Books in Brief

The Age of Wit, by D. Judson Milburn (Macmillan, $6.95). It is not difficult to see why this book was written: the period covered (1650-1750) is, if not an exciting, at least an interesting one in the realm of letters; and, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, “if a man had time to study the history of one word only, wit would perhaps be the best word he could choose.” What is difficult is to see why the book was published. This is not to say it is all bad. The last pages, on the degeneration of wit, might by themselves form a perceptive essay, and a useful supplement to Lewis’s remarks in his Studies on Words. So far, so good. But these pages occur at the end of a long and somewhat anecdotal account of the previous hundred years, enlivened, it is true, by opinions which are quite certainly original (that the Age of Wit shows “an organic concept of creativity, soon to flourish with Romanticism” or that the “grace” of the Ancients and the “gracefulness” of the eighteenth century are alike in being closely allied with metaphysical wit), and written in a style of which the following is a fair example:

Wit, under suspicion of favoring the enemy, imagination, actually deserted to it in this metaphysical context; for it used various traditions contrary to the strictures of judgment and neoclassical rules; irrational and extravagant fancy, the native strength and individuality of genius, the Platonic concept of the furor poeticus, and the elevated style of Longinian sublimity.

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The Age of Wit, by D. Judson Milburn (Macmillan, $6.95). It is not difficult to see why this book was written: the period covered (1650-1750) is, if not an exciting, at least an interesting one in the realm of letters; and, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, “if a man had time to study the history of one word only, wit would perhaps be the best word he could choose.” What is difficult is to see why the book was published. This is not to say it is all bad. The last pages, on the degeneration of wit, might by themselves form a perceptive essay, and a useful supplement to Lewis’s remarks in his Studies on Words. So far, so good. But these pages occur at the end of a long and somewhat anecdotal account of the previous hundred years, enlivened, it is true, by opinions which are quite certainly original (that the Age of Wit shows “an organic concept of creativity, soon to flourish with Romanticism” or that the “grace” of the Ancients and the “gracefulness” of the eighteenth century are alike in being closely allied with metaphysical wit), and written in a style of which the following is a fair example:

Wit, under suspicion of favoring the enemy, imagination, actually deserted to it in this metaphysical context; for it used various traditions contrary to the strictures of judgment and neoclassical rules; irrational and extravagant fancy, the native strength and individuality of genius, the Platonic concept of the furor poeticus, and the elevated style of Longinian sublimity.