VII.

general change, so that an experienced | confirm and combine with more or less historian, studying some particular exactitude and force its three generapart of it, sees in advance and half pre- tive instincts; and we should underdicts the character of the rest. There stand why it is endemic in India, amidst is nothing vague in this interdepen- imaginative, philosophic, eminently fa dence. In the living body the regula- natic brains: why it blossomed forth tor is, first, its tendency to manifest a so strangely and grandly in the middle certain primary type; then its necessi- ages, amidst an oppressive organiza ty for organs whereby to satisfy its tion, new tongues and literatures; why wants and to be in harmony with itself it was aroused in the sixteenth century in order that it may live. În a civiliza- with a new character and heroic enthu tion, the regulator is the presence, in siasm, amid universal regeneration, and every great human creation, of a pro- during the awakening of the German ductive element, present also in other races; why it breaks out into eccentric surrounding creations, to wit, some sects amid the coarse American de faculty, aptitude disposition, effective mocracy, and under the bureaucratic and discernible, which, being possess- Russian despotism; why, in short, it ed of its proper character, introduces it is spread, at the present day, over into all the operations in which it Europe in such different dimensions assists, and, according to its variations, and such various characteristics, accauses all the works in which it co- cording to the differences of race and operates to vary also. civilization. And so for every kind of human production-for literature, music, the fine arts, philosophy, science, the state, industries, and the rest. Each of these has for its direct cause a moral disposition, or a combination of moral dispositions: the cause given, they appear; the cause withdrawn, they vanish: the weakness or inten sity of the cause measures their weakness or intensity. They are bound up with their causes, as a physical phenomenon with its condition, as the dew with the fall of the variable temperature, as dilatation with heat. There are similarly connected data in the moral as in the physical world, as rigorously bound together, and as universally extended in the one as in the other. Whatever in the one case produces, alters, or suppresses the first term, produces, alters, or suppresses the second as a necessary consequence. Whatever lowers the surrounding temperature, deposits the dew. Whatever develops credulity side by side with a poetical conception of the world, engenders religion. Thus phenomena have been produced; thus they will be produced As soon as we know the sufficient and necessary condition of one of these vast occurrences, our understand ing grasps the future as well as the past. We can say with confidence ir what circumstances it will reappear foretell without presumption many por

At this point we can obtain a glimpse of the principal features of human transformations, and begin to search for the general laws which regulate, not events only, but classes of events, not such and such religion or literature, but a group of literatures or religions. If, for instance, it were admitted that a religion is a metaphysical poem, accompanied by belief; and remarking at the same time that there are certain epochs, races, and circumstances in which belief, the poetical and metaphysical faculty, show themselves with an unwonted vigor: if we consider that Christianity and Buddhism were produced at periods of high philosophical conceptions, and amid such miseries as raised up the fanatics of the Cévennes; if we recognize, on the other hand, that primitive religions are born at the awakening of human reason, during the richest blossoming of human imagination, at a time of the fairest artlessness and the greatest credulity; if we consider, also, that Mohammedanism appeared with the dawning of poetic prose, and the conception of national unity, amongst a people destitute of science, at a period of sudden development of the intellect, -we might then conclude that a religion is born, declines, is reformed and transformed according as circumstances

tions of its future history, and sketch | and his special structure with some cautiously some features of its ulterior governing disposition and some domi. development.

VIII.

nant feature. To explain each, it would be necessary to write a chapter of psychological analysis, and barely yet has such a method been rudely H.story now attempts, or rather is sketched. One man alone, Stendhal, very near attempting this method of with a peculiar bent of mind and a research. The question propounded strange education, has undertaken it, nowadays is of this kind Given a lit- and to this day the majority of readers erature, philosophy, society, art, group find his books paradoxical and ob. of arts, what is the moral condition scure: his talent and his ideas were which produced it? what the condi- premature; his admirable divinations tions of race, epoch, circumstance, the were not understood, any more than his most fitted to produce this moral con- profound sayings thrown out cursorily, dition? There is a distinct moral con- or the astonishing precision of his sysdition for each of these formations, tem and of his logic. It was not per and for each of their branches; one ceived that, under the exterior of a for art in general, one for each kind of conversationalist and a man of the art-for architecture, painting, sculp- world, he explained the most compli ture, music, poetry; each has its spe- cated of esoteric mechanisms; that he cial germ in the wide field of human laid his finger on the mainsprings; psychology; each has its law, and it is by that he introduced into the history of virtue of this law that we see it raised, the heart scientific processes, the art by chance, as it seems, wholly alone, of notation, decomposition, deduction; amid the miscarriage of its neighbors, that he first marked the fundamenta. like painting in Flanders and Holland causes of nationality, clinate, temperain the seventeenth century, poetry in ment; in short, that he treated sentiEngland in the sixteenth, music in ments as they should be treated,-in Germany in the eighteenth. At this the manner of the naturalist, and of the moment, and in these countries, the natural philosopher, who classifies and conditions have been fulfilled for one weighs forces. For this very reason art, not for others, and a single branch he was considered dry and eccentric: has budded in the general barrenness. he remained solitary, writing novels, History must search nowadays for voyages, notes, for which he sought these rules of human growth; with the and obtained a score of readers. And special psychology of each special for- yet we find in his books at the present mation it must occupy itself; the fin- day essays the most suitable to open ished picture of these characteristic the path which I have endeavored to conditions it must now labor to com- describe. No one has better taught pose. No task is more delicate or us how to open our eyes and see, to more difficult; Montesquieu tried it, see first the men that surround us and but in his time history was too new to the life that is present, then the ancient admit of his success; they had not yet and authentic documents, to read be even a suspicion of the road necessary tween the black and white lines of the to be travelled, and hardly now do we pages, to recognize beneath the oic begin to catch sight of it. Just as in impression, under the scribbling of a it elements astronomy is a mechanical text, the precise sentiment, the move. and physiology a chemical problem, so ment of ideas, the state of mind in history in its elements is a psychological which they were written. In his wri problem. There is a particular system tings, in Sainte-Beuve, in the German of inner impressions and operations critics, the reader will see all the which makes an artist, a believer, a wealth that may be drawn from a musician, a painter, a man in a no- literary work: when the work is rich, madic or social state; and of each and people know how to interpret it, the birth and growth,' the energy, the we find there the psychology of a soul, connection of ideas and emotions, are frequently of an age, now and then of 1. Corent· each has his moral historva race. In this light a great poem. a

chology of a pecple: if I have chosen this nation in particular, it is rot with out a reason. I had to find a people with a grand and complete literature, and this is rare: there are few nations who have, during their whole existence really thought and written. Among the ancients, the Latin literature is worth nothing at the outset, then it borrowed and became imitative. Among the moderns, German literature does not exist for nearly two centuries.* Italian literature and Spanish literature end at the middle of the seventeenth century. Only_ancient Greece, modern France and Erg.and, offer a complete series of great significant monuments. I have chosen England, because being still living, and subject to direct examination, it may be better studied than a destroyed civilization, of which we retain but the relics, and because, being different from France, it has in the eyes of a Frenchman a more distinct character. Besides, there is a peculiarity in this civilization, that apart from its spon taneous development, it presents a forced deviation, it has suffered the last and most effectual of all conquests, and the three grounds whence it has sprung, race, climate, the Norman invasion, may be observed in its remains with perfect exactness; so that we may examine in this history the two most powerful moving springs of human transformation, natural bent and constraining force, we may examine them without uncertainty or gap, in a series of authentic and unmutilated memo

fine nove, the confessions of a superior man, are more instructive than a heap of historians with their histories. I would give fifty volumes of charters and a hundred volumes of Bate papers for the memoirs of Cellini, the epistles of St. Paul, the Tabletalk of Luther, or the comedies of Aristophanes In this consists the importance of literary works: they are instructive because they are beautiful; their utility grows with their perfection; and if they furnish documents it is because they are monuments. The more a book brings sentiments into light, the more it is a work of literature; for the proper office of literature is to make sentiments visible. The more a book represents important sentiments, the higher is its place in literature; for it is by representing the mode of being of a whole nation and a whole age, that a writer rallies round him the зympathies of an entire age and an entire nation. This is why, amid the writings which set before our eyes the sentiments of preceding genera. tions, a literature, and notably a grand literature, is incomparably the best. It resembles those admirable apparatus of extraordinary sensibility, by which >hysicians disentangle and measure the most recondite and delicate changes of a body. Constitutions, religions, do not approach it in importance; the articles of a code of laws and of a creed only show us the spirit roughly and without delicacy. If there are any writings in which politics and dogma are full of life, it is in the eloquent discourses of the pulpit and the trib-rials. une, memoirs, unrestrained confes- I have endeavored to define these sions; and all this belongs to litera-primary springs, to exhibit their grad ture: so that, in addition to itself, itual effects, to explain how they have bas all the advantage of other works. ended by bringing to light great politIt is then chiefly by the study of litera-ical, religious, and literary works, and es that one may construct a moral by developing the recondite mechanism tistory, and advance toward the knowl- whereby the Saxon barbarian has been edge of psychological laws, from which transformed into the Englishman o events spring. to-day.

I intend to write the history of a literature, and to seek in it for the pay

* From 1550 to 179.

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

BOOK I.

THE SOURCE.