episodes and course of history, and the wide areas of human emotion, conflict and progress, these are to the writer the impersonal factor of his subject

matter.

They have a natural objective reality which he cannot eliminate or modify, they form the irritants and occasions of his writing. The personal element of this subject matter is his interpretation of them, his affinity or repulsion for their various phases, and the productive or creative crises which they evoke in him. Now the object of this essay is to show that a very large part of the most entertaining, the grandest, the most thoughtful, the most varied, subtle, and diversified literature has proceeded from the impersonal element in the occurrences and the appearances of Sin, Ignorance, and Misery. That if we are to form any estimate of a possible literature after this life, and if that life as we all generally hope, will be more serene and blissful than this one, then its literature will lose those characteristics of the impersonal element which in Sin, Ignorance, and Misery have contributed so much to the wealth and merit of that we now possess in any and all languages. And derivatively, if in a less degree, the literature of improved or improving society must suffer a delimina

tion and curtailment with its progressive suppression of these three facts.

Especially we wish to draw attention to an aspect of literary fertility which is not, to our minds, made enough of. The influence of the impersonal, matter of fact actualities in the subject matter of a work of literature especially imaginative literature-is enormous. Today we have partly forgotten it because we are contemplating individualities in writers only, but those individualities are the results and resultants of an inextricable and an interminable series of influences or rather reactions arising from the contact of Mind with the world outside of us.

Taine is consumed with a single thought. He perceives in the varying panorama of literary activity the interaction of a racial force upon objective conditions. He pays but small attention to the effect of what is to be written about upon the writer. This is a less conspicuous and grandiose point of view. To see in the climate, the ethnology, the state of civilization and the mental preoccupations, the formative influences of literature, affords his penetrative fancy a broad and philosophic scope.

In English literature it is first the analysis of the Saxon and the Norman, then a description of a fusing and mixing period when the "New Tongue'

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is formed. Then comes the Pagan Renaissance with the unbolting of the doors of knowledge, animal excess, and natural proclivities, endowed, encouraged and elevated. Within the widened horizon of thought and desire, the literature of Elizabeth raises its virile and multitudinous beauties.

Then follows the Christian Renaissance with a serious morality, sturdy convictions, enduring hopes and intrepid resistance, and its literature, born of its spirit and the new social conditions, is polemic, vivid with religious enthusiasm and exaltation. Then the Restoration with its violent reaction, its unbridled license, its incessant and boisterous parade of lust, and the classic age, conceived within it, rises hollow, elegant, veneered with fine phrases and shining with a kind of parlor wit, while the modern period succeeds, variegated, busy, arduous, and involved.

As M. Albert has said, "la literature du XIXe siècle offre un aspect de confusion, de desordre, d'intemperance, qui trouble. Si l'on pénètre dan la détail, on est frappé de l'intensité de vie, de l'originalité, de la variété."

Taine exerts his copious and exhilarating power of language to gauge and draw and paint these differences in men and ages; he is careful to emphasize the contrast between the precision, logicalness, and con

secutive regularity of a French mind and the amplitude imaginativeness and interior complexity of the Teutonic. But nowhere does he hint at a certain broader underlying basis of distinction between literature and books and writers, which is hidden in the nature of the stuff itself about which they write or are written. He does not pause to think it is the matter and its peculiar forms or aspects that becomes visualized, incorporated by exact contact and sympathy with the mental structure of the man or race, that helps to produce the variegation and modes, moods and works of literature.

He does indeed hint at an influence of this sort, when he enlarges on the effect of surroundings, and when he tells us so frequently what new results in art and literature appeared, when men turned their mental eyes from the asceticism and pauperized narrowness of the middle ages to the rounded intellectual and poetic fleshliness of antiquity. But he does not bring to the surface the fact that after all it is the subject matter that has moulded in the course of ages, literary feeling and invested minds with a peculiar atmosphere. That it is a fact, that if a mind contemplates fossils only, it becomes fossilized; if stones, petrified; if flowers verdant painted and fragrant, that to look at Melancholy induces sadness and sober

tones of thought, to see gayety makes the spectator gay, and to trace effects analytical, and that, however begun, these objective influences having slowly formed a type of mind by acting upon some undifferentiated matrix, it-the type-has become inherited, and under the agency of elections, fixed, strengthened, and deepened. In the succeeding chapter on the "The Evolution of Literary Types" we shall point this out more systematically, and it will assume that novelty which the idea we think possesses, but which fails to imbue its simple statement here made.

But that the radical assumption of the influence of the subject matter upon writing or literary composition may be appreciated, let us ask "What is the Language itself?" It is the sensuous image of thought, therefore the single expression of literature. But how did language arise? Max Muller in his profound work on the "Science of Thought" has shown us. This thinker asserts that by sensations we awaken our thought, which putting on the aspect at first of a "percept" becomes a "concept," when instantly language announces the result. The metaphysics of this operation need not detain us. He says, "thought, in the usual sense of the word, is utterly impossible without the simultaneous working of sen