p A spirit of research and a thirst for knowledge characterised the great realists of the nineteenth century, who in portraying and investigating life and revealing the 104 objective contradictions of capitalism inevitably adopted a critical attitude towards bourgeois society. “The public demands beautiful pictures from us,” wrote Balzac, “but where are the models for them? Your hideous clothes, your abortive revolutions, your garrulous bourgeois, your dead religion, your degenerate power, your kings without thrones, are they really so poetic as to be worth portraying? All we can do now is mock at them."  [104•1  Balzac’s novels have a strong cognitional and critical strain. He frequently interrupts the narrative to give detailed descriptions of his characters’ means and interests, and their economic relations, with all the minutiae of everyday life, dress, manners, customs and habits, tastes, scientific discoveries, financial and banking operations, mortgage business, land deals, and legal business, examining juridical institutions, the relations between Church and State, inheritance laws and economic legislature, portraying fashionable salons and money-lenders’ chambers, city slums and the manners and morals of rural France.

p “Before writing a book, the writer must analyse the characters, immerse himself in all manners, travel round the globe, and experience all passions; or the passions, countries, manners, characters, natural phenomena and moral phenomena must all pass through his mind."  [104•2  Balzac did his best to follow his own advice and endeavoured to examine and portray the life of the individual, the life of society, and history in synthesis. What a contrast there is between Pushkin’s light, delicate prose which time seems not to have aged at all so simple and unadorned it is and so perfectly and naturally does it fit into the background of contemporary literature, and Balzac’s heavy, somewhat archaic prose with its Cyclopean monumentality! Some parts of the vast incomplete edifice of La Comedie Humaine have become moss-grown with the passing of time, yet nonetheless, this truly titanic work still continues to exert a considerable influence on literature, partly due to its powerful characters and because it reveals the innermost passions of the scions of the 105 bourgeois world, and also because it concentrates and conveys with supreme realism the quintessence of life itself in movement, in all its fulness and intensity. Like Hermann in The Queen of Spades, Balzac’s heroes are engaged in a crazed pursuit of their own personal interest, and have that same “monism”, their inner world being entirely occupied by one all-consuming passion. All Pere Goriot’s other feelings were completely submerged by his paternal feeling, just as Gobseck/-Nucingen, Lucien^de Rubempre, du Tillet, the Cointet brothers, Gaubertin, Rigou, Pere Grandet and hundreds of other characters were completely ruled by their passion for wealth. Presenting his characters’ self-absorption, their total pursuit of their own private interests, often at variance with the common interest or the interests of other individuals, Balzac was revealing an objective feature of bourgeois social development—the growth and spread of social atomisation.

p Although he viewed character as man’s inner world ruled by a particular guiding passion, Balzac did not equate character with passion: for him the two were dialectically related, but not identical. The passion was the guiding motive force in a character, and could, and often did, contradict the hero’s moral and mental make-up. A man’s character was formed under the influence of his environment, reflecting its distinctive features and dependent on it. Thus the heroes of La Comedie Humaine were clear-cut individuals despite their social typification, and were neither reduced to their purely social essence or their particular overriding passion, as was the tendency in classicism, nor representative of some universal feature or trait of character, as with the romanticists.

p In portraying his “monistic” characters Balzac revealed remarkable perception and discernment of life in breadth and depth, and his works contained all the minutiae of human existence. With his truly encyclopaedic knowledge of such far-ranging subjects as the art of land speculation, the way the peasants steal timber from the landowners, the value of the jewelry some Viscountess or Marchioness stricken with love and grief takes to a Parisian pawnbroker, what goes on in the stately homes tucked away in the quiet woods of St. Germain, the sordid secrets of stock 106 exchange manoeuvres and political intrigues, Balzac studied the penetration of self-interest into all spheres of private and public life with a historian’s thoroughness, and showed how this corrupted people’s minds and embittered human relations. Sentiments of kinship (Les parents pauvres), family relationships (Le Pere Goriot, Eugenie Grandet and Le Colonel Chabert), friendship (Les Illusions perdues), love (Interdiction, La muse du departement and La femme de trente ansl honesty (Cesar Birotteau), the state machine (Les Employes, Une tenebreuse aHaire), the press, the theatre, publishing, art and banking—everywhere self-interest and egoism reigned supreme, making life a battlefield where the weak were given no quarter, where morals and goodness were trampled underfoot or sullied. A struggle going on in society is not merely a struggle between a man and his fellows, one individual and another, and between the individual and society. In the words of Doctor Benassis, Balzac’s alter ego, this struggle is none other than the war of the poor against the rich going on in bourgeois society, “a union of the haves against the have-nots”. It is also the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the nobles, between the peasants and the landowners, between the workers and the manufacturers, in short the class struggle which lies at the root of social relations explains the mystery of the development of history and is the motor of progress.

p Balzac’s analysis of society led him to the conclusion that the bourgeoisie was bound to triumph, and therefore despite his loathing for the bourgeoisie and his love for fine and noble, aristocrats untainted by self-interest, he was forced to portray the decline of the old society, to sing its swan-song, giving his depiction of the nobility and the aristocracy a strong critical flavour. Balzac made his bourgeois powerful figures, with tremendous will-power and boundless energy, qualities his highly idealised aristocrats seldom possessed. He saw the aristocrats antagonists as the carriers of social activity and drive, and in this respect his founders of financial dynasties anticipate the Griinders in later realist literature—old Buddenbrook, Artamonov senior, and Cowperwood, who have the same strong characters as Balzac’s heroes. But while recognising 107 the strength of the new class that had emerged victorious—and this shows his spontaneous historicism— Balzac did not consider the bourgeois system of social relations to be the summit of creation or eternal. It was his humanism, his refusal to accept the inhuman nature of capitalist civilisation that led Balzac to this conclusion. In his view capitalism was doomed to perish as surely as it was unable to secure happiness for mankind. This ethical criticism of capitalism represents both the strength and the weakness of Balzac’s outlook. While correctly considering alienation, social atomisation, to be the most important result of capitalist progress, Balzac failed to see the other side of capitalism, its unifying role, the way the new social conditions abolished feudal separatism and increased people’s dependence on one another, strengthening connections between people in the sphere of production, and that of industrial production in particular, and in commerce, creating the objective conditions in the capitalist system for the poor to unite against the rich, the oppressed against the oppressor, with a view to changing the existing social order.

p Balzac was full of scorn for bourgeois democracy and bourgeois liberalism and had a pretty clear idea of the real contradictions and the negative aspects of capitalist progress. He was full of sympathy for the republicans, whom he saw as defenders of the rights and interests of the people. Yet for all this, for all the tremendous perspicacity and penetration of his analysis of bourgeois social relations and social undercurrents, the hidden processes of history, Balzac was not up to the level of the Utopian socialists whom he knew well, and with whom he polemicised, pointing out the weak points in their teaching. Balzac’s failure to understand certain important aspects of life occasionally marred his work, and brought romanticist elements into play, introducing a strain of Gothic horror into his essentially realist approach, resulting in such highly improbable, fantastic and naive works as Les Treize. When he came to examine social questions and try and work out. the ways and means of overcoming the negative results of capitalist progress, Balzac adopted a kind of conservative utopianism, 108 suggesting that the power of the aristocracy resting upon the moral values of religion could bring social welfare without destroying the existing property relationships and merely curbing but not abolishing the principle of private ownership. This was the kind of theory expounded by Benassis, the hero of the didactic and Utopian novel Le medecin de campagne, a rather colourless, insipid work, only remarkable for the fact that it contains an expose of the author’s ideas concerning the reorganisation of society. The same thing happened to Balzac as happened to Gogol and Dostoyevsky. Rejecting the capitalist path of social development, while at the same time refusing to accept the idea of revolution as a method of changing the world for the better, they had to seek support in the struggle against bourgeois egoism in authoritarian power and Christian ethics. In the case of Balzac, his conservative utopianism also resulted from the fact that in.studying the forces at work in the society of his day he did not take into account the people as an independent factor, determining the movement of history. At a time when the Utopian socialists led by Saint-Simon were insisting that the “lower classes" including the proletariat were capable of managing all branches of the political and economic life of a country on their own, Balzac openly polemicised with them, maintaining the opposite. In revealing the real contradictions inherent in capitalist progress and criticising capitalism for its failure to satisfy the needs of the masses and of the individual, Balzac was clearly expressing the feelings and attitudes of the “lower classes" that were oppressed by capitalism, in other words, the views of the masses. Yet at the same time he considered that social reforms aimed at abolishing the noxious effects of the capitalist system could only be introduced from above.

p Although witness to the 1848 Revolution, Balzac was to cling to this attitude to the end of his days. Not so Stendhal, who had no illusions about the possibility of authoritarian power resting on the aristocracy and the Church being able to iron out the contradictions in bourgeois society and abolish social egoism through the agency of Christian ethics. For him, a republican with a strong 109 spiritual link with the democratic revolutionary movement, the Church, the aristocracy and all authoritarian power were anti-popular forces. As for the views of the ruling classes, he was firmly convinced that they could not be reformed to serve the common good by rational arguments, for they were borne of advantage. In the same way and to the same extent, the bourgeoisie who had struggled hard to gain its privileges and thought only of increasing its power and wealth, would not sacrifice their own interests to the aristocracy, let alone the masses, without a hard and bitter struggle. Thus, besides seeing the society of his day not simply as a battlefield where it was every man for himself, as also did Balzac and other critical realists, Stendhal—and in this is manifest the truly democratic nature of his outlook—was also aware that a constant struggle was being waged in society between the ruling classes, the propertied classes, and the deprived masses, and it was to the latter that he gave his wholehearted political and personal allegiance. Stendhal’s heroes, unlike the characters in La Comedie Humaine, are either opposed to society as an alien force, like Julien Sorel, Lamiel, Valbayre or the carbonari Missirilli, or begin to sever their link with society like Olivier, Fabrice, and Lucien Leuwen. A number of Balzac’s heroes struggle with society, with its laws and customs, and its oppressive forces—characters like Vautrin, Raphael, Lucien de Rubempre, and even Rastignac. But their struggle is waged within the system, and the main stimulus behind their struggle is the desire to gain a good firm position in society, and if they are successful they eventually come to find society’s laws quite acceptable. The escaped convict Vautrin who is an outcast from society returns to the fold and is willingly received back, becoming a pillar of the society whose laws he had formerly broken. Julien Sorel, forced to make his own way in life and win a place in the sun by his own efforts, uses the same weapon to achieve his aim as those other ambitious people whose victories and defeats are presented in La Comedie Humaine. Yet he never merges to become one with the ruling class in whose orbit he moves, and far from accepting their views, remains their sworn enemy until his 110 dying day, for his plebeian origin makes him socially hostile to bourgeois society. Whereas the conflict between the heroes of La Comedie Humaine and society can be resolved, that between Julien Sorel or Lamiel and their social environment cannot, for it is based on class antagonism, which will last as long as the existing system of social relations persists.

p Despite the fact that the range of subject matter is far narrower in Stendhal’s works than in la Comedie Humaine, he revealed social contradictions no less vividly, and indeed far more sharply and intensely than Balzac. The reason for this is that Stendhal approached the study of society as a democratic writer for whom the fact that bourgeois society was hostile to the true interests of the people was more obvious than to Balzac, whose vision of life was somewhat blurred by the conservative aspects of his outlook.

p Stendhal’s works provide a particularly clear example of the analytic nature of realism. Heir to eighteenth century materialism, Stendhal saw man as combining moral, psychological and physiological principles which could be apprehended and analysed. As a child of his own age, he knew that a man’s spiritual world depends on his environment and his behaviour is motivated by social, that is, material causes. Realising that in bourgeois society man became a monad shut up in himself since private interest tended to disunite people, he did not consider that interest as such had a purely egoistic character. He believed—and it was this that Stendhal regarded as the guarantee of the possibility of social improvement— that personal interest did not necessarily have to be satisfied at other people’s expense: man could also satisfy his own interests and at the same time bring benefit to his fellow men and hence to society as a whole. Thus, while adhering to the views of Helvetius and Holbach, who considered personal gain to be the sole stimulus of human behaviour, Stendhal was proceeding from the humanist belief in man’s creative powers, the might of his intellect and his ability to perfect himself, a belief based on his democratic convictions. He considered that the capitalist system corrupted human nature and the 111 ubiquitous egoism gradually stifled human qualities opposed to self-interest. The gradual destruction of the human being by society or the shattering of his hopes of happiness was the subject which Stendhal was most concerned with.

p Studying the effect of social environment on man’s spiritual and moral world, Stendhal focussed his attention on portraying the psychology of his heroes as subject to the “iron laws of the real world”, and indeed as a part of the real world. He reduced description of situation and circumstances to a minimum, transposing the action to the sphere of human relationships, making the human mind the mainspring of the drama, developing and perfecting the art of psychological analysis in critical realism.

p Stendhal studied the motives of human behaviour, conditioned, directly or indirectly, by a person’s own interests, and described the way man “sets out to hunt for happiness”. At the same time he made a thorough analysis of man’s feelings and passions. Thus while in De 1’amour he tried to penetrate the innermost mysteries of the apparently most irrational passion by means of rational analysis, describing the abstract feeling, divorced from environment and actual conditions, in his later works he went beyond mechanical rationalism stemming from the philosophy of the eighteenth century and examined the psychological and social in man in unity and synthesis. Man and his feelings and passions was not, for Stendhal, an island washed by the waves of life. Stendhal perceived in his personality and general make-up features typical of the milieu, society and class to which he belonged. Signer Valenod and Monsieur de Renal, Count Mosca and Rassi are all social types, but Stendhal reveals their typicality through the sphere of psychology, by studying their inner world which conditions their actions in the given circumstances. Since Stendhal saw character to be a dynamic synthesis of “moral habits”, and these “moral habits" to be the result of the influence of the social order on the human consciousness, he naturally included in the sphere of character essential heterogeneous qualities. Stendhal compared the novel to a mirror placed along the 112 highway and reflecting both the azure sky and the roadside mud. He might as well have said the same of his heroes, for they, like a mirror, reflected both the noble and base, generous altruistic and egoistic “moral habits”. This is what gives Stendhal’s characters their tremendous authenticity, vitality and completeness. A dynamic synthesis of various qualities, a Stendhalian hero seems to reflect in his inner life, in the inner struggle of contradictory characteristics, the objective movement and contradictions of life itself.

p Julien Sorel combines vastly differing elements: vanity, cold calculation, selfishness and noble ideals, heavy, gloomy suspicion, and an open, generous nature, strict self-control and violent, unbridled passion are all mixed and fused in his nature into a mobile, dynamic whole. All these different elements of his nature intermingle, and react on one another. Stendhal examines this contradictory movement, this conflict and development of different thoughts and feelings by means of psychological analysis, and in so doing makes several important literary discoveries, like introducing to the narrative art the inner monologue, which enables him to penetrate with his searching, dissecting lancet further and deeper into the living flesh of the hero’s heart. Equally rich in inner movements and subtle shades of feeling and thought are Stendhal’s other characters—Fabrice, Gina Sanseverina, Count Mosca, the old Leuwen, and Lucien Leuwen. Yet despite the highly variegated nature of the elements that form the character’s dynamic entity, the result is not a loose mixture. It is rather like a magnetic field where the movement and direction of different lines of force can be observed. Every one of Stendhal’s characters has an inner social dominant, to which all the other elements are subordinate. For Stendhal character is the product of circumstances and social environment. The hero acts in certain given circumstances and his actions are the result of his particular character and not accidental: they have their own logic determined by the way the hero sets out “to hunt for happiness”, dependent, that is, on how he struggles to achieve and satisfy his own particular aim or interests and how he clashes with the interests or aims of 113 others in the process. Julien Sorel, a plebeian out to attain success and power in bourgeois society, behaves all the time, and especially when among the upper classes, as if he were behind enemy lines. Class awareness pervades his every thought and action. He even turns up to meet his future mistress armed to the teeth. The behaviour of Fabrice, Gina Sanseverina and Monsieur de Renal are also conditioned by their class psychology. The banker Leuwen, a sceptical free-thinker and Epicurean, retains his essential class consciousness as a capitalist for all his broad views. He despises the common people and plays around with the values of bourgeois democracy just as he does with money on the stock exchange. In Stendhal we find causality—that essential feature of realism—in the form of a social, class dominant, determining the psychology and behaviour of the characters, which are very clearly and methodically analysed.

p Stendhal makes an equally comprehensive analysis of the destructive influence of bourgeois society on the human consciousness. Julien Sorel, with his frank, open nature and heroic ideals, whose whole bold, resolute character would seem to destine him to join the struggle for social justice finds itself on the wrong side of the barricades, devotes his outstanding abilities to ensuring his own advancement in the upper class milieu he so hates, and makes one compromise after another with his ideals. His soul becomes corroded by social egoism, which conditions the main features of social psychology and consciousness in a propertied world. It becomes a part of his flesh and blood, making him a slave of bourgeois prejudices, an out and out individualist, guided in his behaviour by the principle: “every man for himself in this desert of selfishness called life”. Julien Sorel was the first in a long line of characters in world literature of young people corrupted by capitalism. They include Greelou in Bourget’s Le Disciple, London’s Martin Eden and Eugene Witla, the hero of Dreiser’s The Genius, and especially Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who under the influence of the terrible and unnatural conditions prevailing in the society in which he lived evolved the supremely individualist idea that the chosen individuals had the right 114 to sacrifice other people in the interest of achieving their own aims and purposes, the idea that lies behind the concept of the “hero and the crowd”, a theme which in variations is ubiquitous in the philosophy and morality of bourgeois individualism.

p Society had a similar destructive influence on Lamiel, leading her on the path of crime. The feudal-bourgeois reaction crippled the lives of Fabrice and Clelia. Bourgeois society was hostile to the people, oppressing them. It was also hostile to the individual, instilling egoism in him and impoverishing and standardising his nature. Stendhal often shows the flagging of energy in members of bourgeois society, the erasure and loss of true individuality. Stendhal’s views were formed at the time when the class struggle between labour and capital had faded into the background and the chief conflict to be discerned was the struggle between the masses and feudal reaction, which explains why he regarded rule by the people and a republic to be the essential condition for the harmonious development of society. Later, when bourgeois democracy had already revealed its limitations, he was able to distinguish between it and the principles of popular democracy, and indeed believed in the possibility of rule by the people being one day achieved. He rejected the American brand of bourgeois democracy quite emphatically. Lucien Leuwen learns by experience the non-popular character of the bourgeois democracy the July Revolution ushered in. He leaves the army so as “not to have to sabre workers”. But though unwilling to join the ruling classes in the impending struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat which he realises is inevitable, he does not understand that the proletariat is not merely brave fellows, but an historical force coming to the fore of the social, class and political struggle. Stendhal himself did not grasp this either, any more than did the other writers of the classical period of critical realism.

p The manner of character portrayal where psychology and action were interrelated, which Pushkin and Stendhal introduced to realism, co-existed with Balzac’s method of concentrating mainly on the study of the social conditions determining the mentality and the “sum of moral habits" 115 of the hero, and also with the original method Dickens affirmed. Dickens created character on the basis of generalisation, intensiiication and exaggeration (satirical or comic) of the main feature in a character’s nature. The characters of Mr. Pickwick, Sam Weller, Pecksniff, Uriah Heep, Dombey, Scrooge, Bounderby and Mr. Podsnap were none other than variations of a particular psychological trait, elaborated in remarkable detail, with a mass of shades and implications, packed with realistic minutiae of morals and manners. The characteristic so emphasised might be hypocrisy as in the case of Pecksniff, or smugness as with Podsnap. Dickens’s method differed from that of the classicists in that he was not studying an abstract passion as such, but was interested in the expressive side of human nature which to a large extent determines behaviour. Nor do Dickens’s characters resemble the romantic heroes, for he did not isolate the features of human nature from the objective world. All his heroes are very much a part of the social environment which produced them, and have the outlook of the class to which they belong. The highly authentic presentation of a character, complete with all the concrete details, from description of his dress, habits, eccentricities, tastes, likes and dislikes, inclinations, intentions, aims, comportment, convictions, views, the circumstances and conditions in which he lives, trade or occupation, to his actual behaviour—coloured with powerful lyricism or criticism, exaggerated to the point of being grotesque or emanating an aura of the fantastic—creates the illusion of a complete and manysided study of the character’s psychology. Dickens’s characters are so typified, and their social nature so fully defined that the author had no need to embroider on their psychology in the course of the narration in analysing their relationships with other characters or their reactions in various situations. Their moral qualities might alter—Mr. Dombey changes from a cold, soulless capitalist to a repentant and kindly old man, and the miserly old Scrooge becomes the epitome of kindness and generosity—but the inner course of these changes is not traced. This principle of character portrayal is not at odds with 116 the realist method for it is based on social analysis and is thus a perfectly valid form of realistic generalisation of the real, genuine aspects of life reflected in the human consciousness. Gogol, for example, in Mirgorod, and especially in Dead Souls, created his characters solely on the basis of broad generalisation of their basic traits. Plyushkin, Nozdryov, Korobochka, Sobakevich, Ivan Ivanych and Ivan Nikiforovich, Shponka and Podkolesin are all highly typified and presented in their full social essence. In the course of the action they only reveal various shades and aspects of their already set natures. Psychological stability is also a feature of Thackeray’s characters, presented against an extensive background of everyday life. Combining satire with description of manners and morals, Thackeray exaggerated certain aspects of his characters’ nature and paid little attention to their psychological and emotional sub-stratum, being satisfied with stressing the social motives of their behaviour. Becky Sharp, the epitome of the selfish bourgeois go-getter, acts in conformity with her social nature throughout Vanity Fair, revealing generic psychological qualities in various circumstances, always remaining herself. She is more interesting for the energy with which she pursues her own advancement, than as a psychological study. The straightforward and honest Henry Esmond goes through his numerous adventures in wars and Jacobite conspiracies without changing psychologically. Nor is Pendennis at all changed by all the tricks spiteful Fortune plays on him. The embittered plebeian Heathcliff, the extremely striking hero of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, who takes wrathful revenge for the wrongs inflicted on him by life and other people, and suffers prostrating personal tragedy, is the same gloomy, embittered outcast at the end of the novel as when he first appeared, and we only learn about what goes on in his heart from his actions and a few brief confessions and personal admissions.

p Dickens’s highly typified characters are the fruit of his thorough analysis of the fundamental motive processes in life. The years left their mark, and his early optimism gradually becomes clouded by gathering gloom, humour is replaced by tragic irony, and pure fun by angry satire, 117 as he gradually becomes more and more aware of the negative aspects of capitalist progress and bourgeois democracy, which had attained maturity in England. The good-natured, superficial pattern of human relations reducing social contradictions to the struggle between the forces of good and evil, between good, kind people and cruel, hardened rogues, which characterised his early works and was somehow reconciled with a mercilessly truthful portrayal of the hard lot of the working masses, gradually collapsed under the impact of the writer’s growing understanding of the nature of bourgeois social relations. Aware, like all critical realists, that society is a battle-ground of conflicting human interests, Dickens was not content to let the matter rest at that. In his later works, he no longer treats interest merely as a moral and ethical factor, but infused the concept of social struggle with real class content, discerning the clash of interests between the haves and the have-nots in life, between the ruling classes and the people, between the capitalists and the proletariat. From portrayal of individual shortcomings and criticism of certain aspects of bourgeois life, whether it was the position in workhouses and orphanages (as in Oliver Twist) or the state of education (as in Nicholas Nickleby), he passed to a critical presentation of capitalist social relations in their entirety, bourgeois marriage and family life (Dombey and Son), justice and the law (Bleak House), the machinery of government and the apparatus of coercion (Little Dorrit with its famous description of “the Circumlocution Office" and Marshalsea jail), and the factory system and the position of the working class (Hard Times). Dickens criticised bourgeois society from a democratic standpoint, endowing his favourite characters, characters from the people, with fine moral qualities, spiritual beauty and kindness, and making his representatives of the ruling classes ruthless, callous and aggressively self-seeking. Dickens presented the poverty and wretchedness in which the people at the bottom of the social ladder lived, deprived of even the most elementary human rights as the result of exploitation by the wealthy classes. He saw the most important and dangerous consequence of capitalist progress to be the dehumanisation 118 of man due to bourgeois egoism and self-interest. “Oh! Ye Pharisees of the nineteen hundredth year of Christian knowledge, who soundingly appeal to human nature, see first that it be human,” he exclaimed in Martin Chuzzlewit, referring to the various apologists of the existing order, from utilitarians and Malthusians to religious moralists and parliamentarians, in whose view the bourgeois system of social relations was perfectly in accord with the demands of human nature. “Take heed it has not been transformed, during your slumber and the sleep of generations into the nature of the Beasts."  [118•1  The bourgeois outlook and morality with their bigotry and hypocrisy act like a corrosive acid on the human soul, making it cruel, callous and indifferent to the fate of others. This was the case with Mr. Dombey prior to his “conversion”—one of the most monumental figures of a capitalist to be found anywhere in world literature. It is true too of any number of Dickens’s negative characters—Uriah Heep and Carter, Ralph Nickleby and Murdstone, Merdle and Jonas Chuzzlewit. But capitalism does not only distort and disfigure human nature: by enslaving the masses and condemning millions of working people to poverty and misery, and building the wealth and well-being of the possessor classes on their blood and sweat, it thereby produces in the social order of its own creation an insoluble contradiction between oppressors and oppressed, a conflict fraught with the direct consequences for itself. His analysis of life under capitalism and its very real contradictions led Dickens, as it did other realist writers, to the discovery in the very womb of history and life of a new contradiction of decisive importance for the fate of the capitalist system—the contradiction between labour and capital.

p The blatant contradictions in capitalist progress came to light in the middle of the nineteenth century: everywhere the bourgeoisie had shackled the proletariat to the factory system, to a life of backbreaking toil and appalling hardships—whether the Welsh miners or the weavers of Silesia and France, the German artisans or the workers in 119 the iron and steel foundries of Sheffield. The cold, calculating brutality of exploitation exacerbated the class struggle and led to the development of a revolutionary situation, which came to a head in 1848, the Year of Revolutions, bringing new social forces into historical activity—the popular masses led by the proletariat. The conditions were created for the formation not only of the revolutionary consciousness oi the working class, but also working-class philosophical and political selfawareness.

p Bourgeois ideologists continued to consider capitalist production, with all its consequences—the class struggle, social inequality, the division of society into rich and poor, and exploiters and exploited—the perfectly normal, just, and indeed the only possible, system of production. But scientific socialism was already proving the possibility of another method of organisation of production in place of the capitalist, one which would create a new form of social relations based on the principle of collectivism. Grafted to the workers’ movement, scientific socialism brought to it understanding of an aim and transformed socialism from a beautiful dream into a science that unravelled the secrets of historical development and the laws that guide it, thereby placing in the hands of the workers of the world a theoretical weapon that would enable them to effect a transformation of social relations. The ideas of scientific communism did not immediately achieve recognition in the working class movement, however. On the eve of the 1848 revolutions and in the years that followed, the movement was still influenced by manifold social theories and had still to cast off a host of bourgeoisdemocratic and revolutionary-democratic illusions. But it was in these years that the spectre of communism began to haunt the world historical arena, gradually assuming flesh and blood in heroic class battles, and becoming a reality in the feat of the Russian proletariat, the first to embark on the building of communist society.

p Various views were current in the working class movement in the years before the Revolution, from the ideas of levelling communism stemming from the Babouvists, and taken up by the French egalitarians and the German 120 supporters of what was known as “spoon communism" ( Loffelkommunismus), to the ideas of Christian socialism and the theories of Utopian socialism developed by Hazard and Enfanim, Theodore Dezamy and Cabet, and the pettybourgeois theorists Louis Blanc and Proudhon. the father of anarchism. The working class had still not discarded faith in the possibility of bourgeois democracy and its capacity for development. It still believed that once the ruling classes fully realised the appalling plight of the people, they would come to their aid and help ease their burden. This kind of illusions were shared by the English Chartist movement, which Lenin described as the first broad, truly mass proletarian revolutionary movement of a political nature. In the verse of the movement’s poet spokesmen—Ebenezer Elliott, whose poetry is largely connected with the struggle for the repeal of the Corn Laws, Thomas Cooper, Gerald Massey and Ernest Jones—- revolutionary motives are interwoven with philanthropic ones, and opposition to tyranny is found side by side with nonresistance and universal forgiveness. Such illusions were also characteristic of the Weitlingers, the German levellers, and Herwegh and Freiligrath, poets connected with the workers’ movement. They were reflected, too, in the poetry of Heine, who represents the summit of that second romantic movement called to life by the revolutionary situation. Heine, who was quite happy to be called “the defrocked romanticist" for his fierce attacks on reactionary romanticism and for his “unromantic” criticism of the bourgeoisie, said of himself: “Despite my murderous campaigns against romanticism, I have always remained a romanticist, and was much more of one than I ever suspected."  [120•1  Yet he demonstrated remarkable historical perspicacity when he said of the Communists “that they are the strongest party in the world, that their day has not yet come it is true, but patient waiting is no waste of time for the people to whom the future belongs".  [120•2 

p The contradiction between capital and labour was becoming the central issue of history, and could no longer 121 be avoided or ignored either by social thought or literature. It was natural that the issue should have first been examined by the English realist novel, since England was at the time the most industrially advanced of the European powers, and the contradictions of capitalism were consequently more sharply in evidence there.

p Not only the critical realists—like Charlotte Bronte, whose Shirley presents a fine picture of the spiritual world of the working man, retaining a sense of human dignity intact in spite of appalling hardship, or Elizabeth Gaskell, whose Mary Barton gave a shockingly truthful picture of the life of the Lancashire textile workers that represented a strong indictment of the capitalist system— but the bourgeois realists, too, were forced to investigate the position of the working class in order to understand the consequences its struggle for its rights might have for the future of the bourgeois system. In his novel Sybil, Disraeli displayed a sobriety and breadth of vision no longer to be found among bourgeois ideologists today in his portrayal of the terrible position of the English proletariat. He introduced characters who were members of the Chartist movement, and was able to admit the division of society into two nations, the rich and the poor, which he said were as far apart as if they lived on two different planets. However, Disraeli suggested that the class conflict should be solved by partial reforms, improvement of the lot of the poor and by making certain concessions to the proletariat. In this he was counting on the philanthropic feelings of the ruling classes and the obedience of the workers. Harriet Martineau developed a similar view in her cycle of works entitled Illustrations oi Political Economy. In the story Weal and Woe in Garveloch, she made an open attempt to convince the workers of the ideas of Malthus, arguing that large families were the cause of poverty. She called on the workers to abandon organised political struggle (in A Manchester Strike) and advised the bourgeoisie to reduce the burden of taxation (For Each and for All) and increase private charity (Cousin Marshall). Written in a lively, interesting manner, with a good knowledge of the working class milieu and everyday life of the working people, and a 122 certain amount of sentimentality—but avoiding the exaggeration characteristic of the works of Eugene Sue or the novels of the “true communists"—Harriet Martineau’s works enjoyed long popularity with the reading public.

p The critical realists, who had discovered the meaning of the contradiction between capital and labour, were not clear as to how the conflict should be tackled and overcome. Elizabeth Gaskell and Kingsley, author of Yeast and Alton Lock, thought that the answer lay in Christian socialism. Charlotte Bronte and Dickens sought a counterbalance to the bourgeois system in man’s moral qualities, humaneness and goodness. In Hard Times Dickens opposed the levelling power of the capitalist system— using the generalised image of the factory town of Cocktown to symbolise soulless capitalist civilisation and branding the sterile inhumanity of utilitarian theories in Gradgrind and Bounderby—with the humanity of Blackpool and the boundless kindness of Sissy, and also with the purity of his own moral standpoint, with a humanitarian indictment of capitalism.

p The writers of the classical age of critical realism did not look deeply enough into the contradiction between capital and labour to discover the right way to solve it, the way, that is, which would lead to the ultimate victory of the proletariat, with which they sincerely sympathised. This was due partly to the hazy democratic nature of their own views which prevented them from recognising this prospect, and partly to the fact that the working-class movement was still ridden with numerous Utopian, revolutionary-democratic and petty-bourgeois illusions. It took Marx and Engels with their genius to generalise its experience and, fusing it with scientific socialism, to create the revolutionary theory that paved the way to the victory of the proletariat.

p However, critical realism in the classical period of its development assimilated the essence of the new capitalist order that had sprung up on the ruins of the feudal world. It penetrated and presented the conflicts of bourgeois society with merciless clarity and incomparable artistry. The realists turned their attention to every sphere of private and social life and, perfecting the realist method, 123 left a truly encyclopaedic record of a whole historical epoch, its life and morals, and its ideas and types of people, generalising the lasting features of the capitalist system and of the bourgeois mentality. Their works are permeated with the idea of development—the concept of life and society as changing, moving, developing objects of literary portrayal. Thus their views and their works show an inherent spontaneous historicism, a quality that is lacking in present-day bourgeois thought. They presented the clash of opposing interests which divided and alienated people, to reveal the class struggle, the struggle of material interests. In the age of “free” competition, they mainly examined the consequences of capitalist progress which led to division and alienation and could devote far less attention to the unifying processes within the system.

p The desire to interpret reality synthetically characteristic of progressive social thought in the first half of the nineteenth century was likewise a feature of critical realism of the classical period. But critical realism, failing to fully reveal the main contradiction of capitalist society, the contradiction between labour and capital, with all its historical consequences, did not succeed in achieving this synthesis. It was Marx’s Capital and the theories of scientific communism which effected a synthetic interpretation of history, its general laws and tendencies and the real prospects of its development, and proved that the sources of class division and hence of the class struggle are to be found in the economic structure of society. It was the method of socialist realism, which inherited and carried further the achievements and aesthetic discoveries of critical realism, that was able to make a synthetic portrayal of reality.

p Critical realism also foreshadowed socialist realism in the method of artistic investigation of reality and in the social views it expressed. An appraisal made by Marx and Engels of the legacy of French materialism is equally applicable to the classical critical realist tradition, and its importance for the formation of the socialist realist method. They wrote: “There is no need of any great penetration to see from the teaching of materialism on the 124 original goodness and equal intellectual indowment of men, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education, and the influence of environment on man, the great significance of industry, the justification of enjoyment, etc., how necessarily materialism is connected with communism and socialism. If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, the empirical world must be arranged so that in it man experiences and gets used to what is really human and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all moral, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. ... If man is shaped by his surroundings, his surroundings must be made human."  [124•1 

p Similar views may be found in the works of almost all the classics of critical realism. Children of their age, unable to avoid the mistakes and prejudices engendered by the historical conditions which formed their consciousness, and with no clear political concept of how society might be transformed, they expressed the protest of the masses against the inhumanity of capitalism. The moral essence of their works was opposed to the apologist trends in bourgeois ideology, so that despite the limitations and occasional erroneousness of their political ideals, their art was essentially democratic, since it objectively coincided with the interests of the masses opposing capitalism’s encroachments on human rights. A necessary stage in the development of literature, their works paved the way for a new aesthetic method—socialist realism.

Although the bourgeoisie managed to quell the 1848 revolutions, it had become clear to the bourgeois ideologists that the question of the workers was now the central historical issue on which the future of capitalism depended. The bourgeoisie sensed that despite scientific and technological progress, despite the stabilisation of capital ism, the flourishing of trade and the strengthening of the political positions of the possessor classes, a force was maturing within capitalist society which represented 125 a very real danger to the whole system of social relations based on exploitation. They could not help noticing that the decline of bourgeois culture had already set in.