CHAPTER IX

THE EPIC AND THE ROMANCE

THE branches of the great Aryan stock have passed through many successive stages in their long progress from the condition of tribes or hordes, united by the tie of descent from a common ancestor, to that of modern nations with their complex social systems, frameworks of tradition, social habit, written law, personal and property rights, and class groupings. One of these stages, when the patriarchal tradition is not exhausted, and simplicity of manners coexists with considerable development of authority on the part of the chieftain, and of individual freedom in the body of the people, is known as the "heroic age." It is a time of turbulence and family feuds. The constitution of society is aristocratic, but the aristocracy does not look down on the other orders of society as serfs or villains radically inferior in nature. The members of the aristocracy are personal leaders in war or adventure, or judges of the people, and do not disdain to engage in the ordinary occupations of herding or agriculture. This age is represented by the Achæans of whom Homer sings, by the

Franks and Saxons in the time of Charlemagne, by the Germanic tribes who invaded Britain, and by the Scandinavians who settled Iceland in the ninth century.

The poetry in which a people passing through this stage expresses itself is said to have the epic tone. Of course the literary quality of epic songs is determined by the artistic capabilities of each race and by their surroundings; Beowulf or the Nibelungenlied are vastly inferior to the Iliad, but the general character of the society represented in all are similar. There is the same simplicity of vision, the same realism, the same glorification of personal conflict, the supernatural intrudes into the natural in the same primitive and unspiritual manner. Mr. Ker, whose Epic and Romance discusses the subject at length, says that there is nothing in the whole range of English literature so like a scene from the Iliad as the Battle of Maldon in Anglo-Saxon. In epic poetry personality or character is finely conceived, the narrator. loves and appreciates the hero as a man. In the later romantic poems, however, the characters are vaguely portrayed; the knights are abstract embodiments of the chivalric ideal. Odysseus and Birhtnoth, on the contrary, are distinct figures, and even Achilles, the idealized heroic type of the Hellenic race, is himself, energetic, passionate, and primitive. It is an epic feature of the Morte Darthur, a fifteenth-century recast of mediæval romances

that Gawain, Lancelot, and Arthur are marked) personalities, whereas the subordinate characters like Balin, and King Mark, and Merlin have the true romantic indefiniteness.

It is possible to conceive that the great epic narratives grew out of historic narrative ballads, which were added to, welded together, and widened in scope by successive generations of bards, and finally recast by some one individual of elevated poetic genius. There is no historic proof of such a process. Mr. Ker says that the epical material of Iceland was left in a chaotic state, and that an age of more artificiality and literary selfconsciousness followed the heroic age before any unification of the fragmentary songs or selection of any one hero as representative was made. Whether this would have taken place under any circumstances we cannot tell; we only know that in Greece two long narrative poems embodying life in the heroic age were preserved, and that in the Germanic and Scandinavian countries a body of poetry was produced having the same literary characteristics, but of far lower literary quality, because it never crystallized into one supreme epic. It seems almost impossible that the Iliad and Odyssey could have received their unity from any source but the genius of an individual named Homer, though doubtless that exceptional genius worked on a large amount of material gathered by generations of predecessors, and inherited the use

of a highly developed musical language in a community accustomed to poetical expression. Even if Homer's material was old poetry, as Shakespeare's material was old plays and stories, the making of an Iliad or a King John out of the old material was the work of an individual. We may even admit that several earlier epical narratives have been used to form the Iliad without lessening its claims to be Homer's work and not an "agglutination of ballads."

The subject-matter of epical poetry is something of national interest, and the leading characters tend to become representative of broad national traits, and this, even before a political nationality in the modern sense is developed. The Greek tribes unite to rescue a woman stolen from the household of one of the great families. A long desultory war follows, till the family of the ravisher in Asia is exterminated. One of the chieftains, prince of a petty island in the Mediterranean, encounters many delays and difficulties on his return. Songs about Achilles and Odysseus become favorites, and are repeated and expanded till, in the hands of an exceptional poet, they become the expression of the Hellenic sense of race; and the men and their associates are typical, not merely of the warrior and adventurer, but of the Greek spirit of war and adventure. The struggle between the Moors of Spain and the Germanic tribes of Europe has the same ethnical interest and epical breadth, and is a proper

matter for epical treatment in the song of Roland. Malory's Morte Darthur, though essentially a romance, is epical, in as far as its underlying subject-matter is the defeat of the Celtic race and the tragic end of the last of the Celtic chieftains. Shakespeare's historical plays have an epical element, in as far as they turn on events of national importance. Macbeth has an epical quality, in that the character motives are simple and primitive — not "sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought," and the action violent, decided, and rapid, and affecting the Scotch nation. But the true race epic, or heroic song, is the outcome of the heroic age, or that immediately succeeding, though some of its qualities of energy and simple motives may appear in literature of later periods.

In saying that the subject of an epic is something of historic interest, it is not meant that the historic importance of the events or historic accuracy is regarded. The epic is built on historical tradition, and tradition is to fact as a vine which grows over a stone monument, at once hiding and ornamenting the outlines and covering the inscriptions, or even causing them to molder beyond. recognition. The singer of the old epics felt the pride of race, and he rehearsed portions of what he had heard of the great men of the past, and colored the old stories imaginatively. Why a certain name or a certain action should appeal to posterity is difficult to say; but certain men are singled