Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/86

 (ch. xviii.). If the latter proves that in Ezekiel's age the communal sympathies of the old Hebrew clans (mishpâchôth) had dwindled into an individuality with which inherited guilt came into direct collision, the former should prepare us for survivals from the impersonal view of human character in any state of social life, however civilised, however favourable to individual independence.

§ 19. Impersonal ideas of human character, mainly resulting from certain forms of social organisation, are thus the source of the similarity we have observed between the early dramas of Athens and modern Europe. If such ideas are in Athens survivals from the corporate life of the clan, a life gradually expanded into the entire dêmos of the city commonwealth and at the same time narrowed into an evolution of individual culture, they are in medieval Europe due to a resurrection of corporate life in the towns whose rise everywhere marked the decadence of feudal individualism. If clan communities have been in literature more or less concealed from view by the fact that only during their absorption into larger groups and their decomposition into individualised life has literature to any considerable extent made its appearance, if they were fused into cities and nations, the town communities of the Middle Ages likewise lost their corporate sentiments by becoming the local organs of monarchical centres, and neither the literature of feudal castles nor that of kingly courts could sympathise with their corporate life. But we must here remember another cause of the darkness which hangs between us and really archaic conceptions of human character. In any comparison of the classical and modern literatures of Europe in their early developments we must be ready to allow for the influence of a world-religion (as well as a world-language)