7. In outward form the epic poem is simply a narrative in verse.
Historically it seems to have originated in the records of ancestral
heroism, which passed from mouth to mouth in metre, as the natural form
of oral communication in an unlettered age. In the Iliad and Odyssey we
first find this outward form penetrated by a new spirit, which converts
the narrative into the poem. There is no need to do violence to
historical probability by supposing that Homer was a conscious artist,
or that he imagined himself to be doing anything else than representing
events as they happened. We have simply to notice that in him facts have
become poetry, and to ask ourselves what constitutes the change. How is
it that the epic poet, while "holding up the mirror to nature," yet
shows us in the glass a glory which belongs not to nature as we see it,
in its material limitations? The answer is, that though he follows the
essential laws of the human spirit, his scene is not the earth we live
in. He fills it with actors other than the men who "hoard and sleep and
feed" around us. He places the action either in heroic ages--in the
"past which was never present," when gods were more human and men more
divine--or in heavenly places, and among the powers of the air. The
action is simple in proportion to its remoteness from the reality of
life, and rapid in proportion to its simplicity. It arises from the
operation of the most elementary passions, the wrath of Achilles or the
pride of Satan, in collision with an overruling power. For the animal
wants and tricks of fortune, which entangle the web of man's affairs, it
has no place. The animal element, if not banished from view altogether,
becomes merely the organ of the ruling motions of the spirit; and
fortune is lost in destiny or providence. Thus the incidents of the
narrative cease to be mere incidents. They are held together by passion;
they are themselves, so to speak, manifestations of passion working with
more and more intensity to the final consummation. Not the laws which
regulate curiosity, but those which regulate hope and awe, are the laws
which they have to satisfy.