170 SCIENCE AND AESTHETIC JUDGMENT 



Of these qualities, The Ideal in Art takes ^energy' or 'force' as 

 central, and, working out its internal (individual) and external 

 (social, or 'racial') relations, attempts to judge works of literature 

 and art on the basis of the scales which result. Then, as if realizing 

 that, though he may have revealed significant correspondences 

 between life and art, he has not done justice to the dynamics of 

 art itself, Taine applies the organic principle, sketchily and in- 

 adequately, to an analysis of the chief elements in works of 

 literature and art, and their possible 'convergence', considered 

 first aesthetically and then in terms of historical development. 

 We have now to consider some of the issues which arise from such 

 an approach to criticism, in general, as well as in Taine's particular 

 formulation of it. 



Since the core of such criticism lies in the assumed correspondence 

 of science and art, via the natural type or universal, we may best 

 approach the problem it presents by asking: In what ways are the 

 uses of type analysis in the arts similar to, and in what ways are 

 they different from, its uses in the sciences? Have we not entered an 

 entirely diflferent realm? In Coleridge's familiar words: 'A poem 

 is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, 

 by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from 

 all other species (having this object in common with it) it is 

 discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole, 

 as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each com- 

 ponent /?flr/.'50 If the natural type is elusive, and subject to the 

 dangers of abstraction, in attempts to define an element like 

 hydrogen or a species like horse, how much more difficult must its 

 meaning become when we seek for it in the subtle complexities 

 of art ! 



Yet the issue of universality versus concreteness, which we have 

 seen to be central to type analysis generally, is a familiar one in 

 aesthetic criticism, ^i Very briefly, emphasis on the concrete and 

 the varied has usually been characterized as Romantic; that on 

 the universal and unified, as Classic. Starting, as one must in 

 experience, from the concrete, we find that Romantic criticism 

 stresses, above all, the uniqueness of individual personality, and tends 

 to be subjective, on two scores; it considers, not so much the work of 

 art as an object in itself, but as it expresses the artist and is the basis 

 of a fresh experience in the reader or spectator. Classic criticism, on 

 the other hand, seeks the universal both in content and form, 

 recognizing the recurrence of persistent themes in art (nature, man, 



