the psychology of a people; in selecting this one, it is not without
a motive. A people had to be taken possessing a vast and complete
literature, which is rarely found. There are few nations which,
throughout their existence, have thought and written well in the full
sense of the word. Among the ancients, Latin literature is null at the
beginning, and afterward borrowed and an imitation. Among the moderns,
German literature is nearly a blank for two centuries.[7] Italian and
Spanish literatures come to an end in the middle of the seventeenth
century. Ancient Greece, and modern France and England, alone offer a
complete series of great and expressive monuments. I have chosen
the English because, as this still exists and is open to direct
observation, it can be better studied than that of an extinct
civilization of which fragments only remain; and because, being
different, it offers better than that of France very marked
characteristics in the eyes of a Frenchman. Moreover, outside of
what is peculiar to English civilization, apart from a spontaneous
development, it presents a forced deviation due to the latest and most
effective conquest to which the country was subject; the three given
conditions out of which it issues--race, climate, and the Norman
conquest--are clearly and distinctly visible in its literary
monuments; so that we study in this history the two most potent motors
of human transformation, namely, nature and constraint, and we study
them, without any break or uncertainty, in a series of authentic and
complete monuments. I have tried to define these primitive motors, to
show their gradual effects, and explain how their insensible operation
has brought religious and literary productions into full light, and
how the inward mechanism is developed by which the barbarous Saxon
became the Englishman of the present day.
[Footnote A: Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (b. 1828; d. 1893) was one of the
most distinguished French critics of the nineteenth century. He held
the chair of esthetics at the Ècole des Beaux Arts, and wrote a
large number of works in history, travel, and literary criticism.
His "History of English Literature" is the most brilliant book on
the subject ever written by a foreigner, and in this introduction he
expounds the method of criticism which has come to be associated
with his name, and in accordance with which he seeks to interpret the
characteristics of English authors.]
[Footnote 1: Darwin, "The Origin of Species." Prosper Lucas, "De
l'Hérédité."]
[Footnote 2: Spinosa, "Ethics," part iv., axiom.]
[Footnote 3: For this scale of coordinate effects consult, "Langues
Sémitiques," by Renan, ch I, "Comparison des civilizations Grecque
et Romaine," vol I, ch I, 3d ed, by Mommsen, "Consequences de la
démocratie," vol III., by Tocqueville.]
[Footnote 4: "L'Esprit des Lois," by Montesquieu; the essential
principles of the three governments.]
[Footnote 5: The birth of the Alexandrine philosophy is due to contact
with the Orient. Aristotle's metaphysical views stand alone. Moreover,
with him as with Plato, they afford merely a glimpse. By way of
contrast see systematic power in Plotinus, Proclus, Schelling, and
Hegel, or again in the admirable boldness of Brahmanic and Buddhist
speculation.]
[Footnote 6: I have very often made attempts to state this law,
especially in the preface to "Essais de Critique et d'Histoire."]
[Footnote 7: From 1550 to 1750.]
_Planned and Designed at The Collier Press By William Patten_