(SANITIZED)ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PAMPHLETS ON COMMUNISM(SANITIZED)

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP83-00415R003900030002-3
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: R
• Document Page Count: 108
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 8, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: November 29, 1949
• Content Type: REPORT

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ARAGON
MODERN BALLET
THE POWER Of MARXISM
. THE MECHANISM OF EVOLUTION
ENGELS AND MATERIALISTIC
/ESTHETICS
STAT
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Eastern Europe
We recommend for an understanding of this old danger zone these two books
MYTHS AND REALITIES
IN EASTERN EUROPE
by Walter Kolarz
This book by the author of Stalin and Eternal Russia is by an acknowledged
expert on this area and is designed mainly to deal with the ideas behind the
facts, the ideas which conditiop the political actions. With maps. 12,/6
POLAND
by Henry!? Frankel
This book is not only a history hut also an analysis of social and economic
forces and an objective study of the problems of Poland. With maps. 12/6
SHAKESPEARE'S IMAGINATION
by Edward A. Armstrong
A scholarly and unusual examination of Shakespeare's mind which throws a
new light on his use of words and images. io/6
WOMEN AND THE FUTURE
by 11,1argaret Goldsmith
A stimulating study of the place of women in the post-war world and the new
freedom earned during the war. 61-
LINDSAY DRUMMOND
COMING SHORTLY
Two important new editions
ILLUSION & REALITY
Christopher Cauldwell
Demy 8vo. z is.
AESCHYLUS & ATHENS
George Thomson
Demy 8vo. 2 I S.
LAWRENCE & WISHART
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POLEMIC is a magazine of contemporary
ideas. It is a medium for discussions about
the main trends in philosophy, psychology
and mstheties.
POLEMIC 3 includes a highly contro-
versial essay by George Orwell on Burnham's
Managerial Revolution and a long review of
K. R. Popper's important critique of Hegel
and Marx. C. H. Waddington discusses ethics
from the point of view of a socially conscious
scientist, and the Editorial refers to Professor
l3ernal's views on the same subject with some
pungency.
Geoffrey Grigson opposes the romantic re-
action in literature; the mixed Hellenic and
Oriental influences in Botticelli are described
by Toni del Renzio; and Philip Toynbee gives
well-informed but debatable advice to an
imaginary modern Shakespeare or Goethe
aged 22.
3
POLEMIC
Edited by Humphrey Slater.
Published by Rodney Phillips and Company
(Publishers) Ltd.
5 Bathurst Street, London, W.2.
Now on sale at 216 a copy (219 post paid).
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THE MO E/' N QUARTE LY
NEW SERIES. Volume I Number 3 SUMMER 1946
Contents
EDITORIAL 1
THE POWER OF MARXISM (MARX MEMORIAL LEC-
TURE) R. Palme Dutt. 3
THE MECHANISM OF EVOLUTION (PART I) Georges
Teissier . 20
ARAGON Frida Stewart
41
WANDERING INTO TIM ABSTRACT: A DISCUSSION
OF RECENT TENDENCIES IN BALLET Fernau
Hall 57
FREDERICK ENGELS AND MATERIALISTIC YES-
itHETICS Kurt Blaukopf . 74
COMMUNICATIONS from David Worswiek, John
Gollan and J. E. Mortimer on Keynesian and
Marxian Economics; from Rudolf Popper on
Artists and their Public 78
REVIEWS, ETC.
Prussianism and Nazism by Roy Pascal and D.
M. Van Abbe . 85
Essays on Growth and Form reviewed by Michael
Abercrombie 93
THE MODERN QUARTERLY is published by Lawrence and
Wishart, 81 Chancery Lane, W.C.2. Subscriptions (11s, per year,
post free) should be sent to Central Books, 2 Parton Street,
London, W.C.1. We regret to announce that no back numbers
of Nos. 1 and 2 are available as, owing to severe paper restrictions,
the demand very greatly exceeds the supply.
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NISI DOMINUS
Nevi11 Barbour
This book deals fully and sympathetically with
the problem of the future status of Palestine. It
is the first to discuss, without partisanship, the
question and influence of Zionism in that country
and to examine the Zionist-Arab struggle in all
details from a strictly objective point of view.
About los. 6d. net
For publication in August
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ATOMIC ENERGY AND
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ENGLISH EPISODE
CHARLES POULSEN
A historical romance of the period of
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READY IN JUNE
WILLIAM SANSOM'S
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A collection of unusual short stories
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NO CLOUD OF GLORY
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finds herself in the dock charged
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environment. 8s. 6d.
PROGRESS PUBLISHING
Doughty Street, London, W.C.
PP
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IIILLIA111 PRIMROSE
and the
BOSTON SYMPHONY
ORCHESTRA
conducted by
KOUSSEVITZKY
HAROLD IN ITALY
Berlioz
DB 6261-5
Automatic Couplings DB 901 9-23
Album No. 391
Other Fine Recordings by
THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
conducted by KOUSSEVITZKY
BEETHOVEN
Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 36
DB 3919-21 & DBS 3922
Symphony No. 8 in F, Op. 93
DB 3172-4.
BERLIOZ
Hungarian March and Minuet of Will
o' the Wisps (Damnation of Faust)
DB 3009
DEBUSSY
La Mer (The Sea) - - DB 3923-5
LIADOV
Enchanted Lake
- DB 2896
MOZART
Symphony No. 29 in A, K.201
DB 5957-8
Symphony No. 34 in C, K.338
DB 5959-60 & DBS 5961
RAVEL
Daphnis et Chloe ? Suite No. 2
DB 6239-40
SIBELIUS
Symphony No. 5 in E Flat, Op. 82
DB 3168-71
Tapiola ? Symphonic Poem
DB 5992-3
Pohjola's Daughter ? Symphonic
Fantasia - - - DB 5722-3
?MS MASTER'S VOICE'
GREATEST ARTISTS * FINEST RECORDING
The Gramophone Company Ltd., Hayes, Middx.
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PAKISTAN A Plan for India
by the SIRDAR IKBAL ALI SHAH 2s. 6d. net
What is Pakistan? Pakistan is a political ideology evolved by
Indian Muslims, of whom 94 millions claim the right to be
treated as a nation. The work is a serious and practical suggestion
for a solution of the Indian problem.
EUROPEAN DATELINE
by PATRICK MAITLAND Demy 8vo, illus. 15s. net
Not only a thrilling account of many and varied adventures but
also a shrewd commentary on affairs in the Balkans.?
Yorkshire Evening News.
The book is a guide as well as a record.?Liverpool Post.
Will be of use to the serious reader or student. ?Sheffield Telegraph.
ELOCUTION
by ERNEST ESDAILE 6s. net
Foreword by Dame Sybil Thorndike, D.B.E. Appreciation by W.
Maqueen Pope, and a Battle Cry by Dame Lilian Braithwaite,D.B.E.
The author has opened a door into an exciting adventure for
anyone who cares for the spoken word?and opened, by this
means, a way to the appreciation of our many great writers, whose
words must be sounded to be properly enjoyed. Here is some-
thing which is in the reach of every man, woman and child?to
speak lovely words with lovely sound.?Svan. THORNDIKE.
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Lck TOWARDS OLD AGE
by KATE AGNES INGRA.M 4s. 6d. net
With a memoir by Kenneth Ingram. Frontispiece portrait.
A first book, written when the author was eighty-three. It is a
reflection on life, a message equally to young, middle-aged and
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buted a memoir which is of interest if only because it relates to
one born in 1850 who, with and eternally young mind, lived to
see and note the changes of our twentieth century.
NEW FICTION AT ALL LIBRARIES
DEATH ON THE ROOF
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An unusual murder mystery beginning on a hospital roof.
BEHIND THE FIRST WALL
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A particularly good spy thriller set in the blue waters and coasts
of the Mediterranean Sea.
FIDELITY?
by KENNETH HEMINGWAY 8s. 6d.
The problem of husbands and wives separated by time and distance.
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A BIOGRAPHY OF GENERAL
EISENHOWER
THE ALLIED SUPREME COMMANDER
By
ALDEN HATCH
This fully illustrated biography of General Eisenhower
describes his boyhood in Kansas, his courtship of Mamie
Doud, intimate details of his family life and career;
concluding with his drive against Germany through the
great Battle of the Bulge and into the German homeland.
24 illustrations and maps, Demy 8vo, 16s. net
FROM ALL BOOKSELLERS
Publication, May 30th
SKEFFINGTON & SON LIMITED
* * F 0 R. 13 00 K. S 4. 4
Largest Bookshop tihne World
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Write for full particulars :
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the Society for Cultural Relations
Dept. M.Q., 8 Courtfield Gardens,
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OUR TIME
There is now a wider and keener
interest in the Arts than ever before.
Our Time brings together each month a
variety of articles with a progressive out-
look on literature, music, drama, films and
painting.
Its Notes and Comments carry much in-
formation about the developments going
on all over the country.
Monthly. Illustrated.
6d.
THEATRE
TO-DAY
Edited by MONTAGU SLATER
Reflects in articles and photographs the
present tremendous popularity of the
Theatre.
The contributors to the first issue included:
Eric Crozier, Scott Goddard, Miles
Malleson, Michael MacOwan, Sean
O'Casey, Frank O'Connor, etc.
Next issue ready July.
Fully illustrated. 2s.
Seven
Magazine
A popular quarterly specialising in short
stories and drawings.
?25 "best story" bonus.
June number now ready.
From all newsagents.
is.
?FORE PUBLICATIONS LTD?
Past and Present Series
THE
GROWTH
OF
MODERN
GERMANY
Roy Pascal
This is the second volume
in this series
Ready June 7s. 6d.
Ready Shortly
WRITING AND THE ALPHABET
DECLINE OF THE
ROMAN EMPIRE IN THE WEST
PLOUGH AND PASTURE
?COBBETT PRESS
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MOMOMMOMMOMMOO
English
Chamher
Music
Ernst H. Meyer
Analyses the great period of
English chamber music from
the Middle Ages to Purcell in
relation to the social back-
ground of the period. In
addition to about 100 musical
examples in the text there is
an appendix of 80 pages of
complete pieces, many of which
are not otherwise available to
the general public.
Mid-Summer Approx. 308.
LAWRENCE & WISHART
OWOWOWW0WOWWOW
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Editorial
DURING the past three months the ideological offensive
against Socialism has been in full swing in a stream of new
books, in the Press, and on the air. We need only mention the
successive series of broadcasts (four in each) by the Rev. D. R.
Davies, Father Martindale and J. Middleton Murry, whose single
theme was "The Defeat of Modern Man." "Civilisation has one
possibility of survival," says D. R. Davies. "Somehow or other, by
hook or by crook, this world must be robbed of the importance which it
has had" (our italics). As an epilogue to these prophesies of woe
comes the unrelieved pessimism of Koestler, Professor Woodward
and E. M. Forster. We are gratified to note that both Koestler and
Davies make their point of attack the articles by Haldane and
Bernal in the Modern Quarterly.
We conceive it to be our task to continue the counter-offensive
so ably begun by Bernal, Farrington and Haldane in their Sunday
evening broadcasts, and we invite more articles on the current phil-
osophies of our time, critical articles on literary tendencies, and re-
views of recent books, to which we intend to devote more space. We
are anxious for our contributors to take up and critically expound
the "existentialism" which is so influential, especially in France, the
personalism of Berdyaev, the irrationalism of Kierkegaard. We are
glad to announce that in forthcoming issues Professor Haldane
intends to deal with C. S. Lewis of The Screwtape Letters, Maurice
Cornforth will write on Logical Positivism, which is receiving some
attention in Polemic, and two further articles by Cornu will appear
on Marxism and Ideology.
WE are most anxious to extend the field of discussion opened
by the communications we have printed on Marxist
economics and on art. Unfortunately, our supplies of paper are
still greatly restricted. We therefore limit our editorial remarks to
find the maximum space for the many lively communications
which have reached us on these issues and for Mr. Blaukopf's
endeavour to start another hare.
Mr. Hyman Frankel's second article on Whitehead will appear
in the autumn number.
1
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Our Contributors
R. Palme Dutt, the Editor of The Labour Monthly, delivered the
Marx Memorial Lecture on "The Power of Marxism" on March
14th. He is the author of World Politics, Fascism and Social
Revolution, India To-day and other works. He is at present in
India. Professor Georges Teissier is a distinguished French biologist
who has closely identified himself with the Left political move-
ment in France. Frida Stewart writes not only from a wide
knowledge of French literature, but from first-hand experience of
working with the Resistance Movement in France. Fernau Hall
is a Canadian from the University of British Columbia. He acted
in the Unity Theatre production of Waiting for Lefty in 1936.
Demobbed in 1945 he has just written two books on ballet.
Kurt Blaukopf is a civil servant in Palestine and a student of
philosophy. Professor Roy Pascal is Professor of German in the
University of Birmingham and was formerly a Fellow of Pembroke
College, Cambridge, and Lecturer in the University. He is the
author of The Social Basis of the German Reformation, The Nazi
Dictatorship and other works. His forthcoming book in the "Past
and Present" Series is The Growth of Modern Germany. Major
D. M. Van Abb?after a distinguished career at Cambridge, joined
the Army, which he is now leaving to take up an academic post in
Tasmania. Dr. Michael Abercrombie is a member of the Depart-
ment of Zoology in the University of Birmingham.
The Editor of the MODERN QUARTERLY will be pleased to
receive communications raising issues for discussion or criticising
articles which have appeared. Suggestions as to full-length articles
are welcome. It is hoped to develop the section allotted to reviews,
and readers are asked to consult the Editor about books they
would be interested to review.
We should be particularly glad to receive articles on physical
science, economics, esthetie and literary criticism, ethics and
philosophy. All articles are paid for.
Correspondence should be addressed to the Editor, Dr. John
Lewis, 40 Claremont Park, Finchley, London, N.3.
2
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The Power of M rxism
(Marx Anniversary Lecture 1946)
By R. PALME DUTT
WE pay our tribute to-day to the memory of the greatest
thinker, teacher and practical leader of humanity, Karl
Marx, whose influence is shaping the modern world and guiding
mankind through the historical associations of our time, from the
old, barbarous class-society to the future of human co-operation
and ultimate advance to Communism.
It may be truly said that never before in all these sixty-three
years has the influence of Marxism and Communism stood so high.
This is the first anniversary since the defeat of Fascism. Fascism
swore to destroy Marxism and all human progress with every means
of violent suppression and extermination of millions. Fascism
failed, and its military power is now in the dust. Where Fascism
failed, none other that dares to assume its discredited mantle shall
succeed. A new world is coming to birth; the peoples are on the
march, and in that new world Marxism leads the way.
The address which I was to have given you this evening on The
Power of Marxism has been forestalled and my subject stolen from
me by that more distinguished orator who has made a much
publicised speech at Fulton, Missouri, and devoted his address to
his kind of inverted tribute to the power of Marxism in the world.
The brilliant leader of the wars of intervention against the Soviet
Union, who has subsequently claimed the Order of the Red Banner
from Molotov on the grounds that his wars of intervention had
helped to build the Red Army, the brilliant organiser of the Tory
General Election victory campaign and author of those election
broadcasts which so powerfully contributed to the results of the
election, now offers a new crusade against Communism and the
Soviet Union. It is worth recalling the words he is alleged to have
used at the time of his wars of intervention against the young
Soviet Republic:
"It were better to smash the Bolshevik egg before it hatched
than be compelled to chase Bolshevik chickens all over the world."
Well, he now appears to be engaged in chasing the chickens over
the world, and, to use his own favourite phraseology, we can say,
"Some chicken!"
3
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The Modern Quarterly
We can sympathise with the discomfort of Mr. Churchill. The
world is not going the way he intended. The liberation, as he
remarks in his speech, is not what he intended. Michailovich gone;
King Peter gone; Dalian gone; I3adoglio gone; Victor Emmanuel
gone; Franco going. Worse still, himself gone turned out by the
people of Britain, while Stalin remains stronger than ever in the
leadership of a united people. The Soviet Union has not been bled
to death, in spite of the delay of the Second Front, which it is now
revealed he was primarily responsible for postponing in order to
ensure that the main brunt of the war should fall upon the Soviet
Union while the Anglo-American forces should be held in reserve
for his third world war. When he looks at the miscarriage of his
plans to-day, no wonder that he feels sour. His speech was the
defrcatist snarl of a dying social order seeking a new war as their
only way to preserve their privileges.
We warn the Churchills, the Cardinal Griffins, the Andersons
and the rest, others have tried this path before; none has succeeded.
From every assault Communism has emerged the stronger. A long
line of savers of civilisation against Communism fills the records of
the past century Gallifet and Cavaignae, Thiers, who over the
30,000 corpses after the suppression of the Paris Commune pro-
claimed Communism dead, Bismarck and his anti-Socialist Jaws,
Stolypin, and Pobiedonostzev, Denikin and Koltehak, Horthy and
Mannerheim, not to mention our own Joynson Hicks and Neville
Chamberlain and the Munich men, and, finally, the supreme
attempt of the Axis gang, Mussolini, Hitler, Goebbels and the crew
who now stand in the dock at Nuremberg. Not a glorious company
to join?a company remembered only with execration in the
records of history. All have failed; you can't turn back the wheel
of history. As Marx declared of previous such attempts at the time
of the suppression of the Paris Commune:
"Wherever, in whatever shape and under whatever conditions
the class struggle obtains any consistency, it is but natural that
members of our association should stand in the foreground. The
soil out of which it grows is modern society itself. It cannot
be stamped out by any amount of carnage. To stamp it out
the Government would have to stamp out the despotism of
capital over Labour?the conditions of their own parasitical
existence."
1 Marx, Civil War in France.
4
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The Power of Moirxism
A century ago Marx and Engels began their Communist Manifesto
with the famous words about the spectre that was haunting Europe,
the spectre of Communism, and how all the powers of old Europe
had entered into a holy alliance to exorcise that spectre, Pope and
Czar, Metternich, Guizot, etc. To-day the position is reversed.
Millions turn to Marxism; new governments come into being with
Communists in leading roles; a new Europe arises. The spectre
to-day is the ghost of the old, dying forces that brought fascism
and seek to kindle the world in flames in order to save their
privileges. That spectre we shall by.
It is time to end the conspiracy mania in dealing with Com-
munism. The attempt to treat Communism as if it were some kind
of sinister plot, the myths and rubbish about police, and talk of
fifth columns, it is time to end this claptrap and seek seriously to
understand why millions place their confidence in Communism
to-day. If the French people have given the first political position
in their country to the Communist Party with 5 million votes (and
there is every ground to believe that there will be more at the
coming election); if the Italian Communist Party at its last Con-
gress reported 1,800,000 members; if the Czech Communist Party
has 1 million members out of a population of 12 millions?and as
this process is developing at varying rates and tempos in all the
countries of the world; and what is more if this growth has gone
forward against all obstacles and obstruction of the powers in
possession?then this is a political development of lasting signifi-
cance, and it is only possible because it corresponds to the deep
historical needs and aspirations of the people. Therefore it is
necessary for all without exception to approach this development
with sympathetic political understanding.
What, then, is the power of Communism? It is at once the power
of an idea and of a movement; an idea that is a scientific theory,
and a mo zement, a living movement of history embodied in the
working-class movement. It is the combination of the two that is
the special character and strength of Marxism.
Marxism is a scientific world theory, the first completely critical,
completely scientific world theory, without dogma, not static,
embodying the sum of human knowledge and living and growing
with the growth of human knowledge. That is the theory philoso-
phically known as Dialectical Materialism, to which the most
famous modern scientists like Joliot-Curie, Bernal, Haldane and a
host of others increasingly turn for light on their theoretical
5
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The Modern Quarterly
problems. It is worth remembering here the words of Engels at the
graveside of Marx, "To Marx, science was an historically driven
revolutionary force." The truth of this is very powerfully demon-
strated to-day with the tremendous new issues and prospects of
social transformation brought in view by the release of atomic
energy, which fills all the publicists of the old order with glum
foreboding and apprehension, and which only Marxism and the
working class view with confidence and optimism for the future.
This theory applied to human history and with the theory of
historical materialism, ends the old chaos of arbitrary events which
used to pass for history, and lays bare the laws of historical develop-
ment, thereby pointing the way for man to become the master of
history.
Concretely applied to our epoch, Marxism laid bare the laws of
the modern era, of capitalist society; it showed the role of capitalism
in gigantically developing the production forces, and the role of
the early democratic revolts in ending the old forms of oppression
and launching the conception of the liberty and equality of all
human beings. At the same time it showed the shortcomings and
deep contradictions of capitalist society; the continuance of class
oppression through the domination of capital and the growth of
new forms of class struggle; the inability of capitalism to master
the gigantic productive forces which had been brought into being,
and so with the continuous process of capitalist concentration,
accumulation and expansion leading to ever-extending crises and
social and political conflicts, thereby revealing the necessity of the
next stage?the task of our time?that the modern productive
forces must become socially owned, i.e. the aim of Socialism, the
first stage of Communism, ending class society and division and
making man for the first time free, and the master of Nature and
his destiny.
Finally, Marxism showed also the power to achieve this change
arising from this capitalist society, the power of the working class
leading the masses of the people. Here the theory joins with prac-
tice. Marxism is not only a scientific theory whose greatness has
been abundantly proved through decades of experience at a time
when every other theory has been shipwrecked by the events?
Marxism is more. Marxism, Communism, is no passive theory, but a
living movement of millions; a movement of the immense majority
in the interests of the immense majority; a movement of the work-
ing people of the world striving for emancipation and fighting their
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The Power of Marxism
way forward in the light of Marxist theory. Marx brought Socialism
down from the clouds, from being a mere aspiration, a dream of
poets and philosophers. Socialism is embodied in the working-class
movement, the historical movement which can alone achieve this
great transformation of society. Herein is expressed the revolu-
tionary character of Marxism. Lenin said:
"The unvanquishable, attractive force which draws the
socialists of all countries to this theory lies in the fact that it
combines a strict and advanced scientific character (being the
last word in social science) with a revolutionary character com-
bining them, not accidentally and not only because the founder
of the doctrine combined in his person the attributes of a
scientist and a revolutionary, but combining them from within
and inseparably in the theory itself."1
In the light of the social and historical understanding, Marxism
showed the supreme task before the working-class movement to be
to win political power?power adequate to carry through the neces-
sary social transformation and to crush the resistance which we
know well to-day to be the tenacious, the unscrupulous and the
violent resistance of the old ex?p-T5iting classes.
The accomplishment of this task requires mastery of the science
of politics, and to this Marx devoted no small portion alike of his
creative thought and practical work, bringing understanding of all
stages of political development and growth, the forms and condi-
tions of development of the mass movement, the unity of the
working-class struggle with the national struggles for liberation,
and with every phase of democratic struggle; and, above all and
through all, the vanguard role of the working class and of the
political party of the working class founded on Marxism, the Com-
munist Party. In all practical tasks of building the movement,
Marx led the way in the conditions of his epoch, and that work has
been carried forward after him by Lenin, by Stalin, and by all the
leaders of Marxism.
It has been and still remains a long road of development for the
workers to battle their way forward and to reach?from the midst of
all the shortcomings, the frustration and brutalising conditions of
capitalist society?their organisation, their unity and clearness of
political consciousness and leadership. It required the sacrifice and
heroism of generations of pioneers, from the days of Chartism, of
1 Lenin, Who are the Friends of the People?
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The Modern Quarterly
early trade unionism and the early Socialist movement, to build up
that movement which we inherit to-day.
Lenin, in an address on the thirtieth anniversary of the death of
Marx in 1913, spoke of three epochs of world development since the
beginning of the political activity of Marx. The first was that from
1848 to 1871 during which Marxism had to battle to establish its
primacy as the theory of the working class. This was the period of
the first working-class international which culminated in the Paris
Commune, the first victory of working-class power in history whose
seventy-fifth anniversary falls four days from to-day. The second
period was that from 1871 to 1905, the period of the growth of the
mass organisations of the working class, united in the old Second
International already in its formal programme on the basis of
Marxism, but with dangerous weaknesses through the influence of
revisionism and reformism. The third epoch was that which opened
in 1905 with the first Russian Revolution?the revolutionary
epoch. Lenin said:
"After the appearance of Marxism every one of the three
epochs of world history brought it new confirmation and new
triumphs. But the coming historical epoch will bring an even
greater triumph to Marxism as the teaching of the proletariat."1
That prediction made in 1913 has been abundantly proved by the
events. Within four years there followed the victory of the Socialist
Revolution in Russia, the establishment of the Soviet Union, and
thereafter the triumphant building of socialism over one-sixth of the
earth, and the whole world development leading to the great battles
and issues of the present day.
It has not been an easy road; there has been no lack of mistakes
and weaknesses. The working-class movement has to learn from its
mistakes. As Engels said:
"The best way to find theoretical clarity of conception is to
learn from your own mistakes; to learn wisdom at the expense of
your own losses. And there is no other way for a mighty class."2
The epoch of imperialism, which in reality signalised that
capitalism had run the limits of its development and was entering
its decline and downfall, appeared to superficial observers as if it
were a period of gigantic capitalist prosperity and expansion reach-
ing over the entire world. This brought a wave of capitalist influence
Lenin in Pravda, 1913, on the thirtieth anniversary of Marx's death.
2 Engels: letter to Wischnewetsky.
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The Power of Marxism
within the Labour Movement expressed in revisionism and re-
formism, which sought to turn aside the working class from its
revolutionary task, denied the Marxist theory of capitalism and
its growing contradictions, and proclaimed a peaceful, easy road of
prosperously-developing capitalism with increasing benefits for the
workers. Lenin and the Bolsheviks had to fight these false theories.
The First World War obviously smashed their theoretical basis and
opened the general crisis of capitalism. The test of experience
proved that only Bolshevism based on the sure foundation of
Marxist theory was able to lead the workers to Socialism.
After the First World War, despite the tremendous social and
political changes and conflicts which spread throughout the world,
the Labour Movement in the countries outside Russia was not yet
ready and able to win power, and capitalism was unable to rebuild
its shattered structure. There followed a second wave of capitalist
influence based on false theories and capitalist revival, which found
expression in the controversies of social democracy and Com-
munism in the inter-war years. To-day some younger scribes of the
Labour Movement, who appear to have a singular genius for put-
ting their foot into whatever they touch, seek to hold aloft the old
discredited banner of Social Democracy and proclaim as the
great issue of our time the battle of Social Democracy against Com-
munism, "Western Socialism against Communism." They appear
to be unaware how greatly the frontiers have moved and how these
old controversies have been basically settled by history, by
Fascism. The decisive alignment in the present phase is between
the supporters and opponents of working-class unity for the
completion of victory over Fascism and all its reactionary
supporters.
But since this attempt is being made to idealise the conception
of Social Democracy as opposed to Communism, it is necessary for
the younger generation who didn't live through those years to make
fully understood what that Social Democracy was which found its
embodiment in the Second International between the wars and
which revealed its bankruptcy before Fascism.
"What were the issues of controversy between Social Democracy
and Communism between the wars? The Communist Parties
developed from the militant corps of the old Socialist movement
on the basis of the reassertion of Marxism against those tendencies
in the Labour Movement which had travelled away from Marxism
to practical acceptance of capitalism and imperialism. Social
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The Modern Quarterly
Democracy developed as a continuation of the revisionism of the
pre-1914 period.
Social Democracy in the economic sphere denied the Marxist
analysis of capitalism and declared that modern monopoly capit-
alism?"organised capitalism," as they describe it, and especially
American capitalism, Fordism?had solved the problem of poverty
and provided the possibility for indefinitely expanding the pro-
gressive development without crises and with continuous improved
conditions for the workers. Thus one of the leading trade union
theoreticians of German Social Democracy, Tarnow, wrote:
"We must distinguish two epochs in the development of
capitalism; the epoch of British capitalism, which was limited in
its possibilities of expansion, and the epoch of American capit-
alism, which on the basis of the latest technical advances, can
unendingly expand and develop.
"For the first epoch, Marx and Lassalle were typical. They
maintained that wages are determined by certain economic laws,
that they depend on the cost of Labour power, etc. For the
second epoch, Ford is typical. He proved that capitalism can
prosper, while the workers need not at the same time remain
poor."
Corresponding to this economic theory, in the political sphere
Social Democracy denied the necessity of a Socialist movement and
declared that the forms of parliamentary democracy guaranteed a
peaceful transition to Socialism without the necessity of any basic
change in the character of the State. This conception of democracy
was held up and exemplified in its model form in the Weimar
Republic, which was based on universal suffrage and all the other
formal democratic liberties, but which in fact carried over un-
touched the old State apparatus?the military caste, the Law
Courts and bureaucracy, the Junkers and the big industrialists,
who under the protection of Weimar democracy built up the power
of Hitler and Fascism.
Thus one of the principal leaders of Social Democracy, Otto
Bauer, wrote in his book, Capitalism and Socialism, in 1931:
"The working class of the industrial States must go along the
road to Socialism, not by way of civil war and dictatorship, but
peacefully avoiding the terrible sacrifices of civil war; they must
take the peaceful road, which alone makes possible co-operation
with the industrial bureaucracy and with the peasantry.
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The Power of Marxism
"The way of democracy may seem longer than the way of
force, but it is undoubtedly the way which is accompanied by less
sacrifice of well-being, freedom and human life."
This was written three years before the Civil War in Austria and
the victory of Fascism.
Finally, Social Democracy opposed working-class unity and
maintained extreme hostility to the Soviet Union. This was
manifest from the first days of the Bolshevik Revolution, when
Brailsford wrote in the Herald of November 7th, 1917:
"This month is likely to stand in our memories as the blackest
of the war. It began with disaster in Italy that has been followed
by a second Russian Revolution."
This attitude was intensified, as the Russian workers rapidly grew
in strength, to complete denial of the Socialist character of the
Revolution, a denial of its economic achievement, prophecies of
impending economic catastrophe and breakdown, and calls for its
armed overthrow. Thus the resolution of the Brussels Congress of
the Second International in 1928 declared:
"Eleven years after the Revolution the persistence of economic
crises shows that the regime of dictatorship by a terrorist
minority prevents the development of the productive forces of
the country [this in 1928,_ the first year of the Five Year Plan!
Taking that year as 100, the index of industrial production in the
Soviet Union two years later stood at 157.6!] while it prevents
the Russian workers from defending their interests and holds
under its domination nationalities which it oppresses."
At the same Congress Dann declared: "For us, world peace depends
on the liquidation of Bolshevism," and Kautsky wrote in his The
International and Soviet Russia:
"For years the Soviet Government has been chiefly occupied
in enslaving, unnerving and stupefying the proletariat, both
inside and outside of Russia. . . . Soviet Russia is at the moment
the greatest hindrance for the rise of the proletariat in the world
--worse even than the infamous regime of Horthy in Hungary
and of Mussolini in Italy.1
1 p. 11.
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The Mo
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"Like every other military despotism, like the military mon-
archies of the Romanovs, the Hapsburgs, the Hohenzollerns, this
despotism can only be overcome by force."
Such was the suicidal, blind outlook of the leaders of Social
Democracy in the years between the wars. Can any serious Socialist
wish to revive that outlook to-day?
Historically, experience has dealt a smashing blow to these false
theories and illusions, although this does not mean that they do
not continually revive anew from the conditions of capitalism, and
need to be continually combatted. The world economic crisis
brought crashing the theories of the end of crises, of harmonious
capitalist development and of the American miracle. The offensive
of Fascism shattered the illusions of parliamentary democratic
legalism; the war of the united nations exploded the prophesies of
the economic, political and military collapse of the Soviet Union and
demonstrated its role as the foremost fighter in the battle for world
democracy and world peace. This bankruptcy of the old, false
theories had to be admitted even by the leaders of Social Democ-
racy. Thus the Manifesto of the Executive Committee of the
German Social Democratic Party in 1934, after the conquest of
power by Hitler, declared:
"The political transformation of 1918 ended up in a counter-
revolutionary development. . . . The Social Democratic Party
took over control of the State without opposition, sharing it as a
matter of course with the bourgeois parties, the old bureaucracy,
and even with the reorganised military forces. That it should
have taken over the old machinery of government virtually un-
changed was the great historical error committed by a German
Labour Movement which had lost its sense of direction through the
war.
Similarly, Otto Bauer, whose opinion in 1931 we have quoted,
wrote in 1934 on the lessons of the days of February, 1934:
"The days of February, 1934, have taught us an impressive
lesson. At that time we buried, not only our dead, but also our
errors and illusions. A whole epoch in the history of the Austrian
working-class movement came to an end. The Austrian workers
believed that Socialism could be realised by democracy, in
peace. The Fascists have shot democracy to pieces. They have
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The Power of Marxism
taught the Austrian workers that there is no other choice: either
the dictatorship of Fascism or the dictatorship of the proletariat."
In Britain also the experience of MacDonald, Snowden and
Thomas will be remembered, and the most recent pamphlet of the
Labour Party on The Rise of the Labour Party has to recognise that
the second Labour Government fell because of the false theories of
its leaders:
"The Labour Government [1929-31] was hampered by the
hesitations of its own leaders, who were already departing far
from its Socialist past. It failed to take adequate steps to deal
with unemployment . . . it failed in the crisis of 1931 when its
own leader and a few of those closest to him (including Philip
Snowden and J. H. Thomas), who were thereupon expelled from
the Party, formed a National Government of Tories and Liberals
with a few Labour renegades."
In this way Social Democracy was compelled to pass sentence on
its own record in the inter-war years.
This bankruptcy of the old Social Democracy before Fascism was
not only theoretical and moral, but also practical. The German
Social Democratic Party joined unanimously in the Reichstag vote
in May, 1933, after the Communists had been outlawed, in support
of Hitler's policy. The majority of the French Socialist Party
deputies in Parliament after the Communists had been outlawed
joined in voting special powers to Petain in the summer of 1940
which established the Petain Fascist State in France. The Chairman
of the Belgian Labour Party, de Man, after conducting his cam-
paign for neo-socialism against Marxism, passed over to the Nazis
in 1940, and was revealed to have been already for years previously
the agent of Hitler. The Finnish Social Democratic Party lined up
behind Hitler in the war, and its leader, Tanner, has now been
sentenced as a war criminal.
Who dares to wish to revive to-day this shameful record? We
have entered into a new epoch in which big lessons have been
learned by the working-class movement from the experience of
Fascism. Working-class unity, which already began to develop in
face of the onset of Fascism during the years before the war, was
enormously enlarged and strengthened within the resistance move-
ment in the struggle against the Nazi occupation, and has now
swept forward in the majority of the countries of Europe. In a
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The Modern Quarterly
series of countries the question of fusion to form a single united
workers' party on the basis of Marxism has come on to the order
of the day.
On a world scale, this unity has found expression in the estab-
lishment of the World Federation of Trade Unions, uniting over 60
million workers of all countries, irrespective of nation, race or
colour. We may well imagine how this mighty development of
international working-class unity would have warmed the heart of
Marx. The old false theories and illusions still continuously spring
up anew and have to be combatted, but the experience of Fascism
has brought a deeper understanding of the nature of democracy
and of the necessity that democracy shall not tolerate Fascist
reaction or its supporters.
Thus the Second World War which developed from the contra-
dictions of imperialism, as the First World War had done, took on
a basically new and different character from the First World War,
because of the decisive new character of the world situation arising
from the general crisis of capitalism, the victory of Socialisin in the
Soviet Union, and the counter-offensive of Fascism against the
working class in Europe. The Second World War developed from
the outset as a war of liberation against Fascism from the earliest
stages of the resistance of the Chinese people to Japanese Fascism;
from the resistance of the Abyssinian people to Italian Fascism;
from the resistance of the Spanish Republic with the support of the
International Brigade and of the Soviet Union against German and
Italian Fascism. All the efforts of the imperialists could not defeat
or check this basic development of the war of the people for
liberation against Fascism. Neither the imperialist backing of
Hitler and his rearmament, nor the imperialist plans of Munich
for a bloc with German and Italian Fascism against the Soviet
Union; nor the imperialist phase of the war launched by Chamber-
lain and Daladier with all the main forces turned against Com-
munism and the Soviet Union and the phoney war in support of
Hitler?all of these were swept aside by the powerful historical
development which led to its final culmination in the establishment
of the world alliance of the United Nations and the military
downfall of Fascism.
So to-day we come to the great issues of our period following
military victory over Fascism. We are moving now to a period of
enormous opportunities, awakening and change?with the defeat of
Fascism, the establishment of the United Nations, the collapse of
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The Power of Marxism
old political forms, the old ruling classes discredited by collabora-
tion with Fascism, the growth of mighty mass movements
and mass Communist Parties, new democratic Governments and
new forms of democracy?real popular democracy?;Asia awake,
and the fire of popular upsurge spreading through India, Egypt,
Indonesia and all the colonial countries, and in Britain the defeat
of Toryism and the first Labour Government with a Parliamentary
majority as the first signal of the profound political transformation
that is opening.
In the face of this enormous advance, we should not be surprised
that the offensive of reaction is renewed. The old ruling classes fear
the advance of the people after liberation following the downfall of
Fascism. It is therefore no matter for surprise that at this moment
a campaign of hostility is let loose against the Soviet Union, against
Communism and against the new democracies, and that attempts
are made in all kinds of devious ways to revive Fascism. Fascism
has been militarily defeated, but is not yet politically destroyed
and we have still to fulfil the obligation undertaken in the Crimea
Agreement, "To destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and Fascism."
At the present moment it is opportune to recall those final
speeches of Goebbels made only a year ago before the collapse. In
these speeches Goebbels indicated the plans of Nazism for after the
military collapse. He described how Europe and Germany would be
divided between the Anglo-American victors and the Soviet
Union, and how Eastern Europe would be organised behind an
"iron curtain" (it is worth recalling that it was Goebbels that first
coined this phrase "the iron curtain," the description of Soviet-
occupied Europe which has since been so often repeated by all our
publicists), and how this would give rise to the new World War III
between the Anglo-American Powers and the Soviet Union. And it
was on this basis he declared that Nazism would thrive. If we
bear in mind this planned strategy of Nazism it is impossible to
fail to see how actively that plan is being pursued to-day with the
support of all the reactionary elements in all countries.
It is here that arises the significance of Churchill's speech.
Churchill is adopting the language and the slogans of the Anti-
Comintern Pact and even the racial theory of Anglo-American
world domination. Goebbels, in whatever particular hell according
to his own brand of theology he may be roasting, may well rub his
hands over his new convert. Churchill now turns in fury upon the
Soviet Union and the Red Army, for whom in the hour of danger
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he had no words of tribute too high. We need not be surprised at
this ingratitude; the familiar gratitude of the English ruling class
to those who gave their sweat and their blood has been immor-
talised in the words of the favourite poet of Tory Imperialism:
"For it's Tommy this and Tommy that and Tommy fall behind,
But it's 'Please to walk in front, sir' when there's trouble in the wind.
And it's Tommy this and Tommy that and chuck him out, the brute.
But it's 'Saviour of the world' when the guns begin to shoot,
And it's Tommy this and Tommy that and anything you please,
But Tommy's not a blooming fool, and you bet Tommy sees."
We need not push the analogy too far, but we can certainly say that
the Soviet people are not blooming fools and the Soviet people see.
When Churchill lectures on freedom to the people of the world
the irony becomes rich?the arch-apostle of British Imperialism
and of the counter-revolutionary wars and intervention lectures on
the principles of freedom and democracy to the really democratic
governments of Eastern Europe where they have cleared out the
landlords, taken over the big enterprises, and the people have
become masters of their own countries. Churchill tried to present
Greece as the model of freedom! Unfortunately, Sophoulis let him
down the next day, when the Prime Minister of this free and
sovereign country sent a telegram to London asking permission to
change the date of the elections, a request which was sternly
refused.
No doubt when we have reached the situation that we have to
send a telegram to Washington for permission to hold elections in
this country, we shall also have reached the ideal "freedom"
according to Churchill.
At this moment when in India, or Egypt, or Indonesia hundreds
are being shot down in the struggle for their national freedom, and
in Cyprus the leaders of the trade union movement are thrown into
jail, and the possession of Marxist literature is declared to be a
crime, we may well demand what sort of freedom is this which
Churchill proposes to spread with military power over the world.
Never should they get away with insolent and hypocritical talk
about freedom and democracy. We Communists are the most
consistent fighters for freedom and democracy for all the peoples
of the world?freedom for the overwhelming masses of the people, for
the 99 per cent, and not for a few exploiters to oppress the people.
The British people to-day stand before a great choice. Either
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forward with the advancing peoples of the world, with the Soviet
Union and the new democratic governments and the colonial
peoples, or back to enslavement, to Anglo-American finance, with
Britain as the pawn of Wall Street and the victim of a future world
war which reaction is working to bring about.
Churchill's policy is not merely anti-Soviet?it is anti-British.
It is the voice of Tory reaction and American finance which fears
the advance of the Labour Movement and of Socialism in Britain.
We should tell Churchill we want no Wall Street Fifth Column here.
The British people have declared in the General Election where
they stand and what their wishes are. They have declared for the
end of Toryism and for great social changes in this country. On this
basis, the Labour Government has been brought into existence for
the fulfilment of a programme of far-reaching democratic reforms.
We Marxists welcome the formation of the Labour Government and
will fight with all our strength for the successful fulfilment of the
programme of democratic measures which the Labour Government
stands committed to, against all attempts of reaction and monopoly
interests to hold up that programme. At the same time, we recog-
nise that this is only the beginning of the changes which will have
to take place in Britain. We have no illusions as to the character
of the struggle in front of us. Nationalisation, which only changes
the form of administration but not yet the real class relations of
property, is not yet Socialism. The fight for Socialism is still to be
carried through. Toryism has been defeated at the polls, but Tory
policy is not yet ended in the seats of Government. This is especi-
ally manifest in the sphere of foreign policy. Here we may usefully
recall the words of Marx in the inaugural address to the First
International:
"If the emancipation of the working classes requires their
fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfil that great mission
with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon
national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the
people's blood and treasure?"
In our home policy there is also much to be done to strengthen
the measures against the big monopoly interests, to speed up
demobilisation and the change-over from war to peace, to carry
through the great peace production plan for the development of
the productive resources of the country, and to advance a policy
of rising wages and social standards.
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The danger of Fascism is also not yet ended in this country, and
the example at the Albert Hall yesterday has shown that the
British people want no Fascism here.
For all these tasks, the unity of the Labour Movement is more
necessary now than ever, and specifically the unity of the Com-
munist Party and the Labour Party, for this means the unity of
Marxism and the mass movement which is the guarantee of future
victories. To the Daily Herald leader-writer who declared that the
affiliation of the Communist Party would represent a dose of poison
for the Labour Movement, we would declare that it was not the
poison of unity which killed the German Social Democracy, but the
poison of disunity. We may recall the words recently expressed by
the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the German Social
Democratic Party, Max Fechner, when he said:
"The differences which formerly divided Socialists and Com-
munists have largely been settled by history. We shall go back
to the genuine scientific socialism which was the foundation of
the workers' movement. Marx and Engels will again be our great
teachers."
We fight to prevent the third world war, which is not inevitable
and can be prevented by the unity of the peoples, and especially
by the friendship of Britain and the Soviet Union. We fight for
international democratic co-operation and the freedom of all
peoples, including the peoples of India, Asia and Africa, advancing
to their independence. We fight for democratic and social advance,
to speed the change-over to peace production and to bring better
conditions to the people, for the success of the Labour Government,
which requires the unity of the Labour Movement.
We fight for the unity of the Labour Movement, which is indis-
pensable to victory over capitalism. We fight for the great aims of
Socialism, which can alone solve the problems of the modern world
and bring peace and happiness to all people.
On this anniversary we go forward with greater confidence and
enthusiasm than ever. The spirit of Marx and of Marxism and of
the millions of fighters who have gone forward under the banner of
Marxism guides and inspires us. We may recall that story which
Hyndman told, who did so much pioneering work in his day for
Socialism, but remained the respectable, top-hatted, frock-coated
clubman. He relates how he informed the aged Marx with his
typical ineffable worldly wisdom and self-satisfaction: "As I grow
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The Power f Marxism
older I grow more tolerant." And he states that the old Marx
turned upon him his burning eyes and only said: "Do you? Do
you?" The flame that burned in Marx burned higher and higher to
his dying day. Marx never grew tolerant of the bestiality, the
hypocrisy and the cruelty of class society. The spirit of Marx was
that spirit of Communism which inspired the fighters of the resist-
ance movement to face all the devilries of Fascism, which inspired
Stalin when he declared:
"You may have no doubt, comrades, that I am prepared in
the future, too, to devote to the cause of the working class, to
the cause of the proletarian revolution and world Communism,
all my strength, all my faculties, and, if need be, all my blood,
to the very last drop."
Let us be worthy of this great movement of which we form a
part, and commemorate this anniversary by renewing our resolu-
tion to carry forward the banner of Marxism to final victory?the
victory of free humanity?of Communism.
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The Mechanism of Evoluti
rt
BY GEORGES TEISSIER
n (P rt
A:THOUGH no serious biologist nowadays doubts the reality
of evolution, many who have not studied the problem them-
selves still hold that its mechanism remains unknown. Others, who
have been led astray by quite indefensible prejudices, go yet
further and affirm that it is unknowable, since the evolutionary
forces which, without doubt, acted in the distant past have long
since disappeared from our enfeebled world.
There is nothing to excuse this irrational attitude or to justify
this systematic pessimism. The problem of the origin of species will
certainly require a great deal more investigation before it can be
considered completely solved, but in this respect it does not differ
from many other problems of biology. On the other hand, what
we already know of it is of great importance. We now have a con-
sistent theory, every point of which is justified by a large number
of concordant facts or critical experiments; we have even succeeded
in creating species as genuine as those described by Linnpeus. It
will be seen in what is to follow that recently-discovered facts,
many of them known for less than fifteen years, fit quite naturally
within the framework of the doctrine laid down three-quarters of a
century ago. We shall also see why Darwinism is to-day more
alive than ever.
The obstacles encountered at the outset of any study of evolution
arise from its very nature. From whatever side it is considered, the
problem is of a vastly greater scope than any other biological
question. The first and fundamental difficulty is in the duration of
evolution, which began 2,000 or 3,000 million years ago and con-
tinues even now. Although its form of expression has varied widely
from group to group, one may say (thinking only in orders of
magnitude) that a species normally lasts for several hundred
thousand generations. By the standard of the duration of a single
human life, evolution is very slow, and we have no reason to
believe that it was ever swifter. A naturalist carried back to the
Paleozoic or Mesozoic epochs would find there a Nature appar-
ently as stable as that before our eyes. Man is as ill-placed to study
evolution as a creature living only a few seconds would be to study
the annual cycle of the seasons. In the most favourable cases he
could only follow, in the 25,000 or 30,000 days granted him, a few
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The Mechanism (of &Ding n Dart 1)
score or a few hundred generations of the species interesting him,
and he has only the very slightest chance of seeing them evolve
before his eyes. Further, the very rare changes produced in our day
in the animal or plant kingdoms may not be recognised with
certainty, since there is no really complete inventory of fauna and
flora. There are, for example, more than 100,000 known species of
fish, and it is probable that a genuinely new type appears every
ten or twenty or fifty years. How could we recognise it as
such, when every year specialists describe several hundred species,
obviously long-established, but hitherto unknown?
A second difficulty, and, it must be realised, a pretty big one, is
the breadth of evolution, which has gone on, through countless
forms, from an ultramicroscopic being simpler than the simplest
of microbes to beings as complex and as fundamentally different
as are sea-urchin and octopus, bee and man. The meagre modifica-
tions of nature which man has witnessed or which he has brought
about are very small matters compared with these enormous
changes of form, structure and function. But at the same time we
must admit that if these tiny changes were completely explained,
the problem of evolution would be very nearly solved.
One of the greatest merits of the founders of evolutionary trans-
formationism is, indeed, their realisation that it was not possible to
limit the scope of evolutionary theory, having once accepted the
principle, and that it must explain everything or nothing. But this
fortitude has terrified a good many timid souls who have tried to
reconcile an unconfessed belief in immutability, with an evolu-
tionism emptied of the best of its content. There is no intellectual
attitude less reasonable; an evolution powerful enough to transform
species but too weak to upset the framework of phyla, classes,
orders, families or even genera, is quite inconceivable. The syste-
matic limits which the partisans of a limited transformationism
claim to be uncrossable have, in fact, no objective existence, and
the barriers which some wish to place at the boundaries of phyla,
and others at those of the genera or families are as illusory in one
case as in the other. To be convinced of this it is enough to compare
the tables of contents of two contemporary works on zoology of
two different schools. The same family will be found placed in two
different orders, the same order changed from one class to another
or even from one phylum to another. These differences of opinion
are not the result of individual whims, but betray the real embar-
rassment in which all naturalists find themselves when faced by
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The M
dern Quarterly
certain "anomalous" creatures. It is a fact that Balanoglossus has
the form of a worm, the development of an echinoderm, and several
characteristics of the Chordates; that is, it is very close to the
vertebrates. It is a fact that Peripatus combines the unmistakable
characteristics of the worm with equally unmistakable characteris-
tics of the arthropod. It is also true that Archceopteryx is almost as
much reptile as bird. Where are we to place these composite
creatures which were numerous among vanished fauna, but many
of which still exist in Nature to-day? Any solution the zoologist
adopts must always include a large proportion of the arbitrary, and
the present tendency to break up the older phyla into more and
more sub-phyla, and to multiply classes and orders, only emphasises
the increasing difficulties of the problem of classification. These
contradictions and uncertainties are inevitable because the strict
limits implicitly postulated by every attempt at classification do
not exist in Nature. They do not lessen the importance of zoology
or botany which are carried on in the knowledge that they are and
will necessarily remain imperfect, but they completely condemn
all fragmentary theories of evolution. There is not a "micro-
evolution" and a "macro-evolution" interpretable in two different
ways, of which one must be eternally beyond our reach: it is only
evolution which we have to explain.
Biology will develop as geology did. The latter became a true
science when it understood that all the transformations undergone
in the past by the earth's surface could be completely explained by
contemporary phenomena. We know now that enormous mountain
ranges have been raised and levelled, that these have been replaced
by other ranges, which in their turn have been destroyed without
the intervention of any forces other than those which from day to
day shape the surface of the world. Similarly, in the problem with
which we are dealing, we must, if we are to work scientifically, lay
down the principle that there have never existed other evolutionary
forces than those which, acting beneath our eyes, are infinitely
slowly changing the creatures by which we are surrounded. It is
scarcely possible in a lifetime to see more than new races appear, but
the mechanisms which give birth to these races are beyond doubt
the same as those which, acting for hundreds or thousands of cen-
turies, created and will continue to create new species and genera.
We must even admit that as age succeeded age these same
mechanisms have been able to create orders, classes, and even
phyla as dissimilar as those which we see living to-day.
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The Mechanism of Evolution (Part i)
The great problem of evolution is thus brought within reach of
human analysis. The first and most urgent task, that which will
lead to the understanding of the mechanism of the greatest trans-
formations, is the precise analysis of the factors transforming races.
This analysis must naturally be carried out by the methods in use
in all experimental sciences. Therefore we must shield it at the
outset, not only, as we have already said, from any appeal to
mysterious evolutionary forces past or present, but even from the
Lamarckian interpretations which, in theory as in fact, are ex-
pressly refuted by experiment. The only acceptable solution is still,
after three-quarters of a century, that which Darwin developed in
his The Origin of Species.
Those who study evolution in books or in museums have very
different conceptions of it. But all who have studied the problem
as biologists and not as anatomists, all who have realised that a
species is not a series of specimens arranged in a case any more
than it is a collection of pure strains raised in a flask, but that it is
a changing assembly of beings which are born and die?all these
are Darwinists.
I. Principles of Darwinism
All Darwin's predecessors and a very large number of those who
followed him sought an explanation of evolution in unverifiable
hypotheses. Darwin looked for it only in the results of experiment,
and he was particularly well qualified to understand the full
significance of an experiment to which all humanity has contri-
buted. It would, in fact, be impossible to imagine a greater or more
striking experiment in evolution than that carried out by the
unknown farmers and breeders to whom we owe our countless races
of domestic animals and cultivated plants. The experiment began
at the dawn of civilisation and continues still. Our fields, our
gardens, our stables and our fowl-runs are the notebooks in which
year by year are recorded its successes and its failures. Darwin was
the first to learn how to read from this notebook, and no important
change has to be made to-day in the lesson which he drew from it.
All species, whether animal or vegetable, have been improved in
the same manner, and the creation of a new race has always passed
through the same stages:
1. The first stage is a matter of chance alone. One day there
appears in the stock an individual showing a characteristic which
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The Modern Quarterly
for some reason, utilitarian or xsthetic, seems to merit preserva-
tion. This advantageous characteristic (advantageous for the breeder,
of course) may only be the accentuation of a peculiarity already
existing in the stock, but it may also, although very rarely, be
quite new.
2. This exceptional individual is chosen for breeding and its
descendants of the first, second or third generations, are examined
for the appearance to some degree of the characteristic that one
wishes to preserve. If it is discovered, and it doesn't always happen
that it is, only those individuals are used for further breeding which
are beginning to take the form of the future race. It is this selection,
repeated as rigorously as possible in the following generations,
which is the essential act of creating the new race. Carried out for a
long enough time, this methodical choice must result in the isola-
tion of a strain in which all individuals have, to a greater or a lesser
degree, the characteristic upon which the selection has been based.
3. This strain is henceforward stable. It will be enough to keep it
pure by preventing any crossing which might alter it by bringing
in foreign blood. The race thus constituted will differ from that
which gave it birth, not only by the character deliberately selected,
but also very often by other very slight traits of organisation which,
although unsought, are found to have been selected at the same time.
Every attempt to better any animal or vegetable species must
necessarily pass through these three stages. The creation of the new
race may be more or less simple, more or less swift, but once a
variation has been produced there must always be a selection of the
individuals which display it, and once the purity of the strain has
been obtained, there must be an isolation of it. This is the decisive
combination of facts of which Darwin understood the full signifi-
cance.
Since the technique of the breeder is the only one which serves to
create a new race, then, short of renouncing the principles of
scientific reasoning, onc must explain the transformations of the
animal world by the very mechanisms which man has discovered
and used to his advantage. Nor must we underrate their effective-
ness. If in our experience they only bring about the minutest
changes in the form of beings, they yet suffice, if their action is
carried on indefinitely, to explain the most profound transforma-
tions.
A single human generation could not, of course, succeed in
transforming the wild dog, so similar to the wolf, into a being as
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ThP Mechanism of Evolution C'art
different from it and from one another as a basset-hound, a mastiff
or a greyhound. It is because our ancestors began ten or fifteen mil-
lennia ago the task still carried on by breeders to-day that these
races exist, that the attempt to "perfect" the dog has brought
about these results, as well as many others no less remarkable.
Nothing justifies the belief that this task must ever be finished or
that there is a limit to the possible diversity of species. On the
contrary, the more numerous existing races are, the more numerous
also are the possible races; and the tempo with which they appear
is going to increase. What surprising types we could achieve if only
time were not so niggardly measured out to us! In this field, how-
ever, as in others, man works more swiftly than Nature: while wild
types remain stable for millennia, those which man wishes to
transform change from decade to decade. But Nature has no need
to hurry: 1,000 centuries occupy less space in the history of
evolution than does a day in our life. Were Nature to employ,
however slowly, the same methods that man does, she would obtain
results beyond the wildest dreams of the boldest among us.
Thus we arrive at a rational explanation of the origin of species.
But it is still very vague and can only take shape if we find in
Nature the equivalent, step by step, of the human technique of the
creation of races. For the first and for the third stages there is no
very great difficulty. Everyone agrees in recognising that the
variability of wild species does not differ essentially from that of
domestic animals. Several independent and equally effective
mechanisms can assure; without man's intervention, the sexual
isolation of a race in process of being formed. But what mechanism
can we discover to replace that act of will which is the selection by
the breeder of certain privileged progenitors? The triumph of
Darwin is to have understood the logical necessity of a natural
selection free from all teleology and to have discovered its mechanism.
The preceding remarks will suffice to make clear the origin and
import of the principles on which Darwin's theory is based, and
there is no point in developing them further here. Everyone knows
how passionately the discussions of Darwinism and its cornerstone,
natural selection, have been conducted. Most of the arguments
raised by challengers of Darwinism are now without interest, but
some, advanced by one side or the other, appear to have retained
their force. None of these, singly, is convincing. Most of them lack,
in fact, that logical exactness that one has a right to demand in so
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The Modern Quarterly
serious a discussion; there is almost none that may be supported
by a properly conceived and correctly carried-out experiment. It is
therefore hardly surprising that these controversies, which are
always springing up again, and of which Darwinism has been
either the object or the occasion, have never been able to reach a
definite conclusion. To escape from this impasse we need arguments
other than those with which our predecessors have had to be con-
tent. It is from genetics that we shall seek them, for the modern
theory of evolution was born of the collaboration between genetics
and Darwinism. Here we touch the anonymous labours of a whole
generation. Constructed apart from any philosophical dogma, on
exclusively rational and scientific bases, it has neither principle nor
hypothesis peculiar to itself, but flows in with the great current of
thought that stems from Darwin. Genetics has brought to it not
only an immense documentation of everything concerning varia-
tion, heredity and the factors conditioning sexual isolation, but
also?especially?its techniques and its strict spirit of experimenta-
tion. Thanks to these methods, the study of natural selection has
been taken up afresh with an entirely new preciseness. To-day it
constitutes a new chapter of genetics, evolutionary genetics, which,
while still quite recent in origin, already shows a profound origin-
ality. There is no other branch in all biology to which men of more
different backgrounds have contributed, for its advance depends
upon the converging labours of morphologists, experimentalists
and mathematicians. It is the provisional outcome of this work of
collaboration that we are now going to present.
II. Natural Selection
Logical Basis of the Hypothesis
The phenomenon dominating all biology of natural populations
is the incredible capacity of living beings for proliferation. Whether
one accepts or rejects the theory of natural selection (of which this
is the starting point) it is always necessary to keep in mind the
fact that in every species the number of births is always much
higher than the number of individuals who attain the age of repro-
duction. Under natural conditions scarcely one in ten of even the
most favoured species arrives at adulthood, while the proportion is
more often of the order of one in a hundred or even a thousand.
With the majority of plants, many marine animals, and almost all
parasites it is smaller still, and cases are not rare in which only one
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The Mechanism f Evolution (Part .1)
individual in several millions survives. This elimination of the
greater part of the young is a necessary condition for the mainten-
ance of the equilibrium of the living world, and if it is attenuated
in some species through a fortuitous cause the species becomes
overwhelming. The destruction of the larger carnivora has brought
about an excessive multiplication of the herbivora. Animals carried
abroad by man, whether deliberately or not, have often increased
enormously in countries where they have met with few enemies:
thus with the horse in South America, the sparrow in the U.S.A.
and the rabbit in Australia. If a miracle were to spare any species
this slaughter of the young there would soon be no place left on the
surface of the globe for any other. The products of the division of a
bacterium could, in several days, swamp the oceans; the descendants
of a fly would in a year surpass the volume of the sun. Without
going so far, in ten years the number of descendants of a
couple of sparrows would be several millions and that of a pair of
rabbits thousands of millions. Even the elephant, whose develop-
ment is very slow, and fecundity weak, would in five centuries
have fifteen million descendants. Yet there has doubtless never
been at one time more than a few tens of thousands of elephants
on the globe.
It has not really been pointless to cite these few examples, for
Darwin himself admitted the difficulty he experienced in always
keeping in mind the essential fact which they illustrate. No
biological law is, however, more general than that which declares
that in every species death before maturity is the rule and the
arrival at adulthood the exception. None has more important
results for the peopling of the earth. It is upon this law that Darwin
based the entire mechanism of evolution.
The theory of natural selection affirms that the destruction of
innumerable young creatures, found inevitably in every generation
of every species, is not simply a matter of chance; the individuals
that survive generally possess certain qualities lacking in those
that succumb. Those that are more vigorous or better adapted
than their brothers have some opportunity of leaving to their
descendents the qualities which have permitted them to survive.
Thus there is made in each generation a choice of the best indi-
viduals, and this constantly repeated selection gradually changes
the species.
This idea of the "survival of the fittest" in which is found the
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The Modern Quarterly
essence of Darwinism, has been the object of so many tendentious
glosses that the extremely clear meaning that it had in the thought
of Darwin, who many times expressed it in the most explicit
manner, has often been lost to sight. For Darwin, as for those of
his successors who may alone legitimately claim descent from him,
the qualification "fittest" only has meaning in the precise condi-
tions in which the animals, competing with one another, find
themselves. The qualities to which it refers are strikingly varied
from species to species, and for a given species depend essentially
on circumstances. In a species in which cold kills off the greatest
number of the young resistance to cold is the most useful endow-
ment. In a species of which many of the young fall prey to the
carnivora the fittest may be either the most agile or those whose
colour makes them less visible, or even those that have a -particular
skill in disguising themselves; and this list does not exhaust the
possibilities. These advantageous characteristics are often not
marked by any visible peculiarity; two animals may appear iden-
tical, but resist unequally a rigorous winter. But they may also
have a relation to certain traits of organisation or structure. Thick-
ness of fur is riot unimportant for an animal exposed to cold; the
shape of the paw is important for speed in running. It may thus
happen that, if the hypothesis of natural selection is exact, those
of the young which are going to survive differ from those who are
going to perish by morphological as well as by physiological
characteristics.
But the question which arises is whether the hypothesis is well
founded, whether natural selection exists, and if so whether it has
the dominating capital role that Darwin believed it to have.
Conservative Selection and Incipient Selection
It is possible, as we shall see later, to make an experimental
study of natural selection, but for the present we must turn to
simple observation for the maximum information which it can give
us. To guide us through this chaos of facts we shall use that method
which has led to the idea of natural selection: we shall see whether
in accepting the Darwinian hypothesis we ought not to expect the
living world to show certain characteristics that it would not show
in a universe where the hypothesis was not true.
In the first place every species necessarily shows an adaptation
adequate for the conditions in which it lives, an adaptation without
which it would rapidly disappear before other and more favoured
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The Mechanism of Evolution (Part it)
species. Such an equilibrium?which implies that a great number
of physiological characteristics such as those which condition
resistance to disease or changes of weather, the ability to make use
of available food, fecundity, vigour of the young, is maintained at
a certain level is not compatible with any change whatever in the
constitution of the species. In so complex a mechanism a modifica-
tion made by chance is most likely to be harmful. And we know
in fact that almost all mutants are less fecund or less vigorous than
the wild type; so we ought also to expect selection quickly to
eliminate these dangerous novelties and thus work to maintain
specific characteristics. Think only of the strange appearance
Nature would have if, there being no natural selection, each animal
or vegetable species could have had as many varieties as man allows
our domestic animals, or garden plants show. Without natural
selection there could be neither species nor race and the living world
would be a chaos of separate individuals. The existence of this con-
servative selection is unanimously accepted, but not all its sup-
porters have appreciated its consequences, the most important of
which is the necessary existence of "creative" selection. One could
not, indeed, without a logical contradiction, see in selection an
effective agent for the maintenance of the average qualities of a
race and at the same time deny that in other circumstances it could
profoundly transform essential characteristics of the species.
The fact that almost all mutants are discriminated against by
natural selection only means that at long intervals some favourable
mutation may arise and live and sometimes even substitute itself
for the type formerly normal in the species. But this eventuality
is much less probable when the species has had a very long past,
when a very great number of mutations has been tried and when
many useful variations have had the time to become established.
Here we have under another aspect, touching very closely the
problem of evolution, the reason for a fact which has just been
mentioned: practically all mutants have a lower vitality than the
representatives of the origina1 type. This is also the explanation of
one of the most striking results of palwontology. If evolution,
always swift at the origin of a group, slows down rapidly as this
group gains some importance, it does not mean that the group's
evolutionary faculties have become exhausted, but simply that a
chance modification has fewer chances of being favoured when it
appears after a very great number of improvements of detail in an
organisation which remains subject to the same conditions of
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The Mo ern Quart rly
existence. Instances of the substitution of a mutant for the normal
type in its own habitat are, then, very rare. One cannot even be
sure that such cases as are apparently well founded are not in
reality the result of a change of environment that one has not been
able to discern. In fact, the best-known case?that of the birch
moth, which around 1860 produced a black mutant which is
obviously tending to supplant the normal form, and has succeeded
in doing this in several regions, probably should not be interpreted
as a simple case of substitution; for this species as for others, the
replacement of the paler forms by the dark ones has regularly
followed increase of industrial development in the relevant dis-
tricts, a development naturally accompanied by important changes
in the local flora and fauna.
Changes in the environment or changes of habitat must in fact
have played an important role in the differentiation of the species.
It is so far clear from the argument that if the environment changes,
the "selective values" of adaptations both existing and possible
also change. That adaptation which, after the genetic possibilities
of the species and the external conditions have been taken into
account, is discovered to be the best will not be as suited to the
new conditions; another adaptation, formerly ineffective because
insufficient, will become superior to the former and will henceforth
be favoured by selection. Such a physiological characteristic,
hitherto of small importance, may become a decisive factor for
success: so with resistance to cold during the Glacial Age or with
ability to create appropriate antibodies before and during an
epidemic.
This effect of environment is not doubted by anyone, and
"transformationists" are agreed in admitting that it has played a
great part in evolution. But when it comes to estimating the import-
ance of that part certain differences of opinion appear. For a long
time this effect of external conditions was considered a justification
of Lamarckian theories, but it seems to be well established to-day
that the sole but strikingly important effect which a change in
external conditions may have is to give possibilities latent in the
species an opportunity to show themselves. We must now define
the nature of these latent possibilities.
For certain mutationists, the fact that a change of environment
allows new characteristics to show their usefulness is only a sign of
the "externalisation" of qualities already existing, but formerly,
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The Mechanism f Evolution (Pu rt
since they were unimportant or superfluous, hidden. Thus the
stickleback has the quite exceptional peculiarity of being able to
live equally well in water of any degree of salinity?a quality quite
useless in the fresh water that is its normal habitat, but allowing
it, if necessary, easily to colonise brackish streams, in which it
takes on certain peculiar characteristics. In this case and in others
more or less analogous the fact requiring explanation is not the
origin of this or that adaptive characteristic, but rather the genesis
of the corresponding ability to undergo adaptation. This shifting of
the problem may, in some instances, have a great physiological
interest, but it is obvious that as far as the question we are discussing
is concerned it is almost valueless as an explanation.
Darwinists do not dream of denying the existence of a "pre-
adaptation" which allows most species to undergo radical changes
in conditions of life without the least modification of their genotype;
they argue, however, that the new qualities, revealed by very wide
modifications of habitat, exist only in the same way as do many
others, that is as potentialities in the hereditary equipment of the
species. It is by accident that the genes conditioning the mutants
have appeared in certain individuals which, better adapted than
their fellows to the new environment in which they find them-
selves, alone survive to propagate the thereafter modified species.
A change of environment or of climate may thus give new modes of
selection an opportunity to bring about new directions of evolution.
These continue until all the genetic possibilities of the species have
been put to trial and until the final choice of the best and worst
has been completed. Selection, "creative" for a time, will thus
become conservative again.
Thus, by deeper analysis of the principles which are the founda-
tion of Darwinism, we arrive at a quite remarkable conclusion:
natural selection, if it exists, must be at once the agent which trans-
forms the species and that which maintains their stability. The two
aspects of selection, at first apparently opposite, now appear to us
as complementary, the same mechanism being able in turn to
transform or to maintain the forms, to preserve or destroy the
genetic structures. But there is more in it than that. Very often the
conservative and creative actions of the same type of selection must
be operating simultaneously, since the choice which is exercised
only permits or favours changes produced in a special direction, and
pitilessly suppresses all the other attempts of chance. By the
discipline which it imposes on the variations of the species, natural
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selection appears to be the law preventing the living world from
tumbling into anarchy. The evolution which it influences is a
directed evolution which works tirelessly towards an agreement
never fully achieved between the functions of each individual and
the environment in which the history of its race has placed it.
The Faults of the Doctrine of Immortality
The "world of natural selection" which we have just sketched?
in which the species, distinct at each epoch, scarcely evolve save as
their conditions of life change radically?resembles our own world.
We repeat that a world without natural selection would display
complete incoherence. A world in which every individual of every
species had equal chances of survival would be staggeringly change-
able in detail without, however, showing real evolution. The
number of forms genetically possible being infinitely greater than
the number of inhabitants that the earth could nourish, each
generation would see certain genetic combinations vanish and
others brought into being. These necessarily fortuitous changes
would, as it were in blind caprice, bring about a succession of
advances and regressions and could even on occasion bring certain
strains back to their starting point after long detours. Nobody, of
course, would defend a conception which, followed to its conclusion,
would lead to the idea of such an extravagant world. We have only
depicted this world here to show by its absurdity that all naturalists
must, whether they like it or not, accept the principle of natural
selection, and that those who believe they reject it are deceiving
themselves. Since we know with absolute certainty that in every
species there are produced mutations able to affect every imagin-
able character, and that many mutants are perfectly viable and
prolific, it is impossible to deny the existence of conservative
selection. Once this has been accepted, it is impossible to see how
one can reasonably doubt the existence of creative selection. It is,
nevertheless, a fact that the debate aroused by the appearance of
The Origin of Species has not yet come to an end. After eighty
years' quarrelling it is also a fact that certain naturalists, and
these not always the least important, continue to deny the import-
ance of natural selection; or rather they do not wish to recognise
the existence of a creative selection.
The persistence of these controversies is largely due to a mis-
understanding, the word "selection" not having the same meaning
for all who use it. I hope it will have been noticed that here it has
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The Mechanism of Evolution (/'art i)
been given an extremely wide content. In speaking of natural
selection, people often think too much of the struggle for existence
in its most brutal meaning of a direct and generally violent battle
for room and for food. This struggle exists and has an importance
that, in certain cases, may be very great; but cold and heat, an
excessive dryness or humidity are no less effective agents of selec-
tions than is hunger. There is in the normal habitat of a species
nothing animate or inanimate, no physical or chemical agent that
cannot on some occasion or other intervene in conservative selec-
tion. And in particular there is none which by some unforeseen
variation may not be the material for a creative selection. If these
extremely simple ideas were never lost to sight, the controversies
on the mechanism of evolution would doubtless be less numerous.
But since the controversies exist, and since the Darwinian concep-
tions still have obstinate opponents, we must first boldly meet the
difficulties they raise and show that these may not validly be
opposed to the modern theory of evolution. Chance alone, say our
opponents, decides which among all living beings at each genera-
tion are to perpetuate their species. From this lottery, the prize in
which is the hope of having descendants to whom to leave qualities
and defects, only the infirm, the defective and the monstrous, the
chosen victims of conservative selection, are excluded. All others
arc equal in the face of death, and Darwinists make a great mistake
in claiming that the choice working in each generation is not blind,
but takes some account of the characteristics of each individual.
Once the abnormal are suppressed, death no longer chooses its
victims.
In the justification of this thesis the "argument of the pond" is
classic. Of the millions of tadpoles which throng the lakes and
streams in spring only a tiny number reaches adulthood. The
animals which hunt them and the sun which dries up the pond are
indifferent to the various qualities which they may possess, and
a fortiori, to those which they are likely to show later as frogs. How
can one then believe, if only one in a thousand (or even fewer)
survives, that this one owes its preservation to its own merits?
Why not simply admit that he has had more luck than the others,
any one of which could quite as easily as he have been called later to
perpetuate the species, had luck favoured them?
To this argument it would be easy to reply that merely to raise
a group of tadpoles would be enough to prove that they were not
identical. Some grow much faster than others; if the water becomes
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The Modern Quarterly
impure some individuals live on long after all others have perished.
Both these factors are certainly not without influence on the out-
come, fortunate or fatal, of the larval life. But even if one were to
agree, in the face of the evidence, that the death of tadpoles is
always due to random causes, how would this fact refute the
hypothesis of natural selection? Between the moment at which the
young reach their metamorphosis and that at which, having
become adults, they return to the water to breed, the species must
pay a heavy toll to death. But this tribute is doubtless very
different from that imposed by Nature on exotic frogs, more com-
pletely adapted to life in air, who lay only ten or twenty eggs at a
time. This mortality is strong enough for individual characteristics,
favourable or unfavourable, to intervene and for selection to be
operative among individuals having practically adult form. Muta-
tionists are obviously right in claiming that it is not because a
tadpole would become a frog capable of jumping farther than his
fellows that he has better chances than his fellows of surviving the
dangers of larval life. But they are wrong in not recognising that
only those frogs have chances of surviving and of laying eggs which,
during two or three years of life in the air, show themselves agile
enough to escape their enemies and thus will bequeath at least part
of these qualities to their descendants. The error of reasoning which
we have just pointed out is instructive in that it shows that the
limitless prodigality with which certain species spread their spawn
has little importance in evolution. The enormous massacres which
strike the imagination give us a picturesque but somewhat inexact
picture of the scope of evolution. In fact, these huge destructions
doubtless have no more selective value than the more discreet but
persistent elimination which persists long after the "dangerous"
stages of development.
If the preceding remarks are enough to show the feeble demon-
strative value of the classic example of the pond, yet it does not
follow that chance plays no part in the choice of victims. But here
as elsewhere we must not use the word "chance" carelessly.
No one has ever claimed that the fate of a newborn animal has
been rigidly determined in advance or that any one who knew its
genetic and physiological characteristics could from this evidence
alone know whether it would die or live. Its fate depends neces-
sarily on the conditions in which it is going to find itself placed.
The problem is to decide whether their physical constitution gives
to all representatives of a species an equal chance of survival, or
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The Mechanism of Evolution (Part .r)
whether, on the other hand, the probability of survival differs, at
least under certain circumstances, from one individual to another
according to the genetic constitution of each. To put it another
way: in the contest which all genes constantly wage against death
are their chances always mathematically equal? All properly carried-
out experiments have given the same reply to this question and the
reply is decisive: the chances of success of various allelomorphs are
unequal, just as the theory of natural selection assumes them to be.
In these conditions it is easy to demonstrate that it may exception-
ally, and in certain restricted populations, happen that chance
favours a gene that had, a priori, slight chances of success even to
the point of making it supplant its rivals; the normal evolution of a
population, however, is the gradual substitution of the more
advantageous genes for those whose "selective value" is less. It
must once more be made clear that the advantage of which we
speak is not absolute but is relative to certain conditions of exist-
ence and to a certain kind of competition. When all these circum-
stances are exactly defined the selective value of a gene may, at
least in principle, be precisely measured in terms of probability of
survival.
The criticism?a convincing one, I hope?just made of the
allegedly decisive argument of "undiscriminating death" will allow
us briefly to dispose of a second assertion?as ill founded as the
first, although it rests on a fact that is perfectly established.
The most clearly distinctive traits of species, genera or families,
almost always relate to characteristics having by themselves no
importance from the point of view of selection. One has only to
dissect a plant or animal to prove this. Indeed, one cannot see how
the fact of having sepals more or less obtuse or of having smooth
elytra rather than downy ones may be advantageous or disadvan-
tageous to a species. How could selection create species, since the
characteristics which separate them are, in general, trivial? Trans-
formationists formerly tried to reply to this facile argument by
striving to find some usefulness in insignificant anatomical details.
Their efforts were not always in vain; but often from excess of zeal
they thought they had discovered subtle adaptations where
probably none existed, and their opponents had a fine time deriding
their too liberal fancies. Transformationists nowadays do not allow
themselves to be dragged into these arguments, where affirmations
are as valueless as denials. They simply note that the argument of
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The Modern Quarterly
the unimportance of specific characteristics could only be upheld
by those by whom an animal must be studied in a glass case and
who only know of plants in the herbarium. They invite their
opponents to look at a treatise on applied zoology or agriculture,
or even a good horticultural catalogue, and to agree that the
essential characteristics of a race are not generally those by which
it is identified. The colours and shapes which serve to define it
teach nothing of its ability to resist cold or drought, parasites or
disease, any more than of its fecundity, its speed of growth or its
relative ability to use the foodstuffs of the environment in which it
is placed. Each of these characteristics is more important than any
of those which may be noted by the most faithful systematist.
What is true in the comparison of two races is obviously also true
of that of two species, and if the physiological differences that may
exist between these latter are generally unknown, one has never-
theless no right to declare without proof that they are negligible.
The qualities which man has tried to establish in the animal or
plant species which he raises are, for the most part, of a physio-
logical nature, but the races which he has created are distinguished
by their external appearance. The selection of trivial characteristics
has almost always accompanied that of the useful ones to which
they are linked. On the other hand, the geneticist who isolates an
animal differing from its fellows by having several hairs more or
less, or by a detail of colour, selects at the same time characteristics
which he cannot see, but which may just as well affect fecundity or
longevity as larval mortality or resistance to poison or to hostile
bacteria. What artificial selection does, natural selection can do
and doubtless does. If man does not always understand the direc-
tion of the results which he obtains, it is because the appearance of
a species tells one practically nothing of its qualities or its defects,
any more than their differences of shape or colour will suffice to
teach anyone who has never eaten grapes the really interesting
differences between an Aramon, a Chasselas and a Muscat.
The fact that characteristics which are by themselves neither
harmful nor useful may be the object of an active selection, since
they are necessarily linked with hidden but important character-
istics, obviously takes all force from the argument of the unimport-
ance of specific characteristics. It does not, however, 'follow that
we must commit in a new form the error of the older transforma-
tionists, and insist that any morphological peculiarity must always
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The Mechanism of Evolution (Part 2.)
be either directly useful or of necessity linked with an advantageous
characteristic. Nowadays one knows too many cases of evolution
that are beyond doubt harmful to be able still to believe that
selection is inevitably leading the living world towards a kind of
perfection. In thus admitting, as is demanded by elementary good
faith, the imperfections of the living world, the Darwinist yet knows
that he is not giving his opponents such redoubtable arguments as
they imagine. The examination of a solitary but classic example
will suffice to show us that this difficulty, the only one that may be
validly opposed to the theory of natural selection, is by no means
insurmountable.
In several groups of mammals the males possess weapons ?horns
or defences?more developed than those of the females, which
often completely lack them. Palxontology teaches us that in a
certain number of families evolution carries on in this direction,
the males of successive species having greater and greater arma-
ment. In the last species of each series (which are also the largest)
the horns or the defensive armour are so unwieldy and sometimes
so complicated in form that they must beyond doubt be an embar-
rassment to their owners. The enormous horns of the great fossil
elands or even those of the present-day stag are certainly less
effective instruments either as tools or as weapons than the smaller
and simpler ones which their distant ancestors bore. How can we
explain the fact that Nature has so often, and almost as if she were
pursuing a preconceived but irrational plan, produced these
ridiculous instances of "orthogenesis"?' The examination of
this problem will allow us to offer in evidence a perversion of
selection which must have occurred in many other circumstances,
and which is explained by a conflict between the interests of the
individual and of the species.
When conditions of life are difficult, the struggle for food great,
and an increased fecundity has as its natural result the death of the
greatest number of young, every mutation which appreciably
diminishes the probability of the survival of the individuals
1 Palontology has shown that in many evolutionary strains the differences of
form, structure or size separating successive species are not random in nature, but
seem to be produced in a definite direction. Thus the series of ancestors of the horse
has shown at the same time an increase of height, a reduction in the number of toes,
a gradual change in tooth formation and in the shape of the skull. These successions
of changes, each appearing to accentuate the preceding one, are called orthogeneses.
It is remarkable how many independent evolutionary series have shown parallel
orthogeneses. The phenomenon which we are studying here is one of the clearest
examples of this, extremely varied strains having shown a tendency toward gigantism
and a senseless development of their horns or of their defensive armour.
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The Modern Quarterly
affected is necessarily eliminated. But if the population finds itself
during a long enough stage of its history in conditions favourable
enough for it not to have to fear either famine or more powerful
enemies, if the mortality of the young is low, it may show certain
types of evolution which would be closed to it were the competition
more severe. Sexual selection, as conceived by Darwin, is appar-
ently the cause of some of these forms of evolution, which favour
certain individuals to the detriment of others without the species
necessarily benefiting from these transformations.
Among the great mammals we have just been discussing the
males frequently, if not always, engage in battles at the mating
season. The males that are strongest, largest or best armed natur-
ally have better chances than their rivals of emerging victors from
these tournaments and hence of leaving descendants. As physical
qualities are always partly genetic in nature and consequently
hereditary, there is necessarily a selection favouring the develop-
ment of size and of organs of attack or defence, either in the male
alone or at the same time in the male and female alike. But such
an evolution is not necessarily favourable, and the selection of less
spectacular qualities would more certainly assure a future for the
group in which it operates. A higher resistance to weather and to
disease, a marked ability to withstand hunger and thirst, and
especially a high enough birth-rate, are more decisive factors in the
success of a species than are strength and courage. It is only in the
absence of serious competition that a race can wantonly permit
itself the weighty luxury of creating more and more effective
weapons for the duels of its males. It even seems that such an
evolution must almost inevitably lead to a catastrophe for the
group which indulges in it.
It is now known that the two phenomena characterising the sorts
of orthogenesis which we have been trying to explain are not inde-
pendent. The increase in size of the successive species is at once
responsible for the increase of strength and for the complexity of
the weapons provided for it. There is a general law of development
that "sexual variants" such as these weapons, peculiar to the male
or more developed in him than in his mate, grow more rapidly than
their bearers and become more complex as they grow. In these con-
ditions species which are quite large enough necessarily have
weapons of a size disproportionate to their own, weapons whose
form is uselessly complex. Palxontology clearly shows that in many
families the most highly-evolved species, those whose appearance
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The Mechanism of Evolution (Part 1)
heralds the extinction of the group, have passed the stage at which
the organs of attack or of defence achieve their optimum develop-
ment. The explanation of this fact was for a long time a mystery,
and this was used by many as a decisive objection to Darwinism.
Some ten years ago, however, perfected mathematical study of the
laws of natural science revealed it. It has long been known that in
practically every instance quantitative characteristics, such as size,
depend upon the simultaneous action of a large number of genes,
and that for many of these latter all races are heterozygotic. Since
selection acts in favour of an increase in size, it tends to eliminate
the genes which diminish the size of the animal and to increase the
number of those which enlarge it. Now it may be demonstrated that
if this selection goes on long enough the evolution thus orientated
may no longer suddenly be stopped. Were selection to cease so that
it would even, circumstances having changed, combat the tendency
it had formerly favoured, the regular increase of size would still
carry on for a certain time and would necessarily go beyond the
optimum exactly indicated by the cessation of selection. The
orthogenesis that produces gigantism and an excessive development
of male weapons is thus completely explained by a certain "inertia
of evolution," an inertia that one ought always to expect to find
whenever the characteristic affected by selection is conditioned by a
large number of genes.
We may note without dwelling on it that there is a second type
of sexual selection less brutal than that which we have been study-
ing. This was invoked by Darwin to explain the genesis of appar-
ently useless characteristics peculiar to males. It is to seduce his
voiceless female that the nightingale possesses his beautiful song
and to please his dowdy mate that the pheasant has so glowing a
plumage.
It is difficult to prove the validity of this explanation, but it
seems to-day much more real than it was at the time it was enun-
ciated. There is no doubt that in the higher animals, and particu-
larly in birds, the constitution of a mating pair is not left solely to
chance; it depends in some measure on the choice exercised by one
or other partner. However slight may be the role of this choice, it
is enough for selection to develop the characteristics on which it is
based in one of the sexes, and the intensity of the preference given
because of this characteristic in the other. The effect of this double
selection may be an extremely rapid evolution from the point at
which a mutation will have caused the characteristics subject to
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The Modern Quarterly
choice to vary in the desired direction. As with weapons among the
mammals, and for the same reason, this form of evolution may
overshoot its mark and finally harm the species undergoing it.
It is not certain, or even probable, that every instance of
orthogenesis may be interpreted by the mechanism just outlined,
but the recent success of modern Darwinism justifies the hope that
the last obstacle facing the unanimous adoption of the theory of
natural selection will soon disappear.
(To he concluded.)
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Ar on
The Development of a Communist Poet
BY FRIDA STEWART
FEW years ago the name of Louis Aragon was known to
comparatively few people outside certain literary circles.
To-day he is one of the best-known of living poets; his work has
been reproduced in countries all over the world, and articles,
booklets and essays jostle each other inside and outside France in
enthusiastic or hostile comment. My excuse for adding to this is
that no one has to my knowledge yet discussed the essential
questions about Aragon: how he has developed from his early
work, and why he has become such an outstanding and exceptional
poet.
The significant thing about him is, it seems to me, the position
he has adopted towards the world, the attitude which colours every
line he writes; this cannot be looked at as a static thing, but must
be analysed in terms of his. development and growth. To under-
stand Aragon it is not enough to see him as he is to-day; one must
know where he has come from, and where he is going, realise the
choice of ways which has faced him, and the road that he has taken.
This raises the whole issue of the poet and society, the problems
and contradictions that surround any artist working under
capitalism.
The following outline of Aragon's development cannot include a
treatise on the nature of poetry, but it is worth here just recalling
some of the conclusions of Marxist critics on the subject: that
"capitalism has no further use for culture," that "art has become
a commodity" cheapened and vulgarised for the purpose of pro-
moting and preserving bourgeois ideology, and that the poet of our
time is faced with the choice of selling his soul to capitalism or of
abandoning its service.
The question of choice was brilliantly analysed by Christopher
Caudwell in his book, Illusion and Reality,' and applies so
closely to the subject of this article that it is perhaps permissible to
quote two passages at some length. He speaks of the gap between
thinking and acting in society to-day.
1 First published by Macmillan, 1937. A new edition will shortly be published
by Lawrence and Wishart.
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"Social consciousness is torn from social action like flesh
from bone. The ravages apparent in modern consciousness show
that man can hardly endure the pangs of this dismemberment.
"The consciousness which remains adhering to the pole of the
ruling class contracts and stiffens because it is separated from its
organic nexus. It becomes academic, reactionary and fascist, and
petrifies in a living death. The bulk of artistic consciousness
cannot survive this fission. A part is attracted?by all the blind-
ness and instinct in it?to the pole of the exploited class, but the
effect of this is to explode the whole field of consciousness into
fragments.
"This unendurable tension is shown in the chaotic and intoxi-
cated confusion of all sincere modern bourgeois art, decomposing
and whirling about in a flux of perplexed agony. . . ." (p. 317.)
This confusion was at its height in 1919, immediately after the
"Great War," when Aragon was beginning to write. The period of
capitalist prosperity with its complacency and fixed tenets was
finished, and the old order, its real face revealed in all its ugliness,
immorality, greed and injustice, offered nothing to the honest
artist worthy of exalting. The young men who had fought
in the war felt most keenly of all the horrors, the waste, the cruelty
they had experienced; if man could organise such things in full
consciousness, it seemed to them better to turn their backs on
consciousness. (Hence one reason for the cult of the subconscious.)
It was from their ranks that the leading surrealists came, among
them Aragon, in a tempestuous movement of revolt?anarchist,
destructive, nihilist.
The alternative path to this one of anarchy would have been one
of alliance with the working-class movement, of adopting a con-
structive attitude involving a discipline and acceptance of realities
which few were willing or ready to undertake. As Caudwell says,
they hoped for a revolution, but they did not feel with the clarity
of an artist the specific beauty of this new concrete living, because
they were by definition cut off from the organisation which was
to realise it.
Aragon flung himself, with the rest of the surrealists, into the
conquest of the subconscious, the building of a dream world, to
supersede the real, the hated world around.
The nature of surrealist poetry is described by a sympathiser,
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Aragon
Rene Bertele, as the "reflet d'un moment" (reflection of a
moment)?
"nothing else, no more. . . a new definition of poetry appears, a
poetry become the spontaneous expression of fleeting psychic
conditions, rebel against any form?a flashing, a dazzling, a cry,
an ecstasy, a strip torn from the chaos of the senses abandoned
to their wildest adventures. These soundings, taken in the
obscurest depths of the inner life, reveal a submarine flora and
fauna of unsuspected riches. They also reveal a new beauty,
strange . . . disturbing, convulsive." (Panorama de la Poesie
Franfaise. Paris, Laffont, 1942.)
After these somewhat highly-coloured generalisations, M. Bertele
describes some of the poems of Eluard, of Andre Breton and of
Aragon as?
"the pathetic testimony of a handful of men resolved to risk
everything, to try every door, to break all chains?to the exclu-
sive conquest of themselves, of their innermost country. . . ."
We can see from the later Aragon how all this would appeal to
him, this exploring of the depths of the mind, demanding courage
and audacity, and disregard of all conventions, making full use of
his rich imagination and spontaneity. But the baselessness and
final emptiness of surrealism could not satisfy a mind as positive
in quality as his. He eventually saw the inevitable outcome,
expressed by an admirer of the surrealists, Georges Hugnet:
"From literature, and one might say from paper, poetry has
slipped into the heart of life. It is no longer a state of mind, but
life itself, mind itself. . . . To lead poetry to declare itself, to
have led it to the end of the branch, where you say nothing exists,
where we say everything exists, this is the result of the suppres-
sion of the artist's conscious mentality.. . ." (quoted by Bertele.)
Surrealism, by its own admission, had to come to a dead end.
Having led poetry "to the end of the branch," what next? The
surrealists were in an awkward predicament: finding themselves in
an impasse, some of them turned to forms of escape, as shown in
the amusing, somewhat ribald account of the disillusioned intellec-
tuals given in Roger Vailland's excellent novel, Drdle de Jeu (Paris,
Correa, 1945):
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LG. . . Drugs, Trotskyism, suicide, drink, 'racism,' have
accounted for most of my friends, dead or dying. The less tor-
mented work in film studios.. . . There is one who does caricatures
in non-political periodicals. . . . 'I am an anarchist, everything
disgusts me, I disgust myself,' he answers when you ask him to
join up. We all had this in common, that we could not take
bourgeois values seriously; we were the extreme point of one of
the contradictions which the regime breeds in itself. . . . 'I sat
Beauty on my knee; and I insulted her'?this was the final
homage we paid to art. Macabre humour, surrealist humour. . .."
Even the more serious of the surrealists realised that the world
which they burned to change had not been, could not be, affected
by their writing. Bertele, himself a non-political literateur, admits
this: the only alternative was to destroy by action instead of by
writing the a-poetic world and to create that world of prietry which
they so desired. "This is what some of them did, by passing to
political action," says Bertele, who also notes that many of the
surrealist poets emerged from their cult of the subconscious richer
and more experienced.
Aragon was one of these. His surrealist period was one of copious
production, and through his delving into the depths of the mind he
acquired qualities of expression, of rich fantasy and free imagery
which appear even in his most recent poetry. The poems written
between 1919 and 1929 are difficult to read to-day, and seem
curiously out of tune with our time. But they are full of freshness
and lyrical beauty. Take this, with its play of words (unfortunately
not translatable):
"Les fruits a la saveur de sable
Les oiseaux qui n'ont pas de nom
Les chevaux peints comm,e un pennon
Et l' Amour nu mais incassable
"soumis 1 runique canon
De cet esprit changeant qui sable
Aux quinquets d'un temps haissable
Le champagne clair du canon. . . ."
[Fruits that taste of sand
Birds that have no name
Horses painted like a banner
And Love naked but indestructible
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Submitted to the unique test
Of the changing spirit which quaffs
By the lamps of a hateful time
The clear champagne of the cannon. . .
Or take Les Chevaliers de l'Ouragan, evoking the atmosphere of
a whirlwind, hurtling the reader along like a tremendous gale.
Like Picasso in the realm of painting, Aragon in this period tried
out many methods, mastered the technical complexities of his art,
and acquired a facility which is now the envy, the delight or the
cause for insults of his critics, according to their feelings about
him.
For a short period after emerging from surrealism, on the road
towards clear political understanding of the world against which
he had previously rebelled, Aragon wrote poems which are not of
any positive political colour or conviction. Unsatisfied by the
surrealist experiment, he had to find another way. He was in the
position of the bourgeois artist who--and here it is impossible not
to return to Caudwell?"has three possible roles in relation to the
proletariat?opposition, alliance or assimilation." For Aragon the
first was an impossible choice:
"Opposition means a return to discarded categories: it is no
longer possible to return to the discarded forms of yesterday;
they have annihilated themselves. . . . This attempt to roll
history back gives us Spenglerian, 'Aryan' and Fascist art."
(Illusion and Reality, p. 318.)
The second alternative was also unsatisfactory; most bourgeois
artists were at the time of which Caudwell writes "treading the
road of alliance--and many of the surrealists have signed the same
treaty. Such an alliance can only be an anarchist alliance"; these
artists "do not enter the proletarian organisation, but remain
outside the ranks as fellow travellers. Their attitude to existing
society therefore can only be destructive?it is anarchist, nihilist
and surrealiste." (ibid., p. 319.)
Having rejected surrealism, Aragon in 1930 was not to be con-
tent with such an alliance; and he took the only alternative course,
that of entering "the proletarian organisation"?the role of
assimilation. Being extremely direct, honest and uncompromising
by nature, with complete faith in his own decisions, Aragon once
convinced took the extreme step of breaking with those of the
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surrealists who were not progressive, and joined the French
Communist Party.
The first poems of this period, Persecute Persecuteur (1931-2), are
not straightforward professions of a new-found faith; even Les
Communistes ont raison (1932-3) shows vestiges of surrealism. But
in 1933, during a visit to the Soviet Union, Aragon seems to have
finally lost the cobwebs of the subconscious cult, blown away by
the winds of the steppes, destroyed by the machines of which he
became aware in his first real contact with the Workers' State.
The verses written in the Soviet Union under the title Hourra
l'Oural are completely different from anything previously pub-
lished. They are simple, straightforward, even crude, but full of a
vitality lacking in anything written during the 1920's, as though
the poet had broken with his former self in this burst of joy and
enthusiasm, vividly suggested by the title. The poems are tech-
nically not so interesting as the earlier ones; they are very full of
visual impressions and materialist conclusions, and obviously in-
fluenced by Mayakovsky, whom we presume Aragon discovered
at this time (and whose sister-in-law he later married). They
mark the collapse of the whole edifice of dreams in which he had
lived so long.
They are the antithesis of his previous work; and it is not far-
fetched, in a review of his whole career, to see this change as
necessary and dialectic.
For six years after joining the Communist Party Aragon pub-
lished no poetry at all. Verse possibly did not appear to be a
powerful enough weapon for the fight against the forces he had
discovered were exterminating the values he believed in. The most
effective means of attack, for the urgent immediate battle, was
direct political activity, and he dropped poetry temporarily, in
order to throw himself into party work in the form of journalism
(he founded and became editor of the Communist evening paper,
Ce Soir), organisation of cultural progressive elements, resulting in
the "Maison de la Culture," of which he became secretary, active
support for the Ligue des Droits de l'Homme, and other Left-Wing
bodies, grouped round the Popular Front.
Although rejecting poetry, the novel must have seemed a suitable
form of attack, a means of exposing the disastrous bankruptcy of
capitalism, for he embarked in 1934 on the composition of a
"roman fieuve" more or less on the lines of Balzac's Comedie
Humaine and Zola's Les Rougon Macquart, setting out to paint the
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society of our time in all its degeneracy and corruption. Its general
title, Le Monde Reel, conveys an idea of the scope of the work.
Up to 1939 three volumes had appeared: Les Cloches de Bale,
Les Beaux Quartiers and Les Voyageurs de l'Imperiale. In 1944
another volume, Aurelien, was published.
It is not yet possible fairly to judge what place the novels will
have in Aragon's work, or to fit them into a picture of his develop-
ment. They are sincere and sombre pictures; painted in great?
almost too great?detail, on an immense canvas; in spite of careful
construction, they seem uneven and lengthy, and, in spite of the
very fine passages and dramatic moments (such as the description
of a strike in Savoy in Les Cloches de Rile and of a workers' demon-
stration after a comrade's death in Les Beaux Quartiers) the reader
occasionally feels that Aragon has lost his way in the stretch of the
jungle of capitalist high life into which he has plunged. His
enormous energy and facility lead him to pour out torrents of
words, uncanalised by the limits that are automatically set for a
poet.
An indication as to Aragon's possibilities as a writer of prose can
be found if we may be allowed a little chronological licence?in
his very latest publication, the collection of short stories, Servitude
et Grandeur des Francais. Here is all the strength of the novels,
with few of their weaknesses. These sketches?they are hardly
more?of incidents of the Resistance movement are brilliantly
written; alternately dramatic, tragic, amusing. Every one is
different, but equally condensed and swiftly moving, packed
with acute observation and fine character drawing. The situation
in "Penitent 43," where the priest finds himself hearing the
confession of an atheist of the Mavis, while the Germans search
the aisles, is worthy of Maupassant, and so is the rescue from the
hospital of the heroes in "Le Mouton." At the same time,
Maupassant never wrote anything more moving than Le Col-
laborateur, where the reader is led up to its climax?the child's
murder?and left breathless with horror and bitterness.
It is perhaps because these stories are based on subjects which
are true, and very near Aragon's heart, and written at a time
when he was closest to the tragedy and drama of human life?the
time of the occupation of France?that they are so much more
successful than the lengthy novels on uncongenial themes; or it
may be that this form of prose is really nearer poetry, in its require-
ment of condensed vivid wording within a pattern; or it may just
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be that Aragon has grown up in the seven years between these
works. The short stories are the output of a mature writer, and
will find a place of honour when Le Monde Reel is no longer
read. However, to do the novels justice, whatever posterity
thinks of them, they have served a useful purpose in exposing
the way of life of the French ruling class in our lifetime, and
incidentally in getting out of Aragon's system a good deal of
autobiographical detail which could not have been disposed of in
any other form.
The pause in this poetic output turned out to be, at any rate, a
breathing-space during which Aragon gained experience, developed
personally and gathered strength for the coming ordeal. Activity
and work among the militants of the Communist Party, years of
contact with real people of unswerving convictions, resulted in a
very great change. The young writer who in the 1920's threw out
Je n'aime pas les gens had learned that les gens were not the people.
And in the Preface of Les Y eux d'Elsa (1943) he voiced his faith,
acquired through living in the fullest sense in contact with people:
"Je chante l'homme . . . et mon chant ne se peut refuser d'?e
. . . parce qu'il est l'homine meme dont la raison d'?e est la vie."
[I sing of man . . . and my song cannot be denied existence . . .
for it is man, whose reason for existing is life.]
The sexual love, which he claims in Le Libertinage (1924) to be
the only thing that counts ("ii n'y a pour moi pas une idee que
l'amour n'eclipse . . ."), is transformed and heightened to the love
"au visage resplendissant" of which (again in the Preface to Les
Yeux d'Elsa) he declares:
"Tu es ma seule famine avouee, et je vois par tes yeux le monde."
[You are my only acknowledged family, and I see the world
through your eyes.]
In the period 1940-1944?years of intense emotional experiences
of war, invasion, occupation?poetry was the obvious and necessary
means of expression for him. The bitterness of the betrayal and
defeat of France, the agonising separation from his wife, the heart-
rending scenes of battle and flight and chaos, could only be uttered
in verse, concentrated, passionate, personal. The result was Le
Creve-Cccur. Here, in expressing his own feelings, Aragon was
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A
expressing those of millions of Frenchmen. The barrier was broken
down between the poet and the people. What he sang they echoed.
All over France during the Nazi occupation men and women
repeated the verses of Aragon, the cry they would have uttered had
they had the gift.
These poems, the first for six years, show more clearly than any-
thing else the change in Aragon; we find in them the lovely singing
quality and technical mastery of the early poems, fused with the
energy and vitality and purpose of the post-surrealist verses; if
these last were the antithesis of the former, the Creve-Cur poems
are the synthesis of both.
There is not space here to describe Le Creve-Cceur in detail, nor
to quote the poems at length. It must suffice to say that, to read it
through, following the themes of the poet's love for Elsa, and of
his love for France (stated first separately, later interwoven and
fused into one) dwelling on the most beautiful verses such as
"0 soleil de minuit sans sommeil solitude . . ."
[0 midnight sun solitude without sleep.]
and
"0 mois des floraisons mois des metamorphoses
Mai qui fat sans nuage et juin poignarde. . . ."
[0 month of flowerings month of metamorphoses
May which was cloudless and June stabbed in the back . . .]
was, in 1940, heart-breaking as the name implies, and is to-day
still a deep emotional experience.
The Creve-Cceur poems are, however, mainly contemplative in
character; they perfectly interpret the mood, the longings and
sufferings of the French people in 1940. But in 1942 the mood had
altered, and passive endurance of distress had turned into a spirit
of revolt demanding action. The poet was required to be more than
an observer. Many French artists realised that Marx's truth,
"Philosophers have only interpreted the world?the point is to
change it," applied to them as well as to philosophers; among
them Picasso, who not long ago gave the following written state-
ment to a reporter:
? . An artist is a politically conscious being constantly
watching the dramatic and stirring events of the world, grasping
and reflecting their significance. How is it possible not to be
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interested in other men, and what egotistical indolence can drive
one to detach oneself from life which other men help to make so
full? The object of painting is not merely to help adorn houses
. . . painting is also a weapon of war to be used in offence and
defence against the enemy." (Tricolore, May, 1945.)
Among those who understood and acted upon this view of art in
France at that time, Aragon was one of the most energetic. He set
out to organise the writers' resistance groups; with Georges Sadoul,
he founded the National Committee of Writers and Journalists,
and several different national committees of professional men?
doctors, lawyers, and so on. Living in illegality, for three years,
he never ceased work against the Nazis. He is described by Nancy
Cunard as
"undefeatable by danger and fatigue, a welder of disparate
elements into operative cohesion as stimulating as inspired . . .
the embodiment of all that France has been again and again in
time of stress and danger in the defence of human liberty. . . ."
(Our Time, November, 1944.)
He was one of the chief moving spirits behind the publishing of
clandestine literature?a task of constant danger and difficulty, as
may be gathered from these lines of a Maquis writer, which also
show how close the resistance poets were at this time to the heart
of the people:
"Publishing in the Maquis was like this: we had the sub-
machine-gun and its cartridges right by the press, and we got to
work on producing the Franc-tireurs et Partisans Francais
editions on field presses. In this manner we published some
writing by Aragon, Eluard, Cassou, Vercors. These little books
were sold very cheaply, and had an immense success, and all
the Maquisards knew Aragon's Le Muscle Grevin and Eluard's
Liberte by heart." (ibid.)
Notwithstanding the ceaseless underground activity, Aragon never
stopped writing. And his poems became progressively more militant,
calling the French people to action. Les Yeux d'Elsa (1942), which
follows Le Crove-Cceur, contains at the start some poems of the
nostalgic lyricism of the former. Some of them are obscure, full of
technical devices, borrowed, as Aragon describes in the Preface,
from medixval French literature (incidentally, he claims with pride
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that he is not afraid of "imitating"?of having absorbed the best of
the rich heritage of French poetry). After the first few poems,
however, he raises his voice to encourage the stirrings of the
Resistance.
In the poem Richard Cceur de Lion, for instance:
"Tous les Francais ressemblent a Blondel
Quel que soit le nom dont nous l'appellons
La liberte comme un bruissement d'ailes
Re'pond au chant de Richard Cwur de Lion."
[All Frenchmen are like Blondel,
Whatever name we call it;
Liberty like a rustling of wings
Answers the song of Richard Cwur de Lion.]
Here too he protests against poetry being segregated in an ivory
tower (Contre la poesie pure) and in Plus belle que les larmes attacks
the critics who would prevent him writing the truth:
"J'empeche en respirant certaines gens de vivre
Je trouble leur sommeil d'on ne sait quel remords
Ii parait qu'en rimant je debouche les cuivres
Et que fa fait un bruit a rdveiller les morts."
[By breathing I prevent certain people from living,
I trouble their sleep with I know not what remorse;
It seems that when I rhyme I unleash the brass
And that it makes a noise to wake the dead.]
Persuaded by Elsa, as he admits in the Cantique a Elsa, he
determines to discard obscurities and more recondite technicalities
in his poetry, so that it may become more universal:
" . . . Tu me dis Laisse un peu l'orchestre des tonnerres
Car par le temps qu'il fait il est de pauvres gens
Qui ne pouvant chercher dans les dictionnaires
Aimeraient des mots ordinaires
Qu'ils se puissent tout bas repeter en songeant
me dis Si tu veux que je t'aime et je t'aime
II faut que ce portrait que de moi tu peindras
Ait comme un ver vivant au fond du chrysanth'eme
Un theme cache dans son theme
Et marie a l'amour le soleil qui viendra."
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[... You said to me, 'Leave for a space the thundering orchestra,
For just now there are poor folks
Who, unable to search in dictionaries,
Would like ordinary words
That they could murmur, musing, to themselves.'
. . . You said, 'If you want me to love you, and I love you,
This portrait that you paint of me must have,
Like the living worm at the heart of the chrysanthemum
A theme hidden in its theme,
And must marry the sun which will come, to love.]
From now on he adopts a language which will appeal to the
widest possible public, reach the people of France in every corner
ordinarily remote from poetry: words must become weapons, to
attack the enemy, instruments to sing praises of the heroes, tools
to build memorials to the martyrs:
"Trouver des mots a echelle du vent
Trouver des mots qui pratiquent des breches
Dans le sommeil comme un soleil levant
Des mots qui soient a nos soifs une eau frdiche."
[To find words on the scale of the wind,
To find words which force breaches
In sleep, like the rising sun,
Words which may be fresh water for our thirst.]
Aragon has good precedents for this use of poetry: Victor Hugo,
Whitman, Mayakovsky are examples of writers devoting their gifts
to a revolutionary cause. In France from 1942 to 1944 a whole
host of poets followed the same course, and in the illegal press
poetry had a place of honour, and was read and echoed by hundreds
of thousands of ordinary people an unusual thing in capitalist
society. Aragon, speaking in London in 1945, paid tribute to the
resistance poets: "They all wrote and were all popular; I was one
among many." Nevertheless, he was the most outstanding, the
most prolific, and the first; this is acknowledged by the distinguished
writer, Francois Mauriac?a Catholic, and formerly no political
friend of Communists?at a "gala of the liberation" in Paris in
1945:
"Suddenly a poet rose above the false sleepers; he sang the
Prelude to the Diane Franfaise. His love of his country . . .
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delivered itself in a sudden outburst, spurted up in poetry
popular in the most noble sense of the word, a poetry of the soil
of the nation, and of which since Victor Hugo we in France had
lost the secret. Through and beyond the hymns of the French
Revolution, these verses retrieve the rhythm and accent of our
most ancient poets. Poems of love, but of a furious love; for the
fury of Rimbaud rumbles right through the poetry of Aragon.
Hence this rhythm, urgent, breathless, which obliged the con-
quered to lift their humiliated heads, which almost forced
weapons into their hands, which reveals in every one of them a
sleeping hero."
The poems of La Diane Francaise like Le Musee Grevin and
Broceliande, were published mostly in the underground press
under the name Francois Lacolere an appropriate pseudonym
which can hardly have disguised Aragon very effectively. The name
"Diane" (which means reveillee) in itself states what the collection
sets out to be: a call to action, open and resonant no question of
the "theme within the theme" being hidden in this case. They are
with a few exceptions absolutely direct and unambiguous. Some
take the form of popular ballads, based on history; such is the very
moving "Ballade de celui qui chanta dans les supplices," a descrip-
tion of Gabriel Pen's execution; another is La Rose et le Reseda
dedicated to Peri and to d'Estienne d'Orves, on the subject of the
reconciliation of an atheist and a believer both dying for France.
(Here is an example of Aragon's political consciousness applied to
poetry; he actively performs his Party's task in trying to cement
the unity between Catholics and Communists in this poem, and in
others where he uses metaphors from the New Testament, com-
pares crucified France with Christ, and all mankind with the
Son of Man.)
Some are straightforward marching songs, like those summarily
dismissed by Philip Toynbee:
. . I rate them low in literary importance because their
spirit was primarily combative." (Horizon, November, 1944.)
Despite this appalling weakness, the less fastidious reader will
find these songs are moving and exciting?one can imagine the
dynamic effect they must have produced on the men and women
working for the liberation of France: the same effect that Hugo
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produced with his poems to the partisans of 1871. Compare
Hugo's
"0 Franc-tireurs soyez terribles:
Glissez, tirez, rampez dans les ravines .
[0 franc-tireurs, be terrible
Creep, shoot, climb in the ravines .
with Aragon's
"Entendez Franc-tireurs de France
L'appel de nos fils enfermes
Formez vos bataillons formez
Le carre de la delivrance
0 noire insaisissable armee . . ."
[Franc-tireurs of France, hear
The call of our imprisoned sons,
Form your battalions, form
The square of liberation;
0 our unseizable army. . .1
Other poems in La Diane Franfaise commemorate actual events,
such as the Nazi outrages on Strasbourg University, the ejection of
40,000 Marseillais from their homes, and finally the liberation of
Paris. The latter evokes in the poem Paris all Aragon's passion for
France and her capital:
"Rien n'a l'eclat de Paris dans la poudre
Rien n'est Si pur que son front d'insurge
Rien n'est si fort ni le feu ni la foudre
Que mon Paris defiant les dangers
Rien n'est so beau que ce Paris que j'ai.
"Rien ne m'a fait jamais battre le cceur
Rien ne m'a fait ainsi rire et pleurer
Comme ce cri de mon peuple vain queur
Rien n'est si grand qu'un linceul dechire
Paris Paris soi-meme libere."
19
[Nothing's like Paris exploding in battle
Nothing so pure as its insurgent's mien,
Nothing so strong, neither fire nor metal,
As Paris's defiance of dangers unseen,
Nothing's so grand as this Paris of mine.
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"Nothing has ever yet made my heart beat,
Nor set me weeping and laughing aloud
Like this cry of my people conquering proud
Nothing's so .fine as the torn winding-sheet,
Paris, my Paris, by her own hands freed.]
The last poem in the book is Aragon's confession of faith:
The poet to his party. "My party has given me back my memory
and my sight," he says, and in the last five lines he explains the
foundation on which all his poetry is now built: his vision of France,
his view of life, "anger and love and joy and suffering," have been
turned to songs inspired by the teaching of his party.
It is with poems such as this that Aragon's critics quarrel;
although they acclaimed Le Greve Cceur, they cannot tolerate these:
the working-class movement is not, in their eyes, a suitable subject
for poetry; a political party is not the kind of thing you consider
sublime if you live in Bloomsbury or in the caf?of Montparnasse
or Boulevard St. Germain. On the basis of theory, these critics
have a strong hand it is unorthodox, unusual, to bring party
politics into serious art. The real truth, however, is that most
of these intellectuals do not want to, or do not dare. They
profess plenty of sympathy with progressive movements, but
when it becomes a question of directly using their art to advance
the cause of the working class, of sacrificing one grain of
individual, bourgeois freedom for the freedom of the masses, they
remain aloof and condemn those poets who do not share their
attitude.
Those who attack or depreciate Aragon for his political pro-
nouncements and activity to-day are those who in 1937 were
described by Caudwell as making an anarchic alliance with the
proletariat. He mentioned the "Trotsky-like element in their
orientation" and a "slightly anxious preoccupation with personal
liberties, and a scurrying hither and thither for reassurances or
corrections in the proletarian revolutionary theory because of its
suspicious deviations from petty-bourgeois limitations and ideals."
(Illusion and Reality.)
Since those days, when the leading writers in this country and
France took an anti-Fascist line at least in writing on Spain, many
have retreated even from the precarious alliance mentioned in
Illusion and Reality. Some, such as Auden, have withdrawn from
any political expression at all; others, like Arthur Koestler, have
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become, while claiming to be progressive, anti-Communist and
bitterly anti-Soviet. (They incidentally never fail to evoke loud
applause from the literary critics of the reactionary press.) There
is a danger of their being accepted at their own evaluation as
champions of progress and advance; whereas they are elements
who play into the hands of bourgeois reaction by deflecting interest
from the real focus of progress: the organised working-class move-
ment. Such artists and intellectuals who claim to be leaders of
culture in this country, and their opposite numbers in France, are
tending to turn to new forms of philosophy (for example "existenti-
alism") and to rally round such men as Henri Michaud (a writer of
pure nonsense) and Jean Paul Sartre, author of morbid novels about
perverts and neurotics. These are their roads of escape from reality,
their choice in the fatal decision that all artists have to make. They
lead, as surrealism did, to "the end of the branch." And we have
seen where Aragon's road has led: to the country where the artist
finds himself fully in touch with reality, with life in all its richness
and its variety, where freedom is won through the recognition of
necessity. This is what Picasso meant, when, choosing the road of
"assimilation," he joined the Communist Party, with the words
"J'ai trouve ma vraie patrie."
The artist who goes the way of reaction will find himself further
and further removed from life, as Socialism inevitably approaches
through proletarian action. The one who goes forward with the
progressive forces can never lose touch with reality, and his work
will become more and more infused with purpose and vital content.
Aragon, if he stays in the ranks of the working-class movement
(as we hope and believe he will), will continue "to sing for
humanity" (a truth expressed in a play of words by L'Humanite
when publishing his poem Paris). He will continue to fulfil his
mission?to quote George Thomson in Marxism and Poetry?
"surmounting the barrier between the poet and the people, and
restoring the broken harmony between poetry and life."
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BY FERNALT HALL
THE next few years will demand great efforts on the production
front. Shortages of all kinds must be made good, and exports
must be favoured at the expense of home consumption. But there
is no reason why these should be years of cultural poverty. In fact,
the reverse is true.
In this situation we can profit from the experience of the Soviet
Union during the harsh years of N.E.P. and the first two Five-
Year Plans. Immense sacrifices were made for the sake of the
future, but during those years Soviet citizens had the benefit of
the finest theatre in the world, magnificent films, millions of
admirable books, concerts by the thousand, and so on. Prices of
all cultural facilities were kept low, even if this meant appreciable
losses, and commercial considerations were never allowed to in-
fluence the quality of the product. The result was that for the
great mass of the population life was hard, but it was never dull.
There is no doubt that in this country the provision of cultural
facilities will continue to expand: the touring units associated
with the Arts Council are quite inadequate to meet the growing
demand, and the plans for arts centres and community centres
show a clear understanding of this need. The brick-and-mortar
side of the problem is under way; but the question of quality
requires equal attention and forethought.
This is particularly true of ballet?the one art in which we
could claim to lead the world before the war. As Edward Dent
points out, the British Council was right in sending the Sadlers
Wells Ballet to the Paris Exhibition in 1937: "the ballet really
was the best representative art production we could at that time
offer to the inspection of the world."1
Since 1937 material progress in ballet has been impressive.
The efforts of the wartime touring companies have built up an
audience for ballet in every town of any size, not to mention
dozens of factory hostels and Army camps; and the packed houses
show that ballet is rapidly acquiring the same favoured position
as opera in Italy. Three of the leading companies (the two Sadlers
Wells companies and the Ballets Jooss) work in association with
the Arts Council, and the fourth (the Ballet Rambert) is directly
1 A Theatre for Everybody, p. 117.
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managed by the Council. The occupation of Covent Garden?
traditional home of exotic theatrical luxuries?by an English
company is symbolic of the new period now beginning.
Unfortunately, artistic progress since 1937 has been very small
in comparison with the material expansion: relatively few new
ballets have been produced, and with one or two exceptions
(e.g. Peter and the Wolf and Lady into Fox) they cannot compare
with the best ballets of the golden age (1930-7). With the exception
of Robert Helpmann, no new choreographer has come to the fore
for many years, and our greatest choreographer (Antony Tudor)
has been forced to go to America to win the recognition and
support due to his ability. In 1937 the production of a ballet like
Dark Elegies or Checkmate was an artistic event comparable to
the 1945 production of Peter Grimes; to-day a new ballet can be
guaranteed to proceed on certain familiar lines, and is soon taken
for granted. The choreographers have lost none of their technical
skill; but their attitude to content has changed considerably.
The growth of the new attitude to content can be traced very
clearly in the rapidly increasing prejudice in favour of abstract
and near-abstract ballets. Of Ashton's last four ballets, three are
largely or completely abstract (Dante Sonata, The Wanderer, and
Symphonic Variations). Nearly all Walter Gore's ballets are abstract
(though some have a thin framework of story); his latest ballet
(Simple Symphony) is entirely abstract. Of Frank Staff's last three
ballets, one is quite abstract (Enigma Variations), one is a suite of
dances, most of which are abstract (Czerny), and one has only a
tenuous wisp of story (Un Songe). Andree Howard's latest ballet
(Assembly Ball) is a suite of formal divertissements set in a con-
ventional frame. Robert Helpmann alone has swum against the
tide: his best works are highly dramatic. Unfortunately, Helpmann
is unable to create expressive dance images, and makes use of
methods more appropriate to the "legitimate" stage; the inter-
polated passages of dancing strike a note of incongruity (as
Beaumont points out),1 and can often be described as abstract. In
his latest ballet, Adam Zero, Helpmann attempts to cover up the
absence of expressive dance movements by using the stage
machinery in a spectacular manner, and is clearly moving in the
same direction as the abstractionists.
These abstract and near-abstract ballets vary widely in quality.
Those of Frederick Ashton are technical masterpieces, with a
1 C. W. Beaumont, Sadlers Wells Ballet, p. 201.
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Wandering into the Abstract
subtle balance of fast and slow tempo, a pleasing variety of mass
dances and dances for varying numbers of soloists, and evidence
of a sure instinct for making the most out of every movement;
those of Walter Gore, on the other hand, are laboured and
monotonous, in spite of the furious exertions required of the
dancers. But all these ballets have a remarkable family likeness:
whether or not they are credited by the programme with a theme,
their movement and grouping resemble each other to such an
extent that the dancers must wonder at times which ballet they
are performing. In some cases the resemblances extend to non-
abstract ballets as well: Simple Symphony contains a dance by
a male soloist which is almost the same as one in Dark Elegies.
Certain episodes have acquired almost official status in the ab-
stract ballets: one can be certain, for example, that a young man
will be carried across the stage shoulder-high by a group of other
young men. When programme notes are provided, these show
even more of a family likeness. There are no characters in the
normal sense of the word; instead, the dancers represent abstrac-
tions, like "Man," "The External 'World," "Love," etc. Usually
there is no mention of time or place: in The Wanderer we are
specifically told that the male soloist represents "a mental and
emotional traveller who belongs to all time." There is little or
no dramatic structure; whatever the programme may say, the
episodes follow each other with no particular relevance, except
in so far as they are adapted to the form of the music (which
is usually a symphony or concerto). Most of the time the
choreographer is content to improvise movements as a kind of
free interpretation of the music; under these circumstances, com-
position is so easy that (according to Beryl de Zoete) Ashton
completed The Wanderer in a fortnight, in spite of its immense
complexity of texture. So long as the supply of symphonies,
concertos, and sonatas holds out, choreographers can arrange ab-
stract ballets as often as required.
At times the choreographers appear to have doubts whether
their ballets are suffused with quite as much universal significance
as they ought to be; and then they make use of a striking dramatic
grouping or gesture. Ashton has a predeliction for sexual images,
which are repeated from ballet to ballet without much alteration;
in Dante Sonata they are very numerous, though (as Beaumont
says) they are "quite inapposite to the theme." In most cases,
1 Supplement to Complete Book of Ballets, p. 116.
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however, the symbolism is left so vague that the spectator can
attach to the episodes any meaning he likes: on several occasions
during The Wanderer the dancers form up into a line, cross their
forearms at right angles, and rapidly rotate them through an arc
of 90 degrees.
Massine was the first to arrange abstract ballets in the present
century. His first symphonic ballet, Les Presages, caused a sensa-
tion in 1933, and since then nearly all his serious ballets have
been in this style. The first three symphonic ballets (Les Presages,
Choreartium and La Symphonic Fantastique) were not entirely
abstract; they included long episodes which had all the qualities
of good drama?conflict, tension, atmosphere, characterisation,
etc. (A good example is "The March to the Scaffold" in La Sym-
phonie Fantastique; here the movements and costumes are clearly
inspired by the drawings of Daumier and Forain, and represent
a bitter satire of the machinery of justice in nineteenth-century
France.) Passages of this nature represent an important step
forward in the evolution of a dramatic form as peculiar to ballet
as the formal discoveries of Griffiths (close-ups, panning and
tracking shots, cross-cutting, etc.) were to the art of film. At
their best the early symphonic ballets had the precision of imagery
and economy of means characteristic of all good drama. In the
later symphonic ballets, however, Massine lost interest in drama,
and concentrated all attention on the provision of elaborate
spectacle.
Since the beginning of the war Massine has worked in America,
and has had considerable influence on other choreographers work-
ing there. But the most powerful influence on the young American
choreographers is Balanchine, who for years has been in effect the
artistic director of the most important of the "Russian" companies,
the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. His ballets form the main bulk of
the repertoire of this company, and are all abstract. Balanchine's
theories, as taught at the School of American Ballet, represent
the point of view of most abstract choreographers, both here and
in America:
"The importane-thing in ballet is the movement itself, as it
is sound which is important in a symphony. A ballet may con-
tain a story, but the visual spectacle, not the story, is the
essential element. . . . As in music, the audience should be able
to enjoy the movement, regardless of the story.. .. Choreographic
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Wandering into the Abstract
movement is an end in itself, and its only purpose is to create
the impression of intensity and beauty!"1
Though most of the new ballets produced in America are now
abstract, the theories of Balanchine and his followers do not go
unchallenged. John Martin, the famous dance critic of the New
York Times, has a fine record of championing the solid achieve-
ments of the American "modern dance" school, and has a clear
understanding of the importance of content in dancing. Igor
Youskevitch criticises Balanchine from the point of view of the
dancer:
"In ballet, dance technique is a means of expression, as
singing in opera and speech in drama. Why, then, should it be
necessary to deprive ballet of thought and transform it into
a purely gymnastic performance? . . . Ballet movements must
as clearly as possible express the character, thoughts, feelings
of the people on the stage. . . . It is a very sad prospect for
a dancer to be just a puppet which executes a chain of, perhaps
beautiful, but still purely gymnastic movements without having
a deep inner interest in them."2
Before the war, Serge Lifar, maitre de ballet at the Paris Opera,
put forward a demand for "a choreographic theatre, free and
independent" which had much in common with the theories of
Balanchine. Though not abstract, Lifar's ballets?almost all based
on classical stories?were just as hermetically sealed off from the
passions and conflicts of real life as the most formal concerto
interpretation. Lifar collaborated during the German occupation,
and will arrange no more classical ballets glorifying Serge Lifar
at the Paris Opera.
Lifar's theories were subjected to criticism by Ninette de Valois,
Director of the Sadlers Wells Ballet:
"It [Lifar's Manifesto of a Choreographer] basically proves
lack of true theatrical education, and complete confusion as to
the meaning of the synthesis of the arts, which is the main
demand of a theatre production. . . . That is a state of mind
1 Dance News (New York), May, 1945. For "movement" read "form" and for
"story" read "content," and this becomes the art for art's sake theory in all its
purity?even to the suggestion (characteristic of Pater, Roger Fry et al.) that the
arts should all approach to the condition of music.
2 Dance News, June?August, 1945.
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arising from a confusion between the function of the medium
and the exploitation of his own ego. It seems that the true
'choreographic theatre' is the classroom, quite complete in itself
as far as this art is capable of being self-sufficient.
"In a sense, the fundamental business of the theatre is to
portray a state of make-believe. It is mainly a fantastic repre-
sentation of the realities of life through dramatic rendering.
The major channels most commonly used are the play, the
opera and the ballet. . . . The modern cry for a purely abstract
rendering of the ballet divorced from a literary source will
continue to appear inconsistent. Its sponsors do not hesitate to
demand the theatre and all its resources for the fulfilment of
their particular aim, but ignore the views, obligations and
aims of the theatre."
This was published in 1937, and probably written in 1936, i.e.
immediately after Ninette de Valois composed her masterpiece,
The Rake's Progress. This ballet is a fine example of dance drama,
and retains all the bitter social satire of the paintings by Hogarth
on which it is based: nothing could illustrate more clearly the
richness and vitality of social realism, in violent contrast with
the pretentious nonsense produced by those who wish to reduce
choreography to the level of the daily classroom improvisations
of the ballet mistress. In the first scene of Rake, the movements
are relatively inexpressive (consisting alternately of conventional
classroom steps and mime), but as the dramatic tension rises the
choreographer makes use of poetic dance images which have the
clarity and precision demanded by Youskevitch.
Since 1937 Miss de Valois has steadily drifted away from the
sturdy realism of The Rake's Progress and Invitation to the Ballet.
Her latest ballet, Promenade, is no more than a suite of con-
ventional divertissements, followed for no apparent reason by
Breton folk dances; and the current repertoire of her two com-
panies bears little relation to her previous emphasis on "the
realities of life."
The present controversy is not new; it has been repeated (with
variations) at every critical period in the history of ballet. Ballet
in the modern sense of the word can be said to date from the
publication of Noverre's Letters on Dancing and Ballets in 1760. In
Noverre's day ballet was no more than a spectacular entertainment,
1 Invitation to the Ballet, pp. 175-6.
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Wandering into the Abstract
inserted at intervals into the operas. For centuries luxurious
entertainments uniting singing, dancing, acrobatics, mechanical
effects, etc., had been presented at the French Court, where the
nobles literally danced attendance on the king; and the trans-
lation to a State theatre (with the change to a professional basis)
made no important difference to the quality of the performances.
But towards the middle of the eighteenth century the great
materialist philosophers began to attack the whole basis of the
French absolute monarchy; all obsolete feudal ideas were brought
before the "Tribunal of Reason," and Rousseau raised the cry,
"Back to Nature!" Noverre, a friend of the Encyclopxdists, and
the first great maitre de ballet, applied the philosophic ideas of the
time to the art of ballet?one of the most characteristic expressions
of the feudal State. Noverre had no patience with the abstract
formalism of the ballets of his time:
"The name ballet has been wrongly applied to such sumptuous
entertainments, which combine magnificent scenery, wonderful
machinery, rich and pompous costumes . . . brilliant artificial
illumination, pleasing dances and divertissements, thrilling and
perilous feats of strength. . . . Even in all this I find nothing of
what I seek to find in a ballet."
Noverre saw clearly that ballet could only become a serious art
by resuming its historical position as a branch of the drama:
"The art has remained in its infancy only because its effects
have been limited, like those of fireworks, designed simply to
gratify the eyes. No one suspected its power to speak to the
heart. . . .
"I have dared to fathom the art of devising ballet with
action; to reunite action with dancing; to accord it some ex-
pression and purpose."
Using the language of the materialist philosophers, Noverre
demanded a return to Nature and a respect for reason:
"There are few logical ballets; dancing is introduced for the
sake of dancing; and it would seem that everything consisted
in the movement of the legs."
1 All quotations from Noverre are taken from C. W. Beaumont's translation of
Letters on Dancing and Ballets.
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Instead of copying the ballets of others, maitres de ballet' must
study life around them in all its aspects:
"A maitre de ballet ought to explore everything, to examine
all. . . . How many varied pictures will he not find among
workmen! Each of them has different attitudes relative to the
position and movements exacted by his work. . . . Again, what
quaint and curious pictures will not be found in the crowd of
pleasing idlers, and those second-rate fops!"
Characterisation is just as important for choreographers and
dancers as it is for dramatists and actors:
"A maitre de ballet should endeavour to accord to each of
his dancers a different action, expression and character. . . .
Dancers, like actors, should devote themselves to depict and
feel; they have the same object to attain. . . . That realism,
that enthusiasm2 which distinguishes the great actor and which
is the life blood of the fine arts . . . is like an electric spark.
. . . It is a fire which spreads rapidly and captivates the imagi-
nation of the spectator."
By "realism" Noverre did not mean naturalism. He saw that
dancing is capable of expressing with precision subtleties of
emotional experience beyond the reach of words. ("In regard to
the passions there is a degree of expression to which words cannot
attain, or rather there are passions for which no words exist.")
And his contempt for the conventional gestures of the Commedia
dell' Arte?still the refuge of incompetent choreographers?was
unbounded. ("Students of dancing should not confuse the noble
art of pantomime with that low and trivial form of expression
which Italian players have introduced into France.")
Noverre's ideas were much too revolutionary for the French
court, and when he applied for the post of maitre de ballet at the
Opera in 1758, his application was turned down, in spite of his
genius. As a result, almost the whole of Noverre's ballets were
created outside Paris?in Lyons, Stuttgart, Vienna, Milan and
London. Partly through these productions, and partly through the
publication of his famous Letters on Dancing and Ballets, his ideas
1 The artist who designed the movements was not known as "choreographer"
until fairly recently.
2 In the seventeenth century the word "enthusiasm" still retained much of its
original meaning, "possessed by a god."
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gradually won acceptance throughout Europe (though they had
little influence in France until after the Revolution), and ballet
became a serious branch of the drama, as he hoped it would. The
greatest ballets of maitres de ballet like Vigano (1769-1821) and
Perrot (1810-92) were true dance-dramas, 1 in which a powerful and
varied content found expression in dance images comparable to
the word images of the great poet-dramatists. Productions like
Otello by Vigano (1818) and Faust by Perrot (1848) demanded and
received the same serious consideration as great plays and operas.
Unfortunately, the ideas of Noverre never won more than
transitory victories in practice, though most maitres de ballet found
it advisable to pay lip-service to them. The situation in the ballet
world was very similar to that in the film world of to-day, where
the excellence of a small number of honest, sincere films is ob-
scured by the overwhelming proportion of screen time occupied
by slick sentimental productions.
Perrot reached maturity as a creative artist precisely at the
time when the production of La Sylphide (with Taglioni in the lead-
ing role-1832) had inspired a flood of ballets blancs in the same
style?each with its white-clad supernatural beings drifting about
on points and executing the same conventional enchainements of
classroom steps. In these ballets the content was of no import-
ance; everything was subordinated to the personality of the
ballerina (who insisted on being given the steps she did best).
Perrot's first important ballet, Giselle (1841), shows the influence
of this tradition, though enough remains of the original chore-
ography to suggest the expressive vitality of his later ballets.
The chief theoretician of the ballet blanc was Theophile Gautier,
one of the first writers to put forward the idea of art for art's
sake. His definition of dancing might well serve as a motto for
the abstractionists of to-day:
"Dancing consists of nothing more than the art of displaying
beautiful shapes in graceful positions and to develop from them
lines agreeable to the eye; it is mute rhythm, music that is seen." 2
The more conventional and artificial the ballet, the more Gautier
liked it; he considered the intrusion of real content as fatal:
"The more the action is fabulous, the more the characters
are fictitious, the less shock to verisimilitude. . . . We are quite
Vigano called his works coreodrammi.
2 Quoted in A Miscellany for Dancers, compiled by C. W. Beaumont.
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happy to watch a pretty dancer leap about in the midst of an
absurd story. If the foot is small, well arched and curved down
to the toe like an arrow, if the leg is dazzling and pure, we
worry very little about the rest."
Though Perrot arranged Giselle to a script by Gautier, he differed
profoundly from Gautier in his ideas about suitable themes for
ballet. After Giselle, Perrot quarrelled with the Director of the
Paris Opera (who wanted Perrot to use the same trivial themes as
his predecessors) and moved to London, where he took advantage
of the fashionable craze for ballet to create a number of great
works (La Esmeralda, Catarina, Faust and others). Scats at Her
Majesty's were expensive, and ballet was very much an exotic
luxury for the rich. The fashionable audience troubled themselves
little about the content of the ballets they went to see; so long as
stars like Taglioni or Cerrito danced the principal roles, they were
content. They were enthusiastic about the dance-dramas of Perrot,
but they were no less delighted with the insipid ballets blames of
Paul Taglioni. What they particularly craved was novelty; and
even Perrot had to waste time on empty suites of divertissements
like Le Pas de Quatre, designed to bring together all the stars of
the day. The craze for ballet in England began to subside after
a few years, and Perrot left for Russia in 1848.
Social conditions in Europe after the abortive risings of 1848
were favourable to the ideas of Gautier, and those of Noverre
were forgotten. Ballet lost almost all connection with drama and
became once more a luxurious entertainment appealing to the
wealthy patrons of the theatre. The materialism and humanitarian
idealism favoured by the revolutionary bourgeoisie in the eight-
eenth century was now antipathetic to their solidly established
successors, particularly after the Commune. In Russia Perrot was
made welcome for a few years, and produced all the great ballets
he had composed in London; but the infiltration of progressive
ideas from the West made the Court deeply suspicious of his social
realism,2 and the censor enforced a number of humiliating altera-
tions. After ten years Perrot resigned, and for the next fifty years
1 Quoted by Julie Sazonova in Le Vie de la Danse (Paris).
2 "In Catarina, the hard life of the hunted bandit is contrasted with that of the
aristocracy living in luxurious palaces in Rome. Sometimes, too, the aristocrat is
satirised by presenting him as a helpless being when removed from his normal
surroundings." (C. W. Beaumont, The Ballet called Giselle, p. 38.)
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the machine-made ballets of Petipa (full of marches and counter-
marches, processions, conventional "variations," divertissements,
etc.) filled the Imperial theatres, where the dancers made a deep
bow to the Imperial box on their first entrance.
At the beginning of the twentieth century conditions in Russia
were similar to those in eighteenth-century France. Large cracks
had developed in the Imperial State, and the younger artists felt
dissatisfied with the old-fashioned Imperial theatres, where pro-
ductions still retained their character of court entertainments and
failed to express the mood of the rising bourgeois class. This
general feeling of dissatisfaction found expression in the realism
of the Moscow Art Theatre and the barbaric glamour of the
operas and ballets presented by Diaghilev in various European
capitals during the summer holidays of the Imperial theatres.
(The directors of the theatres resisted the new style of ballet, and
few of the great Russian ballets produced by Diaghilev were ever
shown in Russia; eventually Diaghilev had to form a permanent
touring company.)
The new ballets with choreography by Fokine, music by
Stravinsky and decor by Benois and Bakst represented a return to
the ideas of Noverre at a new level of fantasy. In some (e.g.
Scheherazade and Thamar) the choreography was undistinguished,
and the ballet relied for effect mainly on the violent colours of
the decor; but the best of them (particularly Petrouchka) had as
realistic a content and as expressive dance images as the master-
pieces of Perrot and Vigano; and the early ballets of Massine
(The Good-humoured Ladies, The Three-cornered Hat and La
Boutique Fantasque) showed the same tradition applied to different
periods and foreign countries. All these ballets reflect the bitter
social conflicts of the period (1909-19). In Petrouchka, the attempts
by the puppet to become a man are clearly symbolic of the desire
of the Russian people for a better life, and in The Three-cornered
Hat the inhabitants of the village unite to defeat the hated
Corregidor.
After the 1914-18 War the Diaghilev Company lost all con-
nection with Russia, and moved in a cosmopolitan vacuum of
hotels and opera houses. The ballets became more and more self-
consciously sophisticated and fashionable, appealing to the general
craze for novelty at all costs. After Diaghilev died in 1929, there
was a gap of several years, and then various "Russian" com-
panies were formed to carry on the tradition. During the war they
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The Modern Quarterly
have been forced to remain in America?where Massine and
Balanchine have continued to arrange the abstract ballets which
are the logical successors of the ultra-sophisticated Diaghilev
ballets: in both, content is of no importance, and all that matters
is visual spectacle.
Fortunately, the best English choreographers found inspiration
in the early Diaghilev ballets, with their strong roots in real life;
and within an astonishingly short space of time they were pro-
ducing such Novcrrian masterpieces as The Rake's Progress and
Dark Elegies. This was not the only trend; there was a contra-
dictory tendency towards an imitation of the fashionable late-
Diaghilev ballets (particularly in the works of Frederick Ashton
and Andree Howard); but until 1939 the doctrines of the abstrac-
tionists made little progress in face of the strong new English
tradition of fantastic realism.
The abstract ballets of to-day can best be understood as a
development out of the spectacular ballets of the late nineteenth
century, as performed at such theatres as the Maryinsky (St.
Petersburg), the Bolshoy (Moscow), the Scala (Milan) or the
Alhambra (Leicester Square). The connection between the two
can be clearly seen in the ballets of Luigi Manzotti (the Petipa
of Italy); the scenarii of his ballets might well refer to a sym-
phonic ballet of to-day:
"The Elements are seen struggling with each other. Gradually
they are dominated by a new force?Love. . . . Enter Man, the
Lord of Creation, who gazes in mingled astonishment and fear
upon the illimitable marvels of Nature."
In Amor (from whose scenario the above is extracted) the
choreographer used horses and elephants to add to the spectacular
effect. In The Wanderer the choreographer used layers of vari-
coloured lights, so that the dancers changed colour as they moved
up or down stage. The principle is the same in both cases, though
Ashton's methods are far more sophisticated than Manzotti's.
The theories attempting to justify purely abstract ballet will
hardly stand a moment's examination. When choreographers try
to reduce dancers to robots, mere geometric elements in a formal
pattern, they are bound to fail. All movements of the body have
emotional and ideological implications: inward movements, for
example, suggest gathering in, acceptance, etc., and movements
with the head thrown back suggest abandonment to emotions.
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Wandering into the Abstract
When there are two dancers on the stage, their relative move-
ments are full of dramatic implications, as every producer knows.
As the number of dancers increase, the dramatic tensions become
correspondingly complex. If the choreographer ignores these im-
plications, the kinesthetic images in the minds of the spectators
contradict each other, instead of building up into a single dramatic
picture, and he feels unsatisfied.
Things are not much better in near-abstract ballets with a vague
generalised content. As Lenin said, "the particular exists only in
that connection which leads to the general. The general exists
only in the particular and through the particular." Those dancers
assigned the task of representing Man with a big M are faced
with the impossible. They cannot achieve the living passionate
relation with their audience which is characteristic of all good
art unless they are given particular emotions, particular moods,
particular traits of character to portray.
Much the same is true of conflicts. In the near-abstract ballet
there is no conflict of opposites, but only a kind of pretentious
shadow boxing. (In Dante Sonata the Spirits of Light have no
independent dynamic role?they exist only to be bowled over by
the Spirits of Darkness whenever the latter appear.)
A ballet may have all the dramatic virtues of precise imagery,
powerful content, etc., without necessarily being based on an
elaborate plot, as were the great dance-dramas of the past. Dark
Elegies, for example, has a structure somewhat similar to that of
a Greek tragedy: the decisive event which determines the actions
of the characters (in this case the death of the children) has taken
place before the curtain rises, and we see only the final emotional
climax. The conflicts are internal rather than external: the various
parents struggle partly as individuals and partly as a group against
the despair which threatens to overwhelm them, and finally win
through to a mood of resignation. In this ballet universal signific-
ance is obtained in the same way as in any other great drama?
through the author's profound and sympathetic understanding of
the particular experiences of his characters.
The origins of the drama are to be found in a ritual dance, and
in the classic drama of Eastern countries the link between dance
and drama is still preserved: the words for dancer and actor are
often the same, and the dancing is just as vital to the action as
the dialogue. In the Kathakali dance-drama of Malabar the words
1 Notes on Dialectics (Klingender's translation).
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The Modern Quarterly
of the Hindu epics are chanted in Sanskrit?a dead language
incomprehensible to the audience?and, in Bali, Old Javanese is
used in the same way. The traditional dance-dramas are trans-
mitted from generation to generation with very little change, and
the dance preserves all its expressive vitality. Things are very
different in Europe, where ballets suffer considerable changes from
year to year, and are altered almost beyond recognition in a genera-
tion. In a bad period the great works of the past are either lost or
severely mangled, and offer little inspiration to rising young
choreographers. For this reason the pace of change is very rapid:
periods of decadence succeed those of creative achievement after
remarkably short periods of transition, and tend to last very much
longer. As we have seen, the ballets produced during the long
periods of decadence are lavish spectacles designed merely "to
gratify the eyes," and cannot in any true sense be described as
dance-dramas. In England the signs of decay appeared as early
as 1938, but the decline was accelerated by the War, which crushed
out of existence a number of adventurous dance groups, and
brought into existence a vast new audience unfamiliar with the
great ballets of the immediate past. To-day the ballet stage is
dominated by Petipa-style ballets and the abstract ballets which
are their twentieth-century equivalent. But there is some ground
for the belief that this period will not last fifty years, as it did in
Russia.
Some light on possible future developments in this country is
afforded by the history of ballet in Russia in the last three decades.
As already mentioned, Diaghilev found it impossible to present
any of his major works in Tsarist Russia, and after 1914 the
Diaghilev Company never returned to Russia. The result was
that Soviet choreographers were ignorant of the great achieve-
ments of Fokine and Massine, and when they tried to break
away from the Petipa tradition they succeeded only in creating
a new avante-garde formalism. During the period of experi-
mentation every style was tried out, from acrobatics to Central
European, and decors were as Cubist and constructivist as any-
thing to be seen in Paris.
These formalistic experiments failed to satisfy the public, and
the subsequent reaction was as violent as the first one: a number
of the spectacular Petipa ballets were revived, and for many
years all new ballets were in the same style. The action was
carried forward in scenes of conventional mime; the dances were
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Wandering into the Abstract
conventional enchainements of classroom steps, and were in fact
quite abstract.
Gradually, however, choreographers began to move back to the
Noverre tradition; and this tendency found expression in three
different ways.
First there was a new attitude to content. Instead of senti-
mental and artificial stories, like that of The Red Poppy (1927),
librettists devised dramatic and historically accurate plots: a good
example is The Flames of Paris (1932), which portrays some of the
most dramatic episodes of the French Revolution, and makes good
use of La Carmagnole (dance-song of the masses). Another example
is Christmas Eve (1938), based on the famous story by Gogol.
A second influence was that of folk dances. A considerable
number of ballets made use of the varied and expressive folk
dances of the non-Russian peoples of the Soviet Union: The Foun-
tains of Bakhchisarai (1934) and The Prisoner in the Caucasus
(1938) were based on poems by Pushkin. Chaboukiani (a Georgian)
became particularly expert at combining folk dancing with the
classical technique. ("In such an approach, classical ballet and
the people's choreographic art mutually enrich one another."1)
In certain of the autonomous republics (e.g. Armenia) ballets
were produced in the pure traditional style of the region.
A third influence was the study by critics and choreographers
of the work of the great maitres de ballet of the past. The writings
and ballets of Noverre were studied in detail.2 The late Yuri
Slonimsky made a penetrating analysis of the contributions to
choreography of men like Didelot, Perrot and Petipa, and showed
how they tackled (or failed to tackle) the crucial problems of
content and form.3
The trend towards a complete expression of action in terms of
dance images reached a climax in Romeo and Juliet, arranged by
Lavrovsky4 in 1940. In this ballet the choreographer entirely aban-
doned the use of pure mime, yet succeeded in finding balletic
equivalents for the rich content of Shakespeare's play?scene by
scene and even line by line. Lavrovsky's published notes on this
ballet show a profound grasp of the nature of balletic realism:
Joan Lawson, Ballet in the U.S.S.R., p. 11.
2 Cf. article on Noverre by I. I. Sollertinsky in Classic Choreography, ed. by
E. Chesnokov (Moscow, 1937).
3 Maitres de Ballet of the Nineteenth Century (summarised by Joan Lawson in
Dancing Times (London), 1939-40).
4 Lavrovsky has much in common with Tudor, who has also composed a ballet
on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
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The Modern Quarterly
"The depths of passion and ideas, the intensity of feeling
conveyed by the protagonists of Shakespeare's tragedy, demand
the fusion of Dance and Mime. . . . Mime should never descend
to trivial, commonplace, imitative gestures, but become a
genuine theatrical performance in which characters, emotion
and passion are expressed by the movements of the body."
During the war, progress in Soviet ballet was severely hampered,
and the concentration on spectacular ballets in the style of Petipa
at the Moscow Bolshoy Theatre gave casual visitors like Iris
Morley2 a misleading impression of the important trends in con-
temporary Russian ballet. Moreover Miss Morley never visited
Leningrad which still remains, as it has always been, the classical
home of Russian ballet which can be judged only by the
standards achieved here. Her descriptions of the incomparable
skill of Soviet ballerinas like Ulanova and Semyonova are of real
interest, and show how far Russian methods of training surpass
English ones, but she does not clearly distinguish between super-
colossal starring vehicles and works of art. (A much better account
is given in the S.C.R. pamphlet, Ballet in the U.S.S.R., by Joan
Lawson.)
Recent developments in England show interesting similarities
with those in the Soviet Union between the wars. As one might
expect from the experiences of men like Noverre, Perrot and
Diaghilev, the important new ballets are being produced by artists
working outside the long-established companies. Sakuntala, pro-
duced by Ernest Berk last April, was described by an expert on
Oriental dancing (Beryl de Zoete) as "the most successful attempt
hitherto made by West to meet East in the sphere of the dance."3
Like Lavrovsky, Berk translated into dancing the action, atmo-
sphere and characterisation of a great poetic drama?scene by
scene and sometimes line by line. He used several traditional
Indian styles with remarkable authority, adapting them to the
requirements of the European theatre. Sakuntala lasted a com-
plete evening, and was one of the most ambitious dance-dramas
created in England since the days of Perrot.
The Negro ballets of Berto Pasuka, first produced in May, had
such dramatic vigour and intensity of atmosphere that certain
weaknesses in the choreography and execution were almost un-
1 Quoted by C. W. Beaumont in Supplement to Complete Book of Ballets, p. 191.
2 Soviet Ballet (Collins, 15s.).
3 New Statesman and Nation, April 6th, 1946.
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Wanderin into the Abstract
noticeable. Most important were They Came (dealing with the
conflict of white and black cultures in Africa) and De Prophet
(dealing with religious and class conflicts in the West Indies).
In both these ballets the styles of dancing of the Negroes were
welded into a dramatic whole by methods perfected in European
dance-dramas. Though Pasuka's ballets are profoundly Negro in
style, just as Sakuntala is essentially Indian, both are in the main
stream of the Noverre tradition. The abstract and near-abstract
ballets, on the other hand, represent a stagnant backwater, almost
completely isolated from the main stream.
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Frederick Engels and Materialistic lEsthetics
By KURT BLAUKOPF
THE controversy on Soviet Art which has been occupying
some attention in the MODERN QUARTERLY suggests that the
moment is opportune for reviewing the fate of Engels's ideas on
art?especially his views on the relation between art and society.
Recent years have seen many attempts at Marxist interpreta-
tions of art, thus reviving the tradition, established towards the
end of the last century, by writers like G. Plechanov, A. Labriola,
F. Mehring and William Morris. But, to my mind, many of the
more recent ventures in this field suffer from over-simplification.
It is still believed, in some quarters, that Marxism is a ready-made
recipe to be "applied" to all branches of knowledge.
From a more thorough study of the writings both of Marx and
Engels, it becomes clear that the method of "applying" materi-
alistic schemes is contrary to the intention of the founders of this
school of thought.
In a letter to Engels of February 1st, 1858, Marx pointed out
that he was against any artificial application of dialectical schemes
to scientific investigation. Only through a careful criticism of facts
and the verification of previous theories could, so Marx thought, a
dialectical exposition of history be arrived at.
Holding the same views, Engels fought against any distortion of
this principle with particular vigour. In a letter to Paul Ernst of
June 5th, 1890, he condemned the idea of "fitting historical facts
into a ready-made scheme." In his opinion, it was the task of the
Marxist writer to "study history afresh." His attitude towards
over-simplification is set out very clearly in his letter to Conrad
Schmidt (August 5th, 1890):
"In general, the word materialistic serves many younger writers
in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and every-
thing is labelled without further study; they stick on this label
and then think the question disposed of. But our conception of
history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction
in the manner of the Hegelians. All history must be studied
afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of
society must be individually examined before the attempt is
made to deduce from them the political, civil-legal, wsthetic,
philosophic, religious, etc., notions corresponding to them:"
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Frederick Engels an
M terialistk 'Esthetics
It is interesting to note that this aspect of the relationship
between what is called the "superstructure" and the economic
basis of society only gained prominence in the 'nineties of the last
century. Engels, time and again, came back to it in his letters to
P. Ernst, C. Schmidt and F. Mehring. But he was frank enough to
admit that the "guilt" for a lop-sided interpretation of Materi-
alism was partly his. Thus he wrote in his letter to Mehring of
July 14th, 1893:
"We all. . . laid and were bound to lay the main emphasis at
first on the derivation of political, juridical, and other ideological
notions, and of actions arising through the mediums of these
notions from basic economic facts. But in so doing we neglected
the formal side?the way in which these notions come about?
for the sake of the content. This has given our adversaries a
welcome opportunity for misunderstandings. . . .
"So I am not only far from reproaching you with this in any
way, but as the older of the guilty parties I have no right to do
so, on the contrary; but I would like all the same to draw your
attention to this point for the future. Hanging together with this
too is the fatuous notion of the ideologists that because we deny
an independent historical development to the various ideological
spheres which play a part in history we also deny them any
effect upon history. The basis of this is the common undialectical
conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total
disregard of interaction. . . ."
Two points in the letter quoted above are of prime importance
to the student of materialistic esthetics:
(a) The necessity of taking "the formal side" into account, i.e.
the way in which ideological notions come about.
(b) The principle of "interaction" between the superstructure
and the basis of society.
It is the great merit of Antonio Labriola to have embarked on an
exposition of the meaning of these two sets of ideas (see his On
the Materialistic Conception of History, 1896). Following Engels's
ideas, Labriola pointed out the necessity of unravelling the net-
work of "interaction." This led him to the theory of factors: he
recognised that the economic factor was only responsible for
changes in other spheres in the last instance; other factors, such as
the political, legal, psychological?themselves dependent on the
economic factor?were responsible for changes in the higher spheres
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The Modern Quarterly
of the superstructure. This theory of factors was later taken up by
Plechanov, who made use of it in his famous analysis of the French
literature of the eighteenth century and of Russian literature in
the nineteenth.
Labriola and Plechanov greatly contributed to the removal of
crudities, inherent in early pseudo-Marxist interpretation of art
and literature. It must be emphasised, however, that Engels him-
self had already drawn up the plan according to which criticism
was to proceed.
In 1894, H. Starkenburg put the following question to Engels:
"To what extent do economic conditions act causally?"
In his reply, Engels wrote:
"We regard economic conditions as the factor which ultim-
ately determines historical developments. . . . Political, juridical,
philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is
based on economic development. But all these react upon
one another and also upon the economic base. It is not that the
economic position is the cause and alone active, while everything
else only has a passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the
basis of the economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts
itself."
It is clear from the above that Engels rejected the idea, according
to which works of art and literature simply mirror the economic
conditions of the society which gives them birth.
Economics and art are not directly linked to each other. Their
relationship is not in the nature of a simple equation. This, too, was
very clearly brought out by Engels in his letter to Starkenburg:
"The further the particular sphere which we are investigating
is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of
pure abstract ideology, the more shall we find it exhibiting
accidents in its development, the more will its curve run in a
zigzag. So also you will find that the axis of this curve will
approach more and more nearly parallel to the axis of the curve
of economic development the longer the period considered and
the wider the field dealt with."
Engels adhered to this view, not only in the abstract setting-out
of the process of production of artistic and literary ideas, but also in
his literary criticism. This is apparent from his remarks concern-
ing Margaret Harkness's novel, City Girl (1888).
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Frederick Engels an
(1/
Materialistic Esthetics
Although an advocate of realism in literature, he was far from
making any doctrinaire demands upon the author. He did not want
the novel to become an inventory of the author's social and
political ideas.
"The more the views of the author remain hidden, the better
for art," he wrote to Miss Harkness. For this reason, he considered
the novels of Balzac to be models of realism, where the realism of
the writer triumphed over his personal convictions.
But even socialist novelists, so Engels believed, did not have to
propound their views in novels. It is enough for them to depict
real conditions faithfully and thus destroy the conventional illu-
sions and at the same time arouse doubts concerning the eternal
validity of the existing order. This aim, he wrote to Minna Kautsky
(1885), could be attained without directly presenting the reader
with a solution of these problems and, in certain cases, even with-
out indicating where the sympathies of the author lay.
These few examples suffice to show that Engels had a far subtler
approach to the problems of literature and to msthetie problems in
general than is commonly believed. The writings of Engels contain
many a hint at the solution of problems still under discussion. This
alone would justify the publication of a comprehensive compilation
of all his utterances on vesthetic questions. Only such a collection
would enable the contemporary student to assess the significance
of Engels in this field, his influence on Continental writers and the
relationship of his ideas to those of William Morris.
The fiftieth anniversary of the death of Engels might be suitably
commemorated by inaugurating a more intensive study of his
ideas on art and literature.
(We should be glad to publish such a compilation of Engels's
utterances on (esthetic questions, or alternatively an exposition based
upon and embodying a selection of such statements. Articles and
communications on this whole topic will be welcomed.?The Editor.)
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Communications
ARTISTS AND THEIR, PUBLIC
To the Editor, MODERN QUARTERLY
rrHE interesting article by Derek Kartun in the last issue of your
-IL journal is, in a way, a supplement to Dr. Klingender's article about
"Russian Art at the Academy." Although Kartun wisely refrains from
Klingender's oversimplifications, which called forth such a lively con-
troversy, he still deplores that Picasso is "out of touch with any con-
siderable body of the people to an extent quite unprecedented in the
history of great artists and their public."
A few weeks ago there was an interesting discussion in several issues
of the Paris weekly, Les Lettres Franfaises, a review which started clandes-
tinely under the German occupation and acted as the official organ of the
National Committee of French Writers until it had to give up this func-
tion under the pressure of those French writers who took exception to
its?allegedly?predominantly Communist outlook. The discussion
centred round the question whether there was really a divorce between
art and public in post-war France. In his article, Kartun answers this
question in the affirmative. He also refers to the activities of the writer
Jean Cassou. This same Jean Cassou also made his contribution to the
discussion initiated by Les Lettres Franfaises, and it may be of some
interest to confront his views with those of Kartun. What he says reads
in translation as follows:
"The problem of divorce between art and public has emerged during
the whole nineteenth century and during our beginning of the twen-
tieth century. It is the strange adventure of French art which has
pursued its course while astonishing the average public. A separation
has taken place between art and the average and official taste and, at
the same time, between art and what people have called 'reality'?
which is rather the average conception of reality which these people
have. There is therefore no divorce between art and reality, but
between art and the conception of this reality which the average
bourgeoisie have created for themselves.
"What has determined this average conception? It comes from
certain Italian pictures. It constitutes esthetics, which go from Italian
painting to calendar polychromes, the whole being codified by the
official exhibitions, the 'Ecole des Beaux-Arts,' and the Rome Prize.
"Since Ingres there has been a conflict between living art (Ingres,
Delacroix, Gauguin, Cezanne) and these testhetics of the vulgar.
"How to react? One must accustom the French public by exhibi-
tions, criticisms, and studies to become conscious of an art which has
contributed to the prestige of French civilisation."
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Communications
It may interest your readers to know that the man who professes such
views is not only a distinguished art critic, novelist, poet, and essayist,
but a Marxist who, incidentally, played a leading part in the
Resistance Movement.
It is, of course, neither possible nor my intention to comment in a
short letter on the divergence of Kartun's and Cassou's opinions. The
question actually raised is how the artist who must rely on symbols (not
on words), i.e. the painter and sculptor as well as the composer, can and
should make himself understood to a public which no longer (or not yet)
speaks a common language?that means which does not possess such
common symbols. This question is, of course, not new, but arises always
during periods of decisive social changes. It is only the fact that the
social changes which we are witnessing are particularly deep and
elemental which acerbates this problem in the realm of arts and, con-
sequently, in the field of criticism. It makes it, to my belief, all the more
imperative to be very careful in giving advice to artists?particularly to
real artists and to genuinely progressive ones?which may prove
impracticable in present circumstances. "The sense of being in tune with
society . . . which lies at the bottom of the flowering of Renaissance
Italy" cannot possibly be achieved in a society which is out of tune with
itself. I appreciate that the path between the Scylla of the formal
anarchy of the would-be revolutionary and the Charybdis of the "Sanity
in Art" academician is slippery and dangerous. But the art critic who
wants to give a lead to his readers should be aware of the fact that
mortal peril lurks on both sides.
RUDOLU POPPER.
MARXISM AND MODERN ECONOMICS
To the Editor, MODERN QUARTERLY
TOHN GOLLAN'S reply to Mr. Worswick is rather unfortunate,
J not because Worswick's essay is beyond criticism, but because
Gollan in attempting a Marxist criticism reveals an incorrect under-
standing of the Marxian theory of crises. In particular he expounds a
rather crude under-consumption theory, with which Marx had very
little in common. In the Marx-Engels Correspondence (p. 153) Marx
shows that in "simple reproduction," a position of equilibrium can be
obtained in which the demand for consumption goods will equal the
supply of consumption goods. Similar conditions are proved to be
possible for expanded reproduction in Volume II of Capital. This posi-
tion is only possible if the correct relationship is maintained between the
consumer goods industry and the production goods industry, and only
if the activity of the production goods industry is maintained at a
sufficiently high level. This obviously has a marked connection with the
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The Modern Quarterly
Keynesian theory of investment as a regulator of the level of
employment.
On the attitude of Marx to the under-consumption theory the follow-
ing extract from Capital (p. 475) is sufficient:
"It is purely a tautology to say that crises are caused by the scarcity
of solvent customers or of paying consumption. . . . If any commo-
dities are unsaleable it means that no solvent purchasers have been
found for them, in other words, consumers (whether commodities are
bought in the last instance for productive or individual consumption).
But if one were to attempt to clothe this tautology with a semblance
of a profounder justification by saying that the working class receive
too small a portion of their own product, and the evil would be
remedied by giving them a larger share of it, or raising their wages,
we should reply that crises are precisely always preceded by a period
in which wages rise generally and the working class actually get a
larger part of the annual product intended for production."
Gollan appears to accept just such an over-simplified under-consump-
tion theory and to overlook that investment in the production goods
industry increases the consuming power of society, and may even be
more than sufficient to meet the supply of consumption goods on the
market.
Maurice Dobb, in his Political Economy and Capitalism, gives an
account of the Marxian theory of crises which clearly shows that, though
a crisis may manifest itself as "relative overproduction," or "ineffective
demand," it is not correct to end the analysis at that stage.
Regarding Mr. Worswick's essay, I would disagree with his statement
that there are no inherent economic contradictions in a full employment
capitalist system. I would maintain that it would be politically impos-
sible to implement the full policy that follows from the Keynesian theory
(i.e. extensive investment either directly by public authorities or en-
couragement to private industry, re-distribution of the national income
in order to increase the marginal propensity to consume and hence
increase the multiplier, opposition to wage reductions, control of bank-
ing policy and the rate of interest), and still leave the major industries of
the country in the hands of the capitalist class. It is not possible to take
away their economic power with one hand and give it back to them with
the other. The very nature of the capitalist system makes each individual
capitalist look after his own interest regardless of the general interest of
society, and even at times regardless of the collective interests of
capitalists as a class. If a disturbance developed in one section of indus-
try, it could only be tackled after the event, and even then the individual
capitalist or capitalists would regard their own interest uppermost, and
this might not coincide with the interest of society.
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The Keynesian theory for maintaining full employment, even if we
believed it possible of full implementation in a capitalist society, would
therefore not end economic contradictions.
J. E. MORTIMER.
To the Editor, MODERN QUARTERLY.
THE purpose of my article in the December issue was "to sketch
in barest outlines these recent developments (in academic
economics) and to suggest that they have an important bearing on the
struggle for socialism." On re-reading it, I think I did more or less what
I set out to do. But I am not at all clear what Mr. Gollan is after in his
article "Is 'Modern Economics' Adequate?"
The bulk of his article is devoted to a criticism of the analysis con-
tained in Beveridge's Full Employment in a Free Society, a somewhat
disingenuous choice of a handbook of modern economics, since the book
was written in a popular style for a wide public. Mr. Gollan implies
throughout that I agree with Beveridge's formulations, and finally takes
a passage from my own article out of its context and, by so doing, com-
pletely misrepresents my position. May I quote the passage in full:
"There are no inherent economic contradictions in such a full employ-
ment capitalist system. All that is required is the will on behalf of the
Government to pursue the right fiscal policy, and it would appear that the
capitalists should be as much in favour of such a policy as the workers."
Mr. Gollan comments: "Nothing is further from reality . . . it is an
illusion to think that the powerful British capitalist class are enamoured
with full employment theories." But I made exactly this point in the
very next paragraph of my own article, which begins: "There is, how-
ever, an unexplained residue in the analysis of capitalism by the modern
economists and the policy which flows from it. Why were the capitalists
in the United States so violently hostile to the New Deal, a mild expan-
sionist policy, etc.?" I tried to give an answer in terms not unlike those
used by Mr. Gollan himself. Why is he so anxious to confuse the issue?
The same tendency to confuse rather than to clarify is apparent in
Mr. Gollan's treatment of the cause of capitalist crisis. He dismisses the
Keynesian analysis of the interrelation of decisions to save and decisions
to invest, asserting that: "The great bulk of capital accumulation or
savings is the movement of capital within a given concern." How then
can increasing "indebtedness" be adduced as a contributory factor
making for the breakdown of a boom? Mr. Gollan overlooks the incon-
sistency.' He sums up his own position by quoting the passage from
1 Indeed, Mr. Gollan wants it all ways in his treatment of the finance of investment.
It is true, as he says, that in Britain a great part of industrial investment is financed
out of undistributed profits: the role of the new issue market is small. Why, then,
all the fuss about the Capital Issues Committee during the war? Non-essential private
investment was prevented, not by financial controls, but by direct physical controls
of raw materials and labour.
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Capital: "The last cause of all real crises always remains the poverty and
restriction of consumption of the masses, as compared to the impulse of
capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the
absolute power of consumption of society were their limit." But this is
only half the picture. If capitalists were always willing to invest (irre-
spective of expected profitability) then effective demand would be main-
tained and there would be no crisis. Such a system of steady capital
accumulation with consumption at a very low level might be futile, but
it would not break down. To complete the picture of the crisis, we must
also introduce the theory of the inducement to invest, based upon the
expectation of profit, which in turn is related to effective demand and
the stock of capital.
Mr. Gollan says of the analysis of the modern economists: "Through-
out, investment or consumption are treated as if it didn't matter
whether expenditure is on one or the other." Since, in another context,
lie quotes Mr. Kalecki from p. 53 of the Economics of Full Employment,
it is a pity he did not turn to the treatment of the long-run problem
half a dozen pages earlier. Mr. Kalecki points out that: "Private invest-
ment must be at a level adequate to expand the capacity of equipment
pari passu with the increase in working population and productivity of
labour, i.e. proportionately to full employment output." That the main-
tenance of this required level of private investment in a predominantly
private enterprise system presents practical difficulties is undeniable.
But one may well ask why Mr. Gollan implied that modern economists
had not even thought of the theoretical problem.
If Mr. Gollan plays fast and loose with modern economic theory, he
is also not always careful about his facts. About the boom he says for
example that: "Wages can rise, but never keep pace with, and are
always behind the rise in production." Here Mr. Gollan keeps company
with the orthodox perfect competition theorists. The facts, however,
show no such tendency. By a curious coincidence, I cited this case as an
example of the beneficial effect which an increasing knowledge of the
facts has had in clearing away a good deal of controversial lumber. I
was too optimistic!
I am not anxious simply to score points off Mr. Gollan. His article
provides many opportunities, but rejoinders should be short, and in any
case the subject is too important for that kind of controversy. Modern
economics is not perfect: there is substance in the criticism that in recent
years too much attention has been paid to short-run theory at the
expense of the equally fundamental long-run, dynamic analysis. But
whatever the theory it must submit to the test?and it is no easy one
in any social science?of an appeal to the facts. The approach must be,
and in my view is becoming, more scientific. Mr. Gollan, however, prefers
to plant himself firmly in the nineteenth century and to refuse to
acknowledge what is happening around him. If he must do this, Capital
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is a good place to stand in, but I suggest that there are better ways of
finding the solutions to the problems of our time.
G. D. N. WORSWICK.
To the Editor, MODERN QUARTERLY.
IF WOULD be the last to deny that recent developments in academic
-11- economics are worthy of serious study and analysis by Socialists.
My article, concentrating as it did on the question of full employment,
only touched on the fringe of the many important issues raised.
But is my choice of Beveridge so disingenuous? Style has little to do
with the issue. Full Employment in a Free Society was presented as a
report, which under other circumstances would have been issued by the
Government. It is an attempt on the basis of modern economic theory,
to present practical proposals for full employment. No doubt Mr.
Worswick will not agree with all Beveridge writes, but would he disagree
with the substantial correctness of my claim? Mr. Kalecki's contribution
in the Oxford Institute study, The Economics of Full Employment, is
animated by the same general principles underlying Beveridge's work,
although, of course, there are differences.
These points apart, Mr. Worswick returns to the crux of the matter
by repeating his claim that there are no inherent economic contradic-
tions in a full employment capitalist system and all that is needed is the
will on the part of the Government to pursue a correct fiscal policy.
Mr. Worswick seems to agree that a state of affairs in which capitalists
were willing to invest irrespective of profit expectations, effective
demand being maintained and crises avoided, is completely unreal.
The key point of Marxian economics is that capitalist production is for
profit and not for use. Marx's theory of crisis had this basic idea as its
starting point. Consumption in a capitalist society takes place within
this limiting factor. But the realisation of profit depends in the long run
on consumption. This is the contradiction, the point of stress and
ultimate breakdown in the system. It is applicable to, and the under-
lying cause of, not only the trade cycle or short-term movement, but the
long-run economic dynamics of capitalism so accurately foretold by
Marx.
From this point of view "steady capital accumulation with consump-
tion at a very low level" is not only futile, as stated by Mr. Worswick,
but impossible. Any capital accumulation in capitalist society brings
with it the contradiction of its property relationships, the profit motives
of the capitalist and the consumption needs of the masses, the contra-
diction ultimately between production and consumption. From this it is
clear that it is the opposite of Marxist economic theory to say that profit
expectation of the capitalist plays no role in the crises. Our point is that
these expectations are decided by market conditions, and under capit-
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alism these conditions are the result of the contradictory forces we have
described above.
(In passing, just a note about what Mr. Worswick claims is my
"inconsistency." Beveridge advanced rising tension as a result of
increasing indebtedness in boom conditions as a factor making for
crises. My treatment of this point was in the background that the
"greatest single item" in capital accumulation would be industrial
profits. As to the fuss?surely the reason is obvious. Fiscal controls alone
are inadequate, and proves our whole case, that the matter is not one of
fiscal policy alone.)
It is from this point of view that the relationship between investment
and consumption must be studied. True I did not quote Kalecki, but I
did quote Beveridge that the real reason for a state sector in the economy
was not to destabilise it to fit in with the instability of private invest-
ment "but in order to make a steady development on a long-term pro-
gramme possible over a longer field." Of course, Mr. Kalecki and others
deal in a realistic way with the investment level necessary to maintain
full employment, but the explosive nature of modern production and the
need for planned correlation between production and consumption is not
made a central point. Again, I would advance Socialist economic experi-
ence. The latest five-year plan of the U.S.S.R. envisages a 50 per cent.
increase in industrial output, a national income increase of 38 per cent.
and an increase in annual average wages by 48 per cent. This is the
experience of a society built without profit motives.
The point at issue is not that modern economics does not deal with
these things or that Mr. Worswick and his friends do not see the resist-
ance of the capitalist class. Starting from the Keynesian premise, their
entire approach is lopsided. The central issue is that their aim is to
maintain profitability and thus to keep the capitalist system working.
What they do not see is that so long as capitalist production continues
it is constantly creating conditions of crises in which full employment
becomes unreal. In so far as the problem of full employment in modern
society can even be partially solved this is only by a struggle against
the profit system. The ultimate solution is Socialism. Socialism, the out-
come of Marxist economics, is very much twentieth century, in spite of
Mr. Worswick's quips to the contrary.
Mr. Worswick raises a very important final point regarding wages: the
share of national income and important new work in this direction. The
new studies do not disprove my point. What they do prove is that the
increased capitalist share is a temporary one and is brought down again
to roughly its former level as a result of the laws of capitalist production,
including crises and the class struggle. This is a bigger subject, however,
which must be reserved for fuller subsequent treatment.
J. GOLLAN.
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I.
eviews
PRUSSIANISM AND NAZISM
The following article is based on an article by Georg Lukacs in
the Soviet periodical, International Literature (Moscow). D. M.
Van Abbe prepared a translated version of this for the MODERN
QUARTERLY, but it was considered that British readers would need
both simplification and elucidations. As Mr. Van Abbe is out of
Britain, I have undertaken to provide a new version, and am par-
ticularly glad to have the opportunity of paying in this way a tribute
to Lukacs, one of the most profound of Marxist literary critics.
My version reproduces the main lines of Lukacs' article; and
while the introduction has been entirely rewritten, the analysis
of the works of Kleist, Fontane, and Mann follows as closely as
may be that of Lukacs.?R. P.
HE failure of the Revolution of 1848 marks one of the disastrous
turning-points in German history. The German middle class, for
the moment triumphant, ceded their power into the hands of the
Prussian and Austrian monarchy, partly out of fear of the German
masses, and partly out of an imperialist ambition to maintain and
extend German dominion over the eastern nationalities, Poles, Czechs,
Hungarians, over the Italians, too. From the moment of failure, the
German bourgeoisie began to appeal more and more to the Prussian king
to impose unity on Germany by force, as an alternative to the achieve-
ment of unity through popular revolution, in spite of the fact that,
almost without exception, the liberal middle class detested the Prussian
form of government, "Prussianism," which meant autocracy, Junker-
dom, militarism, bureaucracy. When at length, under Bismarck,
Prussia conquered Germany, it received the enthusiastic support of the
liberals. A Germany was fashioned in which Prussia held an over-
whelming power, and in which Prussianism became the dominant
outlook.
Prussianism arises from a combination of elements.1 Its admirers (for
instance, Thomas Mann in his early period, or Moeller van den 13ruck)
would define it as an ideal of duty to the State, or of duty in the abstract.
In this sense its characteristic product is the incorruptible officialdom so
admired by Hegel, an officialdom which strictly carries out its orders
and in times of good leadership is very efficient and energetic, but which
is also rigid and inflexible and unable to meet unforeseen difficulties and
to act independently. Such an officialdom is necessarily connected with
absolutism, for its orders emanate from an unquestioned authority.
1 For a description of Prussianism in its modern form, see S. D. Stirk, The Prussian
Spirit, 19r4-40. Faber, 1941.
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Frederick the Great first fashioned this bureaucracy. That it achieved
such excellence in Prussia must be attributed, not only to the efficiency
to the Prussian ruling class, but, perhaps more particularly, to the fact
that Prussia, from the time of Frederick the Great to that of Bismarck,
was the only German state to win new territory?Silesia, Poland, the
Rhinelands, and in 1866 a whole group of German states?where the
Prussian bureaucracy gained its schooling as a sort of colonial adminis-
tration.
But Prussia was never a centralised monarchy, such as, for instance,
France. The Junkers played an essential part in the formation of the
concept of Prussianism, and they were landowners with a large measure
of independence. In the country districts cast of the Elbe, lands which
had been conquered from the Slays over many centuries, the barons and
squires retained up to 1918 some of the freedoms of lords of the marches.
Though some modifications were introduced in 1872, the Junkers were
outside a few larger towns the magistrates, heads of the police, the chief
employers, patrons of the Churches, and the leading figures in local and
provincial assemblies. The entourage of the king was chosen from their
ranks, and the whole corps of officers was reserved for the Junkers.
Prussia was ruled, in effect, by an alliance of king and Junkers, in which
both sides made concessions. But the Junkers never became a court
aristocracy; they remained firmly rooted in their native soil, crude and
uncultured hobbledehoys, shrewdly conscious of their class interests.
The fourth main factor of Prussianism, alongside the autocracy, the
bureaucracy, and the Junkers, was the Army. A military state from the
outset (the March of Brandenburg was the nucleus of Prussia, and East
Prussia had been won by the Teutonic Knights), Prussia's rise and
expansion had depended on an Army whose size was out of all proportion
to the size and prosperity of the country. Two characteristics are here
to be observed. First, a cult of militarism built a myth of the Army as
the heart of the State, a cult which enabled the German rulers to keep
the Army as their direct instrument, uncontrolled by Parliament, right
up to 1918 (cf. the classic view of the Junkers, put by the Junker leader,
Oldenburg-Januschau, that "the Kaiser, as commander-in-chief, must
be able to command a lieutenant to take ten men and shut the Reich-
stag"); and second, the army was the exclusive sphere of influence of the
Junkers, who monopolised the officer corps and fashioned its outlook.
Though the slogan of "duty" was never off their lips, the officers under-
stood it in a peculiar way?as duty to the king and government in so
far as the traditional interests of the Junkers and army were furthered.
During the Napoleonic occupation of Prussia, under Bismarck and
William II, as under the Weimar Republic, the Army leaders often
intrigued against their rulers in the interest of their own ideal of class.
This whole concept and practice of Prussianism implied that the
middle class was weak and pliant. The backwardness of the middle class
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left the Prussian kings of the eighteenth century with no alternative to
an alliance with the Junkers; and the peculiar course of German history
in the nineteenth century enabled king and Junkers to maintain this
dominance, to find, in fact, allies in an imperialistic bourgeoisie fearful
of the Socialist masses. Bismarck himself complained of the lack of
"civil courage" among the middle class; Prussianism was the ideology of
a people afraid of self-government, and finding a compensation in the
glorification of power.
It is not difficult to see the connection between the Prussianised
German State and the Nazi State; everyone knows of the contribution
to the rise of Hitlerism made by the Army leaders, the high officials, the
judges of Prussian Germany. At the same time there was always a
tension between the aristocratic, duty-bound, traditionalist Prussian
and the plebeian Nazi; above all, the reserve and discipline of the
"Prussian spirit" contrasts strongly with the fanaticism and emotion-
alism of the Nazi. This contrast is being exploited now in the Nurnberg
Trial, where Army leaders and high officials make the most of this ten-
sion. Can we find any connection between the Prussian and the Nazi
spirit? Here a closer study is necessary of the Prussian, and remarkable
insight into this problem is afforded by the evidence given by three of
Germany's greatest writers, Heinrich von Kleist, Theodor Fontane, and
Thomas Mann; the first a Junker himself, the second a middle-class
Prussian, the third in his middle life an admirer of the Prussian spirit
and the author of an appreciative study of Frederick the Great.
Kleist (1777-1811) wrote his great plays in the period of Prussia's
humiliation at the hands of Napoleon. Bred to the Army, he left it during
the period of the uneasy peace with France, out of disgust with its brutal
discipline and coarse spirit. Forced by the occupation of Prussia to
affirm the claims of the State, he entered into political journalism, wrote
a violent anti-French propaganda play, and another, Prince Frederick of
Homburg, his most famous work, which centres in the problem of the
relations of individual and State. Despairing of his own future and that
of his country, he committed suicide just before Napoleon's Russian
adventure.
Lukacs properly calls The Prince of Homburg "the drama of the Prus-
sian spirit." It deals with the victory at Fehrbellin (1675) over the
Swedes, when the founder of the greatness of Prussia, the Great Elector
of Brandenburg, assured his country's predominance in north Germany.
The Prince is a cousin of the Elector, a Junker brought up to military
service. In command of the cavalry in the battle, he charges before the
signal is given by the supreme commander, and, though the victory is
won, it is not so decisive as it would have been had he obeyed orders. Ile
is acclaimed as the victor; but the Elector has him brought before a
court-martial. The Prince, with typical Junker arrogance, cannot
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believe the Elector to be in earnest; but when he sees his grave being
dug, he collapses into abysmal terror and begs the Elector's wife and
niece to intercede for his life. The Elector puts the decision into his own
hands; and at last Frederick gains a true view of his responsibility. lie
accepts his death as a necessity of State, and goes willingly to his fate
"to glorify the sacred law of war." In the moment of acceptance, he is
released; he faints, and as he comes to the officers standing by cry: "To
arms! To battle! Down with all enemies of Brandenburg!"
The play is normally held to be a glorification of the State of Prussia;
yet in Kleist's time and in the succeeding decades, it could not be per-
formed in Prussia owing to the protests of the Junkers. For one thing, it
was considered to be a slur on the Junker class that the Prince should
debase himself so deeply out of fear of execution; for another, Kleist
portrays him at the beginning of the play as a sleep-walker, who cannot
distinguish truth from his delusions, and at the end as a man so trans-
ported by his emotions that he is carried away by his ardour for self-
sacrifice, and faints when he is told he is pardoned. He is in fact a
morbid character. Serious critics have censured Kleist for this "irrele-
vant" conception, yet here more than anywhere else is Kleist's intuitive
genius evident. For the play is Prussian, not merely because it glorifies
the Prussian State, but even more because it shows the "internal
contraditions of the Prussian spirit" (Lukacs).
The problem is expressed in the Prince's words:
"The laws of war, I know, must rule supreme,
But would the tender feelings could as well."
In his character, the tension between subjective individualism and the
claims of the State comes to breaking point.' The acceptance of "duty"
as the overriding ethic implies a resistance within the individual which
takes a morbid, violent, nihilistic form. This Kleist felt in himself; for this
he was an outsider in his own time. His play dissolves the illusion of the
security and psychological naturalness of the Prussian subservience to
State; it shows its instability?and for that reason had to be rejected
by the upholders of this morality.
Theodor Fontane (1819-98), a Prussian of middle-class origin, a man
of a placid, humorous character, and perhaps the most distinguished
realistic German novelist, approaches the Prussian problem from a
totally different point of view from Kleist. Disillusioned by the behaviour
of the middle class during 1848, he found a compensation in dwelling in
1 Many examples of this tension can be adduced. The Prussian Fichte was perhaps
the most subjective and passionate of philosophers; yet in his Enclosed Commercial
State he constructed the most rigid and authoritarian ideal of a State ever known.
The authoritarian Prussian Junkers of the early nineteenth century, Gerlach, Senfft
von Pilsach, etc., were adherents at one time or another of most emotional, pietist
communities. In our own day the Prussian officer Ernst Jiinger, who preached the
ideal of an authoritarian State modelled on the Army, is also an excessive individualist
who finds in dreams the most profound truth.
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his ballads on feudal subjects, and then, coming nearer home, sought for
the sources of Prussian greatness in the homes of the Brandenburg
Junkers (Journeys through the Mark of Brandenburg, 1861 ff). He began
writing his novels in the late 1870's, and it is on these that his true fame
rests. The most important deal with the Junkers of the nineteenth cen-
tury. As the class which brought Prussia and then Germany to greatness,
he does not question their importance; but his honesty and shrewdness
do not allow him to idealise them. Just as he turned more and more, in
the last decade of his life, to radicalism, even to sympathy with the Social
Democrats, so his novels show the problematicalness of the Prussian
ethic of "duty," the conflict between this rigid and mechanical code of
morals and the claims of real personality.
As Lukacs puts it:
"Fontane found behind the sometimes dazzling, frequently decent
and always 'correct' Prussian exterior an interior of irresponsibility,
resigned despair, and sentimental or calculating cynicism. Values
withered, real love was trampled on, duelling deaths abounded, lives
were destroyed?all without real conviction either of Good or Evil."
His early works display Prussian splendour; his best and latest offer
"a (normally gentle) sarcasm of Junker corruption and decay."
A good example is his novel, Schach von Wuthenow (1882), a tale of
the Prussia of 1806, just before the disastrous war with Napoleon. The
hero, a Junker who is a colonel in an elite Prussian regiment, seduces on
a momentary whim a society girl whom, from motives of vanity, he does
not want to marry. The mother presses him, his King, on being appealed
to, orders him to marry her; without a great struggle, he conforms to
the claims of duty and marries her. Immediately after the ceremony
he shoots himself. This tale, which could easily have been taken for a
contemporary incident, gains added force as a symbol of the hollowness
of the Prussian ruling class on the eve of the collapse before Napoleon,
intimations of which Fontane weaves into his plot.
The common run of officers is shown to be brutal, licentious, coarse,
cynical. They parody Luther's marriage with the former nun, Catherine
Bora, in a riotous nocturnal procession. Schach himself refuses his par-
ticipation, but at the sant- time he refuses to put a stop to a proceeding
which shocks his religious and moral feelings. On hearing of Schach's
proposed marriage, the officers issue crude caricatures indicating that
Schach really loves the beautiful mother of his pock-marked fianc?
This is the class background to which Schach, himself a serious and
honourable Junker and officer, is unquestioningly loyal. His suicide is
as much motivated by his subjection to his comrades' views as it is by
the fear of what the King and the more responsible Junkers will say on
seeing him married to an ugly woman?though he recognises that the
girl is intelligent and spiritually attractive as well as charming.
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The moral is pointed at the end by an officer, who, critical and dis-
satisfied, is the only character to suggest that the traditions of Frederick
the Great are ruining Prussia. Commenting on Schach's suicide he
writes:
"It is a sign of the times which. . . could occur in this form only in
the capital of His Royal Highness the King of Prussia, or, if any-
where else, only in the ranks of our Army which lives on the Frederi-
cian tradition?an Army in which honour has turned into conceit,
and the soul into a clockwork machine. . . . This false conception of
honour makes us dependent on the most unreliable and arbitrary thing
in life--the judgment of society, built on shifting sands?and to this
social idol we sacrifice the noblest and most natural instincts. Schach
has fallen a victim to this cult of a false honour, which is nothing but
vanity and perversity. . . . These illusory values, which have ruined
Schach, will destroy us as a nation."
If Fontane stands out above his contemporaries for his insight and
candour, so does Thomas Mann in the following generation. And Mann
too had to wrestle with the "Prussian problem." In his war writings,
1914 to 1918, Mann shows himself a fervent admirer of Prussia, of
authoritarianism as against democracy; and he wrote a eulogistic study
of Frederick the Great. But running through many of his most important
works is the theme of the conflict between the claims of ordinary social
life and the nihilistic, chaotic forces within man?particularly evident in
the artist. In his masterpiece, the short story, Death in Venice (1913),
this conflict finds an expression which can be considered as the anatomy
of Prussianism.
The hero, the writer Aschenbach, is the son of a high official in
Prussian Silesia. "His ancestors were officers, judges, administrators,
men who had spent their rigid, decently meagre lives in the service of
their king. Inner spirituality had once broken out in the family in the
person of a preacher." His father had married the daughter of a Czech
musician (this also we can take to be indicative of the tension in the
family character); and Aschenbach's artistic character arises from this
"marriage of the sober conscientiousness of service with darker, more
ardent impulses."
As an artist, Aschenbach is indeed the idealisation of the Prussian.
He serves invisible values, but above all he serves?Mann calls his work
"a rigid, cold, and passionate service"?and "his whole being as set on
fame." He writes about super-sensual decisions and judgments?but he
is also the author of a prose epic on the life of Frederick the Great. He had
renounced feeling and joy, his God was discipline, his strength the
strength of weakness, passive resistance to the forces of decay, corrup-
tion, chaos which hide beneath "the empty and severe service of form"
or which issue in specious self-idealisation of one kind or another.
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When the novel opens, Asehenbach is a man of fifty. He feels that his
long struggle for self-control has made him tired, that he can hardly
maintain it. He starts on a journey of escape, intending to "loaf round
the world." But, on the way to Venice, he sees a beautiful boy, the
symbol of all that na? and natural beauty from which he had shut
himself off. He cannot tear himself away from contemplation of the lad;
he begins to follow him everywhere, his infatuation gains on him as,
symbolically, cholera spreads in the city. An accident prevents him from
carrying out his intention of breaking away from the spell; and a dream
in which he succumbs to bacchantic obscenities and blood lust completes
his moral collapse. Death supervenes on his moral decay. There is a
remarkable consistency in the evidence on the Prussian character offered
by these three writers, Kleist, Fontane, and Mann. Note that they are
generally recognised to be in the first flight of German imaginative
writers and are particularly distinguished for their insight into the
human soul. Note, too, that all, when they wrote the works referred to
above, were sympathetic to Prussia and Prussianism. The average
Prussian, particularly the average Junker, did not like their analysis; he
preferred the crude idealisation of Army life, of the squirearchy, such as
are to be found in the novels of fifth-rate authors like Wildenbruch, or
in the recent account of Cadet Corps life by the Free Corps man, Ernst
von Solomon (Die Kadetten). Or the more intellectual Prussian, like
Ernst Jiinger, observes two contradictory sets of values, one, Prus-
sianism, valid in the outer, socio-political world, the other applying to
the inner, private world, subjective, emotional, or what you will. But
the greatness of the three authors lies in that they recognised the con-
tradieations and tensions within Prussianism, they show what are its
implications. All show, in particular, how easily this Prussian code of
formal honour and duty, of discipline, can collapse when it comes into
collision with real human relationships, upon the perversion of which it
is built.
They have different "solutions." Kleist's hero finds reconciliation with
duty not on the plane of self-control so much as on the plane of ardent
worship of the State; he does not gain stability, he falls into a passion of
exaltation?the play fittingly closes with a call to battle. Fontane leaves
us before the dilemma of a ruling class whose ethic is hollow and barren.
Mann leaves us appalled at the chaos which Prussian discipline can only
temporarily cover over. And in Mann's writings of the last war we see
further considerations of this problem. In his Betrachtungen eines
Unpolitischen, Mann, while attacking the democracies of the West,
defended the authoritarian State as being essentially German; he
rejected scornfully the idea that the masses are "of age" and have the
right to participate in government; and he painted a lurid picture of the
decadence of democratic Europe, from which Germany could be rescued
only by authoritarianism and discipline. This is essentially the same
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The Modern Quarterly
theme as in Death in Venice. Yet here, in the imaginative work, the
decadence was within the authoritarian system, the dialectical com-
panion of self-discipline; and Mann himself spoke of the German's
characteristic "sympathy with death," of the "fascination of decom-
position."
In espousing the cause of democracy, of humanitarianism, Mann
began to find a way out of this vicious circle. In his great novel, The
Magic Mountain (1924), he symbolised the struggle of the forces of life
with those of death and decomposition; and now he clearly identified life
with democracy, death and decomposition with romantic, authoritarian
anti-democracy. As yet, however, Mann was not completely convinced
in either direction?he saw too clearly the weakness of the old democratic
philosophy as contrasted with the romantic anti-capitalism which
invested authoritarianism with an aura. It was only later that he
learned, through recognition of the character of "imperialistic capital
and international capitalism," to appreciate democracy as a living
process, a step which made him a leading exponent of the unity of
democratic forces against Nazism (1930) and a powerful and incisive
spokesman against Hitlerisna since that date. Equally, by 1930, he
realised the fundamental identity of the philosophies exalting the
irrational instincts with the theory and practice of authoritarianism (in
his essay, "The position of Freud in Modern Thought" in Die Forderung
des Tages, 1930).1 In a society where all have access to the work they can
do and to self-government, where class barriers are overcome, where
irrational and hidden forces are mastered and society becomes subject
to the conscious will of the collectivity, the tension between irrational
individualism and authoritarianism is overcome.
The work of our three authors, particularly the development of
Mann's ideas, throws light on an important aspect of the relationship
between Prussianism and Nazism. We see that in Prussianism there lie,
suppressed but always threatening to erupt, those forces of chaotic
violence, lawlessness, brutality, which in Nazism come to the surface as
a philosophy of society. The "nihilism" of the Nazis, defined in their
deeds as in the works of Rauschning and others, is not the reverse of
Prussianism; or rather, it is the dialectical opposite, the hellish twin of
Prussianism. Prussianism, i.e. authoritarianism, breeds this nihilism, is
fed on it, is necessary because of it. And Nazism cannot be overcome by
restoring a strong authority, as many of the old conservatives of Ger-
many, from the Catholics to Ernst ?Ringer, would suggest. It can be
overcome only by the emergence of a true and radical democracy,
which creates the conditions under which the individual finds a produc-
tive outlet for his energies, and in so doing dissolves the tension between
1 It may, indeed, be said that the outbreaks of literary I3ohemlanism, amoralism,
cultural anarchism, which have occurred in this century in a most violent form
in Germany are not evidence of the liberation of the individual, but are funda-
mentally compatible with authoritarianism.
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instinct and reason, anarchy and duty, the individual and the State.
Germany has, for the last hundred years, been faced by what Lukacs
calls a "false dilemma"; advance can come only through abolishing (in a
Hegelian sense) the two antitheses which have held its people in thrall.
ROY PASCAL.
Essays on Growth and Form presented to D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson.
Edited by W. E. LE GROS CLARK and P. B. MEDAWAR. Oxford,
1945. 21s.
T?THIS volume of essays marks the completion by one of the greatest
-I- figures in modern zoology of sixty years as a professor. It contains
twelve contributions on a variety of aspects of a vast subject, the whole
of which D'Arcy Thompson mastered. The book is really for professional
zoologists, a good deal of it intelligible only to a specialist on growth or
development, and for that audience it is of first-rate importance. But it
has also, it seems to me, an interest for a wider public in that it
illuminates certain important aspects of the recent history and the
immediate future of zoological science.
Immensely important as the Darwinian theory of evolution was in
unifying zoology, it had a less valuable side. It opened a gap in method
and outlook between the main stream of zoology and the physical
sciences at a time when the swift advance of the latter would have made
close collaboration fruitful. For social reasons discussed in Prenant's
valuable book on Darwin, the greatest outburst of research energy
touched off by Darwinism was in the German universities. There atten-
tion was concentrated on proving the theory up to the hilt by the means
readiest to hand: the establishment of relationships of evolutionary
descent between animals by intensive search for similarities in their
post-mortem structure, both adult and embryonic. An immense edifice of
evolutionary comparative morphology grew up. And such was the
prestige gained by the quantity and quality of the output from the
German schools that comparative morphology, deferentially- assisted by
a few servitor sciences such as heredity, seemed to many at that time to
comprise the whole of scientific zoology. The analysis of living animals
as functioning structures, as ,ordered systems of processes, an analysis
which is perfectly compatible with a Darwinian approach, seemed unim-
portant. The form of an animal, including the embryonic growth which
culminates in the adult form, were felt to be adequately explained simply
by discovering the ancestry of the animal; and for that a description of
shape and structure was enough. I have myself heard a famous zoologist
of that generation say that all experiment introduces abnormality, and
cannot therefore contribute to our knowledge of animals. With such an
attitude this great stream of zoology, the momentum of which persisted
up to the First World War, was obviously uninterested in problems
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The Modern Quarterly
where any collaboration with the physical sciences was possible. It took
zoologists very far from the causal analysis practised in the physical
sciences.
D'Arcy Thompson's greatness in the world of zoology lies partly, it
seems to me, in that he broke through this isolationism of zoology, and
at a receptive time. In 1917 he published a famous book, On Growth and
Form, in which he assembled a great deal of scattered and neglected
earlier work, and contributed much more of his own thought, on the
application of mathematics and physics to problems of animal form. By
this he contributed to the new wave of opinion, which, drawing support
from many directions, led to the modern predominance of experimental
zoology.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that no vestige remains of
the isolation of zoology from the physical sciences. The gap has, of
course, been bridged in many places by modern biochemistry, physiology
and embryology. Much interesting bridging is indeed recorded in this
volume. For instance, Le Gros Clark discusses the folding of the cerebral
cortex in terms of geophysical models of the shrinkage of the earth.
J. Z. Young begins the physiochemical analysis of the form of a nerve
fibre, an extraordinary semi-fluid thread, which may be a million times
longer than its diameter. From the chemical side, Astbury discusses
recently-acquired knowledge of the shape of chemical molecules of
biological importance, work which is destined to have a great and not
too distant future.
Yet zoology still has inadequate contact with the physical sciences.
An important example of this is the poverty of our knowledge of the fine
structure and fine function of living matter. This has become a sticking
point, as Bernal calls it, for embryology, genetics and physiology. All
are waiting longingly for more knowledge of what goes on inside cells.
Except perhaps for the confused field of vertebrate behaviour, with its
implications for human society, no part of biology would more richly
repay an investment of large-scale research. But this means bringing
together physics and biology in a way and to an extent not hitherto
attempted. It probably involves, for instance, reform in the training of
scientists, since, as Danielli points out in this volume, the psychology of
problem-solving requires that these sciences be brought together in
single individuals, as well as in teams of specialists. This is an obvious
field for research into how to do research.
The way of co-operation would be easier were the sciences to speak a
common language, or rather an intertranslatable language. This implies,
in the first place, a much greater use of quantities in zoology than
hitherto; zoology, again as a result of its recent history, is quite un-
necessarily under-mathematised. It is one of the great services of this
volume that it contains some valuable essays which follow the lead of
D'Arcy Thompson in mathematical biology; that by Medawar is an
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important example. But, in the second place, zoology keeps a termino-
logically disorderly house, in which words are put to quite improper
uses. No wonder that Prenant quotes a distinguished chemist: "Biolo-
gists do not apply scientific method in that they do not define their
terms." That must be the feeling of many physical scientists about such
terms as "purpose," "field," "growth" and "homology" (the latter,
incidentally, much clarified by Woodger in the volume under review),
words about whose meaning zoologists often squabble. This is not the
arid question of whether living things can be explained in terms of
chemistry or physics. Nobody can draw the limits of chemistry and
physics, either now or still less for the future. It is the urgent question of
whether the problems of living things are to be clearly formulated, and
thus made susceptible to attack with every resource of current science.
The movement towards a closer collaboration of zoology and the
physical sciences, which D'Arcy Thompson pioneered, is still of slow
growth and imperfect form. The crucial importance of at least some of
its aspects, contrasted with their relative neglect by scientists, seems to
be one more argument for the planned allocation of scientific resources.
A deliberate strategy of scientific advance often appears to its opponents
to be an attempt to overwhelm scientists with a mass of immediately
practical problems; but it is surely, in guiding fundamental research in
this way, that it is likely to have its greatest triumphs.
M. ABERCROMBIE.
(In the next issue we propose to open a discussion on A. F. Parker-
Rhodes's article in the Spring number on The Origin of Life.)
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