ABSTRACT
Interest in the recovery of the past is more properly the field of the historian than of the literary critic, and it is perhaps appropriate that Taine, one of the first to offer an explicit statement of the aims of historical criticism, should have perceived literature as the handmaiden of history, and should have felt satisfied to define the goal of the historical critic as being to 'recover from the monuments of literature a knowledge of the way in which people thought and felt several centuries ago' (p. v). Taine's faith in the value of literature as a historical document has come to seem somewhat naive to historians a century or more later, as has his Viconian confidence that patterns of development can be discerned by means of it. To literary critics it is his reduction of literature to a historical instrument, his assumption that the past is more important than the work of literature, that seems to be at fault. Whatever its theoretical shortcomings, however, Tainc's kind of practical exploration of the ways in which we can improve our awareness of the nature of the past has been absorbed with profit and is now taken for granted by historians and literary critics alike.
