(_a_) The most simple, but nevertheless in its abstract concentration,
still one-sided and incomplete mode of epic exposition consists in the
assertion of that which is essentially fundamental and necessary among
the facts of the concrete world and the wealth of mutable phenomena,
and in the expression of such on their own account, as focussed in epic
phraseology.
(_α_) We may begin our consideration of the type with the _epigram_
i, in so far as it really remains an epigram, that is an inscription
on columns, effects, monuments, gifts and so forth, and at the same
time points with an ideal finger to something else, and by doing so
explains through words, inscribed on an object, somewhat otherwise
plastic, local, something present outside the words expressed. In
such an example the epigram states simply what a definite fact is.
The individual does not as yet express his concrete self; he attaches
a concise interpretation to the object, the locality, which he has
immediate perception of and which claims his interested attention, an
interpretation which goes to the heart of the fact in question.
(_β_) A yet further advance may be discovered in the case where the
twofold aspect of the object in its external reality and the fact of
inscription disappears, in so far, that is, as poetry, without any
actual representation on the object, expresses its idea of the fact. To
this class belong the gnomes of the ancients, ethical sayings, which
concentrate in concise language that which is more forceable than
material objects, more permanent and universal than the monument of
some definite action, more perdurable than votive offerings, columns,
and temples. Such are duties in human existence, the wisdom of life,
the vision of that which constitutes in action and knowledge the firm
foundations and stable bonds for human kind. The epic character of
such modes of conception consists in this, that such maxims do not
declare themselves as exclusively personal emotion and reflection, and
also, in the matter of their impression, are quite as little directed
with the object even of affecting our emotions, but rather with the
purpose to emphasize what is of sterling validity, whether as the
object of human obligation or the sense of honour and propriety. The
ancient Greek elegiacs have in some measure this epic tone. We have
still extant a few verses of Solon of this kind, though the transition
here into a hortatory tone and style is easily made. Such include
exhortations or warnings with reference to the common social life,
its laws and morality. We may also mention the gold sayings, which
tradition ascribes to Pythagoras. Yet all such are of a hybrid nature,
and referable to this, that though in general we may associate with
them the tone of our distinct type, yet, owing to the incompleteness of
the object, it is not fully realized, but rather there is a distinct
tendency to involve with it that of another poetical type, in the
present case the lyrical.
(_γ_) Such dicta may, however, _thirdly_, as already suggested, by
being divested of this fragmentary and self-exclusive isolation, go to
form a larger whole, be rounded off, that is, in a totality, which is
altogether of the _Epic_ type; we have here neither a purely lyrical
frame of mind nor a dramatic action, but a specific and veritable
sphere of the living world whose essential nature, as emphasized in
its general characteristics, no less than as situated to particular
aspects, points of view, occurrences or obligations, supplies us with
an integrating unity and a genuine focal centre. In complete agreement
with this type of epical content, which displays what is of permanent
and universal import along with, as a rule, a distinct ethical purpose
of admonishment, instruction or exhortation to an, in all essentials,
ethically stable life, compositions of this kind receive a _didactic_
flavour. Nevertheless, by reason of the novelty of their wise sayings,
the freshness of their general outlook and the ingenuousness of their
observation we must keep them quite distinct from more recent didactic
poetry. They wholly justify, inasmuch as they give the necessary
play to matter entirely descriptive, the conclusion that these two
aspects taken together, instruction and description, are directly
deduced as the substantive summary of facts which have been throughout
experienced. As an obvious illustration I will merely mention the
"Works and Days" of Hesiod, the teaching and descriptive power of
which, in its primitive style and as a poetical composition, exercises
a fascination upon us wholly different from the pleasure we experience
in the colder elegance, the scientific or systematic conclusions of
Virgil's poems on agriculture.
(_b_) The above described modes of epigram, gnome, and didactive
poem accept their _specific_ provinces of Nature or human life as
their subject-matter, while endeavouring to fix attention in concise
language, with more or less limitation of survey, on that which is of
permanent worth and essential truth in this or that object, condition,
or activity; and even under the still more restricted condition
which the art of poetry imposes on such a task the practical result
upon human effort is still maintained. There is, however, a further
or _second_ type of such compositions, which is, on the one hand,
profounder in its penetration, and, on the other, lays less stress
on instruction and reform. Such are the cosmogonies and theogonies,
no less than those most ancient works of philosophy, which are still
unable entirely to liberate themselves from the poetical form.
(_α_) In this way the exposition of the Eleatic philosophy in the
poems of Xenophanes and Parmenides still remains poetic in form; and
this is exceptionally so in the introduction prefaced by the latter
to his work. The content is here the One, which, in its contrast
to the Becoming or the already Become, all particular phenomena in
short, is eternal and imperishable. No particularity is permitted
to bring content to the human spirit, which strives after truth,
and, in the first instance, is cognizant of the same in its most
abstract unity and concreteness. Expatiating in the greatness of this
object, and wrestling with the might of the same, the impulse of
soul inclines instinctively to the lyrical expression, although the
entire explication of the truths into which the writer's thought here
penetrates carries on its face a wholly practical and thereby epic
character.
(_β_) It is, _secondly_, the _becoming_ of objective things, in
particular natural objects, the press and conflict of activities
operative in Nature, which supplies the matter of the cosmogonies,
and impels the poetic imagination to disclose in the still more
concrete and opulent mode of actions and events real eventuality. And
the way this faculty does this is by clothing the forces of Nature
in relatively more or less personified or figurative images placed
in distinct stages, and through the symbolical form of human events
and actions. Such a type of epic content and exposition pre-eminently
belongs to Oriental Nature-religions; and above all among them the
poetry of India is to an excessive degree prolific in the invention and
portrayal of such modes of conception, frequently of an unbridled and
extravagant type, concerning the origin of the world and the powers
that are active therein.
(_γ_) We find, _thirdly_, similar characteristics in theogonies. Such
occupy their true position mainly in so far as, on the one hand, the
many particular gods are not suffered exclusively to possess the life
of Nature as the more essential content of their power and creation,
nor, conversely, is it one god that creates the world out of thought
and spirit, and who, in the jealous mood of monotheism, will tolerate
no other gods beside himself. This fair mean is alone exemplified in
the religious outlook of the Greeks. It discovers an imperishable
subject-matter for theogony-building in the forceful emancipation of
the family of Zeus from the lawlessness of primitive natural forces,
no less than in the conflict waged against them. It is a process and
a strife which we may indeed affirm gives us the historical origins
of the immortal gods of poetry itself. The famous example of such an
epic mode of conception we possess in the theogony known to us under
the name of Hesiod. In this composition the entire course of event is
throughout wedded to the form of human occurrences; it becomes less and
less symbolical just to the extent that the gods, who are summoned to
a spiritual dominion, are themselves liberated through an intelligent
and ethical individuality adequate to their essential nature, and
consequently are rightfully claimed and depicted as acting like
human beings. What is, however, still absent from this type of Epic
composition is, in the first place, a genuinely complete _result_[1]
as poetry. The acts and events, which are within the scope of the
survey of such poems, are no doubt an essentially necessary succession
of occurrence, but they are not an individual action which issues as
from a centre, wherein it discovers its unity and independence. From
a further point of view the content of such poetry does not, and in
virtue of its character cannot, present to us an essentially _complete
whole_. It does, and for the above reason must, exclude the real
activities of mankind, which are indispensable as the truly concrete
material for the active display of the Divine forces. Epic poetry,
therefore, is bound to free itself from such defects, if it is to
receive its most perfect expression.
(_c_) This actually does take place in that sphere which we may
designate the true _Epopœa._
In the types hitherto discussed, which as a rule are wholly passed
over, what we call the epic tone is unmistakably present, but the
content is not as yet poetical in the concrete sense. Particular
ethical maxims and philosophemata still persist as part of the
material. What is, however, poetical in the full sense is concrete
ideality in individual guise; and the epos, inasmuch as it makes what
actually exists its object, accepts as such the happening of a definite
action, which, in the full compass of its circumstances and relations
must be brought with clarity to our vision as an event enriched by its
further association with the organically complete world of a nation
and an age. It follows from this that the collective world-outlook
and objective presence of a national spirit, displayed as an actual
event in the form of its self-manifestation, constitutes, and nothing
short of this does so, the content and form of the true epic poem. As
one aspect of such a totality we have the religious consciousness in
every degree of profundity attained by the human spirit; it furthermore
embraces the particular concrete life, whether political or domestic,
not excluding all the detail of external existence, and the means by
which human necessities are satisfied. All such material the epos makes
of vital account as a growth in close contact with individuals; and
for this reason, that for poetry the universal and substantive is only
realized in the living presence of spirit life.
Such a comprehensive world, together with the human characterization
it embraces, must then pass before us as real in a tranquil stream,
without any undue haste, either as positive history or dramatic action,
towards its aim and conclusion. We must thereby be permitted to linger
round isolated facts, to penetrate into the different pictures of its
movement and to enjoy them in all their detail. And by this means
the entire panorama receives in its objective mode of realization
the form of an external series of events, the basis and limitations
of which must be implied in the essential ideality of the particular
epic content, and of which the positive assertion is alone absent.
If, consequently, the epic poem is, in its links of connection, more
diffuse, and, by virtue of the relatively greater independence of
portions of it, inclined to suffer from lack of coherency, we must not
allow ourselves the impression that it could ever have been actually
sung throughout in this manner. Rather it is an imperative in its case,
as in that of any other artistic production, that it should be finished
off in an essentially organic whole, which, however, moves forward in
apparent tranquillity, in order that the particular fact and the images
of actual life it contains may engage our interest.
(_α_) Such a primitive whole is the epic composition, whether known as
the saga, the book, or the bible of a people. We may add every great
and important nation can claim to have such primitive books, in which
we find a mirror of the original spirit of a folk. To this extent
these memorials are nothing less than the real foundations of the
national consciousness; and it would be of profound interest to make a
collection of such epic bibles. Such a series of Epopees, however much
they fell short of artistic compositions in the modern sense, would at
least present to us a gallery of the genius of nations. At the same
time it is doubtless the fact that it is not every national bible which
can claim the poetic form of the epopœa; nor do all nations which have
embodied their most sacred memorials, whether in relation to religion
or secular life, in the form of comprehensive compositions of the
epic type, possess religious books. The Old Testament, for example,
contains no doubt much epic narrative and genuine history, no less than
incidental poetic compositions; but despite of this the whole is not
a work of art. In a similar way the New Testament, as also the Koran,
are mainly limited to a religious subject-matter, starting from which
the life of the world at large is to some extent and in later times a
consequence. Conversely, though the Hellenes have a poetic bible in
the poems of Homer, they are without ancient religious books in the
sense the Hindoos and the Parsees possess such. Where, however, we meet
with the primitive epopoea, we must essentially distinguish between
primitive poetic books and the more recent classic compositions of
a nation, which do not any longer offer us a mirror of the national
spirit in all its compass but do no more than reflect it partially
and in particular directions. The dramatic poetry of the Hindoos, for
example, or the tragedies of Sophocles present no such exhaustive
picture as we find in the Ramajana and the Maha-Bharata, or the Iliad
and the Odyssey.
(_β_) And insomuch as in the genuine Epos the naïve national
consciousness is expressed for the first time in poetic guise, the real
epic poem will appear for the most part in that midway stage in which,
though no doubt a people is aroused from its stupidity, and its life
is to that extent essentially strengthened to the point of reproducing
its own world and of feeling itself at home therein, yet, for all that,
everything which at a later stage becomes fixed religious dogma or
civic law and ethical rule, still remains in the fluency of life as
mere opinion, inseparable from the individual as such. And along with
this volition and feeling are not as yet held distinct from one another.
(_αα_) It is only after the separation of the individual's personal
self from the concrete national whole, with its conditions, modes of
opinion, exploits and destiny; it is only, further, after the division
in man himself between his emotion and volition, that the lyric and
dramatic types of poetry in turn replace the epic type and attain their
richest development. This consummation is only reached in the later
life-experience of a people, in which the general lines laid down by
men for the due regulation of their affairs are no longer inseparable
from the sentiments and opinions of the nation as a whole, but already
have secured an independent structure as a co-ordinated system of
jurisprudence and law, as a prosaic disposition of positive facts, as
a political constitution, as a body of ethical or other precepts; and
being so, individuals are now confronted with material obligations
rather as a necessary force external to themselves than one which their
own inner life asserts, and which it compels them to substantiate as
its fulfilment. As opposed to such an already actual and independent
system, the individual life will seek in part to find expression in an
equally independent world and growth of personal vision, reflection
and emotion, which are not carried further into the sphere of action,
and will further give _lyrical_ utterance to its selfabsorption, its
pre-occupation with the content of such a soul-experience. And, in
part also, it will make its active passion of main importance, and
will seek to assert itself independently in action, in so far as it
is able to divest external conditions, the event and its concomitants
of any claim to truly epic self-subsistency. It is just this increase
to the strength and stability of individual character and aims in
their relation to action which opens the way to _dramatic_ poetry. To
return, however, to the epic, we repeat that it is the above-mentioned
unity of feeling and action which it demands, that unity between the
self-fulfilled object of the personal life and the external accident
and event; a unity which, as observed, is only present without blemish
as it first appears in the earliest periods of the national life or the
national poetry.
(_ββ_) At the same time, we must not yield ourselves, therefore, to the
impression that a people in its heroical time simply as such, and as
the home of its epos, there and then was in possession of art, or could
necessarily depict its life in the mirror of poetry. As a matter of
fact, an essentially poetical nationality in its actual world-presence
is one thing; the art of poetry regarded as the imaginative
consciousness of poetical material, and the artistic presentment of
such a world is quite another. The felt want to express oneself _as
idea_ in terms of the latter, the trained knowledge of art, are later
acquisitions than the life and spirit itself, which discovers itself in
all simplicity at home in its unreservedly poetical existence. Homer
and the poems under his name are centuries later than the Trojan war,
which is to myself quite as much an historical fact as the personality
of Homer. In the same way we may affirm of Ossian, always assuming that
the poems ascribed to him are really his, that he celebrates an heroic
past, the sunset splendour of which inspires him to recall and reclothe
the same in poetical form.
(_γγ_) Despite, however, such a separation, some intimate bond of
association must exist between the poet and his subject-matter. The
poet must still stand on even terms with the conditions, the general
point of vision, the beliefs which he depicts. All he should find
it necessary to do is to attach to these the poetic consciousness
and the art capable of portraying them; in other respects they are
still essential factors in his own life. If such an affinity as that
above described is absent in our poet's epic creation, his poem must
infallibly contain disparate and irreconcilable features. For both
these aspects--namely, the content, the epic world, which it is the
intention to portray, and the world of the poet's conscious life and
imagination, which is in other respects independent of the above--are
of spiritual derivation; they each of them possess intrinsically a
definite principle, in which particular traits of characterization are
involved. If, then, the personal life of the artist is essentially
of a different order to that by virtue of which the historical and
national life depicted came into actual being, we must necessarily
become conscious of a cleft in the artistic result which will disturb
and injure its effect. We shall have, in short, scenes placed before
us of a previous condition of history, combined with modes of
thought, opinions, and views more pertinent to other periods; and, in
consequence of this, the configuration of primitive beliefs will, in
its contact with the more developed reflection of a later time, lose
the warmth of conviction, become, in short, a mere superstition, an
empty embellishment of the mere poetical instrumentation, from which
all the vitality of its actual life has vanished.
(_γ_) And this brings us to the general question what position the poet
himself of genuine epic poetry really ought to take up.
(_αα_) Now, however much the Epos ought also to be positive in the
sense that it is the objective presentment of a world based upon its
own foundations, and realized in virtue of its own necessary laws,
a world, moreover, with which the personal outlook of the poet must
remain in a connection that enables him to identify himself wholly
with it; yet it is equally true that his artistic product, which
reproduces this world, is throughout the _free creation_ of himself.
In this connection we shall do well to recall that fine expression of
Herodotus: "Homer and Hesiod have created the gods of the Hellenic
race." And, in truth, this free and audacious spirit of creation,
which Herodotus attaches to the abovementioned poets, already is
some testimony to the fact that although the Epopœa belongs to the
early age of a nation, it is not its function to depict the most
primitive condition of all. In other words, every nation possesses
in its earliest origins more or less an alien culture of some kind,
is confronted with a religious cult of foreign importation to which
it submits, or which it regards as sacrosanct. And, indeed, we find
that the minstrelsy, the superstition, the barbarous elements in
human life, no less than the most exalted have their source just in
this, that instead of being entirely at home with themselves, they
are experienced as something aloof from themselves, that is not the
natural product of their own national and individual consciousness.
In this way, for example, the Hindoos must certainly, long before
the date of their great Epopees, have experienced many an important
revolution of religious beliefs and secular condition. The Greeks no
less, as previously remarked, had to transform much material of an
Egyptian, Phrygian, and Asiatic descent. The Romans, in their turn,
were confronted with much of a Greek origin; and the barbarians, in
the period of national invasion, with Christian or Roman antecedents,
and so on. Not until the poet is able with a free hand to cast from
him such a yoke, is able to take stock of what he really possesses,
is conscious of his own worth, and we are thereby released from all
perturbed state of mental vision, will the dawn break of a genuine
epic creation. In contrast to such an outlook we have the age and the
society modified by a cult abstract in its origin, with its elaborate
dogmas, established political and moral maxims, all of which take us
away from the concrete life at home with itself. The world of the truly
epic poet maintains its opposition to such conditions. Not merely in
respect to universal forces, passions, and aims which are operative
in the soul-life of individuals, but also in such a poet's attitude
to all external facts, be his creation never so independent, he is
entirely as one in his own province. In just this way Homer is at home
in all that he sings to us of his world, and where we are conscious
of such intimacy in another we are infected with a like feeling, for
we are here face to face with truth, with that spirit which lives in
its world, and discovers therein its true being; and it does us good
to feel this, inasmuch as the poet is himself present therein heart
and soul. Such a world may, indeed, belong to a less advanced stage
of evolution and culture than our own; but at least it does remain
faithful to that of a poetry and beauty which is open to all, so
that we essentially recognize and understand here everything which
our higher life, our humanity in its fundamental demands, whether
it be the honour, the opinions, the emotions, the exhortation, or
the exploits of each and every hero; and we are able to enjoy such
characters, in all the detail of their portraiture, as themselves
united to such a life and the richness of its actual presence.
(_ββ_) But on account of the emphasis upon the objective independence
of this whole, it is a further necessary contrast that the poet fall
into the background and become lost in his _subject_. What is to
appear is the creation, not the poet; and yet withal, that which the
poem expresses belongs to him. He has imagined all in his mind's eye;
he has implanted there his soul, his genius. All this, however, is
not expressly asserted. So we find, for instance, that at one time a
Calchas will give the outline of events; at another, a Nestor. Yet, for
all that, such interpretative matter is the gift of the poet himself.
Nay, actual changes in the soul-life of his heroes he explains in
objective fashion as an entrance of gods upon the scene, as in the
case where Athene appears before Achilles in his rage, counselling
self-restraint. And inasmuch as the Epos does not disclose the
soul-life of the creator, save indirectly, but the positive facts of
external life, the subjective aspect of his creations must completely
fall into the background, no less than the creator himself vanish
behind the world he unfolds to our vision. From this point of view a
great epic style makes the work appear to be itself its own minstrel.
It seems to pass before us self-begotten, a work of independent birth.
(_γγ_) Moreover, the epic poem, if a true work of art, is the exclusive
creation of _one_ artist. However much an epic may express the affairs
of the entire nation, it remains the fact that it is the individual
who is the poet, not the nation as a whole. The spirit of an age, of
a people, is no doubt the essential operative cause; but realization
is only secured in the work of art as conceived by the constructive
genius of a _particular_ poet, who brings before our vision and
reproduces this universal spirit and its content as his own experience
and his own product. Poetical composition is a real spiritual birth,
and spirit or intelligence only exist as this or that actual and
individual conscious and self-conscious life. When we have already an
artistic creation in a particular style,[2] we have no doubt something
to start from; and others are then able to copy with more or less
success something like it, just as we have to listen nowadays to some
scores of poems written in the Goethesque manner. To continue to
sing many compositions in the same kind of key, however, will never
create the unified creation, which is throughout the work of _one_
inspiring genius. This is a point of real importance not only in our
attitude to the Homeric poems, but also the Niebelungen Lied. For the
last-mentioned work we are unable to determine an author with any
historical certainty; and as for the Iliad and Odyssey, the opinion
of some critics is notorious that the Homer of tradition--that is,
the sole author of these books--never existed at all. They are the
production in different parts of various authors, parts which have
finally been patched together in the two larger works we possess. With
regard to such a theory the question of most importance is whether
either or both of these extant works constitute an independent organic
whole in the epic sense, or, as is the view fashionable nowadays,
they possess no inevitable beginning or conclusion, but rather might
be continued on present lines for ever. We may, of course, admit that
the unity of the Homeric poems is, as part of their essential form,
less compact than that we associate with the terse concentration of a
dramatic work. Inasmuch as every separate portion may be and may appear
as relatively independent, they give free play to many interpolations
and abrupt transitions; but, despite of this, they do unquestionably
constitute throughout a true, ideally organic, and epic totality. Such
a whole can only be the composition of _one_ author. This notion of
a conglomerate without essential unity, of a mere patching together
of various rhapsodies composed in a similar strain, is a wild sort of
idea opposed to all artistic canons. Of course, if such a view merely
amounts to this, that the poet, in his bare individuality, vanishes
in his creation, it is the highest form of praise. This is merely a
statement that we are unable to recognize any positive traces of wholly
personal opinions and feeling. So much is certainly true of the Homeric
poems. What we have before us, and we have only this, is the positive
fact, the objective outlook of a people. But the song of a people
requires a voice, a voice which can sing forth the contents of heart
and soul, as harvested from the national granary; and an essentially
self-integrated work of art calls for yet more than this from the
_unique_ genius of its creator.