Hippolyte Taine

Hippolyte Taine (born April 21, 1828, Vouziers, Ardennes, France—died March 5, 1893, Paris) was a French thinker, critic, and historian, one of the most-esteemed exponents of 19th-century French positivism. He attempted to apply the scientific method to the study of the humanities.

Early life and career

Taine was born into a professional middle-class family; his father was a lawyer. He was educated privately at home until shortly after his father’s death. Thereafter, he went with his mother to live in Paris and became an outstanding pupil at the Collège Bourbon and then at the highly prestigious École Normale. He gained his licenceès-lettres (preliminary degree) in 1848 and began to study for his agrégation (advanced degree) in philosophy, one of his dominant interests. He already held unorthodox intellectual views. He had apparently lost his Christian faith by the age of 15, and his youthful rationalist attitude led him to admire the ideas of the ideologue philosophers, who held that all knowledge must be based on sense experience, on observation, and on controlled experiment; this overriding conviction guided his later career. He was also already attracted by the metaphysical ideas of Hegel and Spinoza, which inspired in him a desire to find a total explanation of the causal forces of life and the universe.

In contrast to these views, his new teachers of philosophy in Paris held the prevailing philosophical doctrine of eclecticism. Consequently—and not without creating some scandal in academic circles—Taine’s agrégation jury failed him in 1851. He then taught for brief periods at Nevers and Poitiers but in 1852 applied for leave of absence. Returning to Paris, he devoted himself to preparing his two dissertations for the doctorate in literature: De Personis Platonicis (“Concerning Plato’s Characters”) and his first well-known work, a study of La Fontaine (1853; revised and published in 1861 as La Fontaine et ses fables [“La Fontaine and His Fables”]).

He gained a doctoral degree in May 1853 and began an essay on Livy, Essai sur Tite-Live (1856), which, despite further criticism of his philosophical outlook, won a prize from the Académie Française. During this period he was also attending lectures in science and gathering the knowledge of physiology that he utilized later in his work on psychology. Reluctant to return to full-time teaching, he lived by private tutoring and as a man of letters. Even a holiday in 1854, necessitated by ill health, was turned to advantage: in 1855 he published a literary guidebook based on his travels, Voyage aux eaux des Pyrénées (“Voyage to the Waters of the Pyrenees”).

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Attack on eclecticism

More important for his own development, he contributed frequent literary and historical articles to such leading journals as the Revue des Deux Mondes, the Revue de l’Instruction Publique, and the Journal des Débats, articles that provided the basis for three books further enhancing the reputation he had gained by his works on La Fontaine and Livy. These were Les Philosophes français du XIX^e siècle (1857; “The French Philosophers of the 19th Century”), a critical polemic against the prevailing eclectic philosophy of Victor Cousin and his group, which also provides in its later chapters a lucid exposition of his own positivist theory of knowledge; a first collection of Essais de critique et d’histoire (1858; “Essays of Criticism and History”); and his notable Histoire de la littérature anglaise, 4 vol. (1863–64; History of English Literature).

The celebrated “Introduction” to the Histoire gives a succinct statement of Taine’s approach to literary and cultural history and a basic text for the understanding of his scientific attitude to literary criticism. The same great causal factors underlie any cultural artifact of a given age and society, he claims. By studying the literary documents, one may understand the psychology of their author, and this, complemented by scrutiny of the facts of his life and personality, illuminates the faculté maîtresse, the predominant characteristic that determines his work; this in turn can then be “explained” by reference to three great conditioning facts: la race, le milieu, and le moment—i.e., the writer’s inherited personality, his social, political, and geographical background, and the historical situation in which he writes. It is evident that Taine’s interest here is less in literature itself than in historical causation and psychology, and his method may well be thought to have encouraged in his admirers an excessive preoccupation with biography and literary history at the expense of critical judgment, though Taine’s own abilities as a critic were considerable.

Throughout the 1860s Taine indefatigably continued his researches and his writing. Even his travels (to England, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands) were utilized to gather notes for future work—for example, his closely observed if simplifying Notes sur l’Angleterre (1872; Notes on England); and even his life in Paris led to his Notes sur Paris: Vie et opinions de M. Frédéric-Thomas Graindorge (1867; Notes and Opinions of Mr. Frédérick-Graindorge), perhaps the most personal and entertaining of his books.

In 1864, by a happy decision of Napoleon III, he was appointed to succeed architect Viollet-le-Duc as professor of aesthetics and of the history of art at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he subsequently lectured for 20 years. The lecture courses, which he eventually published, include Philosophie de l’art (1865; The Philosophy of Art), De l’idéal dans l’art (1867; “On the Ideal in Art”), and those on the philosophy of art in Italy (1866), the Netherlands (1868), and Greece (1869). This post also gave him a security that favoured his more-protracted scientific studies and helped make the later 1860s a happy and fertile period in his life. He published, in addition to the works named, his second volume of essays, Nouveaux essais de critique et d’histoire (1865; “New Essays of Criticism and History”), including his perceptive articles on Racine, Balzac, and Stendhal (whose psychological acuity he was one of the first to admire). In 1868 he married Mlle Denuelle, the daughter of a well-known architect and artist, by whom he had a son and a daughter.