France in the Eighteenth Century | Page 3

it implies more than has been often advanced by previous
writers in other forms, cannot be accepted as true. This is perhaps a
point better worth discussing than any other which his book raises. The
rest is a very elaborate and thorough description of the structure of
society, of its physiognomy in manners and characteristics, the
privileges, the burdens, the daily walk and conversation of the various
classes which made up the French people between the Regency and the
Revolution. M. Taine's method of description does not strike one as
altogether happy. It is a common complaint against French historians
that they are too lax about their authorities, and too heedless about
giving us chapter and verse for their assertions. M. Taine goes to the
contrary extreme, and pours his note-books into his text with a
steady-handed profusion that is excessively fatiguing, and makes the
result far less effective than it would have been if all this industrious
reading had been thoroughly fused and recast into a homogeneous
whole. It is an ungenerous trick of criticism to disparage good work by
comparing it with better; but the reader can scarcely help contrasting M.
Taine's overcrowded pages with the perfect assimilation, the pithy

fulness, the pregnant meditation, of De Tocqueville's book on the same
subject. When we attempt to reduce M. Taine's chapters to a body of
propositions standing out in definite relief from one another, yet
conveying a certain unity of interpretation, we soon feel how possible it
is for an author to have literary clearness along with historic obscurity.
In another respect we are inclined to question the felicity of M. Taine's
method. It does not convey the impression of movement. The steps and
changes in the conflict among the organs of the old society are not
marked in their order and succession. The reader is not kept alive to the
gradual progress of the break-up of old institutions and ideas. The sense
of an active and ceaseless struggle, extending in various stages across
the century, is effaced by an exclusive attention to the social details of a
given phase. We need the story. You cannot effectively reproduce the
true sense and significance of such an epoch as the eighteenth century
in France, without telling us, however barely, the tale, for example, of
the long battle of the ecclesiastical factions, and the yet more important
series of battles between the judiciary and the crown. If M. Taine's
book were a piece of abstract social analysis, the above remark would
not be true. But it is a study of the concrete facts of French life and
society, and to make such a study effective, the element of the
chronicle, as in Lacretelle or Jobez, cannot rightly be dispensed with.
* * * * *
Let us proceed to the chief thesis of the book. The new formula in
which M. Taine describes the source of all the mischiefs of the
revolutionary doctrine is this. 'When we see a man,' he says, 'who is
rather weak in constitution, but apparently sound and of peaceful habits,
drink eagerly of a new liquor, then suddenly fall to the ground, foaming
at the mouth, delirious and convulsed, we have no hesitation in
supposing that in the pleasant draught there was some dangerous
ingredient; but we need a delicate analysis in order to decompose and
isolate the poison. There is one in the philosophy of the eighteenth
century, as curious as it was potent: for not only is it the product of a
long historic elaboration, the final and condensed extract in which the
whole thought of the century ends; but more than that, its two principal

elements are peculiar in this, and when separated they are each of them
salutary, yet in combination they produce a poisonous compound.'
These two ingredients are, first, the great and important acquisitions of
the eighteenth century in the domain of physical science; second, the
fixed classic form of the French intelligence. 'It is the classic spirit
which, being applied to the scientific acquisitions of the time, produced
the philosophy of the century and the doctrines of the Revolution.' This
classic spirit has in its literary form one or two well-known marks. It
leads, for instance, to the fastidious exclusion of particulars, whether in
phrases, objects, or traits of character, and substitutes for them the
general, the vague, the typic. Systematic arrangement orders the whole
structure and composition from the period to the paragraph, from the
paragraph to the structural series of paragraphs; it dictates the style as it
has fixed the syntax. Its great note is the absolute. Again, 'two principal
operations make up the work of the human intelligence: placed in face
of things, it receives the impression of them more or less exactly,
completely, and profoundly; next, leaving