In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Taine, James, and Balzac: Toward an Aesthetic of Romantic Realism Sarah B. Daugherty, Illinois State University HIppolyte Taine (1828-1893) has often been considered as a prophet of the American realistic novel; according to Everett Carter, the critic "took positivism and made it into a literary credo, and it was Taine's positlvistic theory of the source and function of literary expression that became the basis of conscious American realism." And there is indeed evidence that the "vogue of Taine" provided impetus to the work of the local co4or writers and, at least belatedly, to that of William Dean Howells. Perhaps the best-known summary of the realists' view of Taine occurs In the preface to The Hoosier Schoolmaster, where Edward Eggleston stated that the critic's Philosophy of Art in the Netherlands was "little else than an elucidation of the thesis that the artist of originality will work courageously with the materials he finds in his own environment. In Taine's view, all life has matter for the artist, If only he have eyes to see." Moreover, Taine's "scientific" authority was sometimes invoked by critics sympathetic to realism—for example, A. G. Sedgwick, who defended George Eliot's lack of "dramatic power" and her focus on the commonplace by quoting Taine's dictum that "Our business is not creation, but criticism." Ironically, however, -all these statements of Taine's position are oversimplified. Instead of advocating simple realism, Taine argued strongly for the Balzacian novel—a kind of fiction which Peter Brooks has described as pushing "through manners to deeper sources of being."^ Taine was thus Important not only as a forerunner of the realists but as a source of inspiration to Henry James, who eventually acknowledged Balzac as his literary "father." Without Taine, James might have been slower to recognize this heritage and to achieve his own synthesis between realism and romance. Taine was so prolific a writer that his influence has naturally worked In many directions. He is still widely known for his theory that literature is the product of "Ia race, Ie mi I ¡eu," and "I e moment";4 and from this determinism, it would seem to follow that the artist ought to describe his own environment, the conditions which have shaped his work. But Taine's actual views were far more complex. As René WeI lek has noted, Taine was antagonistic to the positivists, criticizing Comte for being "entièrement étranger aux spéculations métaphysiques, à la culture littéraire, à la critique historique, au sentiment psychologique."5 Similarly, he was hostile to the naturalists, describing Flaubert's works as "la littérature dágéneree, tirée hors de son domaine, traînée de force dans celui de la science et des arts du dessin."^ The critic was thus far from being a proponent of "le scientisme"; Instead he was 1. Howe I Is and the Age of Real ism (Philadelphia: Lipplncott, 1954), p. 95. 2. Harry H. Clark, "The Influence of Science on American Literary Criticism, 1869-1910, Including the Vogue of Taine," Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, 44 (1955), 109-164; Jeremiah J. Sullivan, "The Influence of HIppolyte Taine on the Theory and Practice of Major American Writers, 1865-1910" (Diss. New York Univ., 1970). 3. Edward Eggleston, Preface to the Library Edition (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1913), p. 8; A. G. Sedgwick, rev. of El ¡of s Middlemarch, "Recent Literature," Atlantic, 31 (April 1873), 492; Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), p. 4. 4. Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 6th éd. (Paris: Hachette, 1885), I, xxiil. 5. A History of Modem Criticism, 1750-1950, IV (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1965), 490. 6. H. Taine, sa vie et sa correspondance, 3rd éd. (Paris: Hatchette, 1908), II, 233. Contrast the view of Lyal I Powers in his Henry James and the Naturalist Movement (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 7-9. 12 a Hegelian in quest of the concrete universal, the object which would reveal the essence of things.' As a philosopher, then, he mediated between the extremes...

pdf

Share