France in the Eighteenth Century | Page 6

of perception, a fulness of
comprehension, which give a very different notion of M. Taine's
critical soundness and power from any that one could have got from his
account elsewhere of our English writers. Some of the remarks are
open to criticism, as might be expected. It is hard to accept the saying
(p. 278) that Montesquieu's 'celebrity was not an influence.' It was
Montesquieu, after all, who first introduced among the Encyclopædic
band a rationalistic and experiential conception of the various legal and
other conditions of the social union, as distinguished from the old
theological explanation of them. The correspondence of Voltaire,
Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alembert, is sufficient to show how immediately,
as well as how powerfully, they were influenced by Montesquieu's
memorable book. Again, it is surely going too far to say that
Montesquieu's Persian Letters contained every important idea of the
century. Does it, for instance, contain that thrice fruitful idea which
Turgot developed in 1750, of all the ages being linked together by an
ordered succession of causes and effects? These and other objections,
however, hardly affect the brilliance and substantial excellence of all
this part of the book. It is when he proceeds to estimate these great men,
not as writers but as social forces, not as stylists but as apostles, that M.
Taine discloses the characteristic weaknesses of the bookman in
dealing with the facts of concrete sociology. He shows none of this
weakness in what he says of the remote past. On the contrary, he
blames, as we have all blamed, Voltaire, Rousseau, and the rest of the
group, for their failure to recognise that the founders of religions
satisfied a profound need in those who accepted them, and that this

acceptance was the spontaneous admission of its relative fitness. It
would be impossible to state this important truth better than M. Taine
has done in the following passage:--
'At certain critical moments in history,' he says, 'men have come out
from the narrow and confined track of their daily life and seized in one
wide vision the infinite universe; the august face of eternal nature is
suddenly unveiled before them; in the sublimity of their emotion they
seem to perceive the very principle of its being; and at least they did
discern some of its features. By an admirable stroke of circumstance,
these features were precisely the only ones that their age, their race, a
group of races, a fraction of humanity, happened to be in a condition to
understand. Their point of view was the only one under which the
multitudes beneath could place themselves. For millions of men, for
hundreds of generations, the only one access to divine things was along
their path. They pronounced the unique word, heroic or tender,
enthusiastic or tranquillising; the only word that, around them and after
them, the heart and the intelligence would consent to hearken to; the
only one adapted to the deep-growing wants, the long-gathered
aspirations, the hereditary faculties, a whole moral and mental
structure,--here to that of the Hindu or the Mongol, there to that of the
Semite or the European, in our Europe to that of the German, the Latin,
or the Slav; in such a way that its very contradictions, instead of
condemning it, were exactly what justified it, since its diversity
produced its adaptation, and its adaptation produced its benefits' (p.
272).
It is extraordinary that a thinker who could so clearly discern the secret
of the great spiritual movements of human history, should fail to
perceive that the same law governs and explains all the minor
movements in which wide communities have been suddenly agitated by
the word of a teacher. It is well--as no one would be more likely to
contend than myself, who have attempted the task--to demonstrate the
contradictions, the superficiality, the inadequateness, of the teaching of
Rousseau, Voltaire, or Diderot. But it is well also, and in a historical
student it is not only well, but the very pith and marrow of criticism, to
search for that 'adaptation,' to use M. Taine's very proper expression,

which gave to the word of these teachers its mighty power and
far-spreading acceptance. Is it not as true of Rousseau and Voltaire,
acting in a small society, as it is of Buddha or Mahomet acting on vast
groups of races, that 'leur point de vue était le seul auquel les
multitudes échelonnées au dessous d'eux pouvaient se mettre?' Did not
they too seize, 'by a happy stroke of circumstance,' exactly those traits
in the social union, in the resources of human nature, in its deep-seated
aspirations, which their generation was in a condition to
comprehend,--liberty, equality, fraternity, progress, justice, tolerance?
M. Taine shows, as so many others have shown before him, that the
Social Contract, when held up in the