theoryofliteratu00inwell

mere period labels :
Literary History 281
one word cannot carry a dozen connotations.
But the skeptical conclusion which would abandon the problem
is equally mistaken, as the concept of period is certainly one of
the main instruments of historical knowledge.
The further and wider problem, a history of a national litera-
ture as a whole, is harder to envisage. It is difficult to trace the
history of a national literature as an art when the whole framework
invites to references essentially unliterary, to speculations
about national ethics and national characteristics which have little
to do with the art of literature. In the case of American litera-
ture, where there is no linguistic distinction from another na-
tional literature, the difficulties become manifold, since the development
of the art of literature in America must be necessarily
incomplete and partly dependent on an older and stronger tra-
dition. Clearly, any national development of the art of literature
presents a problem which the historian cannot afford to ignore,
though it has scarcely ever been investigated in any systematic
fashion. Needless to say, histories of groups of literatures are
even more distant ideals. The existent examples, such as Jan
Machal's Slavonic Literatures or Leonardo Olschki's attempt to
write a history of all Romance literatures during the Middle
Ages, are not too successful. 35 Most histories of world literature
are attempts to trace the main tradition of European literature
united by their common descent from Greece and Rome, but
none of these have gone beyond ideological generalities or super-
ficial compilations unless possibly the brilliant sketches by the
brothers Schlegel, which hardly serve contemporary needs. 36
Finally, a general history of the art of literature is still a far dis-
tant ideal. The existing attempts, like John Brown's History of
the Rise and Progress of Poetry dating from 1763, are too
speculative and schematic, or else, like the Chadwicks' three volumes
on The Growth of Literature, preoccupied with questions
of static types of oral literature. 37
After all, we are only beginning to learn how to analyze a
work of art in its integrity; we are still very clumsy in our
methods, and their basis in theory is still constantly shifting.
Thus, much is before us. Nor is there anything to regret in the
fact that literary history has a future as well as a past, a future
which cannot and should not consist merely in the filling of