theoryofliteratu00inwell

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Theory of Literature
forget the likenesses, and positive analogy, in so far as it tends to
emphasize the likenesses among the happenings or productions
of a particular period and to forget the differences. The Ro-
mantic and the Baroque periods have proved to be particularly
happy hunting grounds for such exercises of ingenuity.
A good example is Meissner's Die geisteswissenschajtlichen
Grundlagen des englischen Literaturbarocks (1934), which defines
the spirit of the age as a conflict of antithetic tendencies and
pursues this formula relentlessly through all human activities
from technology to exploration, from traveling to religion. The
material is neatly ordered into such categories as expansion and
concentration, macrocosmos and microcosmos, sin and salvation,
faith and reason, absolutism and democracy, "atectonics" and
"tectonics." By such universal analogizing, Meissner arrives at
the triumphant conclusion that the Baroque age showed conflict,
contradiction, and tension throughout its manifestations. There
were active men interested in conquering nature and praising
war j there were passionate collectors, travelers, adventurers -,
but there were also contemplative men who sought out solitude
or founded secret societies. Some people were fascinated by the
new astronomy, while others, the diarists, analyzed personal
states of mind or drew the individual features of men like the
painters of portraits. There were some who believed in the divine
right of kings and others who believed in an equalitarian de-
mocracy. Everything exemplifies thus the principle either of con-
centration or of expansion. If we want concentration in literature,
we are presented with the plain style of prose promoted by the
Royal Society after the Restoration. If we want expansion, we
are shown the long involved sentences of Milton or Sir Thomas
Browne. Like his fellow workers, Meissner never asks the ob-
vious but fundamental question whether the same scheme of
contraries could not be extracted from almost any other age. Nor
does he raise the question whether we could not impose a com-
pletely different scheme of contraries on the seventeenth century,
and even on the basis of the same quotations, drawn from his wide
reading.
Similarly, Korff's large books reduce all and everything to the
thesis, "rationalism," the antithesis, "irrationalism," and their
synthesis, "Romanticism." Rationalism quickly assumes in Korff