gs that could easily happen in the seas of Madagascar cannot now
conveniently happen in Chili. The _Araucana_ is versified history, not
epic. That is to say, the action has no deeper significance than any
other actual warfare; it has not been, and could not have been, shaped
to any symbolic purpose. Long before Tasso and Camoens and Ercilla, two
Scotchmen had attempted to put patriotism into epic form; Barbour had
written his _Bruce_ and Blind Harry his _Wallace_. But what with the
nearness of their events, and what with the rusticity of their authors,
these tolerable, ambling poems are quite unable to get the better of the
hardness of history. Probably the boldest attempt to make epic of
well-known, documented history is Lucan's _Pharsalia_. It is a brilliant
performance, and a deliberate effort to carry on the development of
epic. At the very least it has enriched the thought of humanity with
some imperishable lines. But it is true, what the great critic said of
it: the _Pharsalia_ partakes more of the nature of oratory than of
poetry. It means that Lucan, in choosing history, chose something which
he had to declaim about, something which, at best, he could
imaginatively realize; but not something which he could imaginatively
re-create. It is quite different with poems like the _Song of Roland_.
They are composed in, or are drawn immediately out of, an heroic age; an
age, that is to say, when the idea of history has not arisen, when
anything that happens turns inevitably, and in a surprisingly short
time, into legend. Thus, an unimportant, probably unpunished, attack by
Basque mountaineers on the Emperor's rear-guard has become, in the _Song
of Roland_, a great infamy of Saracenic treachery, which must be greatly
avenged.

Such, in a broad description, is the nature of epic poetry. To define it
with any narrower nicety would probably be rash. We have not been
discovering what an epic poem ought to be, but roughly examining what
similarity of quality there is in all those poems which we feel,
strictly attending to the emotional experience of reading them, can be
classed together and, for convenience, termed epic. But it is not much
good having a name for this species of poetry if it is given as well to
poems of quite a different nature. It is not much good agreeing to call
by the name of epic such poems as the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_,
_Beowulf_ and the _Song of Roland_, _Paradise Lost_ and _Gerusalemme
Liberata_, if