France in the Eighteenth Century | Page 2

chief in the
Assembly of the Scotch Church. Grote and Macaulay were active
members of parliament, and Hallam and Milman were confidential
members of circles where affairs of State were the staple of daily
discussion among the men who were responsible for conducting them
to successful issues. Guizot was a prime minister, Finlay was a farmer
of the Greek revenue. The most learned of contemporary English
historians a few years ago contested a county, and is habitually inspired
in his researches into the past by his interest in the politics of the
present. The German historians, whose gifts in reconstructing the past
are so valuable and so singular, have for the most part been as actively
interested in the public movements of to-day, as in those of any century
before or since the Christian era. Niebuhr held more than one political
post of dignity and importance; and of historical writers in our time,
one has sat in several Prussian parliaments; another, once the tutor of a
Prussian prince, has lived in the atmosphere of high politics; while all
the best of them have taken their share in the preparation of the political
spirit and ideas that have restored Germany to all the fulness and

exaltation of national life.
It is hardly necessary to extend the list. It is indeed plain on the least
reflection that close contact with political business, however modest in
its pretensions, is the best possible element in the training of any one
who aspires to understand and reproduce political history. Political
preparation is as necessary as literary preparation. There is no necessity
that the business should be on any majestic and imperial scale. To be a
guardian of the poor in an East-End parish, to be behind the scenes of
some great strike of labour, to be an active member of the
parliamentary committee of a Trades Council or of the executive
committee of a Union or a League, may be quite as instructive
discipline as participation in mightier scenes. Those who write concrete
history, without ever having taken part in practical politics, are, one
might say, in the position of those ancients who wrote about the human
body without ever having effectively explored it by dissection. Mr.
Carlyle, it is true, by force of penetrating imaginative genius, has
reproduced in stirring and resplendent dithyrambs the fire and passion,
the rage and tears, the many-tinted dawn and the blood-red sunset of
the French Revolution; and the more a man learns about the details of
the Revolution, the greater is his admiration for Mr. Carlyle's
magnificent performance. But it is dramatic presentation, not social
analysis; a masterpiece of literature, not a scientific investigation; a
prodigy of poetic insight, not a sane and quantitative exploration of the
complex processes, the deep-lying economical, fiscal, and political
conditions, that prepared so immense an explosion.
We have to remember, it is true, that M. Taine is not professing to write
a history in the ordinary sense. His book lies, if we may use two very
pompous but indispensable words, partly in the region of
historiography, but much more in the region of sociology. The study of
the French Revolution cannot yet be a history of the past, for the
French still walk per ignes suppositos, and the Revolution is still some
way from being fully accomplished. It was the disputes between the
Roman and the Reformed churches which inspired historical research
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; it is the disputes among
French parties that now inspire what professes to be historiography, but

what is really a sort of experimental investigation in the science of
society. They little know how long and weary a journey lies before
them, said Burke, who undertake to bring great masses of men into the
political unity of a nation. The process is still going on, and a man of M.
Taine's lively intellectual sensibility can no more escape its influences
than he can escape the ingredients of the air he breathes. We may add
that if his work had been really historic, he must inevitably have gone
further back than the eighteenth century for the 'Origins' of
contemporary France. The very slight, vague, and unsubstantial chapter
with which he opens his work cannot be accepted as a substitute for
what the subject really demanded--a serious summary, however
condensed and rapid, of the various forces, accidents, deliberate lines of
policy, which, from the breaking up of the great fiefs down to the death
of Lewis the Fourteenth, had prepared the distractions of the monarchy
under Lewis's descendants.
Full of interest as it is, M. Taine's book can hardly be described as
containing much that is new or strikingly significant. He develops one
idea, indeed, which we have never before seen stated in its present form,
but which, if