For a
Roman, the chief matter for an epic poem would be Roman civilization;
for a Puritan, it would be the relations of God and man. When,
therefore, we consider how close to his subject an epic poet is, we must
be careful to be quite clear what his subject is. And if he has gone
beyond the immediate experiences of primitive society, we need not
expect him to be as close as the early poets were to the fury of battle
and the agony of wounds and the desolation of widows; or to the
sensation of exploring beyond the familiar regions; or to the
marsh-fiends and fire-drakes into which primitive imagination naturally
translated the terrible unknown powers of the world. We need not, in a
word, expect the "literary" epic to compete with the "authentic" epic;
for the fact is, that the purpose of epic poetry, and therefore the
nature of its subject, must continually develop. It is quite true that
the later epics take over, to a very great extent, the methods and
manners of the earlier poems; just as architecture hands on the style of
wooden structure to an age that builds in stone, and again imposes the
manners of stone construction on an age that builds in concrete and
steel. But, in the case of epic at any rate, this is not merely the
inertia of artistic convention. With the development of epic intention,
and the subsequent choosing of themes larger and subtler than what
common experience is wont to deal in, a certain duplicity becomes
inevitable.
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