f population, foreign invasions,
famines, pestilences, and increasing difficulty in procuring the
necessaries of life, are amply sufficient. It then happens that men lose
courage and hope, and consider life an evil. Now, admitting that among
the artists who live in such a time, there are likely to be the same
relative numbers of melancholy, joyous, or indifferent temperaments
as at other times, let us see how they will be affected by reigning
circumstances.

Let us first remember, says Taine, that the evils which depress the
public will also depress the artist. His risks are no less than those of
less gifted people. He is liable to suffer from plague or famine, to
be ruined by unfair taxation or conscription, or to see his children
massacred and his wife led into captivity by barbarians. And if these
ills do not reach him personally, he must at least behold those around
him affected by them. In this way, if he is joyous by temperament, he
must inevitably become less joyous; if he is melancholy, he must become
more melancholy.

Secondly, having been reared among melancholy contemporaries, his
education will have exerted upon him a corresponding influence. The
prevailing religious doctrine, accommodated to the state of affairs,
will tell him that the earth is a place of exile, life an evil, gayety
a snare, and his most profitable occupation will be to get ready to
die. Philosophy, constructing its system of morals in conformity to the
existing phenomena of decadence, will tell him that he had better never
have been born. Daily conversation will inform him of horrible events,
of the devastation of a province, the sack of a town by the Goths, the
oppression of the neighbouring peasants by the imperial tax-collectors,
or the civil war that has just burst out between half a dozen pretenders
to the throne. As he travels about, he beholds signs of mourning and
despair, crowds of beggars, people dying of hunger, a broken bridge
which no one is mending, an abandoned suburb which is going to ruin,
fields choked with weeds, the blackened walls of burned houses. Such
sights and impressions, repeated from childhood to old age (and we must
remember that this has actually been the state of things in what are now
the fairest parts of the globe), cannot fail to deepen whatever elements
of melancholy there may be already in the artist's disposition.

The operation of all these causes will be enhanced by that very
peculiarity of the art