8 THE PROBLEM IN TAINE 



Writing under the Third Repubhc and then witnessing the 

 anti-Naturahst reaction, Ferdinand Brunetiere was more sympa- 

 thetic in his judgment, though he too recognized the moral 

 conflict. Himself a convert to Roman Catholicism (1900) who had 

 been deeply influenced by Darwinian ideas, he claimed that Taine 

 had 'employed forty years of uninterrupted labour . . . to reinstate 

 in eclecticism the principle he had most bitterly derided . . . the 

 principle, that is, of the subordination of criticism and history to 

 morality'. 19 Brunetiere stressed the search for objective critical 

 judgments in Taine's writings and saw his career as one of develop- 

 ment rather than contradiction: '. . .he raised himself progres- 

 sively to a viewpoint which was more general, higher, and more 

 fruitful. '20 Having sought his solutions in 'the experience of 

 humanity' and steadily enlarged his horizon to include problems 

 of psychology, literature, art, and social morality, Taine never 

 quite returned to the God of his fathers 21 — as Brunetiere would 

 have had him do, and as so many were claiming they had, 

 around the turn of the century. 



Martha Wolfenstein narrows the socio-historic perspective even 

 further to the specific facts of Taine's changing relations to his 

 environment: 



'Taine's philosophy of art revolves around one central problem, 

 the problem of the relation of history to values. The question is 

 whether we can reconcile a universal standard of value with the 

 historical variations of art and taste. Taine began by asserting 

 that it was not possible. . . . Taine could not, however, eliminate 

 all considerations of value. Unacknowledged value-judgments 

 forced their way into his historical studies. Eventually Taine 

 recognized this fact, and confronted the task of formulating and 

 justifying his implicit criteria. But the standard of value which he 

 proceeded to elaborate remained uncoordinated with his earlier 

 historical approach. '22 



According to this view, the turning point came around 1865: 

 from 1852 to 1864, Taine was an historical relativist, presumably 

 because during those years he was at odds with society and an 

 outsider to academic circles; his recognition of the need for 

 'justifying his implicit criteria' began in 1865, after the success 

 of his History of English Literature and his appointment to the 

 ficole des Beaux-Arts. Though there may be some validity in this 

 analysis, it exaggerates both the presumed contradiction and the 



