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Updated: May 17, 2025
This epical value is not to be found, let it be understood, in every so-called novel. The great majority are not works of art in anything but a very secondary signification.
"Sunt lacrymæ rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt," are words in which Sainte-Beuve has found the secret of the Æneid; they are at any rate the key to the character of Æneas. Like the poet of our own days, he longs for "the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still." He stands utterly apart from those epical heroes "that delight in war."
Long poetical bulletins were written, in the epical form, to describe the battles and transactions of the war. They had an immense circulation, and served the place of newspapers. They have met the fate of newspapers, and are now on file.
But they are all makers of anxious mosaics; never do they carve the block; exquisite miniaturists, yet lack the big brush work and epical sweep of the preceding generation. Above all, the entire school is minus virility; its music is of the distaff, and has not the masculine ring of crossed swords.
As far as the art of the drama is concerned, Shakespeare is shameless. The poetic instinct one might call it "epical" or "lyrical," for it is both these is far more dominant in our "greatest dramatist" than any dramatic conscience. That is precisely why those among us who love "poetry," but find "drama," especially "drama since Ibsen," intolerably tiresome, revert again and again to Shakespeare.
Hours, days, in my Long Island youth and early manhood, I haunted the shores of Rockaway or Coney island, or away east to the Hamptons or Montauk. Afterward, I recollect, how it came to me that instead of any special lyrical or epical or literary attempt, the sea-shore should be an invisible influence, a pervading gauge and tally for me, in my composition.
Such is the stately soaring of the epical Muse, the Muse of ideal history. Scholars find Greece completely prefigured in Homer, and the time may come when Dante and Tasso shall be the leading authorities for the history of the Middle Ages, and Milton for that of the ages of Protestantism. In such comparison novels are insignificant and imbecile.
The short story among the Italians, who called it the novella, and supplied us with the name devoted solely among us to fiction of epical magnitude, refined indefinitely upon the Greek romance, if it derived from that; it retrenched itself in scope, and enlarged itself in the variety of its types.
Within the bounds of his epical scheme, which was always factitious, every person was so natural that his characters seemed like the characters of biography rather than of fiction. One does not remember them as one remembers the characters of most novelists.
The inscriptions on the two Triumphal Arches in the Court of the Universe are drawn respectively from Occidental and Oriental literature. It was designed that the large central panels possess a cosmical, an epical, or an elemental quality, and that the smaller panels on either side deal with abstractions, such as truth, nature or beauty.
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