BOOKS.
TAINE'S HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.* Mn. VAN LAUN has done a difficult task admirably by translating into the English of a scholar one of the most brilliant books that France has produced for years. The work was made hard by the peculiarity of M. Taine's style, which is only a shade less different from the prose of Voltaire and Pascal than the style of Carlyle is from the prose of Addison and Goldsmith. He has wilfully shot away from the classical simplicity, the logical regularity, the eco- nomy of phrase, by which the masters of French and English prose gain their effects. They spoke to an age in which the mass of readers stood on a higher plane of culture than those of our day, when courtiers, ecclesiastics, fine ladies, the wits of Paris, and the literary clubs of critical London could sentence a play, a poem, an essay, to at least momentary neglect or momentary fame. M. Taine writes for the far different medley of all the world that reads French,—the Bohemians of Paris, the students of the Quartier Latin, the Olympian divinities of Orleanism who hold in their hands the keys of the Academy, the fat shopkeepers who go dovin to Dieppe in August to bathe, the butterflies of fashion who used to crowd the salons of the Tuileries and now go to see Une Visits de Nous," the Americans who are intent on spending the profits of " shoddy" in the French capital, the Benthamite minds of critical London, everybody who seeks to know thoughts as well as things. He is like one of those Dutch painters who saw that they would draw a crowd round their pictures if they filled up every corner with such matters as the handle of a broom, a half-peeled onion, a broken pitcher, cabbages, a brace of phea- sants hung in the window of a poulterer, a labyrinth of wrinkles on the face of an old woman, all painted so faithfully that each sight- seer would find an old acquaintance in each detail. That is pre- cisely what is done by M. Taine. He cannot state either the simplest or the most complex truth without tying a crowd of pictures to its tail. The most homely images are crowded into a subtle analysis of the causes that give shape and colour to Art, and of the notes that ring through such literature as the Elizabethan. A Icing string of mountains, horses, carts, pictures, cabbages, fiddles, pulpits, bows and arrows are crowded into the philosophical laboratory, so that we seem to be in a marine store- shop, hung round with panoramas of the Himalaya mountains, the Vatican, Cremorne Gardens, Spurgeon's Tabernacle, and the fruit stalls of Covent Garden. There is such a glow of colour, such minuteness of detail, such careful finish expended on the carving of a lady's fan, that we seem to be looking at a picture by Toniers ; such a picture as that in which Dives goes down to the place appointed for rich men, and, clad in the glory of an Indian
dressing-gown, is baited by horribly grotesque figures that play _
* /moss rEIIiiFWi Liferatiwe, By IL A. Taal°. TranalMed by LI. Vail Lann. E di nbu rgh ; Edmouetou and DOughve. 1811. on flutes made of their own noses, and dance about the sulphuric cavern like so many imps. But the likeness ends with the variety of hue and crowd of details. Teniers thought only of boors drinking beer from long-necked mugs, peasants dancing, and rich men find- ing that the Devil was a master of pantomime ; whereas Taine gives. utterance to the thought of all the world,—German metaphysics,. Indian philosophy, the system of Comte, the critical canons of Renan, the last word of French scepticism, the Hebraic faith of the Puritans, the influence of a Semitic book like the Bible on ats. Aryan race like the English. His writings teem with the images. castby the thoughts of other men. And, we repeat, he goes away from the rules of French rhetoric precisely because he seeks to. give his readers a firm grasp of whatever he speaks about. Hie- style is a model of clearness, force, epigrammatic point, and light- ness. So far it is as French as the style of Voltaire. But it is made as brilliant as that of Macaulay by the wealth of the illus- trations, and it gathers the kaleidoscopic hues of Mr. Carlyle's rhetoric from the multitude of details which seem to reflect the. hues of all created things as if it were a room of mirrors.
We have minutely noted the features of M. 'faille's rhetoric,. because it marks a separation from the classic regularity of the style which grew up in the atmosphere of Louis Quatorze, when, the audience was small, refined, delicately sensitive to any undue loudness of note, quick to applaud subtility of tone in epigram, satire, eloquence, and oratory. The Democracy will henceforth give the law to French letters, as well as to French polities. The, Academy will insensibly broaden and roughen the old canons Of' rhetoric. And M. Taine, one of the ablest men in France, one of her most scholarly men of letters, one of her acutest thinkers, and, perhaps her most brilliant rhetorician, marks the turn of the tide.
But the half-Cariylian brilliancy of the book is a mere trifle, im comparison with the merits of its substance. It will take its place in the very foremost rank of works on the literature of England.. Such students as Professor Morley or Professor Masson might- not find it difficult to impugn the profundity of M. Taine's acquaintance with the less trodden walks of our literature ;. but even as a display of scholarship it will take a high place, and we do not hesitate to add that no English book can bear. comparison with it for richness of thought, for variety, keen- noes, and soundness of critical judgment, for the brilliancy with. which the material and the moral features of each age are sketched.. The author means the book to be a history of more than the literature of England. Indeed, he cares little for her poets, her dramatists, and her philosophers, except in so far as they light up. the character of her people and the secret of their national pro. gross. And he brings out that secret in a fashion of his own. lie differs from such critics as Sainte-Beuve in having a. definite theory. The literature and art of every period, he says, take their shape and colour from the forces of the. time in which they spring into existence. They are the exact. equation of the forces that dwell in the race, the surroundings,. and the epoch. The literature or the art of one age differs as. widely from the literature and art of another as one century differs. from another. Hence the true way to study the books of the Elizabethan time is to begin by studying the time itself. We must glance at the uprise of Luther, the ferment in the Church, the hatred of the clergy by the common people, the sloth and ViCe, of the monkish orders, the old quarrel between England and Rome, the Tudor defiance of the Pope, the zeal with which the gentry and the nobles rushed to the study of the classics when they saw the glories of chivalry fading before the light of the new day,. the eagerness with which the men of letters studied the dramas of Greece, the love of excitement which the common people had. transferred from the representation of miracle-plays to that of plays which dealt with classic story, the brutality of the populace, the coarseness of speech and tone that marked the intercourse even. of the Sydneys and the Raleighs, the rough and immoral Bohe- mianisra of the life led by the men of letters, and the wonderful expansion given to men's thoughts by the revelations of science and the discovery of America. Thus we find the reason- why the Elizabethan dramatists chose particular subjects, anti treated them in a particular way ; why a family like- ness links Greene, Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, Webster, Iviassinger, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare ; why, in spite of their mental differences, they all seem to start from the same- key-note. Hence M. Taine prefaces the special literary criticism- of each epoch by an elaborate discussion of its general qualities. He minutely analyzes the character of the Saxons and the Normans, before laying bare with his scalpel the bone and tissue of the literary organism in which mingles the blood of both. Such is M. Miine's method, and its soundness admits of ncs question.. Indeed, we might be tempted to call it common-place, if the brilliant critic did not push it to such an extreme as to make it eclipse the influence of individual men. What Buckle does in history Taine does in criticism, by professing to attach importance only to general causes. Just as, in writing the history of the Re- formation, the one would have set little store by the personal force of Martin Luther, and have tried to fix hie eye solely on the general characteristics of the time, so the other seems to study Shakespeare and Milton, Bacon and Hobbes, merely as brilliant specimens of the plants that grow in the garden of literature, and not as the sources of other flowers ; merely as individual curiosities, and not as cen- tres of creative power. He thus etude at the furthest pole from Mr. Carlyle and the school of critics which looks solely to great men, and finds the secret of creeds and literatures in the Mahomets and the Dautes. The theory comes from the material- istic philosophy that the soul, the mind, the conscience are only the product of the forces which dwell in the material of our body, just as the shocks given by a galvanic battery are only the pro- duct of certain material substances. If we could analyze the material forces that dwell in race, circumstance, and time; if we .could find out what amount of energy dwells in the Jewish, the Latin, and the English races ; if we could calculate the disturb- ing force introduced by the encroachment of race upon race, then night we construct, according to this theory, a science of society on lines of such exactness as those in which Sir John Herschel sketched the elementary laws and facts of astronomy. But even if the theory were true, to state such a problem is to demonstrate that it is insoluble. The whole space of humanity is peopled by bodies, now seen and now unseen, which introduce incalculable and inexplicable aberrations. A war, a famine, a plague, a Court in- trigue, a squabble between two countries, a political pamphlet, a popular song may bring in one of those disturbing forces. Buckle or Taint) might say that such trivialities are but the occasions, and not the causes, of revolutionary change, and that the laws which shape the features of a time are independent of such pigmy incidents as the coining of a Luther or a Cromwell. The revolutionists of the world, we are told, are little more than the agents by which the forces of an era are made visible. Those who maintain this theory, however, find it convenient not to offer any sufficient proof, and they give the lie to their own teaching when they write, not the :science of history, but history itself. Buckle cannot shut men out of his historical surveys, any more than Carlyle can overlook general causes when trying to resolve all history into the aunale of great men. The truth lies midway between the theories of those two writers. Nothing is more certain, on the one hand, than the fact that the strongest intellects are powerless to move their age, unless the general thought of the time runs in the same -current with their own ; or that the most searching thinkers -cannot hit upon certain truths until a crowd of other seekers have piled up the materials of discovery ; or that the greatest poetic faculty must remain half-dumb until the instrument of expression has been brightened by generations of literary use. Luther, Newton, and Dente might have all died unknown if they had come .a century earlier. On the other Laud, nothing is more certain than the kindred fact that such men make a prodigious impression not only on their time, but on the whole future of humanity. It ie not philosophy, it is the sheerest blindness of pedantry, to teach that the history of the world would not have been vastly different had there been no such men as St. Paul, St. Augustine, or Calvin, Mehemet, Charlemagne, Cromwell, Frederick the Groat, or the First Napoleon. Who shall measure the force that dwelt in the brain of such revolutionists? It may be quite true that some such ,change as they helped to make would have come in time, even if they had never lived ; but who shall say how long it would have been delayed, or what elements it would have lacked ? After all that can be said by Positivism, the fact remains that Mehemet- anisus cannot come without a Mehemet, And so it is in Litera- ture too. A particular style does grow up la every age, and the poets do but syllable the floating thoughts or fancies of their time. So far they are but the Malian harps on which the breath of the day makes music. But each has also his own note, which modifies the general note of the age, and ,whieli may sound for centuries after the poet himself may have become little more than a name. Thus has it been with Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, Chaucer, and even the forgotten ballad-singers. Thus also will it be with Wordsworth, Byron, and Heine.
Theoretically M. Thine exaggerates the aspect of the general ire which shape the literature of each epoch, for he does not lay ue stress on the origiunaing forces of a great intellect like Kant,
or a magnificent personality like Luther. But practically he does not go far astray, for no critic more minutely analyzes the indivi- dualities of genius. Those parts of his book that deal with the dramatists of the Elizabethan time, and especially with Ben &mama and Shakespeare, are models of analysis. He finds that such men cannot be explained by the minutest account of the time in which they lived. He sees that they have individualities of their own, quite as strong and quite as stubborn as the character of their age. He sees that, after all has been said about the family likeness of the Elizabethan men, Shakespeare must remain a great mystery.
The criticism of Shakespeare is as masterly as any part of the book, and it specially merits note because it is so un-French. Voltaire, the most typical Frenchunim that ever lived, be- trayed a marvellous incapacity to place himself at the point of view from which Shakespeare looked. He did see that the author of King Lear and Macbeth had some wonder- ful gifts, that his imagination was superlatively strong, and that his humour and his grotesque fancy worked with Titanic vigour. But Voltaire's standard of criticism was so essentially classical that he would tolerate no ruffling of the Sophoclean calm- ness of Art, and he called Shakespeare a barbarian, a buffoon, for not paying the same homage to the "unities," and for not casting his rhetoric into the same regular moulds tut Racine. It was meta- physically impossible that a man who had deliberately built up the Homicide in accordance with the classical laws of epic architecture, and who was far more of a logician than a poet, should be stirred into enthusiasm by a lawlessly-built Gothic temple like Hana/st, al. Taine, we presume, does admire the Ilenriade, but he sees what Voltaire did not see, the secret and all-suillicient reason for the art of Shakespeare, and he sete forth the mystery in a passage as remarkable for critical insight as for richness and variety of rhetorical hue. He points out that the aim of Shake- speare and the other dramatists of his time was to paint, not passions like avarice or hypocrisy, but living men, full of surface contra- dictious which find a union in the essential springs of their nature ; to paint such men, not shorn of the smaller moral qualities that hide the grander lines of their nature, but as they are fashioned by nature and by circumstances, with all their trivialities, their petty passions, their whims, oddities, and follies. Still more striking, perhaps, is the fashion in which M. Taine treats the religious side of our literature, as seen in the translations of the Bible into English, and in the tone of men like Milton. Anything more foreign to the mind of a Frenchman than the Puritanism of Eng- land it would be difficult to conceive, and M. Taints, we fancy, leans to the Gospel of Positivism more than to that of our Bible- reading forefathers. Indeed, the grim fanaticism with which Puritanism dogmatically banished mystery from the region of mystery, and wrote in rude English the most secret counsels of the Almighty, might be expected to fill with scorn and disgust a mind trained in the severely logical and literary atmosphere of Pari- sian criticism, trained to test the soundness of every belief by the canons of science, to believe every creed radically unsound, and to crave artistic beauty as imperiously es a musician demands harmony of woven sound. Nevertheless, it is precisely when M. Talne comes to the first Bible Christiana of England, the rough shopkeepers and farmers whose virgin minds were cut into furrows by the ploughshare of Tyndale's translation, that he casts aside the restraints of French decorum, and rises into the eloquence of enthusiasm, The finest passage in the book is that which describes how the Oriental conception of the Hebrew God, a conception scarcely comprehensible to the scientific minds of France, had stamped itself on the minds of a Western people like the English, until it wielded as omnipotent a sovereignty over the conscience of the Puritan farmers, as it had exercised over the acts of the Hebrew people atnoag the deserts and mountains from which it sprang. It would be difficult to offer a more striking proof of the growing catholicity of criticism than the fact that such a passage comes from a French pen. M. Taine's book has already helped to set the literature of England in its true light before the students of France, who, in their union of broad culture and intellectual bigotry, their brilliancy of in- tellect and their inability to look beyond the border-land of French thought and French art, are the Athenians of modern Europe. An equally high service will it do Englishmen, by presenting the analysis of a consummate critic and a brilliant rhetorician who looks at our literature as impar- tially its if he had come from another planet, and yet with as true a sympathy as if all his life lie had breathed the intellectual air of England.
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