Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/356

 recovers, as if at one stroke, both his status and his language, and soliloquises in Sanskrit. But the social system of China permits no such attempts to fix the characteristics of dramatis personæ after hereditary models, or to vary their language in accordance with caste. Chinese critics have indeed classified the subjects and characters of their dramas, but the classification does not represent social distinctions. The diction of Chinese plays contains wide differences—the kou-wen or antique style, siao-choué or familiar style, in which dialogue is commonly written, the hiang-tan or patois of the provinces, used in modern pieces and especially in low comedy; but such variations of diction take their origin from the nature of the subject, and are no more connected with a system of caste than the erroneous English of good Mistress Quickly of Eastcheap.

But it is time to close not only our brief comparison of the Chinese and Indian dramas, but the very imperfect review of Chinese and Indian literatures which space has permitted. Constantly reminded of the littleness of individual life by the vast masses of men and women among whom they lived, the makers of Indian and Chinese literatures turned to the life of Nature and to questions of human origin and destiny before which individualism can never maintain itself. To detail the manner in which the castes and village communities of India, the family system and sentiments of China, aided by physical conditions, prevented the growth of that individualised life which has become in Europe the main source of literary as well as scientific ideas, would be a task far beyond the limits of a work like the present. We have merely selected a few specimens from an immense field of inquiry, and rather stated than solved some of the problems they suggest. With one other