ort of a life a nation or an epoch leads, that a writer rallies to
himself the sympathies of a nation or of an epoch. Hence, among the
documents which bring before our eyes the sentiments of preceding
generations, a literature, and especially a great literature, is
incomparably the best. It resembles those admirable instruments of
remarkable sensitiveness which physicists make use of to detect and
measure the most profound and delicate changes that occur in a human
body. There is nothing approaching this in constitutions or religions;
the articles of a code or of a catechism do no more than depict mind
in gross and without finesse; if there are any documents which show
life and spirit in politics and in creeds, they are the eloquent
discourses of the pulpit and the tribune, memoirs and personal
confessions, all belonging to literature, so that, outside of itself,
literature embodies whatever is good elsewhere. It is mainly in
studying literatures that we are able to produce moral history, and
arrive at some knowledge of the psychological laws on which events
depend.

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