Literature and Society - Text

Literature is a social institution, using as its medium language,  a social creation. Such traditional literary devices as symbolism and meter are social in their very nature. They are conventions and norms which could have arisen only in society. But, furthermore, literature "imitates" "life" 3 and "life" is, in large

measure, a social reality, even though the natural world and the inner or subjective world of the individual have also been objects of literary "imitation." The poet himself is a member of society, possessed of a specific social status: he receives some degree of social recognition and reward} he addresses an audience, however hypothetical. Indeed, literature has usually arisen in close connection with particular social institutions} and in primitive society we may even be unable to distinguish poetry

from ritual, magic, work, or play. Literature has also a social function, or "use," which cannot be purely individual. Thus a large majority of the questions raised by literary study are, at least ultimately or by implication, social questions: questions of tradition and convention, norms and genres, symbols and myths. With Tomars, one can formulate: "Esthetic institutions are not based upon social institutions: they are not even part of social institutions: they are social institutions of one type and intimately interconnected with those others." Usually, however, the inquiry concerning "literature and society" is put more narrowly and externally. Questions are asked about the relations of literature to a given social situation, to an economic, social, and political system. Attempts are made to describe and define the influence of society on literature and to prescribe and judge the position of literature in society. This

sociological approach to literature is particularly cultivated by those who profess a specific social philosophy. Marxist critics not only study these relations between literature and society, but also have their clearly defined conception of what these relations should be, both in our present society and in a future "classless" society. They practice evaluative, "judicial" criticism, based on non-literary political, and ethical criteria. They tell us not only what were and are the social relations and implications of an

author's work but what they should have been or ought to be.

They are not only students of literature and society but prophets of the future, monitors, propagandists; and they have difficulty in keeping these two functions separate. The relation between literature and society is usually discussed by starting with the phrase, derived from De Bonald, that "literature is an expression of society." But what does this axiom mean? If it assumes that literature, at any given time, mirrors the current social situation "correctly," it is false ; it is commonplace, trite, and vague if it means only that literature depicts some aspects of social reality. 3 To say that literature mirrors or expresses life is even more ambiguous. A writer inevitably expresses his experience and total conception of life ; but it would be manifestly untrue to say that he expresses the whole of life or even the whole life of a given time — completely and exhaustively. It is a specific evaluative criterion to say that an author

should express the life of his own time fully, that he should be "representative" of his age and society. Besides, of course, the terms "fully" and "representative" require much interpretation: in most social criticism they seem to mean that an author should be aware of specific social situations, e.g., of the plight of the proletariat, or even that he should share a specific attitude and ideology of the critic.

But it seems best to postpone the problem of evaluative criticism till we have disengaged the actual relations between literature and society. These descriptive (as distinct from normative) relations admit of rather ready classification. First, there is the sociology of the writer and the profession and Institutions of literature, the whole question of the economic basis of literary production, the social provenience and status of the writer, his social ideology, which may find expression in extraliterary pronouncements and activities. Then there is the problem of the social content, the implications and social purpose of the works of literature themselves. Lastly, there are the problems of the audience and the actual social influence of literature. The question how far literature is actually determined

by or dependent on its social setting, on social change and development, is one which, in one way or another, will enter into all the three divisions of our problem: the sociology of the writer, the social content of the works themselves, and the influence of literature on society. We shall have to decide what is meant by dependence or causation ; and ultimately we shall arrive at the problem of cultural integration and specifically at how our own culture is integrated.

Since every writer is a member of society, he can be studied as a social being. Though his biography is the main source, such a study can easily widen into one of the whole milieu from

which he came and in which he lived. It will be possible to accumulate information about the social provenience, the family background, the economic position of writers. We can show what

was the exact share of aristocrats, bourgeois, and proletarians in the history of literature; for example, we can demonstrate the predominant share which the children of the professional and

commercial classes take in the production of American literature. 4 Statistics can establish that, in modern Europe, literature recruited its practitioners largely from the middle classes, since

aristocracy was preoccupied with the pursuit of glory or leisure while the lower classes had little opportunity for education. In England, this generalization holds good only with large reservations. The sons of peasants and workmen appear infrequently in older English literature: exceptions such as Burns and Carlyle are partly explicable by reference to the democratic Scottish school system. The role of the aristocracy in English literature was uncommonly great — partly because it was less cut off from

the professional classes than in other countries, where there was no primogeniture. But, with a few exceptions, all modern Russian writers before Goncharov and Chekhov were aristocratic in

origin. Even Dostoevsky was technically a nobleman, though his father, a doctor in a Moscow Hospital for the Poor, acquired land and serfs only late in his life.

It is easy enough to collect such data but harder to interpret them. Does social provenience prescribe social ideology and allegiance? The cases of Shelley, Carlyle, and Tolstoy are obvious examples of such "treason" to one's class. Outside of Russia, most Communist writers are not proletarian in origin. Soviet and other Marxist critics have carried out extensive investigations to ascertain precisely both the exact social provenience and the social allegiance of Russian writers. Thus P. N. Sakulin bases his treat-

ment of recent Russian literature on careful distinctions between the respective literatures of the peasants, the small bourgeoisie, the democratic intelligentsia, the declasse intelligentsia, the

bourgeoisie, the aristocracy, and the revolutionary proletariat. In the study of older literature, Russian scholars attempt elaborate distinctions between the many groups and sub-groups of the Russian aristocracy to whom Pushkin and Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoy may be shown to have belonged by virtue of their inherited wealth and early associations. 6 But it is difficult to prove that Pushkin represented the interests of the impoverished landed nobility and Gogol those of the Ukrainian small landholder ; such a conclusion is indeed disproved by the general ideology of their works and by the appeal the works have made beyond the confines of a group, a class, and a time.

The social origins of a writer play only a minor part in the questions raised by his social status, allegiance, and ideology; for writers, it is clear, have often put themselves at the service of another class. Most Court poetry was written by men who, though born in lower estate, adopted the ideology and taste of their patrons. The social allegiance, attitude, and ideology of a writer can be studied not only in his writings but also, frequently, in biographical extra-literary documents. The writer has been a citizen, has pronounced on questions of social and political importance, has taken part in the issues of his time.

Much work has been done upon political and social views of individual writers; and in recent times more and more attention has been devoted to the economic implications of these views. Thus L. C. Knights, arguing that Ben Jonson's economic attitude was profoundly medieval, shows how, like several of his fellow dramatists, he satirized the rising class of usurers, monopolists, speculators, and "undertakers." s Many works of literature — e.g., the "histories" of Shakespeare and Swift's Gulliver's Travels —

have been reinterpreted in close relation to the political context of the time. Pronouncements, decisions, and activities should never be confused with the actual social implications of a writer's

works. Balzac is a striking example of the possible division j for, though his professed sympathies were all with the old order, the aristocracy, and the Church, his instinct and imagination were far more engaged by the acquisitive type, the speculator, the new strong man of the bourgeoisie. There may be a considerable difference between theory and practice, between profession of faith and creative ability.

These problems of social origins, allegiance, and ideology will, if systematized, lead to a sociology of the writer as a type, or as a type at a particular time and place. 10 We can distinguish between writers according to their degree of integration into the social process. It is very close in popular literature, but may reach the extremes of dissociation, of "social distance," in Bohemianism, with the foete maudit and the free creative genius. On the whole, in modern times, and in the West, the literary man seems to have lessened his class ties. There has arisen an "intelligentsia," a comparatively independent in-between class  of professionals. It will be the task of literary sociology to trace its exact social status, its degree of dependence on the ruling class, the exact economic sources of its support, the prestige of the writer in each society.

The general outlines of this history are already fairly clear. In popular oral literature, we can study the role of the singer or narrator who will depend closely on the favor of his public: the bard in ancient Greece, the scop in Teutonic antiquity, the professional folk-tale teller in the Orient and Russia. In the ancient Greek city state, the tragedians and such composers of dithyrambs and hymns as Pindar had their special, semireligious position, one slowly becoming more secularized, as we can see when we compare Euripides with Aeschylus. Among the Courts of the Roman Empire, we must think of Virgil, Horace, and Ovid as dependent on the bounty and good will of their Caesar and Maecenas.

In the Middle Ages, there are the monk in his cell, the troubadour and Minnes'dnger at the Court or baron's castle, the vagrant scholars on the roads. The writer is either a clerk or scholar, or he is a singer, an entertainer, a minstrel. But even kings like Wenceslaus II of Bohemia or James I of Scotland are now poets — amateurs, dilettantes. In the German Meistersang, artisans are organized in poetic guilds, burghers who practice poetry as a craft. With the Renaissance there arose a comparatively unattached group of writers, the Humanists, who wandered sometimes from country to country and offered their services to different patrons. Petrarch is the first modern foeta laureatuSy possessed of a grandiose conception of his mission, while Aretino is the prototype of the literary journalist, living on blackmail, feared rather than honored and respected. In the large, the later history is the transition from support by noble or ignoble patrons to that afforded by publishers acting as predictive agents of the reading public. The system of aristocratic patronage was not, however, universal. The Church and, soon, the theater supported special types of literature. In England, the patronage system apparently began to fail early in the eighteenth century. For a time, literature, deprived of its earlier benefactors and not yet fully supported by the reading public, was economically worse off. The early life of Dr. Johnson in Grub Street and his defiance of Lord Chesterfield symbolize these changes. Yet a generation earlier, Pope was able to amass a fortune from his translation of Homer, lavishly subscribed by nobility and university men.

The great financial rewards, however, came only in the nineteenth century, when Scott and Byron wielded an enormous influence upon taste and public opinion. Voltaire and Goethe had vastly increased the prestige and independence of the writer on the Continent. The growth of the reading public, the founding of the great reviews like the Edinburgh and the Quarterly , made literature more and more the almost independent "institution" which Prosper de Barante, writing in 1822, claimed it to have been in the eighteenth century. As Ashley Thorndike urged, the "outstanding characteristic of the printed matter of the nineteenth century is not its vulgarization, or its mediocrity, but rather its specialization. This printed matter is no longer addressed to a uniform or homogeneous public: it is divided up among many publics and consequently divided by many subjects, interests, and purposes." In Fiction and the Reading Public, which might well be considered a homily on Thorndike's text, Mrs. Q. D. Leavis 13 points out that the eighteenth-century peasant who learned to read had to read what the gentry and the university men read ; that the nineteenth century readers, on the other hand, are properly spoken of not as "the public" but as "publics." Our own time knows still further multiplications in publishing lists and magazine racks: there exist books for 9-10-year olds, books for boys of high school age, books for those who "live alone" j trade journals, house organs, Sunday School weeklies, Westerns, true-story romances.

Publishers, magazines, and writers all specialize. Thus a study of the economic basis of literature and of the social status of the writer is inextricably bound up with a study of the audience he addresses and upon which he is dependent financially. Even the aristocratic patron is an audience and frequently an exacting audience, requiring not only personal adulation but also conformity to the conventions of his class. In even earlier society, in the group where folk poetry flourishes, the dependence of the author on the audience is even greater: his work will not be transmitted unless it pleases immediately. The role of the audience in the theater is, at least, as tangible. There have been even attempts to trace the changes in Shakespeare's periods and style to the change in the audience between the open-air Globe, on the South Bank, with its mixed audience, and Blackfriars, a closed hall frequented by the higher classes. It becomes harder to trace the specific relation between author and public at a later time when the reading public rapidly expands, becomes dispersed and heterogeneous, and when the relationships of author and public grow more indirect and oblique. The number of intermediaries between writers and the public increases. We can study the role of such social institutions and associations as the salon, the cafe, the club, the academy, and the university. We can trace the history of reviews and magazines as well as of publishing houses. The critic becomes an important middleman ; a group of connoisseurs, bibliophiles, and collectors may support certain kinds of literature ; and the associations of literary men themselves may help to create a special public of writers or would-be writers. In America especially, women, who, according to Veblen provide vicarious leisure and consumption of the arts for the tired businessman, have become active determinants of literary taste.

Still, the old patterns have not been completely replaced. All modern governments support and foster literature in various degrees ; and patronage means, of course, control and supervision.  To overrate the conscious influence of the totalitarian state during the last decades would be difficult. It has been both negative — in suppression, book-burning, censorship, silencing, and reprimanding, and positive — in the encouragement of "blood and soil" regionalism or Soviet "socialist realism." The fact that the state has been unsuccessful in creating a literature which, conforming to ideological specifications, is still great art, cannot refute the view that government regulation of literature is effective in offering the possibilities of creation to those who identify themselves voluntarily or reluctantly with the official prescriptions. Thus, in Soviet Russia, literature is, at least, in theory again becoming a communal art and the artist has again been integrated into society.

The graph of a book's success, survival, and recrudescence, or a writer's reputation and fame is, mainly, a social phenomenon. In part it belongs, of course, to literary "history," since fame and reputation are measured by the actual influence of a writer on other writers, his general power of transforming and changing the literary tradition. In part, reputation is a matter of critical response: till now, it has been traced chiefly on the basis of more or less formal pronouncements assumed to be representative of a period's "general reader." Hence, while the whole question of the "whirligig of taste" is "social," it can be put on a more definitely sociological basis: detailed work can investigate the actual concordance between a work and the specific public which has made its success ; evidence can be accumulated on editions, copies sold.

The stratification of every society is reflected in the stratification of its taste. While the norms of the upper classes usually descend to the lower, the movement is sometimes reversed: interest in folklore and primitive art is a case in point. There is no necessary concurrence between political and social advancement and aesthetic: leadership in literature had passed to the bourgeoisie long before political supremacy. Social stratification may be interfered with and even abrogated in questions of taste by differences of age and sex, by specific groups and associations.

Fashion is also an important phenomenon in modern literature, for in a competitive fluid society, the norms of the upper classes, quickly imitated, are in constant need of replacement. Certainly, the present rapid changes of taste seem to reflect the rapid social changes of the last decades and the general loose relation between artist and audience. The modern writer's isolation from society, illustrated by Grub Street, Bohemia, Greenwich Village, the American expatriate, invites sociological study. A Russian socialist, Georgi Plekhanov, believes that the doctrine of "art for art's sake" develops when artists feel a "hopeless contradiction between their aims and the aims of the society to which they belong. Artists must be very hostile to their society and they must see no hope of changing it."  In his Sociology of Literary Taste, Levin L. Schiicking has sketched out some of these problems j elsewhere, he has studied in detail the role of the family and women as an audience in the eighteenth century. Though much evidence has been accumulated, well-substantiated conclusions have rarely been drawn concerning the exact relations between the production of literature and its economic foundations, or even concerning the exact influence of the public on a writer. The relationship is obviously not one of mere dependence or of passive compliance with the prescriptions of patron or public. Writers may succeed in creating their own special public ; indeed, as Coleridge knew, every new writer has to create the taste which will enjoy him. The writer is not only influenced by society: he influences it. Art not merely reproduces Life but also shapes it. People may model their lives upon the patterns of fictional heroes and heroines. They have made love, committed crimes and suicide according to the book, be it Goethe's Sorrows of Werther or Dumas' Musketeers. But can we precisely define the influence of a book on its readers? Will it ever be possible to describe the influence of satire? Did Addison really change the manners of his society or Dickens incite reforms of debtors' prisons, boys' schools, and poorhouses? 1S Was Mrs. Stowe really the "little woman who made the great war"? Has Gone with the Wind changed Northern readers' attitudes toward Mrs. Stowe's war? How have Hemingway and Faulkner affected their readers? How great was the influence of literature on the rise of modern nationalism? Certainly the historical novels of Walter Scott in Scotland, of Henryk Sienkiewicz in Poland, of Alois Jirasek in Czechoslovakia, have done something very definite to increase national pride and a common memory of historical events.

We can hypothesize — plausibly, no doubt — that the young are more directly and powerfully influenced by their reading than the old, that inexperienced readers take literature more naively as transcript rather than interpretation of life, that those whose books are few take them in more utter seriousness than do wide and professional readers. Can we advance beyond such conjecture? Can we make use of questionnaires and any other mode of sociological enquiry? No exact objectivity is obtainable, for the attempt at case histories will depend upon the memories and the analytic powers of the interrogated, and their testimonies will need codification and evaluation by a fallible mind. But the question, "How does literature affect its audience?" is an empirical one, to be answered, if at all, by the appeal to experience; and, since we are thinking of literature in the broadest sense, and society in the broadest, the appeal must be made to the experience not of the connoisseur alone but to that of the human race.

We have scarcely begun to study such questions. Much the most common approach to the relations of literature and society is the study of works of literature as social documents, as assumed pictures of social reality. Nor can it be doubted that some kind of social picture can be abstracted from literature. Indeed, this has been one of the earliest uses to which literature has been put by systematic students. Thomas Warton, the first real historian of English poetry, argued that literature has the "peculiar merit of faithfully recording the features of the times, and of preserving the most picturesque and expressive representation of manners" j 20 and to him and many of his antiquarian successors, literature was primarily a treasury of costumes and customs, a source book for the history of civilization, especially of chivalry and its decline. As for modern readers, many of them derive their chief impressions of foreign societies from the reading of novels, from Sinclair Lewis and Galsworthy, from Balzac and Turgenev.

Used as a social document, literature can be made to yield the outlines of social history. Chaucer and Langland preserve two views of fourteenth-century society. The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales was early seen to offer an almost complete survey of social types. Shakespeare, in the Merry Wives of Windsor, Ben Jonson in several plays, and Thomas Deloney seem to tell us something about the Elizabethan middle class. Addison, Fielding, and Smollett depict the new bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century  Jane Austen, the country gentry and country parsons early in the nineteenth century ; and Trollope,Thackeray, and Dickens, the Victorian world. At the turn of the century, Galsworthy shows us the English upper middle classes ; Wells, the lower middle classes ; Bennett, the provincial towns. A similar series of social pictures could be assembled for American life from the novels of Mrs. Stowe and Howells to those of Farrell and Steinbeck. The life of post-Restoration Paris and France seems preserved in the hundreds of characters moving through the pages of Balzac's Human Comedy; and Proust traced in endless detail the social stratifications of the decaying French aristocracy. The Russia of the nineteenth-century landowners appears in the novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy 5 we have glimpses of the merchant and the intellectual in Chekhov's stories and plays and of collectivized farmers in Sholokhov.

Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. One can assemble and exposit the "world" of each, the part each gives to love and marriage, to business, to the professions, its delineation of clergymen, whether stupid or clever, saintly or hypocritical j or one can specialize upon Jane Austen's naval men, Proust's arrivistes y Howells' married women. This kind of specialization will offer us monographs on the "Relation between Landlord and Tenant in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction," "The Sailor in English Fiction and Drama," or "Irish Americans in Twentieth-Century Fiction."

But such studies seem of little value so long as they take it for granted that literature is simply a mirror of life, a reproduction, and thus, obviously, a social document. Such studies make sense only if we know the artistic method of the novelist studied, can say — not merely in general terms, but concretely — in what relation the picture stands to the social reality. Is it realistic by intention? Or is it, at certain points, satire, caricature, or romantic idealization? In an admirably clearheaded study of Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany , Kohn-Bramstedt rightly cautions us: "only a person who has a knowledge of the structure of a society from other sources than purely literary ones is able to find out if, and how far, certain social types and their behavior are reproduced in the novel. . . . What is pure fancy, what realistic observation, and what only an expression of the desires of the author must be separated in each case in a subtle manner." 21 Using Max Weber's conception of ideal "social types," the same scholar studies such social phenomena as class hatred, the behavior of the parvenu, snobbery, and the attitude toward the Jews; and he argues that such phenomena are not so much objective facts and behavior patterns as they are complex attitudes, thus far much better illustrated in fiction than elsewhere.

Students of social attitudes and aspirations can use literary material, if they know how to interpret it properly. Indeed, for older periods, they will be forced to use literary or at least semiliterary material for want of evidence from the sociologists of the time: writers on politics, economics, and general public questions. Heroes and heroines of fiction, villains and adventuresses, afford interesting indications of such social attitudes. 22 Such studies constantly lead into the history of ethical and religious ideas. We know the medieval status of the traitor and the medieval attitude towards usury, which, lingering on into the Renaissance, gives us Shylock and, later, Moliere's L'Avare. To which "deadly sin" have later centuries chiefly assigned the villain; and is his villainy conceived of in terms of personal or social morality? Is he, for example, artist at rape or embezzler of widows' bonds? The classic case is that of Restoration English comedy. Was it simply a realm of cuckoldom, a fairyland of adulteries and mock marriages as Lamb believed? Or was it, as Macaulay would have us believe, a faithful picture of decadent, frivolous, and brutal aristocracy? 23 Or should we not rather, rejecting both alternatives, see what particular social group created this art for what audience? And should we not see whether it was a naturalistic or a stylized art? Should we not be mindful of satire and irony, self-ridicule and fantasy? Like all literature, these plays are not simply documents ; they are plays with stock figures, stock situations, with stage marriages and stage conditions of marriage settlements. E. E. Stoll concludes his many arguments on these matters: "Evidently this is not a 'real society,' not a faithful picture even of the 'fashionable life': evidently it is not England, even 'under the Stuarts,' whether since or before the Revolution or the Great Rebellion." 24 Still, the salutary emphasis upon convention and tradition to be found in writing like Stoll's cannot completely discharge the relations between literature and society.

Even the most abstruse allegory, the most unreal pastoral, the most outrageous farce can, properly interrogated, tell us something of the society of a time. Literature occurs only in a social context, as part of a culture, in a milieu. Taine's famous triad of race, milieu, and moment has, in practice, led to an exclusive study of the milieu. Race is an unknown fixed integral with which Taine operates very loosely, and moment can be dissolved into the concept of milieu. A difference of time means simply a different setting, but the actual question of analysis arises only if we try to break up the term "milieu." The most immediate setting of a work of literature, we shall then recognize, is its linguistic and literary tradition, and this tradition in turn is encompassed by a general cultural "climate." Only far less directly can literature be connected with concrete economic political and social situations. Of course there are interrelationships between all spheres of human activities. Eventually we can establish some connection between the modes of production and literature, since an economic system usually implies some system of power and must control the forms of family life.

And the family plays an important role in education, in the concepts of sexuality and love, in the whole onvention and tradition of human sentiment. Thus it is possible to link even lyric poetry with love conventions, religious preconceptions, and conceptions of nature. But these relationships may be devious and oblique. It seems impossible, however, to accept a view constituting any particular human activity the "starter" of all the others, whether it be the theory of Taine, who reduces all creativity to a mysterious biological factor, "race," or that of Hegel and the Hegelians, who consider "spirit" the only moving force in history, or that of the Marxists, who derive everything from the mode of production. No radical technological changes took place in the many centuries between the early Middle Ages and the rise of Capitalism, while cultural life, and literature in particular, underwent most profound transformations. Nor does literature always show, at least immediately, much awareness of an epoch's technological changes: the Industrial Revolution penetrated English novels only in the forties of the nineteenth century (with Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley, and Charlotte Bronte), long after its symptoms were plainly visible to economists and social thinkers.

The social situation, one should admit, seems to determine the possibility of the realization of certain aesthetic values, but not the values themselves. We can determine in general outlines what art forms are possible in a given society and which are impossible, but it is not possible to predict that these art forms will actually come into existence. Many Marxists — and not Marxists only — attempt far too crude short cuts from economics to literature. For example, John Maynard Keynes, not an unliterary person, has ascribed the existence of Shakespeare to the fact that "we were just in a financial position to afford Shakespeare at the moment when he presented himself. Great writers flourished in the atmosphere of buoyancy, exhilaration, and the freedom of economic cares felt by the governing class, which is engendered by profit inflations." 25 But profit inflations did not elicit great poets elsewhere — for instance, during the boom of the twenties in the United States — nor is this view of the optimistic Shakespeare quite beyond dispute. No more helpful is the opposite formula, devised by a Russian Marxist: "Shakespeare's tragic outlook on the world was consequential upon his being the dramatic expression of the feudal aristocracy, which in Elizabeth's day had lost their former dominant position." 26 Such contradictory judgments, attached to vague categories like optimism and pessimism, fail to deal concretely with either the ascertainable social content of Shakespeare's plays, his professed opinions on political questions (obvious from the chronicle plays), or his social status as a writer.

One must be careful, however, not to dismiss the economic approach to literature by means of such quotations. Marx himself, though on occasion he made some fanciful judgments, in general acutely perceived the obliqueness of the relationship between literature and society. In the Critique of Political Economy, he admits 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. Witness the example of the Greeks as compared with the modern nations or even Shakespeare." 2T He also understood that the modern division of labor leads to a definite contradiction between the three factors ("moments" in his Hegelian terminology) of the social process — "productive forces," "social relations," and "consciousness." He expected, in a manner which scarcely seems to avoid the Utopian, that in the future classless society these divisions of labor would again disappear, that the artist would again be integrated into society. He thought it possible that everybody could be an excellent, even an original, painter. "In a communist society there are no painters, but at most men who, among other things, also paint." 2S The "vulgar Marxist" tells us that this or that writer was a bourgeois who voiced reactionary or progressive opinions about Church and State. There is a curious contradiction between this avowed determinism which assumes that "consciousness" must follow "existence," that a bourgeois cannot help being one, and the usual ethical judgment which condemns him for these very opinions. In Russia, one notes, writers of bourgeois origin who have joined the proletariat have constantly been subjected to suspicions of their sincerity, and every artistic or civic failing has been ascribed to their class origin. Yet if progress, in the Marxist sense, leads directly from feudalism via bourgeois capitalism to the "dictatorship of the proletariat," it would be logical and consistent for a Marxist to praise the "progressives" at any time. He should praise the bourgeois when, in the early stages of capitalism, he fought the surviving feudalism. But frequently Marxists criticize writers from a twentieth-century point of view, or, like Smirnov and Grib, Marxists very critical of "vulgar sociology," rescue the bourgeois writer by a recognition of his universal humanity. Thus Smirnov comes to the conclusion that Shakespeare was the "humanist ideologist of the bourgeoisie, the exponent of the program advanced by them when, in the name of humanity, they first challenged the feudal order." 29 But the concept of humanism, of the universality of art, surrenders the central doctrine of Marxism, which is essentially relativistic.

Marxist criticism is at its best when it exposes the implied, or latent, social implications of a writer's work. In this respect it is a technique of interpretation parallel to those founded upon the insights of Freud, or of Nietzsche, or of Pareto, or to the Scheler-Mannheim "sociology of knowledge." All these intellectuals are suspicious of the intellect, the professed doctrine, the mere statement. The central distinction is that Nietzsche's and Freud's methods are psychological, while Pareto's analysis of "residues" and "derivatives" and the Scheler-Mannheim technique of the analysis of "ideology" are sociological.

The "sociology of knowledge," as illustrated in the writings of Max Scheler, Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim, has been worked out in detail and has some definite advantages over its rivals. It not only draws attention to the presuppositions and implications of a given ideological position, but it also stresses the hidden assumptions and biases of the investigator himself. It is thus selfcritical and self-conscious, even to the extreme of morbidity. It is also less prone than either Marxism or psychoanalysis to isolate one single factor as the sole determinant of change. Whatever their failure at isolating the religious factor, the studies of Max Weber in the sociology of religion are valuable for their attempt to describe the influence of ideological factors on economic behavior and institutions— for earlier emphasis had been entirely upon the economic influence on ideology. 31 A similar investigation of the influences of literature on social change would be very welcome, though it would run into analogous difficulties. It seems as hard to isolate the strictly literary factor as the religious factor and to answer the question whether the influence is due to the particular factor itself, or to other forces for which the factor is a mere "shrine" or "channel." The "sociology of knowledge" suffers, however, from its excessive historicism; it has come to ultimately skeptical conclusions despite its thesis that "objectivity" can be achieved by synthesizing, and thus neutralizing, the conflicting perspectives. It suffers also, in application to literature, from its inability to connect "content" with "form." Like Marxism, preoccupied with an irrationalistic explanation, it is unable to provide a rational foundation for aesthetics and hence criticism and evaluation. This is, of course, true of all extrinsic approaches to literature. No causal study can do theoretical justice to the analysis, description, and evaluation of a literary work.

But the problem of "literature and society" can obviously be put in different terms, those of symbolic or meaningful relations: of consistency, harmony, coherence, congruence, structural identity, stylistic analogy, or with whatever term we want to designate the integration of a culture and the interrelationship among the different activities of men. Sorokin, who has analyzed the various possibilities clearly, 33 has concluded that the degree of integration varies from society to society. Marxism never answers the question of the degree of dependence of literature on society. Hence many of the basic problems have scarcely begun to be studied. Occasionally, for example, one sees arguments for the social determination of genres, as in the case of the bourgeois origin of the novel, or even the details of their attitudes and forms, as in E. B. Burgum's not very convincing view that tragicomedy "results from the impact of middle class seriousness upon aristocratic frivolity." 34 Are there definite social determinants of such a broad literary style as Romanticism, which, though associated with the bourgeoisie, was anti-bourgeois in its ideology, at least in Germany, from its very beginning? 35 Though some kind of dependence of literary ideologies and themes on social circumstances seems obvious, the social origins of forms and styles, genres and actual literary norms have rarely been established. It has been attempted most concretely in studies of the social origins of literature: in Bucher's one-sided theory of the rise of poetry from labor rhythms ; in the many studies by anthropologists of the magic role of early art; in George Thomson's very learned attempt to bring Greek tragedy into concrete relations with cult and rituals and with a definite democratic social revolution at the time of Aeschylus; in Christopher Caudwell's somewhat naive attempt to study the sources of poetry in tribal emotions and in the bourgeois "illusion" of individual freedom. Only if the social determination of forms could be shown conclusively could the question be raised whether social attitudes cannot become "constitutive" and enter a work of art as effective parts of its artistic value. One can argue that "social truth," while not, as such, an artistic value, corroborates such artistic values as complexity and coherence. But it need not be so. There is great literature which has little or no social relevance j social literature is only one kind of literature and is not central in the theory of literature unless one holds the view that literature is primarily an "imitation" of life as it is and of social life in particular. But literature is no substitute for sociology or politics. It has its own justification and aim.