if there were a deeper improbability for
the occurrence of regular epic now than in the times just before Virgil
and Tasso--of regular epic, that is, inspired by some vital import, not
simply, like _Sigurd the Volsung_, by archaeological import. Lucretius is
a good deal more suggestive than Dante; for Dante's form is too exactly
suited to his own peculiar genius and his own peculiar time to be
adaptable. But the method of Lucretius is eminently adaptable. That
amazing image of the sublime mind of Lucretius is exactly the kind of
lofty symbolism that the continuation of epic purpose now seems to
require--a subjective symbolism. I believe Wordsworth felt this, when he
planned his great symbolic poem, and partly executed it in _The Prelude_
and _The Excursion_: for there, more profoundly than anywhere out of
Milton himself, Milton's spiritual legacy is employed. It may be, then,
that Lucretius and Wordsworth will preside over the change from
objective to subjective symbolism which Milton has, perhaps, made
necessary for the continued development of the epic purpose: after
Milton, it seems likely that there is nothing more to be done with
objective epic. But Hugo's method, of a connected sequence of separate
poems, instead of one continuous poem, may come in here. The
determination to keep up a continuous form brought both Lucretius and
Wordsworth at times perilously near to the odious state of didactic
poetry; it was at least responsible for some tedium. Epic poetry will
certainly never be didactic. What we may imagine--who knows how vainly
imagine?--is, then, a sequence of odes expressing, in the image of some
fortunate and lofty mind, as much of the spiritual significance which
the epic purpose must continue from Milton, as is possible, in the style
of Lucretius and Wordsworth, for subjective symbolism. A pregnant
experiment towards something like this has already been seen--in George
Meredith's magnificent set of _Odes in Contribution to the Song of the
French History_. The subject is ostensibly concrete; but France in her
agonies and triumphs has been personified into a superb symbol of
Meredith's own reading of human fate. The series builds up a decidedly
epic significance, and its manner is extraordinarily suggestive of a new
epic method. Nevertheless, something more Lucretian in central
imagination, something less bound to concrete and particular event,
seems required for the complete development of epic purpose.

F