Renan’s style, so much admired in its day, shows certain definite signs of decadence. Renan was always insisting that French literature ought to return to the language of the seventeenth century, that the classical vocabulary was sufficient to deal with modern feelings and ideas; and his own style preserves in distinguished fashion the classical qualities of lucidity and sobriety. Yet this language of Renan’s, which seems precise, has a way of leaving indistinct impressions. Compared to the language of Michelet, with its tightness, its vigor, its vibrations of excitement, Renan’s prose is pale; it lacks relief. If we read him for long at a sitting, the sense blurs and he puts us to sleep.
With Taine, the effect is quite different. Taine is not trying to get back to the past; he has gone ahead with the present. But, in doing so, he has come to exhibit some of the most unattractive qualities of that present; and we may study in his form and his style the characteristics of the bourgeois nineteenth century, as they confront us as soon as we open him—before we pass on to his content.
Amiel complained of Taine: “This writer has a trying effect on me like a creaking of pulleys, a clicking of machines, a smell of the laboratory.” And he was justified: Taine had perfected one of the great modern mechanical styles. His books have the indefatigable exactitude, the monotonous force, of machinery; and, for all his gifts of sympathetic intelligence and the doubts with which he was sometimes troubled on certain tendencies of his contemporary world, he is rarely shaken out of the cocksure and priggish tone, the comfortable conviction of solidity, of the bourgeois whom the machine is making rich. In this, he resembles Macaulay, whom he had at one time inordinately admired; but it is a Macaulay of the latter half of the century and a Macaulay of a more philosophical turn of mind, who is beginning to be sour instead of optimistic at the direction that the century is taking. It is curious to find Taine, in his chapter on Macaulay, condemning in his predecessor the very faults from which he suffers himself. For Taine himself, in spite of his repeated insistence on his attitude of naturalistic objectivity, was to become almost as emphatic as Macaulay with a sort of middle-class moral flatness. And the overdemonstration which he blames in Macaulay, the laboring of points already obvious, is certainly one of Taine’s worst habits.
It is not precisely decadence that is seen here; Taine’s immense sentences, vast paragraphs, solid sections, gigantic chapters, represent the never-slackening ever-multiplying production of a class that is still sure of itself. But there is a lack of human completeness somewhere, and this appears in Taine’s real lack of taste. He manages to combine the rigor of the factory with the upholstery and the ornamentation of the nineteenth-century salon. A large area of the surface of Taine’s writing is covered over with enormous similes, which have been laid on like a coat of paint. These similes at their best are very good; but even when they are good, they are usually overelaborated; and all too often they are ludicrous or clumsy. “A creature of air and flame,” he writes of Voltaire, “the most excitable who has ever lived, composed of atoms more ethereal and more vibrant than those of other men, there is none whose mental structure is finer or whose balance is at the same time more unstable and more true. We may compare him to those precision scales which are susceptible of being disturbed by a breath, but beside which the other devices for measurement are inexact and coarse. Only very light weights should be placed in this scale, only samples as tiny as possible; but it will, on this condition, weigh any substance with strictness.” This is splendid; it really states something which we had never quite realized about Voltaire. But a few pages before, we have had the following: “I compare the eighteenth century to a company of people at table: it is not enough that the food should be before them, that it should be prepared, presented, easy to get hold of and digest; it must also be a special course, or better a delicacy. The mind is a gourmet; let us furnish it with savory and delicate dishes, suited to its taste; it will eat all the more for sensuality’s having whetted the appetite.” Now why must we be told all this simply in order that we may learn that the writing of the eighteenth century was seasoned with “salt and spice”? The notion of wisdom seasoned with wit is surely a common enough one; the simple word was all that Taine needed. Yet, with the utmost complacency, he stages for us a banquet, and a banquet at which we are invited to entertain the forbidding hypothesis that unseasoned and unappetizing food may be served, but at which we are finally relieved to see the diners, their appetite “whetted” by “sensuality,” fall upon food that has been delicately prepared. Later in The Origins of Contemporary France, in the section on The Revolutionary Government, we find what is probably one of the worst figures in literature. Taine is trying to convey the situation of France at the time when, according to his picture, all the men of public spirit and brains had been executed or driven into exile or hiding, and only the ignorant and brutish held the power: “The overturn,” he writes, “is complete: subjected to the revolutionary government, France resembles a human being who should be obliged to walk on his head and think with his feet.” This is bad enough; but when we turn the page, we find the next chapter beginning as follows: “Imagine a human being who has been obliged to walk with his feet up and his head down”—and he goes on to elaborate it for half a page. Compare Taine even at his best with the images in Michelet, which are struck off so much more spontaneously but which stick so much longer in the mind: the Renaissance sawed in two like the prophet Isaiah; the Revolution undermined by speculators like the termites in La Rochelle; the Tsar and the King of Sweden coming down like great polar bears from the north and prowling about the houses of Europe; the unspoken words, congealed by fear, unfreezing in the air of the Convention; the French language of the eighteenth century traveling around the world like light.
So much for the surface of Taine. It is significant of the difference between Michelet, on the one hand, and both Renan and Taine, on the other, that we should think of the latter as presenting surfaces. When we look back on Michelet, what we are aware of is not a surface, but the thing he is presenting, the living complex of the social being. Michelet’s primary concern is to stick close to the men and events; he succeeds in dominating history, like Odysseus wrestling with Proteus, by seizing it and holding on to it through all its variety of metamorphoses; and in the course of this rough-and-tumble struggle, he works out an original kind of literary form. He has no preconceived ideas which hamper him; his ideas are in the nature of speculations, and they are merely set afloat in the upper air while his prime business is with what is actually happening. But both Renan and Taine practise systematizations which, in ordering the confusion of human life, seem always to keep it at a distance. Renan must never get so close to violent happenings or emotions that they can break up his sweet and even flow. Taine feeds history into a machine which automatically sorts out the phenomena, so that all the examples of one kind of thing turn up in one section or chapter and all the examples of another kind in another, and the things which do not easily lend themselves to Taine’s large and simple generalizations do not turn up at all. The thesis is the prime consideration, and he will allow only a moderate variety in the phenomena that go to fill it in. Yet Taine, with his remarkable machine, did manufacture an article of value.
The generation of French artists and thinkers who came to manhood about 1850 had pretty well abandoned political interests. The coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte in 1851 depressed them and left them feeling helpless. Taine, like Renan, had declined to make an issue of the oath of allegiance to Napoleon III. He took the position that the voters, though imbeciles, had the right to confer power on whom they chose; that for a dissident like himself to refuse to submit to their choice would constitute an act of insurrection—the implication being that such an act would be wholly improper in itself, amounting to an attack on organized society. He refused, however, to sign a document presented to the university professors and eliciting an assurance of their “gratitude” and their “respectful devotion.” “Political life,” he wrote to a friend, “is forbidden us for perhaps ten years. The only path is pure literature or pure science.”
Men like Taine were traveling away from romanticism, from the revolutionary enthusiasm and the emotional exuberance of the early part of the century, and setting themselves an ideal of objectivity, of exact scientific observation, which came to be known as Naturalism. Both Renan and Taine pretend to a detachment quite alien to the fierce partisanship of a Michelet; and both do a great deal more talking about science. The science of history is for Taine a pursuit very much less human than it had been for Michelet. He writes in 1852 of his ambition “to make of history a science by giving it like the organic world an anatomy and a physiology.” And in the preface to his Essay on Titus Livy, he wrote in 1856 as follows: “Man, says Spinoza, is in nature, not as an empire in an empire, but as a part in a whole, and the movements of the spiritual automaton which is our being are governed by laws to the same extent as those of the material world in which it is contained.” Note that it is no longer a question of humanity creating itself, of liberty warring against fatality; but of an automaton functioning in an automaton. In the famous introduction to the History of English Literature, published in 1863, Taine stated his full philosophy and program: in dealing with works of literature, “as in any other department, the only problem is a mechanical one: The total effect is a compound determined in its entirety by the magnitude and the direction of the forces which produce it.” The only difference between moral problems and physical problems is that, in the case of the former, you haven’t the same instruments of precision to measure the quantities involved. But “virtue and vice are products like vitriol and sugar”; and all works of literature may be analyzed in terms of the race, the milieu and the moment.
This theory in itself might have produced a criticism utterly arid; but Taine had a great appetite for literature and a gift for dramatizing literary events. In studying works of literature as the flowerings of periods and peoples, he developed superbly a special department of Michelet’s “integral reconstitution of the past”; and literary criticism ever since has owed him an immense debt. From Taine’s program, we might expect him to confine himself to an analysis of works of literature into their constituent chemical elements; but what he does rather is to exhibit them as specimens, and he delights in showing us how each of his specimens is perfectly developed in its kind. Nor is his interest in them, in spite of what he says, of a character purely zoölogical. Taine had strong moral prepossessions of a kind which made the literature of the English a peculiarly happy subject for him. Though he dismisses Dr. Johnson as “insupportable” he enjoys playing the Puritans off against the frivolities of the Restoration and gets one of his best effects by following a description of the Restoration dramatists with a peal of the voice of Milton growling at the “sons of Belial.” One of his most eloquent chapters, however, one of the passages where he seems really great, is the contrast between Alfred de Musset and Tennyson, in which one kind of English morality gets the worst of it: “We think of that other poet away there in the Isle of Wight, who amuses himself by dressing up lost epics. How happy he is amongst his fine books, his friends, his honeysuckle and his roses! No matter. This other, even here amidst misery and filth, rose higher. From the heights of his doubt and despair, he saw the infinite as we see the sea from a storm-beaten promontory. Religions, their glory and their ruin, the human race, its pangs and its destiny, all that is sublime in the world appeared to him there in a flash. He felt, at least this once in his life, this inner tempest of deep sensations, gigantic dreams and intense delights, the desire for which enabled him to live, the lack of which forced him to die. He was not a mere dilettante; he was not content to taste and enjoy; he stamped his mark upon human thought; he told the world what man is, and love and truth and happiness. He suffered, but he imagined; he fainted, but he created. He tore forth with despair from his entrails the idea which he had conceived, and he held it up before the eyes of all, bloody and alive. That is harder and finer than to go fondling and gazing upon the ideas of others. There is in the world only one achievement worthy of a man: the bringing forth of a truth to which we give ourselves up and in which we believe. The people who have listened to Tennyson are better than our aristocracy of bourgeois and Bohemians; but I prefer Alfred de Musset to Tennyson.”
This is not merely a vindication of Musset; it is a vindication of Taine. What sounds in this passage so stirringly is the tone of that real intellectual heroism which makes Taine himself command our respect. But it is significant that he should go back for his text to the generation of 1830. Outside the ideal of “pure science,” to which he imagined he had devoted his life, there was little moral inspiration for Taine in the France of the Second Empire. He took courses in anatomy and psychology, frequented the alienists. Yet his determinism is not enough for him; and although he continues to affirm it, we find him smuggling himself out of his confinement within a mechanistic universe in various more or less illogical ways. When he comes to write his philosophy of art, he is obliged to introduce a moral value in the form of “the degree of beneficence of the character” of a given artist or painting. And in his last phase we are to see him responding to a sense of patriotic duty.
The French defeat and the Commune profoundly shocked and troubled Taine; and he sat down in the autumn of 1871 to an immense and uncongenial task which was to occupy him all the remaining twenty years of his life and to be left by him unfinished at his death. Taine set himself to master politics and economics, and to study the processes of government in France from the eve of the great Revolution down through Napoleon to contemporary society. It is in vain that he keeps insisting that his object is purely scientific, that he is as detached in his attitude toward France as he would be toward Florence or Athens: the Origins of Contemporary France has an obvious political purpose; and we may infer from it how far the enlightened bourgeois has traveled since the end of the preceding century in his relation to the revolution which made possible his present enlightenment and which established him in the present enjoyment of his property and his rights.
The first thing that strikes us, after Michelet and Renan, about the Origins of Contemporary France is that it is not a history at all, but simply an enormous essay. If Renan has become an historian of ideas, allowing other events to lapse into the background, Taine is an historian of literature and displays a truly startling ineptitude when he attempts to deal with parliaments and uprisings. Books and pictures may be pinned down and studied quietly in libraries and museums; and a social life sufficient to explain them may be reconstituted from conversation and travel; but though Taine can read all the documents on a great social struggle as he can read any other books, there is nothing in his own personality or experience which enables him to re-create in imagination the realities these documents represent. Note, in the specimens of his imagery which I have quoted, how awkward he is with a political generalization, but how brilliantly he comes to life when it is a question of a writer to be described. In the eternal generalizations and classifications which constitute the whole structure of his history, the movement of events is lost. In the first place, where Michelet, in attempting to tell everything, is always tending to expand beyond his frame, Taine has begun by laying out a plan which will exclude as many elements as possible. What he is undertaking, he tells us, is merely a “history of the public powers”; he leaves to others the history “of the diplomacy, the wars, the finances, the Church.” Then he formulates a set of simplifications of general political and social tendencies, then marshals to the support of each of these a long array of documentary evidence. By Taine’s time, the amassment of facts for their own sake was coming to be regarded as one of the proper functions of history; and Taine was always emphasizing the scientific value of the “little significant fact.” Here, he says, he will merely present the evidence and allow us to make our own conclusions; but it never seems to occur to him that we may ask ourselves who it is that is selecting the evidence and why he is making this particular choice. It never seems to occur to him that we may accuse him of having conceived the simplification first and then having collected the evidence to fit it; or that we may have been made skeptical at the outset by the very assumption on his part that there is nothing he cannot catalogue with certainty under a definite number of heads with Roman numerals, in so complex, so confused, so disorderly and so rapid a human crisis as the great French Revolution.
As Renan, even after he has explained to us that in the decline of the ancient world it was saints rather than sages who were needed, makes us wonder whether the civilization represented by Marcus Aurelius might not after all have saved itself and done a much more agreeable job of it; so Taine, in the very act of demonstrating the inevitability of the breakdown of the old regime, assures us that its worst abuses were already being corrected by the governing class itself and keeps intimating that if only the people had been a little more reasonable and patient, the whole affair might have been quietly adjusted. Our conviction of the inevitability of religions and revolutions varies in proportion to our distance from them and our opportunity for untroubled reflection. Taine plays down the persecutions for religious belief and liberal thought under the regime of the monarchy and almost succeeds in keeping them out of his picture; and he tries somehow to convey the impression that there was nothing more to the capture of the Bastille than a barbarous and meaningless gesture, by telling us that it contained at the time, after all, only seven prisoners, and dwelling on the misdirected brutalities committed by the mob. Though in some admirable social-documentary chapters he has shown us the intolerable position of the peasants, his tone becomes curiously aggrieved as soon as they begin violating the old laws by seizing estates and stealing bread. Toward the Federations of 1789, which had so thrilling an effect on Michelet, he takes an ironic and patronizing tone. The spirit and achievements of the revolutionary army have been shut out from his scope in advance and are barely—though more respectfully—touched upon. And the revolutionary leaders are presented, with hardly a trace of sympathetic insight—from a strictly zoölogical point of view, he tells us—as a race of “crocodiles.”
Where now is the Taine who, with Alfred de Musset, could exult in the sense of humanity rising to greatness of vision through misery, conflict, dissipation? The human Proteus, in its convulsions and its disconcerting transformations, has thrown Taine and sent him away sulky, as soon as he has emerged from his library. Not only is he horrified by the Marats, but confronted by a Danton or a Madame Roland, he shrinks at once into professorial superiority. At the sight of men making fools and brutes of themselves, even though he himself owes to their struggles his culture and his privileged position, a remote disapproval chills his tone, all the bright colors of his fancy go dead. Where is the bold naturalist now who formerly made such obstinate headway against the squeamishness of academic circles? He is pressing upon us a social program which blends strangely the householder’s timidity with the intellectual’s independence. Don’t let the State go too far, he pleads: we must, to be sure, maintain the army and the police to protect us against the foreigner and the ruffian; but the government must not be allowed to interfere with Honor and Conscience, Taine’s pet pair of nineteenth-century abstractions, nor with the private operation of industry, which stimulates individual initiative and which alone can secure general prosperity.
The truth is that the mobs of the great Revolution and the revolutionary government of Paris have become identified now in Taine’s mind with the socialist revolution of the Commune. Like Renan, he has been driven to imagining that his sole solidarity lies with a small number of superior persons who have been appointed as the salt of the earth; and he is even farther than Renan from Michelet’s conception of the truly superior man as him who represents the people most completely. But, though not much liking his ordinary fellow bourgeois, he will rise to the defense of the bourgeois law and order as soon as there seems to be a danger of its being shaken by the wrong kind of superior people.
Yet something is wrong: his heart is not in this as it was in his early work. He does not like the old regime; he does not like the Revolution; he does not like the militaristic France which has been established by Napoleon and his nephew. And he never lived to write, as he had planned, the final glorification of the French family, which was to have given its moral basis to his system, nor the survey of contemporary France, in which he was apparently to have taken up the problem of the use and abuse of science: to have shown how, though beneficial when studied and applied by the elite, it became deadly in the hands of the vulgar.