ABSTRACT
The history of art and literature has the works of art themselves as its principal subject; those other labours invoke and interrogate works of art, but only as witnesses from whom to discover the truth of facts which are not aesthetic. The name "artistic" or "literary" critic is used in various senses: sometimes it is applied to the scholar who devotes his services to literature; sometimes to the historian who reveals the works of art of the past in their reality; more often to both. By critic is sometimes understood in a more restricted sense he who judges and describes contemporary literary works, and by historian, he who treats of those less recent. The theory of artistic and literary historical method presents problems and difficulties, some common to the theory of historical method in general, others peculiar to it, because derived from the concept of art itself.
