PROBLEiMS OF ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 133 



cient justification for Taine's setting the Master Faculty at the 

 head of his hierarchy of causes. The biological and cultural 

 matrixes are necessary conditions, but the conscious experience"^ 1 

 is what counts most, since it involves the relations, external as well 

 as internal, which are central both to 'The Act of Expression' and 

 to our 'Having an Experience' of the work of art. "^^ 



Such a psychological emphasis would provide a criterion for 

 determining which elements are intrinsic, and which extrinsic, 

 to the problem of criticism. The full meaning of such lines as 'Of 

 man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree . . .' 

 cannot be experienced without a prior acquaintance with Genesis; 

 hence the doctrines oi Genesis are as intrinsic to an analysis of those 

 lines as considerations of metre. Whether or not a statue is hollow 

 may not aflPect my experience of it as a statue; z^ it does not, then 

 that consideration is extrinsic to its criticism as a work of art, 

 though not to its production as an artifact. Whether Milton's 

 eyes were blue or brown probably had no effect on his poetry, 

 but the fact of his blindness affected it profoundly; the former 

 relations are therefore external, the latter internal, to the 

 production and criticism of his art. Thus, from the point of 

 view here suggested, to consider the effect of Milton's blindness 

 would not be to take an 'extrinsic' approach to the study of his 

 poetry. 



A further distinction must be made: to which experience are our 

 relations internal or external? On the one hand, there was the 

 experience of the author, before and during the act of expression or 

 creation; on the other, there is the present experience of the critic, 

 as he reads and thinks about what he is reading. Taine, by writing 

 explicitly 'On the Production of the Work of Art' ( The Philosophy 

 of Art, Part II), indicates clearly that he is concerned primarily 

 with an attempt at a reconstruction of the experience of the 

 author; hence, for him, the relations summed up by the terms 

 Race, Environment, Time, and Master Faculty are indeed 

 internal and intrinsic to his subject-matter. 



But he is assuming, unconsciously and perhaps unjustifiably, a 

 correspondence between his reconstruction as a critic and 

 historian, and what actually happened. In other words, he is 

 implicitly adding to his explicit recognition of the imitative and 

 expressive roles of art^^ an element of communication, thus com- 

 pleting the trilogy of major categories which have recently been 

 labelled the 'Form', the 'Source', and the 'End' of art.'*'* Taine 



