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 tbe 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 great types of character of tlic primitive epic are na tional rather than individual, in the contempla tion of which the nation recognizes with exultant pride its glorious and ideals. Among the Greeks, for instance, this was the secret of the charm exercised by the flied and the Odyssey, and for the French the Chanson de Rotund had the same high significance. Again, in the .L'ucid, in which the divine purpose that Roane should wield the empire of the world is carried out through human instruments; the Ro man people itself is the real hero, as indeed Ver gil's contemporaries must have seen when they called the poem Geste Pointli Romani.
Epic poems fall naturally into two divisions: (1) Those which, like the Iliad, the Cho IISWE de Rolacul, and the Mahablidrala are the outcome of a period of spontaneous composition of epic songs; (2.) those which, like the .Thicid, the Ge rusulemme libcrata, and Paradise Lost, are the 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 KNia cis8p(Dp; and, in the Odyssey, the blind minstrel Demodoens, at the Court of Aleinotis, sings to the assembled company at the bero'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 epie-lyrie, 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, lint at each recitation undergoes fresh changes. In Italy, in Se-via, 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 he 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 ViAsung-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 Volsun 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 1.11 twelfth century this story, conimon to all the Teutonic stock, finally takes place in South Germany as an epic poem, not only is the tale itself different at times in detail and incident, but the entire atmosphere and set ting is changed. History has taken the place of myth. Brunhild is no longer a Valkyr. nor is Siegfried able to change his shape. Be lief and manners are Catholic and medixval in stead of heathen and primitive. Early French epic poetry shows. perhaps, even more clearly the continuous change and growth of popular song. The Chansons de as the name implies, deal with historical facts; but it is history trans formed and glorified by passion and imagination The now and stirring sense of nationality. due to the successes of Charles :Martel, reached its height in the reign of Charlemagne, under whom these aspirations for national greatness were at last almost entirely satisfied. In particular, the war in Spain (778) and the memorable dis aster at Roncesvalles which terminated it called forth an extraordinary outburst of epic song. Later, when an age of royal had been succeeded by an age of feudal magnificence, there is another great. period of epic productivity, which gives ex pression to the feudal ideal. If one examines the Chansons, whether, like the Roland, the Pe/e rinnye de Charlemagne, the Rol Louis, they belong to the royal period, or, like Renaud de Montau ban and Girard (le Roussillon, to the feudal, one discovers at once the same conditions that appear among the Teutons and the Finns—a mass of fluc tuating poetic thought in a perpetual state of composition, decomposition, and recoinposition. This poetry developed among the warrior class and those attached to its service. and there is no doubt that the songs contemporary with the events were often composed and chanted by the knights themselves. But they were especially eomposed and made familiar to all by the min- • strels. the jongleurs (q.v.), who took service with the great lords, or else more frequently made the round of the chflteaux, or sang their lays in places of public resort. Through their wandering, life they became a•quainhal with one another's songs. In the endeavor to please by giv ing a touch of novelty to a favorite old poem, they would combine two or three songs, modify them to remove discrepancies, and am plify for the sake of poetical embellishment or more stirring description of incident. In this way there came into existence an im body of epic material contained in short songs, which toward the middle of the elev enth century began to take the form of long epic poems. Finally, the composition of the Chansons de Geste comes to an end in a period (front the end of the twelfth century to the middle of the fourteenth) whip]] is in all respects analogous to that of the cyclic poets in Greece. The legends are again rehandled and bound together by intro duet ions, connecting links :and continuations, and the interrelated genealogies of the heroes worked out at length. The greatest, of these epics. the Chanson de Bo/find, must he dated, in rliest extant form, full three centuries after the defeat it lloneesvolles; and in this version ther• appear, as one might expect, some names and events of a later age—e.g. Richard of Nor mandy; the sack of ,Terusalem; the frail or Cane Ion, who probably, as Leihnitz suggested, is Weuelon, Archbishop of Sens, accused of treason against Charles the Bald in 859. The Basques who surprised Charlemagne's rear-guard have be come Saracens; and the King himself, who was then thirty-six years old, appears in the form in which, after the close of his reign, tradition conse crated his memory—an riellard ti in barbe /:curie. Over a hundred years later a redaction in rhyme instead of assonance appears, with a new ending of some 2000 lines; and of this version e have again a large number of remaniements or rehand hogs.