EPIC is the imitation, in narrative, of an important and memorable act. Thus epic differs from story, which recounts without imitating; from the dramatic poem, [1] which portrays in action; from the didactic poem, which is a tissue of precepts; from celebrations in verse, from the apologue; from the pastoral poem; in a word, from everything that lacks unity, significance, or nobility.

We are not treating here the origin and progress of this type of poetry: its historical part has been developed by the author of the Henriade in an essay that lends itself neither to piecemeal quotation nor to criticism. [2] We shall not revive the famous dispute over Homer: the works which this dispute has produced are in everyone’s hands. [3] Those who admire pedantic erudition can read the prefaces and remarks of Madame Dacier and her essay on the causes of the decadence of taste. [4] Those who allow themselves to be persuaded by brilliant enthusiasm and by ingenious declamation will enjoy the poetic preface of the English Homer by Pope. [5] Those who wish to weigh genius itself in the balance of Philosophy and Nature will consult the reflections on criticism of La Motte [6] and the dissertation on the Iliad by the abbé Terrasson. [7]

For us, without disputing Homer’s title of genius par excellence, father of poetry and of the gods; without examining whether he owes his ideas only to himself, or could have borrowed them from the numerous poets who went before him, as Vergil took from Peisander and Apollonius of Rhodes the adventure of Sinon, the sack of Troy, and the courtship of Dido and Aeneas; without, finally, attaching ourselves to unneeded personalities, even with respect to the living and a fortiori with regard to the dead, we shall attribute, if you wish, all the flaws of Homer to his era, and all his beauties to him alone; but after this distinction we think we may begin with this principle: that to give as model in poetry the most ancient known poem is not more reasonable than it would be to give as model in watchmaking the first spring-driven machine with wheels, whatever the merit that must be attributed to the inventors of both. Following this principle, we propose to seek in the very nature of the epic what is essential or arbitrary about the rules that have been prescribed for it. Some have to do with the choice of subject, others with composition.

On the choice of subject . Father Le Bossu would have it that the subject of the epic poem is a moral truth, presented under the guise of an allegory; [8] in that case, you invent the fable only after you have chosen the moral, and choose the characters only after you have invented the fable. [9] This vapid notion, presented almost as a general rule, does not even deserve refutation.

Abbé Terrasson would have it that without regard for the moral, you choose as subject of the epic the execution of a grand design, and as a result he disapproves of the subject of the Iliad , which he calls an inaction. But does not the anger of Achilles produce its effect, and the most terrible effect, through the very inaction of this hero? This is not the first time that action, in poetry, has been confused with movement. See Tragedy.

There is no exclusive rule about the choice of subject. A journey, a conquest, a civil war, a duty, a project, a passion: these things are all dissimilar, and all these subjects have produced excellent poems. Why? Because they combine the two great points that Horace requires: importance and interest, pleasure and utility.  [10]

The action of a poem is uniform when from beginning to end, from the undertaking to the event, it is always the same cause that tends toward the same effect. The anger of Achilles, fatal to the Greeks; Ithaca delivered by the return of Ulysses; the establishment of the Trojans in Ausonia; Roman liberty defended by Pompey and succumbing with him: all of these actions have the characteristic of unity that suits the epic ; and if poets have altered it in the composition, that is the vice of the art, not of the subject.

These examples have caused the unity of action to be seen as a sort of invariable rule. Nevertheless, the whole course of a man’s life has sometimes been used as the subject of an epic poem, as in the Achilliad, the Heracliad, the Thesiad, etc.

M. de la Motte even claims that unity of character suffices for the epic , for the reason, he says, that it suffices for the interest; but that is what remains to be decided. See Interest.

However, that may be, unity of action determines neither the duration nor the length. Those who tried to prescribe a time for it failed to appreciate that one can skip over years in a single verse, and that the events of a few days can fill a long poem. As for the number of incidents, they can be multiplied without fear: they will form a regular whole provided they arises from each other and follow in suite naturally. Thus, although Homer, to avoid confusion, took as his subject for the Iliad only the incident of Achilles’ anger, the rape of Helen avenged by the ruin of Troy would nonetheless make a single action, and such as the epic allows in its greatest simplicity.

A vast action has the advantage of fecundity, whence that of the choice: it leaves to the man of taste and genius the freedom to retreat into the corner of the picture which has no interest, and to present in the foreground the objects that can stir the soul. If Homer in the Iliad had embraced the rape of Helen avenged by the ruin of Troy, he would have had neither the leisure nor the thought to describe rugs, helmets, shields, etc. Achilles in the court of Deidamia, Philoctetes on Lemnos, and so many other incidents full of nobility and competing interests, essential parts of its action, would have filled it sufficiently; perhaps he would not even have found room for his gods, and would have lost little.

The epic poem is not limited like tragedy to the unities of place and time; it has over tragedy the same advantage that poetry has over painting. Tragedy is just a picture; the epic is a series of pictures that can multiply without conflating. Aristotle was right to say that the memory embraces them; to allow genius to extend as far as memory does is not to constrain it.

Whether the epic closes in on a single action like tragedy, or embraces a series of actions like our novels, it requires a conclusion that leaves nothing to be desired; but the poet in this part has two excesses to avoid, to wit: extending the denouement too far, or not developing it enough. See Denouement.

The action of the epic must be memorable and interesting, in other words worthy of being presented to men as an object of admiration, terror, or pity. This requires some detail.

A poet who chooses as subject an action the importance of which is based only on opinions particular to certain peoples condemns himself by his choice to interesting those peoples only, and to seeing the whole grandeur of his subject pass with their opinions. The subject of the Aeneid , such as Vergil could present it, was grand for all men; but given the point of view under which the poet envisaged it, it is very far from that universal beauty. Likewise, the subject of the Odyssey as Homer grasped it (not to mention details) is very superior to that of the Aeneid . The duties of king, father, and husband call Ulysses to Ithaca; superstition alone calls Aeneas to Italy. That a hero escapes the ruin of his country with a small number of his countrymen, surmounts all obstacles to go and give a new country to his poor companions: nothing is more interesting or more noble. But that by a caprice of destiny he be ordered to go establish himself in a specific spot on earth rather than some other, to betray a queen who has given herself to him and showered him with gifts in order to go abduct from a young prince a woman who is betrothed to him: that is something that was capable of interesting the pious in the court of Augustus, and flattering a people drunk on its fabled origin, but can only appear to us as ridiculous or revolting. To justify Aeneas, it is always said that he was pious: that is what makes him seem to us pusillanimous; piety towards unjust gods can only be received as a puerile fiction or as a despicable truth. Thus what is grand about Aeneas’s action is taken from nature; what is petty is taken from prejudice.

The action of the epic must therefore have a grandeur and an importance that are universal, in other words independent of all private interest, all system, all national prejudice, and based on the invariable sentiments and reason of nature. Quidquid delirant reges plectuntur achivi  [11] is a valuable lesson for all peoples and all kings: such is the summary of the Iliad . This lesson to give to the world is the sole object that Homer could have intended; for to try to make the Iliad into praise of Achilles is to make Paradise Lost praise of Satan. A panegyrist depicts men as they should be; Homer depicts them as they were. Achilles and most of his heroes have more vices than virtues, and the Iliad is more the satire than the apology of Greece.

Lucan is above all commendable for the boldness with which he chose and treated his subject before the very eyes of the Romans become slaves, and in their tyrant’s court.

This fearless genius had sensed that it was natural for all men to love liberty, to detest whoever suppresses it, and to admire whoever defends it. He wrote for all eras; and were it not for the praise of Nero which he allowed to soil his poem, one would think it was by a friend of Cato.

The grandeur and the importance of the action of the epic depend on the importance and the grandeur of the example it contains: the example of a passion pernicious to humanity, the subject of the Iliad ; the example of a virtue constant in its projects, firm in its setbacks, and faithful to itself, the subject of the Odyssey , etc. In virtuous examples, the principles, the means, the end, everything must be noble and worthy; virtue allows nothing base. In examples of vice, a mixture of strength and weakness, far from degrading the picture, only makes it more natural and awesome. For a powerful private interest to give rise to cruel divisions: it was to be expected, and the example is fruitless. But that the infidelity of a wife and the imprudence of a young fool should decimate Greece and leave Phrygia in flames: that fire set by a spark inspires a salutary fear; the example edifies by surprising.

Although virtue in good fortune is an encouraging example for men, it does not follow that virtue in bad fortune is a dangerous example. If presented such as it is in misfortune, its situation will not discourage those who love virtue. Cato was not fortunate after the defeat of Pompey, and who would not envy Cato’s fate as Seneca depicts it for us, inter ruinas publicas erectum ? [13]

The action of the epic sometimes seems to draw its importance from the stature of its characters. It is certain that there would be nothing grand about Agamemnon’s quarrel with Achilles if it took place between two soldiers. Why? Because the consequences would not be the same. But for a plebeian like Marius, or a private man like Cromwell, Hernando Cortés, etc., to undertake and carry out great things, for either the good or the bad of humanity, his action will have all the importance that the dignity of the epic requires. It has been said: The action of the epic does not have to be grand in itself, provided the characters be of high rank ; [14] and we say: The characters do not have to be of high rank provided the action is grand in itself .

It seems that the interest of the epic must be a public interest: its action would doubtless have more grandeur, importance, and usefulness; yet we cannot make a rule of it. A son whose father was groaning in chains, and who tried in order to deliver him everything courageous and demanding that nature and virtue, valor and piety can undertake: this son, of whatever rank he is assumed to be, would be a hero worthy of the epic , and his action would be deserving of a Voltaire or a Fénelon. [15] One even feels that an individual interest is more palpable than a public interest, and its reason is taken from nature ( see Interest). Yet as the epic poem is above all the school of the masters of the world, it is the interests they have in hand which it must teach them to respect. Now those interests are not those of any particular man, but those of humanity in general, the greatest and most dignified object of the most noble of all poems.

Up to here we have considered the subject of the epic only in itself; but whatever its natural beauty, it is still just a block of marble which the chisel must bring to life.

On composition . The composition of the epic includes three principal points: the structure, the termperaments, and the style. We divide the structure into exposition, nexus, and denouement; the temperaments into passions and moral; and the style, into force, precision, elegance, harmony, and coloration.

On structure. The exposition has three parts: the beginning, the invocation, and the proscenium. [16]

The beginning is only the title of the poem more developed; it must be noble and simple.

The invocation is an essential part of the epic only when we suppose that the poet is to reveal unknown secrets to men. Lucan, who must have been only too well apprised of the travails of his country, instead of invoking a god to inspire him, takes himself back suddenly to the time when the civil war broke out. He shudders, and cries out:

This movement is full of passion; an invocation in its place would have been cold.

The proscenium is the development of the situation of the characters at the moment when the poem begins, and the schema of the opposing interests which by their complication will form the nexus of the plot.

In the proscenium, either the poet follows the order of the events, and the story is called simple , or he leaves behind him a part of the action to double back on the past, and the story is called implex ; [18] the latter has a great advantage: not only does it animate the narrative by introducing a more interested and interesting character than the poet, such as Henry IV, Aeneas, etc., but also, by grasping the subject at the center, it sends back into the proscenium the interest of the actors’ present situation through the audience’s impatience to learn what has brought them to that point.

Still, great events, varied settings, and moving situations are what constitutes the fabric of an excellent poem, even if presented in their natural order. Boileau treats as dry historians the poets who follow the temporal order ; [19] but despite Boileau, chronological exactness or license are quite irrelevant to the beauty of poetry: it is the fervor of the narration, the force of the depictions, the interest of the plot, the contrast of temperaments, the struggle of the passions, the truth and nobility of the manners, which are the soul of the epic , and which will make of the most exactly followed morsel of history an admirable epic poem.

The plot has so far been the most neglected part of the epic poem, whereas in tragedy it has been more and more perfected. Sophocles and Euripides have been left behind, but no one has dared to abandon Homer: Vergil imitated him, and Vergil was imitated.

Aristotle touched on the most luminous principle of the epic when he said that this poem should be a tragedy in narrative. Let us follow this principle in its consequences.

In tragedy everything contributes to the nexus or the denouement; everything ought then to contribute to them in the epic . In tragedy, one incident arises from another, one situation produces another; in the epic poem the incidents and situations ought then to be linked in the same way. In tragedy the interest grows from act to act and the perils becomes more pressing; peril and interest ought then to have the same progression in the epic . Finally, pathos is the soul of tragedy; it should then be the soul of the epic , and find its source in the various opposed temperaments and interests. Let us consider, after that, the plot of the ancient poems. The Iliad has two kinds of nexus: the division among the gods, which is cold and shocking; and that among the chiefs, which only makes a situation. The wrath of Achilles prolongs this interweaving of perils and struggles that make up the action of the Iliad ; but that wrath, as deadly as it is, manifests itself only by the absence of Achilles, and the passions act on us only by their developments. The love and the suffering of Andromache produce only a momentary interest; almost all the rest of the poem is taken up with assaults and battles, pictures that hardly strike anything but the imagination; their interest never going as far as the heart.

The structures of the Odyssey and of the Aeneid are more varied; but how are the situations arranged in them? A gust of wind makes for an episode, and the adventures of Ulysses and Aeneas are as little like the plot of a tragedy as the voyage of Anson. [20]

If there were still Daciers, they would not fail to say that you risk everything by departing from the path which Homer traced and Vergil followed; that poetry is like medicine, and they would cite Hippocrates for us to prove that it is dangerous to innovate in the epic . [21] But why would you not do relative to Homer and Vergil what has been done relative to Sophocles and Euripides? We have distinguished their beauties from their flaws; we have taken up the art where they left it, we have tried to do always as they had done sometimes, and it is especially in the handling of the plot that Corneille and Racine made themselves superior to them. Supposing the whole poem of the Aeneid were fashioned like the fourth book; that the incidents, arising from each other, could produce and maintain to the end that variety of sentiments and images, that mixture of epic and dramatic, that urgent alternative of anxiety and surprise, terror and pity: would the Aeneid not be better than it is?

The epic , in order to fulfill Aristotle’s notion, ought then to be a tragedy composed of an indeterminate number of scenes, the intervals being filled by the poet; such is the principle in speculation: it is up to genius alone to judge whether it is practicable.

From its origin there have been three parts to tragedy: scene, narrative, and choir; and from them three kinds of roles: actors, confidants, and witnesses. In the epic , the first of these roles is that of the heroes; the poet handles the two others. Weep , says Horace, if you want me to weep . [22] If a poet relates horrible or moving things without emotion, you listen without being affected: you see that he is reciting stories; but if he trembles, or groans, or sheds tears, he is no longer a poet, he is a spectator moved to pity, whose situation we feel. The choir is part of the ethos of ancient tragedy; the reflections and sentiments of the poet are part of the ethos of the epic :

Such is the job Horace attributed to the choir, and such is the role that Lucan plays throughout his poem. Let the example of this poet not be disdained. Those who have read only Boileau scorn Lucan; but those who read Lucan pay little heed to Boileau’s judgment of him. Lucan is rightly reproached for indulging in declamation; but how eloquent he is when he is not declaiming! How greatly do the emotions that what he is telling arouse in him communicate warmth and vehemence to his narratives!

Caesar, after capturing Rome without any obstacle, seeks to pillage the treasures of the temple of Saturn, and one citizen opposes him. So is avarice , says the poet, the only sentiment that defies the sword and death?

The two armies stand ready; Caesar’s soldiers and Pompey’s recognize each other: they cross the trench separating them, mix together, are moved, and embrace. The poet seizes this moment to reproach Caesar’s soldiers for their disgraceful obedience:

In the middle of a stormy night Caesar knocks at the door of a fisherman, who asks: Quel est ce malheureux échappé du naufrage? [Who is this wretch who has survived the shipwreck?] The poet adds:

Pompey offers a sacrifice to the gods; the poet addresses Caesar:

About to describe the battle of Pharsalus, he writes, gripped with horror:

This is enough to indicate the mixture of the dramatic and the epic of which the poet can make use, even in direct narrative, and the means of comparing epic to tragedy in the aspect that distinguishes them the most from each other.

But, you may say, if the role of the choir filled by the poet were a beauty in the epic , why would Lucan be the only one of the ancient poets who attempted it? Why? Because he is the only one who had an intensely interesting subject for his poem. He was a Roman; he could still see the bloody traces of the civil war; it is neither art nor reflection that made him adopt the dramatic tone, it is his soul, it is nature itself; and the only means of imitating nature in this aspect is to be profoundly moved as he was.

The scene is the same in tragedy and the epic , for style, dialogue and ethos. Thus, in order to know whether Achilles’s dispute with Agamemnon, Ajax’s conversation with Idomeneus, etc., are as they must be in the Iliad , one has only to imagine them on the stage. See Tragedy.

Yet as the action of the epic is less concentrated and less rapid than that of tragedy, the scene can have more breadth and less intensity. That is where those fine political speeches which abound in Corneille’s tragedies would be marvelously placed. But in its very tranquility the epic scene must be interesting: nothing idle, nothing superfluous. It is even trivial for each scene to have its particular interest; it must contribute to the overall interest of the action; what follows must depend on it, and it on what precedes it. On these conditions dramatic morsels cannot be too numerous in the epic : they spread intensity and life throughout it. One has only to remember the farewells of Hector and Andromache, Priam at Achilles’s feet in the Iliad ; the loves of Dido, Euryalus, and Nisus, the regrets of Evander in the Aeneid ; Armida and Clorinda in Tasso [ Jerusalem delivered ]; the infernal council, Adam and Eve in Milton, etc.

What does La Henriade lack in order to be the most beautiful of all poems known? What wisdom in the composition! What nobility in the design! What contrasts! What color! What progressions! What a poem, in short, would the La Henriade be if the poet had known all his strengths when he fashioned its structure, if he had deployed in it the dominant part of his talent and his genius, the pathos of Mérope and Alzire, the art of plot and situations! In general, if most poems lack interest, it is because there are too many narratives and too few scenes.

Poems in which, by the way the story works, the characters succeed each other like the incidents and disappear, never to be seen again: these poems, which one can call episodic , are not material for a plot. We do not pretend to condemn the way they are organized; we are only saying that they are not narrative tragedies. That definition only fits poems in which permanent characters, announced from the moment of the exposition, can occupy the scene alternatively, and by struggles of passion and interest engage and sustain the action. Such would have been the form of the Iliad and of Pharsalia , had the poets known the art or the design of profiting from it.

The Iliad has been more than adequately analyzed by critics of recent days. But let us take Pharsalia as an example of the poet’s negligence in the shaping of the plot. How does it happen that with the finest subject and the finest genius, Lucan did not make a fine poem? Was it for having adhered to chronology and the exactness of the facts? We have anticipated this criticism. Is it for failure to make use of the supernatural? We shall see below how unnecessary to the epic is the intervention of the gods. Is it for having failed to depict as a poet either the characters or the situations with which his action presented him? The temperaments of Pompey and Caesar, of Brutus and Cato, of Marcia and Cornelia, of Affranius, Vulteius, and Sceva, are captured and drawn with a nobility and vigor of which we know few examples. The mourning of Rome at Caesar’s approach ( erravit sine voce dolor ), [29] Sulla’s proscriptions, the forest of Marseille and the combat by sea, the inundation of Caesar’s camp, the reunion of the two armies, the consumption of Pompey’s camp by thirst, the death of Vulteius and his friends, the tempest which Caesar undergoes, the assault sustained by Sceva, the charm of the Thessalian woman: all these situations and infinite others distributed throughout the poem are sometimes depicted with only too much force, boldness, and intensity. The speech corresponds to the beauty of the pictures; and if in both cases Lucan sometimes exceeds the boundaries of the grand and the true, it is only after having achieved them; and for trying to outdo himself, most often the last verse is turgid, and the one before it is sublime. If you take away from Pharsalia the hyperboles and the overlong passages, the flaws of a lively and fertile imagination, a correction that only requires one stroke of the pen, there will remain beauties worthy of the greatest masters, and which the author of The Horaces , Cinna , and La mort de Pompée did not find beneath him. [30] Yet with so many beauties the Pharsalia is but the sketch of a beautiful poem, not only for the style, which is crude and rough, not only for the lack of variety in the colors of the pictures, more the subject’s shortcoming than the poet’s, but especially for the lack of order and coherence in the dramatic part. The conversation Cato has with Brutus, the marriage of Cato and Marcia, the farewells of Pompey and Cornelia after the battle: all these scenes, aside from some overlong passages, are so interesting and noble! Why not include more of them? Why does Cato, that divine man so worthily announced in book two, not reappear? Why do we not see Brutus on stage with Caesar? Why is Cornelia forgotten on Lesbos? Why does Marcia not go join her there, and Cato find her there at the same time as Pompey? What an interview! What sentiments! What farewells! What a lovely contrast of virtuous characters, had the poet brought them together! It is not for us to trace such a structure; we are aware of the difficulties of that; but we are writing here for men of genius.

On the temperaments . We will not discuss the temperaments at length, intending to treat that part of the dramatic poem in its place ( see Tragedy), but we will place here some observations specific to the characters of the epic .

Nothing is more needless, in our opinion, than the intermixing of supernatural beings and men; all the poet can hope to achieve is to make great men of his gods by clothing them in our garments , to use Montaigne’s expression. And would it not be better to use the efforts of poetry to assimilate men to gods than to gods to men? Humana ad deos transtulerunt , says Cicero, speaking of mythologist philosophers, divina mallem ad nos . [31]

What I see most certainly , says Pope on the subject of Homer’s gods, is that having to speak of the deity without knowing him, he took its image from man; he contemplated in inconstant and murky waters the star he saw reflected in them.

One can object to us that the imagination does not reason; that it is intoxicated by the supernatural; that it transports the soul outside itself without giving it the time to double back on the ideas that would destroy the illusion: all this is true, and that is what prevents us from banishing the supernatural from the epic ; that is what motivates us to allow it even in tragedy. See Denouement. But in both of those poems it is even less reasonable to require it than to forbid it. See Supernatural. [32]

Yet how can one compensate for supernatural characters in the epic ? With virtues and passions, not allegorically personified (allegory excites the physical and chills the moral), but made perceptible by their effects, as they are in nature, and as tragedy presents them. The epic thus requires only men as characters, and the same men as tragedy, with this difference: that the latter requires more unity in the temperaments, being concentrated into a smaller time frame.

There is no simple temperament. Man , says Charon, is a marvelously varied and wavering subject ; yet as tragedy is but a moment in the life of a man, since in that very moment he is violently agitated by a principal interest and a dominant passion, he must, in that short interval, follow a single impulsion and undergo only the natural ebb and flow of the passion that dominates him, whereas the action of the epic poem being extended to a longer time frame, passion has its respite, and interest its diversions: it is a free and vast field for inconstancy and instability, which is the most common and apparent vice of human nature (Charon). [33] Wisdom and virtue alone are above transformations; and that is a kind of marvel which it is good to reserve for them.

Thus, although each of the characters employed in the epic must have a definite basic temperament and interest, the storms which arise therein will still sometimes trouble its surface and hide its core. But we must also observe that one never changes inclination, sentiment, or intention without cause; these changes only come about, if one may say this, by means of counterweights; the whole art consists in properly balancing the scale, and this sort of mechanism requires a profound understanding of nature. See in Britannicus with what art the counterweights are controlled in Burrhus’s scenes with Nero and Nero’s with Narcissus; and in contrast let us take the last book of the Iliad . Achilles has taken the vengeance of Patrocles to the point of barbarity; Priam has just thrown himself at his feet to beg for his son’s body. Achilles, moved, allows himself to yield; and until this point this scene is sublime. Achilles invites Priam to get some rest. “Son of Jupiter” (replies the divine Priam), “do not force me to sit down while my dear Hector is lying on the ground without burial.” What could be more piteous and less offensive than this reply? Who would think that it is for these words that Achilles again goes berserk? He calms down again; he has a tunic and two veils left on Priam’s chariot with which to wrap the body before giving it back to the grieving father; he takes him in his arms, places him on a bed, and places the bed on the chariot. Then he begins to cry loudly, addressing Patrocles: “My dear Patrocles,” he cries, “be not angry with me.” This reversal is admirable, but let us finish. “My dear Patrocles, be not angry with me if they bring thee the news even in the underworld that I have given the body of Hector back to his father, for (we expect him to say: I could not deny the tears of this unhappy father ; but no) for he has brought me a ransom worthy of me.” These discordances prove that they never knew less about heroism than in the times called heroic.

On the style . We assume in the reader a good notion of the qualities of style in general; he may consult the articles Style, Elegance, Precision, etc. Of these qualities, let us apply in few words to the style of the epic those that are relevant to it. The first are force, precision, and elegance. Force and precision are inseparable, but it is with elegance that it is difficult to reconcile them. Among the authors who, as they write, allow their genius to take over, those who think the most are not the ones who write the best: their ideas, which jumble and compete in their impetuosity, make their expressions jam together and crush each other. On the contrary, those whose less tumultuous ideas follow each other, arranging themselves calmly, preserve this sociable facility in their style; their imagination allows their pen the leisure to be elegant. Among the former are Seneca, Tacitus and Lucan, Corneille, Pascal, and Bossuet; among the latter Cicero, Livy and Vergil, Racine, Malebranche and Fléchier.

A work more elegant and less thought-out commonly is more successful than one which is better thought-out and less elegant. Reading the former is agreeable and easy; reading the latter is useful, but wearying; the one is a gold mine, the other a page that is light but artistically fashioned: you admire it, you enjoy it. And who goes digging in the mines? Even those who get rich off them are careful not to reveal where they are. How many famous authors owe their fortune to obscure writers they have never deigned to name? It has been said that a thought belongs to the person who formulated it the best; this is like the law of the strongest. In fact, it is at least true that the man of genius is often like the silkworm who spins for the worker: Sic vos, non vobis ... [34]

But can the care taken to polish the style not inhibit the imagination and slow down thought? Not when the poet hastens first to pour out his ideas in all their rapidity, and gives to correction only the intervals of his genius. In that first draft, expression melds with the thought, and constituting but a single body with it, leaves to reflection only traits to seek after and contours to round out. Nothing is more vivid nor more elegant than the passionate scenes in Racine: that is the way he worked on them; that is the way, no doubt, that he had begun who died at twenty-seven and left us Pharsalia .

Harmony and coloration above all are hallmarks of the epic style. There are two sorts of harmony in style: constrained harmony and free harmony. Constrained harmony, which is that of verse, results from a symmetrical division [35] and a regular measure in the sounds. Let us limit ourselves to heroic verse, the only one that has a connection to what we are trying to prove.

We know that the hexameter of the Ancients was composed of six feet of four beats. It is on this model that, assuming all the syllables of our language to be long or of two beats, twelve were given to our alexandrine verse. But as our language, although less dactylic than Greek or Latin, is nonetheless a mixture of longs and shorts, and the choice of them is arbitrary in the verses, it happens that one verse has two, three, four and up to eight more beats than another verse of apparently the same meter.

Thus in our verse the mixture of short and long syllables destroys the regularity of the measure; but there are no harmonious verses without this mixture, whence it follows that harmony and measure are incompatible in our verse. There the choice of sounds is arbitrary; it is therefore not yet this choice that makes our verses preferable to prose. Finally, rhyme, which can for a moment cause the pleasure of surprise, is at length boring and tiring. What then can wed us to a form of verse which has neither rhyme nor measure, and whose irregular symmetry deprives thought, sentiment and expression of the noble graces of freedom?

Prose has its harmony, and this, which we call free , is created not from some mixture or other of regularly divided sounds, but from a varied mixture of easy, full, and sonorous syllables, by turns slow and rapid as the ear wills it, with suspensions and rests that leave nothing to be desired. There all the numbers the ear has chosen by predilection, dactyl, spondee, iamb, etc., follow in succession and combine with a variety that charms and never tires: the precipitate or sustained measure, interrupted or complete, following the movements of the heart, leave it to sentiment, in coaction with the ear, to choose and mark the divisions: that is where the trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter naturally find their place; for to avoid in prose the measure of a harmonious verse is a puerile affectation, [37] except perhaps for heroic verse, the continuous return of which is too familiar to our ear for it not to be surprised if it finds that verse isolated in the middle of the irregular divisions of prose. See Elocution.

That imitative harmony was one of the beauties of ancient verse is perceptible to us only in a very small number of examples. Sometimes it portrays the physical:

Sometimes it portrays the idea:

But nothing is more difficult or more rare than to give that harmonic expression to our verse;

and if our language is capable of it, it is at most in prose, for its freedom allows the poet’s taste and ear the choice of the terms and formulations, which is perhaps what is lacking in the harmonious, but monotonous, prose of Telemachus . [41]

However, if we must yield to our current habit of seeing poems in verse, there would be a way to break the monotony and make the harmony imitative up to a point; this would be to use verses of different measure, not mixed randomly, as in our free poetry, but applied to the different genres to which their cadence is more analogous. For example, the verse of ten syllables, as the simplest, to emotional poems; the verse of twelve to serene and majestic poems; verses of eight to vehement speeches; verses of seven, six, and five to the most vivid and powerful depictions.

We find a striking example of this mixture of different measures in an epistle of the abbé de Chaulieu to the chevalier de Bouillon:

Maybe it would be better to avoid the tiring return of the repeated rhyme, to alternate the rhymes, [43] and vary the pauses with an art all the more difficult because there are no rules.

Coloration of style is a consequence of coloration of the imagination; and as it is inseparable from it, we have deemed that we could combine them under a single point of view.

The style of tragedy is common to all the dramatic part of the epic . See Tragedy.

But the epic part allows, even requires, more frequent and vivid depictions; either these depictions present the object with its own features, and we call them descriptions , or they present it cloaked in foreign colors, and we call them images .

Descriptions require not only a vivid, strong, and extensive imagination to capture at once the ensemble and the details of a broad vista, but also delicate and sure taste to choose both the scenes and the parts of each scene that are worthy of the heroic poem. That power of the descriptions is the brilliant and perhaps inimitable part of Homer; it is the reason why his work has been compared to the axle of a chariot that catches fire in its rapidity... This fire, they say, has only to appear in the places where all the rest is lacking, and were it surrounded by absurdities, it would no longer be seen . ( Preface to Pope’s English Homer .) [44] That is why Homer has made so many fanatics among the learned and so many enthusiasts among men of genius; that is why he has sometimes been thought of as an unquenchable source where poets drank,

and at other times as the painter Galathon had represented him, cujus vomitum alii poetae adstantes absorbent (Ælian, book XIII, 22 ). [46]

But it is not enough to depict; what is depicted must be well chosen. All true depiction has its beauty, but each beauty has its place. Whatever is lowly, common, incapable of provoking the surprise, admiration, or curiosity of a judicious reader is out of place in the epic .

It takes, they say, simple and familiar depictions to prepare the imagination to lend itself to the supernatural: yes, no doubt; but the simple and familiar have their interest and their nobility. The repast of which Henry IV partakes with the hermit of Jersey is no less natural that the repast of Aeneas on the African coast; yet one is interesting and the other is not. Why? Because one includes the accessory ideas of a tranquil and pure life, and the other only presents the naked idea of a repast of travelers.

Poets must suppose all the details that are not interesting, and which the reader’s reflection can supply without effort; they would be all the less excusable for drawing from sterile springs when philosophy has opened to them very fertile ones. Pope compares Homer’s genius to a star that draws within its vortex everything it finds within reach of its motion , and indeed Homer is of all poets the one who has most enriched poetry with the knowledge of his time. But if he returned today with that divine fire, what colors, what images would he not draw from the great effects of nature so knowledgeably expanded, from the grand effects of human industry, which experience and interest have so advanced in three thousand years? The gravitation of masses, the vegetation of plants, the instinct of animals, the elaborations of fire, the action of air, etc., mechanics, astronomy, navigation, etc.: these are mines scarcely opened where genius can enrich itself; it is from them that he can draw depictions worthy to fill the intervals of an heroic action. Still must he be chary of the space they take up, and never lose sight of an impatient spectator who wants to be entertained without being deterred, and whose curiosity is put off by a long wait, especially when he notices that he is being distracted to no good purpose. That is what would not fail to happen if, for example, in one of the intervals of the action, a thousand verses were devoted only to describing games ( Aeneid, book V ). The great art of dosing the descriptions is therefore to present them in the course of the principal action, as the most natural passages, or as the simplest means. An art too little known, or else neglected up till now.

It remains for us to examine the part of images; but as they are common to all genres of poetry, and as their theory requires extensive detail, we believe we must make a separate article of it. See Image.

We have only been able here to give the summary of a long treatise; there was in particular not enough space in the limits of this article for the examples that support and develop the principles so well. But by surveying poets the intelligent reader can easily add them. Besides, as we have said in the article Criticism, the author who, in order to compose a poem, needs a long study of the precepts can spare himself the trouble.

1. “Dramatic” throughout this article is always a specific reference to the theatre, a use much more restricted than its English homonym.

2. La Henriade is Voltaire’s epic poem featuring Henry IV, published in various forms beginning in 1728; notably, he added to it in 1733 his Essai sur la poésie épique .

3. A dispute that took place between 1714 and 1716 over whether or not Homer can or should be “improved” upon by translation.

4. Besides translating the Iliad and the Odyssey herself, Anne Dacier (1654-1720) published in 1714 her polemical Des causes de la corruption du goût (‘On the causes of the corruption of taste’).

5. Alexander Pope published translations of both the Iliad and the Odyssey between 1715 and 1726

6. Houdar de La Motte, who helped launch the “quarrel” with his verse translation of the Iliad in 1714, published as its preface a Discours sur Homère.

7. Jean Terrasson, Dissertation critique sur l’Iliade d’Homère, où, à l'occasion de ce poème, on cherche les règles d’une poétique fondée sur la raison et sur les exemples des Anciens et des Modernes (1715).

8. René Le Bossu (1631–1680), author of a Traité du poème épique (1675). The link is to a 1693 edition.

9. I.e. , the plot line.

10. In De arte poetica .

11. ‘Whenever monarchs err, their subjects must suffer’ (Horace, Epistles I, 2, 14).

12. “Why did the next generation, why did the grandsons deserve to be born into a monarchy? Did we bear arms like cowards or cover our throats? The penalty of another’s fear sits on our necks.” Lucan, Pharsalia , book VII, vv. 642–645; trans. Matthew Leigh, Lucan , Clarendon Press, 1997, p. 81),

13. ‘Standing noble amidst the public ruins’ ( De Providentia , book I, ch. 2).

14. This is one of the principles of tragedy according to Aristotle’s Poetics .

15. On Voltaire, see note 2; the other reference is to François de Salignac de La Mothe Fénelon (1651-1715), Avantures de Telemaque, fils d’Ulysse (1699), translated as The Adventures of Telemachus, son of Ulysses (1699), a didactic novel, often considered a sort of prose poem, written for the Dauphin.

16. Avant-scène or apron, that part of the stage which is in front of the curtain (or proscenium arch), and by extension an opening dialogue staged there before the curtain rises.

17. “Citizens, halt! what is your madness! / The solitary inhabitant wanders through your cities; / The laborer’s hand is wanting in your barren fields,’ Lucan, Pharsalia , book I, vv 27-29. The French paraphrase/translation is perhaps by Marmontel; the following line is the Latin original of the third line translated.

18. A term borrowed from Aristotle.

19. Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711), in his Art poétique (1674), canto III.

20. George Anson (1697–1762), who led eight ships in a famous circumnavigation of the globe in 1740–1744, published an equally famous Voyage round the World.

21. Both André Dacier (1651–1722) and his wife Anne Dacier (see note 4), were well-known translators of the Ancients.

22. De arte poetica , vv. 102–103.

23. “It should favour the good, and give friendly advice, guide those who are angered, encourage those fearful of sinning” ( De arte poetica , vv. 196–197, trans. A. S. Kline).

24. “The laws no longer have a champion against their oppressor / And gold, the basest of goods, finds a defender.” Here and in the following quotations from book VII of Lucan, Marmontel quotes what is perhaps his own translation; he indeed published a translation, but in prose: La Pharsale de Lucain , 2 vols. (Paris: Marlin, 1766).

25. “Cowards, why do you groan? Why shed tears? / Who is forcing you to bear these parricidal arms? / You fear a tyrant whose support you are! / Be deaf to the signal that recalls you to him. / Alone with his standards, Caesar is but a man: / You are going to see him the friend of Pompey and Rome.”

26. “He has no fear; he knows that a pathetic cabin / Cannot tempt one to civil war. / Caesar knocks at the door; it does not trouble him. / What rampart or temple would not have quaked at this sound? / Tranquil poverty!”

27. “What gods of crime and what Erinyes / Dost thou implore, Caesar, for so many parricides?”

28. “Oh Rome, where are thy gods? The enchained eras / Are doubtless swept along by blind chance. / If there is a Jupiter, if he bears thunder, / Can he see the crimes that are to soil the earth? / His hand will be put to use striking the mountains, / And leaves to Cassius to strike this head. / He refused to allow the festival of Thyestes, / And sheds on Pharsalus a baleful light; / Pharsalus or relatives eager to slaughter each other, / Brothers, fathers, children, are going to bathe in their blood.”

29. ‘Grief roamed silently’ ( Pharsalia , book II, v. 21).

30. All tragedies by Corneille. The title of the one which Marmontel calls Les Horaces is actually the singular Horace , although there are three Horaces in the play.

31. Homer “applied human traits to the gods, I would prefer he apply divine traits to us” ( Rhetorica , Tusculanae Disputationes , I, 65).

32. In French, Merveilleux , which has been translated as “Marvelous” by the translator of that article.

33. Pierre Charron (1541-1603), Le thresor de la sagesse (1601; this edition, Lyon, 1606). In English translation: Of Wisdom (London, 1697).

34. Cryptically, “We labor, but not for ourselves”: Vergil’s famous riposte to a plagiarized line, which calls for a completion which only Vergil can provide.

35. This criterion actually applies to only one kind of verse, which Marmontel indeed has in mind, which is that of the French alexandrine defined in large part by its 6/6 division of syllables.

36. The first of these verses is by Corneille ( Polyeucte , act II, sc. 1), the second by Boileau ( Épître III).

37. It was held to be a flaw in prose to contain an alexandrine, presumably the product of negligence.

38. “Nor watery Amphitrite stretching out her arms along the vast shores of the world” (Ovid, Metamorphoses , I, 13–14, trans. A. S. Kline).

39. “Mighty offspring of Jove” (Vergil, Eclogues , IV, 49).

40. “A fearful monster, vast and shapeless, robbed of the light” (Vergil, Aeneid , III, 658).

41. See note 15.

42. Guillaume Amfrye de Chaulieu (1639–1720), “Au chevalier de Bouillon en 1713.” This poem is a dizain (ten verses) where verses 7 and 10 are alexandrines (12 syllables) and the rest are heptameters.

43. Croiser les vers (abab), as is done in this poem. Four verses here repeat the rhyme in –onde .

44. See note 5. Marmontel’s paraphrase of Pope is only approximate. What Pope actually wrote in his preface to the Iliad was this: “[...] becomes on fire, like a chariot-wheel, by its own rapidity. Exact disposition, just thought, correct elocution, polished numbers, may have been found in a thousand; but this poetical fire, this vivida vis animi , in a very few. Even in works where all those are imperfect or neglected, this can overpower criticism, and make us admire even while we disapprove. Nay, where this appears, though attended with absurdities, it brightens all the rubbish about it, till we see nothing but its own splendor.”

45. “From which, as from a perennial spring, the lips of the poets are moistened by Pierian waters” ( Amores , 3, 9, 25–26).

46. “Whose vomit is swallowed by other poets.”