"There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless." The stoic, melancholy tone is that of Jorge Luis Borges, of course….

We live in a terminal ward; the air our minds breathe is sighed out by dying ideas. Ecology demands that they be sanitarily interred; piety prays that we revere them. In the history of ideas, especially literary ideas, no embalmer is more industrious than René Wellek. Discriminations is the latest in his collection of amber-tinted antiques: It includes essays on the terms comparative literature, classicism, and symbolism, and surveys of Kant's aesthetics, of English literary historiography, of genre theory, and of Dostoevsky criticism. Almost inevitably the approach is historical; Wellek goes as far back toward Genesis as possible and then tracks an idea doggedly through the ages….

An idea or term so tracked emerges into the present looking rather tattered and scarcely fit for further use, but with an air of fallen grandeur about it. Wellek praises Leo Spitzer because "he could focus on the learned key-words of our civilization and write word history within a general history of thought, combine lexicography with the history of ideas." The aim is Wellek's too, and the achievement. The result is a wake on a large scale, as after a massacre, but without whiskey or music.

In the words of Nabokov's poet John Shade …, Wellek is "a preterist: one who collects cold nests." The living birds have long left most of the nests in Wellek's display; the nests have become mere chapters—if not paragraphs or names—in the history of ideas; and the musing reader can invent no thought, no feeling, no cry of dismay that does not immediately take its place with the others, classified and labeled. "All is relative!" he cries, and the ancient holiday fear of relatives mounts the spine.

The title Discriminations is an awkward one for this collection. When Wellek attempts precision, he is shaky: "Style in this sense is identical with great art. It is a critical concept, a criterion of excellence." When he makes a discriminating judgment we wince: Dostoevsky, he tells us, is "a novelist, a supreme creator of a world of imagination, an artist with a deep insight into human conduct and the perennial condition of man." At his best Wellek is a collector—and yet human too, as he reveals in discussing Georg Lukács' Aesthetik: "I have counted the phrase 'Wiederspiegelung der Wirklichkeit' in the first volume; it appears 1,032 times. I was too lazy or bored to count it in Volume Two."