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.