ts
type and, in a way that can never be questioned, declares its artistic
purpose; Virgil perfects the type; and Milton perfects the purpose.
Three such poets are not, heaven knows, summed up in a phrase; I mean
merely to indicate how they are related one to another in the general
scheme of epic poetry. For discriminating their merits, deciding their
comparative eminence, I have no inclination; and fortunately it does not
come within the requirements of this essay. Indeed, I think the reader
will easily excuse me, if I touch very slightly on the poetic manner, in
the common and narrow sense, of the poets whom I shall have to mention;
since these qualities have been so often and sometimes so admirably
dealt with. It is at the broader aspects of artistic purpose that I wish
to look.

"From Homer," said Goethe, "I learn every day more clearly, that in our
life here above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell." It is
rather a startling sentence at first. That poetry which, for us, in
Thoreau's excellent words, "lies in the east of literature," scarcely
suggests, in the usual opinion of it, Hell. We are tempted to think of
Homer as the most fortunate of poets. It seems as if he had but to open
his mouth and speak, to create divine poetry; and it does not lessen our
sense of his good fortune when, on looking a little closer, we see that
this is really the result of an unerring and unfailing art, an
extraordinarily skilful technique. He had it entirely at his command;
and he exercised it in a language in which, though it may be singularly
artificial and conventional, we can still feel the wonder of its
sensuous beauty and the splendour of its expressive power. It is a
language that seems alive with eagerness to respond to imagination. Open
Homer anywhere, and the casual grandeur of his untranslatable language
appears; such lines as:

amphi de naees
smerdaleon konabaesan ausanton hup' Achaion.[6]

That, you might say, is Homer at his ease; when he exerts himself you
get a miracle like:

su den strophalingi koniaes
keiso megas megalosti, lelasmenos hipposunaon.[7]

It seems the art of one who walked through the world of things endowed
with the senses of a god, and able, with that perfection of effort that
looks as if it were effortless, to fashion his experience into
incorruptible song; whether it be the dance of flies round a byre at
milking-time, or a forest-fire on the mountains at night. The sha