ironment the best adapted to produce this moral state? There is
a distinct moral state for each of these formations and for each of
their branches; there is one for art in general as well as for each
particular art; for architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and
poetry, each with a germ of its own in the large field of human
psychology; each has its own law, and it is by virtue of this law that
we see each shoot up, apparently haphazard, singly and alone, amidst
the miscarriages of their neighbors, like painting in Flanders and
Holland in the seventeenth century, like poetry in England in the
sixteenth century, like music in Germany in the eighteenth century.
At this moment, and in these countries, the conditions for one art and
not for the others are fulfilled, and one branch only has bloomed out
amidst the general sterility. It is these laws of human vegetation
which history must now search for; it is this special psychology of
each special formation which must be got at; it is the composition of
a complete table of these peculiar conditions that must now be worked
out. There is nothing more delicate and nothing more difficult.
Montesquieu undertook it, but in his day the interest in history was
too recent for him to be successful; nobody, indeed, had any idea
of the road that was to be followed, and even at the present day
we scarcely begin to obtain a glimpse of it. Just as astronomy, at
bottom, is a mechanical problem, and physiology, likewise, a chemical
problem, so is history, at bottom, a _problem of psychology_. There is
a particular system of inner impressions and operations which fashions
the artist, the believer, the musician, the painter, the nomad,
the social man; for each of these, the filiation, intensity, and
interdependence of ideas and of emotions are different; each has his
own moral history, and his own special organization, along with some
master tendency and with some dominant trait. To explain each of these
would require a chapter devoted to a profound internal analysis, and
that is a work that can scarcely be called sketched out at the present
day. But one man, Stendhal, through a certain turn of mind and a
peculiar education, has attempted it, and even yet most of his readers
find his works paradoxical and obscure. His talent and ideas were
too premature. His admirable insight, his profound sayings carelessly
thrown out, the astonishing precision of his notes and logic, were not
understood; p