‘Large, Non-intellectual Men’: A Frenchman’s Views of Our Victorian Ancestors (Snippet: 2)

Portrait of Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, by Léon Bonnat, engraved by Synnberg Photo-Gravure Company, Chicago, published by Open Court Company, Chicago, 1898. Via WikimediaCommons. in the Public Domain. [[File:Portrait of Hippolyte Taine by Bonnat.jpg|Portrait_of_Hippolyte_Taine_by_Bonnat]]

In a series of visits to Britain between 1862 and 1870, outspoken Frenchman Hippolyte Taine wrote lengthily about his impressions, and his comments-at-a-distance give us a clear and fascinating view of our ancestors in a way that no other source quite achieves.  

Of Englishmen Taine wrote that they had ‘an air of solidity and resolution: a good machine, firmly set, well-built, well maintained, indefatigable and regular… A real pater familias … The face … Cold, still, correct, rather heavy and rather dull. He described one very prominent type of ‘robust man, stolidly built, a handsome colossus, sometimes as much as six feet tall and broad in proportion’ and asked incredulously ‘What yards of cloth must be needed to contain such figures?’

Whilst unimpressed by the intellectual prowess of the English, Taine was quite impressed by the Scots in this respect.  ‘The race is lively and more mentally active here than in England,’ he enthused, and noted that in the Highlands: ‘there are books to be seen even in the smallest cottages; the Bible first of all, a few travel books, medical dictionaries, manuals on fishing, treatises on agriculture, eight to twenty volumes as a rule. …the common people […] were obviously better educated than our own villagers in France.’  

Quotations are from: Notes on England by Hippolyte Taine, translated and with an introduction by Edward Hyams, London, Thames and Hudson, 1957 [Translated from the French Notes Sur L’Angleterre 1860-1870]