ART. VIII.—1, Les Philosophes Classiques du XIX Siècle en France. Par H. Taine, de l'Académie Française. Paris, 1895.

2. Vie et Opinions de F. T. Graindorge. Par le Même. Paris, 1896.

3. De l'Intelligence. Par le Même. Paris, 1895.

4. Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise. I.-V. Par le Même. Paris, 1895.

5. Les Origines de la France Contemporaine. I.-VI. Par le Même. Paris, 1893-94.

And other Works.

H'

ENRI TAINE, philosopher, critic, artist in words, and historian, was the Saint Simon of the French Revolution. He has destroyed a legend; torn their tinsel costume from its demigods and stage-heroes; pulled their machinery to pieces; thrown a flood of light upon flood of light upon the grotesque, unclean, and commonplace figures who ruled France during its hour of weakness; and shown to all the world that astounding phantom called Jacobinism, no longer as a portent which no man could account for, but in its habit as it lived,—a thing of shreds and patches, embodying one false idea, the incarnation of Rousseau in seven or eight thousand criminals, to whom power was given to change times and seasons, and to attempt the creation of a fresh universe. On its first apparition Edmund Burke saw into it and through it with his keen prophetic glance; the Jacobin was no mere rebel, no frondeur such as in olden days France had brought forth, half in a fit of rage, half in a fit of satire; he was an armed doctrine, 'a theorem that walked about on its own feet,' as Taine would one -day call him, a murderous abstraction like one of those symbols in the mediaval moralities, a Vice or an Iniquity which put on the mask of sentiment, breathed most tender sighs over a corrupt and corrupting age, and talked platitudes while cutting its neighbour's throat from pure love and in a spirit of universal benevolence. All this Burke had comprehended, drawing its features with a pencil dipped in scarlet, rudely, indignantly, but no caricature. Singular to reflect that Louis XVI., shut up within that dreary Temple, read the eloquent pages of Burke as they appeared, and himself an actor in so strange a story, had its interpretation given him as in a glass while he waited for the end! Burke, however, prophesied of things which he did not actually see; by a rare and almost divine art of reasoning he deduced consequences from their principles; drew the horoscope

horoscope of a world as yet unborn, and was liable to be refuted by the immortal hopes which men less prescient than himself were bent on cherishing. These had no grasp of law, and among present facts they chose the agreeable which would light. up their sky as with a rose-tinted aurora.

Even on this side of the Channel, some,—and they not the worst of human creatures,-thought Burke a madman whose feelings had carried him away. The French multitudes were not likely to be convinced by what they could not study; soon they were dazzled by Napoleon's victories, dragged after him to a hundred battle-fields, shivered to atoms at Austerlitz, Wagram, and Borodino; for them what interval of reflection was allowed, or how could they see in the whirlwind of dust and smoke which their destroying angel told them was French glory? They saw, indeed, nothing save the onset of the Old Guard, or the clouds of Cossacks advancing upon Paris. A generation passed as in a dream; and when the smoke cleared away, the legend of the Revolution rose like a transformation scene, brilliant with lights on every side, gorgeous with enchanted flowers that sprang up by millions from the ground, or fell in wreaths and festoons from a gaily painted roof; and all the while brazen instruments gave forth such loud-toned music,— the 'Marseillaise' striking its dominant, and the great battles chiming in, that every accent of criticism was drowned, the very Bourbons applauded, and, as Mohammedans date from the Hegira, so did Frenchmen of all colours, Royalist, Catholic, or Liberal, date from 1789. It was the sacred year of a new epoch.

Saint Simon had not yet come. There was a Joseph de Maistre, indeed; but he babbled of St. Louis, the Inquisition, and the Middle Age; who would listen to his homilies? Rousseau had intoxicated all men. Chateaubriand was Rousseau; Victor Hugo was Rousseau; George Sand was Rousseau; M. Thiers was Rousseau; Michelet was Rousseau. It has been profoundly observed that the anarchic spirit of the Revolution overcame not only those who took part in it, but those who described it; an infection of madness seemed to dwell in its name and reminiscence; the picture wrought as if it were a living thing on every one who lifted his eyes towards that immense and lurid canvas; passion so preterhuman had inspired the original that even from the copy it flowed out again, troubling the heart and the judgment. But reason or philosophy, which in Burke had governed the highest flights of imagination, was not to be looked for in Hugo, Sand, Michelet, and these Homeric rhapsodists beheld in their dreams a Golden

Age,

Age, the eclogues of Jean Jacques disporting in flowery meads, and Law transmuted to love and liberty.

Such is the power of enthusiasm that it scorns to be trammelled by facts, and it laughs at philosophy. Edmund Burke was a very dull writer in the eyes of one who had long been gazing upon these cataracts of flame and fire, caught up in the tempest of Hugo's fast-flying rhetoric, or drenched with the attar of roses which Madame Sand poured out from her crystalline flasks in so profuse a measure. Eloquence had its day and ran its course. The documents that would have shamed it into silence were lying dumb and forgotten, in the Royal, or Imperial, or National archives, piled up in thousands, weighing tons upon tons, a world of witnesses behind the screen, independent and irresistible, should they ever be called up to the bar and confronted with one another. It was by accumulation of such particulars, day after day, in all their horrible sincerity, that Saint Simon had put together his enduring mosaic, where 'Louis le Grand Roi,' and his age,—innumerable figures of men and women, alive every one of them,-are fixed in adamant. Saint Simon was the Shakespeare to whom Providence had assigned for his chronicles and his tragedies a real world, not lying in the distant Roman times, or in the centuries behind him, but extant at Versailles, Marly, and Fontainebleau. His task it was to fulfil, as though by anticipation, Henri Taine's formula of writing history:

'De tout petits faits bien choisis, importants, significatifs, amplement circonstanciés et minutieusement notés, voilà aujourd'hui la matière de toute science: chacun d'eux est un spécimen instructif, une tête de ligne, un exemple saillant, un type net auquel se ramène toute une file de cas analogues.'

The huge volumes of Saint Simon abound in slight details carefully chosen, told at length, and full of significance; they are specimens so instructive that, when we have looked well into them, we can watch the heart of the actor beating-even the close-shut heart of Madame de Maintenon loses something of its reserve and the tragi-comedy of the House of France lays bare its hideous secrets. The soldiers, clergy, courtiers, courtesans whom we meet in their single figures are types indeed; such as we note them here, others must have been a great crowd-and in this miniature we know the whole of France. Could a like portrait be composed in its endless petty circumstances of the Jacobin Revolution, we might say confidently that we had now the means of bringing it to judgment. But Saint Simon gave a lifetime to his collection of instances-who would undertake

an

an enterprise that, on the face of things, seemed so much larger and more complicated?

This new historian, if he was to persuade the French that Edmund Burke had taken the altitude of their Revolution, must do so almost unawares; he could not begin with a scheme ready made, or propose to himself the elucidation of theory by appealing to evidence, for as soon as his programme was announced his authority would be gone. He must be, in the language of the courts, a witness omni exceptione major, to whom none could object as a partisan too enthusiastic to be critical, or incapable of reducing to significant order the particulars beyond calculation which make up this tale of some five-and-twenty years packed as close with incident as any the most stirring period known to history. Let him fail in exactitude, and his reputation is ruined; in clearness, and he will not be read; in proof, and he will gain no credence. He is to overthrow a national belief, to dissipate the halo which hangs round canonized heads, to strike the music of the Marseillaise' dumb, to quench these artificial nightlights by letting in upon them a flood of sunshine; but he shall not be an adherent of the old monarchy, or a clerical, or a foreigner; not a Carlyle rapt into prophecy by his own visions; not a Macaulay, picturesque and superficial; not even a colourless Ranke, docketing the protocols of ambassadors; none of all these kinds will suit the modern historian, for none of them is deep enough or as comprehensive as the task requires. He will go back into the eighteenth century, and there in Montesquieu and Condillac he will find the method which he requires, and in the secret biographer of the Regency and 'le grand siècle,' its most striking application on the largest scale.

To observe how fortune has arranged all these things and brought them to a single point is one of the delights of literature. The historian was wanted, and he came. At the age

of twenty-one,-in 1849,-says M. Taine with that slight shade of irony which he cultivated in his style, he had found himself entitled to vote, and not a little embarrassed by reason of this unsought privilege. Had it been a question only of choosing between men and measures! But the French way is to choose between theories, to take service under a flag; and the elector was required to become a Royalist or a Republican, a Democrat or a Conservative, a Socialist or a follower of Bonaparte.

6

And I,' observes M. Taine, was none of these; I was nothing at all; and sometimes I envied those that had the happiness of being something. When I had listened to all their doctrines, I perceived that there must be a vacant space in my intellect. Motives which

appealed

appealed to others did not appeal to me; I never could understand how one was to be governed in politics by one's mere preferences.'

Had he, then, no associations of the home, the school, the church, to mould and direct his youthful mind? Was it that rare thing, a tabula rasa, without writing of any sort upon its surface? Not exactly; but the writing was, so to express his condition, in sympathetic ink, which political harangues did not warm into visible shapes and contours. These affirmative people,' he goes on to tell us, drew up a constitution as if they were building a house for themselves, the plan was the newest, or the prettiest, or the simplest; and their choice did not appear to be limited. One liked the hotel of the marquis; another preferred a comfortable middle-class dwelling; a third the labourer's cottage; a fourth the soldiers' barracks; a fifth voted for Communism and collective phalansteries; while a sixth would have gone out with the savage and lived in tents. All this seemed to our wise young student worthy of CloudCuckoo-Land. Was the political problem one of invention, and not rather one of discovery? Had any other nation taken an architect's plan, made the ground level, and built for itself a lasting abode by contract? First study the nation, then perhaps you will know what should be its constitution,' said M. Taine to his doctrinaires. But they took no heed; wherefore in the space of eighty years they have altered the French constitution thirteen times.

May it not be,' observes the philosopher, that you gentlemen have attempted the impossible? You have reasoned in a vacuum and invented a chimera. For my part, if I ever do profess a creed in politics, it will not be until I have made a deep study of France.'

Thus he in the year 1849. Almost thirty years afterwards, in 1878, the first volume of his 'Origines de la France Contemporaine' saw the light; and he did not live to complete the survey which he had begun. But he kept his promise. He would not invent à priori; yet principles of investigation he must have, unless he suffered himself to be driven about at random,—which was, perhaps, Carlyle's great weakness,-by impressions at once violent and confused. Now Taine had learnt his method from a man whose genius may be disputable, but the strangeness and strength of whose character even those will acknowledge that cannot endure his arrogance, we mean Henri Beyle, otherwise Stendhal, the author of Le Rouge et le Noir.' Beyle had no resemblance to the commonplace Frenchman, whether politician or man of letters. He despised the airs and graces of French rhetoric; if possible, he despised

French