A teacher at the École Normale, appointed chief of the historical section of the National Archives in 1831, Guizot's substitute at the Sorbonne in 1833, professor of history and morals at the Collège de France in 1838, Michelet lived in and for the life of his people and of his land. The Histoire de France, begun in 1830, was completed thirty-seven years later. After the disasters of the war of 1870-71, with failing strength the author resumed his labours, endeavouring to add, as it were, an appendix on the nineteenth century.

A passionate searcher among original sources, published and unpublished, handling documents as if they were things of flesh and blood, seeing the outward forms of existence with the imaginative eye, pressing through these to the soul of each successive epoch, possessed by an immense pity for the obscure generations of human toilers, having, more than almost any other modern writer, Virgil's gift of tears, ardent in admiration, ardent in indignation, with ideas impregnated by emotions, and emotions quickened by ideas, Michelet set himself to resuscitate the buried past. It seemed to him that his eminent predecessors—Guizot, Mignet, Thiers, Thierry—had each envisaged history from some special point of view. Each had too little of the outward body or too little of the inward soul of history. Michelet dared to hope that a resurrection of the integral life of the dead centuries was possible. All or nothing was his word. It was a bold venture, but it was a venture, or rather an act, of faith. Thierry had been tyrannised by the idea of the race: the race is much, but the people does not march in the air; it has a geographical basis; it draws its nutriment from a particular soil. Michelet, at the moment of his narrative when France began to have a life distinct from Germany, enters upon a survey of its geography, in which the physiognomy and the genius of each region are studied as if each were a separate living creature, and the character of France itself is discovered in the cohesion or the unity of its various parts. Reaching the tenth and eleventh centuries, he feels the sadness of their torpor and their violence; yet humanity was living, and soon in the enthusiasm of Gothic art and the enthusiasm of the Crusades the sacred aspirations of the soul had their manifestation. At the close of the mediæval period everything seems to droop and decay: no! it was then, during the Hundred Years' War, that the national consciousness was born, and patriotism was incarnated in an armed shepherdess, child of the people.

By the thirteenth year of his labours—1843—Michelet had traversed the mediæval epoch, and reached the close of the reign of Louis XI. There he paused. Seeing one day high on the tower of Reims Cathedral, below which the kings of France received their consecration, a group or garland of tortured and mutilated figures carved in stone, the thought possessed him that the soul and faith of the people should be confirmed within his own soul before he could trust himself to treat of the age of the great monarchy. He leaped at once the intervening centuries, and was at work during eight years—from 1845 to 1853—on the French Revolution. He found a hero for his revolutionary epic in the people.

The temper of 1848 was hardly the temper in which the earlier Revolution could be judiciously investigated. Michelet and Quinet had added to their democratic zeal the passions connected with an anticlerical campaign. The violence of liberalism was displayed in Des Jésuites, and Du Prêtre, de la Femme et de la Famille. When the historian returned to the sixteenth century his spirit had undergone a change: he adored the Middle Ages; but was it not the period of the domination of the Church, and how could it be other than evil? He could no longer be a mere historian; he must also be a prophet. The volumes which treat of the Reformation, the Renaissance, the wars of religion, are as brilliant as earlier volumes, but they are less balanced and less coherent. The equilibrium between Michelet's intellect and his imagination, between his ideas and his passions, was disturbed, if not destroyed.

Michelet, who had been deprived of his chair in the Collège de France, lost also his post in the Archives upon his refusal, in 1852, to swear allegiance to the Emperor. Near Nantes in his tempest-beaten home, near Genoa in a fold of the Apennines, where he watched the lizards sleep or slide, a great appeasement came upon his spirit. He had interpreted the soul of the people; he would now interpret the soul of humbler kinsfolk—the bird, the insect; he would interpret the inarticulate soul of the mountain and the sea. He studied other documents—the documents of nature—with a passion of love, read their meanings, and mingled as before his own spirit with theirs. L'Oiseau, L'Insecte, La Mer, La Montagne, are canticles in prose by a learned lover of the external world, rather than essays in science; often extravagant in style, often extreme in sentiment, and uncontrolled in imagination, but always the betrayals of genius.

Michelet's faults as an historian are great, and such as readily strike an English reader. His rash generalisations, his lyrical outbreaks, his Pindaric excitement, his verbiage assuming the place of ideas, his romantic excess, his violence in ecclesiastical affairs, his hostility to our country, his mysticism touched with sensuality, his insistence on physiological details, his quick and irregular utterance—these trouble at times his imaginative insight, and mar his profound science in documents. He died at Hyères in 1874, hoping that God would grant him reunion with his lost ones, and the joys promised to those who have sought and loved.

EDGAR QUINET (1803-1875), the friend and brother-in-arms of Michelet in his attack upon the Jesuits, born at Bourg, of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother, approached the study of literature and history with that tendency to large vues d'ensemble which was natural to his mind, and which had been strengthened by discipleship to Herder. Happy in temper, sound of conscience, generous of heart, he illuminated many subjects, and was a complete master of none. A poet of lofty intentions, in his Ahasvérus (1833)—the wandering Jew, type of humanity in its endless Odyssey—in his Napoléon, his Prométhée, his vast encyclopædic allegory Merlin l'Enchanteur (1860), his poetry lacked form, and yielded itself to the rhetoric of the intellect.

In the Génie des Religions Quinet endeavoured to exhibit the religious idea as the germinative power of civilisation, giving its special character to the political and social idea. La Révolution, which is perhaps his most important work, attempts to replace the Revolutionary hero-worship, the Girondin and Jacobin legends, by a faithful interpretation of the meaning of events. The principles of modern society and the principles of the Roman Catholic Church, Quinet regarded as incapable of conciliation. In the incompetence of the leaders to perceive and apply this truth, and in the fatal logic of their violent and anarchic methods, lay, as he believed, the causes of the failure which followed the bright hopes of 1789. In 1848 Quinet was upon the barricades; the Empire drove him into exile. In his elder years, like Michelet, he found a new delight in the study of nature. La Création (1870) exhibits the science of nature and that of human history as presenting the same laws and requiring kindred methods. It closes with the prophecy of science that creation is not yet fully accomplished, and that a nobler race will enter into the heritage of our humanity.

II

Literary criticism in the eighteenth century had been the criticism of taste or the criticism of dogma; in the nineteenth century it became naturalistic—a natural history of individual minds and their products, a natural history of works of art as formed or modified by social, political, and moral environments, and by the tendencies of races. Such criticism must inevitably have followed the growth of the comparative study of literatures in an age dominated by the scientific spirit. If we are to name any single writer as its founder, we must name Mme. de Staël. The French nation, she explained in L'Allemagne, inclines towards what is classical; the Teutonic nations incline towards what is romantic. She cares not to say whether classical or romantic art should be preferred; it is enough to show that the difference of taste results not from accidental causes, but from the primitive sources of imagination and of thought.