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
