, pre-eminently by the French. Such poetry, despite its general epic temper, will very readily pass over into the lyric treatment.

The romances and ballads, which we find both in the Middle Ages and modern times, are no doubt poetry of a kind, though it is impossible to define accurately their type; so far as their content is concerned they are in part epic. If we look at the form of their composition, however, they are for the most part lyrical, so that we have perforce to reckon them from different points of view to different types.

The romantic novel, that Epopaea of modern society, opens a different field altogether. In this we possess, on the one hand, in all its completeness and variety, an epic prodigality of interests, conditions, characters, and living relations, the extensive background in fact of an entire world. We have also the epic exposition of events. What fails us here is the primitive world-condition as poetically conceived, which is the source of the genuine Epos. The romance or novel in the modern sense pre-supposes a basis of reality already organized in its prosaic form, upon which it then attempts, in its own sphere, so far as this is possible from such a general point of view, both in its treatment of the vital character of events and the life of individuals and their destiny, to make good once more the banished claims of poetical vision. For this reason one of the most common collisions in the novel, and one most suitable to it, is the conflict between the poetry of the heart and the prose of external conditions antagonistic to it, including with such the contingency such imply. This is a conflict which may be resolved on the lines of tragedy or comedy, or finds its settlement in the twofold conclusion, first, that the characters which in the first instance contend with the ordinary course of life are taught to recognize in it what is the genuine heart of things, becoming thereby reconciled to their conditions and ready to cooperate with them; and, secondly, that they learn how to brush away the purely prosaic aspect of all that they do and accomplish, and thereby replace the prose which they have found there with a reality allied and congenial to beauty and art. In so far as the form of the exposition is concerned, the genuine romance pre-supposes, precisely as the Epos does, the synthesized purvey of the world and life as one whole, the manifold contents of which are manifested within the reach of the individual event which supplies the focal centre of the entire complexus. In his attitude to detail, however, the poet must here permit himself a freer play both of conception and execution, and all the more so because he is here less able to avoid the prose of actual life in his descriptions, though this freedom should not make him any more inclined to dwell exclusively in such an atmosphere of prose and ordinary occurrence.

3. THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF EPIC POETRY

In looking back upon the course of our previous consideration of the other arts, we find that we reviewed the different stages of the art of building throughout in their historical development as successively in symbolic, classic, and romantic architecture. In the case of sculpture, on the contrary, we accepted the Greek type, by virtue of its complete identity with the notion of this classic art, as the real focal centre, from which we proceeded to develop the specific characteristics of importance, so that here we did not find it necessary to extend so far as in the previous case the range of our historical survey. This contrast is further illustrated in our treatment of the romantic art-character of painting, which, however,[29] not merely in respect to the fundamental notion of its content, but also in that of the mode of its presentation, embraces an equally wide and important range of development in different nations and through different schools, so that in this case it was necessary to make our reference to history more extensive and varied. The nature of the art of music invited us to historical comparisons of the same kind. Inasmuch, however, as I have neither obtained access to the foreign literature dealing with the history of this art, nor can claim personally to possess the adequate knowledge, I have been forced to restrict myself to the mere outlines of what is required incidentally. With regard to our immediate subject, that is, epic poetry, the course of our enquiry will be very much that followed in the case of sculpture. In other words, though the mode of exposition branches off in several direct or collateral divisions, and embraces many historical periods and peoples, yet we have already recognized in the Epos of Greek literature the genuine type of it in its consummate form and most artistic mode of realization. And the reason of this is that in general the Epos possesses the closest affinity with the plastic of sculpture and its objective presence; and, not merely in respect to its substantive content, but equally so in the form of its presentation as that of phenomenal reality. It is therefore by no means simply an accident that we find epic poetry, no less than the art of sculpture, assert itself pre-eminently among the Greeks in its original and unsurpassed perfection. Stages of development, no doubt, are to be met with on either side of this culminating point, stages which are neither intrinsically subordinate or insignificant, but are necessary conditions of the art's growth, inasmuch as all nations are essentially within the sphere of poetic creation, and it is above all the Epos which brings before us the heart and core of the national life. And for this reason, the historical development of the Epic is of greater importance than was the case with sculpture.

We may then classify the entire compass of epic poetry, or, to express ourselves more accurately, of the Epopaea, in three fundamental stages; and these, speaking generally, constitute the course of the art's evolution.

Firsts we have the Oriental Epos, which makes the symbolic type its focal centre.

Secondly, there is the classical Epos of the Greeks, with its imitation in Roman authors.

Finally, we have the abundant and many-sided unfolding of epic-romantic poetry among Christian peoples; which, however, in the first instance appears in Teutonic paganism; and again, from another point of view, that is quite apart from what we may style the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages, we find the old classic world active in another province of life as instrumental to the purification of literary taste or style, or still more directly utilized as a model, until finally the modern romance replaces the Epos altogether.

We may now proceed to some review of single epic compositions: in this it will only be possible to emphasize what is of most importance; and, generally speaking, I can only pretend to give a rapid outline of this field in the space at my disposal.

(a) In the case of Oriental peoples the art of poetry is, as we have already observed, generally of a more primitive type, inasmuch as it remains more closely related to what we may style the essential[30] mode of envisagement, and the diffusion of the individual consciousness in the sublime Unity of the One. And because of this, as a further aspect, and relatively to the specific divisions of poetic composition, it is unable to work out individual personality in the self-subsistency of determinate characterization, with its aims and collisions, an elaboration which is of first importance in the composition of genuine dramatic poetry. The most essential result therefore we meet with here is limited—if we exclude from attention an endearing, sweet-scented, and delicate type of lyric, or one that uplifts itself to the one unutterable God—to poems, which are to be counted of the epic mould. Nevertheless it is only among the Hindoos and the Persians that we come across the genuine Epopaea; but here at least we do meet it in colossal proportions.

(α) The Chinese, on the contrary, possess no national Epos. The prosaic basis of their imaginative vision, which even to the earliest origins of history offers the jejune form of a prosaically organized historical reality, opposes from the first to this the most noble type of epic composition an insuperable obstruction. The religious conceptions of this people, little adapted as they are to artistic configuration, contribute to the same result. We find, however, at a later date and as some compensation, for their elaboration is most profuse, little narratives, and romances spun out to great length, which astound us by the vividness in which situations are realized, the accuracy with which private and public relations are depicted, the variety, fine breeding, or rather I should say frequently the fascinating tenderness they display, more particularly in their female characters, and in short by the art in every respect which succeeds in making works so consummate.

(β) A world of great contrast to the above presents itself in the Hindoo Epopaea. We find already in the most primitive compositions, if we may form an opinion from the little made known to the general public up to the present time from the Veda, most fruitful germs for a mythology fitted to epic exposition; and these, associated with the heroic exploits of men many centuries before Christ—for chronological accuracy is still impossible—are elaborated into genuine Epopaea, works, however, which are still composed in part from the wholly religious point of view, and in part from that of unfettered poetry and art. Pre-eminently do the two most famous of these poems, namely the Ramajana and the Maha-Bharata, place before us the entire world-outlook of the Hindoo race in all its splendour and glory, its confusion, fantastical absurdity and dissolution, and withal, from the reverse point of view, in the exuberant loveliness and the here and there fine traits of heart and emotion, which characterize the profuse vegetation of its spiritual growth. Mythical exploits of men are expanded into the actions of incarnate gods, whose deed hovers vaguely between the divine and human nature, and the determinate outlines of personality and exploit are dissolved in an infinitude of extension. The substantive bases of the whole are of a type such as our Western world-outlook, assuming that it does not choose to surrender the higher claims of freedom and morality, is neither able to find itself truly at home in or to sympathize with. The unity of the particular parts is of an extremely unstable kind; and layers upon layers of episodical matter, consisting of tales of the gods, narratives of ascetic penances, and the powers they create, tediously long expositions of philosophical doctrines and systems, so entirely impair the collective unity that we are forced to regard many of them as later accretions. But, however this may be, the spirit from which these stupendous poems have originated bears constant witness to an imagination, which is not only anterior to all prosaic culture, but as a rule is wholly incompatible with the faculty of ordinary common sense, and is capable in fact of endowing the fundamental tendencies of this national consciousness, in its essentially unique and collective conception of the universe, with an original artistic form. The later Epics, on the contrary, which are called Puranas, in the more restricted sense of the term, that is, poems of the Past, appear rather to be compiled in the prosaic and dull style similar to that adopted by post-Homeric cyclic poets, and pursue their downward course at great length from the creation of the gods and the universe to the genealogies of human heroes and princes. Finally the epic care of the old myths dissolves into vapour and artificial elegance of a purely external poetic form and diction, while on the one hand the phantasy, which exhausted itself in a dreamy wonderland, becomes the wisdom of fables whose most important function is to instruct us in morality and worldly wisdom.

(γ) We may compare side by side in a third division of epic Oriental poetry that respectively belonging to Hebrews, Arabs, and Persians.

(αα) The sublimity of the Jewish imagination no doubt in its conception of the Creation, in the histories of the Patriarchs, the wandering in the wilderness, the conquest of Canaan, and in the further historical course of national event, full as such a vision is of sterling content and natural truth, possesses many elements of primitive epic poetry; the religious interest is here, however, so predominant, that, instead of being genuine Epopaea, they merely approximate either to religious myths in the guise of poetry, or to religious narratives which are wholly didactic.