Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/372

 are wanting, sacred story alone can supply the personages or incidents of a dramatic spectacle.

Let us change the scene to a medieval town. Insurrection, or aid from the king, or commerce, has been here at work; that servile circle of the feudal camp which had been hewers of wood and drawers of water now lives within stone walls, and can stand a siege or make a sally as well as the best of armoured knights. The burghers have little feeling of fellowship with other towns; their group is rather an offensive and defensive alliance against all comers than any forecast of national burghership and the modern rule of the European bourgeois. But though their social sympathies are narrow, they are also intensely real; moreover, an infantine subdivision of labour and trade is going on; the magistracy and the clergy are being organised; new types of character, far different from knight and squire and man-at-arms, are being developed. If modern prose is being roughly hammered into shape in the townsmen's assemblies and their preachers' pulpits, the elements of a drama are also at hand. How does the communal life of the medieval bourg display itself in the townsmen's drama?

The relation of Mysteries, Miracle-plays, Moralities, to the growth of towns all over Europe is a subject which has not received the attention it deserves; and the consequences have been that neither has the peculiar nature of this early drama been understood as reflecting contemporary social life, nor has the growth of the drama of personal character out of these old spectacles been explained as accompanying the evolution of society. We must at the outset get rid of a fallacy which blinds the eyes of many students to the influences of the towns upon the early drama of modern Europe—the fallacy of finding in the Biblical incidents and personages of the Mysteries