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THE EPIC 267
tury this mutually exclusive choice was never thought of at all. Can there be anything more private and intimate than the conversation of two lovers in each others' arms? The situation itself demands isolation, retirement, concealment. And yet the amorous dialogue of Romeo and Juliet is one of the most epic scenes in the dramatic literature of the world, for in this most intimate, private dialogue a historical turning-point is reached : the revolt of individual personal love against the fetters imposed by the feudal, patriarchal family and the tribal laws.
That Antigone loves and respects her brother is a private family matter, but in Sophocles' tragedy it becomes an epic because it is made problematic by the dominant social order.
In former times art knew nothing of the contrast between the epic and the intimate, the great and the small, the universally valid and the merely private. Such differentiation between private experience and socially significant event in the mode of presentation is a phenomenon specific to bourgeois art. This brought about on the one hand the purely introspective 'chamber' art devoid of all social connections and on the other the decorative generalizations of the epic form which glosses over all individual traits. It is obvious from this that this problem could not survive very long in Soviet art and the Soviet film, and that the style of the newer Soviet forms was precisely the historical perspective manifested in private, individual human destinies.
Monumentality in art is not a question of quantity. Neither numbers nor dimensions decide it. Defoe's Crusoe, alone on a desert island, is undoubtedly one of the most epic tales in world literature. It is a well-known fact that it is impossible to estimate the dimensions of a painting or a piece of sculpture from a photographic reproduction of it. Some of these, although small, give the impression of monumentality, and vice versa. What is decisive is the principle that in art only man can be great or little. The large size of an elephant or of a mountain is without significance in art for it is an external, natural quality; a matter of chance, which does not express any inner greatness. Only man's living image can give us the real epic quality and this impression is the mightier, the more individual even, the more personal the image. The reason for