I have taken the words 'Heroic Poetry' to signify the poetry of
strenuous action, the art of describing in vigorous animating verse
those scenes and emergent situations in which the energies of mankind
are strung up to the higher tones, and where the emotions are brought
into full play by the exhibition of valour, endurance, and suffering.
It seems to me remarkable that modern English poetry, with all its
splendid variety, should have produced very little in this particular
form; because no one can deny that the latter-day story of the English
has been full of enterprise and perilous adventure, providing ample
material to the artist who knows how to use it. Nor can it be said
that there is any lack of demand for this sort of poetry, and
consequently little inducement to supply it. On the contrary, any one
can see that hero worship is as strong as ever, that any striking
incident, or example of personal valour, or exploit of war, brings out
the verse-writer, and that his efforts, if only very moderately
successful, are sure to win him great popularity.
But it must be admitted that most of these efforts fail rather
lamentably, insomuch that at the present day we may seem to be losing
one of the finest forms of a noble art. From this point of view there
may be some advantage in looking back to the heroic poetry of earlier
ages, and in endeavouring to mark briefly and imperfectly its
distinctive qualities, to recall the conditions and circumstances in
which it flourished, and possibly to hazard some suggestions as to
the causes of its decline.
I do not know any recent book which throws more light upon this
subject than Professor Ker's book on _Epic and Romance_, published in
1897. It is, to my mind, most valuable as an exposition of the right
nature and methods of heroic narrative, in poetry and in prose. The
author has the rare gift of insight into the ways and feelings of
primitive folk, and the critical faculty of discerning the
characteristics of a style or a period, showing how men, who knew what
to say and the right manner of saying it, have shaped the true form of
heroic poetry. We can see that its elementary principles, the methods
of composition in verse and prose, are essentially the same in all
times and countries, in the _Iliad_, in the Icelandic Sagas, in the
old Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon poems, and to some extent in the French
Chansons de Geste; they might be used to-morrow for a heroic subject
by any one gifted with the requisite skill, imagination, and the eye
for impressive realities.
'Few nations have attained, at the close of their heroic age, to a
form of poetical art in which men are represented freely in action
and conversation. The labour and meditation of all the world has
not discovered, for the purposes of narrative, any essential
modification of the procedure of Homer.'
Professor Ker's essays are a brilliant and scholarly contribution to
the external history of poetical forms: and it would be great
presumption in me to attempt a review of his work. But it is so
eminently suggestive, and to my mind so valuable as a study for verse
writers of the present day, that I have ventured to place this book in
the foreground of an attempt to sketch rapidly some clear outline of
the conditions and the essential qualities of heroic poetry, which is
too commonly regarded as an easy off-hand kind of versification,
largely made up of dash, glowing words, and warlike clatter; although
in reality nothing is more rare or difficult than success in it.
We may say, then, that the first heroic poets and tale-tellers were
those who related the deeds and sufferings, the life and death of the
mighty men of earlier times; and that their verse was the embodiment
of the living traditions of men and manners. They were bards and
chroniclers who lived close enough to the age of which they wrote to
understand and keep touch with it--an age when battles and adventures
were ordinary incidents in the annals of a tribe, a city, or a
country--when valour, skill at arms, and a stout heart were supremely
important, being almost the only virtues that led to high distinction
and a great career. Heroic poetry of the higher kind could not exist
in a period of mere barbarism, for among barbarous folk there is no
art of poetic form. It could not have arisen before the people were so
far civilised as to have among them artistic singers or story-tellers
who gave fine and forcible expression to the acts they celebrated or
the scenes they described.
The old heroic poets were neither too near to the time of which they
sung or wrote, nor too far from it; and this gave them another special
advantage, they had a good audience. The song, or the story, must have
often been recited before listeners to whom the whole subject was more
or less familiar, who knew the facts and ways of war, the true aspect
and usages of a rough and perilous existence. They were too well
acquainted, at any rate, with such things to be captivated by vague
imaginative descriptions of fighting and refined chivalrous methods of
dealing with a mortal foe, such as are found in the later Romance.
Among primitive folk there would have been no taste for fantastic,
allegoric, and extravagant though highly poetical accounts of
valorous exploits by noble knights, with their tournaments and their
adventures with giants, dwarfs, or enchanters. The tradition was of a
community encompassed by dangers for men and for women, where life and
goods depended on strength and sagacity. And so the original hero was
strictly a practical soldier, a man who knew his business, who had
very few troublesome scruples; he was a man of war from his youth up,
struggling with arduous circumstance; and he usually came at last, as
in actual life, to a bloody though glorious end. For the experience of
a rough age is that the drama mostly finishes tragically, not happily
as in a modern novel. There was always a strain of Romance in the
heroic tale, and softer feelings were never quite absent: but all this
was subordinate to facts: whereas Romance seems to have prevailed and
grown popular in proportion as the writer stood further away from the
actualities, trusted to imagination rather than to authentic
experience, preferred literary ornament to probability, and indeed
took his readers as far away as possible from scenes or situations
which they could recognise or verify.
It may thus be suggested that the essential quality of Heroic poetry
is this--that it gives a true picture of the time. Not that the poet
was an eye-witness of what he narrated, or even that he lived in the
same generation with the men or the events that he celebrated. On the
contrary, the distance which lends enchantment to the view is needed
to surround heroes with a golden haze of glorification. But the bard
did live on the outer edge, so to speak, of the period which he wrote
about; he was more or less in the same atmosphere; his audience kept
him very near the truth because they could detect any exaggeration,
absurdity, or very unlikely incident; just as we should mark and
reject any particularly foolish story of the war that might appear in
to-morrow's newspaper. They would indeed swallow strange marvels of a
supernatural kind, the doings of gods and goddesses, and of magicians.
But I think it will be agreed that in all ages this has been a
separate matter, because men will believe what is plainly miraculous,
when they will not accept what is merely improbable. So far as the
natural world was concerned, the heroic artist worked upon genuine
material, transmitted orally or by fragmentary records, producing a
right image of remarkable men and the world in which they lived. It
was a world, in most cases, of small communities and petty wars, in
which a good chief or warrior came rapidly to the front, and was
all-important individually.
The word Hero is one of those Greek words which have been adopted into
all European languages, because they signify precisely a universal
idea of the thing. He must be strong and able in battle, for a lost
fight might mean the death or slavery of all his people. If the hero
does his living and dying in a noble fashion, the folk trouble
themselves very moderately about minor questions of religion or
ethics, and are very moderately scandalised by occasional ferocity.
Such a man is not to be hampered by ordinary rules; he is like a
general commanding in the field, who may do anything for the
preservation of his army, and the consequence is that he is seldom
expected to moralise. He acknowledges and pays great honour to the
cardinal virtues of truth-speaking, mutual fidelity, hospitality,
strict observance of pledges. He is in many ways a religious man;
though he is apt to break away from the priests when they interfere
seriously with the business in hand. For the chastity of wives he has
a high esteem, yet although he and his people are constantly brought
into trouble about women, he is tolerant of them, even when their
behaviour is what might be called regrettable; he treats them in some
degree as irresponsible beings, on the ground, perhaps, that they are
the only non-combatants in the world as he knows it, and that this
gives them special privileges. We can measure the importance of such a
personage in ancient days, by the noise which a first-class hero made
in the primitive world. He became literally and figuratively immortal:
he was regarded as a god, or at least godlike--the greatest of them
were actually deified. He was seized upon by fable, myth, miraculous
legend, and poetry--his name was handed down for centuries until the
heroic lineaments were softened down, disfigured, and at last faded
away in the magical haze of later Romance. But in very rare instances
he had the good luck to be taken in hand, before it was too late, by
some man of genius, who knew the temper of heroic times because he
lived within range of them, and who has preserved for us a story, an
incident, or a typical character--not, indeed, an authentic narrative,
for the true story disappears under the tradition which is built over
it; nor would such accurate knowledge be of much use to the poet,
whose business it is only to give us a fine spirited account of what
might have occurred. For the evidence that an ancient battle was
really fought we must go to the historian; the poet will tell us how
it was fought, he stirs the blood and fires the imagination by his
tale of noble deeds and deaths. His strength rests upon the foundation
of reality that underlies his artistic construction: he has never let
go his hold upon sound experience: and the truth is felt in all the
colour and detail of the picture, though the whole is a work of vivid
imagination. We cannot verify, obviously, the facts and motives which
led to the siege of Troy, although Herodotus appears to agree that the
cause of that war was a Spartan woman's abduction, and only examines
the point whether the Asiatic or the European Greeks were first to
blame in the matter. Professor Murray prefers to believe in a myth
growing out of the strife of light and darkness in the sky: but the
rape of beautiful girls by seafaring rovers was evidently common
enough in those times, so why should not the Homeric version be right?
We can always be sure that the old poems represent accurately life,
manners, and character; and from the analogy of those legends whose
origin is known, we may fairly infer that the root of a famous story,
divine or human, is first planted in fact, not in fancy; just as the
Chanson de Roland is founded on a real battle in the pass of
Roncevalles.
Such, therefore, were the conditions and fortunate coincidences which
produced the finest heroic poetry. You had the popular hero--the noble
warrior who knew his business; and you had also the poet or
story-teller who knew his art, could give you a dramatic picture
founded upon fact, and could always keep close to reality, without
crowding his canvas with unnecessary particulars; he gave you the
ruling motives, actions, and feelings of the age. The excellence of
the work lay in simplicity and directness of treatment, in a sureness
of line drawing, in a power of striking the right note, whether of
praise or sorrow, of glory or grief. There is no staginess or
far-fetched emotion, or artificial scene-painting: the style strikes
the right chords of passion or pity, and stamps upon the mind a vivid
impression of situation and character. Moreover, the heroic poet, as a
composer, had this advantage in early days, that continual recital
before an appreciative public must have had the effect of polishing up
his best verses, and polishing off his bad ones. As the theme was
always some well-known story or personage, it was possible to omit
details and explanations, and to go straight to the points that
repetition had proved to be the most effective, so that the criterion
of excellence must have been immediate popularity with the audience as
in a play. It may be conjectured also that the metre, in length of
line and cadence, formed itself to a great degree on the natural
conditions of oral delivery and listening. For all poetry, I think,
makes its primary appeal to the ear; and the modern habit of reading
it seems to me to have thrown this essential test of quality somewhat
into the background. The arrangement of metre and rhyme may have been
gradually invented to correspond with and satisfy that natural
expectation of the recurrence of certain tones and measures which
always delights primitive men, and of which one may possibly trace
some symptoms even in animals, as when the snake sways slowly to the
simple sounds of a snake-charmer's pipe. The order of all modern
versification (except in blank verse, which is never popular) depends
on the echoing rhyme, which marks time like the stroke of a bell, and
is waited for with keen anticipation by the sensitive listener. It is
strange, to my mind, that such a beautiful creation as the beat of
tonic sounds at a line's terminal should have been comparatively so
recent a discovery in European poetry.
That a master of this art must have been very rare is shown by the
very few pieces of first-class heroic poetry still extant out of the
immense quantity that must have been attempted in different ages and
countries. Yet the materials lie strewn around us, awaiting the
skilful hand; they are to be found wherever a high-spirited warlike
race is fighting its way upward out of barbarism into some less
wretched stage of society that may allow breathing time for working
the precious mines of recent traditions. The state of society
described in some Icelandic Sagas, for example, with its hereditary
blood feuds and perpetual assassinations, with its code of honour
making vengeance a pious duty, its tariff of blood money, and its
council for adjusting civil and criminal wrongs, has a close
resemblance to everyday life among the free Afghan tribes beyond the
North-West Frontier of India. But the Saga writers flourished, I
understand, when this state of things had passed or was passing away;
while the Afghans are still a rude illiterate folk who have only
songs, recited by the professional bards. The best collection of these
popular songs has been made by a Frenchman, the late James
Darmesteter, who remarks that 'English people in India care little for
Indian songs'; though one may reply that he has made use of English
writers and collectors of frontier folklore, and indeed he
acknowledges his debt to Mr. Thorburn's excellent book on _Bannu or
our Afghan Frontier_. However that may be, we have here, in these
unwritten lays, the stuff out of which is developed, first, the
established tradition, and, secondly, not only poetry but also the
beginnings of history, for these lays are the oral records of
contemporary events--'c'est le cri meme de l'histoire.' They tell of
the last Afghan War, and of the most famous border forays made by the
English lords on the Afghan marches: they preserve the names and deeds
of English officers and of the leading warriors of the Afghan tribes:
they tell how Cavagnari 'drank the stirrup-cup of the great journey'
when the English mission was slaughtered at Kabul in 1879, and how
General Roberts, his heart shot through with grief, set out in fiery
speed on his avenging march against the Afghan capital. Here then is
for the modern historian a rare opportunity of comparing the
contemporary popular version of events with exact authentic official
record; and the result ought to aid him in deciding, by analogy, what
value is to be placed on similar material that has been handed down
in the ancient songs and stories of other countries. He will be
fortified, I think, in the sound conclusion that all far-sounding
legend has a solid substratum of fact. As poetry, these songs render
forcibly the temper and feelings of the people; they illustrate their
virtues and vices, their worship of courage and devotion to the clan,
their fanaticism and ferocity. The sense of Afghan honour, in the
matter of sheltering a guest, is shown in the ballad which relates how
a son killed his father for violating this law of hospitality. Like
all popular verse, the Afghan songs have their recurrent phrases and
familiar commonplaces; yet, says Darmesteter,
'in spite of the limited range of ideas and interests, and a rather
low ideal, all such defects find their excuse in the passion, the
simplicity, the direct spontaneous outspeaking, that supreme gift
which has been lost in our intellectual decadence.'
The stirring events of the time have been immediately put into verse;
the scenes and feelings are struck off in the die of actual
circumstance; the heated metal takes a clear-cut impression. It is in
rough songs like these that are to be found the germs of the higher
heroic poetry. The ballad, the short stories, the favourite anecdotes
of remarkable men at their exploits, have the luck to fall, later,
into the hands of a skilful reciter or verse-maker; they are enlarged,
knit together, and fashioned according to the ideas of the day, with
an infusion of rhetoric and literary decoration. The heroic ideal, to
use Professor Ker's words, is thus worked up out of the sayings and
doings of great men of the fore-time, who stand forth as the type and
embodiment of the virtues and vices of their age, as it was conceived
by poets who could handle the popular traditions. And we may guess
that all anecdotes, words of might, and feats of arms that were
current before and after him, if they were appropriate to the type,
would cluster round the hero, and be used for bringing his character
into strong relief. We can even discern this tendency in modern
society, where a notable personage, like the Duke of Wellington or
Talleyrand, is credited with any vigorous or caustic saying that suits
the idea of him, and may be passed on in another generation to the
account of the next popular favourite. The literary habit of providing
impressive 'last words' for great men at death's door might be taken
as another example of the magnetic attraction of types.
Of course the perfect samples of heroic verse, of famous songs and
stories woven into an epic poem, are to be found in Homer.[17]
Nowhere, in the whole range of the world's poetry, can we see such
splendid impersonations of primitive life and character treated
artistically. Yet the plot is simple enough. Agamemnon, the chief
commander of the Greek army, has carried off the daughter of a priest
of Apollo, and flatly refuses to give her back; whereupon the priest
appeals to the god, who brings the chief to reason by spreading a
plague in the Grecian camp; and so the girl goes home with apologies.
But Agamemnon indemnifies himself by seizing a captive damsel
belonging to Achilles, who, being justly infuriated, will go no more
to battle, but sits sulkily in his tent, until the Greek army is very
nearly destroyed, for want of his help, by the Trojans.
Here we have at once a picture of manners not unlike those of the
Afghan tribes, though very differently treated. The poet is at no
pains to put on any moral varnish, or to tone down the roughness
romantically; because he is writing, or reciting, for people of much
the same way of thinking as his heroes, who are fierce chiefs
quarrelling over captured women; and the whole plot is developed by
sheer pressure of circumstance and character. Then on the Trojan side
we have the figure of Hector, the true patriotic hero, who is
naturally displeased with Paris for the abduction of Helen, which has
brought a disastrous war upon Troy; yet what is done cannot be undone,
and his clear duty is to fight for his own people. To Helen herself he
is gentle and kind; and the religious men only irritate him when they
interfere in military matters. But although he is far the noblest
character in the whole poem, he is eventually slain by Achilles, for
the plain reason that Achilles is the most terrible warrior of both
armies. It was Hector's fate, which is the poet's way of saying that
the inexorable logic of facts, as he knows them, must always prevail.
With regard to the position of women in Homeric poetry. They are
mainly irresponsible creatures: how could they be otherwise, when
everything depends on the sword, and a woman cannot wield it? As the
equality of sexes implies a high state of civilisation and security,
so in the old fighting times a woman had to stand aside; yet though
she could not take part in a battle, there were incessant battles
about her: the fatal woman, who is the ruin of her country, is
well-known in all legend and romance, from Helen of Troy to La Cava,
whose seduction by King Roderick brought the Moors into Spain.[18] In
the _Iliad_ King Priam treats Helen with delicate consideration, as is
seen in the beautiful passage that describes her sitting by him on the
walls of Troy, and pointing out to him the leaders of the Greek army
marshalled in the plain before them. Nor is any more perfect female
character to be found in poetry than Andromache, Hector's wife,
high-spirited, virtuous, and passionately affectionate. Yet Helen,
the erring woman, is brought home eventually by Menelaus, and appears
again in the _Odyssey_ as a highly respected matron, who has had an
adventure in early life; while Andromache, having seen her husband
slain and dragged round the walls of Troy behind the chariot of
Achilles, is carried off a childless widow into dolorous servitude.
Here one may feel the tragic power of an artist who draws life from
the sombre verities, not as it is seen through the romantic colouring
of a softer moralising age; he never wastes himself on vain
lamentations, never suggests that virtue will save you from bitter
unmerited calamity: he gives the true situation. There is one short
passage in the _Odyssey_ where the poet, merely by the way, and to
illustrate something else, lets us have a glimpse of an incident that
was probably familiar to him and his audience. He wishes to show what
he means by a burst of grief, and this he does, not by a string of
epithets, but by a picture.[19]
From the historic books of the Old Testament, particularly from the
books of Samuel and the Kings, one might take some fine specimens of
the peculiar quality distinguishing the heroic style, in prose that is
very near poetry. Nothing can be more simple than the narrative, it is
cool and quiet: there are whole chapters without an unnecessary
adjective; and yet it is most impressive, both in the drawing of such
characters as Saul, David, and Joab, who stand out dramatically, like
Homeric heroes, and in the stories of their deeds and death.
Professor Ker's essays contain a masterly and luminous survey of the
vicissitudes undergone by the songs and legends of Western and
Northern nations in the course of transmutation from the primitive
heroic stage into deliberate literary composition. The original
material never attained the grand epical form; the process was
interrupted by the advancement of learning, by ecclesiastical
influences, and by vast social changes.
'Even before the people had fairly escaped from barbarism, before
they had made a fair beginning of civilisation and of reflective
literature on their own account, they were drawn within the Empire,
within Christendom.'
A similar fate, it may here be noticed, has overtaken, or awaits, the
heroic songs of the Afghans; for Darmesteter tells us that as the oral
tradition becomes written it falls into the net of translation and
paraphrase, it is absorbed into the elegant literature of Persia,
Arabia, and Hindustan, it becomes theological and romanesque. And
another dangerous enemy has now appeared in the shape of the
Anglo-Indian schools which follow and fix the English dominion; for
the primitive folklore has no more chance against systematic education
than the wild fighting men have against drilled and disciplined
soldiers. In Europe the Sagas of Iceland, which lay furthest from the
civilising influences, had the luck of preserving the true elements of
heroic narrative; and the Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, though it falls
far short of the epic, has a certain Homeric flavour. The chief is the
'folces-hyrde,' his people's shepherd; and we have Beowulf, like
Hector,[20] desiring that after his death a mound may be raised at the
headland which juts out into the sea, 'that seafaring men may
afterward call it Beowulf's Mound, they who drive from far their
roaring vessels over the mists of the flood.'[21]
Let us turn now to the romantic poetry of England, which for some
centuries ruled all our imaginative literature, and annexed, so to
speak, almost the whole field of battles, adventures, and energetic
activity generally. The subjects are much the same: the gallantry of
men, the beauty, virtues, and frailties of women: but the writers have
got a loose uncertain grip upon the actualities of life; they wander
away into fanciful stories of noble knights, distressed damsels, and
marvellous feats of chivalry--in short they are _romancing_. They care
little whether the details accord with natural fact--whether, for
instance, the account of a fight is incredible to any one who knows
what a battle really is; the heroes are chivalrous knight-errants,
noble, pious, devoted to their lady loves; but they are not
hard-headed, hard-fisted men like Ulysses, David, or some old
Icelandic sea-rover. The true heroic spirit shoots up occasionally,
nevertheless the prevailing idea of the romance-writer is to tell a
wondrous tale of love and adventure, in which he lets his fancy run
riot, rather enjoying than avoiding magnificent improbabilities.
Undoubtedly the beautiful mystic romance of the Morte d'Arthur does
light up at the end with a true flash of heroic poetry, in the famous
lamentation over Lancelot, when he is found at last dead in the
hermitage: but in this passage the elegiac strain rises far above the
ordinary level of romantic composers. Meanwhile, as the English nation
at home settled down into peaceful habits under the strong organising
pressure of Church and State, and arms gave way to laws, the hero's
occupation disappeared from our everyday society, and the heroic
tradition decayed out of imaginative literature, which was often
picturesque, sublime, and profoundly reflective, but had parted with
the special qualities of energetic simplicity and the vivid impression
of fact. Nevertheless, heroic poetry in this sense has never been
quite extinguished in Great Britain; it survived, naturally, wherever
it could be preserved by a living popular tradition. And so it found a
congenial refuge, though in greatly reduced circumstances, in the
rough outlying regions where personal strength and daring were still
vitally necessary--in the borderland between England and Scotland. An
epic poem gave heroic poetry on a grand scale, it told the incidents
of a great war: the ballad tells of a single skirmish or foray. Yet
the difference is but one of degree, for both epic and ballad were
composed for men and by men, who were in the right atmosphere; and so
we have here very different work from that of the fanciful romancer.
There are not many good examples; yet the antique tone rings out now
and then, as in the ballad of Chevy Chase, which commemorates a fierce
Northumbrian fight at Otterburne that must have stirred the hearts of
the whole countryside. Here you have no knightly tournament, or duel
for rescue of dames, but the sharp clash of bloody conflict between
English and Scots borderers, the best fighting men of our island. Of
course the genuine account, given in Froissart, is very different; but
the ballad-singer knows his art; and whereas from history we only
learn that a Scottish knight, Sir Hugh Montgomery, was slain in the
medley, in the ballad an English archer draws his bow
'An arrow of a cloth yard long
To the hard head hayled he.'