FROM ANALYSIS TO JUDGMENT 169 



'importance' and 'beneficence' would resolve some of the contra- 

 dictions which seem to have resulted. Surely the increased 

 emphasis on dynamic principles in the third section is demanded 

 by the subject-matter, and is indicative of that sincere sensitivity to 

 the realities of aesthetic experience which often tends to save Taine 

 as a critic when his abstract theories may seem about to fail him. 

 Finally, it should be noted that the hierarchical principle used 

 in The Ideal in Art was not a new one, but had been active in 

 Taine's criticism from the beginning, '^'^ having been applied in 

 his two earliest studies, the La Fontaine and the Livy. Thus, he 

 wrote in the former: 'La Fontaine has given us a world together 

 with a judgment on the world', ^5 and the 'Conclusion', written 

 in 1 86 1, asserted of the great artist 'that one can measure him and 

 give him his rank'/^ Similarly, the 'Conclusion' of the Essay on 

 Livy attempted to judge him by comparisons both to the great 

 ancient historians and to the schools of modern history. ^7 And the 

 other Lectures on Art, especially the earlier ones on Italy and the 

 later ones on Greece, were applications of the same basic 

 principle. ^^8 



Type Analysis in Literature and Art 



This, then, is the fashion in which Taine goes from scientific 

 analysis to critical judgment: assuming, not only that a correspon- 

 dence of the Real and the Ideal can be attained in science, but 

 that it is the nature and purpose of art, in its own fashion, to make 

 the transition from the former to the latter, he proceeds to develop 

 scales of value for life and then to apply them, by analogy, to art. 

 The procedure is summarized as follows in On Intelligence: 



'We survey the men who live around us, we are struck with a 

 certain general form appropriate to them; we observe, sometimes 

 in one, and sometimes in another, higher degrees of the external 

 signs of some quality or disposition beneficial to the individual or 

 the race, agility, vigour, health, sagacity, or energy; we gradually 

 collect these diflferent signs; we take pleasure in contemplating a 

 human form in which the characters we consider most important 

 and most valuable are manifested by a deeper and more universal 

 print, and if an artist be found in whom this group of conceived 

 conditions results in an express image, a sensible representation, 

 an internal half-sight, he takes a block of marble and hews out the 

 ideal form which Nature has not been able to display to us.''^^ 



