CHAPTER I.
THE CLAN GROUP.
§ 25. Chateaubriand, in a remarkable chapter of Le Génie du Christianisme, maintains that "unbelief is the principal cause of the decadence of taste and genius. When people believed nothing at Athens and Rome, talents disappeared with the gods, and the Muses gave up to barbarism those who had ceased to have faith in them." If we put the word "sympathy" where Chateaubriand would have used "belief," and maintain that the decay of sympathy between man and man is one cause of the decay of literature, just as its deepening and expansion immensely contribute to literary progress, we shall exchange a vague theory of dogma for a fact which the social history of the world abundantly illustrates. The prospect of being heard with sympathy or indifference must profoundly affect the makers of verse or prose, the literary artist and even the scientific inquirer; and it would be an interesting question to ask whether the supposed decay of imagination in civilised progress (a favourite theory with Macaulay) does not mark that temporary break-up of sympathy which constantly accompanies the transition from one social stage to another. Whatever pleasure the scientist may derive from his solitary study—and even this generally finds its source in some prospective audience for his achievements—there can be no doubt that literature, whether its form be verse or prose, whether its spirit be intensely individual or social, cannot live apart from some kind of sympathetic group. Hence the gradual extension of social sympathy is a leading feature of literary development. Sensations and emotions, moral and intellectual ideas, widen in their range as smaller groups merge into larger; and this progressive merger underlies the development of institutions and language, and is largely a maker of myth, the interlacing of group traditions (easily illustrated by early Arab history) creating eponymous myths of every variety.
But it is not to be supposed that the social groups, or their progressive merger into widening circles, admit of exact definition. We cannot select any exact point and say, "Here the clan breaks up and the city succeeds." We cannot deny the existence of clan associations in days when the leading features of clan life have been obliterated—nay, it is often only because such survivals have taken place, owing to the progress of different parts of society at different rates, that we can recover the past at all. We can draw no hard-and-fast lines limiting the idea of "clan" absolutely, or denying its concrete existence save where our ideal definition is exactly realised. And the reason of this apparent vagueness is the best of all possible reasons—viz., the absence of any such definite lines in social phenomena not abstractly sketched on paper, but as living and moving realities. The jurist does not attempt to minutely define the Roman familia, or give the exact dates at which the marked features of that social unit faded away. The economist, with all his masses of statistical information, cannot distinguish his capitalist and labouring groups save by broad distinctions which in concrete life insensibly fade into each other; nor would he fix the decade in which English landlords, or capitalists, or labourers became sufficiently free from medieval restraints to allow his ideal groups some semblance of truth. In fine, no competent judge will deny that these and all social scientists must ideally construct definitions which concrete facts only temporarily and indistinctly contain—unless, indeed, we are content to look in despair on that vast moving mass which we call "social life" and give up the attempt to understand and explain it altogether. The search after minute distinctions in social classification and minute time-marks in social evolution is in fact an eidolon tribûs. An image of the individual's life is insensibly transferred to the action of men in groups, and the distinctness of an individual's personality and career is required from social classifications the very essence of which is their immunity from that defined birth and death which give to individual life its clear-cut limits. The concrete existence of the individual in space is, likewise, sought in group life, and we perpetually forget that, even in the simplest cases, a group is essentially an abstraction drawing up an immense detail of individualities into an apex of common points which are found in actual life diverging into many degrees of diversity. While we thus erroneously seek the unity and personality of the individual in groups, the common standards of chronology are likewise applied by universal consent to the life of groups as to that of individuals. Let the first year of our social memory be once settled, and, whether it be an Egyptian dynasty or the first celebration of public games, or the birth or the death or the flight of a prophet, we are ready to measure back by year and day to this arbitrary terminus the lives of individuals and of groups alike. The observer of organic nature knows by what insensible grades the individuals of his various classes, plants or animals, fade into each other, yet his distinctions, however faint at the outline, are clear enough in the colour. So, too, the observer of inorganic nature must assume the lines which nature does not draw. Least of all should the observer of social life expect minute exactness in those abstract classifications by which he attempts to overcome difficulties peculiarly great in his subject—to stop ideally the constant motion of social life in a kind of instantaneous photograph of its facts, and then to offer an explanation of these facts and a series of pictures detailing social life in progress and explaining its complicated motion. In nature, as A. W. Schlegel has pointedly remarked, the boundaries of objects run into one another; surely it will not be supposed that any magic of science can banish this natural indistinctness of outline?
§ 26. When, therefore, we say that the "clan" is a social classification, we need not be ashamed to admit the ideal character of our abstract term, or our inability to state precisely the points at which its communal career begins and ends. But we must know the leading facts which this abstract term idealises, the wide domain of human history which clan life has dominated, the significant truth that this form of social organisation, under a great variety of names and a considerable variety of features, is the most archaic to which historical science enables us to ascend with confidence. We shall, therefore, explain our ideal of clan life and the nature of the archaic universality it claims so far as anything human can claim that proud title. But first we have something to say about the practical and theoretic conditions which have turned men's attention to the clan organisation.
The importance which the clan has assumed in recent speculation is due to a variety of associations, partly incidental to the ordinary activities of our nineteenth-century life, partly peculiar to the character of our modern thought. The everyday life of Europe in general and of England in particular is now habituated to social contrasts greater than ever before fell within the positive range of human knowledge. While civilised nations stand face to face by aid of press, telegraph, steam-engine, their differences, once thought so considerable, have almost ceased to attract attention compared with the countless grades of Eastern and Western barbarism which adventure, commerce, or missionary zeal have brought home to us as living realities. At the same time, the historical faculty, in which Macaulay rightly places the great superiority of modern over ancient culture, enlarged by new ranges of comparison and contrast, has since the Renaissance and Reformation cast off the shackles which impeded its freedom in Athens and Rome. The overweening contempt for foreigners, which in the Greek and his imitative conqueror despised the lights of comparative inquiry lying all round their march of conquest, was impossible among the variety of nationalities and languages which rose out of the ruins of the Roman empire. The recovery of Greek literature, even while it diverted national literatures into imitations of itself, fostered this growth of conscious comparison. And, after the individual had dared to question the authority of creed with a freedom which Greece and Rome ventured to apply to their myths only when their vitality had perished, the fruits of historical criticism (untimely in the sneering nihilism of Voltaire and Gibbon) needed little but improved knowledge of India and the East in general to ripen into an abundant harvest. It is this harvest which the nineteenth century now reaps in language, in law, in political economy; in fine, in the most accurate and most extended knowledge of history which the world has ever known. Science, like a hundred-handed Briareus, working in many a field, yet watching with the eyes of an Argus all the richly varied ingathering, has learned how to probe among the very roots of social thought, and speech, and action. The hands of the mighty Titan have found the clan ideas, the clan facts, at the roots of property and political institutions, of legal rights, religious doctrines, and moral principles. Are we not justified in the belief that we shall find them also at the roots of literature?
What is a "clan"? As already observed, we are not to suppose that all clans are exactly alike. Trades-unions and co-operative associations are called by their respective common names, yet even with our abundant means of contemporary information we are content to merge individual differences in our general notions of the one and the other. The ancient clan groups—not a whit the less ancient because they coexist with the most advanced civilisation as at the present day—differ widely from trades-unions and co-operative societies in being for the most part of natural, not artificial, growth. They are groups not made with hands, not planned with a set purpose, not supplied with defined rules which can be printed and exhibited in the rooms of a club, but intensely united by bonds of common thought and feeling compared with which the deepest sentiments of Christian communion can hardly be regarded as other than artificial. This bond of unity is common kinship, common ancestry. Not realised as an idea of the intellect, not reflected upon as an emotion of the heart, but profoundly felt to be the centre of social life, this common kinship is as real as though it could be touched in the person of that communal ancestor from whose loins the group is sprung or thought to be sprung, whose imaginary presence sanctifies every festival of common joys, whose favour is to be propitiated in every common affliction, and to whom, in company with others long since gathered to their fathers, it is the destiny of the clansman, sooner or later, to return. Unformulated in any doctrine, but not on that account less real, unwritten in any code, but not on that account less lasting, this unity of blood is the central conception of clan life, the central point to and from which sets the current of the clansmen's deepest feelings.
The outward marks of this common kinship are numerous. Common religious rites, or sacra gentilicia, bind the clansmen in a fellowship of ancestral worship and the village community to its eponymous ancestor. Reciprocal obligations of defence and vengeance unite the brotherhood, whether it consists of Hebrew or Arab Semites, of Greek or German Aryans, of kinsmen in Central Asia or in the wilds of the New World. Rights or obligations of marriage within the clan everywhere attest the same communal exclusiveness; and some forms of clan life would even lead us to believe that the brotherhood once lived under a common roof, and shared not only their sacred festivals but even their ordinary meals. Conspicuous, however, among these signs of communal kinship is an economic feature of the settled clan which living scholars have investigated with equal patience and learning—the common ownership of land. This feature M. de Laveleye, for example, in his Primitive Property, and Sir Henry Maine, in his Village Communities and Early History of Institutions, have illustrated by examples taken from every quarter of the globe—from India and Russia, from the Germanic Mark, and from the agrarian communities of the Celts and the Arabs. No doubt such common ownership of land is not always a mark of clanship. No doubt it marks sometimes the desire to get as much as possible out of the soil by a kind of agricultural co-operation. But, allowing for such economic motives, and admitting the existence of village communities, which are signs of economic rather than clan organisation, we are amply justified in treating common property as an ordinary and prominent feature of clan life.
More interesting, however, than outward signs of clan communion is the inward spirit of these communities. On this moral side the intense social unity of the group expresses itself in notions of right and wrong which curiously conflict with those of civilised nations. Individual responsibility is conceived most obscurely; personal intention, if seen at all, is visible only through mists of communal sentiment; and the corporate responsibility of the group is vividly realised. Inherited guilt, vicarious punishment, the absence of belief in a future state of personal reward or retribution—such are some of the most interesting signs of this clan spirit. It is easy to see how these three characteristics of the clan spirit follow with an unconscious logic from corporate responsibility. The clansman has done wrong, and, until that wrong is atoned for, any member of the offending group is liable to punishment, a liability nowise altered by the birth or death of the individuals composing the group. In the eyes of the clan the inheritance of such responsibility seems not a whit less reasonable than the acquisition of rights in the common lands by birth. In the eyes of the clan the selection of this or that person for punishment seems as reasonable as the escape of others by death from the only known sphere of punishment—human clan life. Indeed, this corporate liability for sins is the only possible moral sanction so long as the individual's intention is left out of sight, his personal being dimly realised, and his personal share in a future life but vaguely felt. And so the communal rites of burial, which form the closing scene in the clansman's career, are but the appropriate dismissal of a comrade to a shadow-world in which reward and punishment for things done in the light of the sun have no place.
§ 27. It will be at once observed that such a group must have prodigiously influenced the beginnings of literature. From it, for example, come the sentiments of blood-revenge so common in early Arab and Saxon poetry. From it come those feelings of duty to kindred which permeate all early poetry, even when it belongs to the chief's hall and gefolge much more than to clan life. But it is not to be supposed that any literature of any country or age does, or could, contain an exact reflection of clan life in its purity. Such purely communal life is clearly impossible save within narrow limits; and the very narrowness of such limits prevents the development of action, thought, or language capable of supporting a literature. It is true that the wild festivals of Indian tribes supplied observers a century ago (such as Dr. Brown, whose History of the Rise of Poetry, noticed approvingly by Percy, deserves more attention than it has hitherto received) with curious combinations of dance, music, song, and gesticulation, in which, as comparative evidences have since proved, they were right in discovering the primary sources of literature. But until some fusion of clans has developed wider sympathies and opened the way for religious centralisation with its ritual of choral song, until bards who can depend upon their art for subsistence have found their patrons in chiefs whom war and property have raised above the group, few of the materials requisite for literature can be said to exist. When these points of social progress have been attained, the development of literature parts into two remarkably different directions, which the literature of the Hebrews on the one hand, and the early poetry of Greece on the other, aptly illustrate. The literature of the Hebrews passed into the hands of a central priesthood; the early poetry of the Greeks is the song of bards possessing local independence. The social and hereditary spirit of the clan predominates in the former; the individual spirit of the chief lives and moves in the latter. There is, no doubt, a strong bond of connection between these early forms of literature in the individual character which decomposing clan life tends to create—a character in which sentiments of devotion to the chief supplant the old ties of communal kinship; and elsewhere we may return to this connection between communal and feudal life and literature. At present, however, we shall devote our main attention to the corporate character of clan literature.