lly base. From
this we see that the novelistic attitude toward character is much more
intimate than the epic attitude. The wrath of Achilles is significant
to Homer, not so much because it is an exhibition of individual
personality as because it is a factor in jeopardizing the victory of
the Greeks. Considered as types of individual character, most of
Homer's heroes are mere boys. It is the cause for which they fight
that gives them dignity: embattled Greece must repossess the beauty
which a lesser race has reft away from it. Even Helen herself is
merely an idea to be fought for; she is not, as a woman, interesting
humanly. It is only in infrequent passages, such as the scene of
parting between Andromache and Hector, that the ancient epics reveal
the intimate attitude toward character to which we have grown
accustomed in the modern novel.

Because the epic authors have been interested always in communal
conflict rather than in individual personality, they have seldom made
any use of the element of love,--the most intimate and personal of all
emotions. There is no love in Homer, and scarcely any love in Virgil
and in Milton. Tasso, to be sure, uses a love motive as the basis for
each of the three leading strands of his story; but because of this,
his epic, though gaining in modernity and charm, loses something of
the communal immensity--the impersonal dignity--of the "Iliad" and the
"AEneid." On the other hand, novelistic authors, since they have been
interested mainly in the revelation of intimate phases of individual
personality, have seized upon the element of love as the leading
motive of their stories. And this is one of the main differences, on
the side of content, between epic and novelistic fiction.

Certain great works of fiction stand upon the borderland between the
epic and the novel. "Don Quixote" is, for instance, such a work. It
is epic in that it sums up and expresses the entire contribution of
Spain to the progress of humanity. It is resumptive of the nation that
produced it: all phases of Spanish life and character, ideals and
temperament, are epitomized within it. But, on the other hand, it is
novelistic in the emphasis it casts on individual personality,--the
intimacy with which it focusses the interest not so much upon a nation
as upon a man.

The epic, in the ancient sense, is dead to-day. Facility of
intercommunication between the nations has made us all citizens of the
world; and an increased s