tradition was of a
community encompassed by dangers for men and for women, where life and
goods depended on strength and sagacity. And so the original hero was
strictly a practical soldier, a man who knew his business, who had
very few troublesome scruples; he was a man of war from his youth up,
struggling with arduous circumstance; and he usually came at last, as
in actual life, to a bloody though glorious end. For the experience of
a rough age is that the drama mostly finishes tragically, not happily
as in a modern novel. There was always a strain of Romance in the
heroic tale, and softer feelings were never quite absent: but all this
was subordinate to facts: whereas Romance seems to have prevailed and
grown popular in proportion as the writer stood further away from the
actualities, trusted to imagination rather than to authentic
experience, preferred literary ornament to probability, and indeed
took his readers as far away as possible from scenes or situations
which they could recognise or verify.

It may thus be suggested that the essential quality of Heroic poetry
is this--that it gives a true picture of the time. Not that the poet
was an eye-witness of what he narrated, or even that he lived in the
same generation with the men or the events that he celebrated. On the
contrary, the distance which lends enchantment to the view is needed
to surround heroes with a golden haze of glorification. But the bard
did live on the outer edge, so to speak, of the period which he wrote
about; he was more or less in the same atmosphere; his audience kept
him very near the truth because they could detect any exaggeration,
absurdity, or very unlikely incident; just as we should mark and
reject any particularly foolish story of the war that might appear in
to-morrow's newspaper. They would indeed swallow strange marvels of a
supernatural kind, the doings of gods and goddesses, and of magicians.
But I think it will be agreed that in all ages this has been a
separate matter, because men will believe what is plainly miraculous,
when they will not accept what is merely improbable. So far as the
natural world was concerned, the heroic artist worked upon genuine
material, transmitted orally or by fragmentary records, producing a
right image of remarkable men and the world in which they lived. It
was a world, in most cases, of small communities and petty wars, in
which a good chief or warrior came rapidly to the front, and was
all-impo