PROBLEMS OF ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 129 



Of course, the very fact of rebellion against a trend is indicative 

 of its influence, and Taine was not unaware of some of the dia- 

 lectical processes involved. The fact that milieu can be either 

 friendly or antagonistic to struggling artists, thus determining 

 whether the work which survives will be cheerful or melancholy, 

 has already been noted i^. b^t the more subtle possibility, that 

 an artist may achieve greatness precisely because he is different 

 or a-typical, is not often recognized by Taine. One abuse of the 

 notion of typicality would be to equate the 'type' with the 

 'average', in which case an argument might be made for Edgar 

 Guest as the great American poet. Taine avoids this pitfall, 

 since 'typical' for him means, not average, but 'ideal'; but 

 he does tend to overlook the writer who is out of the main 

 stream, and the operation of such psychological mechanisms 

 as compensation, which have come to be better understood since 

 his day. 20 



One exception to this general tendency, however, is the essay 

 on Saint-Simon, author of the Memoirs, in which, using the 

 formula of 'The Age', 'The Man', and 'The Writer', Taine 

 accounts for the greatness of that 'secret historian' in terms of his 

 maladjustment to the eighteenth-century court with which he 

 was associated: 'instead of fighting openly with his hands, he 

 fought secretly with the pen. He might have been discontented 

 and a conspirator; he was discontented and a scandal-monger.' 21 

 Nevertheless, Taine's usual assumption is that the artist is repre- 

 sentative, that there is a correspondence between the work and the age. 

 This monistic attitude towards the problem of causation is one 

 expression of his preference for the metaphysics of Spinoza, as 

 against Hegel's dialectics. 22 Undoubtedly, it seems somewhat 

 crude and simple-minded to a generation which has been exposed 

 to the neo-Hegelianism of the Marxists, Freud's analyses of sub- 

 conscious processes, and ambivalences, polarities, ironies, para- 

 doxes, and ambiguities without number. 23 



The third alternative, of a pluralism of causes, is one of which 

 Taine was well aware. On the one hand, in his essay on Macaulay 

 it is a basis for praise24; on the other, it is an aspect of Mill's posi- 

 tion with which he strongly disagrees. 25 Thus, Taine's monism 

 includes a recognition of many factors : he does not, for example, 

 make Race alone, or Environment alone, the prime mover. But 

 he does insist that certain factors are more essential than others, 

 primal elements and generative causes. In this respect he provides 



S.A.J.— 9 



