No More Learning

It is enough for the purpose of this book that the name "Heroic Age" is
a good one for this stage of the business; it is obviously, and on the
whole rightly, descriptive. For the stage displays the first vigorous
expression, as the natural thing and without conspicuous restraint, of
private individuality. In savagery, thought, sentiment, religion and
social organization may be exceedingly complicated, full of the most
subtle and strange relationships; but they exist as complete and
determined _wholes_, each part absolutely bound up with the rest.
Analysis has never come near them. The savage is blinded to the glaring
incongruities of his tribal ideas not so much by habit or reverence; it
is simply that the mere possibility of such a thing as analysis has
never occurred to him. He thinks, he feels, he lives, all in a whole.
Each person is the tribe in little. This may make everyone an
astoundingly complex character; but it makes strong individuality
impossible in savagery, since everyone accepts the same elaborate
unanalysed whole of tribal existence. That existence, indeed, would find
in the assertion of private individuality a serious danger; and tribal
organization guards against this so efficiently that it is doubtless
impossible, so long as there is no interruption from outside. In some
obscure manner, however, savage existence has been constantly
interrupted; and it seems as if the long-repressed forces of
individuality then burst out into exaggerated vehemence; for the result
(if it is not slavery) is, that a people passes from its savage to its
heroic age, on its way to some permanence of civilization. It must
always have taken a good deal to break up the rigidity of savage
society. It might be the shock of enforced mixture with a totally alien
race, the two kinds of blood, full of independent vigour, compelled to
flow together;[1] or it might be the migration, due to economic stress,
from one tract of country to which the tribal existence was perfectly
adapted to another for which it was quite unsuited, with the added
necessity of conquering the peoples found in possession. Whatever the
cause may have been, the result is obvious: a sudden liberation, a
delighted expansion, of numerous private individualities.

But the various appearances of the Heroic Age cannot, perhaps, be
completely generalized. What has just been written will probably do for
the Heroic Age which produced Homer, and for that which produced the
_Nibelungenlied, Beowulf_, and the Northern Sagas.
It may, therefore
stand as the typical case; since Homer and these Northern poems are what
most people have in their minds when they speak of "authentic" epic. But
decidedly Heroic Ages have occurred much later than the latest of these
cases; and they arose out of a state of society which cannot roundly be
called savagery. Europe, for instance, had its unmistakable Heroic Age
when it was fighting with the Moslem, whether that warfare was a cause
or merely an accompaniment. And the period which preceded it, the period
after the failure of Roman civilization, was sufficiently "dark" and
devoid of individuality, to make the sudden plenty of potent and
splendid individuals seem a phenomenon of the same sort as that which
has been roughly described; it can scarcely be doubted that the age
which is exhibited in the _Poem of the Cid_, the _Song of Roland_, and
the lays of the Crusaders (_la Chanson d'Antioche_, for instance), was
similar in all essentials to the age we find in Homer and the
_Nibelungenlied_. Servia, too, has its ballad-cycles of Christian and
Mahometan warfare, which suppose an age obviously heroic. But it hardly
falls in with our scheme; Servia, at this time, might have been expected
to have gone well past its Heroic Age. Either, then, it was somehow
unusually prolonged, or else the clash of the Ottoman war revived it.
The case of Servia is interesting in another way. The songs about the
battle of Kossovo describe Servian defeat--defeat so overwhelming that
poetry cannot possibly translate it, and does not attempt it, into
anything that looks like victory. Even the splendid courage of its hero
Milos, who counters an imputation of treachery by riding in full
daylight into the Ottoman camp and murdering the Sultan, even this
courage is rather near to desperation. The Marko cycle--Marko whose
betrayal of his country seems wiped out by his immense prowess--has in a
less degree this utter defeat of Servia as its background. But Servian
history before all this has many glories, which, one would think, would
serve the turn of heroic song better than appalling defeat and, indeed,
enslavement. Why is the latter celebrated and not the former? The reason
can only be this: heroic poetry depends on an heroic age, and an age is
heroic because of what it is, not because of what it does. Servia's
defeat by the armies of Amurath came at a time when its people was too
strongly possessed by the heroic spirit to avoid uttering itself in
poetry. And from this it appears, too, that when the heroic age sings,
it primarily sings of itself, even when that means singing of its own
humiliation.