126
PARTISAN REVIEW
lectual
intr~pidity-in
enabling him to ignore a whole series of stereo–
typed estimates and to put his finger on what is valid and usable in
the work of writers who have fallen into discredit--or, sometimes, on
what is fruitless in the work of writers who have risen into something
like sacrosanctity.
T. S. Eliot, for example, once remarked that Dr. Johnson wai a
dangerous man to disagree with; Mr. Wellek seems not to be painfully
conscious of this danger, and quite frankly (though not quite idio–
matically) describes Johnson as "one of the first great critics who has
almost ceased to understand the nature of art, and who,
in
central
passages, treats art as life." Eliot once also alluded disparagingly to
Hazlitt's criticism (to the "uninterestingness," as I remember it, of his
mind) ; Mr. Wellek, at the same time that he sees perfectly clcarly how
limited Hazlitt was on the side of analysis and of aesthetic theory, has
written so sympathetically of what is
interesting
in him-particularly of
hi£ primacy in the criticism that depends on evocation, metaphor, and
personal reference-as to have initiated, surely, a reinstatement of Haz–
litt in the ranks of important critics. It is not fashionable, moreover,
to speak with respect of Victor Hugo either as poet or as critic, and
Mr. Wellek is perfectly aware of all that is windy, vague, pseudo–
prophetic in his critical writing. But he is aware also of the presence
in it of "profound insights and brilliant formulas"; he has discovered
certain passages in Hugo's book on Shakespeare "which show a re–
markable insight into a mythic conception of poetry and anticipate the
Jungian view of literature as a creation of 'archetypal patterns.' " Anothc
ancestor is thus happily rescued from the mausoleum.
What makes it possible for Mr. Wellek to carry on these revisions,
these rescues and rejections, is that he is not committed to any sim–
plistic, reductive, and illiberal conception of what criticism
ought
to
be. He is committed to
a
conception of it, as everyone knows who ha5
read his and Austin Warren's
Theory of Literature;
and no such reader
would expect him to attempt the history of modern criticism in the
spirit of an impossible, professorial impartiality or "pure" objectivity.
He has a sharp eye for what is really obsolete in neo-classicism-its
incapacity, for example, to think historically-and for what is sterile in
some romanticisms-their tendency, for example, to identify and con–
fme poetry and prophecy. He is writing quite deliberately from the
point of view of the literary mentality of our time, with our insistence
on drawing clear lines between what is a work of art and what is simply
vital reality, with our bias toward the operocentric (if I may use an
ugly word for concentration on the individual work), with our emphasis
