Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/176

 depths of highly developed individualism. As for Hugo's fancy that the critical terms "epic," "dramatic," "lyric," may be viewed apart from the conditions under which they arose as marks of literary distinctions universally discoverable, it would be easy to show that the meanings of these words changed in the social history of Greece itself, the country of their origin, and that, far from being marks of universal ideas common to every literature, their meanings have continually altered in the mouths of the European peoples and critics who have used them. But it rather concerns our present purpose to observe the unhistorical criticism which overlooks the profoundly significant facts that neither the individualism of the "lyric" author nor that of the human character he celebrates, in truth few of the personal feelings of the modern "lyric," are possible in the really primitive conditions of social life which Victor Hugo and many in his company are accustomed to label "lyrical." The "lyric" of modern life sees all things, expresses all things, in the thoughts and feelings of a personal being connected, indeed, with far wider circles of kinship than it entered into the heart of primitive man to conceive, but only connected by vague ties of infinite and incomprehensible destiny. The so-called "lyric" of early life sees all things, expresses all things in the thoughts and feelings of little groups narrowly exclusive in their ties of common obligation, but feeling the reality of such ties with a force which now can scarcely be conceived. How, then, it may be asked, have such misrepresentations of the spirit of early literature become so common in our European criticism?

We have previously alluded to certain causes of such misrepresentation. In our modern European life individual character has so long occupied the foreground,