theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and the Other Arts 133
to show that Shakespeare's technique is the same as that of
Baroque art, while Corneille and Racine, who composed their
tragedies around one central figure and distributed the emphasis
among the acts according to a traditional Aristotelian pattern,
are assigned to the Renaissance type. In a little book, Wechsel-
seitige Erhellung der Kiinste, and in many later writings, 24
Walzel tried to elaborate and justify this transfer, at first rather
modestly and then with increasingly extravagant claims.
Some of Wolfflin's categories can clearly and rather easily be
reformulated in literary terms. There is an obvious opposition
between an art which prefers clear outlines and distinct parts
and an art with looser composition and blurred outlines. Fritz
Strich's attempt to describe the opposition between German
Classicism and Romanticism by applying Wolfflin's categories
devised for the Renaissance and Baroque shows that these cate-
gories, liberally interpreted, can restate the old oppositions be-
tween the perfect Classical poem and the unfinished, frag-
mentary, or blurred Romantic poetry. 25 But we are then left with
only one set of contraries for all the history of literature. Even
reformulated in strictly literary terms, Wolfflin's categories help
us merely to arrange works of art into two categories which,
when examined in detail, amount only to the old distinction between
classic and romantic, severe and loose structure, plastic
and picturesque art : a dualism which was known to the Schlegels
and to Schelling and Coleridge and was arrived at by them
through ideological and literary arguments. Wolfflin's one set of
contraries manages to group all Classical and pseudo-Classical
art together, on the one hand, and on the other to combine
very divergent movements such as the Gothic, the Baroque, and
Romanticism. This theory appears to obscure the undoubted and
extremely important continuity between the Renaissance and
Baroque, just as its application to German literature by Strich
makes an artificial contrast between the pseudo-Classical stage in
the development of Schiller and Goethe and the Romantic
movement of the early nineteenth century, while it must leave
the "Storm and Stress" unexplained and incomprehensible. Actually,
German literature at the turn of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries forms a comparative unity which it seems
absurd to break up into an irreconcilable antithesis. Thus,