theoryofliteratu00inwell

^6
Theory of Literature
of the arts for the tired businessman, have become active deter-
minants of literary taste.
Still, the old patterns have not been completely replaced. All
modern governments support and foster literature in various
degrees ; and patronage means, of course, control and super-
vision. 15 To overrate the conscious influence of the totalitarian
state during the last decades would be difficult. It has been both
negative—in suppression, book-burning, censorship, silencing,
and reprimanding, and positive—in the encouragement of "blood
and soil" regionalism or Soviet "socialist realism." The fact that
the state has been unsuccessful in creating a literature which,
conforming to ideological specifications, is still great art, cannot
refute the view that government regulation of literature is effec-
tive in offering the possibilities of creation to those who identify
themselves voluntarily or reluctantly with the official prescrip-
tions. Thus, in Soviet Russia, literature is, at least, in theory
again becoming a communal art and the artist has again been
integrated into society.
The graph of a book's success, survival, and recrudescence, or
a writer's reputation and fame is, mainly, a social phenomenon.
In part it belongs, of course, to literary "history," since fame and
reputation are measured by the actual influence of a writer on
other writers, his general power of transforming and changing
the literary tradition. In part, reputation is a matter of critical
response: till now, it has been traced chiefly on the basis of more
or less formal pronouncements assumed to be representative of
a period's "general reader." Hence, while the whole question of
the "whirligig of taste" is "social," it can be put on a more defi-
nitely sociological basis: detailed work can investigate the actual
concordance between a work and the specific public which has
made its success ; evidence can be accumulated on editions, copies
sold.
The stratification of every society is reflected in the stratifica-
tion of its taste. While the norms of the upper classes usually
descend to the lower, the movement is sometimes reversed: interest
in folklore and primitive art is a case in point. There is no
necessary concurrence between political and social advancement
and aesthetic: leadership in literature had passed to the bourgeoisie
long before political supremacy. Social stratification may