Page:English Historical Review Volume 37.djvu/629

 1922 SHORT NOTICES 621 notice in general terms what seems to us a serious defect in this volume, namely, the absence of any generous recognition of the efforts made by English or Anglo-Irish rulers to establish orderly government in Ireland and to introduce better conditions of life, efforts which in the thirteenth century occasioned marked progress and comparative prosperity, and which in the last century were certainly whole-hearted and sincere. G. H. 0. M. Georges Goyau has wisely regarded his Histoire Religieuse de la Nation Franqaise (vol. vi of M. Hanotaux's Histoire de la Nation Fran$aise. Paris : Plon, s. a.) as supplementary to the narrative volumes of the series. He has therefore chosen to write a commentary on the political, social, and literary histories of France, and has rightly given detailed treatment to persons rather than events. Unfortunately, while he was writing his book and more particularly while he was writing the last 100 pages M. Goyau became too much preoccupied with the magnificent part played by French catholics in the history of the Christian church. It would be absurd to accuse the author of L'Allemagne Religieuse of chauvinistic scholarship ; and in face of the curious repudiation even in street names and public monuments by official France of its catholic and monarchical past it must be difficult for a learned French catholic not to magnify the long story of the Gesta Dei per Francos. But M. Goyau, especially in what his countrymen would call a work of ' vulgarisation ', would have been wiser to have insisted less upon the ' union sacree ' of French missionaries and French colonial expansion ; nor would St. Louis have agreed that the circumstances attending the grant of the Capitulations ' honoured the diplomacy ' of the most Christian king. When this has been said no critic would refuse high praise to M. Goyau. Throughout the two thousand years covered by his book M. Goyau has been at pains to consult the most recent scholarship. Occasionally he is behind the times (for example, in his view of the coronation of Charlemagne or the diplomacy of St. Gregory VII), and occasionally he does not do full justice to the wronged party: thus he does not mention the peculiar malevolence of the double process against the Templars. But in general he chooses the more illuminating and lesser known facts : he remembers that Charles Martel was considered by certain of his contemporaries to be in hell with Mahomet ; that, as early as 1700, French Jesuit and Dominican mission- aries disputed whether their Chinese converts could continue the ceremonies of ancestor- worship as a ' culte civil et politique '. M. Goyau's judgement is good. He points out quoting a contemporary Jesuit that one of the worst effects of the religious ' ukases ' of Louis XIV was the intrusion into the Church of large numbers of Huguenots ' qui se sont donnes de bouche et non de coeur ' ; he sums up the deism of Voltaire as the ' philo- sophic pratique d'un favorise du sort qui tient a une cite bien policee, et qui facilement a peur ' ; he shows from a letter of Sainte-Beuve that the alienation of the Romantics from the church was one of the consequences of the defection of Lamennais. Finally, M. Goyau's style though sometimes bordering upon the baroque is lightened by a certain neatness, as when he calls St. Columbanus ' un technicien du renoncement ', or ends his