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
subordination and in the idea of duty, you perceive, as in Germanic
nations, the security and contentment of the household, the firm
foundations of domestic life, the slow and imperfect development of
worldly matters, innate respect for established rank, superstitious
reverence for the past, maintenance of social inequalities, natural and
habitual deference to the law. Similarly in a race, just as there is a
difference of aptitude for general ideas, so will its religion, art, and
philosophy be different. If man is naturally fitted for broader
universal conceptions and inclined at the same time to their
derangement, through the nervous irritability of an overexcited
organization, we find, as in India, a surprising richness of gigantic
religious creations, a splendid bloom of extravagant transparent epics,
a strange concatenation of subtle, imaginative philosophic systems, all
so intimately associated and so interpenetrated with a common sap, that
we at once recognize them, by their amplitude, by their color, and by
their disorder, as productions of the same climate and of the same
spirit. If, on the contrary, the naturally sound and well-balanced man
is content to restrict his conceptions to narrow bounds in order to cast
them in more precise forms, we see, as in Greece, a theology of artists
and narrators, special gods that are soon separated from objects and
almost transformed at once into substantial personages, the sentiment of
universal unity nearly effaced and scarcely maintained in the vague
notion of destiny, a philosophy, rather than subtle and compact,
grandiose and systematic, narrow metaphysically[5] but incomparable in
its logic, sophistry, and morality, si poesy and arts superior to
anything we have seen in lucidity, naturalness, proportion, truth, and
beauty. If, finally, man is reduced to narrow conceptions deprived of
any speculative subtlety, and at the same time finds that he is absorbed
and completely hardened by practical interests, we see, as in Rome,
rudimentary deities, mere empty names, good for denoting the petty
details of agriculture, generation, and the household, veritable
marriage and farming labels, and, therefore, a null or borrowed
mythology, philosophy, and poesy. Here, as elsewhere, comes in the law
of mutual dependencies.[6] A civilization is a living unit, the parts of
which hold together the same as the parts of an organic body. Just as in
an animal, the instincts, teeth, limbs, bones, and muscular apparatus
are bound together in such a way that a variation of one determines a
corresponding variation in the others, and out of which a skilful
naturalist, with a few bits, imagines and reconstructs an almost
complete body, so, in a civilization, do religion, philosophy, the
family scheme, literature and the arts form a system in which each local
change involves a general change, so that an experienced historian, who
studies one portion apart from the others, sees beforehand and partially
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