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