But M. Taine, it may be objected, was surely under no obligation to write the history of your Anglo-Saxon monks! Certainly not. But he was under some sort of obligation not to represent the product of Christianity, viz., the Anglo-Saxon man, as the product of pure paganism. That he has done so, we have shown from the remarkable manner in which he has spoken of the products of Anglo-Saxon literature, and we have not taken into account the full and rich material at command, written in the Latin language by the Anglo-Saxons.
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
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.