Marxism and Literature
I
LET us begin with Marx and Engels. What was the role assigned to literature and art in the system of Dialectical Materialism? This role was much less cut-and-dried than is nowadays often supposed. Marx and Engels conceived the forms of human society in any given country and epoch as growing out of the methods of production which prevailed at that place and time; and out of the relations involved in the social forms arose a ‘superstructure’ of higher activities such as politics, law, religion, philosophy, literature, and art.
These activities were not, as is sometimes assumed, wholly explicable in terms of economics. They showed the mould, in ways direct or indirect, of the social configuration below them, but each was working to get away from its roots in the social classes and to constitute a professional group, with its own discipline and its own standards of value, which cut across class lines. These departments ‘all react upon one another and upon the economic base. It is not the case that the economic situation is the sole active cause and everything else only a passive effect. But there is a reciprocal interaction within a fundamental economic necessity, which in the last instance always asserts itself’ (Engels to Hans Starkenburg, January 25, 1894). So that the art of a great artistic period may reach a point of vitality and vision where it can influence the life of the period down to its very economic foundations. Simply, it must cease to flourish with the social system which made it possible by providing the artist with training and leisure, even though the artist himself may have been working for the destruction of the system.
II
Marx and Engels, unlike some of their followers, never attempted to furnish social-economic formulas by which the validity of works of art might be tested. They had grown up in the sunset of Goethe before the great age of German literature was over, and they had both in their youth set out to be poets; and they responded to imaginative work, first of all, on its artistic merits. They could ridicule a trashy writer like Eugène Sue for what they regarded as his petit bourgeois remedies for the miseries of contemporary society (The Holy Family); they could become bitter about Ferdinand Freiligrath, who had deserted the Communist League and turned nationalist in 1870 (Marx to Engels, August 22, 1870). And Marx could even make similar jibes at Heine when he thought that the latter had stooped to truckling to the authorities or when he read the expressions of piety in his will (Marx to Engels, December 21, 1866 and May 8, 1856). But Marx’s daughter tells us that her father loved Heine ‘as much as his work and was very indulgent of his political shortcomings. He used to say that the poets were originals, who must be allowed to go their own way, and that one should n’t apply to them the same standards as to ordinary people.’
It was not characteristic of Marx and Engels to judge literature — that is, literature of distinction and power — in terms of its purely political tendencies. In fact, Engels always warned the socialist novelists against the dangers of Tendenz-Literatur (Engels to Minna Kautsky, November 26, 1885; to Margaret Harkness, April 1888). In writing to Minna Kautsky about one of her novels, he tells her that the personalities of her hero and heroine have been dissolved in the principles they represent. ‘You evidently,’ he says, ‘felt the need of publicly taking sides in this book, of proclaiming your opinions to the world. . . . But I believe that the tendency should arise from the situation and the action themselves without being explicitly formulated, and that the poet is not under the obligation to furnish the reader with a ready-made historical solution for the future of the conflict which he describes.’
When Ferdinand Lassalle sent Marx and Engels his poetic tragedy, Franz von Sickingen, and invited them to criticize it, Marx replied that, ‘setting aside any purely critical attitude toward the work,’ it had on a first reading affected him powerfully — characteristically adding that upon persons of a more emotional nature it would doubtless produce an even stronger effect; and Engels wrote that he had read it twice and had been moved by it so profoundly that, he had been obliged to lay it aside in order to arrive at any critical perspective. It was only after pulling themselves together and making some purely literary observations that they were able to proceed to discuss, from their special historical point of view, the period with which the drama dealt and to show how Lassalle’s own political position led him to mistake the rôle of his hero.
Æschylus Marx loved for his grandeur and for the defiance by Prometheus of Zeus; Goethe they both immensely admired: Engels wrote of him as a ‘colossal’ and ‘universal’ genius whose career had been marred by an admixture in his character of the philistine and the courtier (German Socialism in Verse and Prose); Shakespeare Marx knew by heart and was extremely fond of quoting, but never — despite the long, learned, and ridiculous essays which have appeared in the Soviet magazine, International Literature — attempted to draw from his plays any general social moral.
So far, indeed, was Marx from having worked out a systematic explanation of the relation of art to social arrangements that he could assert, apropos of Greek art, in his Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, that ‘certain periods of highest development of art stand in no direct connection with the general development of society, nor with the material basis and the skeleton structure of its organization.’
III
With Marx and Engels there is not yet any tendency to specialize art as a ‘weapon.’ They were both too much under the influence of the ideal of the many-sided man of the Renaissance, of the ‘complete’ man, who, like Leonardo, had been painter, mathematician, and engineer, or, like Machiavelli, poet, historian, and strategist, before the division of labor had had the effect of splitting up human nature and limiting everyone to some single function (Engels’s preface to his Dialectic and Nature). But with Lenin we come to a Marxist who is specialized himself as an organizer and fighter.
Like most Russians, Lenin was sensitive to music; but Gorky tells us that on one occasion, after listening to Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata and exclaiming that he ‘would like to listen to it every day: it is marvelous superhuman music — I always think with pride . . . what marvelous things human beings can do,’ he screwed up his eyes and smiled sadly and added: ‘But I can’t listen to music too often. It affects your nerves, makes you want to say stupid, nice things, and stroke the heads of people who could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you must n’t stroke anyone’s head — you might get your hand bitten off.’ Yet he was fond of fiction, poetry, and the theatre, and by no means doctrinaire in his tastes. Krupskaya tells how, on a visit to a Youth Commune, he asked the young people, ‘What do you read? Do you read Pushkin?’ ‘“Oh, no!” someone blurted out. “He was a bourgeois. Mayakovsky for us.” Ilyitch smiled. “I think Pushkin is better.’”
Gorky says that one day he found Lenin with War and Peace lying on the table: ‘Yes, Tolstoy. I wanted to read over the scene of the hunt, then remembered that I had to write a comrade. Absolutely no time for reading.’ . . . ‘Smiling and screwing up his eyes, he stretched himself deliciously in his armchair and, lowering his voice, added quickly, “What a colossus, eh? What a marvelously developed brain! Here’s an artist for you, sir. And do you know something still more amazing? You could n’t find a genuine muzhik in literature till this count came upon the scene.”’
In his very acute essays on Tolstoy, he deals with him much as Engels deals with Goethe — with tremendous admiration for Tolstoy’s genius, but with an analysis of his nonresistance and mysticism, of which Lenin of course disapproved, in terms not, it is interesting to note, of the psychology of the landed nobility, but of the patriarchal peasantry with whom Tolstoy had identified himself. And Lenin’s attitude toward Gorky was much like that of Marx toward Heine. He suggests in one of his letters that Gorky would be helpful as a journalist on the side of the Bolsheviks, but adds that he must n’t be bothered if he is busy writing a book.
IV
Trotsky is much more a literary man than Lenin was, and he published in 1924 a most remarkable study called Literature and Revolution. In this book he tried to illuminate the problems which were arising for Russian writers with the new society of the Revolution. And he was obliged to come to grips with a question with which Marx and Engels had not been much concerned — the question of what Mr. James T. Farrell in A Note on Literary Criticism, one of the few sensible recent writings on this subject, calls ‘the carry-over value’ of literature.
Marx had assumed the value of Shakespeare and the Greeks and more or less left it at that. But what, the writers in Russia were now asking, was to be the value of the literature and art of the ages of barbarism and oppression in the dawn of socialist freedom ? What in particular was to be the status of the culture of that bourgeois society from which socialism had just emerged and of which it still bore the unforgotten scars? Would there be a new proletarian literature, with new language, new style, new form, to give expression to the emotions and ideas of the new proletarian dictatorship? There had been in Russia a group called the Proletcult, which aimed at monopolizing the control of Soviet literature; but Lenin had discouraged and opposed it, insisting that proletarian culture was something which could not be produced synthetically and by official dictation of policy, but only by natural evolution as a ‘development of those reserves of knowledge which society worked for under the oppression of capitalism, of the landlords, of the officials.’
Now, in Literature and Revolution, Trotsky asserted that ‘such terms as “proletarian literature” and “proletarian culture” are dangerous, because they erroneously compress the culture of the future into the narrow limits of the present day.’ In a position to observe from his Marxist point of view the effects on a national literature of the dispossession of a dominant class, he was able to see the unexpected ways in which the presentments of life of the novelists, the feelings and images of the poets, the standards themselves of the critics, were turning out to be determined by their attitudes toward the social-economic crisis. But he did not believe in a proletarian culture which would displace the bourgeois one. The bourgeois literature of the French Revolution had ripened under the old régime; but the illiterate proletariat and peasantry of Russia had had no chance to produce a culture, nor would there be time for them to do so in the future, because the proletarian dictatorship was not to last: it was to be only a transition phase and to lead the way to ‘a culture which is above classes and which will be the first truly human culture.’ In the meantime, the new socialist literature would grow directly out of the literature which had been produced during the domination of the bourgeoisie. Communism had as yet no artistic culture; it had only a political culture.
V
All this seems reasonable enough to us. But, reasonable and cultured as Trotsky is, ready as he is to admit that ‘one cannot always go by the principles of Marxism in deciding whether to accept or reject a work of art,’ that such a work ‘should be judged in the first place by its own law — that is, by the law of art,’ there is none the less in the whole situation something which is alien to us. We are not accustomed, in our quarter of the world, either to having the government attempt to control literature and art or to having literary and artistic movements try to identify themselves with the government. Yet Russia, since the Revolution, has had a whole series of cultural groups which have attempted to dominate literature either with or without the authority of the government; and Trotsky himself, in his official position, even in combating these tendencies, cannot avoid passing censure and pinning ribbons.
Sympathizers with the Soviet régime used to assume that this state of affairs was inseparable from the realization of socialism: that its evils would be easily outgrown and that in any case it was a fine thing to have the government take so lively an interest in culture. Yet I believe that this view was mistaken. Under the Tsar, imaginative literature in Russia played a rôle which was probably different from any role it had ever played in the life of any other nation. Political and social criticism, pursued and driven underground by the censorship, was forced to incorporate itself in the dramatic imagery of fiction. This was certainly one of the principal reasons for the greatness during the nineteenth century of the Russian theatre and novel, for the mastery by the Russian writers — from Pushkin’s time to Tolstoy’s — of the art of implication. In the fifties and sixties the stories of Turgenev, which seem mild enough to us to-day, were capable of exciting the most passionate controversies — and even, in the case of A Sportsmans Sketches, causing the dismissal of the censor who had passed it — because each was regarded as a political message.
Ever since the Revolution, literature and politics in Russia have remained inextricable. But after the Revolution the intelligentsia themselves were in power; and it became plain that in the altered situation the identification of literature with politics was liable to terrible abuses. Lenin and Trotsky, Lunacharsky and Gorky, worked sincerely to keep literature free; but they had at the same time, from the years of the Tsardom, a keen sense of the possibility of art as an instrument of propaganda. Lenin took a special interest in the moving pictures from the propaganda point of view; and the first Soviet films, by Eisenstein and Pudovkin, were masterpieces of implication, as the old novels and plays had been. But Lenin died; Trotsky was exiled; Lunacharsky died. The administration of Stalin, unliterary and uncultivated himself, slipped into depending more and more on making use of literature as a means of manipulating a population of whom, before the Revolution, 70 or 80 per cent had been illiterate and who could not be expected to be critical of what they read.
Gorky seems to have exerted what influence he could in the direction of liberalism: to him was due, no doubt, the liquidation of RAPP, the latest of the efforts at cultural monopolization, and the opening of the Soviet canon to the best contemporary foreign writing and the classics. But though this made possible more freedom of form and a wider range of reading, it could not, under the dictatorship of Stalin, either stimulate or release a living literature. Where no political opposition was possible, there was possible no political criticism; and in Russia political questions involve vitally the fate of society. What reality can there be for the Russians, the most socially-minded writers on earth, in a freedom purely ‘æsthetic’? Even the fine melodramatic themes of the post-revolutionary cinema and theatre, with their real emotion and moral conviction, have been replaced by simple trash not very far removed from Hollywood, or by dramatized exemplifications of the latest ‘directive’ of Stalin.
The recent damning of the music of Shostakovich on the ground that the commissars were unable to hum it seems a withdrawal from the liberal position. And it is probable that the death of Gorky, as well as the imprisonment of Bukharin and Radek, has removed the last brakes from a precipitate descent, in the artistic as well as the political field, into a nightmare of informing and repression. The practice of deliberate falsification of social and political history which began at the time of the StalinTrotsky crisis and which has now attained proportions so fantastic that the government does not seem to hesitate to pass the sponge every month or so over everything that the people have previously been told and to present them with a new and contradictory version of their history, their duty, and the characters and careers of their leaders — this practice cannot fail in the end to corrupt every department of intellectual life, till the serious, the humane, and the clearsighted must simply, if they can, remain silent.
VI
Thus Marxism in Russia for the moment has run itself into a blind alley — or rather, it has been put down a well. The Soviets seem hardly at the present time to have retained even the Marxist political culture, even in its cruder forms — so that we are relieved from the authority of Russia as we are deprived of her inspiration. To what conclusions shall we come, then, at this time of day about Marxism and literature — basing our views not even necessarily upon texts from the Marxist Fathers, but upon ordinary common sense? Well, first of all, that we can go even further than Trotsky in one of the dicta I have quoted above and declare that Marxism by itself can tell us nothing whatever about the goodness or badness of a work of art. A man may be an excellent Marxist, but if he lacks imagination and taste he will be unable to make the choice between a good book and an inferior book, both of which are ideologically unexceptionable. What Marxism can do, however, is throw a great deal of light on the origins and social significance of works of art.
The study of literature in its relation to society is as old as Herder — and even Vico. Coleridge had flashes of insight into the connection between literature and society, as when he saw the Greek state in the Greek sentence and the individualism of the English in the short separate statements of Chaucer’s Prologue. But the great bourgeois master of this kind of criticism was Taine, with his race and moment and milieu; yet Taine, for all his scientific professions, responded artistically to literary art, and responded so vividly that his summings-up of writers and re-creations of periods sometimes rival or surpass their subjects. Marx and Engels further deepened this study of literature in relation to its social background by demonstrating inescapably for the first time the importance of economic systems. But if Marx and Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, are worth listening to on the subject of books, it is not merely because they created Marxism, but also because they were capable of literary appreciation.
VII
But the man who tries to apply Marxist principles without real understanding of literature is liable to go horribly wrong. For one thing, it is usually true in works of the highest order that the purport is not a simple message, but a complex vision of things, which itself is not explicit but implicit; and the reader who does not grasp them artistically, but is merely looking for simple social morals, is certain to be hopelessly confused. Especially will he be confused if the author does draw an explicit moral which is the opposite of or has nothing to do with his real meaning.
Friedrich Engels, in the letter to Margaret Harkness already referred to above, in warning her that the more the novelist allows his political ideas to ‘ remain hidden, the better it is for the work of art,’ says that Balzac, with his reactionary opinions, is worth a thousand of Zola, with all his democratic ones. (Balzac was one of the great literary admirations of both Engels and Marx, the latter of whom had planned a book on him to follow Das Kapital.) He points out that Balzac himself was, or believed himself to be, a legitimist, who was deploring the decline of high society; but that actually ‘his irony is never more bitter, his satire never more trenchant, than when he is showing us these aristocrats . . . for whom he felt so profound a sympathy,’ and that ‘the only men of whom he speaks with undissimulated admiration are his most determined political adversaries, the republican heroes of the Cloître-Saint-Merri, the men who at that period (1830-1836) truly represented the popular masses.’ Nor does it matter necessarily in a work of art whether the characters are shown engaged in a conflict which illustrates the larger conflicts of society or in one which from that point of view is trivial. In art — it is quite obvious in music, but it is also true in literature — a sort of law of moral interchangeability prevails: we may transpose the actions and the sentiments that move us into terms of whatever we do or are. Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.
When Proust, in his wonderful chapter on the death of the novelist Bergotte, speaks of those moral obligations which impose themselves in spite of everything and which seem to come through to humanity from some source outside its wretched self (obligations ‘invisible only to fools — and are they really to them?’) he is describing a kind of duty which he felt only in connection with the literary work which he performed in his dark and fetid room; yet he speaks for every moral, æsthetic, or intellectual passion which holds the expediencies of the world in contempt. And the hero of Thornton Wilder’s Heaven’s My Destination, the traveling salesman who tries to save souls in the smoking car and writes Bible texts on hotel blotters, is something more than a symptom of Thornton Wilder’s religious tendencies; he is the type of all saints who begin absurdly; and Wilder’s story would be as true of the socialist Upton Sinclair as of the Christian George Brush. Nor does it necessarily matter, for the moral effect of a work of literature, whether the forces of bravery or virtue with which we identify ourselves are victorious or vanquished in the end. In Hemingway’s story ‘The Undefeated,’ the old bullfighter who figures as the hero is actually humiliated and killed, but his courage has itself been a victory. It is true, as I. Kashkin, the Soviet critic, has said, that Hemingway has written much about decadence, but in order to write tellingly about death you have to have the principle of life, and those that have it will make it felt in spite of everything.
VIII
The leftist critic with no literary competence is always trying to measure works of literature by tests which have no validity in that field. And one of his favorite occupations is concocting directions and working out diagrams for the construction of ideal Marxist books. Such formulas are, of course, perfectly futile. The rules observed in any given school of art become apparent, not before, but after the actual works of art have been produced. As we were reminded by Burton Rascoe at the time of the Humanist controversy, the æsthetic laws involved in Greek tragedy were not formulated by Aristotle until at least half a century after Euripides and Sophocles were dead. And the behavior of the Marxist critics has been precisely like that of the Humanists. The Humanists knew down to the last comma what they wanted a work of literature to be, but they never were able to find any contemporary work which fitted their specifications (with the possible exception, when pressed, of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, about which they had, however, some hesitation). The Marxists did just the same thing.
In an article called ‘The Crisis in Criticism’ in the New Masses of February 1933, Granville Hicks drew up a list of requirements which the ideal Marxist work of literature must meet. The primary function of such a work, he asserted, must be to ‘lead the proletarian reader to recognize his rôle in the class struggle’ — and (1) it must therefore ’directly or indirectly show the effects of the class struggle’; (2) ‘the author must be able to make the reader feel that he is participating in the lives described’; and, finally, (3) the author’s point of view must ‘be that of the vanguard of the proletariat; he should be, or should try to make himself, a member of the proletariat.’ This formula, he says, ‘gives us ... a standard by which to recognize the perfect Marxian novel ’ — and adds, ‘No novel as yet written perfectly conforms to our demands.’ But the doctrine of ‘ socialist realism ’ promulgated at the Soviet Writers’ Congress of August 1934 was only an attempt, on a larger scale to legislate masterpieces into existence — a kind of attempt which always indicates sterility on the part of those who engage in it, and which always actually works, if it has any effect at all, to legislate existing good literature out of existence and to discourage the production of any more.
The prescribers for the literature of the future have usually some great figure of the past whom they regard as having fulfilled their conditions and whom they are always bringing forward to demonstrate the inferiority of the literature of the present. As there has never existed a great writer who really had anything in common with these critics’ conception of literature, they are obliged to provide imaginary versions of what their ideal great writers are like. The Humanists had Sophocles and Shakespeare; the socialist realists had Tolstoy. Yet it is certain that if Tolstoy had had to live up to the objectives and prohibitions which the socialist realists proposed he could never have written a chapter; and that if Babbitt and More had been able to enforce against Shakespeare their moral and æsthetic injunctions he would never have written a line. And the misrepresentation of Sophocles, which has involved even a tampering with his text in the interests not merely of Humanism, but of academic classicism in general, has been one of the scandalous absurdities of scholarship.
The Communist critical movement in America, which had for its chief spokesman Mr. Hicks, tended to identify its ideal with the work of John Dos Passos. In order to make this possible, it was necessary to invent an imaginary Dos Passos. This ideal Dos Passos was a Communist, who wrote stories about the proletariat, at a time when the real Dos Passos was engaged in bringing out a long novel about the effects of the capitalist system on the American middle class and had announced himself — in the New Republic in 1930 — politically a ‘middle-class liberal.’ The ideal Dos Passos was something like Gorky without the moustache — Gorky, in the meantime, having himself undergone some transmogrification at the hands of Soviet publicity — and the myth was maintained until the Communist critics were finally compelled to repudiate it, not because they had acquired new light on Dos Passos the novelist and dramatist, but because of his attitude toward events in Russia.
IX
The object of these formulas for the future, as may be seen from the above quotations from Mr. Hicks, is to make of art an effective instrument for the class struggle. And we must deal with the dogma that ‘art is a weapon.’ It is true that art may be a weapon; but in the case of some of the greatest works of art, some of those which have the longest carry-over value, it is difficult to see that any important part of this value is due to their direct functioning as weapons. The Divine Comedy, in its political aspect, is a weapon for Henry of Luxemburg, whom Dante — with his mediæval internationalism and his lack of sympathy with the nationalistic instincts which were impelling the Italians of his time to get away from their Austrian emperors — was so passionately eager to impose on his countrymen. To-day we may say with Carducci that we would as soon see the crown of his ‘good Frederick’ rolling in Olona vale: ‘Jove perishes; the poet’s hymn remains.’ And, though Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V are weapons for Elizabethan imperialism, their real centre is not Prince Hal but Falstaff; and Falstaff is the father of Hamlet and of all Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, who, if they illustrate any social moral, — such as that Renaissance princes, supreme in their little worlds, may go to pieces in all kinds of terrible ways for lack of a larger social organism to restrain them, — do so evidently without Shakespeare’s being aware of it.
If these works may be spoken of as weapons at all, they are weapons in the more general struggle of modern European man emerging from the Middle Ages and striving to understand his world and himself—a function for which ‘weapon’ is hardly the right word. The truth is that there is short-range and long-range literature. Long-range literature attempts to sum up wide areas and long periods of human experience, or to extract from them general laws; shortrange literature preaches and pamphleteers with a view to an immediate effect. A good deal of the recent confusion of our writers in the leftist camp has been due to their not understanding, or being unable to make up their minds, whether they were aiming at long-range or shortrange writing.
X
This brings us to the question of what sort of periods are most favorable for works of art. One finds an assumption on the Left that revolutionary or prerevolutionary periods are apt to produce new and vital forms of literature. This, of course, is very far from the truth in the case of periods of revolution. The more highly developed forms of literature require leisure and a certain amount of stability; and the writer during a period of revolution is usually deprived of both. The literature of the French Revolution consisted of the orations of Danton, the journalism of Camille Desmoulins, and the few political poems that André Chenier had a chance to write before they cut off his head. The literature of the Russian Revolution was the political writing of Lenin and Trotsky, and Alexander Blok’s poem, ‘The Twelve,’ almost the last fruit of his genius before it was nipped by the wind of the storm.
As for prerevolutionary periods, in which the new forces are fermenting, they may be great periods for literature — as the eighteenth century was in France and the nineteenth century in Russia (though here there was a decadence after 1905). But the conditions which give rise to the great literature are apparently not the impending revolutions, but the phenomenon of highly developed literary technique in the hands of any writer who derives strength from a set of strongly established institutions. He may reflect an age of transition, but it will not necessarily be true that his face is turned squarely toward the future. The germs of the Renaissance are in Dante and the longing for a better world in Vergil, but neither Dante nor Vergil can in any real sense be described as a revolutionary writer: they sum up or write elegies for ages that are passing. The social organisms which give structure to their thought — the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church — are already showing signs of decay.
It is impossible, therefore, to identify the highest creative work in art with the most active moments of creative social change. The writer who is seriously intent on producing long-range works of literature should, from the point of view of his own special personal interests, thank his stars if there is no violent revolution going on in his own country in his time. He may disapprove of the society he is writing about, but if it were disrupted by an actual upheaval he would probably not be able to write.
XI
But what about ‘proletarian literature’ as an accompaniment of the social revolution? In the earlier days of the Communist régime in Russia, one used to hear about Russian authors who, in the effort to eliminate from their writings any vestige of the bourgeois point of view, had reduced their vocabulary and syntax to what they regarded as an A B C of essentials — with the result of becoming more unintelligible to the proletarian audience at whom they were aiming than if they had been symbolist poets. (Indeed, the futurist poet Mayakovsky has since that time become a part of the Soviet canon.) Later on, as I have said, Soviet culture followed the road Trotsky recommended: it began building again on the classics and on the bourgeois culture of other countries and on able revolutionary Russian writers who had learned their trade before the Revolution.
‘ Soviet publishers ’ — I quote from the Russian edition of International Literature, issue 2 of 1936 — ‘are bringing out Hemingway and Proust not merely in order to demonstrate “bourgeois decay.” Every genuine work of art — and such are the productions of Hemingway and Proust — enriches the writer’s knowledge of life and heightens his {esthetic sensibility and his emotional culture — in a word, it figures, in the broad sense, as a factor of educational value. Liberated socialist humanity inherits all that is beautiful, elevating, and sustaining in the culture of previous ages.’ The truth is that the talk in Soviet Russia about proletarian literature and art has resulted from the persistence of the same situation which had led Tolstoy under the old régime to wear the muzhik’s blouse and to take up carpentry, cobbling, and ploughing: the difficulty experienced by an educated minority, who made up only about 20 per cent of the population, in getting in touch with the illiterate majority.
In America the situation is quite different. The percentage of illiterates in this country is only something like 4 per cent; and there is relatively little difficulty of communication between different social groups. Our development away from England, and from the Old World generally, in this respect — in the direction of the democratization of the language — is demonstrated clearly in H. L. Mencken’s book on the American Language; and if it is a question of either the use for high literature of the language of the people or the expression of the dignity and importance of the ordinary man, the country which has produced Leaves of Grass and Huckleberry Finn has certainly nothing to learn from Russia. We had created during our pioneering period a literature of the common man’s escape, not only from feudal Europe, but also from bourgeois society, many years before the Russian masses were beginning to write their names. There has been a section of our recent American literature of the last fifteen years or so — the period of the boom and the depression — which has dealt with our industrial and rural life from the point of view of the factory hand or the poor farmer under conditions which were forcing him to fight for his life, and this has been called proletarian literature; but it has been accompanied by books on the white-collar worker, the storekeeper, the well-to-do merchant, the scientist, and the millionaire in situations equally disastrous or degrading. And this whole movement of critical and imaginative writing — though with some stimulus, certainly, from Russia — had come quite naturally out of our literature of the past. It is curious to observe that one of the best of the recent strike novels, The Land of Plenty by Robert Cantwell, himself a Westerner and a former mill worker, owes a great deal to Henry James.
XII
Yet when all these things have been said, all the questions have not been answered. All that has been said has been said of the past; and Marxism is something new in the world: it is a philosophical system which leads directly to programmes of action. Has there ever appeared before in literature such a phenomenon as M. André Malraux, who alternates between attempts, sometimes successful, to write longrange fiction on revolutionary themes, and exploits of aviation for the cause of revolution in Spain? Here creative political action and the more complex kind of imaginative writing have united at least to the extent that they have arisen from the same vision of history and have been included in the career of one man.
The Marxist vision of Lenin — Vincent Sheean has said it first — has in its completeness and its compelling force a good deal in common with the vision of Dante; but, partly realized by Lenin during his lifetime and still potent for some years after his death, it was a creation, not of literary art, but of actual social engineering. It is society itself, says Trotsky, which under Communism becomes the work of art. The first attempts at this art will be inexpert and they will have refractory material to work in; and the philosophy of the Marxist dialectic involves idealistic and mythological elements which have led too often to social religion rather than to social art. Yet the human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of re-creating human society; and how can we doubt that, as it acquires the power, it must emerge from what will seem by comparison the revolutionary ‘underground’ of art as we have always known it up to now and deal with the materials of actual life in ways which we cannot now even foresee?
This is to speak in terms of centuries, of ages; but, in practising and prizing literature, we must not be unaware of the first efforts of the human spirit to transcend literature itself,