I04 ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 



'natural place', which provides us with the original meaning of 

 *le (mi) lieu' as 'the middle place'. ^ 



There were many permutations, during the Middle Ages and 

 later, of the notion of 'ambiance'. Newton's 'medium' was ren- 

 dered in French translation as 'milieu', and in Pascal the word 

 had very definite connotations of a 'golden mean' of place 

 between the infinitely great and the infinitely small. ^ The modern 

 use of the word came to Taine from eighteenth-century physicists 

 via the 'Introduction' (1840) to Balzac's Human Comedy, Balzac 

 took it directly from the biological writings of Geoflfroy Saint- 

 Hilaire.io 



In the nineteenth century, a basic split developed in thinking 

 on the subject, between the Aristotelian notion of a 'natural 

 place' or 'golden mean', rendered as 'le juste milieu', 11 and that 

 of a neutral environment, 'milieu d'existence'.^^ If the former 

 sense is preserved, it becomes illogical to speak of a 'milieu 

 ambiant', since what is in the 'true centre' cannot also be 

 'around'. 13 In Comte, the milieu is 'correspondant', i.e., bene- 

 ficent; but as it became involved increasingly with a philosophy 

 of fatalistic determinism, it became increasingly indifferent and 

 even antagonistic, as in the novels of Zola; to Nietzsche, the theory 

 of milieu was 'eine wahre Neurotiker-Theorie', for this reason, i^ 

 Finally, the determinism of the late nineteenth century is mel- 

 lowed, and the word crops up, in an essay by Paul Valery, in the 

 sense of 'field', as used by Maxwell for his electro-magnetic 

 theory: 'Thus, at the touch of a poet's hand, a cycle is completed: 

 from physics to biology, to sociology, to popular speech — and 

 thence to the new physics.' i^ 



Taine's use of the concept is far from monolithic, including 

 examples which might be variously classified as geographical, 

 political, social, economic, institutional, and psychological. The 

 geographical milieu, like the biological Race, sometimes seems to 

 be given a kind of logical priority, though the previous chapter 

 has shown that geography was never isolated from other factors. 

 This is evident not only in Taine's critical writings, but also in his 

 travel books, where he usually passes easily from the contempla- 

 tion of nature, through direct observation of modern inhabitants 

 or historical reminiscence or both, to an analysis of the kind of 

 society which this particular setting has produced, i^ 



Professor Guerard divides the non-geographic environment into 

 its political and social aspects 1 "7; a general distinction between the 



