Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/396

 indeed, as Wilhelm Grimm goes on to say, we have such slight descriptive touches as the morning star rising over the sea glistening in the early dawn; but, as in the Homeric pictures of the island of the Cyclops and the gardens of Alkinous, such descriptions of Nature are completely subordinated to human interests. Had we any truly primitive reliques of Celtic or Teutonic poetry, we might find in them Nature-myths, such as those of Hymir and Odin and the Jötuns, in which some Carlyle would descry for us vast reflections of man's primitive personality supposed to be colossal—"huge Brobdingnag genius needing only to be tamed down into Shaksperes, Dantes, Goethes," as if the diverse personalities of these three master-singers could not only be lumped together, but might be treated as the personality of a clansman "tamed down." But Christianity, while absorbing the folk-lore of its converts, humanised and, so to speak, denaturalised it. Combating the sentiments of clan life—Blood-revenge and the like—Christianity was also compelled to combat pagan worships of Nature and the songs in which they were voiced. Inheriting largely from the municipal life of Greece and Rome feelings of man's superiority to Nature, disdainful of material existence as corrupt and perishable, and now brought into direct conflict with the pagan worship of Nature, the new faith could not be expected to perpetuate such poetry of Nature. Moreover, each successive wave of barbaric conquest contributed to make these sentiments of Nature a kind of savage jungle in which the deities of the pagans figured in wild confusion as dragons and monsters more readily convertible into the devils of the faithful than the lovely forms of classical mythology. Finally, the degradation of those clansmen whose communal property these sentiments of Nature would have been, must have