134 ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 



took for granted what our generation, with its highly developed 

 sense of semantic difficulties, has analyzed so thoroughly that it 

 sometimes seems in danger of analyzing it out of existence: 

 namely, the intelligibility of art, and its ability, when successful, 

 to communicate experience/^ 



However, difficulties of communication — symptomatic though 

 they may be of an age characterized by a breakdown of values 

 and widespread obscurantism, in life as in art — need not invalidate 

 Taine's placing psychology at the head of his hierarchy. Whether 

 or not the artist is communicating his own personal and social 

 experiences — and many though the slips may be between the cup 

 of life which the poet has actually drained and the lips of his 

 readers who would sip of it also — it still remains unquestionable 

 that the artist usually does intend to induce some sort of experience 

 in his public, or in a potential public — unless, of course, he is one 

 of those rare birds who claims to sing only for himself. It is, after 

 all, relatively trivial whether we speak o^ ih.t poems or tht personali- 

 ties of William Blake and Alexander Pope as mystical and 

 rationalistic respectively; indeed, when critics refer to personali- 

 ties, they usually mean poems, or rather their experiences of poems. 

 And the latter emphasis has the advantage of not shutting out 

 whatever light may be shed on the works of art, thereby enriching 

 our experiences of them, from knowledge of the contexts in which 

 they were produced. 



Thus, the shift induced by the 'new criticism' has been chiefly 

 one of emphasis, corresponding to the shift in the writing of history, 

 as in the works of James Harvey Robinson, from the impossible 

 ideal of a total reconstruction of the past, to the more modest goal 

 of an interpretation of the past in the light of subsequent develop- 

 ments and the needs of the present. Taine's search for the general 

 laws of history was perhaps a step in this direction; and his writing 

 of the monumental Origins of Contemporary France was motivated 

 by a desire to understand 'la debacle' of 1870. Nevertheless, it is 

 necessary to make explicit what Taine may recognize theoretically 

 but often seems to forget in practice — namely, that his readings 

 and criticisms are after all his own special literary apergus, based 

 on his own special interpretations of history and of the lives and 

 personalities of the men who are his subjects — and not the final 

 word on anything. 



In sum, the 'new critics' are unduly narrow when they abstract 

 the work of art from its historical context and try to treat as 



