theoryofliteratu00inwell

266 Theory of Literature
one could argue with Schopenhauer, has always reached its goal.
It never improves, and cannot be superseded or repeated. In art
we need not find out "wie es eigentlich gewesen"—as Ranke put
the aim of historiography—because we can experience quite di-
rectly how things are. So literary history is no proper history
because it is the knowledge of the present, the omnipresent, the
eternally present. One cannot deny, of course, that there is some
real difference between political history and the history of art.
There is a distinction between that which is historical and past
and that which is historical and still somehow present.
As we have shown before, an individual work of art does not
remain unchanged through the course of history. There is, to be
sure, a substantial identity of structure which has remained the
same throughout the ages. But this structure is dynamic; it
changes throughout the process of history while passing through
the minds of readers, critics, and fellow-artists. The process of
interpretation, criticism, and appreciation has never been com-
pletely interrupted and is likely to continue indefinitely, or at
least so long as there is no complete interruption of the cultural
tradition. One of the tasks of the literary historian is the descrip-
tion of this process. Another is the tracing of the development
of works of art arranged in smaller and larger groups, according
to common authorship, or genres, or stylistic types, or linguistic
tradition, and finally inside a scheme of universal literature.
But the concept of the development of a series of works of art
seems an extraordinarily difficult one. In a sense each work of
art is, at first sight, a structure discontinuous with neighboring
works of art. One can argue that there is no development from
one individuality to another. One meets even with the objection
that there is no history of literature, only one of men writing. 12
Yet according to the same argument we should have to give up
writing a history of language because there are only men uttering
words or a history of philosophy because there are only men
thinking. Extreme "personalism" of this sort must lead to the
view that every individual work of art is completely isolated,
which, in practice, would mean that it would be both incommu-
nicable and incomprehensible. We must conceive rather of lit-
erature as a whole system of works which is, with the accretion