TAINE AND THE NATURALIST TRADITION 245 



conception of development, science worked out the idea of 

 organic evolution and placed man in nature, not spiritually, as 

 the romantics had sought to do, but physically', ^ producing late 

 nineteenth-century Naturalism. Professor Foerster states the con- 

 tinuity of these three traditions succinctly by speaking of 'another 

 Renaissance, the naturistic Renaissance, composed of two move- 

 ments, the romantic and the scientific'.'^ 



Speaking very broadly, Taine combined elements from all 

 three of these traditions. His Positivism seems obvious, but it was 

 the most superficial layer of his thinking. ^ Professor Levin stresses 

 his individualism and Romanticism^; Irving Babbitt reproaches 

 him for following the 'cult of energy' of Balzac and StendhaP; 

 and nothing could be more Romantic than his critical treatment 

 of Shakespeare, for example.^ His ideas of imitation, of the ideal 

 as normal or typical, of essential character, of analysis of the work 

 of art into its parts, and of health as a criterion of the ideal in the 

 plastic arts — all these are Aristotelian in essence; and the spirit of 

 The Philosophy of Art is quite in harmony with that of Aristotle's 

 Poetics. Compare to Taine, for example, the manner in which 

 Aristotle combines analysis of poetry with rules for its judgment; 

 his discussion of the origin of poetry in imitation and the various 

 manners of that imitation (Chapters 3 and 4) ; his analysis of the 

 qualitative parts of a tragedy (Chapter 6), which Taine follows 

 in his breakdown of literature into agents, actions, and style ( The 

 Ideal in Art, Chapter I, Part 3). Not only are there such interesting 

 parallels of detail, fully explicable by Taine's classical training, 

 but the Stagirite would surely have appreciated Taine's neat 

 logic and precise style. ^ 



NOTES 



1 'The Nature of Naturalism', pp. 354-382, in Naturalism and the Human 

 Spirit (ed. by Y. H. Krikorian), p. 354. 



2 One of those who has recently attempted a revaluation of Taine is Harry 

 Levin, in an essay on 'Literature as an Institution' (first printed in Accent, 

 Spring, 1946; referred to as reprinted in Schorer's Criticism: The Foundations of 

 Modern Literary Judgment). Professor Levin similarly distinguishes three move- 

 ments which stressed the relations between literature and society: Renaissance 

 humanism, which developed the historical point of view; Romantic nationalism, 

 which developed the importance of geography (and, in Taine, race); and 

 scientific positivism, led by Taine, which formulated a sociological approach 



