234
ALFRED KAZIN
to think of economic exploitation as a hindrance to a man's fulfillment
of
his
expected destiny on earth. The great Marxist thinkers have
always been able to interpret complex material problems as metaphors
of the necessary stages on life's way. And Lukacs, though not directly
one of the great figures in the Marxist tradition, nevertheless carries
the reader along in his exciting vision of the nineteenth-century novel
as a drama of man's most majestic possibilities. He makes the reader
feel that Balzac, Stendhal and Tolstoy represent a great age not
only in the novel but also in man's attempt to transcend society–
that their comprehensive mastery of social truth was one with their
artistry, for their criticism of society sprang from their deepest instinct
as artists.
The distinction of Lukacs's
Studies in European Realism–
despite certain passages of obeisance to the Lenin-Stalin cult and
some mechanical flattery of the Russian literary tradition itself
(the book was written in Russia during the terrible purges of the
1930's) - is that it brings an essentially philosophic and moral vision
of man's necessary destiny to bear on the great age of the novel;
the book puts into a new and dramatic focus the sources of realism
in the nineteenth century. Lukacs's studies in realism bring home to
us certain sources of the imaginative power of such towering figures
as Balzac and Tolstoy. Lukacs is exceptional among students of
nineteenth-century realism because he is both a philosopher with great
gifts of critical analysis and a critic who can marshal his points with
logical rigor. He always writes in the perspective of a philosophical
system. He is not, admittedly, the kind of critic that great writers
become in discussing the work of their equals in imagination- Balzac
greeting Stendhal's
La Chartreuse de Parme
or Tolstoy pointing up
the weaknesses of Dostoevsky are often partisan and selective in their
judgments, but they have a kind of insight that professional and
therefore hopefully judicious critics do not share. Indeed, Lukacs is too
theoretical (and I would say even visionary) a writer to be able
to express his judgments with the blend
~f
suppleness and plasticity
and irony which makes novelists like Virginia Woolf and Thomas
Mann such delightful essayists in criticism. On the other hand,
Lukacs's whole strength as a critic is that he has carried· out to the
limits, with intellectual passion, the literary scholar's ability to speak
for literary tradition, for the tradition of
-a
country, of a language,
