When we get further on in M. Taine’s work, we find in his fifth chapter, book the second, a yet more flagrant violation of his promise to show us the Englishman as the psychological product of his literature, and to “develop the recondite mechanism whereby the Saxon barbarian has been transformed into the Englishman of to-day.” Does he present to us the nature of the English Reformation as evolved from the writings of Englishmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Not at all. It would not be pleasant to show that, as politics was the leverage of the Reformation in Germany, plunder was the leverage in England, and he candidly admits, in phrase of studied delicacy (p. 362), that “the Reformation entered England by a side door.”
And so he travels all the way to Germany, and gives us, instead of English opinion and English mind, the echoes of Martin Luther’s “bellowing in bad Latin,”[7] and passages from his beery, boozy Table-Talk, bolstered up with extracts from a modern history of England by the late Mr. Froude. No study of shells and animals and manuscripts here. No elaborate development of recondite mechanism!
But we have scarcely space left for a few remarks we desire to make concerning
THE SHAKESPEARE OF M. TAINE.
And, at the outset, we do not agree with those critics who ascribe M. Taine’s utterly fantastic and distorted appreciation of Shakespeare to the general incapacity of the Gallic mind to grasp the great dramatist. We find something more than this. We discover a labored effort at depreciation, negatively, positively, and by comparison. Of Shakespeare the man, the careful student must admit that we know very little—almost nothing, indeed. Hence the sharpened avidity of his biographers to seize upon every floating piece of gossip, every stray tradition concerning him, whereof to make history. With aid of such loose and unreliable material, M. Taine makes of Shakespeare a man of licentious morals and loose habits.
Our author’s æsthetic starting-point renders simply impossible for him any fair appreciation of the great English poet. Corneille and Racine are his models in tragedy—Molière in comedy. To them and to their productions he subordinates Shakespeare at every step. Listen!
“If Shakespeare does just the contrary, because his genius is the exact opposite” (vol. i. p. 311).
At page 326, we are told: “If, in fact, Shakespeare comes across a heroic character worthy of Corneille, a Roman, such as the mother of Coriolanus, he will explain by passion[8] what Corneille would have explained by heroism.” “Reason,” M. Taine further informs us, “tells us that our manners should be measured; this is why the manners which Shakespeare paints are not so.” Again, “Shakespeare paints us as we are; his heroes bow, ask people for news, speak of rain and fine weather,” etc. (p. 312). As M. Taine finds that Shakespeare’s heroes bow, we should like to know his opinion of the exordium of the grand rhetorical effort which Corneille puts in the mouth of the master of the world, Cæsar Augustus:
“Prends un siège, Cinna.”[9]
It cannot in reason be expected that the man who admires the stiff and frigid artificiality of French tragedy should reach any clear perception of Shakespeare. Nor can we expect the appreciator of Shakespeare to find any superiority in Corneille and Racine. A distinguished German scholar (Grimm) admirably expresses the general German and English estimate of these French poets in a letter he addressed to Michelet: “Must I tell you the opinion commonly expressed among us here in Germany? With the greatest possible amount of good-will, I have again and again opened Racine, Corneille, and Boileau, and I fully appreciate their superior talents; but I cannot read them for any length of time [mais je ne puis en soutenir la lecture], so strong upon me is the impression that a portion of the most profound sentiments awakened by poetry are a sealed book for these authors.”