These are the poems that give us immense and shapely
symbols of the spirit of man, conscious not only of the sense of his
own destined being, but also of some sense of that which destines. In
fact, these two are the poems that develop and elaborate, in their own
way, the Miltonic significance, as all the epics in between Homer and
Milton develop and elaborate Homeric significance. And yet, in spite of
_Faust_ and _The Dynasts_, it may be doubted whether the union of epic
and drama is likely to be permanent. The peculiar effects which epic
intention, in whatever manner, must aim at, seem to be as much hindered
as helped by dramatic form; and possibly it is because the detail is
necessarily too much enforced for the broad perfection of epic effect.
The real truth seems to be, that there is an inevitable and profound
difficulty in carrying on the Miltonic significance in anything like a
story. Regular epic having reached its climax in _Paradise Lost_, the
epic purpose must find some other way of going on. Hugo saw this, when
he strung his huge epic sequence together not on a connected story but
on a single idea: "la figure, c'est l'homme." If we are to have, as we
must have, direct symbolism of the way man is conscious of his being
nowadays, which means direct symbolism both of man's spirit and of the
(philosophical) opponent of this, the universal fate of things--if we
are to have all this, it is hard to see how any story can be adequate to
such symbolic requirements, unless it is a story which moves in some
large region of imagined supernaturalism.
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