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Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books written by Charles W. Eliot

C >> Charles W. Eliot >> Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books







INTRODUCTION TO THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE. (1863)[A]


I

History, within a hundred years in Germany, and within sixty years
in France, has undergone a transformation owing to a study of
literatures.

The discovery has been made that a literary work is not a mere play
of the imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but
a transcript of contemporary manners and customs and the sign of a
particular state of intellect. The conclusion derived from this is
that, through literary monuments, we can retrace the way in which men
felt and thought many centuries ago. This method has been tried and
found successful.

We have meditated over these ways of feeling and thinking and have
accepted them as facts of prime significance. We have found that they
were dependent on most important events, that they explain these, and
that these explain them, and that henceforth it was necessary to give
them their place in history, and one of the highest. This place has
been assigned to them, and hence all is changed in history--the aim,
the method, the instrumentalities, and the conceptions of laws and of
causes. It is this change as now going on, and which must continue to
go on, that is here attempted to be set forth.

On turning over the large stiff pages of a folio volume, or the yellow
leaves of a manuscript, in short, a poem, a code of laws, a confession
of faith, what is your first comment? You say to yourself that the
work before you is not of its own creation. It is simply a mold like
a fossil shell, an imprint similar to one of those forms embedded in
a stone by an animal which once lived and perished. Beneath the shell
was an animal and behind the document there was a man. Why do you
study the shell unless to form some idea of the animal? In the same
way do you study the document in order to comprehend the man; both
shell and document are dead fragments and of value only as indications
of the complete living being. The aim is to reach this being; this is
what you strive to reconstruct. It is a mistake to study the document
as if it existed alone by itself. That is treating things merely as a
pedant, and you subject yourself to the illusions of a book-worm.
At bottom mythologies and languages are not existences; the only
realities are human beings who have employed words and imagery adapted
to their organs and to suit the original cast of their intellects. A
creed is nothing in itself. Who made it? Look at this or that
portrait of the sixteenth century, the stern, energetic features of an
archbishop or of an English martyr. Nothing exists except through the
individual; it is necessary to know the individual himself. Let the
parentage of creeds be established, or the classification of poems, or
the growth of constitutions, or the transformations of idioms, and we
have only cleared the ground. True history begins when the historian
has discerned beyond the mists of ages the living, active man, endowed
with passions, furnished with habits, special in voice, feature,
gesture and costume, distinctive and complete, like anybody that you
have just encountered in the street. Let us strive then, as far as
possible, to get rid of this great interval of time which prevents us
from observing the man with our eyes, _the eyes of our own head_. What
revelations do we find in the calendared leaves of a modern poem? A
modern poet, a man like De Musset, Victor Hugo, Lamartine, or Heine,
graduated from a college and traveled, wearing a dress-coat and
gloves, favored by ladies, bowing fifty times and uttering a dozen
witticisms in an evening, reading daily newspapers, generally
occupying an apartment on the second story, not over-cheerful on
account of his nerves, and especially because, in this dense democracy
in which we stifle each other, the discredit of official rank
exaggerates his pretensions by raising his importance, and, owing to
the delicacy of his personal sensations, leading him to regard himself
as a Deity. Such is what we detect behind modern _meditations_ and
_sonnets_.

Again, behind a tragedy of the seventeenth century there is a poet,
one, for example, like Racine, refined, discreet, a courtier, a fine
talker, with majestic perruque and ribboned shoes, a monarchist and
zealous Christian, "God having given him the grace not to blush in any
society on account of zeal for his king or for the Gospel," clever in
interesting the monarch, translating into proper French "the _gaulois_
of Amyot," deferential to the great, always knowing how to keep
his place in their company, assiduous and respectful at Marly as at
Versailles, amid the formal creations of a decorative landscape and
the reverential bows, graces, intrigues, and fineness of the braided
seigniors Who get up early every morning to obtain the reversion of an
office, together with the charming ladies who count on their fingers
the pedigrees which entitle them to a seat on a footstool. On this
point consult Saint-Simon and the engravings of Perelle, the same as
you have just consulted Balzac and the water-color drawings of Eugene
Lami.

In like manner, on reading a Greek tragedy, our first care is
to figure to ourselves the Greeks, that is to say, men who lived
half-naked in the gymnasiums or on a public square under a brilliant
sky, in full view of the noblest and most delicate landscape, busy in
rendering their bodies strong and agile, in conversing together, in
arguing, in voting, in carrying out patriotic piracies, and yet idle
and temperate, the furniture of their houses consisting of three
earthen jars and their food of two pots of anchovies preserved in oil,
served by slaves who afford them the time to cultivate their minds and
to exercise their limbs, with no other concern that that of having
the most beautiful city, the most beautiful processions, the most
beautiful ideas, and the most beautiful men. In this respect, a statue
like the "Meleager" or the "Theseus" of the Parthenon, or again a
sight of the blue and lustrous Mediterranean, resembling a silken
tunic out of which islands arise like marble bodies, together with
a dozen choice phrases selected from the works of Plato and
Aristophanes, teach us more than any number of dissertations and
commentaries.

And so again, in order to understand an Indian Purana, one must begin
by imagining the father of a family who, "having seen a son on his
son's knees," follows the law and, with ax and pitcher, seeks solitude
under a banyan tree, talks no more, multiplies his fastings, lives
naked with four fires around him under the fifth fire, that terrible
sun which endlessly devours and resuscitates all living things; who
fixes his imagination in turn for weeks at a time on the foot of
Brahma, then on his knee, on his thigh, on his navel, and so on,
until, beneath the strain of this intense meditation, hallucinations
appear, when all the forms of being, mingling together and transformed
into each other, oscillate to and fro in this vertiginous brain until
the motionless man, with suspended breath and fixed eyeballs, beholds
the universe melting away like vapor over the vacant immensity of
the Being in which he hopes for absorption. In this case the best of
teachings would be a journey in India; but, for lack of a better
one, take the narratives of travelers along with works in geography,
botany, and ethnology. In any event, there must be the same research.
A language, a law, a creed, is never other than an abstraction; the
perfect thing is found in the active man, the visible corporeal figure
which eats, walks, fights, and labors. Set aside the theories of
constitutions and their results, of religions and their systems, and
try to observe men in their workshops or offices, in their fields
along with their own sky and soil, with their own homes, clothes,
occupations and repasts, just as you see them when, on landing in
England or in Italy, you remark their features and gestures, their
roads and their inns, the citizen on his promenades and the workman
taking a drink. Let us strive as much as possible to supply the
place of the actual, personal, sensible observation that is no longer
practicable, this being the only way in which we can really know the
man; let us make the past present; to judge of an object it must be
present; no experience can be had of what is absent. Undoubtedly, this
sort of reconstruction is always imperfect; only an imperfect
judgment can be based on it; but let us do the best we can; incomplete
knowledge is better than none at all, or than knowledge which
is erroneous, and there is no other way of obtaining knowledge
approximatively of bygone times than by _seeing_ approximatively the
men of former times.

Such is the first step in history. This step was taken in Europe at
the end of the last century when the imagination took fresh flight
under the auspices of Lessing and Walter Scott, and a little later in
France under Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and others. We
now come to the second step.




II


On observing the visible man with your own eyes what do you try to
find in him? The invisible man. These words which your ears catch,
those gestures, those airs of the head, his attire and sensible
operations of all kinds, are, for you, merely so many expressions;
these express something, a soul. An inward man is hidden beneath the
outward man, and the latter simply manifests the former. You have
observed the house in which he lives, his furniture, his costume, in
order to discover his habits and tastes, the degree of his refinement
or rusticity, his extravagance or economy, his follies or his
cleverness. You have listened to his conversation and noted the
inflexions of his voice, the attitudes he has assumed, so as to judge
of his spirit, self-abandonment or gayety, his energy or his rigidity.
You consider his writings, works of art, financial and political
schemes, with a view to measure the reach and limits of his
intelligence, his creative power and self-command, to ascertain the
usual order, kind, and force of his conceptions, in what way he
thinks and how he resolves. All these externals are so many avenues
converging to one center, and you follow these only to reach that
center; here is the real man, namely, that group of faculties and of
sentiments which produces the rest. Behold a new world, an infinite
world; for each visible action involves an infinite train of
reasonings and emotions, new or old sensations which have combined to
bring this into light and which, like long ledges of rock sunk deep
in the earth, have cropped out above the surface and attained their
level. It is this subterranean world which forms the second aim, the
special object of the historian. If his critical education suffices,
he is able to discriminate under every ornament in architecture, under
every stroke of the brush in a picture, under each phrase of literary
composition, the particular sentiment out of which the ornament, the
stroke, and the phrase have sprung; he is a spectator of the inward
drama which has developed itself in the breast of the artist or
writer; the choice of words, the length or shortness of the period,
the species of metaphor, the accent of a verse, the chain of
reasoning--all are to him an indication; while his eyes are reading
the text his mind and soul are following the steady flow and
ever-changing series of emotions and conceptions from which this text
has issued; he is working out its _psychology_. Should you desire to
study this operation, regard the promoter and model of all the high
culture of the epoch, Goethe, who, before composing his "Iphigenia"
spent days in making drawings of the most perfect statues and who, at
last, his eyes filled with the noble forms of antique scenery and his
mind penetrated by the harmonious beauty of antique life, succeeded in
reproducing internally, with such exactness, the habits and yearnings
of Greek imagination as to provide us with an almost twin sister of
the "Antigone" of Sophocles and of the goddesses of Phidias. This
exact and demonstrated divination of bygone sentiments has, in our
days, given a new life to history. There was almost complete ignorance
of this in the last century; men of every race and of every epoch were
represented as about alike, the Greek, the barbarian, the Hindoo, the
man of the Renaissance and the man of the eighteenth century, cast in
the same mold and after the same pattern, and after a certain abstract
conception which served for the whole human species. There was a
knowledge of man but not of men. There was no penetration into
the soul itself; nothing of the infinite diversity and wonderful
complexity of souls had been detected; it was not known that the moral
organization of a people or of an age is as special and distinct
as the physical structure of a family of plants or of an order of
animals. History to-day, like zooelogy, has found its anatomy, and
whatever branch of it is studied, whether philology, languages or
mythologies, it is in this way that labor must be given to make it
produce new fruit. Among so many writers who, since Herder, Ottfried
Mueller, and Goethe have steadily followed and rectified this great
effort, let the reader take two historians and two works, one "The
Life and Letters of Cromwell" by Carlyle, and the other the "Port
Royal" of Sainte-Beuve. He will see how precisely, how clearly, and
how profoundly we detect the soul of a man beneath his actions and
works; how, under an old general and in place of an ambitious man
vulgarly hypocritical, we find one tormented by the disordered
reveries of a gloomy imagination, but practical in instinct and
faculties, thoroughly English and strange and incomprehensible to
whoever has not studied the climate and the race; how, with about a
hundred scattered letters and a dozen or more mutilated speeches, we
follow him from his farm and his team to his general's tent and to his
Protector's throne, in his transformation and in his development, in
his struggles of conscience and in his statesman's resolutions,
in such a way that the mechanism of his thought and action becomes
visible and the ever renewed and fitful tragedy, within which wracked
this great gloomy soul, passes like the tragedies of Shakespeare
into the souls of those who behold them. We see how, behind convent
disputes and the obstinacy of nuns, we recover one of the great
provinces of human psychology; how fifty or more characters, rendered
invisible through the uniformity of a narration careful of the
proprieties, came forth in full daylight, each standing out clear in
its countless diversities; how, underneath theological dissertations
and monotonous sermons, we discern the throbbings of ever-breathing
hearts, the excitements and depressions of the religious life,
the unforeseen reaction and pell-mell stir of natural feeling, the
infiltrations of surrounding society, the intermittent triumphs
of grace, presenting so many shades of difference that the fullest
description and most flexible style can scarcely garner in the vast
harvest which the critic has caused to germinate in this abandoned
field. And the same elsewhere. Germany, with its genius, so pliant, so
broad, so prompt in transformations, so fitted for the reproduction of
the remotest and strangest states of human thought; England, with its
matter-of-fact mind, so suited to the grappling with moral problems,
to making them clear by figures, weights, and measures, by geography
and statistics, by texts and common sense; France, at length, with its
Parisian culture and drawing-room habits, with its unceasing analysis
of characters and of works, with its ever ready irony at detecting
weaknesses, with its skilled finesse in discriminating shades of
thought--all have plowed over the same ground, and we now begin
to comprehend that no region of history exists in which this deep
sub-soil should not be reached if we would secure adequate crops
between the furrows.

Such is the second step, and we are now in train to follow it out.
Such is the proper aim of contemporary criticism. No one has done this
work so judiciously and on so grand a scale as Sainte-Beuve; in this
respect, we are all his pupils; literary, philosophic, and religious
criticism in books, and even in the newspapers, is to-day entirely
changed by his method. Ulterior evolution must start from this
point. I have often attempted to expose what this evolution is; in my
opinion, it is a new road open to history and which I shall strive to
describe more in detail.




III


After having observed in a man and noted down one, two, three,
and then a multitude of sentiments, do these suffice and does your
knowledge of him seem complete? Does a memorandum book constitute a
psychology? It is not a psychology, and here, as elsewhere, the search
for causes must follow the collection of facts. It matters not what
the facts may be, whether physical or moral, they always spring from
causes; there are causes for ambition, for courage, for veracity, as
well as for digestion, for muscular action, and for animal heat. Vice
and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar; every complex fact
grows out of the simple facts with which it is affiliated and on
which it depends. We must therefore try to ascertain what simple facts
underlie moral qualities the same as we ascertain those that underlie
physical qualities, and, for example, let us take the first fact
that comes to hand, a religious system of music, that of a Protestant
church. A certain inward cause has inclined the minds of worshipers
toward these grave, monotonous melodies, a cause much greater than its
effect; that is to say, a general conception of the veritable outward
forms of worship which man owes to God; it is this general conception
which has shaped the architecture of the temple, cast out statues,
dispensed with paintings, effaced ornaments, shortened ceremonies,
confined the members of a congregation to high pews which cut off the
view, and governed the thousand details of decoration, posture, and
all other externals. This conception itself again proceeds from a
more general cause, an idea off human conduct in general, inward and
outward, prayers, actions, dispositions of every sort that man is
bound to maintain toward the Deity; it is this which has enthroned the
doctrine of grace, lessened the importance of the clergy, transformed
the sacraments, suppressed observances, and changed the religion of
discipline into one of morality. This conception, in its turn, depends
on a third one, still more general, that of moral perfection as this
is found in a perfect God, the impeccable judge, the stern overseer,
who regards every soul as sinful, meriting punishment, incapable of
virtue or of salvation, except through a stricken conscience which He
provokes and the renewal of the heart which He brings about. Here is
the master conception, consisting of duty erected into the absolute
sovereign of human life, and which prostrates all other ideals at the
feet of the moral ideal. Here we reach what is deepest in man; for, to
explain this conception, we must consider the race he belongs to,
say the German, the Northman, the formation and character of his
intellect, his ways in general of thinking and feeling, that tardiness
and frigidity of sensation which keeps him from rashly and easily
falling tinder the empire of sensual enjoyments, that bluntness of
taste, that irregularity and those outbursts of conception which
arrest in him the birth of refined and harmonious forms and methods;
that disdain of appearances, that yearning for truth, that attachment
to abstract, bare ideas which develop conscience in him at the expense
of everything else. Here the search comes to an end. We have reached
a certain primitive disposition, a particular trait belonging to
sensations of all kinds, to every conception peculiar to an age or
to a race, to characteristics inseparable from every idea and feeling
that stir in the human breast. Such are the grand causes, for these
are universal and permanent causes, present in every case and at every
moment, everywhere and always active, indestructible, and inevitably
dominant in the end, since, whatever accidents cross their path being
limited and partial, end in yielding to the obscure and incessant
repetition of their energy; so that the general structure of things
and all the main features of events are their work, all religions and
philosophies, all poetic and industrial systems, all forms of society
and of the family, all, in fine, being imprints bearing the stamp of
their seal.




IV


There is, then, a system in human ideas and sentiments, the prime
motor of which consists in general traits, certain characteristics
of thought and feeling common to men belonging to a particular race,
epoch, or country. Just as crystals in mineralogy, whatever
their diversity, proceed from a few simple physical forms, so do
civilizations in history, however these may differ, proceed from a few
spiritual forms. One is explained by a primitive geometrical element
as the other is explained by a primitive psychological element. In
order to comprehend the entire group of mineralogical species we must
first study a regular solid in the general, its facets and angles, and
observe in this abridged form the innumerable transformations of which
it is susceptible. In like manner, if we would comprehend the entire
group of historic varieties we must consider beforehand a human soul
in the general, with its two or three fundamental faculties, and, in
this abridgment, observe the principal forms it may present. This sort
of ideal tableau, the geometrical as well as psychological, is not
very complex, and we soon detect the limitations of organic conditions
to which civilizations, the same as crystals, are forcibly confined.
What do we find in man at the point of departure? Images or
representations of objects, namely, that which floats before him
internally, lasts a certain time, is effaced, and then returns after
contemplating this or that tree or animal, in short, some sensible
object. This forms the material basis of the rest and the development
of this material basis is twofold, speculative or positive, just as
these representations end in a _general conception_ or in an _active
resolution_. Such is man, summarily abridged. It is here, within these
narrow confines, that human diversities are encountered, now in the
matter itself and again in the primordial twofold development. However
insignificant in the elements they are of vast significance in the
mass, while the slightest change in the factors leads to gigantic
changes in the results. According as the representation is distinct,
as if stamped by a coining-press, or confused and blurred; according
as it concentrates in itself a larger or smaller number of the
characters of an object; according as it is violent and accompanied
with impulsions or tranquil and surrounded with calmness, so are
all the operations and the whole running-gear of the human machine
entirely transformed. In like manner, again, according as the
ulterior development of the representation varies, so does the whole
development of the man vary. If the general conception in which this
ends is merely a dry notation in Chinese fashion, language becomes
a kind of algebra, religion and poetry are reduced to a minimum,
philosophy is brought down to a sort of moral and practical common
sense, science to a collection of recipes, classifications, and
utilitarian mnemonics, the mind itself taking a whole positive
turn. If, on the contrary, the general conception in which the
representation culminates is a poetic and figurative creation, a
living symbol, as with the Aryan races, language becomes a sort of
shaded and tinted epic in which each word stands as a personage,
poesy and religion assume magnificent and inexhaustible richness,
and metaphysics develops with breadth and subtlety without
any consideration of positive bearings; the whole intellect,
notwithstanding the deviation and inevitable weaknesses of the effort,
is captivated by the beautiful and sublime, thus conceiving an ideal
type which, through its nobleness and harmony, gathers to itself all
the affections and enthusiasms of humanity. If, on the other hand, the
general conception in which the representation culminates is poetic
but abrupt, is reached not gradually but by sudden intuition, if
the original operation is not a regular development but a violent
explosion--then, as with the semitic races, metaphysical power
is wanting; the religious conception becomes that of a royal God,
consuming and solitary; science cannot take shape, the intellect grows
rigid and too headstrong to reproduce the delicate ordering of nature;
poetry cannot give birth to aught but a series of vehement, grandiose
exclamations, while language no longer renders the concatenation of
reasoning and eloquence, man being reduced to lyric enthusiasm, to
ungovernable passion, and to narrow and fanatical action. It is in
this interval between the particular representation and the universal
conception that the germs of the greatest human differences are found.
Some races, like the classic, for example, pass from the former to the
latter by a graduated scale of ideas regularly classified and more
and more general; others, like the Germanic, traverse the interval
in leaps, with uniformity and after prolonged and uncertain groping.
Others, like the Romans and the English, stop at the lowest stages;
others, like the Hindoos and Germans, mount to the uppermost.