eryone 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
simil