Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/90

 said, each individual suggests a group, each group a multitude, and the poet manifests a recurring tendency to become a catalogue-maker of persons and things. The impersonal laws of science have also contributed to aid the corporate spirit of our industrial life and modern democracy in producing a creative art of corresponding nature; witness the reign of law, physical and social, in the works of many contemporary makers of literature, whose feelings of personality sometimes seem to die within them at the vast vision of social and physical causes and effects—

But such conceptions are of comparatively recent origin. Corporate life had little place in the masterpieces of earlier European poetry—little in the song of Dante full of the note of Italian individualism, more perhaps in the character-types and allegories of Chaucer, but little in the drama of Shakspere in which the "people," seldom noticed, appear only as a fickle and irrational mob, now huzzaing for Cade and now for the King, now siding with Brutus and now with Antony. Nor need we feel any surprise at this predominance of the individual in modern European literature till the middle of the last century. "The people" at the time when Shakspere wrote was scarcely in existence in England, or France, or Germany; towns there were, indeed, with their local patriotism, their parochial politics, their hostility to the seigneurs and to each other; but "the people," in the sense familiar to our modern industrial communities, in which the steam-engine and the telegraph have done so much to destroy local distinctions, was then and for a long time afterwards, in Mr. Dowden's excellent phrase, like Milton's half-created animals, still pawing to get