of excellent stones, admirably quarried out of a great rock-face of stubborn experience. But for this to be worked into some great structure of epic poetry, the Heroic Age must be capable of producing individuality of much profounder nature than any of its fighting champions. Or rather, we should simply say that the production of epic poetry depends on the occurrence (always an accidental occurrence) of creative genius. It is quite likely that what Homer had to work on was nothing superior to the Arthurian legends. But Homer occurred; and the tales of Troy and Odysseus became incomparable poetry.

An epic is not made by piecing together a set of heroic lays, adjusting their discrepancies and making them into a continuous narrative. An epic is not even a re-creation of old things; it is altogether a new creation, a new creation in terms of old things. And what else is any other poetry? The epic poet has behind him a tradition of matter and a tradition of style; and that is what every other poet has behind him too; only, for the epic poet, tradition is rather narrower, rather more strictly compelling. This must not be lost sight of. It is what the poet does with the tradition he falls in which is, artistically, the important thing. He takes a mass of confused splendours, and he makes them into something which they certainly were not before; something which, as we can clearly see by comparing epic poetry with mere epic material, the latter scarce hinted at. He makes this heap of matter into a grand design; he forces it to obey a single presiding unity of artistic purpose. Obviously, something much more potent is required for this than a fine skill in narrative and poetic ornament. Unity is not merely an external affair. There is only one thing which can master the perplexed stuff of epic material into unity; and that is, an ability to see in particular human experience some significant symbolism of man's general destiny.

It is natural that, after the epic poet has arrived, the crude epic material in which he worked should scarcely be heard of. It could only be handed on by the minstrels themselves; and their audiences would not be likely to listen comfortably to the old piecemeal songs after they had heard the familiar events fall into the magnificent ordered pomp of the genuine epic poet. The tradition, indeed, would start afresh with him; but how the novel tradition fared as it grew old with his successors, is difficult guesswork. We can tell, however, sometimes, in what stage of the epic material's development the great unifying epic poet occurred. Three roughly defined stages have been mentioned. Homer perhaps came when the epic material was still in its first stage of being court-poetry. Almost certainly this is when the poets of the Crusading lays, of the Song of Roland, and the Poem of the Cid, set to work. Hesiod is a clear instance of the poet who masters epic material after it has passed into popular possession; and the Nibelungenlied is thought to be made out of matter that has passed from the people back again to the courts.

Epic poetry, then, as distinct from mere epic material, is the concern of this book. The intention is, to determine wherein epic poetry is a definite species of literature, what it characteristically does for conscious human life, and to find out whether this species and this function have shown, and are likely to show, any development. It must be admitted, that the great unifying poet who worked on the epic material before him, did not always produce something which must come within the scope of this intention. Hesiod has just been given as an instance of such a poet; but his work is scarcely an epic.[3] The great sagas, too, I must omit. They are epic enough in primary intention, but they are not poetry; and I am among those who believe that there is a difference between poetry and prose. If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it. But this will leave me more of the "authentic" epic poetry than I can possibly deal with; and I shall have to confine myself to its greatest examples. Before, however, proceeding to consider epic poetry as a whole, as a constantly recurring form of art, continually responding to the new needs of man's developing consciousness, I must go, rapidly and generally, over the "literary epic"; and especially I must question whether it is really justifiable or profitable to divide epic poetry into the two contrasted departments of "authentic" and "literary."

[Footnote 1: hos d' ote cheimarroi potamoi kat opesthi rheontes es misgagkeian xumballeton obrimon udor krounon ek melalon koilaes entosthe charadraes. Iliad, IV, 452.]

[Footnote 2: Etymologically, the "good" man is the "admirable" man. In this sense, Homer's gods are certainly "good"; every epithet he gives them—Joyous-Thunderer, Far-Darter, Cloud-Gatherer and the rest—proclaims their unapproachable "goodness." If it had been said to Homer, that his gods cannot be "good" because their behaviour is consistently cynical, cruel, unscrupulous and scandalous, he would simply think he had not heard aright: Zeus is an habitual liar, of course, but what has that got to do with his "goodness"?—Only those who would have Homer a kind of Salvationist need regret this. Just because he could only make his gods "good" in this primitive style, he was able to treat their discordant family in that vein of exquisite comedy which is one of the most precious things in the world.]

[Footnote 3: Scarcely what we call epic. "Epos" might include Hesiod as well as epic material; "epopee" is the business that Homer started.]

II.

Epic poetry, then, was invented to supply the artistic demands of society in a certain definite and recognizable state. Or rather, it was the epic material which supplied that; the first epic poets gave their age, as genius always does, something which the age had never thought of asking for; which, nevertheless, when it was given, the age took good hold of, and found that, after all, this, too, it had wanted without knowing it. But as society went on towards civilization, the need for epic grew less and less; and its preservation, if not accidental, was an act of conscious aesthetic admiration rather than of unconscious necessity. It was preserved somehow, however; and after other kinds of literature had arisen as inevitably and naturally as epic, and had become, in their turn, things of less instant necessity than they were, it was found that, in the manner and purpose of epic poetry, something was given which was not given elsewhere; something of extraordinary value. Epic poetry would therefore be undertaken again; but now, of course, deliberately. With several different kinds of poetry to choose from, a man would decide that he would like best to be an epic poet, and he would set out, in conscious determination, on an epic poem. The result, good or bad, of such a determination is called "literary" epic. The poems of Apollonius Rhodius, Virgil, Lucan, Camoens, Tasso and Milton are "literary" epics. But such poetry as the Odyssey, the Iliad, Beowulf, the Song of Roland, and the Nibelungenlied, poetry which seems an immediate response to some general and instant need in its surrounding community—such poetry is "authentic" epic.

A great deal has been made of this distinction; it has almost been taken to divide epic poetry into two species. And, as the names commonly given to the two supposed species suggest, there is some notion that "literary" epic must be in a way inferior to "authentic" epic. The superstition of antiquity has