theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literary History 265
chronological order or in accordance with "schools" to see that
there is a history of the art of painting quite distinct from either
the history of painters or the appreciation or judgment of individual
pictures. It suffices to listen to a concert in which compo-
sitions are chronologically arranged to see that there is a history
of music which has scarcely anything to do with the biographies
of the composers, the social conditions under which the works
were produced, or the appreciation of individual pieces. Such
histories have been attempted in painting and sculpture ever
since Winckelmann wrote his Geschichte der Kunst im Alterturn,
and most histories of music since Burney have paid attention to
the history of musical forms.
Literary history has before it the analogous problem of trac-
ing the history of literature as an art, in comparative isolation
from its social history, the biographies of authors, or the appre-
ciation of individual works. Of course, the task of literary history
(in this limited sense) presents its special obstacles. Compared
to a painting, which can be seen at a glance, a literary work
of art is accessible only through a time sequence and is thus more
difficult to realize as a coherent whole. But the analogy of mu-
sical form shows that a pattern is possible, even when it can be
grasped only in a temporal sequence. There are, further, special
problems. In literature, there is a gradual transition from simple
statements to highly organized works of art, since the medium
of literature, language, is also the medium of everyday communication
and especially the medium of sciences. It is thus more
difficult to isolate the aesthetic structure of a literary work. Yet
an illustrative plate in a medical textbook and a military march
are two examples to show that the other arts have also their
borderline cases and that the difficulties in distinguishing between
art and non-art in linguistic utterance are only greater
quantitatively.
Theorists there are, however, who simply deny that literature
has a history. W. P. Ker argued, for instance, that we do not
need literary history, as its objects are always present, are
"eternal," and thus have no proper history at all. 10 T. S. Eliot
also would deny the "pastness" of a work of art. "The whole of
the literature of Europe from Homer," he says, "has a simul-
taneous existence and composes a simultaneous order." 1X Art,