The first two volumes of René Wellek's projected four-volume "History of Modern Criticism" carries the story from the later eighteenth century through the Romantic Age. By "modern" Mr. Wellek means criticism which is close enough to us still to have some relevance to our present way (or ways) of looking at literature. (p. 24)

I can think of no one better qualified than Mr. Wellek for the task of writing the history of modern European criticism. In the first place, he knows the languages and the literatures at first hand, and he is at home in the whole European literary scene in a way that few contemporary English or American scholars can claim to be. Whether he quotes from Wackenroder, Chateaubriand, or Manzoni, we know he has read them in their original languages, and is not dependent on summaries in works of reference. Secondly, he has devoted many years to research and reflection both on the most fruitful ways of discussing and exploring a work of literary art (the record of this is in "Theory of Literature" …) and on the development throughout the centuries of a critical and methodological apparatus adequate for the writing of literary history (recorded in his "Rise of English Literary History").

Perhaps, indeed, Mr. Wellek is too well qualified. He has lived for years in a world of critical theory; he has crossed swords with other critics and scholars in debating such questions as: "Was there really a Romantic movement?"; he has scratched his head over the question of the mode of existence of a work of literary art; he has observed, recorded, classified, corrected, blessed, and at the same time participated in that enormous mass of modern critical discussion which has not only given us the so-called "New Criticism" but has made ours the critical age par excellence, unprecedented for the abundance, complexity, subtlety, and professional specialization of its literary criticism. He is by temperament a theorist, and patently enjoys discussing and recording the theories of others.

Mr. Wellek is thus committed to modern criticism, to the view of literature elaborated in "Theory of Literature." And this means that his new history is written from the point of view of a benevolent (but sometimes, in spite of himself, irascible) observer on the summit, watching the struggles of climbers below as they endeavor to climb upwards…. [Those who] laudably move upwards but are prevented by fatigue from reaching the summit … are praised for moving in the right direction and indicating the true path to those behind.

There are advantages in this. George Saintsbury, whose monumental "History of Criticism" is the only rival to the present work, and will certainly, as far as the period from 1750 goes, be superseded by it, had to guide him only a post-romantic impressionism and a general sense that liberation from neoclassic rules and the development of a critical relativism was a Good Thing; as a result, he found it impossible to keep his history from degenerating into a series of extended notes, some of them based on hasty and careless reading of the sources. Mr. Wellek knows better than that. Whenever one of the critics he is discussing shows signs of extending the meaning of poetry into some vague, all-inclusive amalgam of art and life, philosophy and religion, he is sternly reproved…. This is the history of criticism written from a clearly defined standpoint: the author is continually assessing the degree to which a particular critic contributed to our mature modern view of literature, and he gives praise or blame according to whether his man points forward to or leads away from—shall we say Wellek and Warren?

Sometimes we feel that Wellek has not done a particular critic justice; that he is so concerned to relate him to the modern movement, either positively or negatively, or to place him in the context of "neo-classic" or "romantic" thought, that he has not sufficiently considered what the critical position being discussed really amounts to. I cannot help feeling that he misunderstands Shelley's "Defense of Poetry" quite radically, because he is looking at it in a wrong context, and that he misses the significance of Wordsworth's having shifted critical attention from the relation of the work of art to the nature which it professes to imitate to the relation between the work of art and the state of mind of the artist who begets it. (pp. 24-5)

One may make minor reservations, but there can be no doubt of the importance of this work. The combination of scholarly and critical apparatus is formidable. There is no other history of criticism like it, none which combines its scope with its sense of contemporary relevance. The next two volumes (which we are told are in active preparation) should be even more useful and interesting. We await them with eagerness. (p. 25)