1. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Works , VIII, 224.

2. For an enlightening discussion of interdisciplinary studies, directions, and methodological pitfalls, see New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation (September 1972), especially essays by J. Seznec and A. Fowler. For a discussion of historical methodology and Hegel, see E. H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford, 1969), especially pp. 32-50. Gombrich specifically addresses the issue of Hegelian Zeitgeist (much as Seznec addresses l'air de famille ): "Hegel," Gombrich writes, "saw all periods as movements since they were embodiments of the moving spirit" (p. 35); Gombrich feels that much art history and interdisciplinary history presumes an Hegelian metaphysics, even when metaphysics per se is replaced by a kind of "stylistic formalism" such as that advanced by Heinrich Wölfflin in Renaissance and Baroque (1888). Gombrich objects to Hegel's assertion that a nation's "religion, constitution, morality, law, customs, science, art, and technology" are all "concrete manifestations of the national Spirit'' (p. 10); such belief Gombrich feels is reductive, a false ordering of events and a violation of any belief in the individual. Gombrich indicts historians and scholars who feel "consciously or unconsciously, that if they let go of the magnet (the 'essence,' 'Spirit,' common 'core') that created the pattern, the atoms of past cultures would again fall back into random dustheaps." The questions I am asking of literature and architecture represent an attempt to avoid any assumption of "magnets"; and Gombrich, both personally and through his scholarship, has guided me in the formulation of many of my questions. For this direction, I am indebted and thankful.

While New Literary History looks mainly at interdisciplinary studies in the 1960s and early 1970s, J. Hagstrum in The Sister Arts (Chicago, 1958) summarizes interdisciplinary studies to the late 1950s, mentioning as he does so the methodological principles and mistakes of earlier studies. See espe- soft

cially his introduction. One of the frequent targets of criticism most recently has been M. Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton, 1969), a work which unfortunately does assume a common spirit of the age. Ironically for us, in terms of the concerns of this book, Praz equates memory (his work is a tribute to the Goddess Mnemosyne) with art in a general sense; qualified, "aesthetic memory" (unlike "practical memory") is characterized "by its incapacity to be realized on the level of the senses," so becoming the unifier of the arts and the rationale for Praz's critical view. For an intelligent critical essay on Praz's study (which, incidentally, is mentioned throughout the issue cited of New Literary History ) see B. Richards, Essays in Criticism , 21 (1971), 325.

3. The question regarding the selection of art-models is one which avoids the belief that separate aspects of culture reflect and proceed from one privileged center.

4. For discussions of hypotheses, proofs, observation, and theory, see the works of K. R. Popper, especially Conjectures and Refutations (London, 1963) and The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York, 1961). Regarding theories, Popper writes, "Theories are our own inventions, our own ideas; they are not forced upon us, but are our self-made instruments of thought: this has been clearly seen by the idealist. But some of these theories of ours can clash with reality; and when they do, we know that there is a reality; that there is something to remind us of the fact that our ideas may be mistaken. And this is why the realist is right" ( Conjectures and Refutations , p. 117). Popper, to whom Gombrich acknowledges indebtedness in Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York, 1961), advances the notion of "critical rationalism" in which one attempts never to "prove positively" (since one always can) a theory but to ''test" it by an attempt "to falsify it, or to refute it" ( Conjectures and Refutations , p. 36). I personally have been attempting not to prove a theory but to document and record the occurrence of a theory, or various theories as stated by others and to discuss what I feel to be the implications of these theories. break