SCIENCE VERSUS CRITICISM? 5 



Theodore M. Greene, may prove helpful in this regard. He defines 

 the three major aspects of criticism as the historical, the re- 

 creative, and the judicial, each of which has been stressed by an 

 important European school, the modern, romantic, and neo- 

 classic in turn.^ What is so often forgotten in the heat of con- 

 troversy is that every critic really worth his salt has combined aware- 

 ness of traditions and careful reading with judgments of aesthetic 

 worth. In truly great criticism (almost as rare as great poetry) 

 these three functions are usually inextricably interwoven. 



Nevertheless, even a cursory review of the history of criticism 

 will reveal that the issue with which we are here concerned has 

 been perennial. The historical or scientific approach, where it has 

 been imaginatively used, may be seen as a more fully developed 

 form of the romantic attempt at re-creation of experience by means of 

 the work of art; thus, the science versus judgment problem has its 

 ancestry in the Romantic versus Classic controversy of the early 

 nineteenth century, in which the neo-classic, judicial type of 

 criticism was under attack. And the history of that controversy, 

 in turn, goes as far back as the ancient Greeks, via the intricate 

 complexities of the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions. 



In the nineteenth century, the conflict took the dual form of 

 the individual versus society and of the natural versus the super- 

 natural. We begin to find in the Romantic movement an emphasis 

 on the individual's private experience and ego-drives which leads 

 naturally to an interest in psychology and a relativism in values; 

 at the same time, appearing as the obverse of the same medal, the 

 individual is confronted with the problem of finding his proper 

 relation to the social environment and turns to history for his 

 answers. Man-and-his-World thus became the prime subjects of 

 scientific studv, and it was in this sense that the Naturalism which 

 Taine represents was the spiritual child of Romanticism. ^ 



Opposition to Naturalism, in the name of moral values, meta- 

 physics, and religion, has never disappeared, but instead has been 

 gaining momentum and influence in the last half-century. The 

 process began early in France, in part as a result of the disillusion 

 which followed her defeat by Prussian arms in 1870; it came to a 

 head in the well-known 'Manifesto of the Five', written by former 

 disciples of Zola who criticized his La Terre as 'a corner of nature 

 seen through a morbid sensorium' (1887); and anti-Naturalism 

 was the dominant mood of France during the last decade of the 

 century. Its inception in America can be dated best, perhaps. 



