Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/180

 heroism of the chief, and drawing no clear distinction between his exploits and those of the kinsmen in general. Old songs of eponymous clan-ancestors would meet such beginnings of epic poetry half-way, and the glory of the clan's ideal parentage would be easily transferred to the personal ancestry of the chief. It has even been proposed to find the roots of epic poetry in hymns of ancestor-worship similar to those of the Shih King. It has been suggested that the oldest epic poems were little else than hymns extolling the deeds of the dead at the celebration of ancestral sacrifices; and wherever ancestral worship has possessed such influence as in China, we may be sure that there was little scope for an epic of any description save through sentiments of such worship. But without laying undue stress on the fact that the Chinese, so far as their literature is at present known to European scholars, possess nothing which can be said to resemble an epic poem, and even admitting that ancestral worship of great families may have contributed something to epic poetry, we must remember that heroic poetry derives its main inspiration from individualised life. Wherever physical and social conditions have allowed the clan or family to maintain their strength, we need not expect such poetry. Hence its absence in early Rome as in China; and if it be replied that India, with its caste-system and village communes, offers us specimens of the epic, we may reply that the Rámáyana and Mahábhárata are rather stories of the gods than celebrations of human heroism, and that their very tissue is the handiwork of a priestly caste.

But space we have not to enter the lists of epic criticism in which so many belted knights of the pen have fought and fallen. We prefer to leave our Homeric battle of the books in the hands of specialists, merely