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Theory of Literature
Wolfflin's theory may help us in classifying works of art and
establishing or rather confirming the old action-reaction, con-
vention-revolt, or seesaw type of dualistic evolutionary scheme,
which, however, confronted with the reality of the complex
process of literature, falls far short of coping with the highly
diversified pattern of the actual development.
The transfer of Wolfflin's pairs of concepts also leaves one
important problem completely unsolved. We cannot explain in
any way the undoubted fact that the arts did not evolve with
the same speed at the same time. Literature seems sometimes to
linger behind the arts: for instance, we can scarcely speak of an
English literature when the great English cathedrals were being
built. At other times music lags behind literature and the other
arts: for instance, we cannot speak of "Romantic" music before
1800, while much Romantic poetry preceded that date. We have
difficulty in accounting for the fact that there was "picturesque"
poetry at least sixty years before the picturesque invaded archi-
tecture 26 or for the fact, mentioned by Burckhardt, 27 that
Nencia, the description of peasant life by Lorenzo Magnifico,
preceded by some eighty years the first genre pictures of Jacopo
Bassano and his school. Even if these few examples were
wrongly chosen and could be refuted, they raise a question which
cannot be answered by an over-simple theory according to which,
let us say, music is always lagging by a generation after poetry. 28
Obviously a correlation with social factors should be attempted,
and these factors will vary in every single instance.
We are finally confronted with the problem that certain times
or nations were extremely productive only in one or two arts,
while either completely barren or merely imitative and derivative
in others. The flowering of Elizabethan literature, which was not
accompanied by any comparable flowering of the fine arts, is a
case in point ; and little is gained by speculations to the effect that
the "national soul," in some way, concentrated on one art or that,
as Emile Legouis phrases it in his History of English Literature,
"Spenser would have become a Titian or Veronese had he been
born in Italy or a Rubens or Rembrandt in the Netherlands." 29
In the case of English literature it is easy to suggest that Puri-
tanism was responsible for the neglect of the fine arts, but that is
scarcely enough to account for the differences between the pro-