Whether, apart
from the way the poet uses it, the subject ought to be an important one,
would not start a very profitable discussion. Homer has been praised for
making, in the _Iliad_, a first-rate poem out of a second-rate subject.
It is a neat saying; but it seems unlikely that anything really
second-rate should turn into first-rate epic. I imagine Homer would have
been considerably surprised, if anyone had told him that the vast train
of tragic events caused by the gross and insupportable insult put by
Agamemnon, the mean mind in authority, on Achilles, the typical
hero--that this noble and profoundly human theme was a second-rate
subject. At any rate, the subject must be of capital importance in its
treatment. It must symbolize--not as a particular and separable
assertion, but at large and generally--some great aspect of vital
destiny, without losing the air of recording some accepted reality of
human experience, and without failing to be a good story; and the
pressure of high purpose will inform diction and metre, as far, at
least, as the poet's verbal art will let it.
The usual attempts at stricter definition of epic than anything this
chapter contains, are either, in spite of what they try for, so vague
that they would admit almost any long stretch of narrative poetry; or
else they are based on the accidents or devices of epic art; and in that
case they are apt to exclude work which is essentially epic because
something inessential is lacking.
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