Marvelous, term used particularly with regard to epic poetry, to designate certain bold, but nonetheless plausible, fictions that are outside the circle of common ideas and therefore astonish the mind. An example is the intervention of the pagan gods in the poetry of Homer and Virgil; or the personified metaphysical entities in modern writings, such as Discord, Love, Fanaticism, etc. These are also known as machines. See Machines.

We have stated under that heading that even in the marvelous verisimilitude has its limits, and the marvelous of the ancients might not be appropriate in a modern poem. We will not examine either one of these points.

1°. In the marvelous a certain discretion must be maintained, and certain proprieties must be observed; for this marvelous varies according to the times, and what appeared marvelous to the Greeks and Romans is no longer marvelous for us. In an epic poem today, Minerva and Juno, Mars and Venus, who play such important roles in the Iliad and the Aeneid, would only be names without reality that would evoke no clear idea in the contemporary reader, because he was born into a completely opposite religion or raised with totally different principles.

That is undoubtedly one of the causes of the pleasure that the marvelous engenders ; but to adopt it, everything depends on the choice, the usage and the application that the poet makes of ideas that are received in his century and nation to create these striking, astonishing and pleasing fictions; and that supposes also that this marvelous must not shock one’s sense of what is plausible. Examples will shed light on this point: that Homer in the Iliad makes horses speak, that he attributes to tripods and golden statues the ability to move and proceed by themselves to the assembly of the gods; that in Virgil hideous and disgusting monsters come to taint the food of Aeneas’s men; that in Milton the rebellious angels have fun building an imaginary palace when they are supposed to be focused entirely on their vengeance; that Tasso imagines a parrot singing songs he has composed; all these traits are not sufficiently noble for the epic poem, or they constitute an extravagant sort of sublime. But if the wounded Mars lets out a cry similar to that of an army, if the movement of Jupiter’s eyebrows rattles Olympus, if Neptune and the Tritons themselves free Aeneas’s vessels mired in the sandbanks of Africa, this marvelous seems more reasonable and transports the reader. From these examples it follows that in order to judge the suitability of the marvelous , one must travel in one’s mind back into the era when the Poets wrote and momentarily adopt the ideas, the customs, and the sentiments of the people for whom they wrote. The marvelous of Homer and Virgil, considered from this point of view, will always be admirable. If one loses this perspective, the marvelous becomes false and absurd; these are beauties that one might call local beauties . There are other kinds that are found in all countries and in every era. Thus in La Lusiade, when the Portuguese fleet commanded by Vasco de Gama is about to sail around the Cape of Good Hope, called at the time the Promontory of Storms , we notice all of a sudden a formidable character who rises out of the depths of the sea, his head reaching to the clouds; storms, winds, and thunder surround him; his arms extend over the surface of the water. This monster or god is the guardian of this ocean, whose waves no ship has yet cut through. He threatens the fleet, he complains about the audaciousness of the Portuguese who have come to fight with him for the dominance of these seas; he announces to them all the calamities that they must endure in their undertaking. It would have been hard to create a better allegory of that difficult crossing; it is great without a doubt in every time and country. Voltaire himself, from whom we borrow this remark, furnishes an example of these grand and noble fictions, which please all nations in all centuries. In the seventh canto of his poem, Saint Louis transports Henri IV mentally to heaven and hell; finally he takes him into the palace of destiny and shows him his descendants and the great men that France will produce. He outlines for him the characters of these heroes in a succinct and true manner that is very interesting for our country. Virgil had done the same thing, and that proves that there is a kind of marvelous capable of creating the same impressions everywhere and in every epoch. Now in this regard there is a type of universal taste that the poet must know and consult. Fictions and allegories, which make up the marvelous system, will only please the enlightened reader insofar as they are taken from nature, are plausibly and judiciously sustained, and conform to received ideas. For if, according to Boileau-Despréaux, there are occasions when

The truth may sometimes not be plausible,

then how much more implausible will a fiction be, unless it is imagined and developed with such art that the reader, far from suspecting the illusion that has been created for him, gives himself up to it with pleasure and facilitates the impression that he receives from it? Although Milton fell into gross and inexcusable errors in this regard, he nonetheless ends his poem with an admirable fiction. The angel, who comes at God’s command to chase Adam out of earthly Paradise, leads this unfortunate man across a high mountain: there the future is laid out before Adam; the first object that meets his eye is a man whose sweetness touches him, who is being attacked and massacred by another, ferocious man. Adam understands at that moment what death is. He asks who these people are, and the angel answers that they are his sons. That is how the angel plays out all the consequences of his crime and the misfortunes of his descendants for Adam to witness, whereas the mere narration of these events could only have been quite cold.

As for personified beings, although Boileau seems to say that one can use them all indifferently in an epic poem,

There everything is used to enchant us,

Everything takes on a body, a soul, a mind, a face.

It is nonetheless certain that in this second branch of the marvelous , discretion must be maintained and proprieties observed just as in the first. Not all abstract ideas are appropriate for this metamorphosis. Sin, for example, which is only a moral being, is a rather forced character between Death and the Devil in an episode in Milton that is admirable for its accuracy and yet disgusting in its detail. A rule that we could propose on this point would be never to intertwine real beings with moral or metaphysical beings, because one of two things will happen: either the allegory dominates and causes the physical beings to be mistaken for imaginary characters, or it fails and becomes a bizarre composite of figures and realities that mutually destroy each other. Indeed, in Milton if Death and Sin, charged with guarding hell and depicted as monsters, shared a scene with some being supposed to be of their own species, the mistake would seem less serious, or perhaps it would not even be a flaw; but they are made to speak, act, and prepare for battle against Satan, whom we rightly regard throughout the whole poem as a real physical being. The spirit of our time and place does not easily reject received ideas and does not lend itself to the changes the poet imagines and wants to introduce into the nature of the things he presents, especially when it perceives a marked contrast between them. To this we must add that certain passions, like certain fables, are not suitable for allegorizing; perhaps only the great passions, those that cause lively feelings and marked effects, may be personified successfully.

2°. The intervention of the gods being one of the great machines of the marvelous , epic poets have not failed to make use of them, except that the ancients only used as agents in their poetry divinities known in their time and in their country, whose cult was at least rather generally established in paganism, and did not use unknown or foreign divinities or gods that they would have regarded as falsely honored; whereas the moderns, albeit persuaded of the absurdity of paganism, have never stopped associating its gods with the real God in their poems. Homer and Virgil admitted Jupiter, Mars and Venus, etc. But they made no mention of Horus, Isis, or Osiris, whose cult was not established in Greece or Rome, although their names were not unknown there. Is it not astonishing after that to see Camoes bringing together at the same time in his poem Jesus Christ and Venus, Bacchus and the Virgin Mary? or Saint Didier, in his poem about Clovis, resuscitating all the names of the pagan gods and having them stir up storms and form a thousand other obstacles impeding the conversion of that prince? Tasso also had the poor judgment to give the devils, who play a great role in Jérusalem délivrée [Jerusalem Delivered], the names of Pluto and Alecto.

One can also claim in these authors’ favor that, accustomed to seeing these names in the works of the ancient poets, they gradually and without paying much attention contracted the habit of using them as terms already known in mythology and more harmonious for versification than others that they might substitute in their place. This is a frivolous excuse, for the pagan poets attached to the names of their divinities some idea of power, greatness and goodness relative to the needs of men, while a Christian poet could not attach the same ideas to them without impiety. We must therefore conclude that in his mouth the names of Mars, Apollo or Neptune signify nothing real and positive. Now what is more unworthy of a rational man than to use empty sounds in this way, and to mix them often with words he uses to express the most respectable objects of religion? No-one fell into this excess more ridiculously than Sannazaro, who in his poem de partu Virginis leaves the empire of hell to Pluto and associates him with the Furies, the Gorgons, and Cerberus, etc. He compares the islands of Crete and Delos, famous in myth—one for the birth of Jupiter, the other as the birthplace of Apollo and Diana—with Bethlehem, and he invokes Apollo and the Muses in a poem intended to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

The decline of mythology necessarily brings with it the exclusion of that sort of Marvelous in modern poems. But in its place, one might ask, may one not introduce the angels, the saints, the demons, or even mix in some mythical or dubious traditions, which are nonetheless commonly accepted?

It is true that Milton’s whole poem is full of demons and angels; but also his is a unique subject, and it seems difficult to make the same marvelous fit other subjects:

These ideas, as we see, considerably reduce the privileges of modern poets relative to the marvelous , and leave them no more, so to speak, than the freedom to use fictions in which beings are personified. Consequently this is the route taken by Voltaire in La Henriade, where, it is true, he introduces saint Louis as the father and protector of the Bourbons; but he does this infrequently, and he places these references far apart. Furthermore it is the personified characters Discord, Politics, Fanaticism, Love, etc. who act, intervene, and create obstacles, and this is perhaps what caused some critics to say that La Henriade contained no fictions and was more a history than an epic poem.

The latest commentator of Boileau remarks that poetry is an art of illusion, which presents us imagined things as if they were real. He adds, whoever is willing to reflect on his own experience will be convinced without difficulty that these imagined things can only impress us as real and the illusion can only be complete insofar as poetry wraps itself in common belief and national opinions. That is what Homer thought; that is why he drew upon the depths of belief and opinion shared among the Greeks for all the marvelous , the supernatural, and the machines of his poems. The author of the Book of Job, writing for the Hebrews, drew his machines from the core of their beliefs. The Arabs, the Turks, the Persians all do the same thing in their works of fiction; they borrow their machines from the Muslim faith and from the opinions common to various peoples of the Levant. Consequently there can be no doubt that we should draw the marvelous in our poems from the very foundation of our religion, were it not also indisputable that,

The terrible mysteries of the Christian faith

Are not open to amusing ornamentation.

Boileau, Art poétique.

This is a reflection that never occurred to Tasso and all his imitators. And in another remark he says that the marvels God has brought about in all ages are very well suited to the most elevated poetry, and he cites the Psalms and canticles of the Holy Writ as proof. As for the plausible fictions , he adds, that one might create in imitation of the marvels that religion offers up to our belief, I doubt that we Frenchmen would ever accept them. Perhaps we may never have an epic poem capable of winning us all over, unless we limit ourselves to presenting the actions of the different human passions. Whatever one may say, the marvelous is not made for us and we will never want it except in subjects drawn from Holy Writ, and then only on the condition that we will not be given other marvels than the ones described there. It would be pointless to base profane subjects on the marvelous permitted in our operas: even stripped of everything that accompanies it, I dare say that it would not amuse us for one minute.

Thus we should no longer seek the marvelous in modern poetry—it would be out of place there; and the only marvelous that we can allow in modern poetry, limited to the personified human passions, is an allegory rather than the marvelous per se. Principes sur la lecture des Poëtes, tome II . Voltaire, Essai sur la poésie épique, Oeuvres de Boileau Despréaux, nouvelle edition by M. de Saint-Marc, tome II .