6 THE PROBLEM IN TAINE 



from the publication by Irving Babbitt in 191 2 of his highly con- 

 troversial work on The Masters of Modern French Criticism; World 

 War I gave impetus to anti-Naturalism, spear-headed by T. S. 

 Eliot's poetry {The Waste Land, 1922) and by his criticism. '^ 

 Norman Foerster summarized the aims of this movement as fol- 

 lows in 1930: 'The need of standards in life, in art, in criticism is 

 more and more apparent, and naturalism has failed to provide 

 standards. . . . Science gives us natural knowledge, not human 

 objectives. 's A second World War, together with its destructive 

 prologue and aftermath, has further sharpened the critical con- 

 troversy between the relativists and those who stress the need for 

 standards. It is against this background that we must analyze and 

 evaluate the works of Taine, 'easily the most eminent of those who 

 have attempted to make criticism scientific. '^ 



Biographical and Historical Explanations 



Though our concern is primarily with the philosophical issue, 

 it may further broaden our perspective if we mention briefly some 

 of the biographical explanations which have been given of the 

 supposed dualism in Taine. Applying Taine's own classification, 

 we find that such analyses tend to stress the conflicts either in their 

 subject's personality ('race') or in his socio-historical environment 

 ('milieu' and 'moment'). 



Typical of the psychological analyses is a penetrating essay by 

 fimile Zola, Taine's contemporary and literary disciple.i^ Describ- 

 ing him as one might a character in a novel, Zola noted that 

 physically Taine was far from being big and forceful, unlike the 

 writers and artists most admired in his criticism. On this basis, and 

 on the internal evidence of Taine's style ('a strange fruit, with a 

 peculiar flavour'), 11 Zola sensed a contradiction in Taine, between 

 a would-be poet or artist and 'a dry and matter-of-fact man, a 

 mathematician of thought, who creates a most singular eflfect 



when placed beside the lavish poet of whom I have just 

 spoken.' 12 



Such an analysis would seem to be especially pertinent, in view 

 of the fact that Taine thought of his own writings as so much 

 'applied psychology', but it is relevant here only in so far as it 

 affected his practice as a critic. Obviously the critic's personality 

 is involved in his judgments concerning the personalities of others, 

 and, if the psychological method in criticism is valid at all, no 

 critic can expect to escape its application to himself ^^ More 



