HISTOKY OP ENGLISH LITERATURE HISTORY ENGLISH LITERATURE BY H. A. TATNE, D.C.L. TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY H. VAN LAUN ONE OP THE MA8TKRS AT THE EDINBURGH ACADEMY WITH PREFACE BY R. H. STODDARD VOL. I. NEW YORK WORTHINGTON CO., 747 BROADWAY 1889 *s COPYRIGHT, 1889, BY R. H. STODDARD.. PREFACE. THE history of the literature of a people, like the history of that people, may be so written as to be ex- haustive but tedious, or be so written as to be brilliant but superficial, the historian depending in the one case upon his accumulation and verification of knowledge, and in the other case upon his classification of this knowledge, and the light in which he presents it to his readers. We have a history of the letter of English Literature in Warton, who was a diligent collector of facts, and we have here a history of the spirit of Eng- lish Literature by Taine, who is an equally diligent creator of fancies. He has a theory respecting English Literature, and that is, that it is not only the interpreta- tion and expression of the English race, but also the inter- pretation and expression of the surroundings of this race in its infancy and childhood, or, in other words, that it is climatic. He finds in it, or imagines that he finds in it, the reflection, the impress, the remembrances of the clouds which overhang and the billows which beat against its Teutonic cradleland. Darkened by skyey in- fluences, strengthened by buffeting winds, hardened by the rigors of long winters, gloomy, stern, tempestuous, savage, it stammered in the Edda, shouted in Sagas, and when, its days of pagan truancy over, it had learned to spell in the horn-book of Christianity, it was edified by hymns like those of Csedmon, and metrical para- phrases of Biblical history. This is to consider the ori- 2GC6521 vi PREFACE. gins of English Literature curiously, but not so curiously as to consider the elements which went to the making of this Literature as existing through all the changes that it has undergone ; to find them, for example, in Shake- speare and Swift, and to find them in Byron as in both. This is surely to consider a little too curiously, and to seek to trace heredity to an invisible attenuation. The primitive letter of English Literature is not so much Saxon as Scandinavian, and its early letter is more Norman than Saxon. Beowulf is not an English poem, nor are the old metrical romances English poems, for, with scarcely an exception, they can be traced to Latin or French originals. Caedmon is English, in a simple, rude way, as, in a scholarly way, were Bede, Alcuin and Alfred. But English poet there was none until we come to Chaucer. None, that is, whose verse we read because it gives us pleasure, and not because it illus- trates the manners of the time when it was written. Our interest in Chaucer is not historical or archaeological, but poetical. A man of importance through his rela- tionship with John of Gaunt, and the state services in which he was employed, a courtier, a traveler, versed in the scholarship of his period, in history, philosophy, classical lore, he served his apprenticeship to verse in translations and imitations from French and Italian poets and allegorists, becoming through the practice which he bestowed upon their laborious trifles a skilful workman, and, at last, in his "Canterbury Tales," a master of song. Down to this time he had dallied with the craft which he professed, but now in his ma- ture manhood, ripened by experience, and strengthened by the consciousness of his powers, he dismissed the poetic shadows which he had hitherto pursued, and de- PREFACE. Vii voted himself to the study of human beings. He rescued the art of story-telling from the fumbling hands of the writers of chivalrous romances, and, inspired by Boccac- cio, whom he more than excelled, he invoked the spirits of brave men and beautiful women, whose memory his- tory had recorded and tradition consecrated, summoned them from their broken urns, and breathed the breath of life into their cold and crumbling ashes. The Past gave up its dead, whom he restored to life by his magic spell, and enthroned forever in his deathless pages. Five hundred years have passed since the " Canterbury Tales " were first told, and they are still unsurpassed in English Literature. The sovereign father of poetic story-telling has had many successors, but none who has worn the crown so royally, so graciously, so surely as himself. There never were such tales as these ! And they are as fresh to-day as the day when they were written, as lovely and as glorious, bathed in the early light of the English Spring, sown with myriads of daisies, sparkling with unrisen dews, jubilant in the shower of song from up-soaring larks. And what a world of life and feeling they reveal to us through the dim vista of the years, what joys and sorrows, what passion and pain, the tenderness of love, the bitter- ness of death, the nameless charm and pathos with which emotion is clothed when it translates itself from the actual world of man into the ideal heaven of genius ! And how vivid and joyous it is, this long procession of figures that we see on its way from the Tabard Inn, at Southwark, to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury, poetic pilgrims whose shoes never wear out, whose staffs always support them, and who are always supplied with scrip. Knight and squire, frank- yiii PREFACE. lin and merchant, prioress and nuns, priest and par- doner, rich, poor, high, low, they are all alive, living, breathing, moving men and women, with hearts, and brains, and characters of their own. They are the first studies of character that we find in English Litera- ture, and being such are interesting as the ancestors of the multitude of characters that we are to meet two centuries later in the Elizabethan drama. Chaucer was the first English poet with the dramatic instinct, as well as the first English poet with the ar- tistic instinct. Dramatist and painter, he was the father of our Song. The elements of English Literature, which are appar- ently so simple, are really so complex that no simple history of their manifestations, agreements, and diver- gences is possible. The method which confines itself to their chronological succession is a good one, and the method which confines itself to their critical analysis is also a good one ; the objection to both is that neither goes far enough, and that neither can be understood without the other. The method of Taine is the critical, not the chronological method, and while its results are always brilliant, they are seldom wholly satisfactory. For granting that English Litera- ture is as positive an outgrowth of the English mind as he maintains, the spirit in which he studies it is quite as positive an outgrowth of the French mind. His comprehension of English Literature is superior to that of most of his countrymen, but all the same it is a Gallic comprehension. Like the gentleman in the old Spanish song, if his soul is in Segovia, his body is in Madrid. The history of English Literature is the history of the PREFACE. ix English people, or, more strictly speaking, of the intel- lectual side of that people of which their books are the landmarks and monuments. What it was in the pre- historic period we may infer from the shadowy tradi- tions that loom through the mists of the-Past, traditions of races that were vanished, and of myths that were long since extinct. Beginning with Chaucer, who emerges from a confused background of struggling figures, bearded skalds, who in uncouth Northern tongues cele- brate in stormy sagas the savage exploits of their gods and heroes, and tonsured monks, who in barbarous Latin stammer out the canticles of the psalmist and the denunciations of the prophets, we find ourselves in the latter half of the fourteenth century in a bright and beautiful country, a kingdom whose inhabitants are ro- bust, hearty, happy, and whose monarch is frank, joy- ous, kindly, magnificent, a sovereign soul who rules un- questioned by the divine right of nature. The palace of Chaucer surpassed the palaces of antiquity in the splendor of its decorations, and his treasure-house was heaped with the riches of Greece, Rome, Italy, the peaceful spoils of letters and the arts. His reign was a perpetual feast, and his guests were the greatest kings and queens, the noblest lords and ladies, captains and conquerors of renown, who created or destroyed empires, descendants and inheritors of the royal family of fame. The successors of Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Occleve, and the rest, divided his kingdom after his death, but held their sceptres with a feeble hand. They achieved nothing that could not be well spared from English verse, his garrulity becoming prolixity m their mouths, his scholarship pedantry, and his art in depicting char- acter, the mechanical craft of weavers, who merely x PREFACE. indicated the outlines of rude figures in their tapestried arras. There were seasons of sterility and seasons of fertility after the golden year of Chaucer, and first among the latter was the oile which began with "Wyatt and Surrey. Many seeds were sown broadcast at that time, and the har- vests were gathered and stored in spacious garners. The cultivation of Italian letters, which had so enriched the domain of Chaucer, dominated Wyatt and Surrey, who from the trim garden of Petrarch transplanted the sonnet form into the broad fields and lush meadows of English verse, where, losing its Southern elegance and sweetness, it grew so vigorously but wildly that it was soon a weed, but a weed of glorious feature. It was from these poets that we received the Sonnet, which nourished so abund- antly under the hands of Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Shakespeare and Milton, and which, when abandoned by the last for graver things, put forth neither blossom nor leaf until after the expiration of more than a century its vitality was restored by Words- worth. There is no better reading than the best son- nets of Sidney, Shakespeare and Milton ; but these, which are few and far between, and, indeed, all the good English sonnets, are easily comprised in a small volume. But we owe more than the Sonnet to these courtly sing- ers of the reign of Henry VIII., or rather to one of them, Surrey, who created blank verse, which is the glory of English Poetry, and without which we could not have had the Elizabethan drama. If not of classic birth, it was of classic nurture, for Surrey found it in the arms of Virgil, who was the most widely known of all the poets of antiquity, and the one who was most translated into the languages of modern Europe. The era of PREFACE. xi English translation began epically with Virgil, and dramatically with Seneca, and continued until it em- braced all the masters of Eoman and Grecian song, whose spirit eluded the eager hands that so roughly clutched its body. What Bentley said of the Homer of Pope must be said with a difference of the Homer and Virgil of Chapman and Dryden, of Ogilby and Cowper. They are pretty poems, but we must not call them Homer and Virgil. But earlier poets than these had devoted their energies to better because original work. For the element of story-telling, which was the inspira- tion of Chaucer, was active in such congeries of chron- icle poems as " The Mirrour for Magistrates," to which Lord Buckhurst contributed a magnificent Induction, and a new element of life of which Chaucer was but dimly conscious, inspired a new and more glorious form of verse. It was begotten of the mighty line of Surrey, and its first birth was Buckhurst's " Gorboduc," which strode into the field of letters like a royal herald, grave and stiff in its embroidered robe, and ushered in English Tragedy, of which it pronounced the prologue. English Literature was greater then than ever before or since, and greatest then in the Drama. It eclipsed the drama of all other literatures in originality and variety, in rich- ness and vigor, in merriment and pathos, and in the dauntless courage, the fearless certainty with which it grappled with emotion and passion. It was as much at home in the cottage of the clown as in the manor-house of the gentleman, or the palace of the king. No nobil- ity to which the heart can rise was too high for it, and no villainy to which the brain can descend was too low. The Thames and the Tiber were alike to it, and if it declaimed yesterday with Brutus and Antony in the xii PREFACE. Roman forum, it was ready to drink to-day with Fal- staff and Poins and Pistol, at Eastcheap or Gadshill. Xative of Stratford, and citizen of London, beyond all men that ever lived Shakespeare was a man of the world. We think of Shakespeare when we speak of the Eliza- bethan drama, and justly, but we must not forget his contemporaries and successors, who, if not of the same great intellectual race, were nevertheless noble and beau- tiful poets, whom we ought to read for their own sake as well as the sake of their master, whose genius is magnified by comparison with theirs. No one who has not studied Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Marston and Middleton can know how great a poet Shakespeare was, how wise and large a thinker, and how tolerant, gracious, and good a man. We feel what he was when we come to Dryden, Davenant, and their fellows, who not being able to write blank verse, wrote mechanical and turgid rhyme, and to Etherege, Con- greve and Vanburgh, who, not being able to write either well, wrote slovenly and filthy prose. The reign of poetry, outside of the drama, the reign of poetry pure and simple, reached its supremacy in the sixteenth century in " The Faerie Queene," and in the seventeenth century in "Paradise Lost." The sceptre was powerless in the hands of Dryden, who was not a poetical poet, and more powerless in the fingers of Pope, who, also, was not a poetical poet, both being merely satirists, one manly and straightforward, the other feminine and malignant. If it were not for what Thomson and Cowper attempted in " The Sea- sons " and " The Task," for what Collins attained in his Odes, and Gray in his Elegy, and for the wonderful PREFACE. xiii burst of lyricism in Burns, one might almost say that the eighteenth century was the century of prose. It was the century of the political pamphlet, the social essay, the novel ; the century of Swift, of Steele and Addison, of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smol- let, and Goldsmith ; of "Robinson Crusoe," "Pamela," " Tom Jones," " Tristram Shandy," " Roderick Ran- dom," and " The Vicar of Wakefield." But in speak- ing of these writings, and, as I would like to, of others of our own century, which seems to me the most important since the age of Elizabeth, inasmuch as it has produced poets like Byron, the greatest ele- mental force since Marlowe, Wordsworth, the first to meditate profoundly on Nature, and Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson, who have established the worship of the Beautiful in the religion of poetry; of novelists like Scott, who as a creator of character is second to Shakespeare alone, Dickens, whose studies of the hu- mors of men are more amusing than Jonson's, and Thackeray, who is superior to his master Fielding ; in saying anything further, I am keeping and I would not willingly keep the reader from the work of a remarkable man, who has written once and for all the most acute, suggestive, critical, and thoughtful History of English Literature. R. H. STODDARD. THE CENTURY, NEW YORK, July 29, 1889. CONTENTS. INTRODUCTION. PAOS Historical documents serre only as a clue to reconstruct the visible individual 2 The outer man is only a clue to study the inner, invisible man ......... 6 The state and the actions of the inner and invisible man have their causes in certain general frays of thought and feeling 10 Chief causes of thoughts and feelings. Their historical effects . . . . " . . . . . 13 The three primordial forces i. Race '. . . . . . . .17 n. Surroundings 19 m. Epoch 21 History is a mechanical and psychological problem. Within certain -limits man can foretell . . .23 Production of the results of a primordial cause. Common elements/ Composition of groups. Law of mutual dependence. Law of proportional influences . .25 Law of formation of a group. Examples and indications . 30 General problem and future of history. Psychological method. Value of literature. Purpose in writing this book . 32 xvi CONTENTS. BOOK L THE SOUEGE. CHAPTEE I. 2TJ)e Saxons. PAGE L Their original country Soil, sea, sky, climate Their new country A moist land and a thank- less soil Influence of climate on character . 37 IL Their bodily structure Food Manners Unculti- vated instincts, German and English . . 41 HL Noble instincts in Germany The individual The family The state Keligion The Edda Tragi-heroic conception of the world and of man- kind 49 rv. Noble instincts in England Warrior and chieftain Husband and wife The poem of Beowulf Barbarian society and the barbarian hero . . 58 v. Pagan poems Kind and force of sentiments Bent of mind and speech Force of impression ; harsh- ness of expression . . . . . .68 VT. Christian poems Wherein the Saxons are predis- posed to Christianity How converted Their view of Christianity Hymns of Csedmon Funeral hymn Poem of Judith Paraphrase of the Bible 72 Vli. Why Latin culture took no hold on the Saxons Reasons drawn from the Saxon conquest Bede, Alcuin, Alfred Translations Chronicles Compilations Impotence of Latin writers Reasons drawn from the Saxon character Adhelm Alcuin Latin verse Poetic dia- logues Bad taste of the Latin writers #2 CONTENTS. xvii PADS vm. Contrast of German and Latin races Character of the Saxon race Its endurance under the Nor- man conquest ...... 92 CHAPTEE IL QThc liormana. L Formation and character of Feudalism ... 95 II. The Norman invasion ; character of the Normans Contrast with the Saxons The Normans are French How they became so Their taste and architecture Their spirit of inquiry and their literature Chivalry and amusements Their tactics and their success . . . . .96 ill. Bent of the French genius Two principal charac- teristics ; clear and consecutive ideas Psycho- logical form of French genius Prosaic histories ; lack of colour and passion, ease and discursive- ness Natural logic and clearness, soberness, grace and delicacy, refinement and cynicism Order and charm The nature of the beauty and of the ideas which the French have introduced . 104 IV. The Normans in England Their position and their tyranny They implant their literature and language They forget the same Learn English by degrees Gradually English becomes galli- cised ........ 115 v. They translate French works into English Opinion of Sir John Mandeville Layamon, Robert of Gloucester, Robert de Brunne They imitate in English the French literature Moral manuals, chansons, fabliaux, Gestes Brightness, frivolity, and futility of this French literature Barbarity and ignorance of the feudal civilisation Geste xviii CONTENTS. MM of Richard Cceur de Lion, and voyages of Sir John Mandeville Poorness of the literature in- troduced and implanted in England Why it has not endured on the Continent or in England . 121 vi. The Saxons in England Endurance of the Saxon nation, and formation of the English constitution Endurance of the Saxon character, and forma- tion of the English character . . . .138 vn.-ix. Comparison of the ideal hero in France and England Fabliaux of Reynard, and ballads of Robin Hood How the Saxon character makes way for and supports political liberty Compa- rison of the condition of the Commons in France and England Theory of the English constitu- tion, by Sir John Fortescue How the Saxon constitution makes way for and supports political liberty Situation of the Church, and precursors of the Reformation in England Piers Plowman and Wycliffe How the Saxon character and the situation of the Norman Church made way for ^religious reform Incompleteness and importance of the national literature Why it has not endured 145 CHAPTEE III. STfje fit&j STotigtw, Chaucer His education His political and social life Wherein his talent was serviceable He paints the second feudal society . . .170 How the middle age degenerated Decline of the ' serious element in manners, books, and works of art Need of excitement Analogies of archi- tecture and literature 171 CONTENTS. si* PAOB m. Wherein Chaucer belongs to the middle -age Romantic and ornamental poems Le Roman de la Rose Troilus and Cressida Canterbury Tales Order of description and events The House of Fame Fantastic dreams and visions Love poems Troilus and Cressida Exaggerated de- velopment of love in the middle age Why the mind took this path Mystic love The Flower and the Leaf Sensual love Troilus and Cressida 1 73 iv. Wherein Chaucer is French Satirical and jovial poems Canterbury Tales The Wife of Bath and marriage The mendicant friar and religion Buffoonery, waggery, and coarseness in the middle-age . 193 v. Wherein Chaucer was English and original Idea of character and individual Van Eyck and Chaucer contemporary Prologue to Canterbury Tales Portraits of the franklin, monk, miller, citizen, knight, squire, prioress, the good clerk Connection of events and characters General idea Importance of the same Chaucer a pre- cursor of the Reformation He halts by the way Tediousness and Childishness Causes of this feebleness His prose, and scholastic notion How he is isolated in his age .... 203 VI. Connection of philosophy and poetry How general notions failed under the scholastic philosophy Why poetry failed Comparison of civilisation and decadence in the middle age, and in Spain Extinction of the English literature Translators Rhyming chroniclers Didactic poets Com- pilers of moralities Gower Occleve Lydgate Analogy of taste in costumes, buildings, and literature Sad notion of fate, and human misery Hawes Barclay Skelton Eletaents of the Reformation and of the Renaissance , 213 CONTENTS. BOOK II. THE KENAISSANCE. CHAPTEE I. Eenaissame. 1. MANNERS OP THE TIME. PADS I. Idea which men had formed of the world, since the dissolution of the old society How and why human inventiveness reappears The form of the spirit of the Renaissance The representation of objects is imitative, characteristic, and complete 227 n. Why the ideal changes Improvement of the state of man in Europe In England Peace In- dustry Commerce Pasturage Agriculture Growth of public wealth Buildings and furni- ture The palace, meals and habits Court pageantries Celebrations under Elizabeth Masques under James I. .... 230 in. Manners of the people Pageants Theatres Vil- lage feasts Pagan development . . . 239 iv. Models The ancients Translation and study of classical authors Sympathy for the manners and mythology of the ancients The moderns Taste for Italian writings and ideas Poetry and painting in Italy were pagan The ideal is the strong and happy man, limited by the present life ........ 243 2. POETRY. I. The English Renaissance is the Renaissance of the Saxon genius . . . . . . 250 n. The forerunners The Earl of Surrey His feudal and chivalrous life His English individual CONTENTS. xxi PAGE character His serious and melancholy poems His conception of inward love . . . .250 m. His style His masters, Petrarch and Virgil His progress, power, precocious perfection Birth of art Weaknesses, imitation, research Art in- complete . . . . . . .256 rv. Growth and completion of art Euphues and fashion Style and spirit of the Renaissance Copious- ness and irregularity How manners, style, and spirit correspond Sir Philip Sydn.ey His edu- cation, life, character His learning, gravity, generosity, forcible expression The Arcadia Exaggeration and mannerism of sentiments and style Defence ofPoesie Eloquence and energy Hia sonnets Wherein the body and the passions of the Renaissance differ from those of the moderns Sensual love Mystical love . .259 V. Pastoral poetry The great number of poets Spirit and force of the poetry State of mind which produces it Love of the country Reappearance of the ancient gods Enthusiasm for beauty Picture of ingenuous and happy love Shaks- peare, Jonson, Fletcher, Drayton, Marlowe, Warner, Breton, Lodge, Greene How the trans- formation of the people transforms art . . 276 vi. Ideal poetry SpenserHis life His character His platonism His Hymns of love and beauty Copiousness of his imagination How far it was suited for the epic Wherein it was allied to the "faSrie " His tentatives Shepherd's Calendar His short poems Eis masterpiece The Faerie Queene His epic is allegorical and yet life-like It embraces Christian chivalry and the Pagan Olympus How it combines these . . .289 xxii CONTENTS. PAIR vil. The Faerie Queene Impossible events How they appear natural Belphcebe and Chrysogone Fairj and gigantic pictures and landscapes Why they must be so The cave of Mammon, and the gardens of Acrasia How Spenser composes Wherein the art of the Renaissance is complete 300 3. PROSE. I. Limit of the poetry Changes in society and manners How the return to nature becomes an appeal to the senses Corresponding changes in poetry How agreeableness replaces energy How pretti- ness replaces the beautiful Refinements Carew, Suckling, Herrick Affectation Quarles, Herbert, Babington, Donne, Cowley Beginning of the classic style, and drawing-room life . 321 n. How poetry passed into prose Connection of science and art In Italy In England How the triumph of nature develops, the exercise of the natural reason Scholars, historians, speakers, compilers, politicians, antiquaries, philosophers, theologians The abundance of talent, and the rarity of fine works Superfluousness, punctili- ousness, and pedantry of the style Originality, precision, energy, and richness of the style How, unlike the classical writers, they represent the individual, not the idea . . . .330 ra. Robert Burton His life and character Vastness and confusion of his acquirements His subject, the Anatomy of Melancholy Scholastic divisions Medley of moral and medical science . . 336 IV. Sir Thomas Browne His talent His imagination is that of a North-man Hydriotaphia, Eeligio CONTENTS. xziii PAOK Medici His ideas, curiosity, and doubts belong to the age of the Eenaissance Pseudodoxia Effects of this activity and this direction of the public mind 343 Francis Bacon His talent His originality Con- centration and brightness of his style Compari- sons and aphorisms The Essays- His style not argumentative, but intuitive His practical good sense Turning-point of his philosophy The object of science is the amelioration of the condition of man New Atlantis The idea is in accordance with the state of affairs and the spirit of the times It completes the Renaissance It introduces a new method The Organum Where Bacon stopped Limits of the spirit of the age How the conception of the world, which had been poetic, became mechanical How the Renaissance ended in the establishment of positive science 347 CHAPTER II. i. The public The stage . . . : 360 n. Manners of the sixteenth century Violent and complete expansion of nature . . . .363 m. English manners Expansion of the energetic and gloomy character . . . . . .373 IV. The poets General harmony between the character of a poet and that of his age Nash, Decker, Kyd, Peele, Lodge, Greene Their condition and life Marlowe His life His works Tambur- xxiv CONTENTS. PAGH lain* The Jew of Malta Edward II. Faustus His conception of man .... 380 V. Formation of this drama The process and charac- ter of this art Imitative sympathy, which depicts by expressive examples Contrast of classical and Germanic art Psychological con- struction and proper sphere of these two arts . 397 vi. Male characters Furious passions Tragical events Exaggerated characters The Duke of Hilarity Massinger FoTd'sAnnalella Webster's Duchess of Malfi and Vittoria Corombona Female charac- ters Germanic idea of love and marriage Euphrasia, Bianca, Arethusa, Ordella, Aspasia Amoret, in Beaumont and Fletcher Penthea in Ford Agreement of the moral and physical type 404 INTRODUCTION. The historian might place himself for a given period, say a series of ages, or in the human soul, or with some particular people ; he might study, describe, relate, all the events, all the transformations, all the revolutions which had been accomplished in the internal man ; and when he had finished his work, he would have a history of civilisa- tion amongst the people and in the period he had selected. GUIZOT, Civilisation in Europe, p. 25. HISTORY has been transformed, -within a hundred years in Germany, within sixty years in France, and that hy the study of their literatures. It was perceived that a literary work is not a mere individual play of imagination', the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners, a manifestation of a certain kind of mind. It was concluded that we might recover, from the monu- ments of literature, a knowledge of the manner in which men thought and felt centuries ago. The attempt was made, and it succeeded. Pondering on these modes of feeling and thought, men decided that they were facts of the highest kind. They saw that these facts bore reference to the most important occurrences, that they explained and were explained by them, that it was necessary thenceforth to give them a rank, and a most important rank, in his- tory. This rank they have received, and from that moment history has undergone a complete change : in its subject-matter, its system, its machinery, the appre- VOL. I. 3 2 INTRODUCTION. elation of laws and of causes. It is this change, such as it is and must be, that we shall here endeavour to exhibit. I. Historical "What is your first remark on turning over the great, lr-.Toniy i stiff leaves of a folio, the yellow sheets of a manuscript, as a clue to a p 0enij a CO( Je of laws, a confession of faith ? This, the visible you say, did not come into existence all alone. It is but individual. ft mou ]^ iji<- ft a fossil shell, an imprint, like one of those shapes embossed in stone by an, animal which lived and perished. Under the shell there was an animal, and behind the document there was a man. Why do you study the shell, except to bring before you the animal I So you study the document only to know the man. The shell and the document are lifeless wrecks, valuable only as a clue to the entire and living existence. We must get hold of this existence, endeavour to re-create it. It is a mistake to study the document, as if it were isolated. This were to treat things like a simple scholar, to fall into the error of the bibliomaniac. Neither mythology nor languages exist in themselves ; but only men, who arrange words and imagery according to the necessities of their organs and the original bent of their intellects. A dogma is nothing in itself; look at the people who have made it, a portrait, for instance, of the sixteenth century, say the stern powerful face of an English arch- bishop or martyr. Nothing exists except tlirough some individual man ; it is this individual with whom we must become acquainted. When we have established the parentage of dogmas, or the classification of poems, or the progress of constitutions, or the transformation of idioms, we have only cleared the soil: genuine history is brought into existence only when the historian begins INTRODUCTION. 3 to unravel, across the lapse of time, the living man, toiling, impassioned, entrenched in his customs, with his voice and features, his gestures and his dress, distinct and complete as he from whom we have just parted in the street. Let us endeavour, then, to annihilate as far as possible this great interval of time, which prevents us from seeing man with our eyes, with the eyes of our head. What have we under the fair glazed pages of a modern poem ? A modern poet, who has studied and travelled, a man like Alfred de Musset, Yictor Hugo, Lamartine, or Heine, in a black coat and gloves, wel- comed by the ladies, and making every evening his fifty bows and his score of bon-mots in society, reading the papers in the morning, lodging as a rule on a second floor; not over gay, because he has nerves, and especi- ally because, in this dense democracy where we choke one another, the discredit of the dignities of office has exaggerated his pretensions while increasing his im- portance, and because the keenness of his feelings in general disposes him somewhat to believe himself a deity. This is what we take note of under modern Meditations or Sonnets. Even so, under a tragedy of the seventeenth century we have a poet, like Eacine for instance, elegant, staid, a courtier, a fine talker, with a majestic wig and ribboned shoes, at heart a royalist and a Christian, who says, " God has been so gracious to me, that in whatever company I find my- self I never have occasion to blush for the gospel or the king ;" 1 clever at entertaining the prince, and rendering 1 Mary "Wollstonecraft, in her Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, p. 25, says, in quoting this passage, " What could be expected from the courtier who could write in these terms to Madame de Haintenon." Ta 4 INTRODUCTION. for him into good French the " old French ofAmyot;" very respectful to the great, always " knowing his place;" as assiduous and reserved at Marly as at Versailles, amidst the regular pleasures of polished and ornate nature, amidst the salutations, graces, airs, and fopperies of the "braided lords, who rose early in the morning to obtain the promise of being appointed to some office in case of the death of the present holder, and amongst charming ladies who count their genealogies on their fingers in order to obtain the right of sitting down in the presence of the King or Queen. On that , head consult St. Simon and the engravings of Perelle, as for the present age you have consulted Balzac and the water- colours of Eugene Land. Similarly, when we read a Greek tragedy, our first care should be to jealise to ourselves the Greeks, that is, the men who live half naked, in the gymnasia, or in the public squares, under a glowing sky, face to face with the most beautiful and the most noble landscapes, bent on making their bodies lithe and strong, on conversing, discussing, voting, carry- ing on patriotic piracies, nevertheless lazy and temperate, with three urns for their furniture, two anchovies in a jar of oil for their food, waited on by slaves, so as to give them leisure to cultivate their understanding and exercise their limbs, with no desire beyond that of having the most beautiful town, the most beautiful processions, the most beautiful ideas, the most beautiful men. On this subject, a statue such as the Meleager or the Theseus of the Parthenon, or still more, the sight of the Mediter- ranean, blue and lustrous as a silken tunic, and the islands that stud it with their massive marble outlines : add to these twenty select phrases from Plato and Aristo- phanes, and they will teach you much more than a multi- INTRODUCTION. 5 tude of dissertations and commentaries And so again, in order to understand an Indian Purana, begin by imagin- ing to yourself the father of a family, who, " having seen a son on his son's knees," retires, according to the law, into solitude, with an axe and a pitcher under a banyan tree, by the brook-side, talks no more, adds fast to fast, dwells naked between four fires, and under that terrible sun, which devours and renews without end all things living ; who. for weeks at a time fixes his imagination first upon the feet of Brahma, next upon his knee, next upon his thigh, next upon his navel, and so on, until, beneath the strain of this intense meditation, hallucinations begin to appear, until all the forms of existence, mingled and transformed the one with the other, quaver before a sight dazzled and giddy, until the motionless man, catching in his breath, with fixed gaze, beholds the universe vanishing like a smoke in the universal void of Being into which he hopes to be absorbed. To this end a voyage to India would be the best instructor ; or for want of better, the accounts of travellers, books of geography, botany, ethnology, will serve their turn. In each case the search must be the same. Language, legislation, creeds, are only abstract things : the complete tiling is the man who acts, the man corporeal and visible, who eats, walks, fights, labours. Leave aside the theory and the mechanism of constitutions, religions and their systems, and try to see men in their work- shops, in their offices, in their fields, with their sky and soil, their houses, their dress, cultivations, meals, as you do when, landing in England or Italy, you look at faces and motions, roads and inns, a citizen taking his walk, a workman drinking. Our great care should 6 INTKODUCTION. be to supply as much as possible the want of present, personal, direct, and sensible observation which we can no longer practise ; for it is the only means of knowing men. Let us make the past present : in order to judge of a thing, it must be before us ; there is no experience in respect of what is absent. Doubtless this reconstruc- tion is always incomplete ; it c?n produce only incom- plete judgments ; but that we cannot help. It is better to have an imperfect knowledge than none at all; and there is no other means of acquainting ourselves ap- proximately with the events of other days, than to see approximately the men of other days. This is the first step in history ; it was made in Europe at the revival of imagination, toward the close of the last century, by Lessing and Walter Scott ; a little later in France, by Chateaubriand, Augustin Thierry, Michelet, and others. And now for the second step. II. ne outer When you consider with your eyes the visible man, man is only * ^ what do you look for ? The man invisible. The words which enter your ears, the gestures, the motions of his visible man. head, the clothes he wears, visible acts and deeds of every kind, are expressions merely ; somewhat is revealed beneath them, and that is a soul An inner man is con- cealed beneath the outer man ; the second does but reveal the first. You look at his house, furniture, dress ; and that in order to discover in them the marks of his habits and tastes, the degree of his refinement or rusticity, his extravagance or his economy, his stupidity or his acuteness. You listen to his conversation, and you note the inflexions of his voice, the changes in his INTRODUCTION. 7 attitudes ; and that in order to judge of his vivacity, his self-forgetfulness or his gaiety, his energy or his con- straint. You consider his writings, his artistic produc- tions, his business transactions or political ventures ; and that in order to measure the scope and limits of his intelligence, his inventiveness, his coolness, to find out the order, the character, the general force of his ideas, the mode in which he thinks and resolves. All these externals are but avenues converging towards a centre ; you enter them simply in order to reach that centre ; and that centre is the genuine man, I mean that mass of faculties and feelings which are the inner man. We have reached a new world, which is infinite, because every action which we see involves an infinite association of reasonings, emotions, sensations new and old, which have served to bring it to light, and which, like great rocks deep-seated in the ground, find in it their end and their level This underworld is a new subject-matter, proper to the historian. If his critical education is sufficient, he can lay bare, under every detail of architecture, every stroke in a picture, every phrase in a writing, the special sensation whence detail, stroke, or phrase had issue ; he is present at the drama which was enacted in the soul of artist or writer ; the choice of a word, the brevity or length of a sentence, the nature of a metaphor, the accent of a verse, the devel- opment of an argument everything is a symbol to him ; while his eyes read the text, his soul and mind pursue the continuous development and the everchanging succession of the emotions and conceptions out of which the text has sprung : in short, he works out its psychology. If you would observe this operation, consider the origin- ator and model of all grand contemporary culture, Goethe, 8 INTRODUCTION. who, before writing Iphigenia, employed day after day in making drawings of the most finished statues, and who at last, his eyes filled with the noble forms of ancient scenery, his mind penetrated by the harmonious loveli- ness of antique life, succeeded in reproducing so exactly in himself the habits and peculiarities of the Greek imagination, that he gives us almost the twin sister of the Antigone of Sophocles, and the goddesses of Phidias This precise and proved interpretation of past sensa- tions has given to history, in our days, a second birth ; hardly anything of the sort was known to the preceding century. They thought men of every race and century were all but identical; the Greek, the barbarian, the Hindoo, the man of the Eenaissance, and the man of the eighteenth century, as if they had been turned out of a common mould ; and all in conformity to a certain abstract conception, which served for the whole human race. They knew man, but not men; they had not penetrated to the soul ; they had not seen the infinite diversity and marvellous complexity of souls ; they did not know that the moral constitution of a people or an age is as particular and distinct as the physical structure of a family of plants or an order of animals. Now-a- days, history, like zoology, has found its anatomy ; and whatever the branch of history to which you devote your- self, philology, linguistic lore, mythology, it is by these means you must strive to produce new fruit Amid so many writers who, since the time of Herder, Ottfried Muller, and Goethe, have continued and still improve this great method, let the reader consider only two his- torians and two works, Carlyle's Cromwell, and Sainte- Beuve's Port-Royal: he will see with what fairness, exactness, depth of insight, a man may discover a soul INTRODUCTION. 9 beneath its actions and its works ; how behind the old general, in place of a vulgar hypocritical schemer, we re- cover a man troubled with the obscure reveries of a melancholic imagination, but with practical instincts and faculties, English to the core, strange and incomprehen- sible to one who has not studied the climate and the race ; how, with about a hundred meagre letters and a score of mutilated speeches, we may follow him from his farm and team, to the general's tent and to the Protector's throne, in his transmutation and development, in his pri