Page:The New International Encyclopædia 1st ed. v. 07.djvu/165

* EPICHARMUS. 141 EPIC POETRY. epigram, No. 17 of Theocritus) can be true only in tliis, that Epicharmus wax one of the first to give comedy developed and artistic form. Epi- charmus was famous for his philosophical utter- ances, and his comedies continued to be studied long by philosophers and grammarians; Apollo- dorus, of Athens, in the second century b.c., pub- lished an edition in ten books. The extanl frag- ments are edited by Lorenz (Berlin, 1864) ; Kai- bcl, Comieuntiii antrum m Fnignn nla, pt. i. (Leipzig, 1899). EPICCENE, ep'i-sen (Gk. tirUoivos, epikoinos, of cither gender, promiscuous), or The Silent Woman. A comedy by Jonson (1609). Morose, an old man who dislikes noise, is led to marry Epiccene, because of her reputation for silence, and in order to disinherit his fortune-hunting nephew, Dauphine. After the marriage Epiccene at once becomes a noisy shrew; and Morose, by promises of reward, secures his nephew's help in releasing himself from her. Thereupon Dauphine shows Epiccene to be a disguised boy, whom he had brought to his uncle to play him a trick. EPIC POETRY. A species of narrative poetry, dealing with an action or series of ac- tions and events of permanent interest and power. Its theme, however varied in its aspects and is- sues — and the epic manner favors multiplicity here — must be, in the last analysis, single in its nature, and must be developed in the region of the ideal. Acts of trifling importance are not for this reason excluded from epic poetry, which rather, in its endeavor to give a broad survey of human life, abounds in matters of every-day oc- currence. But these should form, at the most, only a background for the elevation and greatness of the rest, and must, like them, be set forth in noble phrase. By the Greeks of the classical period it was, from one point of view, distin- guished from lyric poetry by being recited or rather given in recitative instead of being sung, and from dramatic poetry by being simply nar- rated instead of acted. But there is a further difference, as they also saw. A lyric is the ex- pression of sentiment and mood, while a drama deals primarily with the delineation of character through external action. In either case the in- terest is wholly personal, and lies in the portray- al of the character of the individual. The course of events, which in the drama form the plot, is the means whereby this portrayal is accom- plished, and gains its value from this fact, and not primarily from its own intrinsic interest. The web of the action is closely and compactly woven to show the development of character. The successive scenes have a direct and logical bearing upon the statement and solution of the- problem; and thus episodes, which form an im- portant feature of epic structure, are properly excluded from the drama. The epic poem, on the contrary, to quote the words of Dr. Butcher, "relates a great and complete action, which at- taches itself to the fortunes of a people or to the destiny of mankind, and which sums up the life of a period. The story, and the deeds of those who pass across its wide canvas are linked with the larger movement of which the men themselves are but a part. The particular action rests upon forces outside itself. The hero is swept into the tide of events. The hairbreath escapes, the surprises, the marvelous incidents of epic story, only partly depend upon the spontaneous energy of the hero." In accordance with this the "jeat types of character of the primitive epic are na- tional rather than individual, in the contempla- tion of which the nation recognia with exultant pride its glorious achievements and ideals. Among the Creek--, for instance, thi^ was the secret of the charm exercised bj the Iliad and the Odyssey, and for the French the Chanson de Roland had the same high significance. Again, in the lint hi, iii which the divine purpose that Koine should wield the empire of the world is carried out through human instruments ; t lie Ho man people itself is the real hero, as indeed Ver gil's contemporaries must have seen when they called the poem Gesta Populi Romani. Epic poems fall naturally into two divisions: (1) Those which, like the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland, and the Mahabharata are the outcome of a period of spontaneous composition of epic songs; (2) those which, like the /Eneid, the <:<■■ rusulcmme libvruta, and Paradise Lost, arc tin- creation of highly cultivated and widely read minds, consciously using a long-established form and accepted models. The artistic excellence of the Homeric poems, which stand at the beginning of historical Greek literature, necessarily pre- supposes an extended period of poetic produc- tion, during which the material, partly mytho- logical, partly historical, of these long poems formed the subject of numerous shorter folk-songs. In the Iliad, for instance, Achilles, to please his friend Patroclus. sings in his hut before Troy of the «Va avSpuv ; and. in the Odyssey, the blind minstrel Demodocus. at the Court of Aleinoiis, sings to the assembled company at the hero's re- quest a particular lay about the making of the wooden horse by means of which Troy was taken — a lay which, as the context clearly implies, be- longed to a longer tale about Troy. Such epic, or epic-lyric, songs must have abounded, and , must have shown infinite variation of incident and expression; for they were the products of a youthful and buoyant age, in which fancy, not the passion for scientific accuracy, was supreme. This is, in fact, characteristic of popular poetry everywhere. It is markedly impersonal and na- tional. All its elements — structure, metre, phrase, style — are common property, and every complete poem is equally a part of the general stock. It is never simply repeated, but at each recitation undergoes fresh changes. In Italy, in Servia, or in Russia, a song of eight or ten lines will show endless variations, and in Finland, where the entire traditional poetry has one un- varying form, we find a perfect type of popular poetry. Each song, says Comparetti, "not only differs between singer and singer, but even the same singer never repeats it twice in exactly the same manner, often going so far as to bind to- gether and give as one those songs which but re- cently be recited as separate and distinct." This last fact is especially noteworthy as bearing upon the way in which the epic song ultimately grew into the epos. In the Icelandic Poetic Edda, the lays which preserve different parts of the earlier and grander form of the Volsung-Nibelung story show great diversity of treatment of a common legend. The material of these and other lays, not now extant, was worked up into the prose I fil&un- ga-Saga, the action of which, as of the lays, moves wholly in the sphere of the magical and su- pernatural, and shows no trace of Christian influence. But when toward the end of the