lutionary development marks a crisis in the general process
of epic so important, that it can only be discussed when that process is
considered, in the following chapter, as a whole.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: Such as similes and episodes. It is as if a man were to
say, the essential thing about a bridge is that it should be painted.]

IV.

THE EPIC SERIES

By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art
has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which
it was made. But the development of human society does not go straight
forward; and the epic process will therefore be a recurring process, the
series a recurring series--though not in exact repetition. Thus, the
Homeric poems, the _Argonautica_, the _Aeneid_, the _Pharsalia_, and the
later Latin epics, form one series: the _Aeneid_ would be the climax of
the series, which thence declines, were it not that the whole originates
with the incomparable genius of Homer--a fact which makes it seem to
decline from start to finish. Then the process begins again, and again
fulfils itself, in the series which goes from _Beowulf_, the _Song of
Roland_, and the _Nibelungenlied_, through Camoens and Tasso up to
Milton. And in this case Milton is plainly the climax. There is nothing
like _Paradise Lost_ in the preceding poems, and epic poetry has done
nothing since but decline from that towering glory.

But it will be convenient not to make too much of chronology, in a
general account of epic development. It has already appeared that the
duties of all "authentic" epic are broadly the same, and the poems of
this kind, though two thousand years may separate their occurrence, may
be properly brought together as varieties of one sub-species. "Literary"
epic differs much more in the specific purpose of its art, as civilized
societies differ much more than heroic, and also as the looser _milieu_
of a civilization allows a less strictly traditional exercise of
personal genius than an heroic age. Still, it does not require any
manipulation to combine the "literary" epics from both series into a
single process. Indeed, if we take Homer, Virgil and Milton as the
outstanding events in the whole progress of epic poetry, and group the
less important poems appropriately round these three names, we shall not
be far from the _ideal truth_ of epic development. We might say, then,
that Homer begins the whole business of epic, imperishably fixes i