Page:EB1911 - Volume 21.djvu/919

story for its own sake, scornful of purposes ethic or aesthetic, must sacrifice illusion.

Among the former class of epics are to be placed the great epics of growth, such as the Mahābhārata, the Nibelung story, &c.; among the latter the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Paradise Lost, the Gerusalemme liberata, the Lusiadas.

But where in this classification are we to find a place for the Iliad? The heart-thought of the greatest epic in all literature is simply that Achilles was vexed and that the fortunes of the world depended upon the whim of a sulky hero. Yet, notwithstanding all the acute criticisms of Wolff, it remains difficult for us to find a place for the Iliad among the epics of growth. And why? Because throughout the Iliad the dramatic imagination shown is of the first order; and, if we are to suppose a multiplicity of authors for the poem, we must also suppose that ages before the time of Pericles there existed a group of dramatists more nearly akin to the masters of the Great Drama, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare, than any group that has ever existed since. Yet it is equally difficult to find a place for it amongst the epics of art. In the matter of artistic motive the Odyssey stands alone among the epics of art of the world, as we are going to see.

It is manifest that, as the pleasure derived from the epic of art is that of recognizing a conscious scheme, if the epic of art fails through confusion of scheme it fails altogether. What is demanded of the epic of art (as some kind of compensation for that natural freedom of evolution which it can never achieve, that sweet abandon, which belongs to nature The Epic of Art. and to the epic of growth alike) is unity of impression, harmonious and symmetrical development of a conscious heart-thought or motive. This being so, where are we to place the Aeneid, and where are we to place the Shāh Nāmeh? Starting with the intention, as it seems, of fusing into one harmonious whole the myths and legends upon which the Roman story is based, Virgil, by the time he reaches the middle of his epic, forgets all about this primary intent, and gives us his own thoughts and reflections on things in general. Fine as is the speech of Anchises to Aeneas in Elysium (Aen. vi. 724–755), its incongruity with the general scheme of the poem as developed in the previous books shows how entirely Virgil lacked that artistic power shown in the Odyssey of making a story become the natural and inevitable outcome of an artistic idea.

In the Shāh Nāmeh there is the artistic redaction of Virgil, but with even less attention to a central thought than Virgil exhibits. Firdausi relies for his effects upon the very qualities which characterize not the epic of art but the epic of growth—a natural and not an artificial flow of the story; so much indeed that, if the Shāh Nāmeh were studied in connexion with the Iliad on the one hand and with the Kalevala on the other, it might throw a light upon the way in which an epic may be at one and the same time an aggregation of the national ballad poems and the work of a single artificer. That Firdausi was capable of working from a centre not only artistic but philosophic his Yūsuf and Zuleikha shows; and if we consider what was the artistic temper of the Persians in Firdausi’s time, what indeed has been that temper during the whole of the Mahommedan period, the subtle temper of the parable poet—the Shāh Nāmeh, with its direct appeal to popular sympathies, is a standing wonder in poetic literature.

With regard, however, to Virgil’s defective power of working from an artistic motive, as compared with the poet of the Odyssey, this is an infirmity he shares with all the poets of the Western world. Certainly he shares it with the writer of Paradise Lost, who, setting out to “justify the ways of God to man,” forgets occasionally the original worker of the evil, as where, for instance, he substitutes chance as soon as he comes (at the end of the second book) to the point upon which the entire epic movement turns, the escape of Satan from hell and his journey to earth for the ruin of man:—

In Milton’s case, however, the truth is that he made the mistake of trying to disturb the motive of the story for artistic purposes—a fatal mistake, as we shall see when we come to speak of the Nibelungenlied in relation to the old Norse epic cycle.

Though Vondel’s mystery play of Lucifer is, in its execution, rhetorical more than poetical, it did, beyond all question, influence Milton when he came to write Paradise Lost. The famous line which is generally quoted as the keynote of Satan’s character—

seems to have been taken bodily from Vondel’s play, and Milton’s entire epic shows a study of it. While Marlowe’s majestic movements alone are traceable in Satan’s speech (written some years before the rest of Paradise Lost, when the dramatic and not the epic form had been selected), Milton’s Satan became afterwards a splendid amalgam not of the Mephistopheles but of the Faustus of Marlowe and the Lucifer of Vondel. Vondel’s play must have possessed a peculiar attraction for a poet of Milton’s views of human progress. Defective as the play is in execution, it is far otherwise in motive. This motive, if we consider it aright, is nothing less than an explanation of man’s anomalous condition on the earth—spirit incarnate in matter, created by God, a little lower than the angels—in order that he may advance by means of these very manacles which imprison him, in order that he may ascend by the staircase of the world, the ladder of fleshly conditions, above those cherubim and seraphim who, lacking the education of sense, have not the knowledge wide and deep which brings man close to God.

Here Milton found his own favourite doctrine of human development and self-education in a concrete and vividly artistic form. Much, however, as such a motive must have struck a man of Milton’s instincts, his intellect was too much chained by Calvinism to permit of his treating the subject with Vondel’s philosophic breadth. The cause of Lucifer’s wrath had to be changed from jealousy of human progress to jealousy of the Son’s proclaimed superiority. And the history of poetry shows that once begin to tamper with the central thought around which any group of incidents has crystallized and the entire story becomes thereby rewritten, as we have seen in the case of the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Of the motive of his own epic, after he had abandoned the motive of Vondel, Milton had as little permanent grasp as Virgil had of his. As regards the Odyssey, however, we need scarcely say that its motive is merely artistic, not philosophic. And now we come to philosophic motive.

The artist’s power of thought is properly shown not in the direct enunciation of ideas but in mastery over motive. Here Aeschylus is by far the greatest figure in Western poetry—a proof perhaps among many proofs of the Oriental strain of his genius. (As regards pure drama, however, important as is motive, freedom, organic vitality in every part, is of more importance than even motive, and in this freedom and easy abandonment the concluding part of the Oresteia is deficient as compared with such a play as Othello or Lear.) Notwithstanding the splendid exception of Aeschylus, the truth seems to be that the faculty of developing a poetical narrative from a philosophic thought is Oriental, and on the whole foreign to the genius of the Western mind. Neither in Western drama nor in Western epic do we find, save in such rare cases as that of Vondel, anything like that power of developing a story from an idea which not only Jami but all the parable poets of Persia show.

In modern English poetry the motive of Shelley’s dramatic poem Prometheus Unbound is a notable illustration of what is here contended. Starting with the full intent of developing a drama from a motive—starting with a universalism, a belief that good shall be the final goal of ill—Shelley cannot finish his first three hundred lines without shifting (in the curse of Prometheus) into a Manichaeism as pure as that of Manes himself:—

According to the central thought of the poem human nature, through the heroic protest and struggle of the human mind typified by Prometheus, can at last dethrone that supernatural terror and tyranny (Jupiter) which the human mind had itself installed. But, after its dethronement (when human nature becomes infinitely perfectible), how can the supernatural tyranny exist apart from the human mind that imagined it? How can it be as “infinite as the universe”?

The motive of Paradise Lost is assailed with much vigour by Victor Hugo in his poem Religions et Religion. But when Hugo, in the after parts of the poem, having destroyed Milton’s “God,” sets up an entirely French “Dieu” of his own and tries “to justify” him, we perceive how pardonable was Milton’s failure after all. Compare such defect of mental grip and such nebulosity of thought as is displayed by Milton, Shelley and Hugo with the strength of hand shown in the “Sālāmān” and “Absal” of Jami, and indeed by the Sufi poets generally.

There is, however, one exception to this rule that Western poetry is nebulous as to motive. There is, besides the Iliad, one epic that refuses to be classified, though for entirely different reasons. This is the Nibelung story, where we find unity of purpose and also entire freedom of movement. We find combined here beauties which are nowhere else combined—which are, in fact, at war with each other everywhere else. We find a scheme, a real “acorn of thought,” in an epic which is not the self-conscious work of a single poetic artificer, but is as much the slow growth of various times and various minds as is the Mahābhārata, in which the heart-thought is merely that the Kauravas defeated their relatives at dice and refused to disgorge their winnings.

This Northern epic-tree, as we find it in the Icelandic sagas, the Norns themselves must have watered; for it combines the virtues