HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

REVIEW.

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. By H. A. Taine. Translated by H. Von Laun; vol.I.

Mr. TAINE is a remarkable thinker, and has already made a name for himself in literature. His books, now becoming familiar to men of all grades of intellect, are highly prized by the thoughtful few who regard books as sources of instruction rather than of amusement. He considers books as representative not merely of their author, but of the age in which they were written. The minds of their writers were formed by the culture, the passions, the manners and customs, the events, and the civilization of the race in which such books were written; and hence literature is essentially representative, and viewed from this point, appears to be a branch of psychological science. It is in this light that Mr. Taine regards it, and it is under the influence of this view that his critical appraisement of the value of English books is conceived and written. We think he carries this notion sometimes too far, more especially in those parts of his work wherein he restricts the representativeness of the literature of certain periods to those periods. The following picture of the times of Queen Elizabeth, in which times, according to Mr. Taine, Paganism was revived, will serve as an illustration in this respect:—

It was Paganism which reigned in Elizabeth's court, not only in letters, but in doctrine, a Paganism of the north, always serious, generally sombre, but which rested, like that of the south, on natural forces. From some, all Christianity was effaced, many proceeded to atheism from the excess of revulsion and debauchery, like Marlowe and Greene. With others, like Shakespeare, the idea of God scarcely makes its appearance ; they see in our poor short human life only a dream, and beyond it the long sad sleep ; for them, death is the goal of life ; at most a dark gulf, into which man plunges, uncertain of the issue. If they carry their gaze beyond, they perceive, not the soul welcomed into a purer world, but the corpse abandoned to the damp earth, or the ghost hovering about the church-yard. They speak like sceptics or superstitious men, never as genuine believers. Their heroes have human, not religious virtues ; against crime they rely on honour and the love for the beautiful, not on piety and the fear of God. It others, few and far, like Sidney and Spencer, catch a glimpse of this god. It is as a vague ideal light, a sublime Platonic phantom, which has no resemblance to a personal God, a strict inquisitor of the slightest motions of the heart. He appears at the summit of things. Like the splendid crown of the world, but he does not weigh upon human life ; he leaves it intact and free, only turning it toward the beautiful. They do not known as yet the sort of narrow prison in which official cant and respectable creeds were, later on, to confine action and intelligence. Even the believers, sincere Christians, like Bacon and Browne, discard all oppressive sternness, reduce Christianity to a sort of moral poetry, and allow naturalism to subsist beneath religion. In such a broad and open channel, speculation could spread its wings. With Lord Herbert appeared a systematic deism ; with Milton and Algernon Sidney, a philosophical religion; Clarendon went so far as to compare Lord Falkland's gardens to the groves of Academe. Against the rigourism of the Puritans, Chillingworth, Hales, Hooker, the greatest doctors of the English Church, gave a large place to natural reason—so large, that never, even to this day, has it made such an advance.


If a literature pervaded, and imbued by the sentiments and ideas which Mr. Taine attributes to Elizabethan literature, be indeed a representative literature, its representativeness is not confined, to the age of Elizabeth, but extends to all time, and more to the time in which we live than to the period to which Mr. Taine refers it. Few men acquainted with the writings of the leading scientific thinkers of the age will have failed to perceive that the idea of a God considered as a personal agent, distinct in attributes and essence from the forces of the universe, scarcely ever makes its appearance in scientific works. the latter deal with secondary causes, and with those only. Of course there are exceptions now, and so there were in the time of Elizabeth ; but these exceptions serve to prove the reality of the fact from which they differ. Nor are we one iota superior to the men of Elizabeth's time, with respect to our views of death and the after life. Very few think of these matters at all, and, of those who do, how few know anything definite or certain about them. Our life is a perpetual death, and we all know that very soon we must die finally, and most men believe that after death they will exist as thinking conscious men in some other state of being, yet, perhaps, not one in a hundred ever feels desirous of finding out the characteristics of that state of existence towards which we are speeding as fast as time can carry us. We may just as truly say of the men of this age, as Mr. Taine does of the writers of Elizabeth's day, that when they speak on questions of this nature, they either speak like sceptics, or like superstitious men. We differ superficially from the men of Elizabeth's day, and even from the men of earlier ages, but resemble them in all the substantial elements of our common nature. We think Bacon's thoughts, we are inspired by the same sort of passions that were influential in moving men to action in his day, and Shakespeare's maxims and sayings still hold potent sway over us. Indeed, Shakespeare's fame rests chiefly on the fact that his writings represent human nature in general, and not human nature as it existed in any particular period. We think Mr. Taine indulges in much questionable criticism on the merits of certain works, and is led by the principle already stated into much hypercriticism, on the morality of certain writers. This tendency to hyper-criticism is specially evident in his estimate of Shakespeare's moral character. Speaking of Shakspeare, he says :—

A nature, poetical, immoral, inspired, superior to reason by the sudden revelations of his seer's madness, the most creative that ever engaged in the exact copy of the details of actual existence, in the dazzling caprice of fancy. In the profound complications of superhuman passions.
Of Shakespeare all come from within—I mean from his soul, and his genius; external circumstances contributed but slightly to its development. He was intimately bound up with his age; that is, he knew by experience the manners of country, court, and town ; he had visited the heights, depths, the middle regions of the condition of mankind : nothing more. For the rest, his life was commonplace ; the irregularities, troubles, passions, successes through which he passed, were, on the whole, such us we meet with every where else. His father, a glover and wool stapler, in very easy circumstances, having married a sort of a country heiress, had become high-bailiff and chief alderman in his little, town ; and when Shakespeare reached the age of fourteen he was on the verge of ruin, mortgaging his wife's property, obliged to resign his municipal offices, and to remove his son from school to assist him in his business. The young fellow applied himself to it as well as he could, not without some scrapes and escapades: if we are to believe tradition, he was one of the thirsty souls of the place, with a mind to support the reputation of his little town in its drinking powers. Once, they say, having been beaten at Bideford in one of these ale bouts, he returned staggering from the fight, or rather could not return, and passed the night with his comrades under an apple-tree by the road side. Without doubt he had already begun to write verses, to rove about like a genuine poet, taking part in the noisy rustic feasts, the gay pastoral plays, the rich and bold outbreak of Pagan and pastoral life, as it was then to be found in an English village. At all events he was not a pattern of propriety, and his pastimes were as precocious as they were reckless. While not yet nineteen years old, he married the daughter of a substantial yeoman, about eight years older than himself and not too soon, as she was about to become a mother. Other of his outbreaks were not more fortunate. It seems that he was fond of poaching, after the manner of the time, being " much given to all unluckinesse in stealing venison and rabbits," says the Rev. Richard Davies : "particularly from Sir—— Lucy, who had him oft whipt and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly the country: . . . but his revenge was so great, that he is his Justice Clodpate." More over, about this time, Shakespeare's father was in prison, his affairs were desperate, and he himself had three children, following one close upon the other ; he must live, and life was hardly possible for him in his native town. He went to London, and took to the stage ; took the lowest, parts, was a "servant" in the theatre, that is, an apprentice, or perhaps a supernumerary. They even said he had begun still lower, and that to earn his bread he had held gentlemen's horses at the door of the theatre. At all events he tasted misery, and felt not in imagination but in fact, the sharp thorn of care, humiliation, disgust, forced labour, public discredit, the power of the people. He was a comedian, one of "His Majesty's poor players"—a sad trade, degraded in all ages by the contrasts and the falsehoods inseparable from it; still more degraded then by the brutalities of the crowd, who not seldom would stone the actors, and by the severities of the magistrates, who would sometimes condemn them to lose their ears. He felt, it, and spoke of it with bitterness.


Our author instances the character of Falstaff as an illustration of Shakespeare's moral deficiencies. "Because Shakespeare drew that character, therefore he was immoral. This is substantially the argument which Mr. Taine advances. Might we not as well say that Mr. Taine must be as bad as the estimate he gives of Falstaff, because he can understand and appreciate the character which Shakespeare drew. And on the same principle ought we not to regard every novelist who depicts a villain as partaking of the character of the villain depicted. Mr. Taine evidently carries his hyper-criticism too far with, respect to Shakespeare, and indeed it we were to concede to him his canon of criticism, we should be obliged to denounce as immoral every man, who possesses ability to depict either on the canvas of the artist, or in pen and ink, the numerous villains, rogues, and impostors who abound in the world. Our author is particularly severe upon Falstaff. He tells us that :

Falstaff has the passions of an animal, and the imagination of a man of wit. There is no character which better exemplified the dash and immorality of Shakespeare. Falstaff is a great supporter of disreputable places, swearer, gamester, brawler, wine-bag, as low as he well can be. He has a big belly, bloodshed eyes, bloated face, shaking leg; he spends his life huddled up among the tavern-jugs, or asleep on the ground behind the arras; he only wakes to curse, lie, brag, and steal. He is as big a swindler as Panurge, who had sixty-three ways of making money, "of which the honestest was by sly theft." And what is worse, he is an old man, a knight, a courtier, and well-bred. Must he not be odious and repulsive? by no means; you cannot help liking him. " At bottom, like his brother Panurge, he is "the best fellow the world." He has no malice in his composition; no other wish than to laugh and be amused. When insulted, he bawls out louder than his attackers, and pays them back with, interest in coarse words and insults; but he owes them no grudge for it. the next minute he is sitting down with them in a tavern, drinking their health like a brother and comrade. If he has vices, he exposes them so frankly that we are obliged to forgive him them. He seems to say to us : " Well, so I am, what then? I like drinking: isn't the wine good? I take to my heels when hard hitting begins : isn't fighting a nuisance? I get into debt, and do fools out of their money ; isn't it nice to have money in your pocket? I brag : isn't it natural to want to be well thought of?'—"Dost thou hear, Hal? thou knowest in the state of innocency, Adam fell : and what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villany? Thou seest I have more flesh than another man, and therefore more frailty." Falstaff is so frankly immoral that he ceases to be so. Conscience ends at a certain point; nature assumes its place, and the man rushes upon what he desires, without more thought of being just or unjust than an animal in the neighbouring wood. Falstaff, engaged in recruiting, has sold exemptions to all the rich people, and only enrolled starved and half-naked wretches. There's but a shirt and a half in all his company : that does not trouble him. Bah! " they'll find linen enough on every hedge." the prince, who has seen them pass muster, says, "I did never see such pitiful rascals. " Tut, tut," answers Falstaff, " good enough to toss; food for powder : they'll fill a pit as well as better ; tush, man, mortal men, mortal men." His second excuse is his unfailing spirit. If ever there was a man who could talk, it was he. Insults and oaths, curses, jobations, protests, flowed from him as from an open barrel. He is never at a loss; he devises a shift for every difficulty. Lies sprout out of him, fructify, increase; beget one another, like mushrooms on a rich and rotten bed of earth. He lies still more from his imagination and nature than from interest and necessity. It is evident from the manner in which he strains his fictions. He says he has fought alone against two men. The next moment it is four. Presently we have seven, then eleven, then fourteen. He is stopped in time, or he would soon be talking of a whole army. When unmasked, he does not lose his temper, and is the first to laugh at his boastings. " Gallants, lads, boys, hearts of gold. . . . What, shall we be merry ? Shall we have a play extempore" He does the scolding part of King Henry with so much truth that one might take him for a king, or an actor. This big pot-bellied fellow, a coward, a jester, a brawler, a drunkard, a lewd rascal, a pot-house poet, is one of Shakespeare's favourites. the reason is, that his manners are those of pure nature, and Shakespeare's mind is congenial with his own.

This one character is dwelt on at great length, but the purpose of the writer is transparent. Falstaff is Shakespeare transcribed, as a musician would say, or Shakespeare with variations. In the same spirit the author's conclusion of the sketch is conceived and written.

What a soul! what extent of action, and what sovereignty of an unique faculty! what diverse creations, and what persistence of the same impress! There they all are reunited, and all marked by the same sign, void of will and reason, governed by mood, imagination, or pure passion, destitute of the faculties contrary to those of the poet, dominated by the corporeal type which his painter's eyes have conceived, endowed by the habits of mind and by the vehement sensibility which he finds in himself. Go through the groups, and you will only discover in them divers forms and divers states of the same power. Here, the flock of brutes, dotards, and gossips, made up of a mechanical imagination ; further on, the company of men of wit, animated by a gay and foolish imagination; then, the charming swarm of women whom their delicate imagination raises so high, and their self-forgeting love carries so far; elsewhere the band of villains, hardened by unbridled passions. Inspired by the artist's animation ; in the centre of the mournful train of grand characters, whose excited, brain is filled with sad or criminal visions, and whom an inner destiny urges to murder, madness, or death. Ascend one stage, and contemplate the whole scene : the aggregate bears the same mark as the details. the drama reproduces promiscuously ugliness, baseness, horrors, unclean details, profligate and ferocious manners, the whole reality of life just as it is, when it is unrestrained by decorum, common sense, reason, and duty. Comedy, led through a phantasmagoria of pictures, gets lost in the likely and the unlikely, with no other check but the caprice of an amused imagination, wantonly disjointed, and romantic, an opera without music, a concerto of melancholy and tender sentiments, which bears the mind into the supernatural world, and brings before our eyes on its fairy-wings the genius which has created it. Look now. Do you not see the poet behind the crowd of his creations? They have heralded its approach; they have all shown somewhat of him. Ready, impetuous, impassioned, delicate, his genius is pure imagination, touched more vividly, and by slighter things than ours. Hence his style, blooming with exuberant images, loaded with exaggerated metaphors, whose strangeness is like incoherence, whose wealth is superabundant, the work of a mind, which at the least incitement, produces too much and leaps too far. Hence his implied psychology, and his terrible penetration, which instantaneously perceiving all the effects of a situation, and all the details of a character, concentrates them in every response, and gives his figure a relief and a colouring which create illusion. Hence our emotion and tenderness. We say to him, as Desdemona to Othello; "I love thee for the battles, sieges, fortunes thou hast passed, and for the distressful stroke that thy youth suffered."

We do see the poet behind the crowd of his creations," but not in the light in which Mr. Taine beholds him. We behold him as a dramatic magician conjuring up before our mind's eye the weakness, the imbecility, the infirmities, and wickednesses of the world in which he lived, and which is substantially the same sort of world in which we find ourselves.

In a short notice like this we can but merely glance at the leading peculiarities of our author's work. His estimate of many other great men must be omitted for want of space. We must however hear what he says respecting one who, next to Shakespeare, and superior to him in some points, is one of the greatest ornaments of our literature :—

John Milton was not one of those fevered souls void of self-command, whose rapture takes them by fits,whom a sickly sensibility drives for ever to the extreme of sorrow or joy, whose pliability prepares them to produce a variety of characters, whose inquietude condemns them to paint the insanity and contradictions of passion. Vast knowledge, close logic, and grand passion ; these were his marks. His mind was lucid, his imagination limited. He was incapable of disturbed emotion or of transformation. He conceived the loftiest of the ideal beauties, but ho conceived only one. He was not born for the drama, but for the ode. He does not create souls, but constructs arguments and experiences emotions. Emotions and arguments, all the forces and actions of his soul, assemble and are arranged beneath a unique sentiment, that of the sublime; and the broad river of lyric poetry streams from him, impetuous, with even flow, splendid as a cloth of gold.
This dominant sense constituted the greatness and the firmness of his character. Against external fluctuations he found a refuge in himself, and the ideal city which he had built in his soul endured, impregnable to all assaults. It was too beautiful, this inner city, for him to wish to leave it; it was too solid to be destroyed. He believed in the sublime with the whole force of his nature, and the whole authority of his logic, and with him the cultivated reason strengthened by its tests the suggestions of the primitive instinct. With this double armour man can advance firmly through life. He who is always feeding himself with demonstrations is capable of believing, willing, persevering in belief and will; he does not turn aside to every event and every passion, as that fickle and pliable being whom we call a poet; he remains at rest in fixed principles. He is capable of embracing a cause, and of continuing attached to it, whatever may happen, spite of all, to the end. No seduction, no emotion, no accident, no change, alters the stability of his conviction, or the lucidity of his knowledge. On the first day, on the last day, during the whole time, he preserves intact the entire system of his clear ideas, and the logical vigour of his brain sustains the manly vigour of his heart. When at length, as here, this close logic is employed in the service of noble ideas, enthusiasm is added to constancy. Man holds his opinions not only as true, but as sacred. He fights for them, not only as a soldier, but as a priest. He is impassioned, devoted, religious, heroic. Rarely is such a mixture seen; but it was clearly seen in Milton.

There may be some truth, but there certainly is a deal of questionable speculation in what our author says respecting Milton's domestic troubles. We do not question his facts, but we object to some of his views respecting them. All women are not like Milton's first wife, nor yet like his daughters. There are many noble-minded women in the world who, cæteris paribus, would be proud to be the wife of such a man as John Milton. Milton's spouse was a woman of a peculiar stamp, and her domestic misdoings does not furnish a sufficient basis for philosophical speculation on the character of women in general. Scores of cases might be adduced in which women united to intellectual husbands have been household goddesses, have been regarded as such by their husbands, and have keenly enjoyed and appreciated their husbands' intellectual achievements. Our author says:—

On his return to England, Milton fell back among his books, and received a few pupils,from whom he exacted, as from himself, continuous toil, serious reading, a frugal diet, a strict behaviour the life of a recluse, almost of a monk. Suddenly, in a month, after a country visit, he married. A few weeks afterwards his wife returned to her fathers house, would not return, took no notice of his letters, and sent back his messenger with scorn. The two characters had come into collision. Nothing displeases women more than an austere and self-contained character. They see that they have no hold upon it; its dignity awes them, its pride repels, its preoccupations keep them aloof; they feel themselves of less value, neglected for general interests or speculative curiosities; judged, moreover, and that after an inflexible rule ; at most regarded with condescension, as a sort of less reasonable and inferior being, shut out from the equality which they look for, and the love which alone can recompense to them for the loss of equality. the " priest" character is made for solitude ; the tact, abandon, charm, pleasantness, and sweetness, necessary to all companionship, is wanting to it ; we admire him, but we go no further, especially if, like Milton's wife, we are somewhat dull and commonplace, adding mediocrity of intellect to the repugnance of our hearts, he had, so his biographers say, a certain gravity of nature, or severity of mind which would condescend to petty things, but kept in the clouds, in a region which is not that of the household. He was accused of being harsh, choleric ; and certainly stood upon his manly dignity, his authority as a husband, and was not so greatly esteemed, respected, studied as he thought he deserved to be. In short he passed the day among his books, and the rest of the time his heart lived in an abstracted and sublime world of which few wives catch a glimpse, his wife least of all. He had in fact, chosen like a student, the more at random because his former life had been of "a well-governed and wise appetite." Equally like a man of the closet, he resented her flight, being the more irritated because the world's ways were unknown to him. Without dread of ridicule, and with the sternness of a speculative man suddenly in collision with actual life, he wrote treatises on divorce, signed them with his name, dedicated them to Parliament, held himself divorced, de facto because his wife refused to return, de jure because he had four texts of Scripture for it ; whereupon he paid court to a young lady, and suddenly seeing his wife on her knees and weeping, forgave her, took her back, renewed the dry and sad marriage-tie, not profitting by experience, but on the other hand fated to contract two other unions, the last with a wife thirty years younger than himself. Other parts of his domestic life was neither better managed nor happier. He had taken his daughters for secretaries, and made them read languages which they did not understand— a repelling task of which they bitterly complained. In return he accused them of being "undutiful and unkind," of neglecting him, not caring whether they left him alone, of conspiring with the servants to rob him in their purchases, or stealing his books, so that they would have disposed of the whole of them. Mary, the second, hearing one day that he was going to be married, said that his marriage was no news ; the best news would be his death. An incredible speech, and one which throws a strange light on the miseries of this family. Neither circumstances nor nature had created him for happiness.

These extracts will serve to show the nature of Mr. Taine's book. His style is lively, often sparkling, and never dull. His history is more in the nature of a philosophical disquisition on English literature than a dry treatise on English Bibliography. His psychological speculations often lack breadth and completeness. He is too apt to draw general inferences from special cases. In perusing his work, the reader ought, therefore, to be on his guard against receiving an undue bias, for Mr. Taine writes with such freedom and vigour, and in such an animated and piquant manner, as to sometimes make the worse appear the better reason. But, notwithstanding these trifling blemishes, his work is a most interesting and acceptable addition to our literature.

 Empire 7 May 1872,