theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and Ideas ill
sibly even more abundant. Numberless are the interpretations of
Dante's theology. In France, M. Gilson has applied his learning
in medieval philosophy to the exegesis of passages in Rabelais
and Pascal. 8 Paul Hazard has written skillfully on the Crisis of
European Consciousness toward the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury, tracing the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment and,
in a new work, their establishment throughout Europe. 9 In Germany,
studies abound on Schiller's Kantianism, Goethe's con-
tacts with Plotinus and Spinoza, Kleist's with Kant, Hebbel's
with Hegel, and such topics. In Germany, indeed, the collabora-
tion between philosophy and literature was frequently extremely
close, especially during the Romantic period, when Fichte,
Schelling, and Hegel lived with the poets and when even as
pure a poet as Holderlin thought it incumbent upon him to
speculate systematically on questions of epistemology and meta-
physics. In Russia, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy have been treated
frequently simply as philosophers and religious thinkers, and
even Pushkin has been made to yield an elusive wisdom. 10 At
the time of the Symbolist movement, a whole school of "metaphysical
critics" arose in Russia, interpreting literature in terms
of their own philosophical positions. Rozanov, Merezhkovsky,
Shestov, Berdayev, Volynsky, and Vyacheslav Ivanov all wrote
on Dostoevsky or around him, 11 sometimes using him merely as
a text for preaching their own doctrine, sometimes reducing him
to a system and, rarely, thinking of him as a tragic novelist.
But at the end, or better at the beginning, of such studies
some questions must be raised which are not always answered
clearly. How far do mere echoes of philosophers' thought in the
poet's work define the view of an author, especially a dramatic
author like Shakespeare? How clearly and systematically were
philosophical views held by poets and other writers? Isn't it fre-
quently an anachronism of the worst sort to assume that a writer
in older centuries held a personal philosophy, felt even the demand
for it, or lived among people who would encourage any
personal pattern of opinions or be interested in it? Do not liter-
ary historians frequently grossly overrate, even among recent
authors, the coherence, clarity, and scope of their philosophical
convictions?
Even if we think of authors who were highly self-conscious or