‘Bodily Misery and Spiritual Depression’: A Frenchman’s View of Victorian Britain (Snippet: 4)

John Constable, ‘Seascape Study with Rain Cloud (Rainstorm over the Sea)’, between 1824 and 1828

In a series of visits between 1862 and 1870, Frenchman Hippolyte Taine wrote lengthily about his impressions of all things British, 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.

Taine put most of the differences between Britain and France down to the difference in climate.  The ‘six or eight degrees of latitude’ that separated the temperature in the two countries was, in his opinion, the cause of much ‘bodily misery and spiritual depression,’ yet it also created an environment which fostered a serious temperament and hard work. In Scotland, the weather and the characteristics of the people were at even greater extremes. Rain and grey skies put paid to the joie-de-vivre that characterised the Mediterranean countries, ‘the melancholy and severity of nature in this country cuts out at the very roots any possibility of a voluptuous conception of life.’  

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]