WITH VICTORIAN POETRY 375 



except the ' Iliad ' and the ' Odyssey,' how few real epics 

 does the human race possess ! The German ' Nibelungen 

 Lied ' is a late rifacimento of Scandinavian sagas. Sir 

 Thomas Malory's ' Morte d'Arthur,' our nearest approach to 

 a true epic, is the digest of a score of previous romances. The 

 ' Song of Roland ' is an epical lyric. We call the ' ^Eneid ' 

 an epic because it throbs with the sense of Rome. Tanta 

 molis erat Romanam condere gentem. We call the 'Divine 

 Comedy ' an epic because it embalms the spirit of the Middle 

 Ages at their close ; we call ' Paradise Lost ' and ' Paradise 

 Regained ' epics because they carry such a weight of meaning 

 and are so monumentally constructed. But the '^neid/ 

 the * Divine Comedy,' and Milton's ' Paradise ' are not epics 

 in the proper sense of the word : they are the products of 

 reflection and individual genius, not the self-expression of a 

 nation in its youth. And just as the novel has absorbed our 

 forces for the drama, so has it satisfied our thirst for epical 

 narration. In that hybrid form where poetry assumes the 

 garb of prose, both drama and epic for the modern world lie 

 embedded. 



What, then, are the specific channels of Victorian utterance 

 in verse ? To define them is difficult, because they are so subtly 

 varied and so inextricably interwoven. Yet I think they may 

 be superficially described as the idyll and the lyric. Under 

 the idyll I should class all narrative and descriptive poetry, 

 of which this age has been extraordinarily prolific ; sometimes 

 assuming the form of minstrelsy, as in the lays of Scott ; 

 sometimes approaching to the classic style, as in the Hellenics 

 of Landor ; sometimes rivalling the novelette, as in the work 

 of Tennyson ; sometimes aiming at psychological analysis, as 

 in the portraits drawn by Robert Browning ; sometimes con- 

 fining art to bare history, as in Crabbe ; sometimes indulging 

 flights of pure artistic fancy, as in Keats' ' Endymion ' and 

 ' Lamia.' Under its many metamorphoses the narrative and 

 descriptive poetry of our century bears the stamp of the idyll, 

 because it is fragmentary and because it results in a picture. 

 Here it inclines to the drama, here it borrows tone from the 

 epic ; in one place it is lyrical, in another it is didactic ; fancy 



