Thou hast sinned, O Purahi, Thou hast broken the standard of the king. Taiarapu has caused The destruction of us all. The approach of the front rank Has loosened the decoration. One murderous hand is stretched, And another murderous hand: Two armies in and two out. If you had but listened Matitaupe and the dry reef of the Purionu. "There we will die the death Of Pairi Temaharu and Pahupua." The coming of the great army of Taiarapu Has swept Papara away, And drawn its mountains with it. Thou hast sinned, Purahi, Thou and Taiarapu. Thou hast broken the standard of the king, And hast caused the destruction of us all. SOLILOQUY OF TEURA, A BEAUTY, ASKED TO WED PUNU, AN OLD CHIEF HE golden rays of the sky grow wider and wider. THE What is this wind, Teura, that makes the shadows fall Thy heart beats fast, Teura; it takes away thy breath. I hurry with fright, I fall paralyzed with fear of his love. I step and I stop; I should advance, and I hesitate. I would give myself up to death at the cave Tiare. [like the sky Oh to die six deaths! I would give a golden leaf glistening There are but seven times for love and eight for death. I am ill, aweary, fretting at the love that is given me. I would rather die than return it. SONG FOR THE CROWNING OF POMARE THE HE sky flashes like a torch that is thrown. It is the coming of thy king from Hawiri, King of many isles. Thou hast put down The elder power of Matue. Thou goest outside of the reefs of Hitiaa. At Vaiatis is thy house. Thou wilt go to the shores of Tautira, But thou wilt long for the murmurs of the Pare. Thou wilt go and thou wilt find the little pass at Paite; It is like the seat of Pomare. Courage, Paite, it is the crowning! Courage at the power of Pomare! Pomare is the king who has been turned to light With the consent of the god. Courage, Pare, it is the crowning of thy king! [The above article with the translations are from the informal note-book of Mr. La Farge.] HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE (1828-1893) BY FERDINAND BRUNETIÈRE EW writers of our time have exercised, not only in France but outside of France, a greater influence than Taine; and at first this seems strange, when one considers superficially the nature of his works. Even though he has written an excellent 'History of English Literature,' and has shown rare powers of mind in his 'Origins of Contemporary France,' there are many histories of the French Revolution, some of which are based on better information or are no less eloquent than his; there are some less tedious to read: and what can we say of Shakespeare, of Milton, of Dryden, or of Shelley, that would be new enough, after so much that others have said, to modify ever so little the thought of a whole generation? But let us look a little closer and more attentively: we ought to join to the History of English Literature' and 'Origins of Contemporary France' a book like The Philosophy of Art,' or like the book On the Intelligence'; in these books it is necessary to grasp, in the midst of the diversity of subjects, the points in common. And one then sees how true it is that more than a treatise on the matter in hand, and over and above being a history of the French Revolution or an analysis of the power of comprehension, all these works are applications, examples, or "illustrations," of a method conceived as universal or universally applicable, having for its object to separate the principles of critical judgment from the variations of individual opinion. It is this that makes the greatness of Taine's work, and it is this that explains his far-reaching influence. It is this, no less, that is meant by those who profess to see in him not a "critic," nor a "historian," but a "philosopher." And finally, it is from this point of view, at once very general and very particular, that he must be seen to be appreciated at his true worth. H. A. TAINE Taine's life was uneventful. Born at Vouziers, in the Ardennes mountains, in 1828; entered at the École Normale of Paris in 1848; a provincial professor, obliged to send in his resignation on account of his independent spirit and freedom of thought; professor of æsthetics and the history of art at the École des Beaux-Arts; indifferent to outside affairs and superior to most of the vanities that beset mankind,- Taine is of that small number of writers who live solely in order to think, and who, according to Flaubert's phrase, have seen in their surroundings, in history, or even in the universe itself, only "what could contribute to the perfecting personally of their intelligence." It is moreover entirely unnecessary, in tracing a portrait of him that shall resemble him, to linger over useless details, or to republish trivial anecdotes concerning him which contain nothing characteristic, and would not help us to know him better. We should go directly to the point, and keep in view solely that which, together with his literary gift, was of unique interest in him,—I mean the evolution of his thought. Apparently there was something disconcerting in it, and it is even a sufficiently curious fact, that in his last years he counted among his adversaries some of his most ardent admirers of former times, and on the other hand among his supporters those very ones against whom his first works were employed somewhat like a machine of war. Nay more, in his Origins of Contemporary France,' when, after showing at the outset—and according to his expression — that the abuses of the old order of things had made the France of 1789 uninhabitable, he had next assailed with still more violence the religion of the Revolution and of the Napoleonic idolatry, it may be said that he would have turned against him the entire thinking world of France, if two things had not protected him: the brilliance of his talent and his evident sincerity. It was not he, however, who had changed! No more was it his adversaries nor his admirers, nor even the trend of ideas or the spirit of the times. But in going to the bottom of his first principles he had himself seen unexpected results developing from them; and in contact with the better-known reality, these principles in their turn bending and modifying themselves, but not undergoing a fundamental change. What resemblance is there between the acorn and the oak, between a grain and a stalk of wheat, between the worm and the chrysalis? And yet one proceeds from the other. And can we say that they are not the same? His first ambition, summed up in a celebrated phrase become almost proverbial,-"Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar," had been to communicate to the sciences called moral and political that absolute certainty which, like all the scholars and philosophers of his generation, he was accustomed to attribute to the ( 14401 physical or natural sciences; and in fact, this is what he tried to do in his essay on 'La Fontaine and his Fables' (1855), in his essay on Titus Livius (1856), in his Historical and Critical Essays' (1856-58), and above all in his 'History of English Literature' (1863). Starting with the principle that "Moral things, like physical things, have appendages and conditions," he proposed to determine them and to show (the examples are his own) that between a yoke-elm hedge of Versailles, a decree of Colbert, and a tragedy of Racine, there are relations that enable us to recognize in them so many manifestations, not involuntary but yet unconscious, of the same general state of mind. To-day nothing seems simpler, or rather more commonplace. Scarcely less so appears the analysis that he has given of the elements or factors of that state of mind: the Race, the Environment, the Moment. We all admit that between the Merry Wives of Windsor' and 'Tartuffe' there is an initial and fundamental difference; which means that Shakespeare was an Englishman who wrote for English people, and Molière a Frenchman who wrote for French people. We are equally able to conceive without the least difficulty that the court of Louis XIV. did not in all points resemble that of Elizabeth, and that consequently the pleasures of an Essex and a Leicester were differently ordered from those of a Guiche and a LauAnd finally, we have no difficulty in understanding that to all these differences must be added still another; namely, that of the moment, or of the change that takes place from one century or from one generation to another in the general civilization of the world. It is not possible to reason before and after Descartes in the same way; and the discoveries or inventions of Newton have fundamentally modified the very substance of the human intellect. If it happened that some dilettanti doubted this, still it is precisely what Taine has demonstrated with an abundance of illustrations, a wealth of knowledge, literary, historical, philosophical, scientific,- with an incomparable vigor and brilliancy of style. If he has "invented" nothing, in the somewhat rough sense in which this word is used elsewhere, and if the theory of environments for example goes back at least to Hippocrates, he has set the seal of talent on inventions that had not yet received it; he has popularized them, made them familiar even to those who do not understand them; and so mingled them with the current of ideas that they have become anonymous, and to-day we must make an effort of history and of justice if we would restore to him what may be called their literary paternity. zun. How is it then that in their time they stirred up so much opposition and from so many sides? For while recognizing the worth of the writer, there was about 1860 an almost universal protest against the philosopher. One reproached him for his pantheism, another for XXIV-901 |