I

Writing his book, Breakdown, several years ago, Robert Briffault attacked what he Called 'vulgarian individualism':—

In very much the same manner as predatory individualism does not produce things for their own sake, but for the sake of profits, so vulgarian individualism is incapable of rejoicing in things for their own sake. It subordinates every form of gratification to the display of that gratification to itself and to others. Its pleasures are a form of the violent assertion of its success . . . . The vulgarian is not so much anxious to enjoy himself as to persuade himself and others that he is enjoying himself. He may be seen trying to be gay, trying to be drunk, trying to be dissipated . . .

Bourgeois writers early realised this. The very titles of their works mirrored their Views"—" The Waste Land; Those Barren Leaves; Told by an Idiot (Rose Macaulay); Rejected Guest (Aldington). The nemesis of disillusion and cynicism was and still is the most favoured of the Muses. Here and there we find a feeble attempt to combat it by a portrayal of individual victories over the hollowness of life (e.g. The Rains Came).

What, however, have been the main reactions of bourgeois artists to the cultural decay of our day? Firstly there is the deification of the individual. The individual is abstracted from the social environment, there is a flight from reality to mysticism, to infinite and absolute sources of intelligence and wisdom, to crime, to pornography. The heroes of this literature are isolated dreamers, neurotics, thieves, prostitutes, Police sleuths, hooligans. So we haveUlysses, Eyeless in Gaza, Marcel Proust, the Welter of detective fiction, sex fiction (such a book as Margueritte's La Garconne reflects perfectly the sex-cult of modern society), and the pullulating witty satirist-poets who are so particularly noticeable in French literature— Jacob, Luebeck, Morand, Pellerin, Soupault . . . . Co-ordinate with this went the view of the mechanical man of the future, the cipher, the robot, the view so perfectly expressed in Brave New World. Never was the intellectual's refusal to bear witness to the real human Struggle of his age so clearly demonstrated. We need another Carlyle to scourge his Contemporaries, the Carlyle who wrote—

In good truth, if many a sickly and sulky Byron, or Byronet, glooming over the Woes of existence, and how unworthy God's Universe is to have so distinguished a resi page 10 dent, could transport himself into the patched coat and sooty apron of a Sheffield blacksmith, made with a strange feelings and faculties as he, made by God Almighty one as he was, —it would throw a light on much for him.

(Misc. Essays—Corn-Law Rhymes).

One line of reaction hastened a development which had begun in earnest with the French Parnassian school of poetry (this itself had quickly become 'une poesie sterilisee par l'indigence du fond et viciee par les raffinements de la forme')—the development of formalism, not only in literature, but in art generally, and especially, perhaps, in painting.

Modern artists experimenting with form unrelated to anything but the most abstract and therefore attenuated and unconvincing feelings, produce pictures of lines and triangles like jigsaw puzzles, deliberately pursuing form without content, emptying the baby out with the bath. And so we have our Cubism and Vorticism and a multitude of -isms. (H. Levy—Thinking.)

A further comments is added by Apollinaire, a supporter of Cubism, when he writes That 'painters, if they still observe nature, no longer copy it, and carefully avoid the Representation of natural scenes which have either been observed, or reconstructed by study . . . . Art is now austere; and the most touchy senator would find nothing in it requiring censure. It is known that one of the reasons for the success of Cubism in "la bonne societe" is this very austerity.'¹

Parallel with, and twin to this reaction went its opposite— surrealism, the uninterrupted developments of the earliar romanticism, acknowledging as its god Professor sigmund Freud; surrealism— the open page of the imagination, the wider margin of what Freud calls the preconscious mind.' (Herbert Read.) This is another of the supreme gifts of individualism—mystic and escapist works which only the artist himself can understand. The poetry of a Cocteau can be rivalled only by the prose of Finnegan's Wake. Spearman, in his Creative Mind, points out that there was in painting a striking rapport with the work of the schizophrenic insane— For this embarrassing situation two solutions were found. One was for the artists to follow the insane. The other was for the insane to become artists. Both solutions have had their followers— with honours divided.'

Finally, there was a feature which characterized many of the new schools— the refusal to see man any longer in time (see Joyce, Proust; cf. Berkeley Square), a phenomenon of the refusal to see man in his historical setting, to see man in the process of creating himself by creating his environment.

How our modernity
Nerve-wracked and broken, turns
Against time's way and all the way of things,
Crying with weak and egoistic cries.²

(On the time question see Wyndham Lewis—Time and Western Man; Spender in Penguin New Writing No. 3; Ralph Fox— The Novel and the People, pp. 89-90.)

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The whole outlook of bourgeois literature is pessimistic. (The only 'joyous' literature is escapist, and escapism is fundamentally pessimistic because its pleasures are sought not in the real but in the unreal. Hence it never satisfies.) Artistically this takes its rise in the revolt of writers such as Flaubert and Leconte de lisle, who both exercised a tremendous influence on subsequent writers (cf. F. M. Hueffer— Thus to Revisit), against the rapidly-developed industrial capitalism of their time. A dumb fatalism is their answer. Carried on by many writers, notable by Hardy, this has become the main philosophy of bourgeois literature today. Doubt in the morrow and the study of a past idealised by comparison with the dead end of the contemporary world has lead to the overthrow of time, to erudition, obscurity, and the realms of philosophical idealism and mysticism. And this predilection has been enormously strengthened by the steady decay of imperialist culture, by the contradictions of socialised production and capitalist distribution, of scientific progress and ever-recurring wars, and by the growth and the threat of Fascism.

II

But such is not the complete picture of contemporary literature. Many of the writers mentioned above are without doubt great artists—there are few who would deny this—but by their false view of society, by their distortion of the human personality, and by their frenzied escape into sordid isolation, they must stand down before those writers who, though perhaps not so talented, are preserving the historical association of literature with the people, with man as the creative factor in history, who have seen that 'reality is created by the inexhaustible and intelligent will of man, and that its development will never be arrested' (Gorky); who realise that the corruption which disgusts the bourgeois writer is not the result of a moral disease but of a social system in decay. These are the writers of social realism. Gorky has said—

Myth is invention. To invent means to extract from the sum of a given reality its cardinal idea and embody it in imagery—that is how we got realism. But if to the idea extracted from the given reality we add—completing the idea by the logic of the hypothesis— the desired, the possible, and thus supplement the image, we obtain that romanticism which is at the basis of myth and which is highly beneficial in that it tends to provoke a revolutionary attitude to reality, an attitude that changes the world in a practical way. ³

The artist must have, as fielding said, 'a quick and sagacious penetration into the true essence of all the objects of our contemplation.' i.e, he must not only know reality as it is, but where it is going. In imperialist society, America has produced more and better artist along this line than England. 'English writers have been slow to abandon the liberal attitude of their predecessors. But the last few years have shown an ever-quickening responsibility. The threat of Fascism has been more persuasive than the traditional poverty with which capitalist society has always rewarded the artist. The ivory towers are draughty nowadays. It's warmer in the street.' ⁴

Engels wrote to Miss Harkness in 1888 that 'the revolutionary resistance of the page 12 working class against the oppression of its environment, its feverish attempts, conscious or half-conscious, to obtain its human rights are a part of history and may demand a place in the sphere of realism." These writers are convinced that the class struggle and the role of the proletariat do demand a place in the sphere of realism. In fact, these features of contemporary life are so important that a book which portrays modern society otherwise presents a false picture. 'We are living in an epoch of deep-rooted changes in the old way of life, in an epoch of man's awakening to a sense of his own dignity, when he has come to realise himself as a force which is actually changing himself.'

It was certain that this literature could not escape the accusation of dogmatism. That the accusation is untrue is merely proof of the situation portrayed by these writers. To quote Engels again— 'I am far from finding fault,' he tells Miss Harkness. 'with your not having written a pinchbeck Socialist novel, a "tendenz Roman" as we Germans call it, to glorify the social and political views of the author.' The out-look is not preached but appears naturally from the circumstances and the characters themselves. It is not a dogma, but a guide to action based on fact. As Radek puts it:—

Realism does not mean the embellishment or arbitrary selection of revolutionary Phenomena; it means reflecting reality as it is, in all its complexity, in all its contrariety, and not only capitalist reality, but also that other, new reality— the reality of socialism. .

Yet it is true that some writers have written from a dogmatic point of view. Splender has in particular pointed out this fault. Bukharin explains it thus—

The tendency which can frequently be observed in our own Marxian ranks—namely, a purely nihilistic attitude to the problem of form as such— is entirely wrong. In such an event literary research resolves itself into nothing but a superficial social-class characterization of the so-called ideological content of the poetic work, which, in Its bare, rudimentary and over-simplified form, is carried over into the characterization of the poet as a poet. As we have seen, however, form and content constitute a unity, but a unity of contradictions. Moreover, such an attitude leads people to understand by 'content' what is, properly speaking, the ideological source of the content, and not its artistic transformation.

The best representative of these writers have, however, not fallen into this trap. The subject-matter, imagery, and style of the writer of social realism do not lose all individuality, are not reduced to uniformity. We have only to read U.S.A., The Grapes of Wrath, The Magnetic Mountain, On the Frontier, to see this. And the tremendous development of the short story by socialist writers finally removes the accusation.

With Radek, we do not doubt that the time is coming when a great revolutionary literature will be created, and these are undoubtedly its beginnings.