t ever having taken
part in practical politics, are, one might say, in the position of
those ancients who wrote about the human body without ever having
effectively explored it by dissection. Mr. Carlyle, it is true, by
force of penetrating imaginative genius, has reproduced in stirring
and resplendent dithyrambs the fire and passion, the rage and tears,
the many-tinted dawn and the blood-red sunset of the French
Revolution; and the more a man learns about the details of the
Revolution, the greater is his admiration for Mr. Carlyle's
magnificent performance. But it is dramatic presentation, not
social analysis; a masterpiece of literature, not a scientific
investigation; a prodigy of poetic insight, not a sane and
quantitative exploration of the complex processes, the deep-lying
economical, fiscal, and political conditions, that prepared so
immense an explosion.

We have to remember, it is true, that M. Taine is not professing to
write a history in the ordinary sense. His book lies, if we may use
two very pompous but indispensable words, partly in the region of
historiography, but much more in the region of sociology. The study
of the French Revolution cannot yet be a history of the past, for
the French still walk _per ignes suppositos_, and the Revolution is
still some way from being fully accomplished. It was the disputes
between the Roman and the Reformed churches which inspired
historical research in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; it
is the disputes among French parties that now inspire what professes
to be historiography, but what is really a sort of experimental
investigation in the science of society. They little know how long
and weary a journey lies before them, said Burke, who undertake to
bring great masses of men into the political unity of a nation. The
process is still going on, and a man of M. Taine's lively
intellectual sensibility can no more escape its influences than he
can escape the ingredients of the air he breathes. We may add that
if his work had been really historic, he must inevitably have gone
further back than the eighteenth century for the 'Origins' of
contemporary France. The very slight, vague, and unsubstantial
chapter with which he opens his work cannot be accepted as a
substitute for what the subject really demanded--a serious summary,
however condensed and rapid, of the various forces, accidents,
deliberate lines of policy, which, from the breaking up of the great
fiefs do