[BEGIN]
__AUTHOR__
BORIS SUCHKOV
*
__TITLE__ A HISTORY OF REALISM __TEXTFILE_BORN__ 2007-03-30T05:41:28-0800 __TRANSMARKUP__ "Y. Sverdlov"*
PROGRESS PUBLISHERS
MOSCOW
[1]Translated from the Russian
Designed by G. Dauman
E. C Y H K 0 B. HCTOPHHECKHE CyflbBfal PEAJIH3MA Ha __COPYRIGHT__ First printing 1973The creative process in art, that most important of man's intellectual activities, involves thinking in terms of images. It is in the very nature of our perception that these images are engendered in the artist's mind by the outside world.
Even where the artist contrives something which he feels to be beyond the pale of verisimilitude, he is really doing no more than reorganising and reproducing in a new form the component parts of that whole which we call reality.
When Hieronymus Bosch painted his Temptation of St. Anthony, in depicting the monsters pouring up from hell to assail the ascetic in his cell he made use of the materials which reality offered in such abundance. Despite their weird appearance, the devils and fiends testing the patience and faith of the hermit were in fact made of perfectly normal stuff. Bosch merely combined in them the visible elements of natural beings and man-made things which he saw around him every day. He simply altered their natural proportions, put parts of living organisms in the strangest combinations, joining everyday objects like pots and pans, knives and helmets, to insects' tails and feelers, giving animals spiders' and grasshoppers' bodies, and clothed these monsters in armour, endowing these creations of his wild fancy with human emotions, making fiends from hell behave like malicious practical jokers. 5 Thus, while his pictures at first strike one as being apparently at variance with everyday experience, they in fact fit perfectly naturally into the system of everyday values and concepts of his age.
Callot's fantastic pictures or Goya's Caprichos, works which the artist consciously and deliberately freed from a superficial resemblance to reality, were nonetheless based on elements of intellectual, emotional and visual impressions objectively engendered by reality.
Even when primitive man tried to give the fruit of his imagination the attributes of godliness and express his understanding and concept of a deity with the means of art, he could not, in clothing the creation of his fantasy in flesh, go beyond the limits of this earth. The attentive gaze will recognise proto-elements of real concepts of the world reflected in the human mind in the idols and totems of primitive peoples, the monstrous, cruel gods of bygone civilisations, and ritual symbols and masks. Moreover, even such an ``abstract'' form of art as ornament is based on a composition of geometric shapes reflecting the objective relationship of things, or conventionalised animals and plants, or a combination of both.
It is interesting to note that the theoreticians of abstract art Winthrop Sargeant, Andrew C. Ritchie and Reginald H. Wilenski, and the father of abstract painting Vassili Kandinsky before them, tried to justify this trend in modern art by maintaining that the abstract artist's canvas reflects the latest discoveries in nuclear physics, thereby penetrating the very essence of the universe. Thus, these convinced opponents of reality were nonetheless forced to invoke reality in support of their aesthetic theories, for nuclear physics and transformation of energy are every bit as real as trees and fruit, mountains and buildings, people and flowers, and everything else that has always been depicted by genuine painters, on whom the champions of abstract art pour such vehement scorn, accusing them of blind empiricism. This appeal to the microcosm, to reality which is invisible but perceptible to the human mind, is of course pure humbug. There is no connection at all between an arbitrary application of colour purporting to represent the processes going on in the 6 world of elementary particles, and genuine reality. But the nature of the arguments used by the supporters of abstract art to justify their theories is worth noting: struggling against reality, they capitulate to it.
Art is not concerned purely with representing apparent reality. A work of art is not intended to be taken as a likeness of reality. Art's creations differ greatly from objects of the external world, for as well as absorbing impressions and concepts deriving from reality, it reflects too man's inner world, his experience, his personality and his attitude to the world around him. As a special form of spiritual and intellectual activity, and a powerful expression of man's creative powers, art, while ultimately deriving from reality, is to a certain extent independent of it. Goethe had the tremendous perspicacity to point out this rich and complex dialectical relationship between reality and art. Polemicising with Diderot, who reduced the purpose of art to straightforward representation of natural phenomena, Goethe wrote:
``Art does not try to compete with nature in all its breadth and depth, but keeps on the surface of natural phenomena. Nevertheless, art has its own depth, its own strength. It captures the supreme aspects of these superficial phenomena, disclosing what is regular in them---the rational perfection of proportions, the acme of beauty, the virtue of meaning and noble passions.
``We see nature as acting on its own account; the artist acts as a man---on man's account. From what nature offers us, we take into our lives only a small amount, that which is worth desiring, and gives pleasure; what the artist offers man should be entirely accessible and pleasing to the senses, should all give pleasure and have an appeasing effect, should all give food for the spirit, should all educate and ennoble; and the artist is grateful to nature that produced him, and in this way brings back to her a kind of second nature, nature born of the feelings and thoughts, nature perfected by man.
``But if all is to be thus, the genius, the artist by vocation, should act according to laws and rules prescribed by nature herself, laws that do not contradict her, that represent his greatest wealth, for it is with their help that he 7 learns to master and employ both the wealth of his talent and the great riches of nature."^^1^^
Reality is the basis of any image. This is natural, for art is a kind of special language mankind has been talking since ancient times, and just as a word cannot exist without a corresponding concept, so real art cannot deprive an image of its content, that is, of its relationship to what exists objectively, either in the realm of nature or in the realm of human thought and feeling, which is as much a part of reality as the material world.
Art has been man's faithful companion throughout history, developing and improving together with the development and improvement of the human mind. This is why art could never be an amusement to fill the hours of idleness, a source of carefree pleasure, or a means of satisfying purely aesthetic demands. The dual function of art ---cognitive and aesthetic, the two being united and inseparable---was there right from the start, from the moment art emerged.
The earliest extant examples of cave paintings, hunting scenes executed with remarkable accuracy and expression, combined both these aspects of art. In creating these works, the primitive artists must have abandoned themselves to the joyous power and enchantment of line and colour, transferring onto the hard unyielding granite the images and impressions overflowing their souls. Presumably these unknown artists were not the only ones who were moved by their creations. We can assume that their hairy fellow-tribesmen also derived pleasure from the sparkle of art in the prehistoric tribal gloom. The cave paintings were also a part of a magic ritual connected with work, sympathetic magic---a plea to the dark, threatening forces of earth and sky that influenced the life of the tribe. George Thomson, a modern expert on prehistoric culture, writes: ``The Australians are in the habit of decorating rocks and caves with figures of men and animals....
``The human figures are of both sexes, the females with exaggerated sex marks. The animals and plants, so far as _-_-_
~^^1^^ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ``Diderots Versuch iiber die Malerei" }n S&mmtliche Werke, Bd. 34, Leipzig, S. 100--01.
8 they have been identified, are all edible species---- kangaroos, lizards, nalgo fruits. . . .``For the interpretation of these designs we can appeal to the natives themselves, who still use them for ceremonial purposes. At the opening of the breeding season the pictures are repainted or touched up in order to bring rain or to propagate the species represented. Abundance of kangaroos and nalgo fruits is thus ensured, and women are made prolific."^^1^^ Referring to a number of features common to Bushman art and the upper paleolithic cave paintings in France and Spain, Thomson goes on to say: ``The resemblance is so close that some authorities regard them as the work of the same people.... All archaeologists are now agreed that the primary intention of these paintings was magical."^^2^^ On the subject of the genesis of art he makes the following emphatic statement: ``Art grows out of ritual. Stated in general terms, that is a proposition no serious student would deny."^^3^^
Thus, at the dawn of history, when the human mind was first becoming aware of artistic images, we find social experience having a say in the matter. The primitive artist's desire to express his impressions of life goes hand in hand with an attempt to understand and explain life.
This invaluable feature of art, present from the very start, is what makes art a great chronicle, a history of the human race told in words, marble or paint by countless volunteer historians, who captured the events and the spirit of bygone civilisations far more fully than the old sheets of parchment that bear the laws and instructions of rulers, or the silent remains of material culture which the archaeologists and historiographers interpret for us.
We can still understand the thoughts and feelings of the citizens of a Greek polis or of Rome, thanks to Aeschylus' tragedies, Aristophanes' merciless satire, and Catullus' moving lyrics. The feather grass steppes of the Don country have flowered and withered countless times, and the bones of Russians, Polovtsi and Khazars have long since _-_-_
~^^1^^ George Thomson, Studies in Ancient Greek Society. The Prehistoric Aegean, London, 1954, pp. 53--54.
~^^2^^ Ibid., pp. 54--55.
~^^3^^ Ibid., p. 463.
9 turned to dust, yet the voices of the Russian warriors who scooped up the clear waters of the Don in their helmets still ring in our hearts, preserved for posterity by the unknown author of The Lay of Igor's Host. The violent political passions the Italian towns seethed with at the time when medieval Europe has discovered the timeless cultural heritage of a small people who had lived on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula are brought to us by the terza rima of Dante's Divine Comedy, and Michelangelo's Last Judgement.Throughout their existence, art and literature have registered with the sensitivity of a barometer all the changes in the course of mankind's stormy development. The collapse of the humanistic ideals of the Renaissance, which were trampled underfoot with the emergence of bourgeois social relations, was reflected in Shakespeare's later tragedies, in the wise sorrow of Don Quixote, and the gnomic philosophy of Calderon's tragedy la Vida Es Sueno, which sounded the death knell for the vital, optimistic world of Renaissance culture. Swift's black satire and the tragic motives that burst into the bright ethereal element of Mozart's symphonies are like a prelude to the nineteenth century, that ``age of iron" with its greatly intensified social contradictions.
The picture of the world that works of art and literature present is not a slavish copy of reality, and has retained the colours and smells of the world for the simple reason that art has at all times dealt with the essential aspects of nature and human life. Every genuine work of art must have a message; this is the very foundation and vital element for its existence. Art cannot help but submit to the great discipline of reality, but this does not mean that art has always and at all times been realist.
Realism as a creative method is an historical phenomenon that arose at a certain stage in human intellectual development, at the time when people began to feel pressing need to understand the nature and direction of social development, when people began to realise, at first vaguely, then more clearly, that human actions and feelings do not derive from wild passions or a divine design, but are determined by real, or more precisely, material causes, 10 Tre realist method arose in art and literature when the members of society were faced with the task ofi apprehending those hidden underlying forces which determine the working of the mechanism of social relations.
There are traits of reality in the writings of the Ancients, in Gothic, Baroque and Rococo art, or in the works of the classicist writers, but the study of the life of society and individuals in all their complex relationships only came with realism. The works of the early realists already give us a true picture of the life of society, of the interests and demands that occupied the minds of people of various social groups and classes in the past. They show us the development of man's social awareness, and how people living in a society based on private ownership came into conflict with that anti-human social order. Between them, the realist writers produced an epic of the modern age. In many cases unwittingly, merely by their sober objective portrayal of the life they saw, they condemned the evils of the irrational civilisation of property owners.
Realism began its road in the realm of everyday life. Depiction of the life man sees around him is to be found in the facetiae, the fabliaux and the Schwanke, and later in the picaresque novel, born of the ferment of popular uprisings, peasant rebellions and bloody religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, this was not realism in the strict sense of the word, but rather a prelude to realism.
But theoretical philosophic thought too, wrestling with problems of existence on the threshold of the modern age, and struggling to free itself of the spiritual concepts that theology and scholasticism had deeply implanted in people's minds, was only beginning to approach an understanding of the world as a material entity.
Descartes with his idea of the indivisibility of existence and thought, and Francis Bacon, who drew attention to the importance of experience in taking cognizance of the world, revolutionised scientific thought, opening the way for its penetration into the nature of things.
Despite the originality and shrewdness of their conjectures, they were still largely dependent on the level 11 scientific thought had reached in their age. The transcendental dualism and mechanistic approach inherent in his views of the living world prevented Descartes from producing a dialectical picture of reality. Yet by raising the question of the indivisibility of existence and thought he encouraged the investigation of their relationship. His elder contemporary Bacon had the genius to grasp the chief requirement of the thought of the new age---the need for analytic investigation of reality.
In Letters on the Study of Nature, Alexander Herzen wrote that the basic principle of Bacon's philosophy is that ``he starts from the particular, from experiment, from the observation of phenomena and arrives at a generalisation, at a collation of all that has been thus acquired. For Bacon experience is not a passive perception of the external world with its attending circumstances. Quite the contrary, it is the conscious interaction of thought and things external, their joint activity, which, while developing, Bacon keeps in curb, neither allowing thought to make conclusions to which it is not yet entitled, nor allowing experience to remain a mechanical accumulation of facts 'undigested by thought'. The greater and richer the sum total of observations, the more inalienable is the right to deduce from them the general rules by means of induction. But as he discovers them Bacon, ever doubting and cautious, demands another plunge into the stream of phenomena, in search of a generalisation or a qualification.
``Before Bacon, experiment was an accident, it was used as a basis even more rarely than was tradition, let alone intellectual speculation. Bacon turned it into an essential, primary factor of knowledge, which subsequently accompanied the entire development of knowledge, which presupposed constant verification, and, by its irrefutable precision and its concrete universality, acted as a curb on the inclination of abstract minds to rise into the rarefied atmosphere of metaphysical generalities. Bacon believed as much in the mind as in nature but his confidence was greatest when they were at one because he foresaw their unity. He demanded that the mind, leaning on experience, should progress hand in hand with nature, that nature 12 should guide the mind as its pupil until it was in a condition to lead nature towards complete elucidation in thought.
``That was new, extremely new and grand..."^^1^^
Investigation of the external world took many courses. Philosophy absorbed more and more of the knowledge accumulated by the natural sciences, which were gradually preparing for the great Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, as bourgeois relations developed and class antagonisms became more acute, the tendency towards analysis of reality grew stronger in art and literature too, and this naturally above all meant analysis of the human environment.
Analysis, one of the essential features of realism, began to develop in the art of the Renaissance, which saw so many various styles, with the Gothic forms existing side by side with the genre novel and anecdote, represented by the works of Poggio Bracciolini and Masuccio di Salerno, where the medieval conte de geste was transformed into the witty comic verse of Pulci or the heroic gallantry of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, where the subjectivism of the neo-Platonists, mannerism and the baroque spirit gradually replaced the pure poetic tradition descending from Petrarch.
The analytic approach is already present in the works of the major writers of the Renaissance period---Rabelais, Cervantes and Shakespeare. The Rabelaisan novel, which had close affinities with folk literature and myth and disregards external, rationalistic logic in the narration, solved an important new aesthetic problem of the time. The characters in Gargantua and Pantagruel, despite all exaggeration and extraordinary situations, were inherently true to life. The novel undoubtedly contains the seeds of the analytic approach, deeply planted in a bed of mythology, it is true, but nonetheless sufficient to enable the writer to capture the social features of the papacy, scholasticism, feudal statecraft and morality and, most important of all, features of the new man, providing an early glimpse of the bourgeois in the making. One of the _-_-_
~^^1^^ A. Herzen, Selected Philosophical Works, Moscow, 1956, pp. 265--66.
13 main characters, Panurge, who said he knew many ways of getting rich, among which the most honest was daylight robbery, for all his charm represents a destructive element, and personifies the new social forces that were gradually maturing within the feudal system. The Renaissance humanist ideal of Utopia, the abbey of Thelema, is quite incompatible with panurgianism, with real human relations, which were not developing as Rabelais and other humanists hoped. The presence of this conflict in the novel shows that Rabelais sensed the fundamental contradiction in social life, without being aware of either its true nature or its scale. However, the very fact that he revealed this conflict was an important step towards realism.Fifty years later this same conflict was to underlie Don Quixote, a work which absorbed elements from many different genres of the day, from galant-pastoral prose and ironically revalued poetics of the conte de geste to the tale of manners (mceurs). Despite the fact that during his wanderings over many a stony, sun-baked road, Don Quixote meets a whole host of people from practically every level of society, and his excursions take him into country inns and duke's palaces, the novel does not give a complete picture of Spain at that time. As regards the details it gives us of everyday life and morals, it is of considerably less interest than the anonymous work on the travels of the roguish Lazarillo de Tormes. Yet it towers above the literature of the time by virtue of its literary merits and universality, its conflict reflecting the tragic gap between man's noble aspirations for goodness and justice and life as it really is.
The analytic tendency is more manifest in Cervantes' novel than in Rabelais', although convention and the fantastic element still play a big role in it. Cervantes' analysis of society is much more accurate than that of his predecessor. He analyses human relations more fully, and penetrates more deeply into root causes of the discrepancy between humanist ideals and reality. This is because in examining the essence of the contradictions of his age he resorted to the wisdom of the people, poeticised in the person of Sancho Panza. If Rabelais sincerely believed 14 that harmony could be achieved in life and Thelema's Utopia could be attained the wisdom of Don Quixote lies elsewhere, in the way Cervantes, while glorifying good, destroys the illusion of its triumph being possible in existing conditions.
At the dawn of the modern age people had already acquired considerable experience of life in society based on private ownership. The feudal lords who oppressed the serfs had themselves bowed to absolute monarchy. The wealth collected in the royal treasuries was slowly but surely drained into the coffers of the bankers and usurers.
The Fuggers had no less influence in state affairs than many a crowned head of Europe, and the bourgeoisie waged a fierce, relentless struggle with the nobility for a place in the sun. Crowds of adventurers set out across the wide, unchartered oceans in search of El Dorado, for gold had become the measure of virtue and order, freedom and happiness. As Shakespeare wrote in ``Timon of Athens":
Gold? yellow, glittering, precious gold? ...
Thus much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;
Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; valiant, coward___
Within the moss-grown walls of the towns, where craftsmen still produced works of exquisite beauty, the low, stuffy buildings of the manufactories sprang up, crowding out their workshops. Material inequality divided people. Egoistic passions and ideas, the thirst for wealth became part of their flesh and blood, the determinant factor of their social psychology.
The collapse of patriarchal morals and their adaptation to the new historical conditions accompanied the strengthening of those organic, permanent features of private ownership society which derived from its class structure. Michelangelo, in words of great power expressed the mood of the foremost thinkers of the age, who sensed the eventual triumph of the bourgeois order.
Oh! In this evil, shameful age, to live not
Nor to feel is a most enviable lot,
To sleep 't were best, and to be like unto a stone.
Just as science was bringing mankind greater knowledge of the laws of nature, so nascent realist art and 15 literature, by investigating man's spiritual and social life, his actions, thoughts and feelings, was beginning to shed light on the nature of historical progress. Shakespeare's multi-level depiction of life was based on analysis of the real essence of social relations. With Shakespeare the same conflict that is central to the works of Rabelais and Cervantes lost its conventional and fantastic colouring and acquired a concrete historical form, without, however, losing its universality in the process, for Shakespeare was a thinker and artist of genius who generalised the essential and permanent features of the social outlook of people in private ownership society. This is indeed the main reason why his works have stood the test of time.
However, even Shakespeare's view of the world is not entirely free of mystical, fantastic concepts. Deep as he penetrated the human soul, Shakespeare nonetheless subscribed to many of the illusions prevalent in his day and age. His art is syncretic, with realistic and non-realistic elements interwoven. But dominant with him are a realistic portrayal of characters and a truthful, authentic depiction of the environment that engenders the moral conflicts which beset his heroes and, most important of all, a realistic approach to the relationship between man and society. The tragic situations in which his heroes find themselves owe nothing to fatalism or irrational predetermination: they are always determined by material causes and first and foremost by the conditions of life itself. The fate of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet's spiritual drama, Timon's discord with the world, Lear's or Othello's loss of faith in mankind, are all the result of objective contradictions in life itself. Life is the source of the tragedy.
In describing his heroes' sufferings and inner emotional conflicts and analysing their thoughts and passions, Shakespeare saw through it all the free play of material interests, perverting people's natures and shattering the humanist belief that the chaos of life could be brought to a state of harmony. Michelangelo's bitter invective against his age was undoubtedly something Shakespeare understood only too well. But Shakespeare did not simply understand the drama of the time which was so ``out of joint": by going to the very wellsprings of human feelings, 16 thoughts and actions, he showed that the absence of harmony derived from the structure of society itself. If his heart went out to Prospero, in his mind he understood only too well that Shylock could quite possibly be the man oi the future. In order to portray society as a theatre of war between conflicting material interests, Shakespeare had to initiate an analytic study of society, which he did, thereby laying the cornerstone of realism.
After Shakespeare the tendency towards analytic study of social life gradually gained ground in art and literature, despite the fact that there were whole periods where other, non-realistic, trends held the field---baroque, mannerism and classicism. This tendency corresponded to the spirit of the times. When John Locke proved that there are no inborn ideas in the human mind, received from some external, superior power, he forced social thought to investigate man's environment, which is the original motive force determining his way of thinking and conditioning his actions. Locke saw man's environment first and foremost as the sphere of his social practice, which it vtas essential that he should know, since otherwise he would be powerless in the face of unknown forces influencing his life. Art's investigation of human activity in the broadest sense finally resulted in realism acquiring clear, distinctive features and emerging as a creative method.
In the eighteenth century, in the period leading up to the French Revolution, which brought about the final collapse of the economic and ideological structure of feudalism, realism took a great step forward, from the depiction of everyday life and manners to depiction of social existence.
The works of the early realist writers, great and smallwriters like Richardson, Defoe, Smollett, Fielding, Swift. Steele, Diderot, Goethe, Lessing, Mercier and Marivaux, and many, many others---enable us to determine the essential characteristic feature of the new method, the fundamental distinction between it and all other literary movements.
The essence of realism was social analysis, the study and depiction of the life of man in society, of social __PRINTERS_P_17_COMMENT__ 2---0891 17 relations, the relationship between the individual and society, and the structure of society itself.
Realism took the content of all art and literaturedepiction of the world and human thoughts and feelings--- and made it a principle, thereby rising above the flat copying of reality and subjective presentation of human nature as a playground of unbridled passions. Realism does not arbitrarily isolate man from the social environment in which he lives and acts, but instead sets out to perceive and portray the dialectic of social relationships with their real contradictions. Just as spectral analysis enables the physicist to discover the secrets of the movement of matter, so social analysis, the essence of realism, enables the writer or artist to discern life's essential features and approach an understanding of its laws. The more closely the realist scrutinises reality and investigates the connections between the events his work describes, the more full-blooded and convincing his reproduction of reality is, for he has not only perceived it emotionally, but has interpreted it and generalised it as well.
The realist writer discerns the general pattern of the movements and counter-movements of various social forces behind individual events and phenomena. Thus realism depends on the writer's cognition of reality. As Schiller once put it: ``In order to seize the fleeting phenomenon, one must chain it with the bonds of a law, dismember the beautiful body into concepts and preserve its living spirit in the spare verbal framework.'' The intellectual element that permeates realist works requires that the writer has a definite unequivocal view of life, for generalisation of life and people as they really are is impossible if the writer offers a surrogate for reality or treats the sense and substance of the events and phenomena he is examining in an arbitrary, subjective manner. If the social analysis of the environment in which the characters act is to be realistic, the writer must see and portray reality in its determinant, typical, manifestations, which are objectively present in the sphere of human social relations, refracted through the prism of individual characterisations. Engels insisted that this was a major requirement of the realist method.
18The realist principle of typification involves the tracing of the causality that exists in the world of social phenomena. Since it is human life and the life of society that form the subject matter of a work, the hero's inner world, and the sum of his individual traits which we call character are examined and described by the realist writer as the product of numerous, but typical circumstances, which are in a causal relationship with the personal destiny of the hero. Thus, the typical character is a kind of derivative of social forces. The typical character of the hero accumulates and combines the main determinant features of the environment of which he is a product, and it is through him and his personal fortunes that the features of that environment are revealed.
We do not find this typification of characters in nonrealist works. Thus, Racine, a master of character portrayal, was a classicist, like Moliere, in his aesthetic views and creative method. But Moliere's classicism had strong connections with the popular element, and his characters have concrete historical features explained by a certain degree of social analysis. His characters are exaggerated almost to the point of caricature and lack the depth to be fully realistic. They are one-sided, dominated by a single passion---for example, avarice in the case of Harpagon, and hypocrisy in the case of Tartuffe. These characters are one-sided because Moliere was guided by the rationalist aesthetics and philosophy which underlay classicism. Nevertheless, his characters, which have since become proverbial, have something that Racine's characters lack. This ``something'' is the result of a definite attempt to comprehend such universal qualities as avarice and hypocrisy in the context of the contemporary social scene. That is why Moliere, although a classicist, is to be regarded as a precursor of realism in modern French literature.
The student of Port-Royal, on the other hand, concentrated on analysing human feelings and passions. Neither Phedra nor Hermione, Roxana, Iphigenie, or indeed any other of Racine's characters, rich and full as they are, become types. His men and women are detached and isolated from society, from the rough, cruel life of French society in the period of absolutism. In the words of the __PRINTERS_P_20_COMMENT__ 2* 19 eminent Soviet literary historian V. Grib ``Moliere's works reflected the major conflicts and problems of the seventeenth century. Corneille and Racine grasped the psychological results of the great social problems of their age. From Racine it is impossible to tell what these problems were in the actual historical reality, or what was the real stuff of life that went into the making of his theatre."^^1^^ Naturally the characters in Racine's tragedies, and the passions that torment their souls were the product of his age. But in Racine's portrayal their feelings seem somehow purified, ennobled, and to a large extent abstracted from life. They are purged of the authentic stuff of life, and thus, despite the verisimilitude of characters and events, his plays are essentially non-realist.
Racine's plays are literary masterpieces. Keeping within the bounds of classicism and making good use of the means it put at his disposal, Racine created works of great inner harmony and beauty, which depict human relationships ruled by passions, and the contradictions and conflicts of the moral world of the individual. There is nothing irregular about this, for aesthetic effect can be produced in literature by a variety of means, which is the secret of its capacity to develop, and of the simultaneous existence of various trends and movements, each with different aesthetic principles, different ideological and aesthetic approaches to the perception and description of reality.
The existence side by side of various trends and movements naturally results in antagonism and struggle between them, and, of course, in many cases, mutual influence. Behind the diversity of aesthetic principles underlying various literary movements (and often within the framework of a given movement) lies the dialectic of social contradictions, the diversity of social aspirations finding their aesthetic expression in art. The history of art and literature is by no means a calm idyll: there is a fierce clash of tastes, views and aesthetic concepts running throughout its course.
_-_-_~^^1^^ V. Grib, Selected Works, Russ. ed., Goslitizdat, Moscow, 1958, p. 357.
20Laying the foundations of realist aesthetics, which rejects both naturalist copying of reality and abstract generalisations of phenomena of life, Lessing made great efforts in both his Laocoon and Die Hamburgische Dramaturgie to prove that the content and form of classicist works were lifeless, that the passions were presented in a stilted manner, that the style was rhetorical, and the social ideals were unproductive.
``Racine speaks the language of the feelings. Of course, if we accept that proposition then there is nothing too elevated for him. But I don't know where and when feelings speak in such a language. This is a second-hand portrayal of feelings, but never or only very rarely vital, immediate, uncoloured movements of the spirit, seeking for words and finding them."^^1^^ Thus, Herder defended the principles of realist art. And despite their sharply polemical nature these words of the great democrat and thinker are based on weighty historical reasons and not subjective bias.
The romanticists of the early nineteenth century, although making a tremendous contribution to world literature, did not create a single typical character. In Byron's poems with their violent social protest, the hero is an embodiment of the writer's emotions and political views rather than a character in the real sense of the word, that is in his own right. Typical features in the hero's character only begin to emerge with Beppo, that is, in the hero of the poem that marked Byron's transition from romanticism to realism.
Neither the French nor the German romanticists produced anything comparable to the whole gallery of typical characters we find in the works of the realist writers, whose epic novels contain a deep and penetrating analysis of the social milieu, of the typical conditions that determine their heroes' fortunes. However, the romanticists did perceive and present certain features and contradictions of bourgeois society of which the realist writers were not immediately aware. Without the contribution of the _-_-_
~^^1^^ J. Herder, ``Shakespeare'', in: Von deutscher Art und Kunst, Hamburg, 1773, S. 73--74.
21 romanticists before them, the realists would never have been able to make such advances in the investigation ot the living history of their age.While realism as a distinct creative method that made possible analysis of social environment and the causal relationships present there made for an objective portrayal of reality, each realist writer had his own highly individual view of the world. His view of events and his understanding of life and history reflect his attitude to the contemporary social struggle in which he inevitably participates.
A work that portrays reality is bound to reflect too the writer's personal outlook, and the writer is never an impartial chronicler of his time but always champions the ideas which in his opinion embody the wisdom of his age. Naturally, the writer's subjective understanding of history by no means always corresponds to its objective substance. _However, by investigating the development of everchanging reality and analysing social relationships, the realist writers produced an authentic picture of contemporary personal and social life, since the underlying principle of the realist method, active cognition, brought important new achievements. The realists were able to portray the essential conflicts of their age which conditioned the inner world of their heroes, their way. of thinking and behaving, and to see the sources of social evil that were having such a destructive effect on the human personality. Hence the humanistic perception of reality characteristic of the realists who made a social analysis of life in their time in accordance with an individual philosophy of life.
This distinctive feature of pre-socialist realism was already apparent in the earlier stages of the emergence of the method in the period of the French and English bourgeois revolutions.
The banner of the eighteenth century was bourgeois progress, which was out to destroy the moral and economic structure of the feudal system. The main historical task of the age was the transformation of society. The ideas of civic liberty were blowing in the wind, and they were great ideas, heralding a new stage in the development of human society.
22Until the nascent bourgeois society had revealed its contradictions, it was hailed by philosophers and writers connected with the democratic movement of the age as an ideal and perfect form of civilisation, assuring harmony of individual interests. The idea of free or ``natural'' man came to the fore, man independent of the absolutist morality and the hierarchical and seigniorial concept of duty towards feudal power, towards the political and moral props of the moribund feudal order.
``Natural'' man was free from the dogmas of absolutism propagated by classicism. He was regarded by the ideologists of the third estate as being naturally endowed with such new virtues as honesty, enterprise, and persistence. They were considered his inner essence and not introduced from outside, not, that is, implanted in him by the ethics of feudalism.
Fielding's boisterous heroes, with their tremendous joie de vivre, and the sober, practical Robinson Crusoe, were highly charged with historical optimism. Tom Jones behaves as his nature dictates, and if his nature sometimes lets him down, causing him to behave thoughtlessly or wrongly on occasion, no doubt is cast on his intrinsic virtue: he is simply revealing human nature as it is.
When Robinson Crusoe is left alone to battle with the elements and creates a whole civilisation on his island--- helped, to be sure, by the previous collective experience of mankind---his essential ``natural'' self remains intact and emerges triumphant from the hardest trials.
With their active, independent characters possessed of tremendous drive and tenacity, the early realists reflected in their works the chief feature of their age---the emergence of a new man, fundamentally different from the refined hero of classicism. The creation of the hero of the new age was a great triumph of realism, a triumph indeed that only the realists could have achieved, concerned as they were with the investigation and analysis of social environment.
However, while the early realists achieved undeniable successes in the portrayal of new characters, their depiction of environment was in many ways empirical. They did not spiritualise the surrounding world, which for them was 23 not the independent aesthetic object it is for modern realism. Their prose was precise and businesslike, and they often presented situations, without subtle shades and details. Robinson Crusoe's tale of life on his island is more a sober factual account of a business trip than a literary description of the colourful world. This sober, factual, businesslike approach also characterised the prose of Smollett and Swift, and in the case of the latter became an original stylistic device, perfectly in accord with the aesthetic tastes of the time.
Empiricism is the most significant feature of the early realist descriptions of environment. It is to be seen also in the presentation of the psychology of the heroes, who are revealed through their actions rather than in the sphere of the innermost workings of their minds and hearts. The reader was expected to divine the hero's inner life from his actions, for it was not so much personal as universal traits that were stressed in the character's psychology. The characters' spiritual life had not yet been submitted to deep, let alone many-sided, analysis in the realist prose of the eighteenth century. This sphere of personal life was not to be investigated until the nineteenth century.
In early realism empiricism in the portrayal of reality went hand in hand with a pronounced tendency to idealise the hero. This at first sight rather strange contradiction arose from the concept of freedom upheld by realism, which was based on Enlightenment philosophy and ethics. Rousseau's words ``Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains" rang out as a tocsin in the middle of the century. This powerful formula proclaiming freedom to be the natural right of natural man expressed the very essence of the age, and was born of the revolutionary ferment sweeping Europe on the eve of the French Revolution. It demanded emancipation from the suffocating fundamental spiritual principles of feudalism that were bringing people so much misery, and recognised the need to change the structure of society. The ideologists of the third estate did not regard the practical aspect of the matter as presenting much of a problem. It all seemed perfectly simple: free man from his chains and he would become for ever more the free citizen of a harmonious 24 society, since considered from the point of view of abstract, law all men were equal at birth.
In actual fact, however, man was obviously not free from birth, or indeed even before his birth. Rousseau overlooked the simple fact that the infant letting out its first cry in a lowly peasant hovel was not free since he inevitably inherited not only his parents' appearance but also their material condition. The child born in the nobleman's castle or in the house of a respectable merchant was incomparably freer from the start.
Man was not born free, since the society in which he lived and which had existed before him preserved material inequality and therefore could not possess the quality of genuine freedom.
The bourgeoisie sought its own freedom for itself, and when it finally won it, defined it in the codes which became the holy of holies of bourgeois democracy. Article Six of the French Constitution of 1793 produced by the bourgeois revolution gave a classical definition of freedom as understood by the third estate that had acquired power. ``Freedom is the right of man to do anything which does not prejudice the rights of another.'' In Article Sixteen this moralising thesis received unambiguous sociological substantiation. ``Natural'' man was allowed to ``use and dispose of his possessions and income as he thought fit''. Thus, the freedom of man to do whatever was not prejudicial to the interests of another, the ethical ideal so triumphantly proclaimed in the Convention, legalised an illusory freedom, for it affirmed the inviolability of the principle of private property, the fundamental principle of a society based on exploitation. In this way the man was in fact standing aloof from society, and by implication gaining the right to wage war on his neighbour and the whole of society, for what he ``thought fit" was bound to conflict with what other members of society ``thought fit''.
The complex casuistry of the bourgeois ideal of freedom was revealed magnificently by Marx. Contrasting true freedom with the concept of the citizen's social obligations as embodied in the 1793 Constitution, he wrote: ``... So the right to freedom is not based on human unity, but, on the contrary, on human isolation. It is the right to this 25 isolation, the right of the limited individual.'' He goes on: ``The right of a man to private property is therefore the right to use his possessions and dispose of them as he pleases (a son gre) irrespective of other people; it is the right to selfishness."^^1^^
Thus the rights of natural, that is, ``free'' man, supposedly granted him by nature, were now peremptorily placed within the iron framework of the law, which for the protection of its precepts from those who might wish to introduce real freedom for all, and not only for the man of property, resorted to instruments like the guillotine (in the case of the more progressive French bourgeois) or the gallows (preferred by the more conservative English bourgeois).
The guillotine was what awaited the Babouvists, the members of the Conspiracy of Equals who proclaimed true freedom for all and championed the idea of communist organisation of social relations. The French bourgeoisie saw a more fearsome enemy in Gracchus Babeuf than in all the emigres in Koblenz put together.
The law of the victorious bourgeoisie also made short work of the second part of Rousseau's classic formula. The chains of feudalism were indeed removed, but ``natural'' man suddenly found to his amazement and horror that he was now wearing handcuffs, admittedly of far more subtle workmanship than the rough, primitive chains the serf blacksmith had forged in the baron's smithy.
The relentless logic of history removed the mask from ``natural'' man to reveal an ennobled, idealised, enterprising bourgeois, a slave of his selfish personal interests.
This then was the real dialectic of the development of bourgeois class society, which appeared in the realm of ideology and social consciousness in the form of an antinomy between the ideal of ``natural'' man as it appeared to the revolutionary thinkers of the Enlightenment, and the practical implementation of this ideal.
The real bourgeois was engaged in speculation, organising financial deals, lending money on interest to the reckless, spendthrift aristocracy who lived with no thought for _-_-_
~^^1^^ K. Marx, F. Engels, Werke, Bd. 1, S. 364. 26
26 the morrow. He took over their estates, built roads and ships which he sent off to mysterious distant lands and whose cargoes of gold, copra, and silks gave off a heady aroma that turned the head of the respectable pater familias, encouraging him to undertake risky enterprises. The real bourgeois soon grasped the possibilities machines offered compared to human hands, and organised factories, learning to turn the sweat of the workers into hard cash, The antinomy between the social ideal of freedom and reality was a puzzle for many of the realist writers, since, reflecting the mood of the democratic plebeian masses, they sincerely wished to see the new society a harmonious one. Although they were bourgeois thinkers with the limitations that implies, they nevertheless presented in their works the sharp social contrasts of the age and many imperfections of the social order, thereby leaving invaluable testimonies.But the early realists were inclined to ascribe the imperfections of social organisation to the imperfection of human nature, the natural qualities of which needed to be corrected, polished and educated in the spirit of reason. Their natural tendency to idealise the hero reflected the objective revolutionary impulse of the age and the faith and hope of the popular masses, whose beliefs were formulated by realist art, that emancipation from feudal institutions could free people wholly and completely.
The tendency to idealise the hero was also an expression of the didactic aims of the progressive ideology which produced the Encyclopedic, Holbach's Systeme de la nature and the pedagogical Utopia of Emile in the hope that if the views and opinions that prevailed in society could be changed, then society itself would be changed as a result and would acquire the harmony and justice it was so lacking. If, as the Enlighteners believed, inculcating rational notions in people's minds could transform heterogeneous egoistic interests and instincts that still guided human actions into some organic harmonious whole, then art and literature with their power to influence through live images could contribute to such education of society. That is why in the works of the eighteenth century realists we find a certain amount of didacticism and a strong 27 moralising element. This applies not only to the more obvious examples, like Voltaire's Candide, where the moral of reason was contrasted with the unreason of the ruling morality of society. There is also a strong didactical element woven into the fabric of such genre works as Defoe's Mo]] Flanders, or Fielding's Jonathan Wild, as well as in Richardson's novels. Even in Beaumarchais' plays, which bubble with plebeian revolutionary joie de vivre and extol the skill and cunning, energy and practicality of the third estate, the feudal morality was condemned from the standpoint of the morality of the revolutionary bourgeoisie.
In early realism moralising went hand in hand with criticism of the social morals. This was perfectly natural, for the feudal world and the feudal consciousness reflecting the decline of the old order was least of all concerned with preserving and strengthening moral principles. While pathetic imitators of the great dramatists of the eighteenth century were attempting to uphold the idea of aristocratic hegemony with a stream of precious, bombastic, insufferably pompous tragedies, elevating the wretched passions of the decayed nobility, the rest of aristocratic literature was characterised by a spirit of vulgarised Epicureanism and frivolity. The feudal world was nearing its end in an atmosphere far from solemn. The pleasures of the flesh replaced the strict concepts of morality which were the backbone of Cornelian tragedy. The aristocracy hid their own corruption and spiritual bankruptcy behind a facade of refinement, under powder and beauty spots, ruches and farthingales. Frivolous verse, salon comedies with ambiguous situations bordering on the indecent mocked the principles which the bourgeoisie held sacred and inviolable, such as family life, the home, marital fidelity, thrift and economy, respect for one's elders, and so on and so forth. In its criticism of the feudal-aristocratic morality, revolutionary-democratic literature did not limit itself to exposing the ethical foundations of the old society. Diderot's Le Neveau de Rameau, Schiller's Kabale und Liebe, the novels of Godwin and Crebillon (fils) and the articles and satires of Steele, all revealed the imperfections of the existing social order through criticism of morals. 28 But while early realism had some great achievements to its credit as regards condemnation of the old order and its essential moralising and idealising tendency found support in the revolutionary ferment of the age, while attitudes of social protest inspired the works of the great writers and thinkers of the eighteenth century, associating them with the social struggle of the masses, the emergent bourgeois literature proper reflected the antinomy between the social ideal of freedom and its practical realisation with almost documentary accuracy. Side by side with the epic of the new age, the novel, developed the drama, gradually ousting both ``high'' tragedy and comedy, which had been the dominant genres of the earlier part of the century, answering as they did to the demands of feudal society. The drama, or as it was then called ``com\'edie larmoyante" or ``middle-class tragedy" bore distinct marks of its bourgeois origins.
The realist basis of the new drama lay in its accurate, authentic portrayal of bourgeois life, and the vicissitudes of the struggle of the third estate for a place in the sun, at a time when power and the commanding heights were still in the hands of the privileged classes. Its normal theme and conflict was portrayal of the clash between a bourgeois and feudal society, and the literary presentation of this conflict required investigation and analysis of environment. The realistic nature of the main conflict in the bourgeois drama was matched by accuracy in the presentation of details of everyday life, the way of life of the bourgeois family and social environment. However, the ``com\'edie larmoyante" was still marked by rationalism, rather ``stock'' heroes with a tendency to philosophise and embark on rather obvious, long-winded moralising. The founders of the moralising drama---Lillo, Destouches, Niveau de la Chausse, and even Diderot and Lessing---did not succeed in overcoming the natural prosaic nature of the ``natural man'', that is the bourgeois, despite their deliberate exaggeration of his positive qualities. The aesthetic contradictions of bourgeois drama were ideological contradictions, for the aim its creators had set themselves, that of poeticising the private man, was impossible. The real hero of the ``com\'edie larmoyante" was not a 29 suitable object tor poeticisat ion- His practical activities were based on self-interest, and his true face was far removed from the ideal figure the creators of the bourgeois drama saw in their mind's eye. As realists, keen observers of reality, they could not help discerning the negative aspects of their bourgeois heroes, their egoism, callousness and narrow-mindedness. But since bourgeois development had not yet revealed its main imperfections, its essentially inhuman, dehumanising nature, the negative features of the heroes of the middle-class drama were generally attributed, in accordance with the prevailing attitudes of the day, to the imperfections of human nature, which could be overcome and put right with time.
However, time was to destroy and refute this illusion typical of early realism. The historical process was not only marked by the collapse of feudal ties and the growth of revolutionary protest from the oppressed masses, but also by the establishment of bourgeois social relations. The new features of life forced people to give serious consideration to questions such as: Could not the new conditions be the cause of imperfections and weaknesses in human nature? Could human failings be in fact overcome by educational and pedagogical measures, which according to the ideas of the revolutionary Enlighteners should work without fail, yet in practice showed purely marginal success when they did not fail altogether?
The antinomy between man's spiritual and social development, reflecting objective social contradictions and felt by all the major thinkers and writers of the time, demanded clarification and explanation. If human nature is imperfect and not very susceptible to influence by enlightening reason, then there was clearly a need for further investigation of human nature itself and human psychology. The crisis in the concept of modern man as ``natural'' man resulting from bourgeois development which instilled views and habits contradictory to the ideal norms of civic and human virtue formulated by the morality of the Enlightenment, produced a psychological trend in realist prose, first apparent in the works of Prevost, Sterne, Goethe in his Werther period, and later Choderlos de Laclos. These writers examined aspects of the human soul 30 that the novel of the Enlightenment had failed to notice or deliberately ignored.
Lawrence Sterne perceived and revealed the true complexity of the human heart. No one had ever before submitted to such close scrutiny the movements of the human soul. Like painstaking natural scientist he examined the human heart through a magnifying glass and saw not only its bright aspects, but also the contradictions for which it was difficult to find a rational explanation. A strange melancholy pervades his works. His characters' inner world is an eminently healthy one. There is nothing pathological about them, no deviations from normality. Yet all of them---and especially the narrator---lack the selfconfidence of a Tom Jones or a Peregrine Pickle, who are never at a loss and sail blithely through life's most complicated situations. For them life is an open book, which they read without fear, taking the caprices of fortune and the numerous ups and downs of life in their stride.
Sterne's heroes found things far less clear and simple than did the heroes of the Enlightenment novels. The simplest impending action involved much thought and hesitation. While Fielding and Smollett's heroes went out and grappled boldly with the world, striding cheerfully and confidently along the highways of England, popping into inns and squires' halls, joking with buxom serving wenches, coming to blows with hotheads, crossing the Channel and finding their way into the dens of vice of the French capital to fight their way through rows and brawls with the same tireless energy as back at home, Sterne's rather eccentric heroes were confined to the world of their own Ego and a small circle of friends, and they are clearly baffled by life.
Like other representatives of the psychological trend in the 18th century novel, Sterne was aware of the complexity of the ties between man and his social environment, and felt that this environment, reality, which history formed not according to the laws of the philosophy and morality of the Enlightenment, but according to laws of its own, was far more complex than it appeared to the exponents of the rationalist realism of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, Sterne's character portrayal has much in 31 common with that of his contemporaries. While making an accurate analysis of his heroes' feelings, he singled out their dominant characteristic presenting it in ingenious interplay with other, less important, features. What distinguished Sterne from his contemporaries was not so much the original composition of Tristram Shandy, or the melancholia which gave such a unique charm to his prose, as what was new in his understanding of the relationship between the personal and the social in life. While Condor cet denied any contradiction between man's personal and social interests and saw a guarantee of progress in their supposed harmony, thereby ignoring the absence of class harmony and failing to realise that any attempt to identify essentially different interests could only mean unbridled freedom of personal interests, Sterne showed the divorce between the individual and society. Sterne's nervous irony might soften and blur the painfulness of this divorce, glossing over its causes, but his heroes were confined to their own little world simply because they saw the outside world as an unfavourable sphere of activity.
Goethe laid bare the inevitability and social roots of this divorce between the personal and the social most clearly in his Leiden des jungen Werthers, in which he presents man's spiritual life and emotional world with incomparable lyricism combined with analytic acumen.
That universal genius Goethe recognised the strength of the realist method relatively early on. Discovering for himself (and thereby for literature as a whole) the possibilities the new method offered, the young writer turned first and foremost to the lesson of Shakespeare. A revival of interest in the great English dramatist was characteristic of the eighteenth century as a whole. But the young Goethe grasped better than any other of Shakespeare's admirers and followers the essential feature of his art by virtue of which he can be considered the founder of realism.
Goethe's speech ``Zum Shakespeare Tag'', made shortly before he began work on his tragedy Gotz von Berlichingen---one of the finest works of eighteenth century realism which owed a great deal to Shakespeare's histories---- 32 contained a precise formulation of the basic tenet of realism. Goethe pointed out that Shakespeare's tragedies ``revolve around a hidden point . . . where all that is original in our Ego and the bold freedom of our will clash with the inexorable course of the whole"^^1^^. The natural laws of ``the inexorable course of the whole'', that is, the course and development of social relations, could naturally only be shown by realism, capable of analysing phenomena and investigating their causes and effects. Goethe realised that a man's personality and individual psychology could not be understood and explained unless the complex underlying secrets of ``the inexorable course of the whole" were first discovered.
When 1'abbe Prevost created the baffling Manon Lescaut, although a subtle psychologist and perspicacious observer of manners, he found himself at a loss to explain the inner contradictions of his heroine, who combined apparently irreconcilable qualities: fidelity in love and extreme inconstancy, great purity of soul and levity bordering on immorality in her actions, generosity and meanness, frivolity and a serious nature, and so on and so forth L'abbe Prevost is like an alchemist of old mixing different substances he imagines to be incompoundable in his flask and to his great surprise finding they have produced a totally unexpected and hitherto unknown compound. The new conditions had not only changed the social relations in a class society, but had shaped a new psychology, the peculiarities of which amazed 1'abbe Prevost.
Goethe pondered much on the essence and final aim of ``the inexorable course of the whole" throughout his long life. In Werther he boldly lifted the lid off the mysterious world of human feelings and related the sphere of the emotions to the reality of the external world. His novel quite stunned his contemporaries, and this was not only because the power of love---usually put on the pedestal of tragedy, or larded with sentimentality, or simplified and shown as ``the pale fire of desire"---at last acquired the poetry of simplicity and naturalness, and was allowed into the sphere _-_-_
~^^1^^ J. W. Goethe, ``Zum Shakespeare Tag" in: Von deutscher Ait und Kunst, Hamburg, 1773, S. 146.
__PRINTERS_P_33_COMMENT__ 3---0891 33 of everyday life. Along with a lyrical portrayal of complex human feelings, there are strong notes of condemnation of tyranny, and even more important, the novel lays bare the antinomy between a man's longing for freedom and the impossibility of achieving it. This fateful antinomy that racked the young Werther's soul was a burning issue of the time. However, while revealing the new reality, penetrating and investigating so many aspects of it, subjecting the principles of feudalism, its morality and ethics, to merciless criticism, and not stopping short of criticism of the negative aspects of the developing bourgeois society, the eighteenth century realists showed themselves unable to offer any solutions to the basic conflict of the age. Indeed, in accordance with changes in social consciousness and under pressure from other literary methods a transformation of realism began.The revolutionary democratic social thought of the eighteenth century and the emergent bourgeois ideology sensed the approach of revolution whose fiery breath was searing the whole continent, and were each fighting for their own understanding and practical realisation of human freedom. The material and spiritual conditions for a revolution had already matured, and like any other revolution it was attracting many minds and striking fear into the hearts of those who were against any change in the existing order. Like any bourgeois revolution it contained an inalienable contradiction: while declaring freedom it affirmed a new form of exploitation. The storming of the Bastille and the subsequent events of the French Revolution, which became more and more fierce as the revolutionary crisis deepened, while inspiring revolutionary democratic thought, modified the social, and hence the aesthetic, aims of democratic art and literature, which did not rise enough to become truly revolutionary. As Marx wrote in his article ``Moralising Criticism aud Criticising Morality": ``The reign of terror in France could ... only serve to wipe away as if by magic all the feudal ruins of France with blows of its fearful hammer. The bourgeoisie with their cowardly caution would never have managed to do the job over decades even. The bloody actions of the people, therefore, merely cleared the way for 34 the bourgeoisie."^^1^^ If the revolutionary democratic art and literature of the time (Forster, Schubart, Joseph Chenier, Radishchev, the painter David and the composer Gossec and so on) were inspired by the ideas of the Revolution, undismayed by what was called its ``excesses'', democratic, not to mention bourgeois, art and literature, although also seething with civic ideas and sentiments, and considering man's emancipation from the burden of feudal relations an historical necessity, displayed ``cowardly caution".
The character of the development of thought at the end of the 18th century was determined by the fact that the Enlightenment outlook called to life by the ripening revolutionary situation was unable to rid itself of its inner contradictions. For both the ideologists of the third estate and revolutionary democrats expressing the true interests of the oppressed masses, the root causes of the historical process and its real prospects remained a mystery. Nor was realism in a position to bring them to light, for its strength and weakness lay in social analysis of reality, which was constantly changing and fraught with completely new unforeseen tendencies and features of development.
Describing the theoretical achievements of social thought in the eighteenth century in generalising on the practical experience and demands of the bourgeoisie, Engels wrote in his Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy:
``The eighteenth century, the century of revolution, also
revolutionised economics. But just as all the revolutions of
this century were one-sided and bogged down in
antitheses---just as abstract materialism was set in opposition
to abstract spiritualism, the republic to monarchy, the
social contract to divine right---likewise the economic
revolution did not get beyond antithesis. The premises
remained everywhere in force: materialism did not
contend with the Christian contempt for and humiliation of
Man, and merely posited Nature instead of the Christian
God as the Absolute facing Man. In politics no one dreamt
of examining the premises of the State as such.
It did not occur to economics to question the validity of
_-_-_
~^^1^^ K. Marx, F. Engels, Wetke, Bd. 4, S. 339.
Classicism as a literary method arose in the period when the countries of Europe were consolidating as nation states, when centralised power was suppressing feudal liberties (which was of unquestionable benefit to the bourgeoisie). Therefore, the essential ideology of classicism was founded on the civic principle, on the absolutisation of monarchic duty, which was placed above personal interests. In the age of the bourgeois revolution, classicism again shaped and expressed civic passions and sentiments, civic _-_-_
~^^1^^ K. Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts oi 1844, Mos-. cow, pp. 177--78.
36 awareness, but it now absolutised the concept of public duty. The Jacobins, the most consistent revolutionaries, were also the most consistent classicists, which is only natural, since for them the question of civic duty and publicspiritedness was literally a matter of life and death. Through classicism the democratic and bourgeois consciousness also affirmed their understanding of man's duty to society in the new conditions created by the revolutionary crisis.Lessing, Diderot, and even Rousseau, were favourably disposed towards revolutionary classicism because of its social content, for the revolutionary democrats drew a sharp distinction between social interests (essentially, those of the whole people) and arbitrary, selfish, personal interests. The moderate bourgeois ideology of the third estate, on the other hand, characterised, to use Marx's term, by ``cowardly caution'', regarded classicism first and foremost as a means of compromise with reality, although the theoreticians of bourgeois classicism also insisted on the principle of freedom as the natural precondition for human progress. Winckelmann, who did so much to promote the study of the art of antiquity, declared in his Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, an important landmark in the development of eighteenth century social thought, ``calm is the quality most characteristic of beauty'',~^^1^^ thereby expressing through aesthetic theory the political demands of the moderate bourgeoisie and formulating the programme for the development of the new art.
Winckelmann did not wish to relate the new art directly to the social struggle. ``The mind of a rational being'', he wrote, ``has an innate longing to transcend matter into the realm of abstract ideas".^^2^^ This definition can be said to characterise German ideology as a whole with its aptitude for accomplishing universal historical revolutions in the realm of pure thought. It clearly reveals the inability of the burghers of Germany (and not only Germany) to go very far in criticism of reality by real, practical, as opposed to theoretical, methods. In the years when _-_-_
~^^1^^ J. Winckelmann, Geschichte dei Kunst des Altertums, Weimar, 1964, S. 144.
~^^2^^ Ibid., S. 135.
37 Winckelmann formulated the aesthetico-political credo of bourgeois classicism, the ``rational being'', far from aspiring to the ``realm of thought" was trying in the most insistent manner to introduce the rational demands of ideology into everyday life. Basically, Winckelmann was reconciling himself to reality, sanctifying his conciliation with refined aestheticism imbued with the spirit of antiquity.For all their important differences, the various classicist trends in eighteenth century literature all arose for perfectly logical reasons, as reflections of changes in social consciousness. The logic of the emergence of classicist tendencies is to be seen especially clearly in the spiritual evolution of Goethe and Schiller whose works represent the consummation of the aesthetic and social quests of eighteenth century literature considered as an independent stage in the development of world literature.
Both Goethe and his younger contemporary, the initiators and finest representatives of eighteenth century realism, had a rare awareness of the historical essence of their time. Both deliberately and warrantably went over to new creative positions, realising that the existing realist means, based as they were on insufficient comprehension of the laws of social development, did not allow of solving the riddles that arose with the emergence of bourgeois social relations. In turning to classicism and attempting to revive the noble, harmonious spirit of the art of antiquity, with its perfect form and great sense of artistic proportion, Schiller and Goethe were basically resolving the same humanistic problems as they had posed in their pre-- classicist works.
Unlike Jacobin classicism, which supported the idea of revolution all the way, the classicism of Goethe and Schiller proceeded from rejection of terror as a method of implanting the new social relations. But if their classicism had been simply a reaction to the events of the Revolution, it would have degenerated into an effete philistine apology for reality or pure formalism manipulating motives borrowed from classical antiquity, and essentially, eclectic and sterile. As it was, their classicism was based on the consequences of the revolutionary changes which 38 had failed to usher in an era of genuine human happiness. Naturally, Gotz von Berlichingen and Werther, Die Rauber and Kabale und Liebe, despite their powerful protest against the abnormalities of social relations, also contained doubts as to the possibility of their transformation by revolution. The world order that was established following the victory of the French Revolution, and especially after Thermidor, far from removing the inherent contradictions of class society, tended to exacerbate them. In regarding beautiful---and hence moral---art based on perfect classical models as a means for educating man and destroying the egoism and disharmony in his soul, Goethe and Schiller were essentially continuing to uphold the ideals of the Enlightenment, displaying wise humanistic faith in the idea of the perfectability of human nature and society. Their classicism, unlike Winckelmann's, did not represent a compromise. Characterised by the universalisation of moral, humanitarian duty, it represented rather an attempt to resolve by new means the new ethical and social problems that the course of historical progress had posed, and it arose on the basis of the achievements of realism. Although late eighteenth century literature was marked by a retreat from realism and the birth of preromantic and romantic trends, these new trends were unable to develop without taking into account the achievements of realism.
Goethe and Schiller were aware of the fruitlessness and futility of the bourgeois individualist cult of self-will preached by the Sturm und Drang school They found equally unacceptable the attempts to find new ways of reflecting reality made by their pre-romanticist and romanticist contemporaries, who began to perceive life as a fabric of interwoven illusions, left the world of reality for the world of fancy, or proposed, like Novalis in his treatise Die Christenheit oder Europa, the restoration of the old order destroyed by history. The time was not yet ripe for revolutionary romanticism to take the stage.
At the turn of the century, the literature which reflected the results of the revolutionary crisis, like philosophical thought, was making a serious attempt to perceive and comprehend what had happened, and raise, on 39 the ruins of shattered hopes and illusions, a new outlook, a new understanding of nature, society and human consciousness.
While bourgeois economists were busy justifying strictly bourgeois progress substantiating its inevitability with frank delight, while German idealist philosophers and Natural philosophers were concentrating all their efforts on criticising the mechanistic materialism of the Enlightenment, while nascent romanticism, painfully aware of the growing discord between the individual and society, was unable to shed any light on the origins of this discord, in the midst of this very confused period a new idea was emerging that was to revolutionise thought---- the idea of development. At the turn of the century, the basic group of questions of outlook later to be formulated by Hegel in his Die Phanomenologie des Geistes ( substantiation of dialectics, definition of the law of the negation of a negation, and a constant attention to history) was already taking shape. New theories developed at this point, new social theories suggesting an unexpected solution to the apparently insoluble question of human freedom, with which the thinkers of the Enlightenment had wrestled in vain, theories proceeding from rejection of capitalist private-ownership relations and seeming to confirm by the very fact of their existence the correctness of Hegel's law of the negation of a negation. Out of the ruins of the feudal system, out of the scaffolding of the capitalist system, Utopian socialism arose, attempting to apply the idea of development to history, seeking a logic in its flux.
In his Theorie des quatre mouvements, which appeared the year after La phenomenologie de 1'esprit, Fourier wisely pointed out the need of the new age for a new spiritual synthesis based on other ideological and social foundations than the democratic ideology of the Enlightenment, not to mention strictly bourgeois political economy and philosophy. ``After the disaster of 1793, all illusions were shattered; the political and moral sciences were in disgrace and all faith in them had been irretrievably lost. Henceforth it was to be foreseen that happiness was not to be expected from any acquired knowledge, 40 that social welfare must be sought in some new science, and new paths laid for the political spirit; for it was clear that neither the philosophers nor their rivals knew the cures for social sufferings and that under cover of the dogmas of both, the most terrible ills, including poverty, would continue forever."^^1^^ This need for synthesis and generalisation of the social experience acquired during and after the bourgeois revolution was also felt by Hegel, who raised the edifice of an encyclopaedic philosophical system, and by Saint-Simon with his idea for a new encyclopaedia, and also by the circumscribed, pedantic, bourgeois thinker Auguste Comte, who emasculated the revolutionary and socialist substance of Saint-Simon, borrowing only the rationalist-positivist aspect of his theory.
The need to acquire an understanding of the new social reality that was taking shape naturally produced a heightened interest in history, which was to characterise the intellectual life of the early nineteenth century.
Such geniuses as Goethe and Schiller also turned their attention to history and tried to understand the lessons of the French Revolution through its events and consequences. Schiller, who had made an extensive study of the past as an historian, and was the author of works on the Netherlands Revolt, the Thirty Years War and the political struggle in France in the reign of Henry IV, all written by an artist rather than a scholar, realised that the hidden mainspring of human passions and actions lay in material interests, or in other words adopted a realist approach in his analysis of events. The realist view of life, which enabled Schiller to rise above the theories and principles of classicism, is already to be seen in Kabale und Liebe. In his later dramas, in the Wallenstein trilogy and Mary Stuart, and especially Wilhelm Tell, it is the principle underlying the whole action. Schiller did not merely turn to history in search of subjects and great figures for the purpose of drama and tragedy. He regarded history as the struggle of various moral principles, _-_-_
~^^1^^ Ch. Fourier, CEuvres Completes, T. 1, ``Theorie des quatre mouvements'', Troisieme edition, Paris, 1846, pp. 2-3.
41 and it was this study of history that brought him round to the belief in the idea of rule by the people in his later years although he had previously rejected the Jacobin method of transforming society.Features of utopianism were also clearly manifest in his outlook, for the objective basis of historical changes remained a mystery to him, a mystery that was to be solved in the near future by social thought, art and literature, once the contradictions of the capitalist system had become apparent.
Both in his Briefe tiber die asthetische Erzeihung, where he expresses great hopes in the power of art to change man and hence society, and in his later tragedies, Schiller adhered to the aesthetic canon of his classicism, exaggerating the power of man's intrinsic moral essence and devoting considerably less attention to study and analysis of the real underlying factors of the historical process. Hence the frequent irruptions of fatality into his heroes' fortunes, this really being none other than disguised historical necessity and conditionally which the author failed to perceive (viz., Wallensteiri). His portrayal of personal passions, thoughts and feelings pushed into the background the environment in which the character moved and acted, the ``Falstaffian background" which could have imparted realistic completeness to the whole structure of his tragedies. Schiller often abandoned objectivity, making his hero the carrier of and voice for his own ideas, resorting to exalted and somewhat abstract rhetoric. All these features of Schiller's drama have a logical historical explanation, and bear witness to the fact that, he was constantly developing as an artist, doing his utmost to embody in artistic images the new reality, which could only be apprehended and presented in word form by realism, and on no account by that revived classicism to which the poet so frequently declared allegiance. Nevertheless, Schiller's later plays do comprise tremendous love of man, magnificent characters, a remarkably full and accurate presentation of the characters' inner worlds, and quite extraordinarily intense and authentic conflicts. Most important of all, Schiller had come to realise that the practical result of the French Revolution, the new order that 42 was establishing itself in place of the old world destroyed by the revolution, was not the end product of social development, and that history was a process in the course of which old ways of life and social forms that pass away are replaced by new ones. The idea of rule by the people which Schiller reached in Wilhelm Tell, after overcoming his bourgeois fears of popular revolt, shows that he realised that only the future would be able to resolve the apparently indissoluble contradictions of his age.
If Schiller turned to history in order to comprehend the meaning of the social revolution he was witnessing, Goethe's works and spiritual evolution reflected the essence of the age somewhat more indirectly. In his treatise Uber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung Schiller made a very shrewd assessment of the main feature of Goethe's original genius, expressed in his spontaneously realist and powerful perception of life. Goethe strongly disapproved of various forms of subjectivism in art and philosophy, and often openly expressed his contempt for it. He valued the objectivity of the world and nature over and above all else, and constantly felt the living pulse of existence: he preferred the Spinozan brand of determinism to the painful attempts of contemporary Naturphilosophie to derive laws of nature, exclusive to nature, from human thought. Goethe considered development to be a natural feature of nature and extended this concept to history, frequently employing and adapting the views expressed by Herder in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte.
Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pilanzen zu erklaren, which like the works of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, anticipated the idea of evolution, and Faust, that bold, triumphant hymn to creative, constructive, searching human thought, are pervaded with the idea of development, the idea of the incessant movement of life, constantly in the making, continuously changing.
Goethe always saw man as a child of ever-changing, flowing nature, a leaf on the evergreen tree of eternity. Faust, while evoking the spirit of the Earth and recognising its power, at the same time feels himself a part of the Universe, to the understanding of which he devoted all the powers of his mind.
43But if the objectivity of nature and its laws was obvious to Goethe and he was able to grasp the concrete features of the evolution of the living being (suffice it to remember his discovery of the intermaxillary bone); if we can agree with the Russian poet who wrote: ``The book of the stars was clear to him and the salt wave spoke with him'', the idea of development which was such an organic part of Goethe's Weltanschauung never acquired true realist concreticity in his later works when applied to the social sphere, the domain of living history. Following in Herder's footsteps and accepting that history, like nature, conformed to certain reasonable laws, Goethe was unable to discover the forces that determine human social relations. Time put fetters even on his indomitable mind.
Despite the fundamental differences between the two great writers, there is a definite similarity in their approach to the presentation of history, to be attributed to the identical social conditions in which their art matured. The fate of the gloomy, ambitious Wallenstein marching inevitably towards his doom, has its counterpart in Egmont who throws himself with equal passion and delight into sensual pleasures and social struggle. Portraying Egmont as an active participant in the national liberation movement, Goethe focussed his attention on the idealistic political blindness of his hero, his inevitable progress towards the executioner's block, rather than on the struggle between real social forces, which is relegated to the background. This was no accident: Goethe substituted analysis of the spiritual world of his tragic hero for the dialectic of historical contradictions of a class origin which determined the behaviour of Egmont as an historical figure, and thus the fatality, the predetermination of his fate expresses, just as in the case of Schiller's trilogy, the poet's ignorance of the nature of historical necessity.
Goethe, like Schiller, did not welcome the French Revolution and offered in contrast to the fierce political passions raging in France the orderly, limited and moderate bourgeois existence extolled and idealised in sweet hexameters in Hermann und Dorothea. Yet, again like Schiller, he understood perfectly well that the results of 44 the revolution did not represent the final stage in the historical development of mankind.
In his latter years, Goethe followed closely the successes and advances of contemporary social, political and aesthetic thought. In the new period that followed the Revolution of 1789, a period full of events of tremendous scale and importance, Goethe could observe much that was unknown to the 18th century, and Utopian elements begin to feature more and more distinctly in his outlook and literary works.
The idea of education as a means of creating first a harmonious individual and later a harmonious society, was characteristic of Weimar classicism too, and forms the core of Wilhelm Meister. But the new age had introduced new elements into the positive programme for perfecting social relations expounded in the novel. The theme of part two, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, shows a marked similarity to the practical ideas for reorganising society propagated by Fourier and Saint-Simon. Goethe's ideas were particularly akin to the ideas that received this final expression in Saint-Simon's treatise Opinions litteraires, philosophiques et industrielles, containing the famous epigraph: ``The Golden Age which blind tradition has hitherto placed in the past is yet to come".
Saint-Simon wrote: ``The nineteenth century philosophers should now be proceeding with their task which is very different from that performed by the philosophers of the 18th century.
``The nineteenth century philosophers should unite to demonstrate fully and comprehensively that at the present state of knowledge and civilisation only industrial and scientific principles can serve as the foundation for social organisation, or rather to show that at the present state of knowledge and civilisation society can be organised in such a way as to tend directly towards an improvement of its moral and physical welfare.
``The philosophers of the 18th century created Encyclopaedia to refute the theological and feudal system. The philosophers of the 19th century should in their turn produce their .Encyclopaedia to establish the industrial and scientific system.
45``All the ideas there should be submitted to analysis in order to prove that the common weal will be the necessary result of the influence exercised by scientific and industrial principles in place of that which had been exercised on society up to now by feudal and theological principles."^^1^^
In Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, Goethe, foreseeing the gigantic role industry would come to play in the life of mankind, accorded a great deal of space to reflections on the organisation of industry on a kind of communal basis. He attached equally great importance to collective labour in working the land, made the property of all. For Goethe labour was inseparable from the problem of education, preparing man for socially useful activity. ``The Province of Pedagogy'', that social and pedagogical Utopia, like the whole system of organisation of life described in the novel, served one end---the future, the affirmation and propagation of a more rational system of social relations than that which had resulted from the Revolution.
The philosophy of Faust also has a Utopian element. The spiritual pivot of the tragedy is undoubtedly the scene of the atonement, the scene of Faust's victory over Mephistopheles, when Faust's bold desire for knowledge turns to the good of others, when, having completed the course of his earthly existence and experienced all human joys and sorrows, he undertakes the re-creation of a whole land and in labour in the name of human happiness and freedom finds happiness for himself and the summit of his desires. Surely Goethe never attained such supreme, stirring tragedy as in this scene where the wild joy and elation of man the creator, at having discovered the meaning of life in fruitful activity, is clouded by the clanging of spades, and the dull sound of earth slipping into the grave Mephistopheles' faithful servants, the Lemurs, are digging for him. The historical optimism in Faust's last monologue, when he says:
_-_-_Only he deserveth life and liberty
Who every day goes out to fight for them
~^^1^^ Saint-Simon, Opinions lHl6iaiies, philosophiques et industrielles, Paris, 1825, pp. 83--84.
46 remove the gloomy tragic atmosphere of the scene, but not the real difficulty of achieving the ideal of freedom which Goethe extols in Faust.Accepting the idea of development as historically legitimate and inevitable, the great poet understood that the tremendous social progress the Revolution had ushered in would not be consummated, for the Revolution had also called forth forces arresting mankind's advance towards rational social relations. Goethe saw that egoism and individualistic desires were eating away the humanistic ideal of the common weal and preventing it from taking root in the soil of life, which had been ploughed by the Revolution and well watered with human blood in the European wars that followed. But he did not reveal the root causes of social egoism, nor the motive forces of the historical process, and thus his social views, while evolving towards Utopian socialism by no means always concurred with it in everything.
Fourier and Saint-Simon applied the idea of development to history and came to the conclusion that the motive force in the historical process was the class struggle. Despite his interest in his theory of new Christianity, towards the end of his life Saint-Simon had begun to speak in the name of ``the lower class'', the force which had formed in the depths of bourgeois society, in the name, that is, of the proletariat. The social organisation which in his opinion would replace the egoistic civilisation which had grown up on the ruins of the feudal system, should promote ``the growth of welfare of the proletarians"^^1^^. Like Fourier and Robert Owen, Saint-Simon still had illusions about the ways and means of reorganising society, but he already spoke with complete conviction of the ability of the proletariat to take part in the government and organisation of the ``system of social welfare'', thereby demonstrating remarkable historical perspicacity and prescience. The combination of the idea of development with the theory of class struggle, and the discovery of the laws of history governing social relations led to the emergence of scientific socialism, which brought about a major _-_-_
~^^1^^ Ibid., pp. 158--59.
47 revolution in human thought and social life. But this discovery of universal historical importance was to be made later, and in the early years of the 19th century progressive social thought was only just beginning to come to grips with the new reality, so that it was perfectly natural that SaintSimon, continuing the tradition of such outstanding 18th century thinkers as Morelly and Mably, and with Gracchus Babeuf as an immediate precursor, should have gone much further than Goethe in his theoretical views. The demarcation line between the democratic and humanist views of Goethe and the socialist theories of the utopists arose for the simple reason that the great poet's Weltanschauung was formed in a backward country with a cowardly and ready-to-compromise bourgeoisie, that displayed more than average ``cowardly caution" towards the Revolution. Genius though he was, Goethe was a scion of the German middle class, and this was bound to leave its mark on his attitude to history.The evolution of Goethe's social views in the latter part of his life entailed corresponding changes in his basic aesthetic principles. The classicist elements in his work were on the decrease and he was searching more and more purposefully for new artistic ways and means of presenting ``the inexorable course of the whole''. Wilhelm Meister had been experimental both from the point of view of its inner spiritual content and the manner in which it was expressed. Realistically reproduced pictures of life and manners alternate with romantic scenes which Goethe, despite his reserved and even critical attitude towards Romanticism, insinuated into his novel, often unwittingly, while the concluding part really represents a sociophilosophical treatise. Goethe was seeking a new literary idiom that would enable him to express the ideas he had reached and convey their objective, historical significance. But his ignorance of the causes determining the `` inexorable course of the whole" prevented him from achieving their realistic embodiment.
The work that crowned Goethe's literary career, his tragedy about Doctor Faustus who sold his soul to the Devil to learn the meaning of things, and after long torments and sufferings rose from the personal, individualist 48 search for the meaning of life to appreciation of the common good and service to one's fellow men, was syncretic in form. The popular legend of the magician and wizard, on which the plot of the tragedy was based, introduced the historical colour of Germany's distant past, conveyed in Sachs' verse; the dramatic episode of the seduced maiden becoming a child murderer brought a powerful folklore current into the tragedy; the gloomy imagery of northern mythology is paralleled by elements from ancient mythology adapted and developed in complexity; the baroque splendour of the court scenes is combined with the strict classical severity of the Helen episode; the poetic exposition of natural science theories did not prevent the inclusion in the tragedy of the solemn liturgical finale; the allegory of the Walpurgisnacht scenes is closely interwoven with elevated symbolics, and the whole work, with its wealth and complexity of artistic elements is reminiscent as regards structure of the old mystery plays and is distantly related to the puppet theatre, that is to the folk tradition, to folk tales and legends. Goethe created a colourful, unusual, fantastic world, owing its completeness to the unity of content and manner of expression. Since the personal fate of the hero represents the fate of the whole of mankind seeking the right path in life and history, intent on discovering the secrets of the Universe, and, in Goethe's opinion, called upon to overcome the tremendous obstacles on his historical path and introduce a rational foundation to his life, Faust and his adversary Mephistopheles are symbolic. Symbolism and (often extremely nebulous) allegory also attach to other characters in the tragedy.
It is in the very nature of the artistic image to lend itself to different interpretations (including symbolic ones), for no art reflects reality with mirror-like accuracy, providing a perfectly unambiguous copy of the world of things and phenomena. Nor could it, for the human mind does not reflect objective reality like a passive mirror. There can be various principles underlying an artistic image: it can be built on associations, on similarity or comparison; it can be sharpened and made grotesque or a caricature; it can be allegorical, perfectly three-- __PRINTERS_P_48_COMMENT__ 4---0891 49 dimensional and plastic, literal and figurative, at the same time, but whatever its structure and whatever features---- rationalistic or emotional---predominate, it is always based on some particular manner of apprehending reality depending on the social nature of the author's outlook.
The aesthetics of the naturalist school began to emerge in the mid-19th century at a time when profound changes were taking place in bourgeois social consciousness based on an empirical approach to reality, which the theoreticians and exponents of naturalism considered a static category not subject to development. Naturalism cultivates the principle of copying reality, and photographic images which cannot be generalised and made to express the essence of things. Thus the naturalist aesthetics not only impoverished art and literature but detracted from the cognitive value of the image, and hence from the cognitive value of art itself.
Unlike non-realist trends, realism makes good use of all the inherent possibilities of thinking in images that help express the substance of the apprehended object. Realism absorbs all the available principles of creating an image and reveals the qualities and features of apprehended reality. In this way the realistic image objectivises reality and is equivalent to it in its own right. Realism conveys the essence of things and not their superficial appearance as naturalism does, and its aesthetics are thus truly rich and varied. The epic fullness of Tolstoi's imagery recreating the tangible, material texture of the fabric of existence, is as typical of realism as is the controlled, rationalist intellectual imagery of Stendhal; the nervous, tense, highly emotional imagery of Dostoyevsky's novels also provided a realistic picture of the life of his age, as did the laconic, concise prose of Chekhov, with its complex overtones conveying the deeper undercurrents of events. The Russian satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin used symbolism and grotesque distortion in his scathing criticism of the social structure of Russia's capitalist-landowner society. His History of the Town of Glupov, although it avoids oversimplified, didactical allegory, is full of symbolism and its characters, too, are symbolic. But the symbolic presentation of the town officials, far from being at 50 variance with realism, Hows straight from the realist tradition, for the author is embodying in these characters typical concrete historical features of social reality. Behind the rather phantasmagorial surface of Shchedrin's satire lay the reality of semi-feudal Russian life, the author's vision of its future path and the impending doom of the existing order. Shchedrin resorted to symbolism as the best means he could find of presenting and typifying the universal features of the social system.
The subjectivist trends that arose at the turn of this century lacked an integrated view of life and went further than naturalism towards destroying the cognitive function of the image. The surrealists, for example, broke the link between the image and reality, treating the image as a form without objective content and only using it as a vehicle for chaotic feelings and emotions, associations and sensations arising in the poet's soul, which is supposedly independent of the external world and unaffected by its logic. The theoreticians of surrealism (Andre Breton and company) seem to have been unaware of the fact that the ``mysterious'' soul of the poet and the emotions it expressed had absorbed the chaos of the outside world. The symbolists, for whom the essence of reality was dark and inscrutable, presented their perception of it by vague, insubstantial allusions. Vyacheslav Ivanov, one of the foremost theoreticians and exponents of symbolism, defined the nature of symbolist imagery thus: ``The symbol is only a true symbol when it is inexhaustible and infinite in its meaning, when it utters in its secret language (hieratic and magic) of allusion and suggestion something indelible, that is not equivalent to external words. It is manyfaceted, polysemantic and always dark in the deepest depth. It is an organic formation, like a crystal. It is a certain monad and hence differs from the complex and disparate composition of allegory, parable or simile. Allegory is teaching; the symbol is indication."^^1^^ Vyacheslav Ivanov and the other symbolists (Maeterlinck, Hofmannsthal and Bely) raised an impassable barrier between literature and reality, refusing to apprehend reality and declaring the symbol to be the only means of expressing _-_-_
~^^1^^ Vyacheslav Ivanov, From Star to Star, 1909, p. 39 (in Russ.).
__PRINTERS_P_52_COMMENT__ 4* 51 the essence of life. Adopting an intuitive outlook, they assigned to art the miserable role of diviner of the holy mysteries dispensed in the universe, by some supernatural power which they named, according to taste, personal inclination and what they had read in philosophical and theological literature, the universal spirit, or will, or the life urge, or death, or somewhat more clearly---the divine principle.The symbolism in Faust was not merely the product oi poetic fancy: it was the result of an incomplete apprehension of the concrete forms of the historical process, its foundations and essential root causes. Philosophical abstraction, allegory and symbol made their appearance in Goethe's tragedy where he was unable to impart real, authentic life substance to his reflections on the historical destiny of man and human society. But, like his hero, Goethe aspired to rise from ignorance to knowledge, to apprehend the meaning and goal of man's social development. Goethe, like the progressive thinkers of his day, came to the conclusion that the Golden Age lay not in the past but in the future. The noble ideal of mankind's one day achieving earthly happiness illuminated his last great work, in which the antinomy between the ideal of freedom and the ways it could be achieved although not solved, was at least in the process of being surmounted. This ideal was extremely potent, being deeply rooted in the soil of life, and answering the demands that history had produced in the popular masses, for whom the change in the form of exploitation that was the chief result of the bourgeois Revolution meant the beginning of a new period in the struggle for emancipation. Goethe's tragedy crowns a whole stage in the development of world art and literature, confirming that the solution of the questions the historical process had placed before social thought, questions that arose as a result of the bourgeois Revolution, must be sought in history itself.
This is indeed what happened: with the exacerbation of the contradictions of bourgeois society which came to light in the very hour of its triumph over feudalism, history became of necessity an object of cognizance and investigation for literature and art.
52 __ALPHA_LVL1__ HISTORY AND REALISM __ALPHA_LVL2__ [introduction.]After the French Revolution, which had a colossal impact on all spheres of social and spiritual life in Europe, art and literature entered a new stage of development.
Revolutionary classicism, with its enthusiasm for the strict civic virtues of the ancient Romans, was exhausted as an independent school by the beginning of the 19th century, for the flame of freedom of which it was a reflection was burning low. The painter David, who had given such a touching portrayal of Marat's death agony in famous canvas, already worshipped a new deity. His paintings glorified a new Caesar: Bonaparte, on his prancing horse, pointing towards the Alpine peaks, as misty as his future; Bonaparte, in his splendid court, placing the imperial gold crown on his own head----
Yet despite the crisis in revolutionary classicism, its poetics, imbued with sincere civic ardour, became an essential element in the aesthetic views of many writers who were aware that literature was capable of being an active social force and were ideologically connected with the democratic movements---writers like Byron, Beranger, the Russian Decembrist poets, and Griboyedov.
On the whole, classicism was obviously falling into decay and was ultimately doomed to extinction, for the conditions which had produced the kind of artistic thought of which it was the expression had already disappeared. The new reality could not be apprehended and presented 53 in the classicist manner partly because its canons---the distinction between high and low style, the strict regiementation of genres, the theory of the three unities, and the formalism of classicist associations and motives---were obsolete, but especially because the very essence of classicism, whose basic feature was a conception of life as something static, prevented the works of the classicists from reflecting life's renewed, changing forms. At a time when the idea of development had penetrated the human consciousness thanks to an acceleration in the course of history, development by leaps and bounds, enabling the most progressive thinkers of the early years of the century to divine something of the nature of social ties, classicism revealed its inability to grasp their dynamics, the dynamics of social development. The classicists regarded the passions as the basis of character, considering them to be immutable, the same in all ages. Hence the way their characters were so often mere personifications of particular passions or ideas, and were devoid of real-life concreticity and unable to develop and reveal themselves. The classicists dissolved the individual in the species, depriving their characters of personality, and were therefore unable to combine the general and the particular. They abstracted their heroes from real life, so that their works acquired a general universality often bordering on the schematic. Even their best works show static composition, a tendency to posing in the characters, and a declamatory, rhetorical style, as in David's The Oath of the Horatii, a work which glorifies self-sacrifice. The heroes of the civic tragedy are depicted as if frozen in their spiritual elan at the moment they take their vow, and have not been very individualised by the painter. Their womenfolk stand leaning towards one another in an orderly and rather impersonal attitude of sorrow without ruffling in the slightest impeccable folds of their long garments. The whole painting is in a heavy declamatory style which presents us with the main idea but makes no attempt to go into details. The action is also weak in Goethe's tragedy Iphigenie auf Tauris, which was finished two years after David's picture, and marks the beginning of Weimar classicism. The drama in the play certainly does not derive 54 from the action. Whereas The Oath of the Horatii was in praise of civic action, the necessity and indeed the inevitability of social struggle, Goethe's tragedy poeticised the mora! principle as an agent of transformation, and Iphigenie's meek kindness is contrasted to Orestes's dagger. While in the painting the old man blesses his sons and hands them swords for the battle, Iphigenie takes her brother's weapon from him. This tragedy of renunciation shows Goethe's rejection of the idea of revolutionary transformation of the world.
The spirit of conciliation in Iphigenie auf Tauris did not lessen the moral sufferings of the heroes, but these sufferings were expressed not through the action but through elevated and somewhat impersonal rhetoric, in the cold, measured dialogues and monologues. The static inner world of this tragedy seems distilled as compared with the movement of life throbbing and seething in Goethe's realist works.
While inclining more to the elevated and the lofty, extracted from the mundane, classicism did not turn its back entirely on the everyday stuff of life. What it did do was to regard it as a ``low'', amusing sphere and accord it a subsidiary position in the run of aesthetic objects, thereby failing to rise from portrayal of everyday manners to portrayal of the vast canvas of human life which realism presented. Nevertheless, the question of the social foundations of progress was a major one in art, literature and social thought at the beginning of the 19th century, and by failing to investigate the practical aspects of life, failing to observe its objective movement, classicism was lagging behind the spirit of the times. Classicism gradually became the banner of the inveterate supporters of the old order, who were ready to accept anything rather than change, and it therefore incurred fierce attacks from the romanticists and the realists, who saw it as a force arresting the development of art, and an ideological weapon of reaction.
By the middle of the century classicist painting had degenerated into cold, soulless academicism, despite the fact that such talented artists as Ingres, Bryullov and Thorwaldsen continued to work in the manner. In literature 55 classicism was represented by a host of hack imitators, and not until the latter part of the century, with the appearance of neo-classicism proclaimed and defended by Jean Moreas, Ernest Seilliere and Charles Maurras in France and Paul Ernst, Wilhelm von Scholz and others in Germany, did it again come to merit attention.
The neo-classicists with their insistence on clarity and strict form as against the obscureness of symbolism were least of all concerned with questions of pure aesthetics. Their ideology was based on the Nietzschean interpretation of classical antiquity, and their works and philosophical treatises propagated the morality of the masters and the principles of the hierarchical organisation of society based on strict social discipline. They combined support of class inequality with militant nationalism, and aesthetic refinement with adoration of power and will. The product of new forms of social consciousness, and one of the currents of European decadent art and literature, neoclassicism had nothing in common with classicism apart from its name.
Romanticism played the leading role in the art of the early 19th century. ``Only romantic poetry, like the epos, can be the mirror of the whole surrounding world, the reflection of the age,'' Schlegel wrote, and rightly to a certain extent, for it was Romanticism that first shed light on the new sentiments and outlook that were characteristic of the post-revolutionary period, and indeed on whole new aspects of reality.
Romanticism enriched world art and literature with the sense of history, without which the new order that replaced feudalism could not be properly comprehended. ``There is no other kind of self-knowledge other than the historical,'' wrote Schlegel. ``Nobody knows what he is unless he knows his fellow men and above all his supreme fellow man, the master of masters---the genius of the age.'' These words are a pretty shrewd comment on what was essentially new in the work of the romantic writers, for prior to romanticism art had not noted the changeability of history, and what preceded and prepared the present had not been regarded as essentially different from the present. Earlier art and literature on themes from the past 56 had tended to eliminate the temporal dimension. Thus, paintings of biblical subjects showed Roman legionaries dressed as medieval mercenaries, and townsfolk dressed very much as the artist's contemporaries. As Stendhal wrote: ``Our grandfathers were moved by Orestes in Andromache who was played in an enormous powdered wig, red stockings and shoes with fire-coloured bows."^^1^^ This was perfectly natural, for it never even occurred to the audiences who were so delighted with plays like Andromache that Orestes or Achilles did not wear wigs. Neither in the Enlightenment novel nor in baroque literature, as in Lohenstein's pseudo-historical novels, was history treated as a process. It was only with the preromantic trends in the intellectual life of Europe at the time of the Revolution that history's movement in time began to be examined, as witnessed by the extensive study of folk art and the epic, Macpherson's interest in The Poems of Ossian, and the appearance of historical themes in the so-called ``Gothic novel'', where in actual fact historical events still played a purely decorative role.
The heightened interest in history observable in the social thought of the early 19th century was by no means due to purely intellectual causes; history itself burst into people's lives, for the new century did not descend on the world lightly as a dove but to the thunder of cannon, the beating of drums and whiffs of grape-shot. The rhythmic march of soldiers' feet shook the continent from the Pyrenees to the Volga, and the bloody fields of Austerlitz, Borodino and Waterloo marked the course of Napoleon's cruel star, its zenith and its nadir.
The invasions of the French armies led by Napoleon's marshals, bloated with victory, helped sweep away the feudal order in the countries of Europe. But the oppressive regimes they set up in the occupied territories produced a rapid growth in national consciousness among the subject peoples and encouraged the development of national liberation movements. Napoleon had a strong taste of this first in Spain and then during his fateful 1812 campaign, _-_-_
~^^1^^ Stendhal, CEuvres completes, ``Racine et Shakespeare'', Paris, 1954, p. 58.
57 when the Grande Armee was crippled by the blows inflicted on it by the Russian people and the foundations of Napoleon's Empire were so shaken as never to recover.The national liberation movements in Europe in the first quarter of the nineteenth century were organically linked with the democratic movements trying to carry through the destruction of the bastilles of feudalism begun by the French Revolution. ``Napoleon's imperialist wars continued for many years, took up a whole epoch and exhibited an extremely complex network of imperialist^^1^^ relationships interwoven with national liberation movements. And as a result, through all this epoch, unusually rich in wars and tragedies (tragedies of whole peoples), history went forward from feudalism to 'free' capitalism."^^2^^
The Spanish guerrilla movement created the preconditions for the bourgeois revolution of 1820. Under pressure from the popular masses, whose mood was expressed by the Tugendbund, the frightened heads of states of the German confederation, vowed to introduce constitutional government, and only the fierce resurgence of feudal reaction following Napoleon's defeat enabled them to avoid carrying out their solemn promises. In Italy the carbonari who had headed an anti-French and anti-Austrian movement, led bourgeois revolutions in Naples and Piedmont in 1820-- 21. Among the officers who entered Paris with the victorious Russian armies were those who took part in the tragic Decembrist uprising on Senate Square in St. Petersburg one cold winter's day in 1825.
The restoration under the aegis of the Holy Alliance of the pre-revolutionary order affected first and foremost the political aspect of European social life. The Restoration was unable to halt the development of the new capitalist system of economic relations.
While social movements on the continent where the bourgeois transformation of society had not yet been completed were mainly bourgeois-democratic or revolutionary-democratic, in England, which was more advanced _-_-_
~^^1^^ ``I call here imperialism the plunder of foreign countries in general and an imperialist war the war of plunderers for the division of such booty.'' (Lenin's note.)
~^^2^^ V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, p. 51.
58 industrially and socially, another historical factor was making itself felt: the class struggles of the proletariat wen. beginning. ``The new mode of production,'' wrote Engels, ``was, as yet, only at the beginning of its period of ascent; as yet it was the normal, regular method of production--- the only one possible under existing conditions. Nevertheless, even then it was producing crying social abuses."^^1^^ These social evils were naturally borne by the have-not sections of the population and especially the proletariat, for the development of machine production, the vast increase in exploitation and the growth of the towns was producing fundamental changes in their patriarchal forms of labour, their way of life and thinking. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the struggle of the working class in Britain had become extremely serious, heralding the fierce class battles that were to erupt on the Continent and culminate in the revolutions of 1848. Driven to desperation by grinding poverty, the workers openly attacked the factory system and, singing hymns fell upon the machines they so loathed with heavy hammers, seeing in the machines the source of their grievances. The bourgeoisie punished the Luddites as an example, but were unable to put a stop to unrest among the workers and in 1819 resorted to arms against a peaceful meeting at St. Peter's Field near Manchester. The Peterloo massacre, as this shameful event went down in history, revealed the extreme acuteness and uncompromising nature of the major social antagonism of the new age to which all the other contradictions of capitalist society were objectively subordinate. But in the first quarter of the nineteenth century this antagonism had not yet taken its place at the centre of spiritual life and was not perceived as the basic contradiction of the age. At that time, as Marx remarked: ``The class-struggle between capital and labour is forced into the background, politically by the discord between the governments and the feudal aristocracy gathered around the Holy Alliance on the one hand, and the popular masses, led by the bourgeoisie on the other."^^2^^ _-_-_~^^1^^ F. Engels, Anti-Duhring, Moscow, 1969, pp. 309--10.
~^^2^^ K. Marx, Capital, Moscow, 1965, Vol. I, p. 14.
59In the process of assimilating history in the making art, literature and social thought were constantly coming across new phenomena, reflecting its motion from feudalism to ``free'' capitalism. The Enlighteners' illusion of the possibility of social harmony following from the Revolution was shattered on contact with reality, for instead of a harmonious man capitalism produced an unharmonious man, instead of a coherent society, a divided society, instead of concord between people, their estrangement, instead of the individual living for the common good, the individual with selfish thoughts and feelings.
Social consciousness perceived the system of capitalist relations which was inexorably emerging as a sphere of elemental conflicts between heterogeneous, hostile interests, whose destructive power was not only manifesting itself in people's practical activities, but was determining man's spiritual world, mentality and character.
There was naturally nothing new about this observation. The French thinkers of the Enlightenment in their investigations into the mechanism of social relations had come to see interest as the primary motive force of human ideas and actions. Helvetius wrote in his treatise DC 1'esprit that all people are subject to their interests. Hoibach in his Le Systeme de la nature maintained that personal gain and interest lie at the root of such feelings as love and hate. They were not dismayed by this observation, for, like the Russian thinker Chernyshevsky with his theory of ``reasonable egoism'', they believed in the essential goodness of human nature, did not consider different personal interests to be necessarily hostile, and saw no reason why they should not give way to the principle of the common good. However, the thinkers of the Enlightenment did not fully understand the social nature of personal interest and were therefore unclear as to how concern for the common weal could overcome personal interest, and this made their ideas rather utopian.
The bourgeois ideologists proper saw the struggle of interests as perfectly natural and normal. The English utilitarians with Jeremy Bentham at their head considered the concept of the common weal an empty 60 abstraction, pure illusion. For Bentham and his followers the only reality was individual interests, which they regarded as regulating and guaranteeing just relations between people in society. Hegel, however, in his examination of legal structure of society, destroyed the liberal theory of the utilitarians that individual interests acted as regulators in human relations. In his Philosophic des Rechts he noted: ``Individuals are in the quality of citizens ... of a state private persons pursuing the aim of personal interest."^^1^^ Thus society is a battlefield of individual private interests, a struggle of all against all (here Hegel repeats Hobbes' idea), an arena where personal interest conflicts with the special interests of society, and at the same time the interests of private persons and society clash with the established order of the state. This was a pretty accurate description of the bourgeois system. It merely omitted to explain the reasons why society had become a battlefield of divergent interests, an explanation that only Marxism was to provide, by showing that interest is a consequence of the private ownership principle on which class society is based, that it is the expression of the class antagonisms<