Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/64

 that an "epic" poem "must either be national or common to all mankind." Such common characteristics M. Géruzez seeks when, criticising Voltaire (Histoire de la Littérature Française, vol. ii. p. 410), he says that "scenes depicted with vigour, portraits sketched by an artist powerful and ingenious, some beautiful lines, some noble ideas well expressed, are not enough to make an epic; there must be varied characters, personages full of action and heroic life, communion between heaven and earth, in fine, unity of action and interest—vital conditions which are not observed in the Henriade." These marks of an "epic," evidently collected from Homer and Vergil, do not carry us much farther than Johnson, who praised the "universal" interest of Paradise Lost and the "integrity" (or unity) of its design. Possibly M. Géruzez did not mean to say more than that the "epics" of Greece and Rome are models of such compositions; and we can hardly object to the harmless assertion that persons or poems are models of themselves. But when Johnson tells us that the question "whether the poem (Paradise Lost) can be properly termed heroic is raised by such readers as draw their principles of judgment rather from books than from reason," we may see that he at least, like Schlegel and Coleridge, is thinking of some universal model not to be discovered in the Iliad or other epics, but innate in the human heart or intellect as a kind of literary conscience, If our subjective critics would only stop to ask how far their literary conscience extends, to what countries, or ages, or social groups it belongs or does not belong, we should soon hear no more of universal ideas of the "epic " or any other species of literature. But it is much easier, much more showy, to talk and, if possible, to think in the free and splendid language of universals than to accept the