so far as it can be thus decided. From 1848 till our own day it has
been predominantly naturalistic and non-religious. After Guizot and
the Thierrys, the nearest approach to Christianity by an influential
French historian is perhaps in the case of the very heterodox Edgar
Quinet. Michelet was a mere heretic in the eyes of the faithful,
Saisset describing his book Du Prêtre, de la Femme, et de la Famille
(1845), as a "renaissance of Voltaireanism." [1834] His whole brilliant
History, indeed, is from beginning to end rationalistic, challenging
as it does all the decorous traditions, exposing the failure of the
faith to civilize, pronouncing that "the monastic Middle Age is an
age of idiots" and the scholastic world which followed it an age of
artificially formed fools, [1835] flouting dogma and discrediting
creed over each of their miscarriages. [1836] And he was popular,
withal, not only because of his vividness and unfailing freshness,
but because his convictions were those of the best intelligence
around him. In poetry and fiction the predominance of one or other
shade of freethinking is signal. Balzac, who grew up in the age of
reaction, makes essentially for rationalism by his intense analysis;
and after him the difficulty is to find a great French novelist who is
not frankly rationalistic. George Sand will probably not be claimed
by orthodoxy; and Beyle, Constant, Flaubert, Mérimée, Zola, Daudet,
Maupassant, and the De Goncourts make a list against which can be
set only the names of M. Bourget, an artist of the second order,
and of the distinguished décadent Huysmans, who became a Trappist
after a life marked by a philosophy and practice of an extremely
different complexion.