I do not think anyone need hesitate to put Sigurd among the epics; but I do not think anyone who will scrupulously compare the experience of reading Jason with the experience of reading Sigurd, can help agreeing that Jason should be kept out of the epics.  There is nothing to choose between the subjects of the two poems.  For an Englishman, Greek mythology means as much as the mythology of the North.  And I should say that the bright, exact diction and the modest metre of Jason are more interesting and attractive than the diction, often monotonous and vague, and the metre, often clumsily vehement, of Sigurd.  Yet for all that it is the style of Sigurd that puts it with the epics and apart from Jason; for style goes beyond metre and diction, beyond execution, into conception.  The whole imagination of Sigurd is incomparably larger than that of Jason.  In Sigurd, you feel that the fashioning grasp of imagination has not only seized on the show of things, and not only on the physical or moral unity of things, but has somehow brought into the midst of all this, and has kneaded into the texture of it all, something of the ultimate and metaphysical significance of life.  You scarcely feel that in Jason.

Yes, epic poetry must be an affair of evident largeness.  It was well said, that “the praise of an epic poem is to feign a person exceeding Nature.”  “Feign” here means to imagine; and imagine does not mean to invent.  But, like most of the numerous epigrams that have been made about epic poetry, the remark does not describe the nature of epic, but rather one of the conspicuous signs that that nature is fulfilling itself.  A poem which is, in some sort, a summation for its time of the values of life, will inevitably concern itself with at least one figure, and probably with several, in whom the whole virtue, and perhaps also the whole failure, of living seems superhumanly concentrated.  A story weighted with the epic purpose could not proceed at all, unless it were expressed in persons big enough to support it.  The subject, then, as the epic poet uses it, will obviously be an important one.  Whether, apart from the way the poet uses it, the subject ought to be an important one, would not start a very profitable discussion.  Homer has been praised for making, in the Iliad, a first-rate poem out of a second-rate subject.  It is a neat saying; but it seems unlikely that anything really second-rate should turn into first-rate epic.  I imagine Homer would have been considerably surprised, if anyone had told him that the vast train of tragic events caused by the gross and insupportable insult put by Agamemnon, the mean mind in authority, on Achilles, the typical hero—­that this noble and profoundly human theme was a second-rate subject.  At any rate, the subject must be of capital importance in its treatment.  It must symbolize—­not as a particular and separable assertion, but at large and generally—­some great aspect of vital destiny, without losing the air of recording some accepted reality of human experience, and without failing to be a good story; and the pressure of high purpose will inform diction and metre, as far, at least, as the poet’s verbal art will let it.