Savitri

      II

Epics, Ancient and Modern

"The epic in general, ancient and modern", writes C. M. Gayley, "may be described as a dispassionate recital in dignified rhythmic narrative of a momentous theme or action fulfilled by heroic characters and supernatural agencies under the control of a sovereign destiny. The theme involves the political or religious interests of a people or of mankind; it commands the respect due to popular tradition or to traditional ideals. The poem awakens the sense of the mysterious, the awful, and the sublime; through perilous crises it uplifts and calms the strife of frail humanity."² This is the greatest common measure of the epics, for whatever its origin, it is nothing if not a narrative poem involving heroic, even supernatural, actions and characters, sustained by tradition, implicated in the life-ways of the people, and enveloped in the aura of the unusual, the awful, and the sublime.

      But there is a difference between the 'authentic' epics, the so-called communal or folk epics, the epics of tradition, on the one hand, and the more deliberate compositions, on the other, of a later day. Among the former are the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Song of Roland, Beowulf and the Asiatic Gilgamesh; and among the latter, the Aeneid, the Divina Commedia (if it could be called an epic), Camoens' Os Lusiadas, Paradise Lost, and Mahākāvyas in Sanskrit like the Raghuvamsa of Kalidasa. Something is lost, and something is gained. The change is significant, but no more significant than the change from the Heroic Age to the more recent period of sophistication and organised civilisation. The old epics were evidently recited

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before groups of appreciative listeners, but the 'literary' epics are read more often than listened to, treasured in books rather than in men's memories. Striking a sort of balance-sheet between the old epics and the new, C. M. Bowra writes: "If the oral epic triumphs through its simplicity and strength and straightforwardness, through the unhesitating sweep of its narrative and a brilliant clarity in its main effects, the written epic appeals by its poetical texture, by its exquisite or apt or impressive choice of words, by the rich significance of phrases and lines and paragraphs."³ We have as it were passed from the Gir forest in Kathiawar to the 'Hanging Gardens' on Malabar Hill. There is a diminution but also a refinement, there is less vitality, but more complexity.

      The two great Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, however, defy easy description. They are more than epics, they are really called itihasas, reservoirs of traditional knowledge from which people can drink deep, and significantly form their minds and shape their lives. Their massiveness itself gives them a place apart: the Ramayana with its 44,000 lines and the Mahabharata with its 2,20,000 lines, by their very size, admit of an encyclopaedic range. Of course, mere length is no proof of vastness of conception or richness of content. As Lascelles Abercrombie perceptively puts it, "length in itself is nothing, but the plain fact is that a long poem, if it really is a poem,... enables a remarkable range, not merely of experience, but of kinds of experience, to be collected into the single finality of a harmonious impression: a vast plenty of things has been accepted as a single version of the ideal world, as a unity of significance."⁴

      In both, but much more so in the Mahabharata than in the Ramayana, the personal, national and racial perspectives and the human, social and religious slants mingle and fuse to achieve a unity and universality of varied significance. Bowra is vaguely conscious of the difference between the Homeric and the ancient Indian epics, for he says that in these latter "a truly heroic foundation is overlaid with much literary and theological matter";⁵ the essential contrast between

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the Western classical epics and the great Indian epics, however, goes rather deeper, though on the surface there is considerable similarity as well:

These epics are...a highly artistic representation of intimate

significances of life, the living presentment of a strong and noble

thinking, a developed ethical and aesthetic mind and a high social

and political ideal, the ensouled image of a great culture. As rich in

freshness of life but immeasurably more profound and evolved in

thought and substance than the Greek, as advanced in maturity

of culture but more vigorous and vital and young in strength than

the Latin epic poetry, the Indian epic poems were fashioned to

serve a greater and completer national and cultural function...⁶

Devout Hindus to this day look upon these poems as scriptures, as dharmaśāstras (Codes of Righteous Action); and the Mahabharata is often referred to as the fifth Veda. Together these two epics form a Book of Origins for much of the later literature in India, and classical dramatists like Bhasa, Kalidasa and Bhavabhuti as also poets of our own time like Subramania Bharati, Tagore and Sri Aurobindo have freely taken deep draughts from this veritable Ganga-Yamuna confluence of the great Indian epic tradition.

      The literary epics from the days of Virgil in Europe and since the days of Kalidasa in India have carved no mean territory for themselves in the 'realms of gold'. Not all hill-ranges can be of equal immensity, nor can all rivers match the Mississippi or the Godavari in full and awesome flood. The latter-day epics have many things to recommend them, and they are cherished for one or another reason. Even so the doubt is often expressed that the world has now gone past the age of providing the right stimulus to the epic poet. Lyrics and satires and elegies, perhaps; perhaps, even, tragedies, though only occasionally; but epics—No! Yet, as J. K. Stephen jocularly remarked, genius finds out what it cannot do and then it goes and does it.

      The great Polish poet, Adam Mickiewicz, turned history into epic poetry in his Pan Tadeusz (1834), in which, "the act of looking

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back is really a glimpsing beyond the semi-darkness to see the approaching new dawn of equality, justice and freedom."⁷ There is Victor Hugo's La legende des siecles, which is said to have the true epic movement and quality. There have been other, though less successful, attempts too during the last one hundred and fifty years; and, besides, long poems like The Prelude, Don Juan, The Ring and the Book, Walt Whitman's Song of Myself and Bridges's The Testament of Beauty have also been sometimes loosely called 'epics', though epics with a substantial difference. And works of fiction like War and Peace, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Ulysses and perhaps even Doctor Zhivago, though written in prose, make a total impact that is not unlike the impact of epics on us. And what is one to say about a phenomenon like Goethe's Faust or Hardy's The Dynasts} The Cantos of Ezra Pound sets a similar problem: is it an epic, too, an epic still in progress? And we have, above all, Nikos Kazantzakis' colossal epic The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel⁸ and Sri Aurobindo's Savitri. It cannot be the truth that the days of the epic are over.

      An epic of our time cannot be exactly modelled on an Iliad or a Mahabharata; a modern epic must not be a mimicry of a great ancient epic. The 'race' may be essentially the same, but the 'milieu'—especially the climate of thought—must have changed a good deal in the course of the last two thousand years. The present moment in human history is truly pregnant with possibilities, and the poet must be acutely conscious of it all and desire to project his misgivings, his hopes, his nightmares, and his Pisgah visions in the form of poetry.

      There are dramas like Maurice Maeterlinck's which shift the focus of the action from the outer world to the inner theatre of the soul, recalling the silent suffering of Job, Harischandra, or the great Prahlad who have defied evil with the calm strength of their souls. Cannot epics, too, be fashioned in the same way? After all, what it the 'action' in an epic, or an epyllion, like Milton's Paradise Regained? Satan tries to tempt Jesus, tries again and again, and fails. It is what Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch would have called the perfect 'static drama'.

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The modern consciousness is obviously different from the 'heroic' consciousness of an Achilles or a Hector, of a Roland or a Kama; they were powers piled up in sheer strength, rather like masses of granite.

      The modern consciousness partakes of the complexity of a Hamlet and the goodness of a Myishkin. Especially after the release of atomic power, man holds in his grip the means of complete self-annihilation and also the means of forging a new order of peace and plenty. Humanity now seems to be at the cross-roads of its destiny, damnation and salvation being both within the realm of immediate probability. The great epic poet of today cannot therefore content himself with jousts, dynastic rivalries, campaigns of conquest or wars on land, air and sea. His consciousness must penetrate further, it must boldly and justifiably pursue, in Milton's words, "things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme".

      Discussing these possibilities, Sri Aurobindo wrote forty years ago:

The epic is only the narrative presentation on its largest canvas

and, at its highest elevation, greatness and amplitude of spirit and

speech and movement. It is sometimes asserted that the epic is

solely proper to primitive ages...This is to mistake form and

circumstance for the central reality. The epic, a great poetic story

of man or world or the gods, need not necessarily be a vigorous

presentation of external action: the divinely appointed creation of

Rome, the struggle of the principles of good and evil as presented

in the great Indian poems, the pageant of the centuries or the

journey of the seer through the three worlds beyond us are as fit

themes as primitive war and adventure for the imagination of the

epic creator. The epics of the soul most inwardly seen as they will

be by an intuitive poetry, are his greatest possible subject, and it

is this supreme kind that we shall expect from some profound

and mighty voice of the future. His indeed may be the song of

greatest flight that will reveal from the highest pinnacle and with

the largest field of vision the destiny of the human spirit and the

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presence and ways and purpose of the Divinity in man and the

universe.⁹

Even as man is purposefully participating in earth's evolutionary endeavour, cherishing ideals and dreams and visions, making experiments, pushing slowly ahead albeit along a difficult zig-zag course, man's creations too—his crafts, his arts, his political and social institutions—move towards these larger horizons of the future. The epics of today need not be patterned exactly on the epics of the past. New moulds, new motivations, a new organisation, a new colouring are possible. What is indispensable, however, is the largeness of the canvas, the height of elevation, the "greatness and amplitude of spirit and speech and movement".

      In the course of his illuminating discussion on the 'Epic Spirit', Tillyard mentions the following requirements: high quality and high seriousness; "amplitude, breadth, inclusiveness, and so on"; "a control commensurate with the amount included", in other words "the structural ideal"; and the 'choric' quality, which means that, "the epic writer must express the feelings of a large group of people living in or near his own time."¹⁰ Sri Aurobindo and Tillyard have both, the former succinctly and the latter with expansive elaboration, laid stress on the same qualities; whatever else is or is not there, these are quintessential to a true epic creation.

      An epic cannot be a frivolous exercise, only a mock-epic (like The Rape of the Lock) can be that, and even a mock-epic generally aims at purging folly through laughter, which is a serious enough purpose. An epic cannot be close and constricted—wideness and largeness are its natural habitat. An epic speaks with a recognisable voice; it may tell us a hundred things but without confusing the main issue, it should be able at once to provoke the play of multiplicity and effectively to control it. Above all, there should be room in the epic for the slow significant rumbling of undertones, for what the Sanskrit rhetoricians call dhivani, so that always more is meant than meets the ear. As the centre of the action shifts from the visible outer arena of the

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battlefield to the mind and soul of man—the invisible promontories, the slippery ascents, the dark abysses—there is increasing need to imply more than to state, to send out waves of suggestion than raise walls of brick.

      Even with regard to an early epic like the Aeneid, Bowra says that because Virgil, "wished to write a poem about something much larger than the destinies of individual heroes, he created a type of epic in which the characters represent something outside themselves, and the events displayed have other interests than their immediate excitement in the context."¹¹ Dante himself has explained that he wrote the Commedia in four senses: the literal, the allegorical, the analogical and the ethical. When viewed from the outside, it is the description of a journey; it is, in a deeper sense, a survey of states of mind, and, in a further sense, "a symbol of mankind's struggle upward out of ignorance into the clear light of philosophy...In a fourth sense, the Commedia is an expression of the laws of eternal justice; 'il contrapasso', the counterpass, as Bertran calls it or the law of Karma, if we are to use an Oriental term."¹² The transvaluation is from the visible to the invisible, from the material to the spiritual. As Stambler says, "Just as God uses the physical, temporal universe to convey to man, by analogy, the existence and the meaning of His universe, so does Dante the poet use narrative-in-time and detailed sense-experience to communicate to the reader his universe, a universe which the poet alone could comprehend simultaneously (in all its purposes) as well as sequentially."¹³

      From our everyday experience of the space-time continuum we are subtly and surely transported by the power of Dante's poetic art into an imaginative participation in Dante's triple world which is really, in Scott Buchanan's words, "a rather complete integration of several great cultures with all their disparate and conflicting possibilities."¹⁴ A point is reached when poetry must race beyond reason, as it does when Dante the mystic pilgrim feels as if he has "entered a still uncleft pearl", thereby as it were impearling himself. On this

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Williams comments as follows: " How body enters body, dimension supports dimension (he says), we cannot tell; therefore we should more expressly long to understand the union of our nature with God's, that is, the Incarnation."¹⁵ The Commedia, superficially, is as unlike the Iliad as cheese is unlike chalk; but what it loses in one way it gains in another; there is less of the blaze of action and assertion and more of the twilight revelation of inner striving and struggle and achievement.

      Of the European epic poets between Dante and Milton, two Italians, Ariosto andTasso, and the Portuguese, Camoens, stand rather in the forefront. Camoens's Os Lusiadas preceded by a few years Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, and was itself preceded by about sixty years by Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. There is more of the Aeneid than of the Commedia in these epics of the Renaissance. They are serious, they are expansive, and they are indelibly touched by the hues of romance and chivalry; above all, they are Christian in their main inspiration. In some respects, Camoens's epic is the most rewarding of the three. Like Dante, Camoens too—though with different results —acknowledges Virgil as his master. If Virgil sang of arms and the man, Aeneas, Camoens sang too of arms and the men—the men who carved out the Portuguese Empire and won the gorgeous East for Christ:

The deeds I tell of are real, and far outstrip the fabled adventures

of any Rodamonte, Ruggiero or Orlando, even granting that

Orlando did exist. In place of these you will meet a valiant Nono

Alvares, who did such notable service to his king and country,

an Egas Moniz, a Fuas Roupinho, for whom alone I wish I had

the lyre of Homer. The twelve knights Magrico led to England

are more than a match for the paladins of France, the illustrious

Vasco da Gama for Aeneas himself.¹⁶

It is clear Camoens is anxious to make out a case for his heroes as against the heroes celebrated by Ariosto and Virgil. But what is of particular significance in Os Lusiadas is that the scene of action has now overflowed Europe and the Mediterranean, and it is not merely a secular Empire that Carnoens's heroes strive to establish, but also a spiritual Empire. "The Portuguese achievement, as Camoens saw it", writes William C. Atkinson, "was part of a great providential design to win the world for the true faith, the ulterior purpose of which clearly merged into God's purpose for the universe as a whole."¹⁷ "They alone shall be my theme", declares Camoens towards the close of the seventh canto, "who for God and king adventured life itself and, losing it, won a larger life in the fame their works have so richly merited."¹⁸ It is already a far cry from the world of the Iliad, it is some distance even from the world of the Aeneid. Camoens is ready to judge by other than pure terrestrial standards;' he can already look a little beyond the unweeded garden that is the earth and see the Kingdom of God that is to be.

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