theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and Society 9
problems of the audience and the actual social influence of lit-
erature. The question how far literature is actually determined
by or dependent on its social setting, on social change and development,
is one which, in one way or another, will enter into
all the three divisions of our problem: the sociology of the
writer, the social content of the works themselves, and the in-
fluence of literature on society. We shall have to decide what is
meant by dependence or causation ; and ultimately we shall arrive
at the problem of cultural integration and specifically at how
our own culture is integrated.
Since every writer is a member of society, he can be studied
as a social being. Though his biography is the main source, such
a study can easily widen into one of the whole milieu from
which he came and in which he lived. It will be possible to ac-
cumulate information about the social provenience, the family
background, the economic position of writers. We can show what
was the exact share of aristocrats, bourgeois, and proletarians in
the history of literature; for example, we can demonstrate the
predominant share which the children of the professional and
commercial classes take in the production of American litera-
ture. 4 Statistics can establish that, in modern Europe, literature
recruited its practitioners largely from the middle classes, since
aristocracy was preoccupied with the pursuit of glory or leisure
while the lower classes had little opportunity for education. In
England, this generalization holds good only with large reser-
vations. The sons of peasants and workmen appear infrequently
in older English literature: exceptions such as Burns and Car-
lyle are partly explicable by reference to the democratic Scottish
school system. The role of the aristocracy in English literature
was uncommonly great— partly because it was less cut off from
the professional classes than in other countries, where there was
no primogeniture. But, with a few exceptions, all modern Rus-
sian writers before Goncharov and Chekhov were aristocratic in
origin. Even Dostoevsky was technically a nobleman, though his
father, a doctor in a Moscow Hospital for the Poor, acquired
land and serfs only late in his life.
It is easy enough to collect such data but harder to interpret
them. Does social provenience prescribe social ideology and
allegiance? The cases of Shelley, Carlyle, and Tolstoy are ob-
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