THE ANATOMY OF LIBERALISM
best an empty musi<;, mere sound, and nonsense syllables would do as well
as anything else." Consequently, any anti-Marxian critic who condemns
proletarian art for having a viewpoint is committed to the absurd pro–
position that art is meaningless. Bonamy Dobree, for instance, in his book
Variety of Ways
maintains that in art beliefs are irrelevant to its effective–
ness. Of course, the French Symbolists, and the early Surrealists, and the
transition
group avoided this fallacy and have had an essentially sounder
position in insisting that art works mean what they are and that any
translation of this meaning into other symbols is a distortion. But this,
too, evades the question of how art meanings, whatever they are, are related
to other meanings, such as the beliefs of the artist and prevailing currents
of thought. A complete refutation of this view is beyond the scope of this
essay, but the reasoning of Hazlitt, insofar as it jibes with MarxIsm, may
be used to indicate the nature of the fallacy: the term
meaning
car–
ries no sense if it is restricted to symbols which have no valid relation to
other symbols on some plane of discourse.
If
art has meaning, then a
Marxian outlook may be part of that meaning. But Hazlitt apparently
seeks to forestall this by stating, "Certainly any poetry that attempts to
enforce a specific article in the conventional moral code, to bring about
a specific reform, to explain a scientific theory, or in any other way falls
into didacticism, is likely to be abominable." These are certainly not the
kind of beliefs which Marxists advocate for literature.
Proletarian
literature does not "enforce a specific article"; it introduces a new way
of living and seeing into literature. It does not enforce the new view; it
embodies it. By using some such
reductio ad absurdum
formula, critics
like Tate, Flint, and H azlitt have been able to deny the value of any
given proletarian work of art, and by conveniently forgetting the formula,
they hayc been able to affirm the value of Eliot's or Dante's Catholic
poetry, or MacLeish's anti-Communist poetry.
Hazlitt's statement that great art is at the crest of a wave of rebellion
against a current of tradi tion is a half-truth; he begs the entire question
of determining which are the most important forces of tradition and which
the genuine forces of revolt. A M arxist is no longer in the dark about this.
In fact, he proceeds to estimate the correct balance of this stress and strain
in specific forms of proletarian literature in successive stages of its progress.
In application of his theory of the Social Mind, Hazlitt stresses the
relation of anyone critic to criticism as a whole. But he fails to grasp the
function of criticism in its entirety, by seeing it as a mere resultant: "It
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