CRITIQ.UE OF ABSTRACTION 55 



appeared before publication of the essay on Mill. When Taine 

 published his volume of collected Critical and Historical Essays in 

 January, 1858, he wrote a preface to answer some of the points 

 which had been raised during a year in which the philosophy of 

 method expounded in The Classic Philosophers had been subject to 

 much criticism. A footnote concerning this criticism made special 

 mention of 'M. Sainte-Beuve, M. Guillaume Guizot, M. Gustave 

 Planche, M. Prevost-Paradol, M. Weiss'; chief among these, of 

 course, was Sainte-Beuve, whose two Causeries de Lundi^^ had been 

 largely sympathetic but had taken Taine to task for the very 

 tendency towards 'abstraction' with which we are now concerned. 



After a brief restatement of his critical method (in which the 

 ideas of organic unity, master faculty, and causation were stressed), 

 Taine's Preface attempted a summary statement of the chief 

 objection to his method, namely, that it failed to do justice to the 

 complexities and nuances of personality, experience, and works 

 of art, and that Taine's Tormulas' tended to reduce and hence 

 mutilate the objects to which they were applied. In Sainte- 

 Beuve's articles this had taken the form of a contrast between 

 Montaigne's discursive manner 'of going straight on before him 

 at random and trusting to the chances of accidental encounters' 

 and Taine's logical manner and persistent search for general 

 laws 37; animadversions concerning his 'reductions' of La Fon- 

 taine ^8 and Livy, which, however, accepted the 'formulas' as 

 literary apergus rather than scientific statements ^9; and scattered 

 objections to the effect that Taine had failed to do justice to the 

 individual, that 'the how of creation or of formation, the mystery 

 escapes', that one cannot pronounce 'the last word concerning a 

 spirit, concerning a living nature !''*o 



In answering these objections, Taine did two things. First, he 

 paid a tribute to the critical genius of Sainte-Beuve, whom he 

 considered his 'master'. He had already addressed him as such in 

 a letter sent to the older man together with a copy of The Classic 

 Philosophers',^'^ now his 1858 Preface included an acute and 

 eloquent summary of Sainte-Beuve's method, but ended by dis- 

 avowing any vain attempt to imitate him. "^2 



Second, Taine made a sharp distinction between 'descriptive' 

 and 'philosophic' criticism, corresponding roughly to Greene's 

 *re-creative' criticism, on the one hand, and his 'historical' and 

 'judicial' types, on the other (Taine obviously was trying to achieve 

 a fusion of the latter two) : 'That is a conclusive argument against 



