men. He sees the passions of an epoch as clearly as the passions of a man, and paints the Middle Age or the Renaissance with as much vivacity as Philippe le Bel or François I. . . . Every picture or print he sees, every document he reads, touches and impresses his imagination; vividly moved and eloquent himself, he cannot fail to move others. His book, the History,' seizes the mind fast at the first page; in vain you try to resist it, you read to the end. You think of the dialogue where Plato describes the god drawing to himself the soul of the poet, and the soul of the poet drawing to himself the souls of his auditors. Is it possible, where facts and men impress themselves so vividly upon an inflamed imagination, to keep the tone of narration? No, the author ends by believing them real;- he sees them alive, he speaks to them. Michelet's emotions thus become his convictions; history unrolls before him like a vision, and his language rises to Apocalyptic.» In his first design or vision of the 'History of France,' Michelet saw men and facts not chained to one another, and to past and future, by chains of logical sequence, he saw them as episodes rising in each period to a culminating and dramatic point of interest; and however interrupted his work was, he pursued his original design. Hence his volumes bear the titles of episodes: 'The Renaissance,' 'The Reformation,' 'Religious Wars,' 'The League and Henry IV.,' 'Henry IV. and Richelieu,' 'Richelieu and the Fronde,' 'Louis XIV.,' 'The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,' 'Louis XV.,' 'Louis XV. and Louis XVI.,' 'The French Revolution.' The Renaissance he incarnated in Michel Angelo, the Revolution in Danton. He in fact breathed a human soul into every epoch, period, and event that came under his pen: and "a soul," he says, "weighs infinitely more than a kingdom or an empire; at times, more than the human race." "He wrote as Delacroix painted," Taine says: "risking the crudest coloring; seeking means of expression in the gutter mud itself; borrowing from the language of medicine, and the slang of the vulgar, details and terms which shock and frighten one." His prolific suggestions swarm and multiply over the diseased tissue of a character, in the tainted spot of a heart, until, as in the description of the moral decadence of Louis XV., the imaginative reader shudders and stops reading; for suggestion has suggested what it is unbearable to think. It is to the perfect happiness of his marriage to a second wife— an incomparable companion-that we owe that series of books whose dithyrambic strains were poured out under the silvery light of a continuous honey-moon, as a biographer expresses it: 'L'Oiseau,' 'L'Insecte,' 'L'Amour,' 'La Mer,' to which later a fifth, 'La Montagne,' was added; and which Taine says adds him to the three great poets of France during the century,- De Musset, Lamartine, and Hugo: "for art and genius, his prose is worth their poetry." The 'Bible of Humanity' and some volumes of collected essays complete the series of his published writings. |