theoryofliteratu00inwell

Literature and Society 97
be interfered with and even abrogated in questions of taste by
differences of age and sex, by specific groups and associations.
Fashion is also an important phenomenon in modern literature,
for in a competitive fluid society, the norms of the upper classes,
quickly imitated, are in constant need of replacement. Certainly,
the present rapid changes of taste seem to reflect the rapid social
changes of the last decades and the general loose relation between
artist and audience.
The modern writer's isolation from society, illustrated by
Grub Street, Bohemia, Greenwich Village, the American expatriate,
invites sociological study. A Russian socialist, Georgi
Plekhanov, believes that the doctrine of "art for art's sake" de-
velops when artists feel a "hopeless contradiction between their
aims and the aims of the society to which they belong. Artists
must be very hostile to their society and they must see no hope of
changing it." 16 In his Sociology of Literary Taste, Levin L.
Schiicking has sketched out some of these problems j
elsewhere,
he has studied in detail the role of the family and women as an
audience in the eighteenth century. 17
Though much evidence has been accumulated, well-substan-
tiated conclusions have rarely been drawn concerning the exact
relations between the production of literature and its economic
foundations, or even concerning the exact influence of the public
on a writer. The relationship is obviously not one of mere dependence
or of passive compliance with the prescriptions of
patron or public. Writers may succeed in creating their own spe-
cial public ;
indeed, as Coleridge knew, every new writer has to
create the taste which will enjoy him.
The writer is not only influenced by society: he influences it.
Art not merely reproduces Life but also shapes it. People may
model their lives upon the patterns of fictional heroes and
heroines. They have made love, committed crimes and suicide
according to the book, be it Goethe's Sorrows of Werther or
Dumas' Musketeers. But can we precisely define the influence
of a book on its readers? Will it ever be possible to describe the
influence of satire? Did Addison really change the manners of
his society or Dickens incite reforms of debtors' prisons, boys'
schools, and poorhouses? 1S Was Mrs. Stowe really the "little
woman who made the great war"? Has Gone with the Wind