[In Georg Lukács'] works two beliefs are incarnate. First, that literary criticism is not a luxury, that it is not what the subtlest of American critics has called "a discourse for amateurs." But that it is, on the contrary, a central and militant force toward shaping men's lives. Secondly, Lukács affirms that the work of the critic is neither subjective nor uncertain. Criticism is a science with its own rigor and precision. The truth of judgment can be verified. Georg Lukács is, of course, a Marxist. Indeed, he is the one major critical talent to have emerged from the gray servitude of the Marxist world. (pp. 327-28)

[The] Marxist critic cherishes the conviction that he is engaged not in matters of opinion but in determinations of objective reality. Without this conviction, Lukács could not have turned to literature. He came of intellectual age amid the chaotic ferocity of war and revolution in central Europe. He reached Marxism over the winding road of Hegelian metaphysics. In his early writings two strains are dominant: the search for a key to the apparent turmoil of history and the endeavor of an intellectual to justify to himself the contemplative life. Like Simone Weil, of whom he often reminds me, Lukács has the soul of a Calvinist. One can imagine how he must have striven to discipline within himself his native bent toward literature and the aesthetic side of things. Marxism afforded him the crucial possibility of remaining a literary critic without feeling that he had committed his energies to a somewhat frivolous and imprecise pursuit. (pp. 328-29)

His writings on French and German literature became an impassioned plea against the lies and barbarism of the Nazi period. This accounts for a major paradox in Lukács' performance. A Communist by conviction, a dialectical materialist by virtue of his critical method, he has nevertheless kept his eyes resolutely on the past. Thomas Mann saw in Lukács' works an eminent sense of tradition. Despite pressure from his Russian hosts, Lukács gave only perfunctory notice to the much-heralded achievements of "Soviet realism." Instead, he dwelt on the great lineage of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European poetry and fiction, on Goethe and Balzac, on Sir Walter Scott and Flaubert, on Stendhal and Heine. Where he writes of Russian literature, Lukács deals with Pushkin or Tolstoy, not with the poetasters of Stalinism. The critical perspective is rigorously Marxist, but the choice of themes is "central European" and conservative. (p. 329)

As a Marxist, he discerns in literature the action of economic, social, and political forces. This action follows on certain laws of historical necessity. To Lukács criticism is a science even before it is an art. His preference of Balzac over Flaubert is not a matter of personal taste or fiat. It is an objective determination arrived at through an analysis of material fact. Secondly, he has given his writing an intense immediacy. It is rooted in the political struggles and social circumstances of the time. His writings on literature, like those of Trotsky, are instruments of combat. By understanding the dialectic of Goethe's Faust, says Lukács, a man is better equipped to read the sanguinary riddles of the present. The fall of France in 1940 is writ large in the Comédie humaine. Lukács' arguments are relevant to issues that are central in our lives. His critiques are not a mere echo to literature. Even where it is sectarian and polemic, a book by Lukács has a curious nobility. It possesses what Matthew Arnold called "high seriousness."

But in practice, what are Lukács' major achievements as a critic and historian of ideas? (p. 330)

There is Lukács' analysis of the decline of the French novel. He is the foremost living student of Balzac and sees in the Comédie humaine the master edifice of realism. His reading of Les Illusions perdues is exemplary of the manner in which the vision of the historian is brought to bear on the fabric of a work of art…. Balzac looks on the world with the primitive ardor of conquest. The Comédie humaine built an empire in language as Napoleon did in fact. Flaubert looks on the world as through a glass contemptuously. In Madame Bovary the glitter and artifice of words has become an end in itself. When Balzac describes a hat, he does so because a man is wearing it. The account of Charles Bovary's cap, on the other hand, is a piece of technical bravado; it exhibits Flaubert's command of the French sartorial vocabulary. But the thing is dead. And behind this contrast in the art of the novel, Lukács discerns the transformation of society through mature capitalism. In a pre-industrial society, or where industrialism remains on a small scale, man's relationship to the physical objects that surround him has a natural immediacy. The latter is destroyed by mass-production. The furnishings of our lives are consequent on processes too complex and impersonal for anyone to master. Isolated from sensuous reality, repelled by the inhumane drabness of the factory world, the writer seeks refuge in satire or in romantic visions of the past. Both retreats are exemplified in Flaubert: Bouvard et Pécuchet is an encyclopaedia of contempt, whereas Salammbô can be characterized as the reverie of a somewhat sadistic antiquarian.

Out of this dilemma arose what Lukács defines as the illusion of naturalism, the belief that an artist can recapture a sense of reality by mere force of accumulation. Where the realist selects, the naturalist enumerates. (pp. 331-32)

Lukács does not compromise with his critical vision. He exalts Balzac, a man of royalist and clerical principles. He condemns Zola, a progressive in the political sense, and a forerunner of "socialist realism."

Even more original and authoritative is Lukács treatment of the historical novel. This is a literary genre to which Western criticism has given only cursory attention…. Only very rarely, when a writer such as Robert Graves intervenes, do we realize that the historical novel has distinct virtues and a noble tradition. It is to these that Lukács addresses himself in a major study, The Historical Novel. (p. 332)

[Lukács explores] the development of historical fiction in the art of Manzoni, Pushkin, and Victor Hugo. His reading of Thackeray is particularly suggestive. He argues that the antiquarian elements in Henry Esmond and The Virginians convey Thackeray's critique of contemporary social and political conditions. By taking the periwig off the eighteenth century, the novelist is satirizing the falsehood of Victorian conventions (what a Marxist calls zeitgenössische Apologetik). I happen to believe that Lukács is misreading Thackeray. But his error is fruitful, as the errors of good criticism usually are, and it leads to a most original idea. Lukács observes that archaic speech, however deftly handled, does not in fact bring the past closer to our imaginings. The classic masters of historical fiction write narrative and dialogue in the language of their own day. They create the illusion of the historical present through force of realized imagination and because they themselves experience the relationship between past history and their own time as one of live continuity. The historical novel falters when this sense of continuity no longer prevails, when the writer feels that the forces of history are beyond his rational comprehension. (p. 333)

Whether or not one agrees with this analysis, its originality and breadth of implication are obvious. It illustrates Lukács' essential practice: the close study of a literary text in the light of far-reaching philosophic and political questions. The writer or particular work is the point of departure. From it Lukács' argument moves outward traversing complex ground. But the central idea or theme is kept constantly in view. Finally, the dialectic closes in, marshaling its examples and persuasions. (p. 334)

The quality of Lukács' mind is philosophic, in the technical sense. Literature concentrates and gives concretion to those mysteries of meaning with which the philosopher is eminently concerned. In this respect, Lukács belongs to a notable tradition. The Poetics are philosophic criticism (drama seen as the theoretic model of spiritual action); so are the critical writings of Coleridge, Schiller, and Croce. If the going is heavy, it is because the matter of the argument is persistently complex. Like other philosopher-critics, Lukács engages questions that have bedeviled inquiry since Plato. What are the primary distinctions between epic and drama? What is "reality" in a work of art, the ancient riddle of shadow outweighing substance? What is the relationship between poetic imagination and ordinary perception? Lukács raises the problem of the "typical" personage. Why do certain characters in literature—Falstaff, Faust, Emma Bovary—possess a force of life greater than that of a multitude of other imagined beings and, indeed, of most living creatures? Is it because they are archetypes in whom universal traits are gathered and given memorable shape?

Lukács' inquiries draw on an extraordinary range of evidence. He appears to have mastered nearly the whole of modern European and Russian literature. This yields a rare association of tough, philosophic exactitude with largeness of vision. (pp. 335-36)

But there is an obverse to the medal. Lukács' criticism has its part of blindness and injustice. At times, he writes with acrimonious obscurity as if to declare that the study of literature should be no pleasure, but a discipline and science, thorny of approach as are other sciences. This has made him insensible to the great musicians of language. Lukács lacks ear; he does not possess that inner tuning-fork which enables Ezra Pound to choose unerringly the instant of glory in a long poem or forgotten romance. In Lukács' omissions of Rilke there is an obscure protest against the marvel of the poet's language. Somehow, he writes too wondrously well. Though he would deny it, moreover, Lukács does incline toward the arch-error of Victorian criticism: the narrative content, the quality of the fable, influence his judgment. Its failure to include Proust, for example, casts doubt on Lukács' entire view of the French novel. But the actual plot of the Recherche du temps perdu, the luxuriance and perversities which Proust recounts, obviously outrage Lukács' austere morality. Marxism is a puritanical creed.

Like all critics, he has his particular displeasures. Lukács detests Nietzsche and is insensitive to the genius of Dostoevsky. But being a consequent Marxist, he makes a virtue of blindness and gives to his condemnations an objective, systematic value…. Lukács' arguments go ad hominem. Infuriated by the world-view of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, he consigns their persons and their labors to the spiritual inferno of pre-Fascism. This is, of course, a grotesque misreading of the facts.

Of late, these defects of vision have become more drastic. They mar The Destruction of Reason and the essays on aesthetics which have appeared since that time…. [There] is, I think, an intense personal drama. At the outset of his brilliant career, Lukács made a Devil's pact with historical necessity. The daemon promised him the secret of objective truth. He gave him the power to confer blessing or pronounce anathema in the name of revolution and "the laws of history." But since Lukács' return from exile, the Devil has been lurking about, asking for his fee. (pp. 336-37)

A man who has lost his sight continues to view his surroundings in terms of remembered images. In order to survive intellectually, Lukács must have hammered out some kind of inner compromise; such punitive forays into one's own consciousness are characteristic of the Marxist condition. His comment about the threat of revisionism gives us a lead. If I interpret him at all accurately, he is saying that the Hungarian episode is a final extension, a reductio ad absurdum of Stalinist policy. But that policy was a false departure from Marxist-Leninist doctrine and the violence of its enactment merely proves its bankruptcy. Therefore, the proper response to the Hungarian disaster does not imply an abandonment of Marxist first principles. On the contrary, we must return to those principles in their authentic formulation. Or as one of the insurrectionist leaders put it: "Let us oppose the Red army in the name of the Leningrad workers' Soviet of 1917." Perhaps there is in this idea that old and most deceptive dream: Communism divorced from the particular ambitions and obscurantism of Russian domination.

Lukács has always held himself responsible to history. This has enabled him to produce a body of critical and philosophic work intensely expressive of the cruel and serious spirit of the age. Whether or not we share his beliefs, there can be no doubt that he has given to the minor Muse of criticism a notable dignity. His late years of solitude and recurrent danger only emphasize what I observed at the outset: in the twentieth century it is not easy for an honest man to be a literary critic. But then, it never was. (p. 339)