LUKACS
235
of a specific national culture. For Lukacs European realism, the
modem literature he loves most in the world, is the highest ex–
pression of a continuing ambition of the human spirit that he finds
in the great writers of the past. The literary tradition of Europe
is
his intellectual patrimony, his culture, his faith. Apart from writers
like Coleridge, Keats and Eliot, who usually write the most original
and therefore the most influential criticism, for they are seeking to
create a new taste in accordance with the originality of their own
artistic demands, the most useful criticism in any generation tends to
come from those, like Van Wyck Brooks or F. R. Leavis or Edmund
Wilson, who identify themselves with a literary tradition. In the
deepest sense such writers are the guardians or conscience of tradition.
And where a specialist in one period or another serves us by
his
specific
and technical knowledge, a critic like Lukacs shows that the literary
tradition of the nineteenth-century novel is not a continuum of
writers and works and "schools," but a moral and philosophic
tradition with urgent consequences for our own generation.
Lukacs's
Studies in European Realism
is
a work based on tradition
and makes up a study in tradition. Its perspective is different from
that of a great creative writer, who probably would not admire
Balzac and Tolstoy so absolutely, and from that of a professional
literary scholar, who would value more for their own sake the details
of literary history. Lukacs writes as a good European who venerates
the highest achievements of his culture in great works of literature.
As
a Marxist, Lukacs of course wants to show that the best promise
of continuing
this
tradition
is
the international working-class move–
ment. But quite apart from the fact that Lukacs
is
obviously enthu–
siastic about the great nineteenth-century novels and not interested
in or even encouraging about twentieth-century literature (one of
whose major problems, how the individual writer can
be
creative
in a collectivist society, Lukacs never considers), it must be said
that Lukacs's very distinction and even
his
stimulating powers as
a critic depend on his profound involvement with the literary tradition
of the nineteenth century. A deep and urgent sense of tradition
is
what makes the good critic.
If,
like Keats
in
his letters and Coleridge
in his essays, he can put
himself
into this tradition, then he does
what Eliot in his famous essay .on "Tradition and the Individual
Talent"
~aid
that the poet must do--transform the past in the light
