346
PARTISAN REVIEW
attitude at the Finland Station: "Lenin endured the flood of eulogis–
tic speeches like an impatient pedestrian waiting in the doorway
for the rain to stop." He knew how to contrast the general and the
particular, how to unite grand historical abstractions with homely
details, often in one sentence, as when he writes of "The pauper·
ization of the German petty bourgeoisie, barely covered by ties
and socks of artificial silk. . . ."
The chief defect of his writing, in fact, is perhaps an exces·
sive energy and ingenuity of expression, so that the style sometimes
obscures the development of the thought. Individual paragraphs,
sentences, and phrases, distract attention from the general design
by their brilliant display. But whether obscured or not, the struc·
ture is usually there: the most casual of Trotsky's articles are dis–
tinguished from most products of leftwing journalism in that they
are equipped with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even in his
testimony before the Dewey Commission this instinctive sense of
form appears. And always, informing the style and raising it to a
high level, the historical imagination is at work. Has any better
characterization of fascism been made than Trotsky's summary,
tossed off in a long-forgotten magazine article: "Fascism has
opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in
peasant huts but also in the city skyscrapers there lives alongside
of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred mil·
lion people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of
signs and exorcisms. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of
darkness, ignorance and savagery!"
As a polemist, Trotsky had few if any equals. Bernard Shaw,
a competent judge in such matters, awarded Trotsky the palm over
Marx himself: "In everything but length of wind, the pupil sur–
passes the master.... Trotsky has a much better temper. Marx hit
where he could and often hit spitefully; Trotsky does not hit below
the belt." Shaw also noted "the gaiety of his controversial style."
Although Trotsky at times was guilty of the sort of venomous,
turgid abuse which has become, unhappily, part of the Marxist
tradition-as in his attack last year on Serge and Souvarine–
Shaw's appreciation is on the whole a just one. His polemical
style is considerably more civilized than Lenin's: he does not try
to strip his antagonist of all human dignity; he usually maintains
an easy witty, even genial, tone; there is more of Voltaire about
