The same direction of study leads to a similar conclusion for the later epics of this class. The more we know of the middle ages, the less warrant we find for calling these epics primitive. True, they are less finished than the _Iliad_; true, they show clearer traces of old war-songs; but neither their art nor the society for which it was shaped can accurately be called primitive. Alike the literary conventions of the poems themselves and the social conventions of their times rule such a characterization out. The “Gothic night” fancied by supercilious eighteenth-century critics, the “dark ages” of imperfect historians, are found to have had considerable illumination. Nevertheless the twofold classification of epic, in spite of the inaccuracy of its terms, has some significance. Earlier epic, what we might call primary epic, is in fact more directly answerable to a homogeneous community. Its unknown poets evidently felt themselves to be spokesmen of communal emotions and achievements; and the world that they saw they expressed with less intervention. As if they were transmitters rather than creators, they expressed not themselves so much as their people. This people, too, was in that stage of civilization in which foray and warfare by small groups brought out individual heroes and kept life precarious and simple. Booty and food, a fine sword and a fine web, still had immediate appeal; and the physical sensations of battle-strain and sweat, of ceaseless surf and darkening deep, were still common experience. Thus primary epic, communal and objective, has the directness of immediacy. Arising from those simpler emotions which we all feel together, primitive perhaps in that sense, and expressing them in terms of familiar physical sensations, it has its own inimitable flavor.