LUKACS
239
critic. Of course no critic
is
ever passive enough in his taste to be
able to read a work of literature wholly for its workmanship. A book
is
a formal composition, but it is composed on the basis of certain
ideas, and inevitably
it
leaves certain ideas in the mind as the effect
of the literary experience. And the strength of this book, the chapters
on Balzac and Tolstoy, is so clearly related to what these great writers
represent of heroism and genius to Lukacs's mind, that one can
criticize the exaggerated emphasis he gives to the work of Dobrolyubov
and Chernyshevsky, not
his
concern with the social setting or
his
belief in criticism as a social instrument.
Yet
this
said,
it
has to be admitted that Lukacs, like almost
all Marxist critics, has not found the satisfying balance between
his admiration for the achievement of certain writers and
his
evalua–
tion of what writers represent in society that one does find in the
comments on literature of Marx and Trotsky-the only two writers
in
this
tradition whose judgments of literature seem to be entirely
"free," and which are stimulating to writers themselves. In Marx and
Trotsky literature is a kingdom of power related to social power but
not identical with it. Lukacs does not have their proud and easy
capacity for judgment. By comparison with them he suffers, for
brilliant as he is on his favorite, Balzac, the system of values by
which he operates never gives space to autonomous aesthetic achieve–
ment: Balzac is not just the greatest modern novelist, but he is the
greatest
of a certain type.
And Lukacs, in the last analysis, will never
take a chance on a writer who is of the wrong type, or on a writer
who strays from being the right type. He does love the type more
than he loves the individual-which does not mean that he is lacking
in taste or in the capacity for making sustained and valuable analyses
of the great books he loves. It is simply that his approach to literature
is
finally not to the work but to the scholarly and philosophical and
perhaps "revolutionary" example that it serves.
You can see
this
lack of directness in the very awkwardness
of Lukacs's style, which can be associated with the fact that he
emphasizes formulations about the natun; of a school or style rather
than insights into a particular style starting from a direct concern
with
the text. But the kind of direct aesthetic criticism that we value
is
usually written only by a handful of people in any generation–
the primary figures in the creation of literature. Much of what passes
