THE CRITICISM OF LITERATURE CHAPTER I CRITICISM AND THE CRITIC THE history of literary criticism shows that there have been two departments of criticism, theory and practice. Until the seventeenth century, however, we look almost in vain for critical accounts of individual books and authors. There was in the ancient world an occasional critic like Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who wrote a series of comments on Greek authors, or Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, whom Saintsbury calls the patriarch of book reviewers.1 Comments here and there in letters or in the course of treatises on critical theory are to be found, but their sum is very small. On the other hand, there are many systems of Poetics, as they were called, such as those of Aristotle, Horace, and Boileau, to cite three authors whose influence upon critical theory was very great. These make two attempts: first, to define literature, or usually, as the name suggests, poetry, for prose as an art form was of comparatively late development; second, to construct rules for the composition of epic, tragedy, and comedy. By implication, of course, standards are set up for good epic, 1A History of Criticism, Vol. I, p. 184. Photius wrote Bibliotheca, which purports to be an account of 280 authors whose works he had recently read. 1 |