any semblance of epic scope.  But by devising somehow a connected sequence of idylls, something of epic scope can be acquired again.  As Hugo says, in his preface to La Legende des Siecles:  “Comme dans une mosaique, chaque pierre a sa couleur et sa forme propre; l’ensemble donne une figure.  La figure de ce livre,” he goes on, “c’est l’homme.”  To get an epic design or figure through a sequence of small idylls need not be the result of mere technical curiosity.  It may be a valuable method for the future of epic.  Tennyson attempted this method in Idylls of the King; not, as is now usually admitted, with any great success.  The sequence is admirable for sheer craftsmanship, for astonishing craftsmanship; but it did not manage to effect anything like a conspicuous symbolism.  You have but to think of Paradise Lost to see what Idylls of the King lacks.  Victor Hugo, however, did better in La Legende des Siecles.  “La figure, c’est l’homme”; there, at any rate, is the intention of epic symbolism.  And, however pretentious the poem may be, it undoubtedly does make a passionate effort to develop the significance which Milton had achieved; chiefly to enlarge the scope of this significance.[14] Browning’s The Ring and the Book also uses this notion of an idyllic sequence; but without any semblance of epic purpose, purely for the exhibition of human character.

It has already been remarked that the ultimate significance of great drama is the same as that of epic.  Since the vital epic purpose—­the kind of epic purpose which answers to the spirit of the time—­is evidently looking for some new form to inhabit, it is not surprising, then, that it should have occasionally tried on dramatic form.  And, unquestionably, for great poetic symbolism of the depths of modern consciousness, for such symbolism as Milton’s, we must go to two such invasions of epic purpose into dramatic manner—­to Goethe’s Faust and Hardy’s The Dynasts.  But dramatic significance and epic significance have been admitted to be broadly the same; to take but one instance, Aeschylus’s Prometheus is closely related to Milton’s Satan (though I think Prometheus really represents a monism of consciousness—­that which is destined—­as Satan represents a dualism—­at once the destined and the destiny).  How then can we speak of epic purpose invading drama?  Surely in this way.  Drama seeks to present its significance with narrowed intensity, but epic in a large dilatation:  the one contracts, the other expatiates.  When, therefore, we find drama setting out its significance in such a way as to become epically dilated, we may say that dramatic has grown into epic purpose.  Or, even more positively, we may say that epic has taken over drama and adapted it to its peculiar needs.  In any case, with one exception to be mentioned presently, it is only in Faust and The Dynasts that we find any great development of Miltonic significance.  These are the poems