THE EPIC
The Idea of Great Poetry. By Lascelles Abercrombie. (Seeker. 6s.) Ma. ABEacaordonE's is a heart-refreshing book to those who feel themselves to be strangers in this present generation. Here we are living in the aftermath of impressionism. We do not believe the universe to be the simple Mosaic organism which our grandfathers thought it to be. At the same time we have not yet advanced sufficiently with our scientific reconstruction to be able to find a concise and usable vision of Order. So we are forced intellectually along the track to which our nervous reactions from a mechanical environment have already directed us. We are victims of speed. We might be compared to a countryman whose native village has been destroyed by an earthquake, and who is being hurried from the disaster in an express train. The poor fellow has seen the eternal things—the mellowed church, the Jolly Farmer Inn,' the old manor house, the yew tree—all snatched into a foreign, impersonal hell. His mind still bleeds from this wound ; and here he is in this unfamiliar express being hurled away from the ruins. Can he piece together what he sees ? Does he think it worth while to attach a coherency and a meaning to the moods which succeed the snapshot impressions received by his eyes from the vanishing countryside ? He is numbed and blinded.
Our plea to-day is that we are in the same condition as this countryman. It may be, therefore, that Mr. Abercrombie's statement will fall on deaf ears ; for in it he is destroying the heresy which began with Edgar Allan Poe, and is to-day reiterated by Croce : the heresy that there is no such thing as an ideal epic form, the highest form in which poetic inspiration can be embodied.
It is a common belief that an epic poem is only a number of jewels strung on a thread of tedious incident. There are two reasons for that wrong belief. The first is that actual achieve- ment in this form so frequently falls short of the ideal. The epic poems of the world may be counted on the fingers. And where the gods so seldom appear, where are the gods ?
The second reason for that wrong belief, however, is due to the critics themselves. They demand that the epic shall be a long-continued lyric inspiration. If that thing were possible, it would be intolerable. We might just as well demand that married life shall be one long-drawn-out moonlit idyll with the sweet stranger. Yet this is what Croce looks for in the Divine Comedy, and fails to find. The fault is in his being too far removed from reality, so that the condition of solidity—or in moral expression, responsibility—becomes more and more neglected by him, and his taste withers to a detached and sterilized aesthetic that has no relationship to the real problems created by human nature, time, and space, interacting on the series of treacheries and alliances which we call life. Mr. Abercrombie greatly helps us in our conviction that Croce is a connoisseur rather than a constructive critic.
Another claim made by the zealots of impressionism is that the perfect lyric is as great an achievement as the perfect epic. There is some plausibility in this argument, when we remember what precedes the crystallization of the pure lyric ; what slow gathering of spiritual fuel ; what painful erection of the intellectual furnace ; what choice selection of the pro- pitious moment to serve as the alembic ; what vigilant distil- lation of the stuff of song. But with this technique at its best, it is no more than a means for showing the poet's reactions to sporadic contacts with life. It is, as it were, the elaboration of an anarchy of moods. If these moods have a continuity, it is unconscious, and not to be confounded with the delibera- tion of the epic inspiration.
That epic inspiration is a very different matter. Compared with the lyrical muse it is as the god is to the angel. It follows after, and is a development of, the lyrical approach to the world. While the lyric gossips of life, flashing bright interpre- tations to the heart, the epic gathers up these myriad atoms of emotional matter, and withdraws into chaos, where it shapes a world of its own, in which the chance and catastrophe of actuality are accepted into a symbolism that co-ordinates them to the swift logic of this new universe. In this world the fine frenzy of lyricism has increased and steadied into an equilibrium, so that the momentary glimpses of divine con- sciousness now become a permanent vision, in which the parts and the whole are related to each other, and justice and morality are identified as the first principles of aesthetic judgment.
These fragmentary notes on the epic show the importance of a book which seriously attempts to discover the foundations of epic poetry ; the form in which the great poet finds his final means of expression. Mr. Abercrombie's effort is carried to success by a conscientiousness that indulges in no special pleading. He sees soberly and widely, coming slowly to truths that Wordsworth won to by sheer intensity of character ; and Coleridge by an F.astern subtlety of mind. This essay is a valuable addition to the constructive criticism of the art of poetry.
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