PROBLEMS OF ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM 135 



external, or 'extrinsic', all relations except those contained in 

 literature as literature (whatever that may mean). But they have 

 served as a healthy corrective to the positivistic myth of the 

 historian as an objective Scientist endowed with a kind of God- 

 like omniscience — that cocksureness which some practitioners of 

 the historical method, driven by a passion for classification, have 

 tended to exhibit; and with their help that method could be im- 

 mensely enriched. Its focus would now be on the complex of rela- 

 tions revealed in the contemporary critic's experience of the work 

 of art, as a twentieth-century man, aware of history and tradition, 

 but of history and tradition constantly enlarged by ever-new per- 

 spectives; and on careful and sensitive reading, with which no 

 criticism has ever been able to dispense. It would continue to 

 search for 'dominant traits', or 'master faculties', but they would 

 not now be so much those of a fictive poet or artist (who cannot 

 be summoned from the grave to a psycho-analyst's couch!) but 

 rather of his surviving work, whose undying power to move and 

 please is what really counts. 



Thus, the 'new critics' have helped us remember — what no 

 true critic, including Taine, has ever forgotten — that criticism, 

 though pursued with all the help that scientific analysis can pro- 

 vide, can never dispense with the imaginative insight and fire of 

 art. Taine recognizes this fully in the second part of his Essay on 

 Livy, on 'History Considered as an Art', and fortunately he pre- 

 served the great tradition in much of his practice. As Edmund 

 Wilson put it recently: 'The truth was that Taine loved Hterature 

 for its own sake — he was at his best himself a brilliant artist — and 

 he had very strong moral convictions which give his writing emo- 

 tional power. His mind, to be sure, was an analytic one, and his 

 analysis, though terribly oversimplified, does have an explanatory 

 value. Yet his work was what we call creative. Whatever he may 

 say about chemical experiments, it is evident when he writes of a 

 great writer that the moment, the race, and the milieu have com- 

 bined, hke the three sounds of the chord in Browning's poem about 

 Abt Vogler, to produce not a fourth sound but a star.''*^ 



The Metaphysical Issue: Analysis and Judgment 



There is a difference, however, between recognition of the 

 primary importance of experience, and hence psycholog}^ for 

 criticism and Taine's more general doctrine of a hierarchy of 

 ideal values and the identitv of the Real and the Ideal. The former 



