Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from History of English Literature, Vol. 1 of 4
With Taine's work in hand the thoughtful reader may realize to a large extent the significance of Leslie Stephen's memorable dictum: The whole art of criticism consists in learning to know the human being who is partially revealed to us in his written and spoken words. M. Taine's pages continually at test his deep conviction that the style is the man in a very comprehensive sense. In his Introduction to his History of English Literature, we find such statements as these You study the document only to know the man, just as you study the fossil shell only to know the animal behind it Genuine history is brought into existence only when the historian begins to unravel the living man, toiling, impassioned, en trenched in his customs, with his voice and features, his ges tures and dress, distinct and complete as he from whom we have just parted in the street; Twenty select phrases from Plato and Aristophanes will teach you much more than a multitude of dissertations and commentaries The true critic is present at the drama which was enacted 1n the soul of the artist or the writer; the choice of a word, the brevity or length of a sentence, the nature of a metaphor, the accent of a verse, the development of an argument - everything is a symbol to him; in short he works out its [the text's] psychology; there is a cause for ambition, for courage, for truth, as there is for mus cular movement or animal heat. To put M. Taine's great and characteristic merit into a sentence, we may say that he was the first writer on English literature to apply to it the fundamental principle, patent to every person of re?ection, that we necessarily think in concrete terms, and that, there fore, a treatise must be valuable just in proportion to the concreteness of its presentation.
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