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Updated: June 15, 2025
The condition of society does not produce the artist's talent; but it assists or checks its efforts to display itself; it decides whether or not it shall be successful And it exerts a "natural selection" between different kinds of talents, stimulating some and starving others. To make this perfectly clear, we will cite at some length Taine's brilliant illustration.
So much, then, for the political side of the 'philosophy of the century, if we are to use this too comprehensive expression for all the products of a very complex and many-sided outburst of speculative energy. Apart from its political side, we find M. Taine's formula no less unsatisfactory for its other phases.
"If you only knew all that I have been doing for you! the wires I have pulled; the influences I have interested; the critics and newspaper men that I have talked to! Of course I couldn't do anything in a large public way, so soon after Mr. Taine's death, you know; but I have been busy, just the same, and everything is fixed.
"Andrew Carnegie," beamed the salesman. Another youthful clerk in the Scribner retail bookstore, unconscious of the customer's identity, waited one day on the wife of Mark Twain. Mrs. Clemens asked the young salesman for a copy of Taine's Ancient Regime. "Beg pardon," said the clerk, "what book did you say?" Mrs. Clemens repeated the author and title of the book.
"I'd better leave you here." She thanked him and, waving a good night, he left her. That would have been quite all if they hadn't met on Fifth Avenue one morning a week later. She started and blushed and seemed so glad to see him that they chatted like old friends. She was going to her dressmaker's, eat lunch alone at Taine's, shop all afternoon, and meet her husband on the ferry at five.
"I don't quite understand," she said, a trifle put out by the turn his answer had taken. "I mean," he explained eagerly, "that I want to repaint your portrait. You remember, I wrote, when I returned Mr. Taine's generous check, that I was not altogether satisfied with it. Give me another chance." "You mean for me to come here again, to pose for you? as I did before?"
M. Taine's philosophy which regards the art of any people or period as the necessary result of the conditions of race, religion, civilization, and manners in the midst of which the art was produced and esteems a knowledge of these conditions as sufficient to account for the character of the art, seems to me to exclude many complex and mysterious influences, especially in individual cases, which must affect the work of the artists.
Quickly he pushed another easel to a position beside the one that held Mrs. Taine's portrait, and drew the curtain. The effect, for a moment, silenced even Mrs. Taine but only for a moment. A character that is the product of certain years of schooling in the thought and spirit of the class in which Mrs. Taine belonged, is not transformed by a single exhibition of painted truth.
But it is well also, and in a historical student it is not only well, but the very pith and marrow of criticism, to search for that 'adaptation, to use M. Taine's very proper expression, which gave to the word of these teachers its mighty power and far-spreading acceptance.
Calm and severe, he saw in Napoleon only Taine's 'condottiere' who kicked Volney in the stomach. Everybody wished to define the true Napoleon.
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