his audience to the tale he was about to chant; Elene, a story of the search for the true cross, a poem of Cynewulf's old age and his masterpiece, strikes the familiar chords; the clash of sword and shield, the flight of the battle-serpents, the ashen arrows, the resounding sea, the swan-road over which swing the galleys, foaming wave-floaters, the treasure gifts in the mead-hall are not yet forgotten. For in Cynewulf, even in his old age, and for all his learning and his saintly tales, there survives the Viking still. The Andreas, also in the Vercelli book, and by some scholars attributed to Cynewulf, is filled with the many voices of the sea and wind. "The sword-fish played, Through ocean gliding, and the grey gull wheeled At the period of their conquest of Britain our ancestors were in the epic stage, and to that stage their extant literature corresponds. Their failure to produce a completer or more perfect form of epic poetry was due in part to their failure to achieve a higher political unity, which, had they achieved it, might well have manifested itself in epic of high dignity. But political constitution apart, the influence of the new religion upon the heroic temper and heroic life was in itself paralysing. Ideas foreign to the experience of these peoples entered and interrupted the evolution of their poetic genius, the current of their lives was altered and directed into other channels than those in which it had been accustomed to flow, heroes unknown to their national history were presented to them as exemplars, they were introduced to the art of writing, they came under the influence of learning and a culture derived from books, their language itself underwent changes in the loss of inflexion and gender and its prosody was gradually modified, the importance of the scôp both as singer and historian was diminished. To these changes the decline of epic poetry can be directly traced. Yet the strength of the impulse towards it appears in the character of the early Christian literature just spoken of. The epic process is interrupted, it has received fatal injuries, a lyrical and reflective note and a devotional mood foreign to its nature soon appear in it, yet it retains sufficient vitality to impose its form and method upon Christian poetry for several centuries. The first stage in the decline is seen in the subjects of the Caedmonian poems, which are selected in the interests of the new religion. The second appears in the poetry of Cynewulf, who, if not ecclesiastic, was at least educated under ecclesiastical conditions, and draws his material exclusively from Latin sources. To poetry in the age of Alfred succeeded prose, and the epic stream, "forgetting the bright speed it had," is lost in the low and level tracts of Church annals and theological homilies. G CHAPTER VI EPIC AND ROMANCE-CHAUCER ROMANCE entered as an element into the epic poetry of Homer, it entered into Beowulf; we may regard it as one of the ultimate inexpugnable constituents of the narrative art. No one indeed, as I have said, can indicate the moment at which poetry ceases to be heroic because it is too romantic. A generous contributor to epic splendour, there comes, nevertheless, a moment at which we must brace ourselves against the acceptance of romance as sufficient in itself. Who will wish to enter on the epic register the whole stupendous mass of romantic poesy? These millions of acres would, if added to our ground of respectable epic dimensions "Singeing his pate against the burning zone Romance is not epic, nor is it necessarily heroic poetry. Epic, as in the Odyssey, can take up and convert to its own high uses of episode and amplification an indeterminable amount of foreign and marvellous matter, but-and here the first distinction emerges-true epic or heroic poetry has its roots in native soil; it is not an exotic, it is a home growth. Whatever meanings, and they are many, that have been attached to romance, there is involved in it, and invariably, a foreign element, something brought from a distance, a strange country, or strange ways of thought. The wonder and mystery of it, the secret of the charm hides in its remoteness from the world we know. The ideas of epic poetry, the society it pictures, the hero it praises, the deeds it recalls, to whatever race or country they are assigned, have in them the genius of that race or country, as in a mirror is reflected there, if not always historical fact, at least the shadow of history and national achievements. Sift from the Odyssey the romantic fables brought from far, omit from Virgil the battles and episodes, the decorative and picturesque literary additions, and they still exhibit national attachments; there is still left something to remind us of the birthplace of this poetry, a solid substratum of life and character, as it was lived in Greece or exhibited in Rome. The secondary type of epic, the poems of the bookmenand Virgil may be placed in this category also-like Jerusalem Delivered or Paradise Lost, have established their own claim to be included upon the epic roll. Their claim consists in this, that they follow deliberately the epic tradition, their authors chose to imitate the manner of the authentic epic. True, they are not epic in the way that Homer is epic or Beowulf, but in a derived and cultivated manner of their own, yet by virtue of their discipleship they have made good-it is a matter of common consent their right to the great title. The chief business of heroic poetry is war, the martial deeds of heroes, and war of a kind with which its authors had commonly some real knowledge. Virgil had no such knowledge, nor Milton, but they chose to keep within the tradition. VirgilSang of battles and the breath 66 Of stormy war and violent death," though the rift between his own and the heroic world is visible. He had, it is clear, no Homeric pleasure in battle, the desire of it he describes as an insane lust." The painful incidents of war he touches with a pathos altogether un-Homeric; he dwells by preference on its picturesque splendours, its stern array; he pities the fallen warrior and forgets to exult with the victor.1 With Virgil we are already passing away from the heroic strain, he knows nothing of the passionate Berserker fury, "the eaglebark for blood." Virgil was not himself a fighting man, but a court poet, and he delightfully covers his deficiency in martial ardour by episodes like that of Dido, exquisite, admired in every age, by appeals to Roman pride and patriotism, by noble sentiment, and by the exercise of his consummate art. Yet we cannot exclude Virgil or Milton from the epic company though 1 Æneid, xii. 544-7. 1 they are themselves remote in experience and feeling from the heroic world-they preserve the epic tradition. With the romantic poets it is otherwise. Medieval romance neither knew nor cared for the tradition. Pursuing a new avenue to poetic delight, it makes the introduction of surprising unfamiliar things its chief end; it departs wherever possible from the positive ground of human experience. It provides a second distinction between its aim and the prouder design of heroic poetry-entertainment and provokes vulgar curiosity, not a curiosity about the historical foundation of the tale, nor the characters, but about the mere happenings, the incidents, and occurrences. Abundat dulcibus vitiis, it abounds in pleasant faults. Where epic poetry, like Beowulf, is based upon a life actually lived, a life familiar to the poet who speaks of what he knows, romantic poetry sets the imagination wholly free and trusts to its novelty, its introduction of magic and marvels, its sentimental subtleties, its extravagances of rhetoric and chivalric idealism. It addresses itself deliberately to the age in which it is produced, presents a past that never was present," a past imagined as the audience for whom it was provided desired to imagine it. Can it be accepted, or any part of it, as falling within the epic field? With the passing of the heroic age one type of epic becomes impossible, the type which, its literary values apart, possesses interest and worth as an historical document. A new order of literature takes its place, dealing sometimes with new, sometimes with the old themes. Yet though the themes may be preserved the fashion of the handling must alter. The business of the heroic world and of its poetry, for example, is war. In romantic literature the theme remains, war is still one of the major interests. But it is a changed type of war. Battle tends to pass from the foreground into the background as an interest fading, to become unreal, not practically necessary, not every one's and a daily affair, not so much a way of life as a way of amusement or adventure, like hunting or hawking. Men now sometimes doff their armour, cease to be continually on guard, have leisure for other entertainment. The interest of love, hardly |