tainted by the malady of the age, and will never more than half be quit of it. We shall arrive at truth, not at calm. All we can heal at present is our intellect; we have no hold upon our sentiments. But we have a right to conceive for others the hopes which we no longer entertain for ourselves, and to prepare for our descendants the happiness which we shall never enjoy. Brought up in a more wholesome air, they mayhap will have a wholesomer heart. The reformation of ideas ends by reforming the rest, and the light of the mind produces serenity of heart. Hitherto, in our judgments on men, we have taken for our masters the oracles and poets, and like them we have received for certain truths the noble dreams of our imagination and the imperious suggestions of our heart. We have bound ourselves to the partiality of religious divinations, and the inexactness of literary divinations, and we have shaped our doctrines by our instincts and our vexations. Science at last approaches, and approaches man; it has gone beyond the visible and palpable world of stars, stones, plants, amongst which man disdainfully confined her. It reaches the heart, provided with exact and penetrating implements, whose justness has been proved, and their reach measured by three hundred years of experience. Thought, with its development and rank, its structure and relations, its deep material roots, its infinite growth through history, its lofty bloom at the summit of things, becomes the object of science, an object which, sixty years ago, it foresaw in Germany, and which, slowly and surely probed, by the same methods as the physical world, will be transformed before our eyes, as the physical world has been transformed. It is already being transformed, and we have left behind us the point of view of Byron and our poets. No, man is not an abortion or a monster; no, the business of poetry is not to revolt or defame him. He is in his place, and completes a chain. Let us watch him grow and increase, and we shall cease to rail at or curse him. He, like everything else, is a product, and as such it is right he should be what he is. His innate imperfection is in order, like the constant abortion of a stamen in a plant, like the fundamental irregularity of four facets in a crystal. What we took for a deformity, is a form; what seemed to us the contradiction, is the accomplishment of a law. Human reason and virtue have as their elements animal instincts and images, as living forms have for theirs physical laws, as organic matters have for theirs mineral substances. What wonder if virtue or reason, like living form or organic matter, sometimes fails or decomposes, since like them, and like every superior and complex existence, they have for support and control inferior and simple forces, which, according to circumstances, now maintain it by their harmony, now mar it by their discord? What wonder if the elements of existence, like those of quantity, receive, from their very nature, the irresistible laws which constrain and reduce them to a certain species and order of formation? Who will rise up against geometry? Who, especially, will rise up against a living geometry? Who will not, on the other hand, feel moved with admiration at the sight of those grand powers which, situated at the heart of things, incessantly urge the blood through the limbs of the old world, disperse the showers in the infinite network of arteries, and spread over the whole surface the eternal flower of youth and beauty? Who, in short, will not feel himself ennobled, when he finds that this pile of laws results in a regular series of forms, that matter has thought for its goal, and that this ideal from which, through so many errors, all the aspirations of men depend, is also the centre whereto converge, through so many obstacles, all the forces of the universe? In this employment of science, and in this conception of things, there is a new art, a new morality, a new polity, a new religion, and it is in the present time our task to discover them. CHAPTER III. The Past and the Present. I. The past-The Saxon invasion-How it established the race and determined the character-The Norman Conquest-How it modified the character and established the Constitution-The Renaissance-How it manifested the national mind-The Reformation-How it fixed the ideal-The Restoration-How it imported classical culture and diverted the national mind -The Revolution—How it developed classical culture and restored the national mind-The modern age-How European ideas widened the national mould. II. The present-Concordances of observation and history-Sky-Soil-Products-Man-Commerce-Industry -Agriculture-Society-FamilyArts-Philosophy-Religion- What forces have produced the present civilisation, and are working out the future civilisation. HA § 1. AVING reached the limits of this long review, we can now embrace in one prospect the aggregate of English civilisation: everything is connected there: a few powers and a few primitive circumstances have produced the rest, and we have only to pursue their continuous action in order to comprehend the nation and its history, its past and its present. At the beginning, and furthest removed in the region of causes, comes the race. A whole people, Angles and Saxons, destroyed, hunted out, or enslaved the old inhabitants, wiped out the Roman culture, settled themselves alone and pure, and, amongst the later Danish ravagers, only encountered a new reinforcement of the same blood. This is the primitive stock of its substance and innate properties is to spring almost the whole future growth. At this time, and as they then were, alone in their island, the Angles and Saxons attained a development such as it was, defaced, brutal, and yet solid. They ate and drank, built and cleared ground, and, in particular, multiplied the scattered tribes who crossed the sea in leather boats, became a strong compact nation,-three hundred thousand families, rich, with store of cattle, abundantly provided with corporal subsistence, partly at rest in the security of social life, with a king, respected and frequent assemblies, good judicial customs: here, amidst the fire and vehemence of barbarian temperament, the old Germanic fidelity held men in unison, whilst the old Germanic independence held them upright. In all else they barely advanced. A few fragmentary songs, an epic in which still is faintly heard the warlike exaltation of ancient barbarism, gloomy hymns, a harsh and furious poetry, sometimes sublime and always rude, this is all that remains of them. In six centuries they had scarcely gone one step beyond the manners and sentiments of their uncivilised Germany: Christianity, which obtained a hold on them by the greatness of its biblical tragedies and the troubled sadness of its aspirations, did not bring to them the Latin civilisation: this remained at the door, hardly accepted by a few great men, deformed, when it did enter, by the disproportion of the Roman and Saxon genius-always altered and reduced; so much so, that for the men of the Continent these islanders were but illiterate dullards, drunkards, and gluttons; at all events, savage and slow by mood and nature, rebellious against culture, and sluggish in development. The empire of this world belongs to force. These people were conquered for ever and permanently,-conquered by Normans, that is, by Frenchmen more clever, more quickly cultivated and organised than they. This is the great event which was to complete their character, decide their history, and impress upon character and history the political and practical spirit which separates them from other German nations. Oppressed, constrained in the stiff net of Norman organisation, although they were conquered, they were not destroyed; they were on their own soil, each with his friends and in his tithings; they formed a body; they were yet twenty times more numerous than their conquerors. Their situation and their necessities will create their habits and their aptitudes. They will endure, protest, struggle, resist together and unanimously; strive to-day, to-morrow, daily, not to be slain or plundered, to restore their old laws, to obtain or extort guarantees; and they will gradually acquire patience, judgment, all the faculties and inclinations by which liberties are maintained and states are founded. By a singular good fortune, the Norman lords assist them in this; for the king has secured to himself so much, and is found so formidable, that, in order to repress the great pillager, the lesser ones are forced to make use of their Saxon subjects, to ally themselves with them, to give them a share in their charters, to become their representatives, to admit them into Parliament, to leave them to labour freely, to grow rich, to acquire pride, force authority, to interfere with themselves in public affairs. Thus, then, gradually the English nation, buried by the Conquest under ground, as if with a sledge-hammer, extricates and raises itself; five hundred years and more being occupied in this re-elevation. But, during all this time, leisure failed for fine and lofty culture: it was needful to live and defend themselves, to dig the ground, spin wool, bend the bow, attend meetings, juries, to contribute and argue for common interests: the important and respected man is he who knows well how to fight and get much gain. It was the energetic and warlike manners which were developed, the active and positive spirit which predominated; they left learning and elegance to the Gallicised nobles of the court. When the valiant Saxon townsfolk quitted bow and plough, it was to feast copiously, or to sing the ballad of 'Robin Hood.' They lived and acted; they did not reflect or write; their national literature was reduced to fragments and rudiments, harpers' songs, tavern epics, a religious poem, a few books on religious reformation. At the same time Norman literature faded; separated from the stem, and on a foreign soil, it languished in imitations; only one great poet, almost French in mind, quite French in style, appeared, and, after him, as before him, spread an incurable drivel of words. For the second time, a civilisation of five centuries was found sterile of great ideas and works; this still more so than its neighbours, and for a twofold reason,-because to the universal impotence of the Middle-age was added the impoverishment of the Conquest, and because of the two component literatures, one, transplanted, became abortive, and the other, mutilated, ceased to expand. II. But amongst so many rough draughts and attempts, a character was formed, and the rest was to spring from it. The barbarous age had established on the soil a German race, phlegmatic and grave, capable of spiritual emotions and moral discipline. The feudal age had imposed on this race habits of resistance and association, political and utilitarian prejudices. Fancy a German from Hamburg or Bremen confined for five hundred years in the iron corslet of William the Conqueror: these two natures, one innate, the other acquired, constitute all the springs of his conduct. So it was in other nations. At Like runners drawn up in line at the start of the race, we see at the epoch of the Renaissance the five great peoples of Europe let loose, though we are unable at first to foresee anything of their career. first sight it seems as if accidents or circumstances will govern their pace, their fall, and their success. It is not so: from them alone their history depends: each will be the artisan of its fortune; chance has no influence over events so vast; and it is national inclinations and faculties which, overturning or raising obstacles, will lead them, according to their fate, each one to its goal,-some to the extreme of decadence, others to the height of prosperity. After all, man is ever his own master and his own slave. At the outset of every age he in a certain fashion is: his body, heart, mind have a distinct structure and disposition; and from this enduring arrangement, which all preceding centuries have contributed to consolidate or to construct, spring permanent desires or aptitudes, by which he determines and acts. Thus is formed in him the ideal model, which, obscure or dis |