14 THE PROBLEM IN TAINE 



This description remained true of Taine all his life: whatever un- 

 resolved contradictions and conflicts may have been in him were 

 there from the beginning. As a student, he was already a savant^ 

 with the air of a disillusioned post-Romantic; this function and 

 this mood were not changed, but rather reinforced, by his experi- 

 ences during the latter half of the century, including the remark- 

 able change of his interests which followed the Franco-Prussian 

 War. 3 When he wrote La Fontaine^ in 1852, he was frightened by 

 the future; when he wrote his posthumously published Last 

 Essays, early in the Jin-de-siecle decade, he was frightened by the 

 present. 4 



Thus, though we can only aflford them a rapid glance, it would 

 be wrong to underestimate the influence on Taine's personality 

 of his first two decades. He was born on 21 April, 1828, at 

 Vouziers, Ardennes, into a respectable professional family of the 

 provinces: his father, Jean Baptiste Antoine Taine, was a country 

 lawyer who found time to cultivate the sciences and literature, 

 having some reputation as a poet in that region; his mother, nee 

 Marie Virginie Bezanson, was a woman of culture, to whom he 

 remained closely attached all her life.^ His great-grandfather, 

 Pierre Taine, had been nicknamed 'the philosopher' by his neigh- 

 bours; his maternal grandfather, Nicolas Bezanson, was a gifted 

 student of philosophy, mathematics, and magnetism, ^ and 

 Hippolyte treasured his books and notes after he died in 1850.^ 

 One of the mother's brothers, Alexandre Bezanson, who had lived 

 in the United States for some years, taught his nephew the English 

 language at an early age.^ From his early years in Ardennes, 

 Taine seems to have retained a very strong feeling for nature, for 

 mountains and forests, which is exhibited especially in his travel 

 books. 9 



But Taine's childhood ended, painfully and abruptly, at the age 

 of twelve, when his father died after a lingering illness. The 

 impact of this event is evident in the first chapter of Etienne 

 Mayran, an incomplete novel, largely autobiographical, which 

 Taine started to write in 1861.10 Looking back, twenty years later, 

 Taine headed the first chapter 'The Shock', and claimed that the 

 hero of his story 'saw the least details of that day as if they were 

 present, each one, with the colours of the objects, with the facial 

 expressions of the people and their gestures'. 11 Writing to a 

 friend in 1852, Taine said: 'Will is not lacking; I guess that it will 

 never be lacking; but perhaps there is something shattered in 



