[Footnote A:  Walt Whitman (1819-1892), the most original of American poets, was born in West Hills, Long Island, educated in the Brooklyn Public Schools, and apprenticed to a printer.  As a youth he taught in a country school, and later went into journalism in New York, Brooklyn, and New Orleans.  The first edition of “Leaves of Grass” appeared in 1855, with the remarkable preface here printed.  During the war he acted as a volunteer nurse in the army hospitals, and, when it closed, he became a clerk in the government service at Washington.  He continued to write almost till his death.]

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.