His culpa.
The fault of Taine as a critic was put once for all from two different points of view and by two widely different, though each in his different way supremely competent, persons, in that conversation at one of the Magny dinners which is referred to elsewhere,[[848]] and the reporting of which,[[849]] whether justifiable in itself or not, should bribe Rhadamanthus in his condemnation of the Goncourtian reportage. He did not understand the sublime—the “magnificent”—in literature, as no less a person than Sainte-Beuve told him on that occasion: and he did not understand it, because, as no less a person than Gautier (consciously or unconsciously repeating Longinus) told him, he did not see that the secret of literature lies in the “mots rayonnants,” the “mots de lumière.” Or, rather, he would not understand: for as two of his selected quotations,[[850]] from such an apostle of the mot rayonnant as Saint-Victor, show, he had the root of the matter in him, but would not let it grow.
His miscellaneous critical work.
Taine is, therefore, the capital example of the harm which may be done by what is called “philosophy” in criticism. If he had resisted this tendency, and had allowed himself simply to receive and assimilate the facts, he might have been one of the great critics of the world. That he could have done so is shown, I think, completely by the greatest work of his life, the Origines de la France Contemporaine—in which, with a good grace, if not explicitly, swallowing all he had said in his earlier remarks on Carlyle’s French Revolution, he allowed himself to yield to the other facts, and established the truth for ever, on and in an impregnable foundation and circumvallation of document. But he had no time to do everything: and in his literary perversity he had gone too far. He began as quite a young man, but not young enough to be immature, in the famous studies on La Fontaine and Livy, by a philosophical crystallisation of the process which Sainte-Beuve had almost invented, but had always kept in a fluid and flexible condition—the process of inquiring into the “circumstances,” the ancestry, country, surroundings, religion, tastes, friends, career, of the man of letters. As crystallised under the influence of a philosophical determinism, this process became one of inquiring into the racial origin, chronological period, and general environment (milieu) of the individual, the school, the literature, as a result of which these “had to be”—what they seemed to M. Taine. The man of letters, be he Shakespeare or Voltaire, Dante or Cervantes, was simply a made-up prescription.
His Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise.
It might not have been so disastrous as it was, if M. Taine had had the audacity—or from a different point of view the pusillanimity—to choose the literature of his own country as his sphere of principal operation. His theory would not have been so cramping as Nisard’s, and he was better furnished with facilities of direct appreciation. That there would have been faults, gaps, oddities, in the survey is certain: but it would have been a great and an invaluable history of French Literature. Now his famous Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise—one of the most brilliantly written of its class, one of the most interesting, perhaps the history of literature, which has most of literature itself—is only valuable for qualities which are not of its own essence, and in the qualities which are of its essence is very nearly valueless. To any one who knows “those who are there and those who are not”—the authors whom M. Taine discusses and the authors whom he skips—it is a stimulating and piquant, if not exactly an informing, book to read. Those who do not know them will be led hopelessly astray. To begin with, M. Taine himself did not know enough, though he knew creditably much. He had many distractions and avocations at the time, and did not plunge on the document with anything like the “brazen-bowelled” energy which he afterwards showed in the Origines. Whole periods—especially where language or dialect present difficulties—are jumped with the most perfect nonchalance, but unfortunately not always in silence. Those minor writers who give the key of a literature much more surely than the greater ones (for these are akin to all the world) receive very little attention. The native, automatic, irrational, sympathies and preferences, which keep a man right much oftener than they lead him wrong, are necessarily wanting. Nothing interferes to save the critic from the influence of his theory. He has constructed for himself, on that theory, an ideal Englishman with big feet (because the soil of our country is marshy and soft), with respect for authority (as is shown by English boys calling their father “Governor”), Protestant, melancholy, with several other attributes. This ideal Englishman is further moulded, tooled, typed, by race, time, milieu: and he becomes Chaucer, Shakespeare, Pope, Byron. And the literature of Byron, Pope, Shakespeare, Chaucer has to deliver itself in a concatenation accordingly.