poetry. And from this it appears, too, that when the heroic age sings,
it primarily sings of itself, even when that means singing of its own
humiliation.--One other exceptional kind of heroic age must just be
mentioned, in this professedly inadequate summary. It is the kind which
occurs quite locally and on a petty scale, with causes obscurer than
ever. The Border Ballads, for instance, and the Robin Hood Ballads,
clearly suppose a state of society which is nothing but a very
circumscribed and not very important heroic age. Here the households of
gentry take the place of courts, and the poetry in vogue there is
perhaps instantly taken up by the taverns; or perhaps this is a case in
which the heroes are so little removed from common folk that celebration
of individual prowess begins among the latter, not, as seems usually to
have happened, among the social equals of the heroes. But doubtless
there are infinite grades in the structure of the Heroic Age.

The note of the Heroic Age, then, is vehement private individuality
freely and greatly asserting itself. The assertion is not always what we
should call noble; but it is always forceful and unmistakable. There
would be, no doubt, some social and religious scheme to contain the
individual's self-assertion; but the latter, not the former, is the
thing that counts. It is not an age that lasts for very long as a rule;
and before there comes the state in which strong social organization and
strong private individuality are compatible--mutually helpful instead of
destroying one another, as they do, in opposite ways, in savagery and in
the Heroic Age--before the state called civilization can arrive, there
has commonly been a long passage of dark obscurity, which throws up into
exaggerated brightness the radiance of the Heroic Age. The balance of
private good and general welfare is at the bottom of civilized morals;
but the morals of the Heroic Age are founded on individuality, and on
nothing else. In Homer, for instance, it can be seen pretty clearly that