HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY HENRY VAN LAUN
WITH A SPECIAL INTRODUCTION BY
J. SCOTT CLARK, A. M.
PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
REVISED EDITION
VOLUME I
SHAKESPEARE BEFORE SIR THOMAS LUCY.
Photogravure from a painting by T. Brooks.
This picture brings vividly before us an interesting incident of Shakespeare's early days. He has just been caught red-handed in the crime of poaching, and is now brought before Sir Thomas Lucy to answer to the gamekeeper's charge. Though this incident seems well authenticated, little is definitely known of this period of the great dramatist's life. But we do know that that energy, which later achieved so much, in his youth ran to waste in all kinds of lawless pleasures. The artist here depicts Sir Thomas Lucy sitting stern and grave as he listens to the constable's charge against Shakespeare. A slaughtered deer has been brought in, as testimony against him. Shakespeare himself, though seeming fully aware of the gravity of his offence, appears nevertheless composed and prepared to answer the charge. Though the magistrate may not be favorably impressed by the dauntless independence of Shakespeare's bearing, we may be sure he excites the admiration of the feminine members of the household, who are watching him with interest. All the accessories of carved woodwork, leaded casements, and tapestried walls interest us as depicting the interior of a typical manor-house of the period.
#THE WORLD'S# GREAT CLASSICS
LIBRARY COMMITTE 1
TIMOTHY DWIGHT, D.D. LLD. RICHARD HENRY STODDARD ARTHUR RICHMOND MARSH. A.B. PAVL VAN DYKE, D.D. ALBERT ELLERY BERGH
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CLARENCE COOK—ART EDITOR
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DEDICATION
Even at the present day, the historian of Civilization in Europe and in France is amongst us, at the head of those historical studies which he formerly encouraged so much. I myself have experienced his kindness, learned by his conversation, consulted his books, and profited by that intellectual and impartial breadth, that active and liberal sympathy, with which he receives the labors and thoughts of others, even when these ideas are not like his own. I consider it a duty and an honor to inscribe this work to M. Guizot.
H. A. TAINE.
SPECIAL INTRODUCTION
The publication of M. Taine's "History of English Literature," in 1864, and its translation into English, in 1872, mark an epoch in educational history, especially in that of America. Prior to the appearance of this work, the total knowledge of British writers gained in the school and college life of the ordinary American youth was generally derived in the form of blind memorization from one text-book. This book was a combination of minute biographical detail with the generalities and abstractions of criticism. The student, and the general reader as well, did not really study the great writers at all; he simply memorized what someone had written about them; and he tried, generally in vain, to comprehend the real concrete significance of such critical terms as "bald, nervous, sonorous," etc. But with the distribution of M. Taine's great work came the beginning of better things. It was the first step in an evolution by no means yet completed—a movement paralleled in the development of methods of scientific study during the last four decades. Forty years ago the pupil did not study oxygen, electricity, or cellulose; he simply memorized what someone had written about these elements. He never touched and rarely saw the things themselves, and he counted himself fortunate if his instructor had the energy and the facilities to perform before the wondering class a few stock experiments. But all this has been changed. It is now universally recognized that the only sound method of studying any science is the laboratory method; that is, the study of the thing itself in all its manifestations. In methods of studying literature the progress towards a true scientific, that is, a laboratory method, has been much slower, but it seems almost equally sure. We are just now in the intermediate stage, where we study "editions with notes." Our educators, as a rule, have yet to learn that to memorize biographical data and the mere generalities and negations of criticism, or to trace out obscure allusions and doubtful meanings, is not to study a writer in any broad or fruitful sense. But the movement towards a true scientific method is already well begun; and, as we have said, to M. Taine belongs the honor of taking the initial step.
With Taine's work in hand the thoughtful reader may realize to a large extent the significance of Leslie Stephen's memorable dictum: "The whole art of criticism consists in learning to know the human being who is partially revealed to us in his written and spoken words." M. Taine's pages continually attest his deep conviction that "the style is the man," in a very comprehensive sense. In his Introduction to his "History of English Literature," we find such statements as these:—"You study the document only to know the man, just as you study the fossil shell only to know the animal behind it; Genuine history is brought into existence only when the historian begins to unravel... the living man, toiling, impassioned, entrenched in his customs, with his voice and features, his gestures and dress, distinct and complete as he from whom we have just parted in the street; Twenty select phrases from Plato and Aristophanes will teach you much more than a multitude of dissertations and commentaries; The true critic is present at the drama which was enacted in the soul of the artist or the writer; the choice of a word, the brevity or length of a sentence, the nature of a metaphor, the accent of a verse, the development of an argument—everything is a symbol to him;... in short he works out its (the text's) psychology; there is a cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, as there is for muscular movement or animal heat." To put M. Taine's great and characteristic merit into a sentence, we may say that he was the first writer on English literature to apply to it the fundamental principle, patent to every person of reflection, that we necessarily think in concrete terms, and that, therefore, a treatise must be valuable just in proportion to the concreteness of its presentation.
In order to show how great was the advance made by M. Taine's work over its predecessors, let us take a classic English writer at random and compare the treatment given him by M. Taine with that given in the text-book already mentioned. Suppose we open to the discussion of Addison. In the latter work we are told that he was born in 1672 and died in 1719; that he was a son of Lancelot Addison, a clergyman of some reputation for learning; that Addison studied at the Charter House, where he formed a friendship with Richard Steele; that he afterwards entered Oxford; that he wrote various short poems and one long one, of which six whole lines are given as a specimen. We are told, also, that Addison held, in succession, certain political offices; that he contributed one-sixth of the papers found in Steele's "Tatler," more than one-half of those in the "Spectator," and one-third of those in the "Guardian"; that he published a drama called "Cato," which, the book informs us, is "cold, solemn, and pompous, written with scrupulous regard for the classical unities." We learn, further, that Addison married a countess, and died at the early age of forty-seven; that he had a quarrel with Pope; that his papers published in the "Tatler," the "Spectator," and the "Guardian" are marked by "fertility of invention and singular felicity of treatment"; that their variety is wonderful, and that everything is treated "with singular appropriateness and unforced energy"; that "there is a singular harmony between the language and the thought" (whatever that may mean); that Addison's delineations of the characters of men are wonderfully delicate; that he possessed humor in its highest and most delicate perfection; that his hymns breathe a fervent and tender spirit of piety. Contrary to the usage of its author, the text-book gives the whole sixteen lines of Addison's most famous hymn—the longest illustrative quotation in the whole four hundred pages—one blessed little oasis in a vast desert of dry biographical minutiæ and the abstract generalities of criticism. In the eight pages devoted to Addison there are not more than ten lines of real criticism; and these consist, for the most part, of what, to the ordinary reader, are meaningless adjectives or high-sounding epithets. Yet this is one of the very best chapters in the book. It is certainly a fair specimen of the barren method generally prevalent before the appearance of M. Taine's work.
Now let us compare his treatment of Addison. In the first place, scattered through the eighteen pages devoted to that writer (single-volume edition) we find no less than twenty-two illustrative passages, varying in length from six to 176 lines of very fine print. In his general treatment M. Taine begins by tracing the physical, social, and moral environment of Addison, thus leading us up to the consideration of the man and the writer by a natural process of evolution. We are first shown what kind of a man to expect, and then we are made acquainted with him. And all this is done with the most vivid and brilliant touches. Mere biographical details are either ignored or given incidental mention. The opening paragraph is a tableau vivant, which we see Addison at Oxford, "studious, peaceful, loving solitary walks under the elm avenues." We are told how, from boyhood, "his memory is stuffed with Latin verses"; how "this limited culture, leaving him weaker, made him more refined" how "he acquired a taste for the elegance and refinement, the triumphs and the artifices, of style"; how he became "an epicure in literature"; how "he naturally loved beautiful things"; how "Addison, good and just himself, trusted in God, also a being good and just"; how he writes his lay sermons; how "he cannot suffer languishing or lazy habits"; how "he is full of epigrams against flirtations, extravagant toilets, useless visits"; how "he explains God, reducing him to a mere magnified man"; with what literal precision he describes Heaven; how he "inserts prayers in his papers and forbids oaths"; how he made morality fashionable.
These illustrations of M. Taine's method might be multiplied indefinitely, but enough have surely been quoted to demonstrate how vastly more vivid and concrete is the idea of Addison, the man and the writer, gained by this method in comparison with that which was in general vogue before the publication of M. Taine's book. In the one case the reader has come into contact with a mere abstraction—a man of straw, with not a single feature that impresses itself on the imagination or the memory. In the other, he has come into communion with a real living soul—a man "of like passions with ourselves."
But the very qualities of the great French critic which make his book so helpful are the source of his defects as a writer. These qualities are national quite as much as individual. It is a truism that the French people lead the world in the field of criticism as applied to both literature and art. This superiority is strikingly illustrated also in St. Beuve, and is due to a certain quickness of perception, a certain power of concrete illustration, that seems inherent in the race of cultivated Frenchmen. M. Taine himself well defines this ethnic trait when he speaks of "France, with her Parisian culture, with her drawing-room manners, with her untiring analysis of characters and actions, her irony so ready to hit upon a weakness, her finesse so practised in the discrimination of modes of thought." This national talent is almost invariably associated with a nervous, sanguine temperament , which easily tends to extremes of expression. We are therefore compelled to read M. Taine with some degree of caution when we are seeking exact statement and strict limitation.
Again, M. Taine is sometimes inaccurate or unjust from a lack of sympathy. He sometimes finds it impossible to rid himself of his Gallic predilections and aversions, especially when treating of the Puritan character or the stolid English morality. He cannot appreciate the religious conditions that surround his subject. He is always the Frenchman discussing the English writer. He cannot forbear to contrast the effect or the reception accorded to an author's work in England with that which it would have received in France; as when he says, concerning Addison's lay sermons in the "Spectator": "I know very well what success a newspaper full of sermons would have in France"; and again: "If a Frenchman was forbidden to swear, he would probably laugh at the first word of the admonition." A little farther on he objects to what he calls, with certainly picturesque concreteness, "the sticky plaster of his (Addison's) morality"—an expression that has led to Minto's sharp retort that Addison's morality was something which it is quite impossible for the Gallic conscience to conceive. Another illustration of that bias which compels us to be somewhat on our guard in reading Taine is found in his treatment of Milton. Although we may admit that the great Puritan poet peopled his paradise with characters having altogether too strong a British tinge, we are almost shocked to hear Taine and his disciple, Edmond Scherer, dilate upon Milton's Adam as "your true paterfamilias, with a vote; an M. P., an old Oxford man," etc., etc., or to hear them exclaim, "What a great many votes she (Eve) will gain among the country squires when Adam stands for Parliament!" Quite as striking is M. Taine's inability to understand Wordsworth.
But, after making these and all other due admissions concerning Taine's work, the fact stands that his "History of English Literature" meets fully Lowell's quaint definition of a classic, when he says, "After all, to be delightful is a classic." In reading this work we never feel that we have in our hands a text-book or even a history. It is rather a living, moving panorama. We see again the old miracles and moralities, with their queer shifts and their stark incongruities; we see the drawing-rooms and hear the conversation of the reign of Queen Anne, and walk through Fleet Street with Johnson. In a word, we realize in no small degree the full meaning of Leslie Stephen's dictum, in that we really feel that we know, in some degree at least, "the human being who is partially revealed to us in his written and spoken words."
Of course, no introduction to this work would be complete without some reference to the psychological theory on which it is based. We have reserved this point to the last because, for the general reader, what Taine says and how he says it, are far more interesting considerations than any theories on which the book may be based. In a word, the author held that both the character and the style of a writer are the outgrowth of his social and natural environment. And this environment, in Taine's opinion, affects not only the individual but the national character as manifested in the national literature. In discussing any literary production he would first ask: To what race and nation does the author belong? What is the influence of his geographical position and of his nation's advance in civilization? What about the duration of the literary phase represented by the writer in question? In developing this theory of the influence of environment M. Taine doubtless sometimes treats as permanent scientific factors influences and circumstances that are in their very nature variable. Yet this application of the theory is as consistent and plausible as it is everywhere apparent. A few illustrations of his psychological theory will make more plain than much abstract discussion the almost fatalistic nature of his method. For example, after vividly portraying the political and social conditions that had surrounded Milton from his birth, the French critic asks: "Can we expect urbanity here?" Again, in tracing Dryden's beginnings, he says: "Such circumstances announce and prepare, not an artist, but a man of letters." Much might be written of the detailed application of M. Taine's psychological theory. But the reader has already been too long detained from a perusal of the riches that fill the following pages. Charles Lamb once wrote: "I prefer the affections to the sciences." The majority of the readers of M. Taine will doubtless find so much to enjoy in his brilliant pages that they will care little for his theories, and will not allow certain defects in his sympathies to mar their enjoyment of this monumental work.