and Miracle-plays the key to all their characteristics. The abstract, allegorical, impersonal characters of these spectacles cannot be attributed to the nature of the Christian faith; for in the early days of that faith profound problems of personal being—personal immortality, responsibility, and the like—had formed, with subtle speculations on the subject of the Trinity, the great questions of Christianised Greek intellect. The truth is that a new communal life was giving a new prominence to the impersonal, the allegorical, in religion and philosophy and poetry. Men again, but under very different conditions from those of the clan, had merged their sense of personality in that of group life, content to leave to feudal lords those sentiments of individualism which, in the ears of serfs or townsmen but lately freed from serfdom, sounded of the lord's tyranny and the tortures of hell, devoutly believed and hoped to be reserved for such strongly marked personalities. No doubt there are wide differences between a body of feudal serfs fighting their way to burghership and clan corporations of kinsmen. No doubt there are differences almost as wide between a commune of France, or a chartered town of medieval Spain, Germany, England, and the city commonwealths of Greece before they began to lose the clan feeling of identity between the citizen and his city group. Yet in one fundamental point the characteristics of the city commonwealth and the clan are repeated in these European organisations—in the subordination of the individual to the corporation of which he is a member. It is here that we discover the social maker of the medieval drama's abstract and allegorical and impersonal characteristics.
§ 91. The communal authorship of the Mysteries and Miracle-plays recalls that clan ownership of early song to
