Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/240

 § 58. Thus the social development of Athens is reflected with peculiar accuracy in her dramatic—a development from the life of the group to that of the individual, from the ethics of the clan to personal responsibility, from a spectacle in which groups of men and women, or impersonal abstractions, or heroic types predominate to a drama of character in which persons borrowed from contemporary life humanise the stage. In Rome the development of individualism was a slower and more confused process; yet even here, in spite of Greek imitation and patrician culture, we may find in the progress of the drama some marks of social evolution. For in Rome, as in Athens, the rude forms of the early drama foreshadowed a popular literature; and, had her political and social factions amalgamated before her acquaintance with Greek civilisation, a truly Roman drama might have been produced. Plainly the old ritual of Rome, as in the hymn of the Fratres Arvales previously translated, contained, like some of the Vedic hymns, the germs of a dramatic spectacle. Responsive songs, too, like the Fescennine and the triumphal, would aid this dramatic tendency; and the absence of epic or lyric (personal) poetry would allow greater room for a drama of some kind. Professor Teuffel, indeed, tells us that "the Romans possessed a tendency to preserve and cherish the recollection of past events, and, as they perceived that metre facilitated both recollection and