Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/376

 this tendency, that in most literary histories attempts are made to distinguish the Mysteries, with their sacred personages, from the Moralities, with their allegorical characters, Virtue, Vice, Pity, and the rest. But we cannot distinguish these spectacles by any fixed line; we can only say that the popularisation of the drama which is marked by the use of the vernacular languages is accompanied by an increased love of abstractions and allegories; and the student of contemporary social life cannot fail to observe how this love of impersonal being reflects that tendency towards corporate or guild life which is the most striking characteristic of the growing towns. It must not be forgotten that nameless characters (such as L'Evesque, Le Prescheur, L'Ermite, in the Miracles de Notre Dame) are not individuals properly so called, but types of classes, and as such deriving their interest from a social life which (like that of the German towns even in the days of Hans Sachs) could be marked off into trades almost as distinct as Eastern castes. The prevalence of allegorical thought and ideas of men in classes or types can, indeed, be illustrated from all kinds of medieval literature as well as the drama; the satirical allegory of Piers Ploughman, or Rabelais, or Das Narrenschiff of Sebastian Brandt, with its hundred and ten classes of fools, might be readily traced to conditions of social life. So, too, in Chaucer's famous tales, Knight and Squire, Prioress and Monk and Friar, the Shipman, the Doctor of Physic, and the rest, in spite of individualising touches, are primarily types of social classes; while in the Haberdasher, Carpenter, Webbe, Dyer, Tapicer, all "clothed in one livery of a solemn and great fraternity," we have the guild directly introduced. Every reader of medieval literature knows the popularity and perpetual allegory of the Roman de la Rose, echoed in the Faux-Dangier,