Hippolyte Taine arrived in England in the summer of 1858 with a reputation already made in France as a philosopher, historian, and critic, and with a habit of looking at nations the way a naturalist looks at specimens. Notes on England collects the letters he sent back to the Paris Temps over the following months — sketches of London streets and Sunday silence, of public schools and factories, of parks, sermons, marriages, and the English character — later gathered into a book and translated for English readers by W. F. Rae, who prefixed a long introductory chapter on Taine’s life and critical method. It is a travel book, but a travel book written by a man who believed that manners, institutions, and beliefs could be classified and explained as systematically as plants or animals.
A Naturalist Among the English
Taine’s governing premise is that a people is a product — of climate, race, and circumstance — and that the observer’s task is to trace the connections between them. Rae’s introduction summarizes the argument Taine made in his own defense: that analyzing a man into his constituent faculties and tendencies does not abolish his freedom or responsibility, any more than describing the parts of a watch explains away its movement. History, on this view, can aspire to the condition of natural history, where Cuvier’s law of the connection of characters and the anatomists’ principle of unity of composition find their analogues in the customs of nations. Rae himself is skeptical, and says so: a Frenchman judging English painting or English character still judges by a French standard, and some of Taine’s explanations merely restate that a genius was a genius. The quarrel between translator and author is worth keeping in mind, because it names the book’s central risk — that a system supple enough to explain everything may end by explaining nothing.
The Making of a Critic
The volume opens with its prefatory matter: Taine’s Notes on England, translated and introduced by W. F. Rae, issued in New York by Henry Holt with a portrait of the author, and inscribed as a gift to the University of Toronto library. A publisher’s list sets the book among Taine’s uniform works — the English literature, the Italian volumes, the books on art and intelligence, the French revolutionary series. The contents promise an introductory chapter in three movements (Taine’s life, his method, his opinions) followed by thirty-five chapters running from Boulogne to the return home.
Rae’s introduction begins with an occasion: Oxford resolved to grant Dr. Döllinger an honorary doctorate in civil law, and Taine was chosen as the Frenchman to share that rare distinction. Soon after, the Notes on England began appearing in the Paris Temps, and were quoted, praised, and attacked wherever French papers circulated; an English selection in the Daily News was reprinted across Britain, America, India, Canada, and Australia, and made the stuff of leading articles. Who was this man, readers asked, who treated English topics with such intelligence? Rae means to answer, since even the best biographical dictionaries were thin on Taine.
Hyppolite-Adolphe Taine was born at Youziers, on the frontier of Champagne and the Ardennes, on 21 April 1828. His family belonged to the French middle class — Nature’s aristocracy of intellect and education, respected in France as much as any titled line. His father was a solicitor; uncles and cousins were notaries, merchants, engineers; relations sat as deputies under Louis Philippe and in the Assembly of 1848. They were comfortable, not rich. His studious father taught him Latin; an uncle who had lived in America taught him English, and English books — especially the classic novels of the last century — were the one light literature allowed him, on the theory that reading a foreign tongue was itself a species of study. From that early licence came his later intimacy with the great English writers.
His father died when he was thirteen. At fourteen his mother brought him to Paris: a year as a boarder in a private school, then the College of Bourbon — a public school that changed its name with every change of government, becoming the Fourcroy Lyceum under the Republic, the Bonaparte Lyceum under the Empire, and now the Condorcet. His mother watched over his studies with tender solicitude, rejoiced in his triumphs as her own, nursed him through long illnesses, and kept house for him into his mature years.
Rae’s Objections to the Method
Rae turns to Taine’s critics, who say he turns man into a machine and denies free personality. Taine’s answer is that the soul is composed of faculties and tendencies, and that analysing them leaves the whole’s spontaneous initiative intact; research into such dependencies, like physical science, only increases man’s power to foresee and modify. He compares history to natural history — Cuvier’s law of the connection of characters, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire’s law of organic counterbalances, the unity of composition that links dog’s paw, horse’s leg, bat’s wing, man’s arm, whale’s fin — and finds analogues in human affairs, so that history might become a science of laws.
Rae pushes back. Botanists have no national bias; a Frenchman judging foreign art judges by a French standard. He cites Taine’s low estimate of English painting — Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy,” Hogarth, Reynolds, Landseer — and his assumption that Ruskin is the accepted English authority on the subject. Taine’s explanations, Rae complains, merely restate that these men were geniuses: Lafontaine was a poet, Livy an oratorical historian, Shakespeare had a complete imagination. He quotes Condillac on rules as a bridge’s parapet, likens Taine to Byron swimming the Hellespont, and disputes his notion of cause as a fact, holding cause and effect to be mere sequences. Then the corrections: drunkenness is not bred by climate, since it afflicts the United States, Canada, and Australia; “ennui” and “spleen” are French figments; “governor” is recent slang; the brutal parent and the red-haired chambermaid are unrepresentative; and an informant wrongly told Taine that medical men are kept from the peerage by taking guineas, though barristers take them and become peers. Still, Rae concludes, the Notes are first-rate, and Taine a model traveller.
From Boulogne to the Thames
Taine’s own text opens at eleven o’clock as the ship leaves Boulogne; the lights fade and the vessel passes into darkness and mist. At sunrise the flat English coast shows like a pale water-colour, and the dirty, muddy Thames is set down as a worker and a porter. A middle-class Englishman of twenty-five, who has travelled forty thousand miles through India and Australia, talks to him of marriage, dowries, and life insurance, calls drunkenness the national vice, and explains why the poor shun the workhouses. Around them: two young couples drenched under umbrellas rather than separate, a tender husband, two girls speaking German and French, a ludicrous lady of forty, a phlegmatic tall Englishman, three gesticulating Frenchmen. Approaching London he notes Gravesend, the docks, an iron church being made ready for India, and the vast shipping — one of the great spectacles of the planet.
Sunday in London
Sunday in London: deserted, rainy streets, Somerset House, soot-blackened classical architecture, St. Paul’s, the Nelson column, Waterloo Bridge. The climate, he concludes, drives the English inward — to home, club, and business — leaving church or pot-house for the Sabbath. Parks stand open with no keepers and no damage done, a contrast to French municipal guards and fenced festivals; at railway stations the English wander freely to the line and meet friends at carriage doors, and are annoyed to see foreigners caged in waiting-rooms and led like sheep. Returning on foot to Piccadilly, the London weather resumes: small constant rain and dissolving mud. F., who has wintered there, reports little snow but perpetual fog, rain nearly every day, and execrable streets — proof being the ladies’ boots as large as gentlemen’s and their waterman’s gait.
How the English Spend Their Leisure
The question recurs: how do the English spend their leisure, above all Sunday? The Club, and often wine. F. had a neighbour in the reading-room who drank a large glass of wine, slept, drank a second half an hour later, slept again, and so on without a word. A leading merchant with sixteen gardeners at his country seat works all day, comes home, speaks seldom, and lives like an automaton among his children, while his daughter travels all year with a governess; in the family circle he merely finds the money. The trait is common: a deficiency in expansion and amiability.
The Case for Educating Daughters
A father complains that his daughter Jane, twenty-four and unmarried, has shut herself in the library to read solid works. Asked what dowry he will give her, he names two thousand pounds—the estate goes to his eldest son, a mine yielding two thousand a year to the second. His adviser tells him to settle five thousand on Miss Jane. He does; she marries, has a baby, and proves to have been made for motherhood. Taine admires the girl’s coolness and good sense, her courage in silently altering her course without complaint. English houses, he notices, carry no fashion journals; a friend tells him no well-brought-up woman reads such platitudes. The English Women’s Review runs pieces on emigration to Australia and French public instruction—substantial fare beside the French provincial journal with its bonnet patterns, embroidery, sentimental stories, and the directress’s correspondence, a masterpiece of absurdity. He lists the women who write in the Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science—Louisa Twining, Mary Carpenter, Florence Nightingale, Bessie Parkes, and others, most of them unmarried, several secretaries of associations. Mary Carpenter is quoted on education: the infant’s will must first be developed and directed, since one is improved only by oneself and moral rule must spring from within. English novels, he finds, show precision in depicting character; a woman obliged to write for bread may understand the human heart better than a professional psychologist. He defends such women against the charge of being pedants and blue-stockings: he knows four or five who write yet remain pleasing and natural, and most cited authoresses are simple domestic ladies. A French artist spent days with two who possessed genius without knowing their talent; one hostess knew more Greek than M—— and wrote his English sentence in Greek, yet is a stylish woman of the world with nine daughters, two nurses, two governesses, and perfect order. In France, he says, people wrongly believe that a woman who ceases to be a doll ceases to be a woman.
Love, Dowries, and the Marriage Market
Englishmen tell him a young English girl will not marry without inclination; she weaves a romance that is part of her pride and chastity, a theory voiced in novels by ladies, John Halifax, Gentleman above all. Yet she is positive and practical, wishing to be her husband’s helper in difficult enterprises—like Mrs. Livingstone and Lady Baker. A bishop’s wife bears the marks of a terrible climate; a rich girl will follow her husband to Australia, returning once in five or six years; a delicate lady of twenty-four with four children in the Punjaub sends them to Europe before the age of two. Dowries are commonly small, three to five thousand pounds, and ladies of that fortune may marry simple gentlemen and descend in fortune. The reverse is the fishery for husbands: rich young men are run after and grow suspicious. Many women, their inclinations thwarted, never marry and live with an eldest brother. Every Englishman, Taine observes, has a bit of romance about marriage; he may wait, go to India or Australia, labour, return, and marry—Thackeray’s Major Dobbin waits fifteen years. Protracted chastity and taciturn concentration intensify passion; disappointment may half unhinge a man. One distinguished man supplanted by a titled rival was feared for his reason for two years; he went to China and Australia, is now a baronet, unmarried, and sometimes steals off alone. Young people associate freely and study each other; the man addresses the girl first, then her parents—the opposite of French custom. A friend, C——, allows that love-matches often end in discord and arranged marriages in concord. The wife’s dowry is placed in trustees’ hands, its interest serving as pin-money, a fund secured against the husband’s accidents, since by law the wife’s property is engulfed in his and she holds nothing in her own right. This is one reason Mill protests against the subjection of women: they are kept down by law, religion, and manners. The husband is their lord, often tells her nothing of his concerns, and she is merely a housekeeper—an inequality with grave inconveniences, for he is often a despot, and if he dies she cannot clear up affairs or replace the head of the family. Marriage is encompassed with profound respect; adultery is never excused, even in licentious writings. Breaches occur among tradesmen and the fashionable lower nobility, but among well-brought-up persons wives are almost always faithful. One might visit drawing-rooms for eighteen months without meeting an exception; only one case is cited among the highest class. More occurred fifty years ago, in the time of Byron and Alfieri; opinion has since grown severe, and the Queen labours by example, excluding ladies of doubtful reputation from Court—only the urgency of the Crimean war made her tolerate at Windsor a statesman known as a profligate. Dread of publicity and newspapers is another guaranty. C—— recalls hearing in Paris a man ask another, “Is it true that your wife has got a lover?”—which he considers monstrous. Balzac’s Physiologie du Mariage would give offence.
School and Life as One Continuum
Taine argues that England knows no profound separation between child-life and adult-life; school and society stand on equal footing, with no moat or wall between them, the one preparing for the other. The English adult does not leave a hothouse of compartments and an exceptional rule, nor is he troubled by change of air. He has not only cultivated his mind but served an apprenticeship to life; his ideas suit the world receiving him, and in politics and religion he finds a place ready at twenty. Thus he escapes scepticism more easily, settles down faster, experiments less. Those seen in class, fields, and streets have a healthy, active, decided air—greater children and more manly, more addicted to play, less inclined to pass the limits of their years, yet more independent and more capable of governing themselves. The French schoolboy, above all the inmate of our colleges, is wearied, embittered, rendered precocious; caged up, his imagination ferments. In character-formation English education is superior; it better prepares for the world and forms healthier minds.
Tom Brown and the Cult of Character
The author of Tom Brown’s School-days says he set out to represent the most common type of little English boy of the upper middle class, and the book had enormous success; youths and adults recognised themselves in a portrait kindly if not flattered. Neither Tom nor his father cares much for education properly so called. His father does not care a straw for Greek particles or the digamma; he wants Tom to turn out a brave, helpful, truth-telling Englishman, a gentleman, and a Christian. Tom wants to be A1 at cricket and football, to make his hands keep his head against any fellow, to carry away just enough Latin and Greek to take him through Oxford respectably, and to leave the name of a fellow who never bullied a little boy or turned his back on a big one.
The Great Pleasure Garden and the Roman Comparison
The book opens this final stretch in a pleasure garden built to overwhelm the senses: a Sphinx, sixty-foot Egyptian statues, colossal trees—including the bark of a California sequoia mounted on an inner framework to suggest a tree 450 feet high and 116 feet in circumference—a circular concert room with tiers of benches like a Coliseum, and life-size reproductions of antediluvian monsters, megatheriums and deinotheriums among them. Blondin performs on his rope a hundred feet above it all. Taine compares the conglomeration to the Rome of Caesar and the Antonines, where pleasure-palaces for the sovereign people collected statues, paintings, animals, musicians, and acrobats—bazaars where novelty and the fantastic ousted any appreciation of simple beauty. Rome enriched herself by conquest, England by industry; Roman statues and monsters were stolen originals and living beasts that tore people apart, whereas here the statues are plaster and the monsters goldbeater’s skin—a second-class spectacle of the same kind, which a Greek would deem fit for powerful barbarians who failed at refinement.
Street Preachers and Religious Sentiments
On two Sundays, open-air preachers with Bibles and umbrellas missionised in Hyde Park—laymen impelled to communicate religious impressions. In a village forty miles from London, two men in frock coats and black hats sang psalms on the green, said to be common when the afternoon sermon left hearers with an overplus of fervour; long lean bodies, nasal voices, upturned eyes, twenty persons around them. Zeal runs keen among Dissenters; youths are assigned duties, distributing tracts on Sunday or holding a Thursday meeting of bargemen. Female Methodist preachers may still be heard; one notable authoress reportedly began so. In Paris the Rev. Reginald advertised sermons with “Come to Jesus” in large type, the sect holding that the hardened sinner may be instantaneously converted by grace; Reginald presented a stout young man as visible token of success, who testified he had been a vile sinner touched by God’s grace—a truly English method of producing tangible proof, like a zoologist’s specimen. In a University town at eight in the evening, two gentlemen and a middle-class man preached weekly on the highway: a bashful twenty-year-old gesticulated about Jesus Christ pitying sinners; a second read of Jerusalem besieged by the King of Assyria, terrified by the Angel of the Lord, and the two lepers finding tents full of provisions. A sailor story follows: though father, brother, and grandfather drowned, he goes to sea, since the gentleman’s relatives died in their beds yet he lies down unafraid; for a Christian the only assurance is to know Christ. The third preacher, thin, lantern-jawed, grating-voiced, seemed moved; Taine left after a quarter-hour. Of fifty well-dressed listeners, some whispered and smiled ironically, but most men and all women listened attentively. He approves: such proceedings vent a consuming passion that else would become madness, melancholy, or sedition; they moralise; they keep alive belief in noble ideas and zealous souls.
These are relics of the old Puritan spirit, a fossilised grand fauna. According to Gr—, most young men here, including active intellects, have never had a twinge of infidelity; three-fourths of newspapers and books denounce “French scepticism and German infidelity.” Grown men believe lukewarmly in God, the Trinity, and Hell. Protestant dogma chimes with the race’s serious, poetic, moral instincts; an Englishman would be mortified without faith in another life, imaging the mysterious country by an antique map—Christianity explained by the clergy, the revered geographers—who permit latitude; he accepts Protestantism and the Church along with the English Constitution, seeing in Protestantism a rule of conduct and in the Church an auxiliary of the State, an institution of moral hygiene. Unbelief is reluctantly admitted in a good Englishman; the Edinburgh Review of April 1848 is quoted on “intellectual poltroonery” and the severe social penalties on unorthodox opinions. M. Guizot’s Memoirs relate that saying “Hell is paved with good intentions” drew a lady’s rebuke that “Hell” was too serious for general conversation. A young French acquaintance, rowing, fell backward and let slip “Dieu me damne”; the ladies gazed at the water, one gentleman laughed, two blushed like young girls. Religious prudery often leads to hypocrisy: a London merchant, jovial in Paris, forbade his Paris host to touch a miniature billiard-table on Sunday lest neighbours be scandalised; touring Paris with wife and daughters he was stiff and proper—his religion a court dress, the cant that disgusted Lord Byron. In twenty years it has diminished; Comte’s philosophy, German exegesis, geology, and natural science advance slowly; free inquiry re-assumes sway, opening doors without breaking windows.
Aristocratic Ascendency
Observations converge. A polished middle-class lady entered a Brighton cheesemonger’s; the shopkeeper asked obsequiously “What kind of cheese, ma’am, do you patronise?”—merchandise honouring aristocratic approval, as tins and pomades boast “Adopted by the nobility and gentry.” B—, visiting France during the Exposition, was surprised at soldiers’ familiarity with officers: two soldiers bent over a Guides captain’s shoulder at a shop window; B— said such conduct would not be tolerated at home, “we have distinctions of rank.” Dr. Arnold’s 1839 notes at Calais record the same observation.
The Journey to Manchester
Taine departs for Manchester, reading newspapers and reviews on the journey, including three or four articles on France attacking its despotic Government, which forbids private individuals to take part in public affairs. The writers argue as if Frenchmen were Englishmen, unconsciously picturing themselves in France and supposing how their feelings would be shocked and their actions hampered by the administrative system. These shackles seem trifles to the French, and the majority would be more sensitive to the opposite system: taking part in public affairs means committees, reports, speeches, statistics and investigations—wearisome occupations handed over to the Government, which, if a despot, is also a steward, trammelling them but saving them worry. They permit it to cut and carve like a steward with full powers, openly criticising its doings and privately whispering that if it became unbearable they could turn it out of doors. Taine calls this calculation faulty: after years of quiet and indifference they suddenly find themselves ruined and having concluded bad bargains; forcible expulsion always leads to rioting; and since the master cannot get on without a steward, after each disturbance he must select the first comer, often worse than his predecessor.
For the first hundred miles the landscape is flat and tame; then hills begin and the country acquires expression—undulating hill-tops bathed in mist, a feeble light resting like a smile on the pale green amid sodden fields.
The Theory of the Natural Representative
The most sustained argument in the book is political, and it is really an argument about France conducted on English soil. England’s government, Taine proposes, rests on “natural representatives” — the families in each parish and county whom everyone, down to the day-labourer, recognizes as the local landmarks, “like the five or six large trees of the locality.” Because such people are marked out beforehand by rank, fortune, and education, the vote, when it comes, only confirms an assent that already exists; the support behind them is firm and lasting rather than the slippery, provisional preference of a French electorate choosing between lists it does not understand. Taine imagines a catastrophe destroying Parliament and the royal family outright, and concludes that the country would simply re-form itself, because the “born captains” are still in their places. Against this he sets France, where noble and peasant, bourgeois and workman eye each other with distrust, and where the only chiefs are movable functionaries obeyed but not accepted — which is why, he says, every French regime feels like a painted backdrop that may descend or rise again at any moment. The argument is conservative and frankly admiring, but it is not merely flattery: Taine insists that election confers power without capacity, and that a statesman’s judgment is built only by travel, languages, and long comparison — the very education his English notes are meant to supply.
Character as the Sum of Small Habits
What holds the book together is Taine’s conviction that a nation’s mind shows itself in its smallest externals. The Englishman’s reserve, his low voice at a cricket match, the groom who calms two frightened horses without a word, the admiral who greets a captured captain with “Fortune of war” — these are evidence of a phlegmatic temperament in which impressions sink deep and surface slowly. From that root Taine derives a whole typology: the noble calm of the cultivated gentleman, the stiffness of the clergyman who walks as if he had swallowed a poker, the awkwardness of the stammerer who is eloquent the next day before eight meetings. Dress tells the same story, with its one honest exception, the plain riding habit; so does the English Sunday, which drives the whole nation indoors into home, club, and business. The method has obvious limits, and Rae’s objections — that drunkenness is not a matter of climate, that “spleen” is a French figment — land real blows. Yet the portraits have a novelist’s density, and Taine knows it: he reads John S., the barely literate Bristol mechanic who built a factory and cannot bring himself to marry, as a figure out of George Eliot or Dickens, and he treats Tom Brown’s School-days as a national document because it puts character above scholarship and cricket above Greek particles.
The Price of the System
Taine’s admiration is never unqualified, and the book’s most uncomfortable pages are its social ones. The same education that produces self-governing, healthy men also produces fagging, flogging, and broken collar-bones; the same respectability that keeps wives almost universally faithful also keeps them, by law and manners, in subjection, their property swallowed by their husbands’. The enclosure of the commons, the eight-shilling agricultural wage, the Lincolnshire cottages where two hundred families sleep in a single room — these are set beside the parks and the seven-course households of the gentry, and Taine refuses to let the contrast dissolve into complacency. His verdict on reform is cautious to the point of fatalism: every state has its hereditary scrofula, and great surgical operations seldom do more than weaken the patient. The Manchester chapters sharpen the point. The sheer scale of English industry commands him — the mill with three hundred thousand spindles, the workshops that are “a living and moving structure” — but the blackened brick, the barefoot children pouring out at six o’clock, and the speculative rows of identical villas leave him asking what winter must be like.
A Frenchman’s England
The book’s afterlife belongs less to its conclusions than to its method and its temper. Taine’s habit of treating literature, politics, and dress as so many symptoms of one underlying disposition became a template for later criticism, and his English notes were read across Europe and America as soon as they appeared — quoted, argued over, and used to point morals in leading articles from London to Melbourne. What keeps them alive is the tension inside them: a systematizer who cannot resist an anecdote, a theorist of race and climate who admits that his informants may have misled him, and a Frenchman who confesses, after an hour in St. James’s Park, that what pleases him most in England is the trees.
