familiar substance of early epic, but to use it as a convenient and pleasant solvent for the novel intention.  It is what has been done in all the great “literary” epics.  But hasty criticism, finding that where they resembled Homer they seemed not so close to their matter, has taken this as a pervading and unfortunate characteristic.  It has not perceived that what in Homer was the main business of the epic, has become in later epic a device.  Having so altered, it has naturally lost in significance; but in the greatest instances of later epic, that for which the device was used has been as profoundly absorbed into the poet’s being as Homer’s matter was into his being.  It may be noted, too, that a corresponding change has also taken place in the opposite direction.  As Homer’s chief substance becomes a device in later epic, so a device of Homer’s becomes in later epic the chief substance.  Homer’s supernatural machinery may be reckoned as a device—­a device to heighten the general style and action of his poems; the significance of Homer must be found among his heroes, not among his gods.  But with Milton, it has become necessary to entrust to the supernatural action the whole aim and purport of the poem.

On the whole, then, there is no reason why “literary” epic should not be as close to its subject as “authentic” epic; there is every reason why both kinds should be equally close.  But in testing whether they actually are equally close, we have to remember that in the later epic it has become necessary to use the ostensible subject as a vehicle for the real subject.  And who, with any active sympathy for poetry, can say that Milton felt his theme with less intensity than Homer?  Milton is not so close to his fighting angels as Homer is to his fighting men; but the war in heaven is an incident in Milton’s figurative expression of something that has become altogether himself—­the mystery of individual existence in universal existence, and the accompanying mystery of sin, of individual will inexplicably allowed to tamper with the divinely universal will.  Milton, of course, in closeness to his subject and in everything else, stands as supreme above the other poets of literary epic as Homer does above the poets of authentic epic.  But what is true of Milton is true, in less degree, of the others.  If there is any good in them, it is primarily because they have got very close to their subjects:  that is required not only for epic, but for all poetry.  Coleridge, in a famous estimate put twenty years for the shortest period in which an epic could be composed; and of this, ten years were to be for preparation.  He meant that not less than ten years would do for the poet to fill all his being with the theme; and nothing else will serve, It is well known how Milton brooded over his subject, how Virgil lingered over his, how Camoen. carried the Luisads round the world with him, with what furious intensity Tasso gave himself to writing