Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/277

Rh sense of the word without implication of aesthetic or ethical inferiority. Every truly national epic passes through certain stages,—at first it is treated with, in the Arnoldian phrase, "high seriousness." Personages and themes appeal primarily to the racial, the historic, the realistic instinct, and secondarily to the romantic, the aesthetic instinct. But there comes a time when the epic, having established a standard, becomes a convention, and the development of that convention proceeds along lines laid down more and more by appeal to the romantic instinct of the hearer, or in accordance with the individualized aesthetic impulse of the teller. Ultimately these two tendencies reduce the convention to a condition in which it can only be saved by the exercise of deliberate, self-conscious humour, and the "simple, sensuous and passionate" presentment of the epic in its heyday may end in a parodistic rendering, charming or grotesque, naive or profound, according to the temperament and genius of the race and the artists which elaborate it. This general statement is verifiable alike in the case of the Greek and of the Irish epic. The "primitive" character of the Homeric poems has been denied on account of their surpassing literary merit, but this is due to the genius of the Hellenic race. The Homeric poems are, on the whole, "primitive" in a true sense, because, on the whole, they belong to a "primitive" stage of epic; they are conceived in a vein of "high seriousness"; they are charged with ethical intent on the part of the narrating artist, with appeal to the ethical feeling of the audience, and by these tests the Odyssey approves itself younger than the Iliad.

Now of the Arthurian epic nothing has survived "primitive" in this sense, as the Homeric poems are primitive, though much of the matter used in it may be quite as primitive as anything in the two-thousand year older Greek epic. That such a stage was once represented in Welsh literature I see no reason to doubt; the extant remains of the Gododin, and, though to a less extent, of the Llywarch Hen cycles are conceived in a realistic, serious spirit, and such a spirit shines forth through the halting Latin of Nennius in what he relates of Arthur. The Four Branches cycle, belonging to pre-Arthurian heroic myth, is still, though