theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and the Other Arts 1 3
share much more fully in "aesthetic measure" than literature.
The problem of the parallelism of the arts early suggested
the application to literature of style-concepts arrived at in the
history of the arts. In the eighteenth century, innumerable com-
parisons were made between the structure of Spenser's Faerie
Queene and the glorious disorder of a Gothic cathedral. 17 In
The Decline of the West, analogizing all the arts of a culture,
Spengler speaks of the "visible chamber music of the bent fur-
niture, the mirror rooms, pastorals and porcelain groups of the
eighteenth century," mentions the "Titian style of the mad-
rigal," and refers to the "allegro feroce of Franz Hals and the
andante con moto of Van Dyck." 18 In Germany this mode of
analogizing the arts has incited copious writing on the Gothic
man and the spirit of the Baroque, has led to the literary use
of the terms "Rococo" and "Biedermeier." In the periodization
of literature, the clearly worked-out sequence of art styles of
Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Romanticism, Bieder-
meier, Realism, Impressionism, Expressionism has impressed
literary historians and has imposed itself also on literature. The
styles named are grouped into two main groups, presenting fundamentally
the contrast between the Classical and the Romantic
Gothic, the Baroque, Romanticism, Expressionism appear on
one line 5 the Renaissance, Neo-Classicism, Realism on the other.
Rococo, Biedermeier, can be interpreted as late decadent, florid
variations of the preceding styles—respectively Baroque and
Romanticism. Frequently the parallelisms are pressed very
hard j and it is easy to pick out absurdities from the writings of
even the most reputable scholars who have indulged in the
method. 19
The most concrete attempt to transfer the categories of art
history to literature is Oskar Walzel's application of Wolfflin's
criteria. In his Principles of Art History, 20 Wolmin distin-
guished, on purely structural grounds, between Renaissance and
Baroque art. He constructed a scheme of contraries applicable to
any kind of picture, piece of sculpture, or specimen of architec-
ture in the period. Renaissance art, he held, is "linear," while
Baroque art is "painterly." "Linear" suggests that the outlines
of figures and objects are drawn clearly, while "painterly" means
that light and color, which blur the outlines of objects, are them-
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