Taine, HENRI, French critic, so styled first through a whim of the editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, his real name being Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, was born at Vouziers in Ardennes, 21st April 1828. He studied at Paris at the Collège de Bourbon and the École Normale, but his religious opinions barred the way to a scholastic career commensurate with his abilities. He filled minor parts at Toulon, Nevers, Poitiers, but soon threw up the state educational service to return to Paris, where after a short time of struggle he conquered fortune by the sheer strength and originality of his literary work. He took his Docteur ès Lettres in 1853, writing for the occasion, besides the regular thesis, a treatise on Lafontaine's Fables—a masterpiece of critical analysis which established his reputation. Here at twenty-five he had reached the critical method which was to dominate him throughout life. His method is to make a searching investigation into the race, social conditions, and antecedents of the individual, his environment, the special tendencies of the age and their bearing upon him. These supply the key to the fundamental quality—the faculté maîtresse—of the author, which, once grasped, the critical judgment is complete and unassailable. But unfortunately race, period of time, and environment give completely different combinations to the reading of different observers, and with the help of all these it is only possible to see what one wishes or expects to see. The individuality is a subtle essence which eludes all this pretentious analysis, and these vast generalisations remain mere preconceived theories and foregone conclusions, the process the very opposite of the objective, the scientific, the certain. In 1854 Taine won the Academy's prize for an essay on Livy—an audacious application of the same critical method to a period of which he did not possess adequate knowledge. His Voyage aux Eaux de Pyrénées (1855) and Voyage en Italie (1866) are books that stand almost first of their class. In 1863 Taine was appointed to an examinership at St Cyr; in October 1864 he became professor of Aesthetics and the History of Art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, thus finding a motive for his well-known subtle and paradoxical books on the Philosophy of Art, the Ideal in Art, and the Philosophy of Art in Italy, in Greece, and in the Netherlands. Already an Oxford D.C.L. (1871), was elected to Loménie's chair in the French Academy in 1878; he died 5th March 1893. Some of his maturest critical work is to be found in the Essais de
Critique et d'Histoire (1857) and the Nouveaux Essais (1865); his most vigorous polemic in Les Philosophes Français du XIX. Siècle (1856), an attack on Cousin, Jouffroy, &c. The Notes sur l'Angleterre (1861) is perhaps his best book of its class, spite of its cleverness a warning example of the folly of splendid inductive theories without adequate knowledge. His famous Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise (5 vols. 1863-64; Eng. trans. by H. Van Lann, 4 vols. 1872-74) excited a clerical storm in France which cost him the Academy's prize of 4000 francs. The work is marred by sins of omission and commission alike, and by no means justifies its title—Sainte-Beuve suggested as an alternative, 'Histoire de la race et de la civilisation anglaises par la littérature.' But it remains the best work of the kind done by a foreigner, full of sympathetic insight and subtlety, and admirably written. Taine's greatest work, however, is his study of the Revolution, its causes and its issues, Les Origines de la France Contemporaine (L'Ancien Régime, 1875; the Revolution itself, in three sections, 1878-81-85; Le Régime Moderne, vol. i. 1890). As a psychological history of the greatest event in modern history this work stands absolutely alone. The first part is a patient and accurate study of the social state of France for a hundred years, proving the inevitableness of revolution and of its violence alike. Sheer love of truth has carried him through portentous labours in dusty archives, deeds, letters, and memoirs, and the results are set forth with unfailing exactitude and clearness, the only fault being that sometimes the reader feels that breadth of vision has been sacrificed to detail, and that he can scarcely see the wood for the trees. The treatment of the Revolution itself is original, courageous, and creditable in the highest degree to Taine when we consider his liberal antecedents and prepossessions. It constitutes the strongest attack yet made upon the men and the motives of the Revolution, the conclusion being much the same as that reached by Burke in his Reflections—to Taine 'a masterpiece and a prophecy,' although to Michelet a 'miserable piece of declamation.' He held before himself a lofty aim, and it must be said that this end he has attained—'J'ai tracé le portrait [of revolutionary France] sans me préoccuper de les débats présents; j'ai écrit comme si j'avais eu pour sujet les révolutions de Florence ou d'Athènes. Ceci est de l'histoire, rien de plus.'
See his Derniers Essais de Critique et d'Histoire (1895) and his Carnets de Voyage (1897); also Katscher in Nineteenth Century for July 1886; Bourget, Psychologie Contemporaine (1887); and the monograph by G. Monod, Les Maîtres d'Histoire: Renan, Taine, Michelet (1895).