Sometimes the simplest forms are the most difficult to explain. Perhaps the reason for this is that one estimates the problems involved as being too simple, too obvious, and does not seek, therefore, to penetrate to their core. Besides, there is an aura of the primitive and underivative about a literary form we are used to considering as popular; we hardly dare profane it by dry, objective analysis. As the tradition of a community, it shares the anonymity of the latter. Seeking the traces of creative and tradition-conscious personages, we find only an amorphous mass of the unknown. No wonder that the riddle has been relegated back to prehistoric times, permitting us to conceal its problems behind a veil of mystery.

It can hardly be claimed that the advance in material civilization has done much for poetry. The growth of large towns has curtailed that intimate connection of man with nature which has in the past provided countless themes for song; the pressure of crowded populations fosters conventions of behavior which are inimical to the free play of imaginative impulse; the spread of standardized education does not always encourage the originality and independence which are necessary to creative work; the specialization of intellectual life diminishes not merely the desire to write poetry but the ability to enjoy it. A mass of evidence shows that poetry is far less popular in western Europe and the United States than in countries like Persia or China or India, whose material civilization is far less advanced but which have kept a traditional taste for the beauty of words. At an even lower level, in societies where conditions are still primitive and existence is indeed hard, poetry may be the main pastime and consolation of peoples like the Asiatic Tatars or the Armenians or the Ainus, among all of whom it is a truly national art practiced with a high degree of accomplishment and enjoyed by whole populations. Compared with such societies, our own mechanized, urban world is indeed feeble and uncertain in its approach to an art which has in the past enjoyed great glory but seems now in danger of becoming an esoteric pursuit of cliques and coteries.

During the past century and a half historians and sociologists have often shown signs of considerable simplicity of mind when assessing the motivating forces behind the men whose deeds they are studying, and those attaining the most flattering notoriety in the intellectual world have been among the simplest. From the early nineteenth century, beginning with the fall of Napoleon, there is a tendency to present the historical disciplines as sciences: the re-creative anecdote is greeted with increasing disdain, and sociology undergoes its act of baptism. The Revolution of 1789 and the epic of imperial France are events of such dimension that it is difficult to associate them with the conscious designs of a few individuals. No longer a muse, Clio becomes a goddess. In War and Peace Tolstoi ironically treats historians of the old school who pretend to offer the key to the Revolution “in exposing the deeds and gestures of a few dozen men in one building in the city of Paris.” The French emperor's gallop into Russia and the stubborn but apparently passive resistance offered by Kutuzov—these are facts in which Tolstoi sees the manifestation of forces far surpassing the play of a few human wills. Tolstoi's manner in extolling Kutuzov is typical: Kutuzov is not a visionary; he shows no signs of genius, but with humble and patient fervor he turns aside all obstacles which might stifle the voice of popular instinct. Thirty years before Tolstoi, in a letter to his fiancée, Georg Büchner stated the case in another good example of this type of thinking: “I have studied the history of the Revolution. … I find in human nature a frightening equality, in the condition of man an ineluctable power conferred at once upon all and upon no one. The individual is but a fleck of foam upon the wave, greatness merely the result of chance, the power of genius a puppet show, a ridiculous struggle against a law of iron.” Men are interesting insofar as they are representative. Saint-Simon, mentor of Auguste Comte and father of sociology, declares that the great men of the world merely play the role assigned to them in historical evolution. According to Saint-Simon, the sixteenth century, an age of theology, gave birth to theologian-kings: Charles V and Henry VIII. Because he is a theologian, Henry VIII easily prevails over gallant and witty Francis I. The eighteenth century, a siècle of philosophy, “counts but two great names among its sovereigns: Catherine and Frederick the Great, friends of philosophers and patrons of philosophy.” Seen in this light, the features of the individual become blurred and shadowy. History is admired instead— history which, often with material of mediocre quality, builds solid edifices. But, faced with the astonishing drama played out by Napoleon himself, Tolstoi merely shrugs his shoulders, while following step by step simple men like Tostopchin or Kutuzov, who are obviously the mere instruments of history. Heine, who went through a Saint-Simonian phase, is amazed that Luther, that rough, gross monk whose brain was clouded by anxiety and superstition, so easily wielded the battering ram that shattered the old medieval world. In the 1830’s Auguste Comte foresees a “history without proper names,” a definition which is of prime importance in the analysis we are undertaking here. But, a hundred years later, Maxime Leroy, nourished on both Comte and Sainte-Beuve, draws more subtly shaded definitions: history becomes a “sociology containing proper names.”

Nothing has yet been done, and, here, in the middle of the twentieth century, it is fast becoming too late to draw up a suitable catalogue of the works of human wisdom. We are forced to project for the future the complete realization of our desires. This future will no doubt discover a conscious and effective organization of thought and action—a constant good fortune in the pursuit of legitimate satisfactions through a total mastery of natural forces—in a word, a perfect and reciprocal adaptation between man and that part of the universe in which he lives. All this, or most of it, still remains to be done; but much has already been said in the five thousand years that men have been writing. An intelligent observer arriving from Sirius would doubtless be especially struck by the extraordinary gap separating here on earth what is so well said from what is so badly carried out. Or rather he would wonder how it is that beings as highly gifted as men, judging from the knowledge and wisdom they have accumulated, still make such ineffective and even harmful use of the means at their disposal. The most indulgent hypothesis would be to see in this the result of a temporary misunderstanding owing to the great speed with which human thought evolves. Our observer would resume his journey then, resolved to return after a hundred years or two, sure that he would then find that man had bridged the gap and become as great in what he does as in what he knows.

History, as most people understand it, is the product of an intense effort to describe in an objective way and in rigorous chronological order events which have occurred in past time. Before the Renaissance the historian compiled traditions, chronicles, and statements, with no concern to verify the correctness of his data; thus legend was mixed with truth in confused and picturesque narration. Now, however, the investigator, established as a judge of inquiry, begins research on a chosen subject within his competence by unleashing his critical judgment, rather like a hound on the trail of suppositions. He unearths documents and confronts them, weeding out the false from the authentic, subjects the most diverse witnesses to close comparison, and then with great patience, whether gifted or inept, he presents his thesis to the assembly of the learned. These, like a jury, either accept his conclusions, admit only a part of them, or reject them completely. Thus, from the time of the humanists who cleared the way up to the present day, an extraordinary legion of specialists, as patient as the ancient Benedictines are said to have been, have made efforts to clarify past events to establish the bases of an objective text of what has actually taken place. Hence the work of the great historian consisted in joining and fusing this labor into a homogeneous unit that would be the approximate reflection of the epoch under study.

Our knowledge of ancient history has been tremendously enlarged in the last hundred years. Ancient civilizations, formerly scarcely glimpsed or completely unknown, have emerged from the obscurity in which they were buried. In other domains, already more or less well known, the discovery of documents year after year has shed a clearer—sometimes even a harsh—light upon the great pages of the human past. These discoveries, which reveal to us what the man of earlier days was like and which enable us to achieve a better understanding of the man of today, have at times been due to the purest chance. The manuscripts we are discussing here as well as many others belong in this category.

The theories about the origins of humanity contain, for the most part, a strange contradiction. For one thing, we acknowledge that the human mind is basically different from animal intelligence; indeed, there are few writers who question the revolutionary nature of the change that has occurred in the psychic makeup of living beings as a consequence of the advent of conceptual thought, of conscious reflection, and of objective knowledge of the world. “Human intelligence,” writes Le Roy, “presents a completely original, distinctive feature; there is something exceptional and unique about it that is not to be found anywhere else,” while Durkheim observes: “Man is not merely an animal with a few additional attributes, but quite another thing.” “Although the Infusoria are linked to the monkey by a whole series of intermediate stages, the monkey is separated from man by a hiatus,” insists Claparède, and, finally, a writer who is not a scholar expressed the following common-sense judgment on the subject: “We would know exactly what man is if we could accurately assess that insurmountable wall that separates the most ‘intelligent’ animal from the most primitive pygmy.”