FOREWORD 



SOME authors fade away altogether; some date; some age; 

 some remain indomitably alive. I could not tell to which 

 category Hippolyte Taine should be consigned. He was part 

 of my youth, that is to say of a world before two floods. Once his 

 awe-struck rebellious child, I was afraid his figure, still so vivid in 

 my mind, would turn to dust at the touch of younger hands. I read 

 Sholom J. Kahn's thorough and sensitive study, first with mis- 

 givings, then with eagerness, and at the end with gratitude. He 

 has not destroyed the Taine I revered, nor the Taine I combated. 

 Training the light of a new generation upon a personality at the 

 same time painfully definite and yet elusive, he has helped me 

 recover my own past. 



But this work is not intended for a wistful vanishing generation. 

 It has its dramatic interest, and its lessons, for young men of 

 today. The appeal of Taine is first of all historical: he is the 

 perfect intellectual representative of his period. Sainte-Beuve 

 was older, a repentant survivor of early romanticism; the blend of 

 scholarship, aestheticism, sentiment, and irony in Renan remained 

 unique. Taine is 'Second Empire' through and through; as much 

 as the Exposition of 1867, the grand avenues hacked out by 

 Haussmann, Garnier's Opera — and Hortense Schneider, for he 

 too contributed to La Vie Parisienne. 



History is not of the dead: history is 'the presence of the past'. 

 Taine is with us still: not wholly for our good. With austere 

 dignity, he expressed the materialistic philosophy which, today 

 more than ever, is guiding the two giants of the modern world, the 

 Soviet Union and the United States. Many of us still believe with 

 him that 'vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar'; 

 many are still asserting, in more confused terms, that culture is 

 conditioned, and perhaps even determined, by 'race, environ- 

 ment, and time'; many are still attempting to catch the spirit of 

 art in the coarse mesh of a 'realistic' doctrine. There is a Taine 

 lurking in the heart of every critic. 



VII 



