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He was trained in realities even more than in ideas; and hence he is original, forcible, clear, an enemy of all philosophic indefiniteness and obscurity; so that it may well be said of him, in the words of a writer in the Revue Contemporaine, ce n'est pas un philosophe comme les autres, c'est un philosophe qui a vu le monde.
There is Constant's account, also written from that point of view in which it is proverbial that no man is a hero. But of all the vivid terrible pictures of Napoleon the most haunting is by a man who never saw him and whose book was not directly dealing with him. I mean Taine's account of him, in the first volume of "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine."
Guyan, for instance, in a charming passage of his "Problemes de l'Esthetique Contemporaine," argues for the aesthetic quality of the moment when, exhausted by a long mountain tramp, he quaffed, among the slopes of the Pyrenees, a bowl of foaming milk. The same dispute appears, in more complicated form, in the conflicting dicta of the critics.
I have shown in this rapid sketch that a man of the stamp of Georges Ohnet must have immortal qualities in himself, even though flayed and roasted alive by the critics. He is most assuredly an artist in form, is endowed with a brilliant style, and has been named "L'Historiographe de la bourgeoise contemporaine."
For these Pan-Turanian tendencies in Hungary and Bulgaria, see my article "Pan-Turanism," American Political Science Review, February, 1917. See article by "X," quoted above; also his article "Les Courants politiques dans la Turquie contemporaine," Revue du Monde musulman, December, 1912.
The wish to enter political life, which haunted him always, was already beginning to stir in 1819, when he wrote at the time of the elections to a friend, M. Theodore Dablin, that he dreamt of nothing but him and the deputies; and his last book, "L'Envers de l'Histoire contemporaine," accentuated, if possible more than any work that had preceded it, the extreme Royalist principles which he showed in his garret play, the ill-fated "Cromwell."
William Forster, and a little volume on Ruskin called 'L'Esthetique Anglaise', which was published in the 'Bibliotheque de Philosophie Contemporaine'.* Shortly before the arrival of Mr. and Mrs.
I mentioned the reputation Von Sybel enjoyed in Germany as having an excellent style, and the response was, "Very likely: where all the rest are blind a one-eyed man sees very well" a remark true enough as regards the mass of German writers, but very unjust to the person under discussion. Taine's models are Macaulay and Froude, but one would hardly think so from reading his France contemporaine.
1: Preface to the Official Statistical Returns of 1853, page 64. 2: 'La Grèce Contemporaine. 3: Etudes Statistiques sur Rome, par le Comte de Tournon. 4: A few of them did good service in the cause of liberty, and deserved well of their country, in the glorious but unsuccessful struggle of 1848, soon about to be renewed, and, let us hope, under happier auspices, and with a very different result.
During 1863-64 he produced his "History of English Literature," a work which, on account of Taine's uncompromising determinist views, raised a clerical storm in France. About 1871 Taine conceived the idea of his great life work, "Les Origines de la France Contemporaine," in which he proposed to trace the causes and effects of the revolution of 1789.
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