Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1888

Marx-Engels Correspondence 1888

Engels to Margaret Harkness

In London

Publisher: (unknown);

London, early April

Dear Miss Harkness,

I thank you very much for sending me your “City Girl” through Messrs
Vizetelly. I have read it with the greatest pleasure and avidity. It is indeed,
as my friend Eichhoff your translator calls it, ein kleines Kunstwerk... [a small work of art. DM]

If I have anything to criticize, it would be that perhaps, after all, the
tale is not quite realistic enough. Realism, to my mind, implies, besides truth
of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical
circumstances. Now your characters are typical enough, as far as they go; but
perhaps the circumstances which surround them and make them act, are not perhaps
equally so. In the “City Girl” the working class figures are a passive mass,
unable to help itself and not even showing (making) any attempt at striving to
help itself. All attempts to drag it out of its torpid misery come from without,
from above. Now if this was a correct description about 1800 or 1810, in the
days of Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, it cannot appear so in 1887 to a man who for
nearly fifty years has had the honour of sharing in most of the fights of
the militant proletariat. The rebellious reaction of the working class against
the oppressive medium which surrounds them, their attempts - convulsive, half
conscious or conscious - at recovering their status as human beings, belong to
history and must therefore lay claim to a place in the domain of realism.

I am far from finding fault with your not having written a point-blank
socialist novel, a “Tendenzroman” [social-problem novel. DM], as we Germans
call it, to glorify the social and political views of the authors. This is not
at all what I mean. The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the
better for the work of art. The realism I allude to may crop out even in spite
of the author’s opinions. Let me refer to an example. Balzac, whom I consider a
far greater master of realism than all the Zolas passés, présents et a venir
[past, present and future], in “La Comédie humaine” gives us a most
wonderfully realistic history of French ‘Society’, especially of le monde
parisien [the Parisian social world], describing, chronicle-fashion, almost year
by year from 1816 to 1848 the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie upon
the society of nobles, that reconstituted itself after 1815 and that set up
again, as far as it could, the standard of la vieille politesse française
[French refinement]. He describes how the last remnants of this, to him, model
society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar monied upstart,
or were corrupted by him; how the grand dame whose conjugal infidelities were
but a mode of asserting herself in perfect accordance with the way she had been
disposed of in marriage, gave way to the bourgeoisie, who horned her husband for
cash or cashmere; and around this central picture he groups a complete history
of French Society from which, even in economic details (for instance the
rearrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned
more than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of
the period together. Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work
is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are
all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never
keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and
women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of
whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political
antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at
that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That
Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political
prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles,
and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real
men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that
I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest
features in old Balzac.

I must own, in your defence, that nowhere in the civilized world are the
working people less actively resistant, more passively submitting to fate, more
hébétés [bewildered] than in the East End of London. And how do I know
whether you have not had very good reasons for contenting yourself, for once,
with a picture of the passive side of working-class life, reserving the active
side for another work?