1 96 EPILOGUE 



Paul Bourget's novel, The Disciple (1889), Taine (or perhaps, 

 rather, 'Tainism', though the personal reference was clear) was 

 practically blamed for 'la debacle' of 1870 and the difficulties 

 which followed. Bourget's feeling 'that the soul of France had been 

 terribly hurt in 1870, and that it must be helped, healed and 

 cured', 1 has been paralleled in the United States, perhaps, by 

 some critics who have blamed all the woes of depression, fascism, 

 and war on the presumed cynicism and 'materialism' of the so- 

 called 'lost generation' of writers in the post-war twenties. 



But now that we have had the benefit of a generation of critics, 

 many of them brilliant, 'emancipated' from the demands of 

 Taine's historical method, 2 we are perhaps ready to achieve 

 a more temperate and balanced view. From the perspective of a 

 century, we should be able to cease lining up for him and against 

 him and to do his contribution some measure of justice. 



Taine'' s Personal Limitations 



It is necessary, indeed, to begin with a full realization of Taine's 

 limitations, since only from such a realization may we perhaps be 

 able to avoid them, and their ill effects, in the future. Here, again, 

 we may take a clue from his own method of presentation and 

 classify our negative criticisms according to whether they spring 

 primarily from his personality, from his environment and time, 

 or from his method itself. ^ 



One should, in all fairness, attempt to divorce judgment of 

 Taine's method from feeling about him as a person, a difficult 

 process, since so much of 'the style was the man'. In the Preface to 

 the Critical and Historical Essays (1858), he made a plea for such a 

 divorce, emphasizing that the kind of analysis he was trying to use 

 had an inspiring ancestry. ^ Yet we have seen how even a contem- 

 porary admirer like Zola was bothered by the contradictions and 

 inadequacies of his personality. For all his courage and honesty, 

 there was something of the lonely misanthrope about him. He was 

 far from humourless, as some of his delightfully satirical pieces 

 reveal; but it was a dry, somewhat cynical, wit, with a touch of 

 Swift and Voltaire. Called a pessimist, because of his sometimes 

 harsh realism on political issues, he yet shared the optimism of his 

 century where the progress of science was concerned; withal, he 

 was not a bitter man, and that he was capable of much warmth in 

 his friendships is evident to any reader of his Life and Letters. Pro- 

 fessor Guerard sums up a familiar reaction, however, in a telling 



