Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/277

Rh POETRY 267 lect of the reader, though this may be counterbalanced by the hardness of mechanical structure which sometimes dis turbs the reader s imagination in tragedy. When, for instance, a dramatist pays so much attention to the evolution of the plot as Sophocles does, it is inevit able that his characters should be more or less plot-ridden ; they have to say and do now and then certain things which they would not say and do but for the exigencies of the plot. Indeed one of the advantages which epic certainly has over drama is that the story can be made to move as rapidly as the poet may desire without these mechanical modifications of character. is one of kind, if the Iliad alone is taken to represent Greek epic. In speaking of the effect that surrounding conditions seem to have upon the form in which the poetic energy of any time or country should express itself, we instanced the Iliad as a typical case. The imagination vivifying it is mainly dramatic. The characters represent much more than the mere variety of mood of the delineator. Notwithstanding all the splendid works of Calderon, Mar lowe, Webster, and Goethe, it is doubtful whether as a born dramatist the poet of the Iliad does not come nearer to ^Eschylus and Shakespeare than does any other poet. His passion for making the heroes speak for themselves is almost a fault in the Iliad considered as pure epic, and the unconscious way in which each actor is made to depict his own character is in the highest spirit of drama. It is owing to this speciality of the Iliad that it stands apart from all other epic save that of the Odyssey, where, how ever, the dramatic vision is less vivid. It is owing to the dramatic imagination displayed in the Iliad that it is impossible to say, from internal evidence, whether the poem is to be classified with the epics of growth or with the epics of art. All epics are clearly divisible into two classes, first those which are a mere accretion of poems or traditionary ballads, and second, those which, though based indeed on tradition or history, have become so fused in the mind of one great poet, so stained, therefore, with the colour and temper of that mind, as to become new crystallizations inventions, in short, as we understand that word. Each kind of epic has excellencies peculiar to itself, accompanied by peculiar and indeed necessary defects. In the one we get the freedom- apparently schemeless and motiveless of nature, but, as a consequence, miss that &quot; hard acorn of thought &quot; (to use the picturesque definition in the Volwnga Saga of the heart of a man) which the mind asks for as the core of every work of art. In the other this great requisite of an adequate central thought is found, but accompanied by a constriction, a lack of freedom, a cold artificiality, the obtrusion of a pedantic scheme, which would be intolerable to the natural mind unsophisticated by literary study. The flow of the one is as that of a river, the flow of the other as that of a canal. Yet, as has been already hinted, though the great charm of Nature herself is that she never teases us with any obtrusive exhibitions of scheme, she doubtless has a scheme somewhere, she does somewhere hide a &quot; hard acorn of thought &quot; of which the poem of the universe is the expanded expression. And, this being so, art should have a scheme too ; but in such a dilemma is she placed in this matter that the epic poet, unless he is evidently telling the 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 Mahdbhdrata, the Niblung story, &c. ; among the latter the Odyssey, the JEneid, Paradise Lost, the Gerusalemme Liberata, the Lusiadas. art. 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, ^Eschylus, 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 A con- of art is that of recognizing a conscious scheme, if the epic scious of art fails through confusion of scheme it fails altogether. scheme What is demanded of the epic of art (as some kind of com- ^ ot j ve re _ pensation for that natural freedom of evolution which it quired for can never achieve, that sweet abandon which belongs to the true nature and to the epic of growth alike) is unity of im- e ic of pression, harmonious and symmetrical development of a conscious heart-thought, or motive. This being so, where are we to place the jEneid, and where are we to place the Shah Ndmeh ? 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 re flexions on things in general. Fine as is the speech of Anchises to ^Eneas in Elysium (^En. 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 Shah Ndmeh 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 so indeed that, if the Shah Ndmeh 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 Yusuf 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 Mohammedan period, the subtle temper of the parable poet, the Shah Ndmeh, 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 &quot;justify the ways of God to man,&quot; 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 :
 * &amp;lt;&amp;gt;f The only kind of epic for Aristotle to consider was
 * - ul Greek epic, between which and all other epic the difference