Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/88

 among the barbarians of the fifth and sixth centuries marked differences between the independence of the chiefs and that of the common clansmen. But the difference does not assume Homeric proportions until the barbarian conquerors have settled down, and the comitatus or gefolge of the chief changes into the retainers of a feudal lord, while the body of clansmen sink into villagers over whose common lands the seigneur alternately extends his protection and his domain. Then a striking contrast to the social life of Athens and Rome begins to disclose itself. Instead of the life and the ideas of the city, we find men passing their days in isolated groups under the shadow of the seigneur's castle, serfs dependent on a master whom there is no public opinion and little public force to keep in check, serfs who hardly know of any world beyond their village and their lord's retainers, and who bear in ruined harvests or devastated homes the marks of that knightly independence to which Europe for a season offered a romantic field for individual caprice or chivalry. In such ages literature had no resting-place save in the lord's hall or in the monk's cell; and it is not surprising that some centuries of this feudal individualism did much to destroy recollections of the clan and its social character. In such ages the very notion of "the people"—that abstraction which the social conditions of our modern life have made so significant—did not exist; for the isolated groups of villagers had, until the rise of towns, no bond of social communion save through their lords. Hence, in feudal, as in Homeric, literature, personal character, aggressive and isolating, overshadows all corporate bonds of social unity. To create such bonds was the work of new groups whose rise in Spain, Italy, Germany, France, England, makes the most memorable chapters of modern social history. With the rise of the modern towns—so