First Sentence

"If it is permissible to define literature, with a certain rhetorical flourish, as a mirror of society, it is nevertheless a more or less distorting mirror depending on the conscious or unconscious desires of the collective soul which is examining itself - depending, more particularly, on the interests, prejudices, sensibilities and neuroses of the social groups responsible for making the mirror and holding it up to society, or at least that part of society capable of seeing, that is, of reading."