HISTORY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 35 



which he was mainly concerned, the working of a universal spirit 

 as revealed by outward manifestations. Of this he strove to be a 

 dispassionate, intelligent onlooker and an accurate, sympathetic 

 observer; a faithful recorder, whether the record lends itself to litera- 

 ture or not, and in his hands for the most part it did not. Nowhere 

 in his voluminous writings is there any passage which rises to the 

 heights reached by Mommsen in his description of Csesar. Profound 

 as was the scholarship of the latter, he was an avowed advocate of 

 imperialism, the cause for which he spent his life, and so at times 

 his passion lifted him to sublimity : the sober Ranke trod the solid 

 earth. His was not merely the science of detail like that of Mommsen, 

 it was an orderly array both of thoughts and of thoughts about 

 thoughts, as well as a marshaling of facts. For this reason his 

 attempts at a universal history bear the stamp of creative art. It is as 

 an historical architect that he becomes approximately an artist; not 

 in rhetoric, imagination, or enthusiasm. Neither an interpreter nor 

 a critic, his style is clear, his characters forcibly modeled, his defini- 

 tions exact. He is bold, but not too bold, for prudence is his forte and 

 his foible. It is thus that he raises the spirit of each successive age 

 and reveals, one by one, the hidden springs of action. His philo- 

 sophical dogma cannot always restrain him, and there are pages of 

 his which are masterpieces, not only in historical reconstruction, but 

 in historical divination. 



Extremes meet in the world of history as elsewhere. This is seen 

 when Taine avows himself a disciple of Macaulay, as he virtually does 

 in print and frequently did in private conversation. Antipodal in 

 every respect to the Englishman, the Frenchman yet admired Macau- 

 lay as the representative of everything which France and Taine were 

 not. The great French historian was an embodied contradiction, 

 having been justly styled a poet-logician and considered to possess 

 a philosophic imagination. What he openly admired in England were 

 its social stratification, its sturdy Protestant common sense, its 

 passion for liberty and for the traditions of its history, its boisterous, 

 proud, and energetic spirit. For Latin, Celtic, ecclesiastical, Roman 

 England he had a contemptuous disdain: it was the England of 

 Macaulay which was the country of his soul. But he could not there 

 abide, so pitiless and merciless was his logic. His philosophical career 

 began in Hegel, passed by way of Spinoza, and ended in a positivism 

 compared with which Comtism was a weak decoction. His earliest 

 important paper was the outline of a system whereby the methods of 

 the exact sciences could be applied to history and from the effort 

 to do so there was no surcease until he died. Alone of the pure 

 materialists, who make emotion dependent on the bodily organism 

 and on the nervous system, he carried his conviction, amounting 

 almost to bravado, into the realm of practice. Others have sketched 



