Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/179

 or the languages of these countries as indices to average discrimination of sounds, he would also have discovered that the type of humanity he had in view was only one among many diverse types, and that his statical view of human sensations and their effects on the arts would require to be supplemented by dynamical views of human development, and the effects of different social systems on music, sculpture, architecture, painting, literature.

If one of the very founders of historical science experienced such difficulty in rising above the associations of personality to which he had been himself accustomed, we need not be surprised that few have yet grasped the historical fact that types of personality have come into being and disappeared with different stages of social evolution. But neither should we allow the imperfect philosophy of a Montesquieu or the poetic fancies of a Victor Hugo to stand between us and the light.

§ 42. Had space permitted, we might here pause to trace the rise of those social conditions which permitted an epic poetry of personal prowess and kingly descent. We might show that such conditions are to be found in the decadence of communal life before the growth of personal property and personal rank. It is when the head men of the clan have assumed the privileges of hereditary chiefs, and come to stand alone in the golden sunset of a divine ancestry once common to the entire group, when the mass of clansmen have sunk into simple freemen or even serfs, and the chief's men stand apart from the common folk as their lord's comitatus, that both the choral and the personal poetry of the clan give way to the songs of the chief's hall. Perhaps one of the earliest shapes of heroic poetry was the genealogical poem, familiar to students of Celtic literature, blending the communal personality of the clan with the individual