The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1929-04-13

cannot give their social significance.
He does not see that Hugo died
natural death when the French revo-
luton had played out its initial i'm
petus, when the bourgeoisie had al
ready ensconced itself as the master
class, when its struggle against the
former ruler was over and it no
longer pulsated with the roman
ticism that marked the revolution
airy era and its struggle against in
itial difficulties. That individual
bourgeois romanticist was to appear
in the future only as a decadent, in
the form of Baudelaire, who could
find no solace for his individual
idealism in the era of individual ma
terialism and ran from the scene al
together. The romanticism gave
way to the realistic bourgeois nov
els and stories OF Balzac, Flaubert
and Maupassant. The bourgeoisie
had won it's position and now it was
to be treated as an accomplished
fact. Its institutions, mannerisms,
morals had become ''life" and the
great French novelists of the 10th
century accepted it and wrote about
it.
Naturalism was a third develop
ment which marked the birth of
present day liberalism, and runs
parallel with reformism as social
philosophy. The petty bourgeoisie, of
which lola was the intellectual rep
resentative, was caught between
two fires; on one hand the growing
power Of big capital, on the other,
the proletariar masses. 1t would
rather become the helpmates of the
former than be wiped out by the
latter. 1t wanted peace and order
at all costs, which meant the pro-
longation of the status quo. In or
der to obtain its much beloved peace
and order it would grant the prole-
tariat reforms, it would attempt to
pacify it by giving it relief. 1t would
be the arbitrator between its mas
tiers and the working class. 1t would
keep all the forms of bourgeois
democracy and justice and defend
the principles of "justice and truth
SO as to prolong the bourgeois legal
institutions.
In literature this was expressed
by naturalism. lola, the truth
seeking bourgeois, smells out all the
sores of the social order, presents
them in all their horrible details
through the carbon-paper of bour-
seois ideology. He does not know
the life of the masses, he knows only
details that he has observed. He
does not feel the blind impetus of
the working class towards doing
away with its exploitation by over
throwing the system. He has caught
details of this exploitation and puts
them down in a passive way. He
would like to see them changed, but
changed within the old shell. That
is as far as his truth-seeking goes.
In his later books he develops mild
sort of socialism which proposes So
cial peace by series of reforms, by
Disqualification.
In the case of Dreyfus he played
a similar role. A member of his
own class, Jew, had been made
the scapegoat in order to protect
the integrity" of the army. Later
the case developed into a struggle
between royalist, militarist and re-
dictionary elements against minori-
ties, political and racial. lola knew
Dreyfus to be innocent. He fought
the case to save the honor of the
man arid the honor of France-in
other words, to give the army and
the capitalist state the quality of
integrity which it does not have.
Jean Jaures, the socialist, also
fought on the side of Dreyfus, but
he used the opportunity to educate
the workers into class-consciousness.
No one can say that lola did not
fight for his principles, although
they were the principles of bour-
geois liberal; although not fighting
with the workers, he fought the re-
action.
lola remains, however, as great
French novelist, who has had a ire
mendous influence on contemporary
literature. Josephson does not give
him that credit, for he does not see
that his art has opened the way for
the revolutionary realism of today.
Not content with a passive accept
ance of detail, the revolutionary
writer today will mold his facts into
an expressive whole. Naturaiism in
the hands Of class-conscious
worker becomes a new realism-the
realism of the class struggle which
takes the "details" of a lola and
wilfully uses them to express the
struggle and ideal of a class.
"Prisoners of the Sea-.