THE FOUNDING FATHERS
13
orthodoxy, to those tender-minded writers who always manage to
adapt themselves to the party line, is the passport to Utopia.
The Fathers
The truth of the matter is that Marx was not a literary critic, and
no amount of textual research can convert him into one. Nor was
Engels. There is ample evidence that their reading was wide, and
their taste good, and that Marx even intended to write a book on
Balzac, but, so far as I know, they were silent on those internal ques-
tions of literature which occupy modern criticism. (It should be noted,
too, that literature is the only art about which they had anything to
say, implying that they might, perhaps, have been indifferent or in-
sensitive to music and painting.) As for literature, they regarded it as
one part, along with philosophy, law and religion, of what they
called the superstructure of society, and their main concern was to
find the social laws which governed the superstructure
as a whole.
Whatever specific remarks they did make about literature were
generalities
rather than
generalizations,.
the bulk of these remarks con-
sists of passing tributes to some writer of stature or to an entire cul-
ture, like that of Greece, and of warnings to overzealous critics and
novelists among their disciples against the use of the economic inter-
pretation of history as a means of dismissing literary movements. This
is not to deny that Marx and Engels were bent on discovering the
place of literature in society and were sensitive to the pulse of society
in literature, but that is a far cry from the legend that they founded
a Marxist criticism. And it is, indeed, this legend which is one of the
chief obstacles to the actual development of Marxist criticism today.
At no time did Marx and Engels either state or imply that art
is but a class weapon, nor did they sponsor a proletarian art to educate
the workers in the theory and tactics of communism. On the contrary,
Marx wrote in the
Preface to the Critique of Political Economy
that "certain periods of highest development of art stand in no direct
connection with the general development of society, nor with the
material basis and the skeleton structure of its organization"; and the
later writing of Marx and Engels sought to correct the impression
given in their earlier work that the economic (or class) factor is the
sole and constant determinant of art. As to proletarian literature, in
the often quoted letter to Minna Kautsky about one of her novels,
Engels says, "You evidently fclt the need of publicly taking sides in
this book, of proclaiming your opinions to the world ....
But I be-
lieve that the tendency should arise from the situation and the action
themselves without being explicitly fOI:mulated, and that the poet
is under no obligation to furnish the reader with a ready-made his-
