A history of English literature based on a system new to the great body of English readers, and written with freshness, verve, and certain attractive peculiarities of style, could not fail to fix their attention and engage their interest from the beginning to the end of its two bulky octavo volumes. The author of the work in question is so well known in the world of letters by his essays on the philosophy of art that he needs no introduction to our readers.
M. Taine starts out with the assumption that the literature of any given country is the exponent of its mental life, or, as he states it (p. 20), “I am about to write the history of a literature, and to seek in it for the psychology of a people.” In France and Germany, we are told, history has been revolutionized by the study of their literatures.
“It was perceived,” says M. Taine, “that a work of literature is not a mere play of imagination, a solitary caprice of a heated brain, but a transcript of contemporary manners, a type of a certain kind of mind. It was concluded that one might retrace, from the monuments of literature, the style of man’s feelings and thoughts for centuries back. The attempt was made, and it succeeded.”
Unquestionably the style of man’s feelings may be traced in literature for centuries back. That is M. Taine’s first approach. But between the successful insight into this or that writer’s opinions and modes of thought and the opinions and modes of thought of a nation, the void is so enormous—unless, indeed, we dangerously reason from particulars to generals—as to require to fill it more subjective literary productions than any country has ever yet produced.
From this system it would follow that if a nation has no literature it can have no history. If it have—as is too often the case—no literature but that of a despotism or of a dominant minority, it follows that you cannot discern a single idea nor hear a single pulsation of the heart of a great people. But granting the literature to exist, although we are told that a work “is not a mere play of the imagination,” we nevertheless know full well that some of the most brilliant portions of every literature are precisely what that phrase describes. Beyond that, we also know that all writers are not only not sincere, but too often unfaithful because too often venal, and cannot therefore be relied upon.
In certain writings enumerated by him, M. Taine says: “The reader will see all the wealth that may be drawn from a literary work: when the work is rich, and one knows how to interpret it, we find there the psychology of a soul, frequently of an age, now and then of a race.” Partially true. And M. Taine might have instanced the Confessions of St. Augustine, but he does not. We may indeed find what he indicates under certain conditions, for, as he very correctly adds, “their utility grows with their perfection.” Unfortunately, such works occur in literature at the rarest intervals.
It cannot be questioned that M. Taine’s theory contains a germ of truth. But, in fact, so far as it is true it is a very old story. What is true in his theory is not new, and what is new is questionable. Since history has risen to be something more and something better than a mere roll of warriors and a correct list of kings and queens—which latter class of good people are fast disappearing, never again, we trust, to return—since the historian has been elevated from the rank of a mere annalist to be the interpreter to his own age of not only the acts and sufferings, but the mind and the heart of dead generations, he has become avid of the most trifling details concerning their transitory passage here on earth. He desires to discover and relate how they lived, slept, and ate—how they talked, toiled, and travelled—what they said, what they thought—what, in a word, was their social and psychological life. To obtain the knowledge he seeks, all sources are equally valuable—written manuscripts that speak as well as stone ruins that are dumb.
Such knowledge as this the new school of German historians, having first exhausted all literary material, have sought to gather from the most remote and even repulsive sources; and from philological analysis, from works of art, from monuments, old roads, half-corroded coins, almost obliterated inscriptions, broken pottery, partially effaced frescoes, and from the very fragments of mere kitchen utensils, they have created afresh and revealed to us, in all its details, the daily and familiar life of ancient Rome, and poured a flood of light upon the living man of the that day.
And yet, before the results of their archæological and ethnological labors were given to the world, we thought we knew our Roman well and familiarly. For what literature, unless it be that of Greece, presents so rich and so complete a portrait gallery of all the types of its people as the literature of Rome? From Virgil, who gives us the ploughman and vinedresser, and Cæsar, through whose pages marches the Roman soldier, to Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Juvenal, and Horace, we have a score of writers in whose pages all the virtues and vices, the grandeur and the shame, the nobility and the grovelling sensuality, of Rome are spread before us in language so attractive and so grand as to promise to outlast many modern masterpieces.
M. Taine sneers at “Latin literature as worth nothing at the outset,” being “borrowed and imitative.” To this we reply, Adhuc sub judice, etc., and, bad or not, it tells the story of the Roman people, and very nearly reveals to us the ancient Roman as he walked on earth.