Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/181

 observing that up to the present the wordy war has savoured rather too much of the modern study and blotting-pad, and rather too little of early social life in Greece. If our laborious German scholars would only devote a little spare time to the comparison of the social conditions under which the poetry of heroism has flourished in different countries and ages, we might know more about the beginnings of the epic than we are likely to learn from any number of textual emendations and verbal skirmishings.

It would have been part of our treatment of the epic to have traced or attempted to trace the changes through which the makers of literature passed in the social transition from communal to personal life; for the rise of personal authorship is one of the main literary effects of the decadence of clan life. So long as dance and music and mimicry form as integral parts of the literary performance as the words said or sung, property in song is almost inconceivable; and, long after priestly castes had commenced to create a kind of religious literature of hymns and legal ordinances belonging to the sacerdotal oligarchy, the conception of personal property in literature seems to have remained practically unknown. To examples of communal authorship and apparent survivals from it we have previously referred; and, if space permitted, we might have treated the universal prevalence of verse in early literature as closely connected with this communal song-making, or might have watched the gradual rise of prose as accompanying the development of personal freedom, and aided by that invention before which assonance and rime and metre ceased to perform the practical function of supporting the memory, and became ornaments of art—writing. But neither the