CHAPTER X 



PROBLEMS OF ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 



The ^New Criticism'' 



THUS far, our study of Taine's critical method has sketched 

 its more general features and especially the various cate- 

 gories of analysis which he employed: abstraction, history 

 and psychology, causes and conditions, biology and culture, and 

 master faculty — these were the chief avenues through which he 

 sought to understand literature and art. Concerned primarily with 

 a philosophy of method, the preceding chapters have probably 

 given an inadequate impression of what has been described as 

 'the social density, the soaked-up material of history that distin- 

 guishes Taine at his best'^ and of the brilliant series of critical essays 

 and books in which these categories were applied; to correct that 

 lack, however, there can be no substitute for first-hand acquaintance 

 with Taine's works themselves. Finally, despite some corrective 

 criticisms, made in the light of later scientific developments, our 

 chief goal has been sympathetic exposition, and the result has 

 been, on the whole, to defend the basic soundness of his approach. 

 Nevertheless, neither criticism nor science have stood still in 

 the century since 1850. Besides correcting many of the details of 

 Taine's system within the framework of his own scientific method, 

 recent decades have also witnessed an anti-Naturalist movement^ 

 which has attacked some of his more basic assumptions. These 

 attacks, some of which will be considered briefly in the present 

 chapter, have come chiefly from two quarters: first, from critics 

 and aestheticians of literature and art; and second, from scientists 

 and philosophers who, gathering information and opening vistas 

 unfamiliar to the nineteenth century, have had a powerful impact 

 on recent world-views and thus, indirectly, on the theory and 

 practice of criticism. 



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