The traditions of all nations go back to an age of heroes.
Nature, also, has had her time of stupendous greatness, a period
of great revolutions in nature, of which we can see traces to
this day; and of huge animals, whose bones are still being dug
up. The history of civilization also has its period of great
achievements, and poetry has had its time of the wonderful and
gigantic. In numerous heroic poems of different nations we can
trace the unity of all heroic personages, as in the Iliad and the
Odyssey of Greece, the Sagas of the North in the Nibelungen-lied,
and the Ramayon of the Orient. Freedom, greatness and heroism are
embodied in these poems, and many of them breathe a martial
spirit.
We find the same character, however touched by local color, in
all these beautiful traditions of whatever nation or clime; at
the zenith of success, in the spring-time of youth and hope, on
the very eve of joy unutterable, there often seizes on the soul
of man an overwhelming sense of the hollowness and fleetingness
of life. It is this touch of the spiritual which raises these old
heroic poems to such sublime beauty and power. Poetry of this
kind implies a nation, one which is still, or has been, great;
one which has a past, a legendary history, vivid recollections,
and an original and poetical manner of thought, as well as a
clearly defined mythology.
Poetry of this order--lyric as well as epic--is much more the
child of nature than of art. These great mythological poems for
hundreds of years were never written; but were committed to
memory, sung by the bards, and handed down from one generation to
another until in time they were merged, after the Christian era,
into the historical heroic poems. These in turn were the origin
of the chivalrous poetry which is peculiar to Christian Europe,
and has produced such remarkable effect on the national spirit of
the noblest inhabitants of the world. Nor has this oral poetry
entirely died out. In the present day Mr. Stephen Gwynne has
astonished the world by telling of how he heard aged peasants in
Kerry reciting the classics of Irish-Gaelic literature, legendary
poems and histories that had descended from father to son by oral
tradition; and the same phenomena was found by Mr. Alexander
Carmichael among the Gaelic peasants in the Scottish Highlands
and surrounding islands. It has been said that heroic poetry is
of the people, and that dramatic poetry is the production of city
and society; and cannot exist unless it has a great metropolis to
be the central point of its development, and it is only by the
study of the literature of all nations that we see how
essentially these heroic poems were the foundation of all that
followed them in later ages.
