OUR HERITAGE FROM TAINE 199 



rigid set of concepts, and towards neglect of the subtle complexi- 

 ties and conventions involved in the processes of cultural com- 

 munication. Hence his rather naive assumptions that analysis of 

 the effects of Race, Environment, and Time is 'but a mechanical 

 problem'; that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the 

 Zeitgeist and the spirit of an artist's work; and so forth. Despite the 

 fact, pointed out by Brunetiere,!'^ that Taine was constantly mak- 

 ing progress towards mastery of new areas of human experience, 

 the essentials of his method and values were fixed by the age of 

 twenty: growth after that age seems to have been more quantita- 

 tive than qualitative, except perhaps after the crisis of 1870. His 

 attempts at being all-embracing, and reconciling the opposites of 

 permanence and change, led to uses of broad terms like 'abstrac- 

 tion', 'race', 'milieu', and 'moment' which were just vague 

 enough to have provided grist for the mills of hundreds of 

 commentators. 15 



Most serious of all, perhaps, from our point of view, is his over- 

 simplification of the entire problem of culture and communica- 

 tion, which, as Cleanth Brooks has pointed out, has been the 

 central concern of more recent criticism, i^ Though, as an 

 historian, he had a rich awareness of the densities of facts, his 

 Hegelian search for laws of history led him to take too many of 

 his documents at their face values, without inquiring sufficiently 

 into the special meanings terms and symbols may have had for 

 various generations, as Professor Spitzer has done recently in his 

 essays in 'historical semantics'. Curious enough, for a protagonist 

 of historical method, in this respect he was not historical enough. 



Taine' s Permanent Contributions 



Yet, with all these limitations, personal and methodological, 

 there is a solidity to Taine's philosophy and achievement which 

 makes it one of the permanent contributions in the history of 

 criticism. He is one of those figures whom one cannot ignore, 

 however much one may agree or disagree with him. Professor 

 Guerard's experience is typical: 'My relations with Taine were 

 intimate and acrimonious. I learned much from him, mostly 

 through the process of fighting him.' 1*7 One way to correct the 

 tendency to dismiss Taine because of his imperfections is to ask, 

 not what ht fails to do, but what he succeeds in doing. It is unfair 

 to expect of any critic that he be all things to all men, perfect, like 

 a God. What then are Taine's peculiar virtues? 



