[George Lukács's] importance as a critic was first made clear to me by the late Karl Mannheim, who had known him well in Hungary, and who … did not agree with the Marxist basis of Lukács's criticism. What one was made to realize after the reading of a single essay by this critic (and to envy), was the formidable superiority of any polemicist who combines dogma with sensibility. It is the same kind of formidability that one finds in certain Catholic writers (such as Jacques Maritain), and it makes one realize, rather ruefully, that sensibility is not enough: our humanist or libertarian criticism must have an equally strong foundation in faith. (p. 156)

[Lukács is different from most Marxist critics.] He is saved, not only by his innate sensibility, which leads him to respect those elements of form and style so often contemptuously dismissed by Marxist critics, but also by his passionate humanism, which leads him to concentrate on Balzac and Tolstoy and to present their essentially humanitarian ideals with sympathy. All this leads …, to a certain amount of "doublethink"; but how refreshing, for example, to find a Marxian critic expatiating on "the extraordinary concreteness of poetic vision" in Tolstoy, or, more generally, seeing in romanticism, not one more form of bourgeois escapism, but "the expression of a deep and spontaneous revolt against rapidly developing capitalism." (p. 158)

There can be no question of the acuteness of Lukács's intelligence—he is by far the most formidable exponent of the Marxist point of view in literary criticism that has yet appeared anywhere in the world. Like most Marxist critics in whatever sphere, Lukács begins with claims that are merely pretentious. "Marxism," he said in Studies in European Realism, "searches for the material roots of each phenomenon, regards them in their historical connections and movement, ascertains the laws of such movement and demonstrates their development from root to flower, and in so doing lifts every phenomenon out of a merely emotional, irrational, mystic fog and brings it to the bright light of understanding." This is to ascribe to "Marxism" what is merely the agreed practice of all critics who have any claim to be regarded as "scientific", and one could mention a hundred names from Taine to Sartre, from Lessing to Schücking, from Dr. Johnson to Dr. Leavis, who have had the same ideal of scientific method. What distinguishes Marxist criticism is not its scientific method (for when it comes to the point it disclaims any notion of "objectivity"), but certain a priori assumptions—for example, the assumption that realism is the highest type of art. Realism is defined as "the adequate presentation of the complete human personality" and its "central category and criterion" is "the type, a peculiar synthesis which organically binds together the general and particular both in characters and situations". (p. 159)

[Lukács's] essays on Balzac and Tolstoy are the most interesting. There is no doubt that Lukács has revealed new aspects of these great novelists, and brought into clear focus certain elements that explain their enduring appeal. But in the end the bourgeois reader is likely to get most pleasure from observing that process which Orwell has satirized as "doublethink". Lukács is too honest, too sensitive, to question the greatness of Balzac and Tolstoy—they are for him the incomparably greatest artists of their epochs. But the awkward facts are, that Balzac was a reactionary royalist and Tolstoy a utopian anarchist. Doublethink is a little difficult to follow—it is meant to be. But the passionately held views of Tolstoy, for example, which to him were implicit in all his work and life, become "historically necessary illusions", and it has to be admitted that "a great artist creates immortal masterpieces on the basis of an entirely false philosophy". It is even admitted that this "swimming-against-the-current" was a necessary element in Tolstoy's development to greatness. His bourgeois freedom was essential to his "specific manner of concentration". But then doublethink takes another twist, for it is nowhere implied that such freedom would be permitted to a writer in the Marxist paradise. On the contrary, Gorki is extolled for his perfect conformity, and this somewhat dreary writer (admittedly a fine "fighting humanist") is invested with Tolstoy's mantle. It is a sorry spectacle. Subject to a few evasions, the integrity of the critic can be maintained so long as his subject is in the past, but it abdicates entirely to the exigences of a contemporary tyranny. For it has to be demonstrated "concretely" (i.e., at all costs) that "the contradictions of bourgeois art can be overcome in Socialist practice". (pp. 160-61)