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with Hegel, who codified (and in a sense, laid out, as for burial) the
romanticism of his German predecessors. What intervenes is the account
of a great
shift
in literary sensibility as it was reflected in criticism–
the shift from a veneration for reason, for objective representation, the
typical and the general, impersonality, order, and regularity, to a pas–
sion for subjectivity, feeling, the individual and idiosyncratic, and the
spontaneous, the expressive, the organic. The story is told, not as an
impersonal "history of ideas," but in a series of chapters that expound
and comment on the views, the insights, the tastes, of a series of great
individual figures and some minor men.
The story is an absorbing one, and suggests a multitude of reflec–
tions, but in any case it inspires extreme admiration for the success
with which Mr. Wellek has told it. This success is owing in part to his
erudition: he is at home in the languages and literatures of England,
France, Germany, and Italy (to speak only of those represented fully in
these volumes), and is rescued thus from the cultural provinciality that
has too often led to badly mistaken attributions of originality, primacy,
and the like, as well as to other astigmatisms. The most sensational
example in these volumes, I suppose, is Mr. Wellek's treatment of Cole–
ridge, who has come close to deification by some English and American
critics: the extent to which Coleridge drew upon and even plagiarized
(the harsh word seems unavoidable) such German writers as Kant, A.
W. Schlegel, and Schelling has never yet been made so evident as Mr.
Wellek makes it, and it will simply force a revised estimate of Cole–
ridge's inventive significance.
A revised estimate, but not an equally exaggerated one at the nega–
tive pole. Nothing is more striking in this history than the care with
which Mr. Wellek preserves a balance, a studious justice, in his valua–
tion not only of Coleridge but of a long list of other critical writers.
His final judgment of Coleridge is a disappointed one-he speaks in
some despair of the "random eclecticism" of his mind-but meanwhile
he has seen how great was the service Coleridge performed in the trans–
mission of German literary ideas to the English-speaking world, and has
done justice to what was strong and positive in Coleridge's work-his
firm grasp, for example, on the principle of dialectical and organic
unity in poetry. "Nevertheless"-"however"-"this does not mean that":
these are characteristic locutions of Mr. Wellek's, and they indicate that
he knows how to save himself from the bigotry, the rigidity, the one-eyed
partisanship that in our time have too often ended in wholly uncritical
judgments of the criticism of the past. This disinterestedness of Mr.
Wellek's has cooperated with what is almost more important-his intel-
