Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/45

 differences make their appearance not merely between human beings and physical nature, between human beings and other animals, but between different groups of men and women and different individuals composing these groups, it is a matter of little importance whether with Kingsley we use the concrete phrase "men and women," or prefer to sum up varieties of group or individual in the highly abstract term "man," provided we never forget that our abstract groups as well as our individual "men and women" depend for their character on space and time, on conditions of social organisation, on physical influences, geographical, climatic, and the like.

To select one out of many examples of the dependence of human character on social development, look at the different manner in which different literatures, or different periods of the same literature, have treated the characters of women. The status of women in different conditions of social life has left its marks in literary pictures of their character amazingly different. Simonides of Amorgos, in a very famous poem, contrasted different types of female character by comparing them with a hog and a fox, a dog and an ass, a weasel, an ape, and a bee; but if we were to search through the various likenesses of female character in literatures of the East and West, we might not only increase at will this uncomplimentary catalogue, but discover how profoundly female liberty or tutelage, public freedom or private seclusion, have affected the general and particular characters of women in different ages and countries. The women of Indian, Chinese, and Japanese dramas are, as we would anticipate, different enough from those of Attic tragedy and comedy, or from those of our modern European theatres. But such differences are by no means confined to countries so far removed from each other in social and physical