Page:Hutcheson Macaulay Posnett - Comparative Literature (1886).djvu/46

circumstances. The careful study of any literature possessing a history sufficiently long reveals the most diverse treatment of female character within its own limits. Even in the "stationary" East the heroines of the classical Indian dramas possess a degree of independence impossible under the system of seclusion which has followed the Mohammedan conquest of India; and those of the early Chinese drama likewise contrast with the domestic prisoners of modern China described by the Abbé Grosier and others. But in the "progressive" West the evolution of female character may be more readily illustrated. Thus, Mr. Mahaffy has the merit of being among our earliest critics in contrasting the various conditions of women at different stages of social life in ancient Greece. The women of the Iliad and Odyssey—Helen, Andromache, Nausicaa—bring before us social relations very different from those of Aristophanes' women. Elsewhere like contrasts may be seen. The songs of Miriam and Deborah, even the witch of Endor, carry us back to days of Hebrew social life when the woman possessed a status far higher than one of her lord's harem. Again, the Roman women of the early republic, under the perpetual tutelage of their fathers, husbands, sons, or guardians, could have supplied no such rumours of ill fame as Juvenal voices, and, deprived of that freedom which permits at once the development and the display of character, might have realized the Periclean ideal of the sex. But the lesson which comparative literature must draw from such contrasts is something more than the dependence of human character on social conditions; it is also the impossibility of exact historic truth in the workmanship of literary art. In this impossibility lies one of the great facts which our phrase "relativity of literature" is intended to mark. We