Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/83

 lead both the makers and the critics of literature. It is easy to forget that the very existence of a literature implies a considerable degree of social and linguistic unity, and that such unity involves the break-up, more or less, of those miniature communities, clans, and tribes in whose corporate and unindividualised ideas we find the roots of early religion, law, and literature. Thanks to such scholars as Von Maurer and Nasse, Emile de Laveleye and Sir Henry Maine, we now know more of these little circles of kinship than we ever did before. We know that, with more or less modification, they are to be found in every part of the East and West, and that wherever they have perished survivals of their existence have been left in human action or thought. But we too often forget that in literature, in the productions which states of social communion on a much larger scale than that of clan or tribe have thought worthy of transmission, we must view any survivals from these early communities through the medium of much later associations. Hence it is easy to be deceived by the prominence of individual life in the Iliad, or Beowulf, or the Nibelungenlied. Yet this prominence is readily enough explained. The clan communities, whose impersonal conceptions of ownership, contract, crime, have only been recovered because at the birth of central government they forced themselves on the recognition of a weak authority, were in the process of their decomposition into larger groups (such as tribal federations) subordinated to military and religious chiefs; and it was only when this process had reached a considerably advanced stage that writing began to be employed, and, in the interests of the widening social groups, legends of clans once isolated were combined and centred round this or that eponymous ancestor, this or that individual hero. Literature, therefore, apparently