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History and Criticism: A Problematic Relationship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

W. K. Wimsatt Jr.
W. K. Wimsatt Jr.*
Affiliation:
Yale University New Haven, Conn.
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Extract

The Topic which I am undertaking to discuss—that of the relation between history and literary criticism—is one which today apparently invites the polemic style. I wish, however, to forego that style and at the same time to refrain from the special defence of, or attack upon, any critic or historian or any school of critics or historians. What I have in mind is the delineation of a certain issue which arises between literary criticism and historical scholarship. This issue I look upon as something unavoidably problematic, part of a troublesome opposition which runs through all our experience—between the particular and the universal, between the contingent and what is in any sense necessary, probable, or ideal, between what merely was and what in any way is. We may think Aristotle's statement that poetry is a more serious and a more philosophic thing than history only a rude beginning of theory (unhappily antithetical), but it is a beginning of something which can scarcely be left alone. The problematic relation between history and criticism has always existed. It may have been adjusted during one long epoch of our tradition, the classical, by a certain neglect of the claims of history. The modern advance of historical techniques and consequent sharpening of historical conscience have, however, sufficiently reasserted the problem and sufficiently increased its difficulty.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 66 , Issue 1 , February 1951 , pp. 21 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951

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References

1 J. Dover Wilson, ed. King Henry V (Cambridge, 1947), p. lvii.

2 Spenser's Acrasia and the Circe of the Renaissance,“ JHI, iv (1943), 381-399.

3 By Laurens J. Mills (Bloomington, Ind., 1937), p. 258.

4 My own emphasis falls upon the second of these words.

5 Dante (New York, 1922), p. 32.

6 A British critic has recently alluded to the “truism” that the life of poetry “is in the present or nowhere; it is alive in so far as it is alive for us”—F. R. Leavis, Revaluation (New York, 1947), Introd., p. 2.

7 Henry V … A Facsimile of the First Folio Text, ed. J. Dover Wilson (London, [1931]), Introd.

8 Greg actually says nothing about the relation of textual study to the evaluation of King Lear or to that of any other literary work. He does offer several illustrations of a somewhat different sort: “It was the displacement of certain quires in the manuscript of The Testament of Love that concealed Thomas Usk's authorship of the work, and the correction of that error that enabled Henry Bradley to read his anagram aright, and so dispose finally of the attribution to Chaucer. … Without the accidental preservation of the original form of pages … altered or suppressed, we should still be wondering over the genesis of the Harvey-Nashe quarrel and as to why Jonson and Chapman went to jail for writing Eastward Ho” (Groningen, n.d., pp. 4-5). These are striking examples “of the service performed by bibliographical investigation to textual and literary studies.” But what kind of literary studies? It is only fair to say that the term “Literary Criticism” in Greg's title is meant to include a number of things, among which he explains that “aesthetic criticism” is only one.

9 I beg leave to say very little about a certain other kind of history, what may be called the history of the detached fact—whether Cortez or Balboa gazed at the Pacific, whether Charles of Sweden was killed by a cannon ball or by a musket ball. The relatively casual relation of this kind of history to history as lexicography will scarcely be questioned.

10 April 28, 1945, p. 200, review of Gerald E. Bentley, Shakespeare and Jonson, Their Reputations in the Seventeenth Century Compared (Chicago, 1945).

11 P. B. Coremans, Van Meegeren's Faked Vermeers and De Hooghs,A Scientific Examination (Amsterdam, 1949), pp. 26, 34, 35. It is not essential to my argument that the evaluation of Dr. Coremans be the correct one, and that the negative view of certain other critics, notably M. M. Van Dantzig (Johannes Vermeer, De “Emmausgangers” en de Critici, Leyden, 1947), be mistaken. In either case, the emphasis on authenticity prevails. The impression which I myself receive from the reproductions is that the Disciples at Emmaus is remarkably unlike Vermeer in certain ways and remarkably like certain erotic and mystical drawings of Van Meegeren, but that it may be nevertheless a very fine picture.

12 Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us (New York, 1935), p. 335.

13 “Shakespeare's Judgment Equal to his Genius.”