within themselves
the entire contribution to human progress of a certain race, a certain
nation, a certain organized religion. The glory that was Greece is
epitomized and sung forever in the "Iliad,"--the grandeur that was
Rome, in the "AEneid." All that the Middle Ages gave the world is
gathered and expressed in the "Divine Comedy" of Dante: all of
medieval history, science, philosophy, scholarship, poetry, religion
may be reconstructed from a right reading and entire understanding of
this single monumental poem. If you would know Portugal in her
great age of discovery and conquest and national expansion, read the
"Lusiads" of Camoens. If you would know Christianity militant against
the embattled legions of the Saracens, read the "Jerusalem Liberated"
of Tasso. If you would know what the Puritan religion once meant to
the greatest minds of England, read the "Paradise Lost" of Milton.

The great epics have attained this resumptive and historical
significance only by exhibiting as subject-matter a vast and communal
struggle, in which an entire race, an entire nation, an entire
organized religion has been concerned,--a struggle imagined as so vast
that it has shaken heaven as well as earth and called to conflict not
only men but also gods. The epic has dealt always with a struggle,
at once human and divine, to establish a great communal cause. This
cause, in the "AEneid," is the founding of Rome; in the "Jerusalem
Liberated" it is the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre; in the "Faerie
Queene" it is the triumph of the virtues over the vices; in the
"Lusiads" it is the discovery and conquest of the Indies; in the
"Divine Comedy" it is the salvation of the human soul. Whatever
nations, whatever races, whatever gods oppose the founding of Rome or
the liberation of Jerusalem must be conquered, because in either case
the epic cause is righteous and predestined to prevail.

As a result of this, the characters in the great epics are memorable
mainly because of the part that they play in advancing or retarding
the victory of the vast and social cause which is the subject of the
story. Their virtues and their faults are communal and representative:
they are not adjudged as individuals, apart from the conflict in which
they figure: and, as a consequence, they are rarely interesting in
their individual traits. It is in rendering the more intimate and
personal phases of human character that epic literature shows itself,
when compared w