Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/177

 so strongly have individualised passion and sentiment become associated with literary art and criticism either distinctively our own or inherited from Athens and Rome, that only very recently and under the influence of a new uprising of corporate life have we cared to remember that personality in primitive is very different from personality in civilized communities. Moreover, we have been long content to regard the beginnings of literature as socially ascending little farther than the feudal castle, and for the most part dependent upon the rise of monarchical courts or of polished city commonwealths such as those of Greece and Italy. To penetrate beyond such forms of social life, to reach conceptions of personality quite different from those which the lord's castle, the city, or the court have produced, to even explain survivals from the earlier types of social and individual life in these later organisations, has been up to the present the tentative work of a few scholars who have scarcely affected popular views of literature at all. Moreover, it is exceedingly difficult even for scholars possessing a thoroughly historical turn of mind to grasp facts so subtle in their nature as the historical changes of human personality. One illustration will suffice to show the difficulty with which even profoundly historical minds have reached the conception of types of personality dependent on the changing forms of social organisation.

Montesquieu, in his Essay on Taste, left unfinished at his death, saw clearly enough the importance of the senses as sources of our ideas of the beautiful neglected by Platonic idealists. Deriding such idealism as converting internal perceptions into real and positive qualities, he observed how different our emotions and feelings would have been had we possessed one organ of sense