Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/370

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MAN IN NATIONAL LITERATURE.
349

and quite different from that of the feudal castle. Elsewhere, however, the old domination of city life was overthrown, and a lasting preponderance of the country over the town established. It was during this preponderance of country life that the villagers, dependent on feudal lords and their men-at-arms, fell into a serfdom frequently more oppressive than pagan slavery. Unbound to their masters by any ties of sentiment or kinship, held together solely by the force of their local despot, hopeless for the future, ignorant of the past, shut out from each other and made the enemies of each other by their lords' raids, these villages, whether descended from provincials of Rome or barbarian clans, could feel none of that free enthusiasm in life which makes the flesh and blood of song. Before the life of men in groups could again become a song-maker, some degree of social happiness, some width of social sympathy, some sense of a free equality which slaves attached to the land or person of a lord could not feel, needed to be developed. This development was the work of the towns throughout Europe; it is with their struggle into independence from feudal control that social sentiments, the earliest makers of song, rise as in resurrection from the grave in which they had been buried with the old clan communities of Celt and Teuton.

§ 90. Thus from the fifth to the twelfth centuries, from the fall of Rome to the rise of the cities, two individualising types of human character prevail—the monk and the baron; and the Christian resignation of the former as well as the brutal or chivalrous prowess of the latter need not here be illustrated from Latin chronicle or early chanson. For neither of these types can any deep sense of personality be claimed. The man of mail, you may see from his songs, thinks of personality as so