PARTISAN REVIEW
is more than dubious to talk of the critics guiding a culture or a set of
literary tendencies; because in practice the critic is just as much the child
and victim of his age as the crrative writer." What, then, wouid Hazlitt
say is the function of the critic in an age of growing proletarian strength
in politics, economics, and literature?
Hazlitt has presented within the limitations of half-truth a set of
apparently sensible critical ideas. \Vhatever validity they do have comes
from the assumptions they share with lVIarxism. These assumptions are
not fulfilled because they are really derived from Hegelian idealism rather
than from Marx's materialism (though Hazlitt's "synthesis" is not even
Hegelian in that it is more of a compromise or composite than a real
synthesis) .
The idea of a social mind is found in Hegel, too, in the form of a
Zeitgeist.
It is interesting to note that Lasalle retained the social mind
of Hegel; and now social-democratic theory contains Hegel's social mind
and
social
consciou,ness instead of lVlarx's
class consciousness.
Social–
democracy accepts even some aspects of the Marxian principle that the
"social" mind is
economically
conditioned. (Hazlitt believes "economic
conditions and the ideas
interact,"
producing a "time-spirit".) But social–
democracy, by failing to recognize the full meaning of class divisions, fails
to see the proletariat as the antithetical force to the bourgeois mind (fonn
of- society). This accounts for the absence of a distinct art and culture
criticism in social-democracy today.
If
American social-democracy were
to have an explicit theory of art criticism, it would probably be somewhat
Iilce that of Henry Hazlitt: liberal. urbane, social, but non-Marxian,
liuper-class.
In granting meaning to art and in relating the artist
qua
man to the
artist
qua
artist, Hazlitt affirms for art its old vigor of content, but there
is a large gap between the meanings of Proust and of, say, Grace Lumpkin's
To Make my Bread
or Conroy's
The Disinherited.
Besides, this attitude
is related to the modern reaction against the currents of aestheticism, as
in Gertrude Stein or Eugene Jolas. The social scene is very much before
the eyes today, and most important critics champion the return of
literatur~
to this scene. Archibald MacLeish is probably the most important bour–
geois poet in America today. Aside from his technical competence, his
liense of- social ferment and use of social objectives in his poetry is very
much to the point. There has been a shift of recent years in all capitalist
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