The English version may fairly demand success on its own merits, being careful, exact, and spirited. It errs, we think, on the side of a too literal exactness, through which it frequently ceases to be idiomatic. »He tore from his vitals, ...« for instance, »the idea which he had conceived«, would render M. Taine's figure better than »he tore from his entrails«. And it is surely in strong contradiction to the author's portrait of Lord Macaulay to translate his allusion to the great historian's physionomie animée et pensante by »an animated and pensive face«. No one, we fancy, not even M. Taine, ever accused Lord Macaulay of being pensive.

M. Taine's work is a history of our literature only in a partial sense of the term. »Just as astronomy,« he says, »is at bottom a problem in mechanics, and physiology a problem in chemistry, so history at bottom is a problem in psychology.« His aim has been »to establish the psychology of a people«. A happier title for his work, therefore, save for its amplitude, would be, »A Comparative Survey of the English Mind in the leading Works of its Literature«. It is a picture of the English intellect, with literary examples and allusions in evidence, and not a record of works nor an accumulation of facts. To philological or biographical research it makes no claim. In this direction it is altogether incomplete. Various important works are unmentioned, common tradition as to facts is implicitly accepted, and dates, references, and minor detail conspicuous by their absence. The work is wholly critical and pictorial, and involves no larger information than the perusal of a vast body of common documents. Its purpose is to discover in the strongest features of the strongest works the temper of the race and time; which involves a considerable neglect not only of works, but of features. But what is mainly to the point with the English reader (as it is of course excessively obvious in the English version) is that M. Taine writes from an avowedly foreign stand-point. The unit of comparison is throughout assumed to be the French mind. The author's undertaking strikes us, therefore, constantly as an excursion. It is not as if he and our English tongue were old friends, as if through a taste early formed and long indulged he had gradually been won to the pious project of paying his debt and embodying his impressions; but as if rather, on reaching his intellectual majority and coming into a handsome property of doctrine and dogma, he had cast about him for a field to conquer, a likely subject for experiment, and, measuring the vast capacity of our English record of expression, he had made a deliberate and immediate choice. We may fancy him declaring, too, that he would do the thing handsomely; devote five or six years to it, and spend five or six months in the country. He has performed his task with a vigour proportionate to this sturdy resolve; but in the nature of the case his treatment of the subject lacks that indefinable quality of spiritual initiation which is the tardy consummate fruit of a wasteful, purposeless, passionate sympathy. His opinions are prompted, not by a sentiment, but by a design. He remains an interpreter of the English mind to the mind of another race; and only remotely, therefore, – only by allowance and assistance, – an interpreter of the English mind to itself. A greater fault than any of his special errors of judgment is a certain reduced, contracted, and limited air in the whole field. He has made his subject as definite as his method.

M. Taine is fairly well known by this time as a man with a method, the apostle of a theory, – the theory that »vice and virtue are products, like vitriol and sugar«, and that art, literature, and conduct are the result of forces which differ from those of the physical world only in being less easily ascertainable. His three main factors – they have lately been reiterated to satiety – are the race, the medium, and the time. Between them they shape the phenomena of history.