Among all the many and costly expeditions which had been sent out by a grate ful country, surely one more might have been encouraged, and that a most inexpensive and simple one, the raison d'être of which was the almost absolute certainty that an English naval captain had gone whither his instructions directed him to go.

And meantime those poor souls starved and hoped, and dropped down dead as they walked; and, of all their number, only the corpses of thirty men and a few graves were found at the mouth of the Great Fish River, five dead bodies on Montreal Island, the skeleton of the stew ard, and two skeletons in a boat about fifty miles from Point Victory.

The supposition is that the fatal retreat was made some time during the short summer of 1848, and that, with the exception of those few whose bodies were discovered, all the rest had found a grave at nature's hands in the shape of the winter snow, beneath which all traces of them were hidden from the view of both Hobson and McClintock, who travelled over the very same ground as that by which the retreating Franklin party had endeavored to reach the Great Fish River, but

which, when those two officers passed over it, was covered with thick snow, beneath which all the rest were lying buried, as it was in the case of the one solitary skeleton found by McClintock, and of which he writes, "Shortly after midnight of the 25th May, when slowly walking along a gravel ridge near the beach, which the winds kept partially bare of snow, I came upon a human skeleton, partly exposed, with here and there a few fragments of clothing appearing through the snow. The skeleton, now perfectly bleached, was lying upon its face; and it was a melancholy truth that the old Esquimaux woman spoke when she said, that they fell down and died as they walked along.'

It was then eleven years since all this had happened; it is now just four times eleven years; and while men and women, not then born, are now reading this narrative of facts, comfortably seated by their firesides, those whitened bones of Arctic heroes long gone to rest still lie bleaching beneath the northern snow, their faces turned toward that far-off home they never more could reach, and looking to the very last for help that never came.-Cornhill Magazine.

-Temple Bar.

FRANCE is discrowned. A little while ago it was her privilege to possess two of those encyclopædic minds which contain in themselves the whole knowledge of their time, which sum up all its tendencies, intellectual and moral, and look out upon nature and history from an elevation which enables them to obtain something like a bird's-eye view of the universe. Within five months these two men, so unlike in personal character and in the qualities of their work and thought (and therefore all the more, the two of them, an incarnation of the diverse aptitudes of their race and country), these two, universally recognized as the most authentic exponents and the most authoritative teachers of the generation which flourished between 1850 and 1880, have been taken from us in the plenitude of their powers, M. Renan in October, at the age of sixty-nine, and M. Taine in March, at the age of sixty-four. I will not indulge in the easy and deceptive pastive of drawing a parallel between them, nor weary the reader with a catalogue of forced and illusory likenesses and contrasts in order to pass a judgment on their relative merits as idle as it would be impertinent. I will only point out in passing that both these men-true children of our democratic modern society-rose, by dint of their own genius and efforts, from a position of humble obscurity to fame and honor; that each (like so many of the great writers of this century-like Chateaubriand, like Victor Hugo, like Lamartine) lost his father in early life, and was brought up by a mother whom he tenderly loved; and that, apart from the circumstances which drove the one from his seminary and the other from the public schools, the life of each was unmarked by any adventure other than the adventures of the intellect, and was devoted without interruption to literary or professorial labors, lightened by the simple pleasures of the fireside or the circle

of friends. Each took science for his mistress, and scientific truth for his end and aim; each strove to hasten the time when a scientific conception of the universe should take the place of the theological conception; but while M. Taine believed it possible, without ever venturing beyond the narrow limits of acquired and demonstrable fact, to lay the foundations of a definite system, M. Renan delighted himself with the visionary glimpses of sentiment and reverie into the domain of the uncertain, the unknown, and even the unknowable, and loved to throw fresh doubt upon established conclusions, and to warn other people against a fallacious intellectual security. Moreover, the action of Renan had something contradictory about it. He was claimed by thinkers of the most opposite tendencies. He paved the way, to some extent, for the momentary reaction we see around us against the positive and scientific temper of recent times. In his irony, as in his flights of fancy and of hope, he seems to soar above his time and above his own work. Taine's work, on the other hand, while more limited in range, has a solid unity and a rigid logical consistency; and it is in strict relation with the time in which he lived, at once acting powerfully upon it, and giving it its fullest and most complete expression.

I.

M.

Taine was the theorist and the philosopher of that scientific movement which in France was the successor of the romantic movement. The romantic movement itself-the work of the generation of 18201850-had been a reaction against the hollow, conventional, and sterile art and thought of the age which preceded it. To the narrow and rigid rules of the classical school of the decadence it opposed the broad principle of the freedom of art; for the servile imitation of antiquity it substi

tuted the discovery of new fountains of inspiration in the works of the great masters of all times and countries; while the dull uniformities of a mechanical style gave place to the varying caprices of individual taste, and the narrowness of a tame and timid ideology to the broad horizons of a spiritual eclecticism which found room and recognition for all the great doctrines that in their turn have swayed and captivated the minds of men, and which even professed to reconcile philosophy with religion. But, brilliant as was this epoch of our intellectual history, with its men of genius and its works of art-much as it did for the emancipation of taste and thought, and much as it gave to both at and literature of life and color and newness, it still fell short of fulfilling the hopes it had inspired. It was mistaken. in asserting as a basal principle of art that liberty which is only one of its essential conditions. With its superficial eclecticism, its confused syncretism, it was lacking in unity of action, in definiteness of aim, in organic principle. It had replaced conventions by new conventions, the antiquated rhetoric of the classic writers by a rhetoric which from the first day seemed also faded; it had fallen, in its turn, into vague declamation and noisy commonplace; and it had made the fatal mistake of supposing that efforts of imagination and flights of fancy could take the place of serious study and acquired knowledge, and that the secret things of history and the human heart could be got at by guess-work and delineated with a clever sweep of the brush. Its philosophy, at the same time, had fallen into utter helplessness, while obstinately refusing the fresh impulsion of the spirit of research which was even then creating a new science of nature and of man, and relaying the experimental bases of psychology.

The generation which came to its full age about 1850, or within some twenty years after, while it retained to a great extent the legacy of the romantic school -its rejection of the antiquated rules of the classicists, its assertion of the freedom of art, and its hunger for life, and color, and variety-nevertheless took a very distinct departure of its own. Instead of leaving an open field for the play of individual sentiment or imagination, and allowing every one to shape for himself a vague and purely subjective ideal, it held

fast to one common principle of life and art, the search for truth-truth, not as an abstract intellectual idea, subjective and arbitrary, not as one of those visions of the imagination which people dignify with the name of truth, but truth objective and demonstrable, sought for and seized upon in the concrete reality, that is to say, scientific truth. This tendency of the time was so general, so profound, so truly organic, that it characterizes, consciously or unconsciously, every form of intellectual production. We note its presence no less in the paintings of Meissonier, of Millet, of Bastien Lepage, and the open-air painters than in the plays of Augier, no less in the poetry of Leconte de Lisle, or Hérédia, or Sully-Prudhomme than in the historical works of Renan or of lustel de Coulanges, no less in the novels of Flaubert, Zola, or Maupassant than in the writings of philosophers like Taine himself.

The movement had had illustrious precursors: Héricault and Stendhal, Balzac, Mérimée, Sainte-Beuve, and Auguste Comte, and others beside these, had anticipated it. But it was not till after 1850 that scientific realism became the organic principle of intellectual life in France. By that time it pervaded everything. Alike in poetry and in the plastic arts we find the same striving after technical accuracy, the same effort to come to closer terms with nature, to adhere more strictly to the historic verity. The novelists, whether they are describing the present or reanimating the past, become scrupulous in their observation of life and manners, and exacting in their demand for positive evidence. Flaubert employs the same methods in depicting the manners of a Norman village as in describing those of the Carthaginians during the war of the Mercenaries. Bourget analyzes the characters in a novel with the precision of a professional psychologist; and Zola goes the length of introducing physiology and pathology. The poetry of Hérédia and Leconte de Lisle is steeped in erudition, that of Sully-Prudhomme in science and philosophy; while Coppée is a hard student of middle-class and working-class manners. The historians apply themselves with an almost excessive conscientiousness to the examination of documents and the dissection of details, and make it their highest ambition to have an unerring eye for a text. The philosophers turn to

mathematics, to natural history, to physiology, to supply the bases of a more rigorous psychology, a more certain and rational conception of the universe, and a more accurate knowledge of the laws of thought. The study of outward truth on the one hand-the attempt at a faithful representation of the visible and tangible phenomena of life-and, on the other, the search for the underlying truth, for the play of forces and interaction of natural causes which determine these phenomena -this has been the twofold aim of our poets and painters and sculptors, our novelists and our philosophers, no less than of our men of science; and, in spite of the errors into which modern realism has betrayed some of its devotees, there is an incontestable grandeur in this unity of effort and of inspiration. It was the glory of M. Taine that he, above all other men, was intimately cognizant of the mind and spirit of his generation; that whether as philosopher, historian, or critic, he represented it with unapproached precision, and splendor, and potency; and that he exerted upon it a profound influence. If we discern in him, nevertheless, some lingering trace of that classic spirit of which he was the life-long antagonist; if he sometimes mistakes simplicity and clearness for an evidence of truth; if he was over-fond of absolute formulæ, and of logical systematizing; if we discover also a touch of romanticism in his love for the picturesque, and his delight in exuberant and tumultuous character; he had, nevertheless, this supreme merit—that he loved and believed in truth for its own sake, that he trusted to its beneficent influence, that he sought it with sincere and disinterested effort, and that he proved to his own generation how the passionate pursuit of art may be united with the austere and modest service of science.

II.

Nothing could have been simpler than his life. Born in 1828 at Vouziers, in the Department of the Ardennes, and early orphaned of his father, he was brought up by a brave mother in a straitness of circumstance akin to poverty. After a brilliant course of study at Paris, he was entered at the École Normale at the age of twenty, and found himself the companion of a number of men who were destined with himself to make their mark

in literature-Weiss, About, Paradol, Gréard, and Fustel de Coulanges. Among these he soon took the first tank. He gave proof of his superiority in the examination for his degree in philosophy; but, at the same time, he showed such independence of mind in his treatment of the received eclectic doctrines that the examiners rejected him on the ground of heresy, while admitting that he had taken the first place. The political and religious reaction which marked the opening years of the government of Napoleon III. was then at its height; and the young University, suspected of a leaning to independence, was subjected to petty persecutions which obliged several of Taine's most distinguished comrades to abandon teaching as a profession, and seek their fortunes in journalism. Taine himself, stigmatized by his degree examination as a dangerous character, was forbidden the entry of the philosophy class-room, and sent to Besançon as assistant teacher to the sixth form. He resigned, and went to live in Paris with his mother, and earn his living by private lessons. Meanwhile he was studying medicine and natural science, and acquiring that scientific training which he considered indispensable for a philosopher; and by 1853 he had passed his doctorat-ès-lettres with a treatise on La Fontaine and his Fables. The next year

in "and

he published his "Essay on Livy,' 1856 his "Travels in the Pyrenees, in 1856 his "French Philosophers of the Nineteenth Century.

The success of his books was instantaneous and phenomenal. He was recognized at once as a writer, a critic, an historian, a thinker; the Revue des Deux Mondes and the Journal des Débats sought contributions from him, and he showed the extent of his knowledge and the force of his thought by applying to the most various literary and historical subjects of the philosophic theories which he had already completely elaborated in his two first works. These articles, in which his talent shows itself at its supplest, its most sparkling, its most seductive, have been collected and published in the two volumes of Critical and Historical Essays" (1858 and 1865). While still engaged in these excursions among the literatures of the world-excursions which led him from Xenophon and Plato to Guizot and Michelet, from Marcus Aurelius and Bud

66

dhism to the Mormons and Jean Reynaud, from Renaud de Montauban to Balzac, and from Racine to Jefferson-he was preparing a great work in which he was to apply to a noble literature and a noble race his theory of the conditions of the development of civilization and of intellectual production. In 1864 he published his History of English Literature" in four volumes. This is his most splendid achievement, and it is one of the glories of French literature. Henceforth his position was unassailable. Life smiled on him; the world opened its arms to him. His friends were the most illustrious men of the time in science, art, and letters. The State sought to repair the wrong it had done him by appointing him professor at the École des Beaux Arts, and examiner in history for St. Cyr. His marriage, a little later, with a woman of superior endowments, created for him at once a wider life, and the conditions most favorable to the expansion of his affectionate nature and the patient and cheerful pursuit of his literary labors. His lessons on the history of Art gave him the opportunity of seeking, in a fresh department of human activity, a new demonstration of his philosophical theories. His "Travels in Italy" (1868) and his little books on "The Philosophy of Art, in Italy, in the Netherlands, and in Greece," and "The Ideal in Art" (afterward republished in two volumes under the title "The Philosophy of Art"), displayed all the resources of a mind capable of giving the most varied forms and applications to a quite immutable basis of doctrine. In Thomas Graindorge" (1867), the humorist and satirist of Parisian society scarcely conceals the personality of the philosopher who in 1870 lays down the laws of thought in his two volumes on "The Intelligence.' He was projecting a work on the Will, which should complete the exposition of his philosophy, when the war of 1870 broke out, and was followed immediately by the Commune. Taine was profoundly affected by these events. The development of the political and social situation in France, and its relation to the past and the future, seemed to him the gravest and most pressing of all the problems which had as yet presented themselves to his mind, and he resolved to apply to it all his powers of work and thought, and all the rigor of his

This

method. His treatise on Universal Suffrage and the Manner of Voting," published in 1871, testifies to the practical motives which led him to this decision; and thus it was that to his great literary work, "The History of English Literature," and his great philosophic work, The Intelligence," he added his great historical work, "The Sources of Contemporary France. The mere overhaul. ing of documents was a colossal task; his abstracts filled something like a dozen folio volumes. Then he had to explain the causes of the fall of the Ancien Régime, to account for the powerlessness of the revolutionary assemblies to found any durable political system, and to expose the evils due to the Napoleonic institutions which still reign in France. task of generalization, not abstract and vague, but precise and concrete, involving the classification of thousands of facts and the minute and conscientious study of all manner of institutions, legal, political, administrative, religious-all this accompanied by the constant effort of organizing and philosophic thought-was pursued for twenty years without faltering, though not indeed without weariness. With all the alleviations of his long summer sojourns in the delicious retreat he had provided for himself at Menthon Saint-Bernard, on the shores of the lake of Annecy, the repeated hydropathic cures at Champel, near Geneva, and the hygienic regularity of a life from which the exhausting fultilities of social distraction were rigorously excluded, he had not the physica! forces necessary to resist the strain of that perpetual tension of the mind, working always in a given direction, and never for a moment inactive. Never had his perceptions been more lucid, nor his faculties more robust than when he wrote those chapters on the Church and Education in the Nineteenth Century, which were published but a year ago. But the body, worn out by the exactions of a too hardy soul, refused to go through with the task, and he died on the 5th of March, leaving his great work, of which six volumes had already appeared, unfinished by two or three chapters.

III.

Such was his life-laborious, simple, serious; elevated and illumined by the consolations of friendship and family, the