1, s. 495 et seq.] We inevitably apprehend, not merely his thoughts,
but him thinking. In the epic form of poetry, the poet has, moreover,
an opportunity for a more direct mode of self-revelation, an opportunity
for comment and judgment upon the life which he portrays. And this we
should accept, not in a spirit of controversy or criticism, but with
sympathy, as a part of the total aesthetic expression, striving to get,
not only the poet's story, but his point of view regarding it as well.
This duality in the life of the epic involves a two-foldness in its
time. In both lyric and dramatic poetry, life moves before us as a
single stream actual in the present; but in the epic there is the time
of the story-teller, which is present, and the time of the events that
he relates, which is past. And being past, these events appear as it
were at a distance, at arms' length and remote; they lack the vivid
reality of things present. Moreover, since the past is finished, unlike
the present which is ever moving and creating itself anew, the epic,
in comparison with the drama, comes to us with its parts as it were
coexisting and complete, more after the manner of space than of time.
And just as a spatial thing allows us to survey its parts by turn,
since they are all there before we look; so, in reading an epic, we
feel that we can proceed at our leisure and, despite the causal
relation, take the incidents in any order. It is not so in the drama,
where events move rapidly and make themselves in a determined sequence.
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