Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/79

 We would, for example, be more interested in the fate of an individual soldier in combat than in the grand events of a general action; in the happiness of two lovers raised from misery and anxiety to peace and union than in the successful exertions of a whole nation. From what causes this may originate is a separate and obviously immaterial consideration. Before ascribing this peculiarity to causes decidedly and odiously selfish, it is proper to recollect that while men see only a limited space, and while their affections and conduct are regulated, not by aspiring at an universal good, but by exerting their power of making themselves and others happy within the limited scale allotted to each individual, so long will individual history and individual virtue be the readier and more accessible road to general interest and attention; and perhaps we may add that it is the more useful, as well as the more accessible, inasmuch as it affords an example capable of being easily imitated."

The limited range of living human sympathy is, no doubt, a key to many secrets of our modern literature; but it is not true that individual character has always been the centre of human interest, or that generalisation in all states of society "destroys effect." The individualism on which Sir Walter Scott bases his theory of poetry has been evolved from conditions under which men and women were more deeply interested in social action and communal sympathies than in any emotions or thoughts of personal being. If we compare the early dramas of Athens, England, France, we discover certain points of similarity which cannot be attributed to imitation; and the most striking of these resemblances is the absence or weakness of individual character. In the medieval mysteries and morality-plays, as is well known, the so-called "characters" introduced are either divine