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It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, this something which it is the function of that form of art to create, this epical value, that I propose chiefly to seek and, as far as may be, to throw into relief, in the present study.
The odyssey of the coal that was lifted high out of ships on the tide beyond, to fall ultimately into the furnaces within, scarcely touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was by itself epical. Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four million cubic feet per hour cooled the entire palace, and gave to these stoke-holes the uncanny quality of refrigerators.
The joy of the meeting between Flush and me would be a good subject for a Greek ode I recommend it to you. It might take rank next to the epical parting of Hector and Andromache. He dashed up the stairs into my room and into my arms, where I hugged him and kissed him, black as he was black as if imbued in a distillation of St. Giles's. Ah, I can break jests about it now, you see.
It was pleasant to see proud parents and charming sisters, wearing their best, clustered excitedly round some sturdy and well-brushed young hero, the hope of the race; pleasant to see frock-coated masters, beaming with professional benevolence, elderly gentlemen smilingly recalling tales of youthful prowess, which had grown quite epical in the lapse of time; it was inspiriting to feel one of a big company of people, all bent on being for once as good-humoured and cheerful as possible, and all inspired by a vague desire to improve the occasion.
Wagner sought in the epical rehabilitation of a vanished Valhalla a surcease from the world- pain. He consciously selected his anodyne and in "Die Meistersinger" touched a consoling earth. Chopin and Nietzsche, temperamentally finer and more sensitive than Wagner the one musically, the other intellectually sang themselves in music and philosophy, because they were so constituted.
However, the self-assertion of the individual or of groups of individuals, their struggles for superiority, and the conflicts which resulted therefrom, have already been analyzed, described, and glorified from time immemorial. In fact, up to the present time, this current alone has received attention from the epical poet, the annalist, the historian, and the sociologist.
There are pages of epical breadth and power, passages of elemental vigour and ferocity passages, again, of an exquisite tenderness and poignancy. Not before had he given so convincing an earnest of the larger aspect of his genius: neither in the three earlier sonatas, in the "Sea Pieces," nor in the "Indian" suite, had he attained an equal magnitude, an equal scope and significance.
Beneath the brooding spirit of a new civilization signs of life had at length appeared, and Europe became vocal in every part with fantastic poems, lyrical in the South, epical in the North. They were wildly exuberant products, because severe art was unknown, but simple, naïve, and gay, and suited to the taste of a time when the classics were regarded as superstitiously as the heavens.
It is this idea which underlies and issues from a romance, this something which it is the function of that form of art to create, this epical value, that I propose chiefly to seek and, as far as may be, to throw into relief, in the present study.
Nor did she in the least show the resigned, disillusioned air of women who have but recently lost their youth. She bore herself just as though she still had no fear of strong lights, and as though she was still the dazzling, dashing blonde of whom John in his earliest twenties used to say, with ingenuous enthusiasm, that she was 'ripping' the ripping Mrs. Chris Hamson. An epical creature!