I have undertaken to write a history of a literature and to ascertain 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 Ecole 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’Heredite.”]

[Footnote 2:  Spinosa, “Ethics,” part iv., axiom.]

[Footnote 3:  For this scale of coordinate effects consult, “Langues Semitiques,” by Renan, ch I, “Comparison des civilizations Grecque et Romaine,” vol I, ch I, 3d ed, by Mommsen, “Consequences de la democratie,” vol III., by Tocqueville.]

[Footnote 4:  “L’Esprit des Lois,” by Montesquieu; the essential principles of the three governments.]