Note 4 — Chapter I · THE SUBJECT MATTER

Lettres de Prosper Mérimée à une Inconnue, préf. end. When, however, M. Taine wrote on Sainte-Beuve's death (1869), he laid down, as one of the necessities of the search for "the true truth," this very determination "to be the dupe of nothing and nobody, above all of oneself" (Derniers Essais, p. 52). Years before an acute critic had said of his literary criticism: "M. Taine, at bottom, let us say it with bated breath, is the dupe of himself when he supposes himself to have given a rigorous formula, an exact definition, a chemical analysis of his author" (Frédéric Morin, Les hommes et livres contemporains, 1862, p. 33). Compare the brochure of Professor Edouard Droz, La critique littéraire et la science, 1893, discussed in the present writer's New Essays towards a Critical Method, 1897, p. 13 sq.