of Homer, in the
other early epics. It has occasionally an unforgettable grandeur of
phrasing. And it has other and perhaps deeper poetic qualities. When the
warriors are waiting in the haunted hall for the coming of the
marsh-fiend Grendel, they fall into untroubled sleep; and the poet adds,
with Homeric restraint: "Not one of them thought that he should thence
be ever seeking his loved home again, his people or free city, where he
was nurtured." The opening is magnificent, one of the noblest things
that have been done in language. There is some wonderful grim landscape
in the poem; towards the middle there is a great speech on deterioration
through prosperity, a piece of sustained intensity that reads like an
Aeschylean chorus; and there is some admirable fighting, especially the
fight with Grendel in the hall, and with Grendel's mother under the
waters, while Beowulf's companions anxiously watch the troubled surface
of the mere. The fact that the action of the poem is chiefly made of
single combat with supernatural creatures and that there is not tapestry
figured with radiant gods drawn between the life of men and the ultimate
darkness, gives a peculiar and notable character to the way Beowulf
symbolizes the primary courage of life. One would like to think, with
some enthusiasts, that this great poem, composed in a language totally
unintelligible to the huge majority of Englishmen--further from English
than Latin is from Italian--and perhaps not even composed in England,
certainly not concerned either with England or Englishmen, might
nevertheless be called an English epic.

But of course the early epics do not, any of them, merely repeat the
significance of Homer in another form. They might do that, if poetry had
to inculcate a moral, as some have supposed. But however nicely we may
analyse it, we shall never find in poetry a significance which is really
detachable, and expressible in another way. The significance _is_ the
poetry. What _Beowulf_ or the _Iliad_ or the _Odyssey_ means is simply
what it is in its whole nature; we can but roughly indicate it. And as
poetry is never the same, so its significance is never quite the same.
Courage as the first necessary value of life is most naively and simply
expressed, perhaps, in the _Poem of the Cid_; but even here the
expression is, as in all art, unique, and chiefly because it is
contrived through solidly imagined characters. There is splendid
characterization, too, i