The period from 1864 to 1870 was perhaps the happiest of Taine's life. He derived pleasure from his employment at the Beaux Arts and Saint Cyr, which left ample leisure for travel and research. In 1865 appeared La Philosophie de l'Art, in 1867 L'Ideal dans l'Art, followed by essays on the philosophy of art in the Netherlands (1868), in Greece (1869), all of which short works were republished later (in 188o) as a work on the philoso phy of art. In 1865 he published his Nouveaux Essais de Critique et d'Histoire; from 1863 to 1865 appeared in La Vie Parisienne the notes he had taken for the past two years on Paris and on French society under the sub-title of "Vie et Opinions de Thomas Frederic Graindorge," published in a volume in 1867, the most personal of his books, and an epitome of his ideas. In 1867 ap peared a supplementary volume to his history of English litera ture, and in January 187o his Theorie de l'Intelligence. In 1868 he married Mademoiselle Denuelle, the daughter of a distin guished architect. He had made a long stay in England in 1858, and had brought back copious notes, which, after a second jour ney in 1871, he published in 1872 under the title of Notes sur l'Angleterre.
Taine, deeply shaken by the events of 187o, now felt that it was the duty of every Frenchman to work solely in the interests of France. On Oct. 9, 187o he published an article on "L'Opinion en Allemagne et les Conditions de la Paix," and in 1871 a pam phlet on Le Suffrage Universel; and his intention of writing on the French Revolution returned in a new and definite shape. He determined to trace in the Revolution of 1789 the reason of the political instability from which modern France was suffering. From the autumn of 1871 to the end of his life his great work, Les Origines de la France Contemporaine, occupied all his time, and in 1884 he gave up his professorship in order to devote him self wholly to his task; but he succumbed before it was finished, dying in Paris on March 9, 1893.
Les Origines de la France Contemporaine, Taine's monu mental achievement, stands apart from the rest of his work. The problem which Taine set himself was to inquire why the cen tralization of modern France is so great that all individual initia tive is practically non-existent, and why the central power, whether it be in the hands of a man or of an assembly, is the sole and only power ; also to expose the error underlying two prevalent ideas:—( I) That the Revolution destroyed absolutism and set up liberty; the Revolution, he points out, merely caused abso lutism to change hands. (2) That the Revolution destroyed liberty instead of establishing it ; that France was less cen tralized before 1789 than after 1800. This also he shows to be untrue. France was already a centralized country before 1789,
and grew rapidly more and more so from the time of Louis XIV. onwards. The Revolution merely gave it a new form. The Origines differ from the rest of Taine's work in that, although he applies to a period of history the method which he had already applied to literature and to the arts, he is unable to approach his subject in the same spirit; he loses his philosophic calm; he cannot help writing as a man and a Frenchman, and he lets his feelings have play; but what the work loses thus in impartiality it gains in life.
Taine was the philosopher of the epoch which succeeded the era of romanticism (1820-50) in France. The ideal of the newer generation was truth ; their watchword liberty; to get as near as possible to scientific truth became their object. Taine must ever be regarded as one of the most authoritative spokesmen of this period.
Taine served science unfalteringly, without looking forward to any possible fruits or result. In his work we find neither en thusiasm nor bitterness, neither hope nor yet despair ; merely a hopeless resignation. The study of mankind was Taine's inces sant preoccupation, and he followed the method already described. He made a searching investigation into humanity and his verdict was one of unqualified condemnation. In "Thomas Graindorge" we see him aghast at the spectacle of man's brutality and woman's folly. In man he sees the primeval savage, the gorilla, the car nivorous and lascivious animal, or else the maniac with diseased body and disordered mind, to whom health, either of mind or body, is but an accident. Taine is appalled by the bete liumaine; and in all his works we are conscious, as in the case of Voltaire, of the terror with which the possibilities of human folly inspire him. It may be doubted whether Taine's system, to which he attached so much importance, is really the most lasting part of his work. For Taine was an artist as well as a logician, an artist who saw and depicted what he saw in vital and glowing language. From the artist we get his essay on La Fontaine, his articles on Balzac and Racine, and the passages on Voltaire and Rousseau in the Ancien Regime. Moreover, not only was Taine an artist who had not escaped from the influence of the romantic tradition, but he was by his very method and style a romanticist. His emo tions were deep if not violent, his vision at times almost lurid. He sees everything in startling relief and sometimes in exaggerated outline, as did Balzac and Victor Hugo. Hence his predilection for exuberance, strength and splendour; his love of Shakespeare, Titian and Rubens ; his delight in bold, highly-coloured themes.