BOOKS
overthrow the dominant Newtonian system. We see at this point
how Wilson's preconception of the mechanics of personality in all
creative work encourages a purely analogical fancy and leads him
to distort the history of physics; for he disregards the fact that
already long before Einstein the classical mechanics and the New–
tonian system were in a precarious state, and that Einstein was
dealing with problems which occupied the generation of physicists
before him.
Wilson's taste for characterization of personalities has its
weak side in this tendency to improvise psychological explanations
of ideas and styles without taking into account their complicated
history and the objective conditions of intellectual work. In his
conviction that ideas are the man, he is too quick to find resem–
blances between theory and character, as if the personality was a
die of fixed pattern stamping uniformly every human product, or
as if all human actions were best understood internally as ex–
pressive and style-bound. And for a critic who misses no chance to
condemn abstractions, metaphysics and willful intuitiveness, he is
surprisingly hospitable to dubious theories of race, of the influence
of the environment and of cultural action at a distance, so dear to
German historians and critics.
If
Engels writes a clear prose, has
sensibility and humor, it is because there is French Protestant
blood in his family (forgetting Heine).
If
Lenin is solid, efficient
and diligent, it is because of the German blood of his mother.
If
Marx is severe, it is an Old Testament sternness; if he is illogical
or brooding, it is because he has absorbed from the environment of
Trier "the mists and septentrional lights of German metaphysics
and mysticism"; if he emphasizes activity, it is the "primitive
German Will," from the same stream as German Imperialism and
now the Nazi movement. And if Michelet goes to the historical
sources, it is because he comes from a family of printers, like the
Aiduses of Venice who had a taste for editing old manuscripts.
But far from being like a Renaissance historian in this respect,
Michelet belongs very much to his age; the period of Michelet's
youth was precisely the time of the fresh exploration of historical
manuscripts and the huge editions of texts and monuments for the
study of French history, like Petitot and Monmerque's (1819-
1829) in a hundred and thirty-one volumes, Guizot's (1824-1835)
in thirty-one volumes and Buchon's (1824-1829)
in
forty-seven.
