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PARTISAN REVIEW
A PERSPECTIVE ON CRITICISM
A HISTORY OF MODERN CRITICISM: 1750-1950 (Vol. I: The Loter
Eighteenth Century. Vol. ,,: The Romontic Age ). By Rene Wellek. Yole
University Press. $5 each.
It may be an Age of Criticism in which we are living-it un–
doubtedly is-but it is not an age that has always been very acutely or
instructedly aware of its own antecedents; and the temporal provin–
ciality of some of our criticism, even when it has had other merits, has
sometimes been a heavy limitation. We are all guilt-ridden here in
some degree or other, and for that reason every one of us can find his
account in, and draw instruction from, these two extraordinary volumes
of Mr. WelIek's. They have come, one is tempted to feel, in the nick
of time, and may very weIJ have the clarifying, cartographic, signpost
effect on contemporary criticism that the older nineteenth-century
histories of literature generally-T aine, De Sanctis, Brandes-had on
the writing that followed them. Only the most irreconcilable contem–
ners of history-history of ideas, history of the arts, history of literature
-will be able to hold out against them.
It has been half a century since anyone h as tried to do this par–
ticular thing-to write the history of modern criticism on a European,
not merely a national, scale--and when it was last done, as it was by
Saintsbury, who indeed took all criticism from Plato on for his pro–
vince, the book that resulted was enormously vigorous, hearty, and ap–
preciative, but it suffered badly, too, from Saintsbury's constitutional
incapacity to deal with general ideas or even to take them seriously.
This is exactly the capacity that Mr. WeIJek has in an eminent degree,
and if his history has much less the effect of an immense banquet, com–
plete with wines and brandies, than Saintsbury's had, it has much more
the effect of a solid meal, by no means without its vinous accompani–
ment, which one would not be likely to regret the next day.
These, of course, are the first two of four projected volumes which
are to tell the story of modern literary criticism from about the middle
of the eighteenth century to our own time. They deal with, roughly,
the first half of that story-the period which began with the gradual
subsidence of the neo-classicism that had prevailed for a couple of
centuries, and ended with the settling down (and the mapping by
philosophers) of the romanticism that had washed over and submerged
it. Mr_ WeIlek's first volume begins with Voltaire, the last (except for
small fry) of the complete neo-classicists, and his second volume ends
