Evening star., 1925-05-29
THIS AND THAT
BY CHARLES E. TRACEWELL.

beginning of Chapter II of Book I,
treating of the Normans.
Brave men had at length made a
stand against the Norsemen and the
robbers. They had planted their feet
IN the soil, and the moving chaos OF
the general subsistence had become
fixed by the effort of their great hearts
and Of their arms. At the mouth OF
the rivers. in the defiles of the noun.
tains, on the margin Of the waste Dor
ders, at all perilous passes, they had
built their forts, each for himself, each
on his own land, each with his faith
| full band; and they lived like scatter
ed, but watchful army, encamped and
| confederate in their castles, sword in
hand, in front Of the enemy"
| The above passage, selected purely
at random, shows two things, first
the flowing style Of the author. and
second, his Interviewing Of history
and literature One gets almost as
much English history from Taine as
he does History Of Literature"
| Yet in no other general work will
the careful reader secure SO many
little known specimens Of early Eng
lish literary effort, SO much unusual
information, quotations carefully veri
fed. Here one gets lengthy specimens
| VI tne ftODln f1OOQ DdlldQS, anu LAicS
about Robin himself.
| One cannot escape Hippolyte
Adolphe Taine when reading his His.
tory Of English Literature!' Some
authors manage to keep themselves
| out of their books pretty we'll, but this
man stands in his with both feet,
arms waving, eyes flashing.
No wonder the French governme nj
felt called upon, in his early days
after he had been graduated from the
Ecole Normale, at Paris, to assign
him as an instructor in q provincial
town, in order to get him out of the
way. He was regarded as danger
GUS"
| This dangerous fellow was born in
1928, dying at Paris in 1898. After
the publication Of his monumental
history of the literature of the coun.
try across the channel, he was ap.
pointed to a professorship in the Ecole
de BeauX-Arts. He was discovered to
be not dangerous, but just truth
telling.
In a series of histories on the old
royal regimes and the revolution he
| managed to get in Dutch" with all
parties, condemning the royalists, then
| the republicans, for repeating the old
faults of their predecessors, then lam
basting Napoleon.
His "Histoire de la Literature An
glaise" wins the following tribute
from our own Encyclopedia Ameri
cana:
THE brilliancy of this performance
is unquestioned, but the justice OF the
method has been much discussed, and
| while Taine became the founder OF q
cult in France, he found in England
and America no imitator of impor
tance. Literary criticism, es
thetics and psychology were TO him
sciences as exact as chemistry; he
treated them with a laboratory style
of analysis and deduction"
This authority declares that Taine
| judged all products Of the human
mind by the three inflexible standards
of race, epoch and surroundings, and
these he manipulated as If they were
mathematical formulae. HE quite
disregarded the factor of individual
iity," the Americana states.
Whatever Taine may not have done
he did write an enthusiastic history OF
English literature, one in which he
paid the highest tributes, not only tc
the poems, plays and prose works oi
Englishmen through the centuries
but also to the great Fundamental
moral qualities of the race, which
despite many ups and downs, the
English stand for everywhere they
are found.
In Washington, D. c., in 1925, we
find the city sweeping vulgar maga
zines of the newsstands. The Eng
lish idea Of decency did it. For fur
ther particulars. read Taine's His
tory of English Iiteraturer'