fact and the actual particulars of human existence in terms of a general significance—­the reader must feel that life itself has submitted to plastic imagination.  No fiction will ever have the air, so necessary for this epic symbolism, not merely of representing, but of unmistakably being, human experience.  This might suggest that history would be the thing for an epic poet; and so it would be, if history were superior to legend in poetic reality.  But, simply as substance, there is nothing to choose between them; while history has the obvious disadvantage of being commonly too strict in the manner of its events to allow of creative freedom.  Its details will probably be so well known, that any modification of them will draw more attention to discrepancy with the records than to achievement thereby of poetic purpose.  And yet modification, or at least suppression and exaggeration, of the details of history will certainly be necessary.  Not to declare what happened, and the results of what happened, is the object of an epic; but to accept all this as the mere material in which a single artistic purpose, a unique, vital symbolism may be shaped.  And if legend, after passing for innumerable years through popular imagination, still requires to be shaped at the hands of the epic poet, how much more must the crude events of history require this!  For it is not in events as they happen, however notably, that man may see symbols of vital destiny, but in events as they are transformed by plastic imagination.

Yet it has been possible to use history as the material of great epic poetry; Camoens and Tasso did this—­the chief subject of the Lusiads is even contemporary history.  But evidently success in these cases was due to the exceptional and fortunate fact that the fixed notorieties of history were combined with a strange and mysterious geography.  The remoteness and, one might say, the romantic possibilities of the places into which Camoens and Tasso were led by their themes, enable imagination to deal pretty freely with history.  But in a little more than ten years after Camoens glorified Portugal in an historical epic, Don Alonso de Ercilla tried to do the same for Spain.  He puts his action far enough from home:  the Spaniards are conquering Chili.  But the world has grown smaller and more familiar in the interval:  the astonishing things that could easily happen in the seas of Madagascar cannot now conveniently happen in Chili.  The Araucana is versified history, not epic.  That is to say, the action has no deeper significance than any other actual warfare; it has not been, and could not have been, shaped to any symbolic purpose.  Long before Tasso and Camoens and Ercilla, two Scotchmen had attempted to put patriotism into epic form; Barbour had written his Bruce and Blind Harry his Wallace.  But what with the nearness of their events, and what with the rusticity of their authors, these tolerable, ambling poems are