The institution of criticism in the eighteenth century

Abstract

Starting in the late seventeenth century, observers throughout Europe agree that never before had the world seen so many critics. ‘[T]ill of late years England was as free from Criticks, as it is from Wolves’ , Thomas Rymer attests in his Preface to Rapin (1674) - the work that launched the word's popularity in England - though ‘our Neighbour Nations have got far the start of us’. ‘Criticism’ had entered the vernacular languages from Latin around 1600, first in France and later in England, where Dryden was the first to use it; it arrived in Germany only about 1700, but by 1781 we have the testimony of Kant's first Critique , testimony as well to the term's extraordinary breadth of meaning for the period: ‘Our age is in every sense of the word the age of criticism [ Kritik ], and everything must submit to it.’ The eighteenth century inherited from the seventeenth a primary meaning of ‘criticism’ as a range of activities including grammar, rhetoric, history, geography, and such newly named studies as ‘palaeography’ - the whole range of textually based learning pursued by Renaissance humanists; as Bayle said, ‘le règne de la critique’ began with the revival of letters. This is how the term is defined from Bacon to Jean Le Clerc's great Ars critica , first published in 1697 and much reprinted. In this sense ‘criticism’ appears as a synonym for ‘grammar’, ‘philology’, ‘erudition’, and even ‘literature’, as it still does for instance in Marmontel's entry ‘Critique, s.f.’ in the Encyclopédie; in the Dictionary of 1755, Johnson defines ‘Philology’ simply as ‘Criticism; grammatical learning’. Eighteenth-century writers both refine and extend this definition.

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