History of English Literature Volume 1 (of 3) — John Shaqi
History of English Literature Volume 1 (of 3)Taine, Hippolyte
History
History of English Literature Volume 1 (of 3)
Taine, Hippolyte
English literature -- History and criticism
On observing the visible man with your own eyes what do you try to find
in him? The invisible man. These words which your ears catch, those
gestures, those airs of the head, his attire and sensible operations of
all kinds, are, for you, merely so many expressions; these express
something, a soul. An inward man is hidden beneath the outward man, and
the latter simply manifests the former. You have observed the house in
which he lives, his furniture, his costume, in order to discover his
habits and tastes, the degree of his refinement or rusticity, his
extravagance or economy, his follies or his cleverness. You have
listened to his conversation and noted the inflections of his voice, the
attitudes he has assumed, so as to judge of his spirit, self-abandonment
or gayety, his energy or his rigidity. You consider his writings, works
of art, financial and political schemes, with a view to measure the
reach and limits of his intelligence, his creative power and
self-command, to ascertain the usual order, kind, and force of his
conceptions, in what way he thinks and how he resolves. All these
externals are so many avenues converging to one centre, and you follow
these only to reach that centre; here is the real man, namely, that
group of faculties and of sentiments which produces the rest. Behold a
new world, an infinite world; for each visible action involves an
infinite train of reasonings and emotions, new or old sensations which
have combined to bring this into light and which, like long ledges of
rock sunk deep in the earth, have cropped out above the surface and
attained their level. It is this subterranean world which forms the
second aim, the special object of the historian. If his critical
education suffices, he is able to discriminate under every ornament in
architecture, under every stroke of the brush in a picture, under each
phrase of literary composition, the particular sentiment out of which
the ornament, the stroke, and the phrase have sprung; he is a spectator
of the inward drama which has developed itself in the breast of the
artist or writer; the choice of words, the length or shortness of the
period, the species of metaphor, the accent of a verse, the chain of
reasoning--all are to him an indication; while his eyes are reading the
text his mind and soul are following the steady flow and ever-changing
series of emotions and conceptions from which this text has issued; he
is working out its psychology. Should you desire to study this
operation, regard the promoter and model of all the high culture of the
epoch, Goethe, who, before composing his "Iphigenia" spent days in
making drawings of the most perfect statues and who, at last, his eyes
filled with the noble forms of antique scenery and his mind penetrated
by the harmonious beauty of antique life, succeeded in reproducing
internally, with such exactness, the habits and yearnings of Greek
imagination as to provide us with an almost twin sister of the
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