94 ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 



and the precision of experience. There is not yet a science of the 

 races, and we take many risks when we try to imagine how the 

 soil and cHmate can form them.' 45 



A footnote indicates that 'An anthropological society has just been 

 established in Paris, through the efforts of several eminent anato- 

 mists and physiologists, Messrs. Brown-Sequard, Beclard, Broca, 

 Follin, Verneuil.''*^ Despite the tragic uses to which they may 

 have been put, Taine's speculations on Race were no more or 

 less wrong than many of the other generalizations of nineteenth- 

 century science. After all, to assert the relationship of men to 

 their land reduces to a kind of truism: 'One should not indulge in 

 too much guess-work, but after all it is because there is a 

 France, it seems to me, that we have had a La Fontaine and 

 Frenchmen. '4 7 



Thus, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren give Taine's work due 

 recognition in their chapters on 'Literature and Society' and 

 'Literary History', but repeat the familiar over-simplification 

 that Taine 'reduces all creativity to a mysterious biological factor, 

 'race' . . .'."^^ However, if we look at Taine's work from a per- 

 spective which includes the entire history of the social sciences 

 during the last century, he appears less as a mystical or vicious 

 'racist' and more as a pioneer of the comparative method who 

 (like most social scientists!) never fully achieved the scrupulous 

 objectivity at which he was aiming. 



Two criteria may perhaps be used to distinguish Nazi doctrines 

 from more scientific approaches to the problem of Race, namely, 

 the doctrine of the innate superiority of one race over another and 

 the concern for preserving the purity of races. ^^^ On the first point, 

 it seems clear that Taine's interest was primarily an attempt to 

 understand differences and not to establish the superiority of a 

 'master race'. When implications of superiority and inferiority are 

 introduced, it is usually in an attempt to understand why certain 

 schools of literature or art (such as the sculpture of Greece and the 

 painting of Italy) are great. Every 'species' of man Taine studies 

 is examined for both its strengths and its weaknesses: thus, though 

 at one point he is tempted to regard 'the human animal' of the 

 Germanic race 'as inferior on comparing him with the Italian or 

 southern Frenchman', ^o such judgments are few, and he imme- 

 diately goes on to point out 'bad results' in 'the Latin families'. 

 He affords the greatest praise possible to the Northern nations by 



