theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and the Other Arts 129
working on them. Many parallels between the arts are possible
only because they ignore the utterly different social background
to which the individual work of art appealed or from which it
seems to be derived. The social classes either creating or demanding
a certain type of art may be quite different at any one
time or place. Certainly the Gothic cathedrals have a different
social background from the French epic; and sculpture fre-
quently appeals to and is paid for by a very different audience
from the novel. Just as fallacious as the assumption of a common
social background of the arts at a given time and place is the
usual assumption that the intellectual background is necessarily
identical and effective in all the arts. It seems hazardous to in-
terpret painting in the light of contemporary philosophy: to
mention only one example, Karoly Tolnai X1 has attempted to
interpret the pictures of the elder Brueghel in evidence of a
pantheistic monism paralleling Cusanus or Paracelsus and an-
ticipating Spinoza and Goethe. Even more dangerous is an "explanation"
of the arts in terms of a "time spirit," as practiced by
German G eistes geschichte y a movement which we have criticized
in a different context. 12
The genuine parallelisms which follow from the identical or
similar social or intellectual background scarcely ever have been
analyzed in concrete terms. We have no studies which would
concretely show how, for example, all the arts in a given time
or setting expand or narrow their field over the objects of
"nature," or how the norms of art are tied to specific social
classes and thus subject to uniform changes, or how aesthetic
values change with social revolutions. Here is a wide field for
investigation which has been scarcely touched, yet promises con-
crete results for the comparison of the arts. Of course, only
similar influences on the evolution of the different arts can be
proved by this method, not any necessary parallelism.
Obviously, the most central approach to a comparison of the
arts is based on an analysis of the actual objects of art, and thus
of their structural relationships. There will never be a proper
history of an art, not to speak of a comparative history of the
arts, unless we concentrate on an analysis of the works themselves
and relegate to the background studies in the psychology
of the reader and the spectator or the author and the artist as