Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/151



§ 36. we mean by "personal" poetry such laments for the individual's growing age and regrets for his fleeting youth as appear to have been common in the songs of the Greek lyrical poets who represented an age of aristocratic individualism, if we mean the poetical expression of that individualising spirit which dwells with a kind of sad pleasure upon personal recollections of youth and the contrast of the ideal future of self with its real past, and which fondly dallies with reminiscences of times, and places, and persons, and things never again to be seen in the golden dream-light of vanished childhood-then we must admit that the poetry of the clan cannot be called "personal." The life-view of the clan, like that of the lyric Greek, is indeed confined to earth, but its strong feelings of unity with kindred leave no place for such personal regrets, and look forward to the prolonged existence of the group not as a mere substitute for individual immortality (for of that ambition the clan knows little), but as the only kind of life worthy of enthusiastic contemplation. Poets of clan life, or deeply imbued with the spirit of clan life, know not the Greek melancholy of individual decay nor the modern melancholy of individual hopes unsatisfied—the latter far more frequently the result of limitless personal ambitions than