Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/375

 authorship, just as the gradual disappearance of sacred and allegorical characters before the growth of individualism in the towns is a still more interesting evidence of the dependence of literature on social evolution. Let us take a bird's-eye view of this dramatic evolution from communal to individual life.

I. The sacred spectacle, exhibited by the clergy in town or monastery, either written completely in Latin, or intermixed with French or German, as the case may be, presents divine personages who, like the heroes of the early Attic stage, present at once an abstract and historical character. The first great Miracle-play of German origin (The Rise and Fall of Antichrist, an Easter play of the tenth century, found in the Convent of Tegernsee in the Bavarian Highlands) is in Latin, and contains such personages as Paganism and the Jewish Synagogue (introduced as women), Mercy, Justice, Hypocrisy, Heresy. In the old French Miracle-play, The Wise and Foolish Virgins, "Christ speaks, or rather sings, in the words of the Latin Bible; but he then repeats what he has said in Provençal verse, which is also used by the Virgins." In fact, the Latin Mysteries were easily elaborated out of the Officia of the Church; and old remains of Officia used for this dramatic purpose have been discovered at Freising in Bavaria, at Orleans, Limoges, and Rouen. "From the time of Gregory the Great the Mass itself became an almost dramatic celebration of the world-tragedy of Golgotha. It embraced the whole scale of religious emotion, from the mournful cry of the Miserere to the jubilee of the Gloria in excelsis."

II. Though the personages of the Latin Mysteries were already rather allegorical and abstract than individual and concrete, the use of vernacular languages and the consequent influx of prevalent ideas so much increased