Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/175

 the fact that communal groups of kinsmen, not free individuals, are the starting-points of social progress, so the poetic fancies of Victor Hugo disappear into dream-land at the touch of historical facts which prove the "colossal" individualism of his "primitive" ages to be a myth. Hugo, in fact, seems to waver between two theories alike unhistorical. Partially he seems to retain the Platonic fancy that personal character is not essentially different in different stages of social evolution, that the range of social life within which the individual acts and thinks does not profoundly affect his character, and that consequently "lyric" means the same bundle of facts and ideas for the clan, the city, the nation, the world-empire. Partially, on the other hand, he seems inclined to adopt the old religious and poetic theory of human degradation from a race of gods and heroes, as if individual character (and physique, no doubt) at first "colossal" had gradually sunk into the more moderate dimensions of a giant—the Titans reduced to Nimrods, let us suppose—and finally narrowed down into the average stature and age of men as we find them. But the main source of Victor Hugo's brilliant errors is the same as that of Rousseau's fallacies—the assumption of individual freedom, objective and subjective, under social conditions which by their communal narrowness of thought and sympathy and action, their communal restraints on personal independence by innumerable chains of custom, prevented any but the weakest and most material sense of personality. Hugo's theory of "lyric," "epic," "dramatic" progression is, from one standpoint, not unlike Carlyle's Hero-worship; and neither Hugo nor Carlyle seems to have discovered the profound differences which separate the merely objective and animal personality of primitive groups from the subjective