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REVIEWS ENGLISH LITERARY CRITICISM: THE RENASCENCEl H. s. WILSON The historian of literary criticism has a thankless role. If his aim is to record the opinions that have come down to us concerning the art of writing, his task js well-nigh endless. He must give the gist of thousands upon thousands of dull pages of rules and formulas; he must relate the squabbles of the coteries, and the bandyings of authorities by means of which teachers have endeavoured to enforce their opinions in the schools; and amid the welter of changing and discarded tastes, he must try to distinguish and suitably commend to the reader the few pages of golden counsel that have desc.ended from Aristotle's time to ours. All but the stoutest-hearted may well quail at the mere thought of such an undertaking . There are, to be sure, certain ways of simplifying the task. Professor George Saintsbury, a generation ago, devoted some of his enormous energy and enthusiasm to A History of Criticism and Literary Taste, from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day, in which he undertook to give chiefly the results of his sifting of the fine gold of criticism, with casual and entertaining comments upon the baser ore. His volumes contain an interesting record of the critical principles and tastes of their worthy author but they do not constitute a "history" in any other sense. The commoner expedient is to attempt the history of literary criticism for only a limited period and from a special and limited point of view. Thus in the period of the Renaissance , J. E. Spingarn's Literary Criticism in the Renaissance provides the best account of the background of seventeenth-century classicism, and this study has been admirably continued in R. Bray's La Formation de la doctrine classique en France. But Spingarn's .work attains its special concentration at the expense of ignoring the greater part of the literary theory in the period of which he treats-that which concerns rhetoric-and it too is a "history" in but a limited sense. It is the distinction of Professor Atkins that he has given us an historical survey of literary theory and criticism in antiquity that is more up-to-date, more thorough and conscientious in its coverage, and, on the whole, more readable, than any other account in English;2 that he has explored the wilderness of medieval theorizing in a volume which, though necessarily more restricted in scope, is nevertheless packed with useful information and provides the only treatment of its theme in English that is worth close attention ;3 and finally that, in the volume here under review, he has examined the documents of English criticism for the Renaissance with the laudable purpose of systematic thoroughness. This is more than 1English Literary Criticism: The Ren.ascence. By J. W. H. Atkins. London: Methuen [Toronto: SaundersJ. 1947. Pp. xii, 371. ($4.25) 2Literary Criticism in Antiquity (Cambridge, 1934), 2 vols. 3English Literary Criticism: The Medieval Phase (Cambridge, 1943). 402 REVIEWS 403 any other writer in the field has attempted in recent times, and for the magnitude of the undertaking alone, it deserves to be considered with respect. In English Literary Criticism: The RenascenceJ Professor Atkins begins with a survey of the critical stimulus that came to England by way" of the Italian humanists of the fiftet;.nth century. Proceeding, then, with a chapter on the critical ideas and teachings in the writings of the founders of English humanism, Colet, Erasmus, and Vives, he next considers briefly the rhetorical tradition of the schools, with special reference to Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique. Successive chapters deal with "The Defence of Poetry" (Willis, Lodge, Sidney) ; "The Art of Poetry" (Gascoigne, Harvey, E. K., Webbe, Puttenham); the miscellaneous criticism of Nashe, Harington, Daniel, Meres, and Hall. There is a chapter ·on dramatic criticism, and the four concluding chapters trace the later critical developments of the period through Chapman, Bacon, Ben Jonson, and others, to the time of Milton. · Where so much is offered, backed by a perspective ·of the historical development of the critical tradition such as Professor Atkins commands and by a body of learning so thorough...

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