'Bärensprung.' It is still possible that dissimilation from the ensuing & may have caused 'Аρктakiŋ to change into 'ApTakin; and it is a fact that the island of Cyzicus, in which the spring was, bore the name "Арêтwv Nñσos, ‘Isle of Bears.' This is something, but not much. Considering the immense frequency of names beginning with 'Arto' all along the Asiatic coasts, the probability is that 'Arkton Nesos' is a mere rough Grecising of some native and unintelligible name, a name which remained untranslated in Artake and Artakie, Artakoi and Artakioi. If M. Bérard had only argued this question openly he would have had readers ready-nay, quite unduly anxious—to agree with him. It will be a real sorrow to lose faith in the Bear.

It is almost the same with the Doves' Rock, Λαιστρυγονίη. We are told to derive it from λάας, λεύς or Xaîs, a stone,' and the adjective Tρuyovín, which is used by Oppian. Now there is a word Xaas, and there is a word Acús, which are not what we want. What we want is the third form, λaîs. There is no such word. We tacitly assume it, and pass on.

In points of strict scholarship also the book is not impeccable. The piece of translation quoted above has a certain dashing looseness running through it In vol. ii we have noted, on p. 235, the hypothetical adjective τηλòs treated as if it were as real as μακρός. On p. 452 σύβοτος is proposed as an emendation for Boúßoros, without any mention of the prima facie difference of quantity. On p. 556 KλELOTòv is suggested as a possible variant for KAUTÒν, in utter defiance of metre. It is much rarer to find a lapse from common-sense in argument. M. Bérard has a strong head, and is seldom intoxicated by his own speculations. Yet such lapses do occur.

It would be mere blindness of admiration to deny the existence of blemishes such as these. The whole work, as is natural considering its vast range and its wealth of suggestion, has many faults as well as many merits. But the faults are such as one finds in many books; the merits are quite individual, and indeed extraordinary.

GILBERT MURRAY.

Art. III. HIPPOLYTE TAINE, PHILOSOPHER AND CRITIC.

1. Hippolyte Taine; sa Vie et sa Correspondance. Vols. I and II. Paris: Hachette, 1902–4.

2. Life and Letters of H. Taine, 1828-1870. Translated by Mrs R. L. Devonshire. Two vols. Westminster: Constable, 1902-4.

THE publication of Taine's letters is an event of special interest to Englishmen. The historian of English literature, the author of the Notes sur l'Angleterre,' the admirer of English society, the friendly critic of English institutions and manners, deserves neglect at our hands least of all; and we, as well as the nation of his birth, have cause for much gratitude to Madame Taine, in thus supplying his admirers, the whole body of those liberally interested in literature, art, and psychology, with this self-drawn portrait of a great mind.* Few men have possessed an intellect so logical and acute, an imagination so vivid and consecutive, a sensibility so tender and refined; and, although he cannot be held to have laid to rest the questions with which he dealt, yet his influence has been profound. Perhaps more completely than any other man, he typified in his own person the varied mental life of the half-century which has just closed.

But Taine's life has another and intrinsic value. It has a unity which we often find in the lives of philosophers and scientists; but it has also a completeness which is almost unique. The early part of his life was spent in the search for abstract truth; he gave as little of himself as he could to the sordid affairs of practical life; his teaching, with the exception of his lectures on art, was the analogue of Spinoza's lenses. Like Spinoza, he never thought, never cared to think, how his theories might affect existing things. He did not know whether he was a conservative or a revolutionist. The chief aim of his work was to resume all the sciences into a single science, a single formula. This involved a certain superficiality, but it gave him a lofty outlook over life. When

The translation by Mrs Devonshire is, in general, both accurate and well written. That it has the charm of the original cannot be said, and will hardly be expected.

he had found his formula, when he had tested it in many ways, when he had at last convinced himself that he had definitely grasped the essential nature of man and his intelligence, he turned, as no other abstract thinker had ever quite done, to actual life. He devoted the fruit of half a life-time's thought to his country; he spent the rest of his life in the endeavour to determine what was the wisest course of action for the men who surrounded him; and he died with this last task incomplete. As he himself had said with happy premonition when, scarcely more than a boy, he was planning out his life:

'Action will have its place, but at the proper time, and when I know how to act; social philosophy will be for me the commentary and corollary of the philosophy of history and of metaphysics.' ('Vie,' i, 82.)

Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine was born at Vouziers, in the Ardennes, in 1828. His family belonged to the solid middle class, which, in this case, at least, does not seem to have been at all lacking in general culture. It is, perhaps, somewhat chimerical to attempt to deduce the general basis of his mind from the mixture of races that inhabit the district in which his family had long been settled; but we may trace a general resemblance between Taine and the people among whom his ancestors had lived. Michelet has a passage of great interest in this connexion. In his description of the Ardennes, he says:

The race is strongly marked; it has something more than usual of intelligence, sobriety, and thrift. These people's faces are dry, as it were, and rough-hewn. This characteristic of dryness and severity is by no means peculiar to the little Geneva of Sedan. It is the same almost everywhere. The country is not rich, and the enemy is near at hand. That makes people think.'

Taine's early childhood was placid and happy. Looking back, he must have remembered an almost ideal home, with its calm, regular and modest life, as M. Giraud has so truly said, uniting labour and tenderness, and inspiring the sweet familiarity of domestic life with intellectual joys and interests.

'What famous river,' he wrote many years after, 'equals the little stream where for the first time you saw the ripples

interweaving their arabesques, fringed with silver at the touch of a drooping willow branch? What noble park surpasses the charm of the poor meadow where you have paused in childhood to pick the convolvulus or buttercup?' ('Derniers Essais,' p. 43, et sqq.)

His father died in 1840; and, although the boy was too young to feel very profoundly, the grief of others seems to have made a deep impression upon him. He had no brothers; but his sisters, and above all his mother, were supremely dear companions. They remained so throughout. In after-life, when he was living in a provincial town, with no congenial friend near, he wrote to his mother: 'I am tired, but can find nothing so refreshing as your memory.' Before his father's death he had been sent to a boarding-school at Rethel, kept by an old priest and his sister. But it was soon decided to seek some more regular instruction for the boy; and he was entered at a school in Paris, where his mother soon came to live, at her father's house in Les Batignolles. From this time onward, until his entrance to the École Normale, Taine lived with her and his sisters, working as few English boys work, with an excursion to the Forest of SaintGermain, a visit to the Louvre, or a swimming lesson from his uncles, as his chief amusements.

When he was just twenty, a few months before he entered the great training school, he wrote an account of his intellectual life during the previous five years, which is remarkable for the self-knowledge and meditative spirit which it displays.

'There are certain minds,' he writes, which live shut up in themselves, whose passion, sorrow, joy, and action are all internal. I am of their number; and, if I should desire to review my life, I could only recall the changes, the uncertainties, and the progress of my thought. If I write this now, it is in order that I may find it later, and know then what I was at this time.'

Here, already, is that preoccupation with the phenomena of the mind which was to show itself so strongly afterwards. He goes on to describe an early religious crisis ; and it is pathetic to find this scarcely-trained, precocious intellect confusing itself with questions which maturity

cannot solve. He entered early on the long labour of thought.

'What fell first was my religious faith. One doubt provoked another; each belief dragged another down in its fall. . . . I valued my reason too highly to believe in any other authority. ... I grew angry with the virtue which springs from fear and the belief which arises from obedience. Pride and

love of liberty set me free.'

The next three years, he tells us, were spent in the search for general truths, in efforts to grasp the totality of things, to know what men and society really are.

'I went to the extreme limit of doubt. I was sad then. I had denied the authority of that reason which I prized so highly.... Then, wearied out with contradictions, I devoted myself to the service of the newest and most poetical hypothesis; I defended pantheism with all my might. . . . That was my salvation. Thenceforward metaphysics appeared intelligible, and science serious. I arrived, by dint of seeking, at a height from which I could embrace the whole philosophical horizon. . . . I set to work with eagerness; the clouds broke; I understood the origin of my errors; I saw the unity and the totality of the universe. . . . ( Vie,' i, 20 et sqq.)

...

In November 1848 he was admitted, first of his year, to the École Normale. The Revolution of '48 seems to have made little impression upon him, certainly none at all comparable with that made by the coup d'état of 1851, or by the insurrection of the Commune; and he entered the School with a mind devoted to high philosophical speculations. His first experience of collegiate life seems to have been unfavourable. It was the first time that he had been really separated from his family. I have no friend at the School,' he writes; 'a great sadness and great hopes overwhelm me.' There was no one to whom he could speak in this 'moral solitude' of the thoughts which lay nearest to his heart.

This first experience of men coincided with the beginning of a certain pessimism, so common in early manhood, which never quite deserted him.

'Amid the immeasurable disgust and discouragement which assailed me,' he wrote to his early friend, Prévost-Paradol, 'I should have given way except for beliefs supported by a few