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Symbolic War

Proletarian Literature in the United States, An Anthology edited by Granville Hicks, Michael Gold, Isider Schneider, Joseph North, Paul Peters, and Alan Calmer. With a critical introduction by Joseph Freeman. International Publishers

The Southern Review, Summer 1926, 134–147

Poetry, I take it, is a matter of welfare—as religion and politics are matters of welfare. And welfare, in this imperfect world, is grounded in material necessities. Even if we chose to deny these material necessities, starving or being slain in behalf of some cause, our self-abnegatory act would still be grounded in material necessities. The “material basis of reference” is as strong in the acts of those who would flout it as in the behavior of any businessman who treats financial profit and spiritual profit as interchangeable terms. It is in this sense that believe in the priority of economic factors. Some have said challengingly, and some bitterly, what Aristotle said as a matter of course: that people live together for their greater advantage. The problems of congregation center about the problems of wealth, derived from the means of production and defense. Where the available means of production and defense are ample, poverty or loss can only arise from some disorder in the modes of congregation. The dispossessed man is in a different “environment” from the man who enjoys the fruits of the society’s wealth. He has a different “relation to the productive forces.” And insofar as this situation sharpens his fears, hopes, and conflicts, it helps to condition his “morality.”

Thus do such matters as wealth, morality, poetry, environment, production, and congregation tend to become intertwined, shaping a point of view, making for “partisans” insofar as different relationships become simplified as consciousness of “class.”

However, to have pursued our speculations as far as the matter of “class-consciousness” is to realize that the relation between the “economic substructure” and the “moral superstructure” is lacking in the symmetry of one-to-one correspondences. We can belong in as many classifications as scientists or philosophers care to invent. Though a radical paper is written for a different “class” than a conservative one, we may have heard complaints from the contributors to radical papers which would suggest that, to them, the editors of the radical paper often seem to be in the same “class” as the editors of the conservative paper. Their most intimate connection with a “class war” may be in the war between the editor class and the contributor class—and it can be a very bitter one, waged behind the lines at a moment when battles on a wider front are being fought.

Again, our “economic environment” is not wholly historical. At any given time in history, we have specific relationships to the forces of production (tools and weapons) accumulated by our society. But there is another “economic plant,” the resources of the body itself, the biologic tools and weapons, with their “superstructural” counterparts (intelligence, love, hate, desire for mobility, etc.). We might call this a “human” environment or situation, wider than any given historic environment. Here enters the possibility of cultural overlap, whereby a “proletarian” may find much in common with the “late feudal” or “early bourgeois” Shakespeare.

The presence of this “human” environment, the “natural” frame of reference that is wider than the “historical,” may be discussed as the tendency of the poet to “transcend” the peculiar economic necessities of his times. Not even a fish could be said to live in a totally different environment from man. The “moralities” of man and fish must tend to overlap, destroying the symmetry of complete differentiation, insofar as both “classes” live by respiration and locomotion. A happy translator might do a fairly reputable job at turning a fish’s delight in gills and fins into a glorification of lungs and legs.

Many of the recent literary battles hinge about this issue. The over-simplifying advocate of “proletarian” art would stress the historic environment to the exclusion of all else (and would then invent all sorts of subterfuges and epicycles to explain a liking he might have for Dante or Aeschylus, perhaps finally deciding that they were “workers” in their field). And the oversimplifying advocate of the universally human would lay all emphasis upon the continuity of “man’s burden” throughout the ages, as he incessantly confronts the critical events of birth, growth, love, union, separation, initiation, sorrow, fear, death, and the like.

In sum: we live by the goring of the ox (or some equivalent victim, be it only a vegetable). Call this relationship the biological, the universal-human, that attains its replica in the syntheses of ideology and morals (“imagination”). But it also makes a difference whose ox is gored. Call this relationship the historical, the partisan, making for “consciousness” insofar as the partisans tend to think of themselves as a “class” (“propaganda,” “rhetoric,” the “producing of effects”). As so stated, might not some of the issues dissolve? Might we not suspect that, unless men were brutes or gods (and Aristotle reminds us that they are not either) they must inevitably exemplify imagination and propaganda both? Or, to employ another trope: the nonpartisan, imaginative poet writes, “Beware, a storm approacheth.” As propagandist he adds, “Go thou, and buy rubbers.” The critics of the “proletarian” school (in tune with the Zweck im Recht analysis of law) have done us a service in recalling how often the poet, in this imperfect world, is in effect writing, “Go thou, and buy rubbers” when he is only aware of writing, “A storm approacheth.” In the mere act of warning us what to beware of, he suggests the kind of measures to be taken.

There is also the problem of “leads.” Philosophies are thinking machines—and like machines, they are frightfully “efficient.” Their efficiency makes particularly for extremes in the placing of emphasis. And the proletarians, even the least intellectual of them, are philosophers. Their philosophy (the philosophy of the “class struggle”) gives them “leads.” And it is obvious that “leads” can on occasion mislead. By giving us so quickly and persuasively certain important clues as to the nature of “experience,” they can incidentally prevent us from noticing other clues. In particular, those of their readers who follow other leads may sometimes find their work impoverished and “unreal,” by reason of misplaced emphases. Indeed, insofar as the privileged can hire men to gore the ox for their benefit, the privileged may even afford to be above this despicable matter entirely. And they can resent the low-mindedness of those who would go back over a territory that they have happily left behind. I would answer them by quoting Goethe’s admonition, that “no one walks unpunished beneath palms.” Even were there no acute social issues, even if we had, here and now, an ideal “classless society,” with communal property upon which to build a communality of morals (as in the monastic orders of the early Church) I should suspect that a people could forget the goring of the ox only at their peril. The neglect would be an act of pride; and pride is the basic sin not only of the Church, but of the universe. Pride: “that state of mind that goes before a fall”—the “assumption that one can walk unpunished beneath palms”—the “failure to remind oneself that all blessings are mixed blessings.” The monastic orders were framed to guard against it; hence their great emphasis upon the moral effect of lowly occupations. A monastic order would deteriorate in proportion as the admonitions of its founder came to be forgotten, “alienation” arising as some men were “released” from too immediate concerns with the goring of the ox, which somehow got gored, while they could turn to nobler matters, and of a sudden you find the order corrupt.

As Mr. John Crowe Ransom has wisely admonished us, there is a disturbing contemporary tendency to imagine God after the analogy of central heating and dental anesthetics. He resents this cult of a deity that is merely a celestial version of “all modern conveniences.” He has asked for a Jehovah, a God of wrath, a God with thunder. And I have paradoxically asked myself whether the “proletarian” school, for all its atheistic trappings, might come very close to meeting his requirements. Merely put “history” in place of “Jehovah”—and anger, vengeance, lamentation once again come to the fore. History, in the proletarian code, a just God, a jealous God, a wrathful God. Only at their peril can men violate its commandments. It rewards, with the rewards of a good conscience, those that give it strict obedience and glorify its prowess. But as for those that sin against it, attempting to maintain human laws in opposition to its laws, it wreaks its vengeance upon them, even unto the children of the third and fourth generation.

Thus, I should not advise one to take the atheistic trappings at their face value. Why be sidetracked if, by a mere shifting of vocabulary, a new word causes to live again a pattern of thought that had been obscured by an old word? The morality of toil was ingrained in Hebraicism. It renewed its vigor in Catholicism after the collapse of pagan Rome, an elegant world that pined away in proportion as its cultured elements became psychologically unemployed (“leisured”). But Catholicism in turn eventually ran into difficulties. Surely it is not an accident that the last monastic order before the collapse (the Franciscans), an order that just missed being anathematized as a heresy, attempted to counteract the new difficulties of work by making a vocation of the mendicant (somewhat as we today some-times attempt so to manipulate our fictions that unemployment itself can be turned into a profession). In keeping with the nostalgia and mystic vision of Piers Plowman, new vents for human effort were found through Protestantism (particularly in the new vein that could be tapped by the Calvinistic sanctions upon credit and investment). And when this solution in turn has floundered of its “inner contradictions,” we find the morality of toil reborn in the emphases of socialism. It holds that there can be no leisure without decay. Were every material want to be satisfied, people could live as moral beings (without pride) only by developing subtler concepts of necessity. In a civilization of mechanical slaves, for instance, they might revert to Grecian concepts of effort. They might focus their attention upon the ultimate task, the development of the “perfect citizen” (shaped for the playing of his role as member of a collectivity). But that too would be toil—and, if the toil were avoided, the God of wrath, speaking through history, would once more pronounce his curse, and the proud architecture of the State would crumble.

It is for such good reasons, I think, that this new literary movement devotes particular attention to the poignancy of unemployment, and of employment under conditions of intolerable conflict. Turning to the works themselves, you will unquestionably find such subjects painfully overstressed. The strike, the lock-out, bad working conditions, the witting or unwitting agents of “exploitation,” the physical and mental rigors of joblessness, the organizing of protest (whereby the forces of anger and anguish may not be allowed to follow their natural chaotic bent, but may be directed into rational, socially useful channels of expression)—a continual harping upon such grim themes is bothersome to us, insofar as we have been taught that we have a right to anesthesia. And this reviewer admits that, but for the nature of his task, he would not have read the book continuously, but would have turned to it now and then, wisely interspersing it with material more in the “glorification of the American girl” tradition. I know of one critic who, though avowedly “proletarian” in his sympathies, read the anthology while convalescing in a hospital, and developed such a “blockage” that he has not been able to review it at all. Lamentations may be more gratifying to write than to read.

Our resistance, particularly to the work of the less imaginative contributors, is justified for another reason. They are not able to “transcend” the partisan “leads” supplied by their philosophy. Their philosophy makes them quick to recognize a propaganda situation, and they proceed with great efficiency to build a work that emphasizes it. In fact, they become so intent upon the emphasizing of the situation, that they overlook the humane development of character. Their characters are formed in haphazard fashion, for the specific partisan purpose at hand, like the distortions of a political cartoonist. Hence, if the situation itself is burdensome to the reader, there may be nothing else in the work by which the writer can cajole him. One may hypothetically picture the two opposite procedures: that of the “partisan” writer, who begins by discovering a “propaganda situation,” and proceeds to exploit it by inventing characters to fit; and in contrast, there is the “imaginative” writer, who might begin with an attachment to some very appealing character, and in the course of depicting him, might show him at work in some propaganda situation, such as the harboring of a labor leader hunted by vigilantes. Ultimately, there need be nothing at odds between the two approaches: an expression that is not truncated will encompass both. But if the partisan factor is emphasized with too much greed, it may lead to schematization of character, with nothing of appeal insofar as the situation itself lacks appeal.

An extreme instance of this is Philip Stevenson’s story, “Death of a Century.” Some of Stevenson’s stories in the old American Caravan, prior to his “efficient” development of the partisan approach, were very appealing in the subtlety of their humaneness. But here he attempts to project, through an entire piece, a feeling people sometimes experience when seeing pictures and hearing stories of Rockefeller in extreme old age. He imagines a fabulously wealthy capitalist, now in his dotage, a living mummy surviving for a time after a successful revolution in the United States. Venomously, literal in his settling of scores, the author attempts to wreak symbolic vengeance upon his villain by picturing him as a victim of both revolution and old age. Not only is the result childishly repellent in the simplicity of its wish-fulfillments. It is so naïvely partisan that it defeats its purpose as partisanship. One grows indignant at the author’s treatment of senility. In trying to discredit capitalism by identifying it with a decrepit old man, he quite unintentionally reminds us that no social change can remove the pathetic feebleness of age—and the more vengeful he becomes, the sorrier we feel for the scapegoat of his vengeance. Thus, the character is thin at best, and insofar as it takes on fullness, it does so at the expense of the propagandistic purpose.

There is a compensatory feature of the “propaganda situation” that should be noted, however. Whereas, in its overemphasis, it can serve as imaginative restriction, it does contribute one virtue to even the least pretentious contributions in the book. For I think that the strong sense of the propaganda situation is linked with the strong sense of an audience one gets when reading this anthology. This literature is written to people, or for people. It is addressed.

So much by way of introduction. The volume is compendious, and uneven. Yet perhaps we should single out for comment some of the more representative texts.

Robert Cantwell’s story, “Hills Around Centralia,” is a good example of a crucial propaganda situation embodied imaginatively. It is based upon the poignancy of the Crucifixion theme (the “benefactor” persecuted as “malefactor”). Irony of clashing moralities. The author “weights” his material propagandistically by showing us, first, the morality of the vigilantes in action, and then slowly widening our conception of the total scene by a sympathetic portrait of the strikers. Tactfully, he permits us to see how the interests of the vigilantes have led them to misinterpret the nature of a riot, while their grip upon the channels of education and publicity serves to shape “neutral” opinion in their favor. The two opposing worlds (of vigilantes and strikers) are eventually “synthesized” by a bridge device, being brought together when some impressionable boys, who had been bewilderedly subjected to the vigilante views, come upon two strikers hiding in the woods (overtones of the “little child shall lead them” theme). The author’s choice of sides is made atop the ironic, the relativistic—hence, “propaganda” in the fullest sense, because profoundly humane. Strict “proletarian” morality could not be so “shifty.” It would be pitted squarely against the enemy. But the farthest-reaching propaganda (as a device for appealing to the enemy, and not merely organizing his opposition by the goads of absolute antithesis) requires the more ambiguous talents of the diplomat (who talks to an alien camp in behalf of his own camp).

The excerpt from Jack Conroy’s novel, The Disinherited, reveals upon analysis that the author, for all his superficial roughness, can be very sensitive in the delicacy of his formal progressions. For his tendentious situation, he draws upon our sympathies for a courageous, hard-working, but victimized mother. The “argument” falls into three parts: (1) we see the mother rejecting the thin-lipped charity that would separate her from her children; (2) we get an effectively ironic association when the son, resolving to be a “man,” hears the other children playing “hide and seek,” and yearns to join them; (3) the mother rigorously at toil. The chapter is rhetorically rounded off with something that might be called a coda. Apparently at a tangent, Conroy falls to telling of an incident unrelated to the matters at hand—and when he has finished, he suddenly reveals its application to his theme. It becomes a bitter device for rejecting “those canned Western Union greetings” for Mother’s Day. If the reader is not moved by this turn, at once surprising and prepared, he is blessed with a tougher skin than is your present correspondent. Conroy evidently likes to think of himself as a “diamond in the rough” sort of writer; but the correctness of his form reveals a sense of propriety in the best sense of the word.

Ben Field’s “Cow” is interesting as a problem in propaganda because of its vigorous attempt to combat anti-Semitism by destroying the stereotype image of the Jew and assembling a different cluster of traits in its stead. Perhaps he approaches his task a little too head on. Hence, those who respond strongly to the stereotype will tend to feel his portrait as “false,” since his zeal for reconstruction gets him into the “statuesque” rather than the “humane.” But its attainments may be felt despite its defects—and one must recognize the justice of its inclusion in a book of this kind, representing the attitudes of a group which, like the many religious bodies of the Hellenistic period, recruits its members by cutting on the bias across traditional distinctions of nationality and race.

Albert Halper’s “Scab!” suffers from an O. Henry patness in the “well-made” conversion of the last two lines. But it makes one notable contribution in the search for propaganda situations. Halper adds this particular twist: he establishes his own point of view by showing a man who sins against it in spite of himself. He “weights” his material by giving a sympathetic plea for the strikebreaker while at the same time causing the strikebreaker to revolt against his own role. Obviously, such internal conflicts, that match external conflicts, provide a good opportunity for the dramatic—and Halper develops the possibilities with complexity, complexity enough in fact to have spared us the bluntness of the ending.

Albert Maltz’s “Man on the Road” is a remarkable mixture of dream-magic and realistic shrewdness. The man with the glazed eyes, standing at the approach to the tunnel, conveys to us the overtones of the “pit,” and of “living death.” Yet the fact that the author built his ominous dreaming about a worker dying of silicosis (his politics prompting him to see the “news” in the West Virginia disaster without waiting for the story to “break” in our headlines) indicates how deep an author’s enlistment in a practical cause may go. We observe how a writer may on occasion tie even his dreams to a party line.

I might close my reference to the story section by a mention of an excerpt, complete in itself, from Edwin Seaver’s novel of white-collar workers, The Company. Seaver has evidently learned much from Sherwood Anderson, whose lyric mode of story-telling he applies to his idylls and laments of metropolitan life. He is particularly good at finding simple themes that suggest complex connotations. In some ways, the tendentious situation embodied in his portrait of Aarons places us strategically at the very “narrows” of the propaganda issue. Aarons works for a public relations counsel—and the public relations counsel is the proletarian propagandist in reverse. He is purely and simply the historic devil. For whereas (the proletarian propagandist would enter the region of overlap between) his group and the people for the purpose of enlisting the people in behalf of social change, the public relations counsel would work in this same marginal territory to obstruct social change. Hence the subtlety of the situation which Seaver economically depicts for us, as we see Aarons, with a revolutionary interest in this region of overlap, employed by a man whose business it is to manipulate this same region for reactionary purposes. We watch Aarons making himself at home in this schizoid state. We see him undermining the simple loyalty of the others in the office, until their self-cynicism impairs the convincingness of their copy, while Aarons has learned to harness his detestation. From the very violation of his own beliefs, he derives a perverse strength, and is finally commended by his boss in the presence of those whose confidence in themselves he has destroyed. The bowing of the head, the theme on which this brief story ends, is mutely eloquent.

I have considered the stories at some length, since they lend themselves particularly well to an analysis of the tactics underlying propagandist art. Turning to the poetry section, we note that the lyrics necessarily possess, in their epistolary, polemic ingredient, a level of relevance beneath which they cannot sink. There are such incidents as May Day, the burning of the books, the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti to be commemorated; there is a definite need of encouragement to equip one for the intricacies of “class struggle”—hence the strongly recitative, oratorical note that pervades this form, a form rapidly becoming almost bereft of gravitational pull. To borrow a word from capitalism, we may note that there is a “market” for occasional verse, devotional verse, and the ritualization of dogma. These poets are at the stage where Commodianus was in the upbuilding of Catholic poetry. One feels behind them the pressure and sincerity of hunger (sometimes hunger literally, more often hunger in its wider, metaphorical aspects). Much of this verse is not written merely for the eye, or even for the ear, but for the mouth. Thus, though most of these atheistic poets would be scandalized at the thought, I should say that their verse is primarily concerned, in secular guise, with the mimetics of prayer. For prayer, we are told by the shrewdest of our naturalistic explainers-away derives the force of its appeal from the first experiences of childhood when the child learns “word magic,” the influencing of reality by speech (as when it summons its nurse by calling for her). Its obverse is the anathema. So we get here the building of character by the “magical” devices of petition, plaint, and curse.

Let me mention, “among those present,” such pieces as: Kenneth Fearing’s three declamatory poems, an amalgam of politics and sentiment. Robert Gessner’s “Cross of Flame,” vigorously realizing for us the incidents before the Reichstag fire. Michael Gold’s “A Strange Funeral in Braddock” (“listen to the story of a strange American funeral”); and his “Examples of Worker Correspondence” suggest good possibilities, if the poet can resist the temptation to convert his wise lameness into a mannerism. Horace Gregory’s “Dempsey, Dempsey,” employing for polemic purposes the psychoanalytic account of the “identification” process. Alfred Hayes’ “In a Coffee Pot,” interesting for its transformation from the theme of one man’s unemployment to the theme of organized group resistance, an “extension device” also well utilized in Langston Hughes’ “Ballad of Lenin.” James Neugass’ “Thalassa, Thalassa” (a serviceable “idea,” as he incongruously draws upon our connotations of ancient Greece when celebrating a strike of Greek freighters at Buenos Aires, though it is far better as an invention than in its working out). Kenneth Patchen’s “Joe Hill Listens to the Praying,” a work conducted on three levels: the sermon, Joe Hill, the poet’s comments. Edwin Rolfe’s “Unit Assignment,” a homely but accurate account of an incident in the spreading of the doctrine. Muriel Rukeyser’s “City of Monuments,” the imaginative opposing of tomb and sprout. Isidor Schneider’s “Portrait of a False Revolutionist” (“He’ll chant red song/like a cricket all day long”)—also one should note his use of the Brecht-Eisler “you must be ready to take over” theme in “To the Museums.” The middle class writer’s concern with scruples, in Genevieve Taggard’s “Life of the Mind, 1933” and “Interior.” Don West’s “Southern Lullaby” (which Mr. Brooks had condemned for its sentimentality, an unfavorable diagnosis one could rephrase favorably, or part-favorably, by saying that the author undertakes the strategic feat of incongruously introducing politics into the least political of themes). And two anonymous Negro pieces, which well illustrate how the moods of the spiritual can be drawn upon for “modern” purposes.

The “reportage” section is excellent. Perhaps it maintains the highest average of quality in the whole anthology. Nor is this an accident. I sometimes wonder whether, when Communists speak of “reality,” they mean purely and simply “news.” And there is a notable accuracy here. The early bards were hardly more than news peddlers. Later, when the bourgeois order became established, the resistance to the democratization of news was stubborn and powerful (since private access to news gave one a distinct commercial advantage). And Communists feel, of course, that “the news” is still being tampered with, to an extent that prevents people from seeing, in the proper proportions, the “realities” of the historic process now under way. Each of these eight items has much to recommend it. I should mention in particular the strange circumstantiality of Meridel Le Sueur’s “I Was Marching.” It has an almost mystical cast, that may result from the hysterical suppression of terror. Nor can one read Agnes Smedley’s “The Fall of Shangpo” without being fascinated. She carefully depicts the dreadful upheavals of the human mind as archaic ways of thought are jammed brutally into new situations. John Mullen’s “Mushrooms in the Factory” is brief, with a surprising touch of fancy in its ingenious way of revealing the workers’ attachment to their place of work despite the many good reasons for alienation. Perhaps John L. Spivak’s “A Letter to the President” is the most vulnerable article in this section. Spivak learned his trade doing “sob sister” work for MacFadden. He has brilliance, and the events he is describing make an authentic claim upon our sympathies—but it would take no princess to be disturbed by the pea of his early training beneath the twenty mattresses of his politics.

The inclusion of Clifford Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty” among the plays would be enough to make the drama section valuable. I spoke earlier of the tendency to begin with propaganda situations and work towards character. This method of construction is more natural to the dramatist—and in “Waiting for Lefty” it flowers. Odets builds characters with strict reference to their functional necessity; his efficiency is sometimes astounding. This functional or formal emphasis prompts him to make unexpected discoveries. When the crooked labor leader says, for instance, that it is “only an hour’s ride on the train” to Philadelphia, a voice pipes up: “Two hours”—and these simple words carry an enormous load. They are eloquent in their place, because they are rich with promise. In their trivial stubbornness, they show you which way the arrows are pointing. You are amused—and there is a strong promise that your attitude of vengefulness towards the crooks will subsequently be permitted fuller expression.

Marxism is above all an inducement to drama. It is a dramatic theory of history, for it clearly and unmistakably names the vessels of good and evil (you can’t make good drama without the assistance of a villain in goading forward the plot). It is loquacious, litigious, rhetorical. In our theatres at least, the revolution has already taken place, as the old hack producers of the “give the public what it wants” school had already brought on the fatal crisis in culture, darkening one house after another by their inability to have the least notion as to what the public wants. In addition to full-sized plays, requiring considerable commercial organization, there are many short skits being produced without scenery, in political gatherings of one sort or another. At their poorest, they merely confirm the audience’s prejudices, as a war play in war times. But often they “transcend” these simpler requirements, attaining a wider comic or tragic scope—and there is no reason why, as audiences develop, the talent they enlist should not develop also.

As for the specific works in this collection: Odets’ “Waiting for Lefty” and Alfred Kreymborg’s “America, America!” (somewhat in the manner of a morality play) will probably appeal best when read, though all the pieces can disclose virtues to those who also watch for theatric possibilities.

I agree with Newton Arvin that the section on criticism seems least developed. The dramatic invitation to “make a choice” may lead the critic to make his choice too soon. Here enters the problem of “suspended judgment,” as against the invitation to the dramatics of invective. In fact, if one reads Michael Gold’s “Wilder: Prophet of the Genteel Christ” purely as a fiction, he is likely to enjoy it much better. I could even imagine Wilder enjoying it, if he were able to think of it as a Cicero thundering against a Catiline. And in “Eagle Orator,” Malcolm Cowley administers very deft punishment to Paul Engle’s earlier work, “American Song.” For criticism of a non-pyrotechnic nature, we should signalize Edwin Berry Burgum’s appreciation of Spender, Auden, and Lewis, written from the standpoint of their serviceability in shaping revolutionary attitudes. And the essay by the younger critics, William Phillips and Philip Rahv, bears testimony that they understand the complexity and indirectness involved in the “imaginative assimilation of political content.” Indeed, I believe that their reservations would require them, editors of the Communist Partisan Review, to be less friendly towards some of the political matter in this anthology than I have been. We should also include here a reference to Joseph Freeman’s introduction which, though prolix and unnecessarily defensive, contains many acute formulations.

In conclusion: As one particularly interested in the processes of literary appeal, I have generally tended to consider the volume from this standpoint. I have been vague about “absolute” tests of excellence, for I frankly do not know what such tests might be. Particularly in works of a controversial nature, the imponderabilia of emotional bias strongly influence our aesthetic judgments. Hence, in dealing with a book of this sort, I thought it better to place the emphasis upon the matter of functions, which are neutral, available to anyone, like a theory of ballistics. But in the course of discussing processes, I have also found it necessary to touch somewhat upon the “way of life” that gives them meaning.

For the anthology does represent a way of life—and in this congregational feature lies the power and the promise of the “proletarian” movement as a contribution to our culture. In this movement, there is the customary high percentage of unexalted moments, as regards the field of literary representation, and even more so as regards the field of practical relationships. But taking what we have, I think we may see how the “proletarian” sort of emphases and admonitions can provide a lasting and essential stimulus to the formation of the national “consciousness.”