How did Hippolyte Taine connect an author’s life and personality to literary works?

Hippolyte Taine sought to establish a scientific approach to literary criticism by analyzing the causal forces that shape an author and their work. He believed that by studying literary documents alongside the facts of an author's life and personality, one could identify the faculté maîtresse, or the predominant characteristic that determines the writer’s output.1

Taine argued that this core personality and the resulting work are conditioned by three primary factors:

• Race: The inherited temperament or disposition that persists within a group over thousands of years.21
• Milieu: The social, political, and geographical environment that modifies an individual's inherited traits.21
• Moment: The momentum of past and present cultural traditions and the specific historical situation in which the author writes.21

By applying this framework, Taine aimed to move beyond subjective interpretation, treating literature as a historical and psychological artifact that reveals the underlying motives and psychology of both the individual creator and their culture.21