Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/362

 personal descent were but filthy rags in the light of the eternal sun. Thus, if feudal exclusiveness narrowed ideas of descent in a manner likely to chill popular sympathies as soon as "the people" should arise out of isolated bourgs and the serfs, the universal ideas of Christianity also tended to weaken national kinship by counting every individual, irrespective of land or race, as a spiritual unit and nothing more. Finally, the growth of the towns, upon which the growth of national sentiments, as distinct from the localism of feudal life and the universalism of Christianity, was so largely to depend, laid the foundations of a comparative and historical inquiry not to be far pursued without discovering the hybrid character of European nations.

But, though community of blood is disproved by the history of each European nation, vague feelings of common kinship, no doubt supplemented by love of native land, still form the groundwork of national sentiments for the masses. In cultured minds the place of such feelings has been taken by respect for common language and the long line of literary and scientific achievements embodied in that language, and by sympathies with the historical doings and sufferings of those men and women who from age to age have borne the nation's name. To unity of country and government—a material rather than an ideal unity—we must add, as an element of nationality, respect for the monuments of national literature. National literature is an outcome of national life, a spiritual bond of national unity, such as no amount of eclectic study or cosmopolitan science can supply. So thought Goethe, when he said that the Germans of his youth, though acquainted with all the kinds of poetry in which different nations had distinguished themselves, lacked "national material"—"had