ath its
surface. The vast differences separating the men of two centuries, or
of two peoples, escape them entirely.[3235] The ancient Greek, the early
Christian, the conquering Teuton, the feudal man, the Arab of Mahomet,
the German, the Renaissance Englishman, the puritan, appear in their
books as in engravings and frontispieces, with some difference in
costume, but the same bodies, the same faces, the same countenances,
toned down, obliterated, proper, adapted to the conventionalities of
good manners. That sympathetic imagination by which the writer enters
into the mind of another, and reproduces in himself a system of habits
and feelings so different from his own, is the talent the most absent in
the eighteenth century. With the exception of Diderot, who uses it badly
and capriciously, it almost entirely disappears in the last half of
the century. Consider in turn, during the same period, in France and
in England, where it is most extensively used, the romance, a sort of
mirror everywhere transportable, the best adapted to reflect all phrases
of nature and of life. After reading the series of English novelists,
Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith down to
Miss Burney and Miss Austen, I have become familiar with England in the
eighteenth century; I have encountered clergymen, country gentlemen,
farmers, innkeepers, sailors, people of every condition in life, high
and low; I know the details of fortunes and of careers, how much is
earned, how much is expended, how journeys are made and how people eat
and drink: I have accumulated for myself a file of precise biographical
events, a complete picture in a thousand scenes of an entire community,
the amplest stock of information to guide me should I wish to frame
a history of this vanished world. On reading a corresponding list of
French novelists, the younger Crebillon, Rousseau, Marmontel, Laclos,
Restif de la Breton, Louvet, Madame de Stael, Madame de Genlis and the
rest, including Mercier and even Mme. Cottin, I scarcely take any
notes; all precise and instructive little facts are left out; I
find civilities, polite acts, gallantries, mischief-making, social
dissertations and nothing else. They carefully abstain from mentioning
money, from giving me figures, from describing a wedding, a trial, the
administration of a piece of property; I am ignorant of the situation
of a curate, of a rustic noble, of a resident prior, of a steward, of an
intendant