RE-ACTION.-LITERARY TRANSFORMATION.— HISTORIANS. WHEN We became enthusiastic imitators of our neighbours, when every thing was English in France-dress, dogs, horses, gardens, books-the English, from their instinctive hatred of us, became anti-French; the more we strove to approach them the more they kept aloof from us. Exposed to the public derision on their stage, there was to be seen in all John Bull's parodies a meagre Frenchman, in an apple-green taffeta suit, his hat under his arm, with spindle-shanks, long queue, and the air of a famished dancing-master or hair-dresser; he suffered his nose to be pulled, and he ate frogs. An Englishman on our stage was always a lord or a captain, a hero of sentiment and generosity. re-action in London extended to the entire literature; the French school was attacked. Sometimes striving to re-produce the past, at others attempting unknown routes, our neighbours, proceeding from The innovation to innovation, arrived at the modern English school. When, in 1792, I took refuge in England, I found it necessary to reform most of the opinions which I had borrowed from the criticisms of Voltaire, Diderot, La Harpe, and Fontanes. As for the historians, Hume was reputed a Tory Jacobite writer, heavy and retrograde; he was accused, as well as Gibbon, of having overloaded the English language with Gallicisms; his continuator Smollett, of whig and progressive principles, was preferred to him. Gibbon was just dead; he passed for a rhetorician: a philosopher during his life, having become a Christian at his death, he was as such charged and convicted of being a weak man; Hallam and Lingard had not yet appeared. People still talked of Robertson, because he was dry; one cannot say of the reading of his history what M. Lerminier says of the reading of the history of Herodotus at the Olympic Games: "Greece trembled and Thucydides wept." The learned Scottish divine would have tried in vain to match that speech which Thucydides puts into the lips of the Platæans, pleading their cause before the Lacedæmonians, who condemned them to death because they had continued faithful to the Athenians. "Turn your eyes to the graves of your fathers slaughtered by the Medes, and buried in our furrows; to them we every year pay public honours, as to our old companions in arms. Pausanias buried them there, conceiving that he was depositing them in hospitable earth. If ye take away our lives; if ye make the field of Platea a field of Thebes; will it not be abandoning your kindred in an enemy's country and leaving them among their murderers? Will you not be enslaving the soil on which the Greeks conquered their freedom? Will you not be abolishing the ancient sacrifices of the founders of these temples? We become supplicants to the ashes of your ancestors; we implore those dead that we may not be enslaved to the Thebans. We will remind you of the day when the most glorious deeds shed a lustre over us, and we conclude this address-a necessary and terrible conclusion, for it may perhaps be but to die that we shall cease to speak." Have we amidst our fields graves where we every year perform libations? Have we temples which remind us of memorable deeds? The Grecian history is a poem, Latin history a picture, modern history a chronicle. LITERARY TRANSFORMATION. (CONTINUED.) PHILOSOPHERS-POETS-POLITICAL ECONOMISTS. FROM 1792 to 1800, I seldom heard Locke mentioned in England: his system, it was said, had become obsolete, and he was regarded as weak in ideology. With respect to Newton, as a writer, they would not have him upon earth, and sent him off to heaven, which was perfectly just. Il vint; il revela le principe suprême, Constant, universel, un comme Dieu lui-même: As for the poets, the "Elegant Extracts" afforded an asylum to a few pieces of Dryden's. People could not forgive the rhymed verses of Pope, though they went to see his house at Twickenham, and cut pieces from the weeping willow which he planted, but which has died away like his fame. * Contemplation. A mon père. J. J. Ampère. Blair? A tiresome critic, in the French style: he was placed far below Johnson. The old Spectator? To the garret. Philosophic literature? Confined to the classes at Edinburgh. The works of the English political writers possess little general interest. General questions are there seldom touched upon; those works scarcely ever discuss any but truths peculiar to the constitution of the British islands. The productions of the economists are less circumscribed. The calculations respecting the wealth of nations, the influence of colonies, the movement of generations, the employment of capital, the balance of trade and agriculture, apply in part to the different European societies. However, at the period of which I am treating, Burke had overstepped the circle of national political individuality. By declaring against the French Revolution, he hurried his country into that long series of hostilities which terminated on the field of Waterloo. Cut off from the rest of the world for twenty-two years, England defended her constitution against the ideas which are at this day overpowering it, and dragging it to the common fate of ancient civilisation. |