Heroic Age

“ 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. ”

“ The Heroic age has left no more comely monument, than its informal, but instinctive, and most emphatic sense, thus recorded for our benefit, of the sanctity of marriage, of the closeness of the union it creates, and of the necessity of perpetuity as an element of its capacity to attain its chief ends, and to administer a real discipline to the human character. ”

“ Looking at the amount of great little heroisms, which are being, as I assert, enacted around us every day, no one has a right to say, what we are all tempted to say at times: “How can I be heroic? This is no heroic age, setting me heroic examples. ”

“ In settled, social conditions, as has been well remarked, “most of the heroes would sooner or later have found themselves in prison.”
A heroic age, happily for society, cannot last long; it has about it while it does last a sheen of passing and pathetic splendour, such as that which lights up the figure of Achilles, but it is bound to fade and pass. A heroic society is almost a contradiction in terms. ”

“ It may be possible to point to communities in which the Heroic Age has persisted for many centuries, just as numerous peoples in different parts of the world have remained in a state of 'infancy' or savagery down to the present time. ”

“ and I felt that this was the heroic age itself, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men. ”

“ These latter heroes were gradually evolved, in the course of political and religious development, out of the ancient epic heroes; in them, the heroic age continues its existence after the heroes of the powerful and crafty types have disappeared. In this broader significance of the word, a hero is any powerful individuality whatsoever, and the general characteristic of this new age, therefore, is the predominance of the individual personality. Externally, this expresses itself primarily in the fact that the age regards even all past events as the deeds of individual persons. ”

“ The relation of epic poetry to its heroic age is not to be found in the observance of any strict historical duty. It lies rather in the epic capacity for bringing together all manner of lively passages from the general experience of the age, in a story about famous heroic characters. The plot of the story gives unity and harmony to the composition, while the variety of its matter is permitted and justified by the dramatic variety of the characters and their interests. ”

“ The history of the heroic age is the history of the most celebrated persons belonging to this class, who, in the language of poetry, are called 'heroes.' The term 'hero' is of doubtful origin, though it was clearly a title of honour; but, in the poems of Homer, it is applied not only to the chiefs, but also to their followers, the freemen of lower rank, without, however, being contrasted with any other, so as to determine its precise meaning. ”

“ These young men were so brave that they well deserved the name of heroes, which has always been given them; and they met with many adventures about which the people loved to hear. Long after they had gone, the inhabitants, remembering their relief when the robbers were killed, taught their children to honor these brave young men almost as much as the gods, and they called the time when they lived the Heroic Age. ”

“ We have seen above that the characteristics of Heroic Ages in general are those neither of infancy nor of maturity—that the typical man of the Heroic Age is to be compared rather with a youth. The characteristics which we are now discussing are by no means inconsistent with such a view, though clearly they will not hold good for adolescence in general. ”

“ They rely, like the Teutonic epic and the Sagas, on situations that test the force of character, and they find those situations in the common conditions of an heroic age, subject of course to the modifications of the comparatively late period and late form of society to which they belong. ”

“ We have seen that to make up a heroic age there must be two factors, the new and the 164old; the young, vigorous, warlike people must seize on, appropriate, in part assimilate, an old and wealthy civilization. ”

“ However remote the age may be which these products of art represent, the general spirit which animated it has not vanished. The greatest turning-point in the spiritual history of man consists in the stupendous achievement which inaugurates the heroic age. I refer to the creation of the ideal man, the hero, and of the god in whom heroic characteristics are magnified into the superhuman and demoniacal. Here lies the beginning of a real history of art ”

“ Those whom we have hitherto noticed were the men of an heroic age. They are departed, and now so utterly departed, as not even to touch upon the passing generation through the medium of persons still in life, who can claim to have known them familiarly. ”

“ But that in the end they were a benefit to the world no one who reads can doubt; and that in their course they brought out a love for all that is heroic in human nature, the love of freedom, the honour of prowess, sympathy with sorrow, perseverance to the last, and patient endurance without hope, the chronicles of the age abundantly prove ”

“ The qualities exhibited by these societies, virtues and defects alike, are clearly those of adolescence. Further, we may note in this connection that the evidence of history gives us no ground for supposing that the 'heroic' spirit is an innate and permanent characteristic of certain peoples. ”

“ The problem as a whole is surely one which requires considerably more investigation than it has yet received. But I should be much surprised if such investigations, carried out in an impartial spirit, did not bring to light many traces of stories relating to the Heroic Age, which were independent of anything that we may fairly call 'Homeric' poetry. ”

“ It may be that to some people the heroes I have chosen do not seem heroic, but there is no doubt that to the age and generation which wrote or sang of them they appeared real heroes, worthy of remembrance and celebration, and it has been my object to come as close as possible to the mediæval mind, with its elementary conceptions of honour, loyalty, devotion, and duty. ”

“ It is a common opinion, at least in this country, that the general effect has been rather to obscure than to solve the real problems presented by the poems. If we put aside the opinions of more conservative scholars we may indeed find a common element—namely the belief that the attitude of the ancients themselves to stories of the Heroic Age was mistaken. ”

“ The legends which attribute their first foundation to the times of demigods and heroes, are so far consonant with truth, that exhibitions of physical strength made the favourite diversion of that wild and barbarous age which is consecrated to the heroic. ”

“ The Heroic Age of the Faith, born in anguish, nursed in adversity, and terminating in trials as woeful as those that greeted its birth, has been succeeded by that Formative Period which is to witness the gradual crystallization of those creative energies which the Faith has released, and the consequent emergence of that World Order for which those forces were made to operate. ”

“ Between this and the following age, the better heroic race of poetical and even historic tradition is somewhat strangely introduced; and the whole series of generations is closed by the Iron age, the present and last period of the world—the term of man's progressive degeneracy. ”

“ Nay, if there’s room for poets in the world A little overgrown, (I think there is) Their sole work is to represent the age, Their age, not Charlemagne’s,—this live, throbbing age, That brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires, And spends more passion, more heroic heat, Betwixt the mirrors of its drawing-rooms, Than Roland with his knights, at Roncesvalles. ”

“ All progress in literary style lies in the heroic resolve to cast aside accretions and exuberances, all the conventions of a past age that were once beautiful because alive and are now false because dead. ”

“ Unless all analogies are misleading the conclusion to which we are driven is that the original story began more or less where the Nibelungenlied begins, and that the hero's youthful adventures are later accretions, such as we see gathering round the childhood or ancestry of other heroes, e.g. ”

“ The past is only so heroic as we see it. It is the canvas on which our idea of heroism is painted, and so, in one sense, the dim prospectus of our future field. Our circumstances answer to our expectations and the demand of our natures. ”

“ Tales of Sexual exploits have become novels, novelettes, short stories, sketches,—a many-expressioned countenance of Man. But the old Heroic Legend,—and the Hero is always the next born after the Monster in the far-back dawn-days, is the lineal progenitor of History,—History which was first the glorification of a warrior and his aids ”

“ The dreary progress of our story, over fields of blood and battle, might naturally dispose the imagination to lay the scene of action in some rude and savage age; an age, at best, of feudal heroism, when the energies of the soul could be roused only by the fierce din of war. ”

“ They contain the heroic tales of the exploits of the great men in whom the new era was inaugurated; not mythic like the Iliads and the Eddas, but plain, broad narratives of substantial facts, which rival legend in interest and grandeur. What the old epics were to the royally or nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people. We have no longer kings or princes for chief actors to whom the heroism, like the dominion of the world, had in time past been confined. ”

“ Whatever name they may have borne, it was Heroes, who had left their Age far behind them, giants among surrounding men in material and spiritual power. They subdued to their Idea of what ought to be, races by whom they were on that account hated and feared; through sleepless nights of thought they pondered their anxious plans for their fellow-men; from battlefield to battlefield they rushed without weariness or rest, renouncing the enjoyments which lay within their grasp, making their life a spoil, often shedding their blood. ”

“ The range of hero-tales is wide. Among them are the mythological and folk-lore tales previously suggested; the legendary hero-tales which are partly fact and partly fancy, such as the Knights of the Round Table, Robin Hood, and most of the medieval stories; and Bible stories, among which there are a host of heroic characters, whose moral heroism should be made the dominant note.
There are also the heroes who have traveled, explored, and dared in the interests of science, and those who have endured hardship and privation in order to carry civilization to the dark corners of the globe. ”

“ The Age of Miracles is forever here—! ”

“ Few shapes of Heroism can be more unexpected.
Alas, the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world! ”

“ In this one I desire to give if possible the impression, for it can be no more than an impression, of a life which in its conflicts and its victories manifested throughout heroic qualities. Such qualities can be shown in many ways, and the field of battle is only one of the fields of human endeavor where heroism can be displayed. ”

“ But I think among what we call "heroic" lives—lives the story of which touches us with something higher than pity, and deeper than love—there never was any of his race who left behind a history more truly heroic than he. ”

“ My dear wife, since I have been an observer in this country, I have been more and more convinced that the hero age has not yet gone. This country, so highly favored by nature, a land emphatically of sun and flowers, so abject in the slavishness and brutality of its people, needs a hero spirit for its regeneration. ”

“ They have got themselves clear of the confusion and extravagance of early civilisation, and have hit upon a way of telling a story clearly and in proportion, and with dignity. They are epic in virtue of their superiority to the more fantastic motives of interest, and in virtue of their study of human character. They are heroic in the nobility of their temper and their style. If at any time they indulge in heroic commonplaces of [Pg 15] sentiment, they do so without insincerity or affectation, as the expression of the general temper or opinion of their own time. ”

“ Fact and theory, the natural and the supernatural, the legendary and the philosophical, shade off so imperceptibly one into the other, in the stories of the Olympians, or of their first offspring, that we can never assure ourselves that we are on historic ground, or that, antecedent to the really historic age, there is any such ground to be found anywhere. The old notion, that the heroes were deified men, is no longer tenable. ”

“ THE HERO AS EVENT AND PROBLEM
There is a perennial interest in heroes even when we outgrow the hero worship of youth. The sources of this interest are many and deep. But they vary in intensity and character from one historic period to another. In our own time interest in the words and acts of outstanding individuals has flared up to a point never reached before. The special reasons for this passionate concern in the ideas and deeds of the uncrowned heroes of our age are quite apparent. ”

“ All senses of the term “hero,” as used by the adherents of heroic interpretations of history, presuppose that whatever the hero is, he is marked off in a qualitatively unique way from other men in the sphere of his activity and, further, that the record of accomplishment in any field is the history of the deeds and thoughts of heroes. ”

“ To re-create the shadowy figures of the heroic past, to clothe the dead once more in flesh and blood, to set the puppets of the play in life's great dramas again upon the stage of action,—frankly, this may not be formal history, but it is what makes the past most real to the present day. Pictures of men and women, of moving throngs and heroic episodes, stick faster in the mind than lists of governors and arguments on treaties. ”