X PREFACE 



Typical among recent statements of the problem is Cleanth 

 Brooks' essay on 'Criticism, History, and Critical Relativism', 

 in 77?^ Well Wrought Urn. Without denying the relevance of histori- 

 cal study, Mr. Brooks complains that 'we have gone to school to 

 the anthropologists and the cultural historians assiduously, and 

 we have learned their lesson almost too well' (p. 197). He reviews 

 the opinions of F. A. Pottle, Yvor Winters, John Crowe Ransom, 

 and others on the issue; and defends his own critical practice, in 

 which 'the specific view taken in the particular poem, and . . . 

 how the attitude of the poem was made to inform the poem' 

 (p. 205) is the centre of interest, and in which 'the judg- 

 ments are very frankly treated as if they were universal 

 judgments' (p. 199). It is precisely because the issue of scien- 

 tific analysis versus aesthetic and moral judgment is still so 

 very much alive that we turn with such interest to the works 

 of Taine. 



Our present essay has a two-fold purpose: first, an exposition 

 and discussion of Taine's theories, and some of his practice, as a 

 critic of literature and art; and second, a more general considera- 

 tion of the chief issues raised by his central problem and enter- 

 prise, namely, the attempt to approach the analysis and judg- 

 ment of works of art historically, and thus to provide an objective 

 basis for criticism. 



Though this is not an attempt at a personal biography of Taine, 

 the essential facts are included: Part One, by a detailed examina- 

 tion of his early ideas, as revealed especially in his student note- 

 books, attempts to demonstrate the unity of his intellectual 

 development; and biographical notes to a 'Selected Bibliography' 

 carry the story forward through 1871. 



Since attention is restricted chiefly to Taine's writings on 

 literature and art, the discussion ends, rather abruptly, with the 

 Franco-Prussian war, about the time when he published his JVotes 

 on England in 1871, at the age of 43. Two more decades of impor- 

 tant writings were to follow, but the monumental historical 

 opus, entitled The Origins of Co7itemporary France, which absorbed 

 his energies almost entirely during those years, raises a host of 

 non-aesthetic issues with which we have not been concerned. 

 However, as Ferdinand Brunetiere and others have pointed out, 

 this last period really witnessed the application of the same tools 

 of analysis, formerly appHed to works of art, to a new subject- 

 matter: from a methodological point of view, very little, if any- 



