walls of this demonstration-the powers of Parliament under the old régime, the work of the Constituent Assembly, the action of external causes, wars, and insurrections-is eliminated by the definition. This dominating logical faculty dictates the whole doctrine of Taine-a doctrine of inexorable determinism. Determinism is for him, as for Claude Bernard, the basis of all progress and of all scientific criticism; and he seeks in it the explanation alike of the facts of history and the works of human art.

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At the same time, if Taine was a logician, he was a logician of a particular stamp. He was a realist, and his logic works only upon concrete notions. We shall ill understand his doctrine if we separate it from his method. And here we get some valuable light on the constitution of his intellect from the nature of his mathematical aptitudes. He had a great gift for mathematics, and especially for mental calculation. He could multiply sums of several figures in his But he did it by visualising the figures and working the sum a blackboard. In the same way the starting-point of his logical processes was always facts-facts observed with an extraordinary power of vision, collected with indefatigable conscientiousness, grouped in the most rigorous order. In history and in literary or artistic criticism the process was the same as in philosophy. The starting-point of his theory of intelligence is the Sign, the Idea being for him nothing but a name for a collection of impossible experiences. The Sign is the collective name of a series of images; the image is the result of a series of sensations; and the sensation is the result of a series of molecular movements. Thus, through a congeries of sensible facts, we arrive at an initial mechanical action. That is absolutely all. The fact and the cause are identical. This it is which distinguishes Taine from the pure Positivists. While the Positivists content themselves with analysing facts and noting their co-ordination or succession, without assuming any certain relation of cause and effect between them, Taine, with his absolute determinism, sees in each fact a necessary element in a wider group of facts, which determines it and is its cause. Each group of facts is again conditioned by a more general group to which it owes its existence; and one might thus go on in theory from group to group up to some unique cause which should be the originating condition of all that exists. In this conception force and idea and cause and fact are all mixed up together; and if Taine had believed it possible to soar into metaphysics, I suppose his metaphysics would have consisted of a sort of self-determining mechanism, in which the phenomena of the sensible universe and the ideas of the thinking Ego would be but the successive appearances presented to the senses by the manifestation of Being in itself, of idea in itself, and of action in itself.

And this helps us to understand how the great logician came to

be also a great painter, how he developed that individual style, with its union of imaginative splendour and rigorous reasoning—a style in which every sweep of the artist's brush is an indispensable element in the philosopher's demonstration. Even his imagination has a character of its own. It has neither sentiment nor reverie. It startles us with none of those instantaneous flashes, those leaps of insight, with which Shakespeare penetrates the heart of Nature or illumines in a moment the mysterious recesses of the human soul. It is not the imagination that suggests and reveals; it is descriptive and explanatory. It shows us things in their full relief, their full intensity of colour, and, by means of sustained comparisons, drawn out with all the analytic art of the logician, it enables us to classify facts and ideas, His imagination is but the sumptuous raiment of his dialectic. It has been said that this glowing oratory was none of his own, to begin with; that when he entered the Ecole Normale he was reproved for his dull and abstract style, and that he set himself, by dint of study and effort, to acquire a better manner, browsing meanwhile upon Balzac and Michelet. But a good part of this is neat invention. No doubt, with so robust a genius as Taine's, the will played its part in the formation of his delivery as of his ideas; but there is far too deep an accordance between his style, his method, and his doctrine, for us to imagine it other than the necessary product of his nature. A style like this, at once firm and flashing, now vibrating with nervous tension, then spreading out into a broad and majestic harmony, is not made at pleasure or by machinery.

It must be acknowledged, however, that this intimate admixture of the logical with the picturesque, this application of science to æsthetics, this constant intervention of physics and physiology in the affairs of the mind, this effort to reduce everything to necessary laws and to simple and definite principles, was not without its dangers and its inconveniences. The complexity of life is not so easily to be crammed into a framework thus rigid and inflexible; and nature, in particular, has this strange and inexplicable privilege, that wherever she combines two elements she can add a new one, which results from them but is not accounted for by them.

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This is true especially in the organic world; life consists of just that indefinable something which educes the plant from the seed, the flower from the plant, and the fruit from the flower. In the universal mechanism of Taine this mysterious something has no room to breathe and its absence gives to his style, as to his system, a rigidity which repels many of his readers. Amiel has expressed with that exaggeration which his morbid sensibility introduces into everything— the impression produced by Taine on some tender and mystical natures which shrink away wounded from the mercilessness of his logic.

"I have a painful sensation in reading him-something like the grinding

of pulleys, the click of machines, the smell of the laboratory. His style reeks of chemistry and technology; it is inexorably scientific. It is dry and rigid, hard and penetrating, a strong astringent; it lacks charm, humanity, nobleness, and grace. It sets one's ears and one's teeth on edge. This painful sensation comes probably from two things-his moral philosophy and his literary method. The profound contempt for humanity which characterises the physiological school, and the intrusion of technology into literature, inaugurated by Balzac and Stendhal, explain this latent aridity which you feel in his pages and which catches you in the throat like the fumes of a mineral factory. He is very instructive to read, but he takes the life out of you; he parches, corrodes, and saddens you. He never inspires; he only informs. This, I suppose, is to be the literature of the future, an Americanised literature, in profound contrast with the Greek; giving you algebra in place of life, the formula instead of the image, the fumes of the alembic for the divine dizziness of Apollo, the cold demonstration for the joys of thought-in a word, the immolation of poetry, to be skinned and dissected by science."

Now in all this there is some truth, but there is a good deal of exaggeration and even injustice. One has but to turn to his essay on "Iphigenia in Tauris" to recognise Taine's susceptibility to the beauty of the antique, to his pages on Madame de Lafayette to feel his grace, or to those on the English Reformation to see how deeply he was touched by the struggle of conscience and the spectacle of moral heroism. It would be easy to show, by running through his books, how this great mind, so profoundly artistic, as much at home-consummate musician that he was in a sonata of Beethoven as in the metaphysical reverie of Hegel, was accessible to all the great ideas as to all the great emotions, but that he regarded it as a duty to moral as well as intellectual honesty to eliminate from the search for truth all those vague aspirations by means of which men try to create for themselves a universe of their own; ' re-moulded nearer to the heart's desire."

V.

Excluding thus from the whole field of his conceptions all metaphysical entities, all elements of mystery or uncertainty, and reducing everything to the mere grouping of facts, he could not but treat all the problems of literature and aesthetics as problems of history. Thus all his works, with the exception of his "Travels in the Pyrenees and his treatise on the Intelligence, are historical works. They mark the last stage of the evolution by which literary criticism has become one of the forms of history. Villemain had been the first to show the relation between literary and historical development. Sainte.-Beuve had sought, still more systematically, the explanation of an author's work in the circumstances of his life and time. Taine recognised in literature the most precious documents, the most significant testimony, to which history could appeal, at the same time that he regarded it as the necessary product of the epoch which gave it birth. The essay

on La Fontaine is an essay on the society of the seventeenth century and the court of Louis XIV.; the essay on Livy is an essay on the Roman character; the history of English Literature is a history of English civilisation and the English mind, from the time when Normans or Anglo-Saxons overran the seas and ascended the rivers, pillaging, burning, and massacring, shouting their war-songs as they went, down to Queen Victoria dowering the illustrious Tennyson with the laureateship and a peerage. In the "Travels in Italy" and the 66 the "Philosophy of Art," you are introduced to the Italian society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and to Dutch life in the seventeenth; and are made acquainted with the manners of the Greeks in the time of Pericles and of Alexander. It is easy to perceive that for Taine the histories of literature and of art are but fragments of the natural history of man, which is itself but a fragment of the story of the universe. Even the "Life and Opinions of Thomas Graindorge is a humorous study of French society, from the same philosophical hand to which we owe the "History of English Literature." Never has any writer shown throughout his works such unity of conception and of doctrine, or manifested from the first so clear a consciousness of his own method, or proved so invariably equal to himself. From the Ecole Normale onwards, Taine pursued his own method of generalisation and simplification. Every man and every book," he said, "may be summed up in three pages, and those three pages in three lines." Nevertheless, he loved detail. His "Voyages aux Pyrenées" gives the impression of an exercise in description to see what could be done in it—something like a violinist's finger exercises. It is the only instance we have in his works of description for its own sake. Everywhere else the description is intended to furnish the elements of an historical generalisation. He describes a country in order to explain its inhabitants; he describes the manners and the life of men in order to explain their thoughts and feelings. He has a wonderful gift of making visible to the eye the costume, the decoration, the outward manifestation of the most various civilisations and societies of men, of producing a general effect by accumulation of detail, and by the happy selection of the most characteristic features. In this he shows himself a great historical painter. Nor is the art less wonderful by which he reduces to a few clear and simple motives, logically grouped together and subordinated to a single ruling motive, the whole motley company of external phenomena. One kicks a little, it is true, against accepting explanations so simple for facts so complex, but one is subjugated by the rigour of the demonstration and the tone of conviction and authority, and also by the absolute sincerity with which the historian describes and the philosopher explains, untouched by either tenderness or indignation, and valuing men exactly

in proportion as they represent the essential characters of their epoch, and are moved by the motives which animate it. He will speak in almost the same tone of admiring sympathy of Benvenuto Cellini, who personifies the spirit of the Renaissance, indifferent to good and evil, and only alive to the pleasure of working out its own individuality without hindrance and to the enjoyment of beauty in all its forms, and of Bunyan, the mystical tinker, who personifies the Reformation, with its contempt of beauty in outward things, and its passionate preoccupation with its own soul. His sympathy is the sympathy of the botanist or the zoologist, who appreciates a specimen as true to type. He searches history for the most perfect instances of the different varieties of the human animal. If he classifies and places them, as he does his works of art, according to their importance or their utility, one feels that nevertheless, in his character as a naturalist, all are interesting to him, while his admiration is reserved for those which best conform to type, be the type what it may.

VI.

Nevertheless, this serenity-which had its source in his necessitarian philosophy-did not accompany him to the end. In this respect his last work contrasts with all that went before it. He is not here content with describing and analysing; he judges, and he is angry. Instead of simply displaying, in the fall of the ancien régime, the violences of the Revolution and the splendours and tyranny of the Empire, a succession of necessary and inevitable facts, he speaks of faults, of errors, and of crimes; he has not the same weight and measure for the Reign of Terror in France that he had for a revolution in Italy or in England; and after being so indulgent to the tyrants and the condottieri of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries he speaks with absolute abhorrence of Napoleon, the great condottiere of the nineteenth century, and one of the most superb human animals, moreover, that have ever been let loose upon history.

M. Taine has been reproached with inconsistency. It has even been suggested that his severity towards the men of the Revolution was due to political passion, to the wish to flatter the Conservatives, to some vague terror of the perils and responsibilities of a democratic system. Now it is impossible to deny that the experiences of the war and the Commune acted on the mind of Taine; but they certainly did not act upon it in any such mean and childish way. He believed that he saw in these events the tokens and precursors of the decadence of France, the explanation and the consequence of the political convulsions of a century ago. Surely, so far from upbraiding him with the emotion he betrayed, we should rather take it kindly of him that he felt so much, and that, seeing his country, as he believed, on the edge of the abyss, he should have tried to arrest her by the tragic delineation of her perils and her ills.