Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/82

 into a mere spectator. Heroic personages are, indeed, retained, but only as the external clothing, the stage "properties," under which varieties of individual character may be put forward. Allegorical parsonages, like Dêmos and Eirênê, “The People," and "The Peace," walk the stage side by side with living celebrities, just as in the "Miracle du Saint Guillaume du Desert." Saint Bernard, the famous Abbé de Clairvaux, figures beside Beelzebub and the rest. And, at length, the open introduction of everyday life banishes or altogether subordinates the mythical heroes and allegorical characters of old Athenian tragedy and comedy. It will not, of course, be supposed that individual character in the Athens of Æschylus was as weakly developed as in the French Communes of the twelfth century or the early German town-guilds, much less that the social life of Athens at the time of Euripides did not differ in many respects from that of England and Spain, of Italy, France, and Germany, at the appearance of the legitimate drama in modern Europe. But they who will remember how inherited sin supplied the pivot conception of theatrical ethics in Athens, and how a grossly sensual view of vicarious punishment supplied the ethical doctrine of the mystery-plays, will admit that weak ideas of individual responsibility and character imparted as much interest to early Athenian tragedy as to the medieval spectacles. Wherein do we find the causes of such similarity ? The answer to this question discloses that principle of literary growth to which in preceding pages we have incidentally referred.

§ 18. The development of individual character is at the outset confused by certain facts which tend to