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.
We have no such faithful picture of the English people in English literature.
We fear that M. Taine mistakes a part for the whole. Unquestionably, literature has its uses, and high ones, for the elucidation of many a problem and the illumination of many a page of history; but, if we set out to find the history of a nation in its literature, outside of history proper and the new aids to historical research we have referred to, we merely adopt a deceptive guide that can lead us only to disappointment. For these grand theories, so symmetrical and so plausible, when presented by their generally eloquent framers, stand, when put into actual service, very little wear and tear. Accordingly, we find that there happens to M. Taine precisely what happens to every man who starts out to construct a work strictly according to a given system. And what thus happens is a serious matter. This it is. Facts are treated as of secondary importance. They are put upon their best behavior. They must show themselves up to a certain standard, or they are counted as worthless. If they are so wrong-headed as to come in conflict with the author’s theory--the old story--why, so much the worse for the facts, and our theorist ruthlessly tramples upon and walks over them straight to his objective point, which is, necessarily, his foregone conclusion.
It would detain us too long to present an analysis of M. Taine’s introduction, from which alone it would not be difficult to demonstrate the insufficiency of his theory. It contains passages which, in the stately march of his eloquent phrase, seem to sound as though they announced newly discovered truths of startling import, but which, translated into familiar language, turn out to be but little more than the text-book enunciation of some familiar principle. Thus:
“When you have observed and noted in man one, two, three, then a multitude of sensations, does this suffice, or does your knowledge appear complete? Is a book of observation a psychology? It is no psychology, and here as elsewhere the search for causes must come after the collection of facts. No matter if the facts be physical or moral, they all have their causes; there is a cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, as there is for digestion, for muscular movement, for animal heat. Vice and virtue are products, like vitriol and sugar, and every complex phenomenon has its springs from other more simple phenomena on which it hangs.”