MASK, IMAGE AND TRUTH
9
nhampered
propagate hi'> poisonous ideas in obscure, false but effective
images.
1'hese images are effective because they have three thousand years of
religion, three centuries of bourgeois ideology, the whole culture of capital–
ism
to sustain them; because they evoke emotional habits, deep, deep in the
souls of most of us, engrll'lled there from earliest childhood by the priests,,
the pedagogues, the journalists, the politicians, the poets of the propertied
classes-and by the day to day relatioTtS between classes and individuals
necessarily imposed by the conditions of capitalist society.
Disraeli's JJi"isecrack
Marxist cnt1C1sm makes such images less effective. It exposes the
bourgeois philosopher's formulas, the puet's myths, the journalist's "im–
partial" reports for what they are-propaganda for the mouldy attitudes
of the dying world. The fact that such attitudes are sometimes uncon–
scious, blind, "sincere" does not make any difference. Perhaps Hitler,
too, is "sincere." Certainly, the Big Businessman "sincerely" believes that
laws, ideas and actions in defense of monopoly capital are in the best in–
terests of "civilization." No one in Russia doubted D.ostoyevsky's sincerity,
yet how many of the b-est writers in the various progressive camps arose
in chorus to damn
The Possessed,
his libel on the revolutionary movement
-among them the creative writer Maxim Gorki.
For that matter, creation is inseparable from g; od criticism in mod–
ern
literature, as a glance at European and American letters will show.
Dante was a critic, so were Tasso, Ronsard , Sidney, Ben Jonson, Cor–
neille, Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith, Sam Johnson, Voltaire, Lessing, Diderot,
Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Landor, Coleridge, Gautier, Poe, Tolstoy;
so are Eliot, Pound, Valery, Yeats, Shaw, Dos Passos, MacLeish, Mike
Gold and John Howard Lawson.
Who sneers · at poets? The philistine. Who, ignoring history, said
that critics are men who have failed in art and literature? The very
clever, very cynical, very adroit but not very profound rhetorician Ben–
jamin Disraeli.
Surely it is no more "creative" to caricature proletarian ideas in verse
than to expose bourgeois ideas in prose. When a novel or play or poem
describes everyone as a louse except the Hero, who mistakes his own vin–
dictiveness for poetic observation, we have every right in the world to say:
this
is
false art.
When some one, in all "sincerity" writes a Hearst edi–
torial in free verse, we have every right in the world to point out its
fascist ideas. We cannot permit anyone to bully us into swallowing his
values, creeds, or opinions merely because he uses a form which convention
calls "creative." We reserve the right to think.
