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In one of those highly interesting criticisms of English literature which, even when they most conspicuously miss the mark, are so instructive to Englishmen, M. Taine has instituted an elaborate comparison very much, I need hardly say, to the advantage of the latter between the indecency of Swift and that of Rabelais that "good giant," as his countryman calls him, "who rolls himself joyously about on his dunghill, thinking no evil."
"We'd better wring its neck! Teach its kind a lesson " The skipper roared at him. "Be quiet! Our ship is a wreck! We have to consider the facts! We and these Plumies are in a fix together, and we have to get out of it before we start to teach anybody anything!" He glared at Taine. Then he said heavily: "Mr. Baird, you seem to notice things. Take this Plumie over the ship.
I had also attended many lectures, some occasionally, others regularly, such as those of Janet, Caro, Leveque and Taine. Of all contemporary French writers, I was fondest of Taine. I had begun studying this historian and thinker in Copenhagen. The first book of his that I read was The French Philosophers of the Nineteenth Century, in a copy that had been lent to me by Gabriel Sibbern.
From the conception of the work, with its general notes on its nature, its movement, its physiology, its determination, its first sketches of the personages, the milieu he was an ardent adherent of Taine in this particular the occupations of the characters, the summary plan with the accumulated details, thence to the writing, the entire method is exposed in this ingenious and entertaining book of Massis.
The physician spoke again; "Your wife is here, Mr. Taine." A sudden gleam of light flared up in the glazed eyes. The doctor could have sworn that the lips were twisted into a shadow of a ghastly, mocking smile.
He might have carried the figure farther; for that same blind beggar, when his eyes had been opened, was persecuted by the very ones who had fed him in his infirmity. It is easier, sometimes, to receive blindly, than to give with eyes that see too clearly. When Mrs. Taine went to the artist, in the studio, the next day, she found him in the act of re-tying the package of his mother's letters.
Gobineau may be set aside as a professor of a fixed idea. There are other Frenchmen who have paid glowing tribute to Germany. Taine excelled in praise of her intellectual vigour and productivity. Victor Hugo expressed his love and admiration for her people, and confessed to an almost filial feeling for the noble and holy fatherland of thinkers.
All this riot of passion and frenzy of vigorous life, this madness and sorrow, in which life is a phantom and destiny drives so remorselessly, Taine finds on the stage and in the literature of the period.
"Quite right," agreed Mr. Rutlidge. "Whenever you are ready," said Mrs. Taine, submissively. When their friends from the Heights were gone, Conrad Lagrange looked the artist up and down, as he said with cutting sarcasm, "You did that very nicely. Over-sensitive to your environment, hell! If you are a bit fine strung, you have no business to make a show of it. It's a weakness, not a virtue.
It reminded me of Taine, yet I knew the man had never heard of that brilliant though dangerous thinker. "He led a lost cause, and he was not afraid of God's thunderbolts," Wolf Larsen was saying. "Hurled into hell, he was unbeaten.
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