different at once from the early clan communities and from the municipal systems of Greece and Rome—began a twofold process; the subordination of individual to collective interests accompanied by a development of individual liberty within limits prescribed by law. It is in the earlier growth of this town life, when feudal enemies kept the commune and its corporate interests uppermost in the burghers' minds, that we find the social source of likeness between the early dramas of Athens and modern Europe. How much of this resemblance was due to survivals from the clan age in Athens and medieval Europe we need not now inquire. It is enough to observe how great must be our difficulties in tracing the evolution of personal out of impersonal character when Homeric bards, feudal trouvères and troubadours, or monks deeply imbued with the universal humanity of a world-religion and the personal ideas of Christianity, were in the course of social progress our early makers, and witnesses to the making, of literature.
But there is another cause of our difficulties in realising the evolution of individual character. Living in communities highly individualised, which have derived so much of their art from Athens and Rome—communities themselves highly individualised—adult ideas of personality have long formed for us the centre of all our creative art, of all our criticism. The corporate life of men in groups has only found admittance in our modern literatures since industrial development began to create a new social and impersonal spirit. Marks of this corporate life on creative art we may, for example, discover in Faust, with its allegorical personages recalling the medieval mystery, in the Légende des Siecles, with its vision of the social changes through which humanity has passed, or in the poems of Walt Whitman, in which, as it has been well
