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http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/letters/88_04_15.htm
Engels to Margaret Harkness
Abstract
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 viellie 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?