38
PARTISAN REVIEW
to be one for
subjective decision.
He did not see it as an ineluctable
characteristic of all literature, as the product and the weapon of the class
struggle.
Secondly, he welcomed
all
partisanship-including one's oppo-
nent's-as a step forward; thus taking a
formal
view of the whole problem
of partisanship.
We need not show at length how Herweigh's whole viewpoint is
based upon
illusion.
But since every bourgeois theory for or against
"tendentious art" is based more or less upon such illusions, it is worth
mention and merits the foregoing brief analysis. Weare less concerned
with the disclosure of these illusions as such than in exposing their roots
in bourgeois class existence. This is of some importance to us, as Franz
Mehring's* basic formulations of this problem in proletarian-revolutionary
literature were strongly influenced by bourgeois "tendency art." Nor
was Mehring ever able to surmount the unresolved contradictions of the
problem involved in its bourgeois formulation.
Obviously enough, proletarian literature,
at its inception, derived
from the "tendentious literature" written by and for the remnants of
the progressive bourgeoisie; hence it took over the theory and practice
of "tendency." For at its very beginnings it was forced to take the em-
battled position which this bourgeois literature had always held.
"Ten-
dency," it should be noted, is an extremely relative term.
In bourgeois
literary criticism any work whose class basis and class goal are hostile to the
dominant school is called "tendentious";
one's own "tendency" is not
"tendentious."
This hostility among the various literary factions of the bourgeoisie
(with the politically and socially more progressive group usually accused,
of course, of more "tendentious writing" than the reactionaries) was
even more pronuonced towards the first beginnings of proletarian litera-
ture.
Every portrayal of the social order, whether depicting the prole-
tariat or the bourgeoisie, was called "tendentious" if done from the prall
tariat's class standpoint, and all the arguments that "tendency [or pro
aganda] art" was "inartistic" and "hostile to art" were paraded against
1
Under these circumstances it is quite understandable that embryolL
-Franz Mehring (died in 1919) was one of the major theoreticians
of the pre-
war German Social-Democracy and one of the leaders of its Left Wing.
He or
ganized,
with Liebknecht
and Luxemburg,
the Spartakists,
and was one of th
founders of the Communist
Party of Germany.
Mehring wrote the standard bio-
graphy of Marx,
a major critical analysis of German literary history,
Die Lessing-
Legende,
in addition to invaluable fundamental
literary criticism scattered through
the files of the
Neue Zeit,
the tbeoretical
organ of the Social-Democracy.
