CHAPTER II.
MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE.
§ 89. At first sight it might seem that the individual and not the social spirit laid the foundations of national literature throughout Europe. In such early extant specimens of Saxon, German, and French poetry as Beowulf, the Lay of the Nibelungs, and the oldest Chansons de Geste, the note of communal song is subordinated to that of personal glory. Whatever choral odes or hymns the clans and village communities of Teuton and Celt may have possessed, we have now but scanty indications of their existence; and such glimpses of communal literature as we do find are to be observed only through a dense growth of individualised poetry.
At this fact, however apparently inimical to our view of literary development, we need not be surprised; for the most powerful causes united to obscure the social beginnings of modern European literatures. Clan songs and hymns, full of pagan worship and unchristian conceptions of clan duties, like Blood-revenge and a Shadow=world such as the gathering-place of the Hebrew kinsmen, could have little to attract the class to which we are indebted for almost all we know of European barbarism—the Christian clergy. Moreover, contact with Roman life and habits of military service in the imperial armies
