theoryofliteratu00inwell

102 Theory of Literature
tory, or that of the Marxists, who derive everything from the
mode of production. No radical technological changes took
place in the many centuries between the early Middle Ages
and the rise of Capitalism, while cultural life, and literature in
particular, underwent most profound transformations. Nor does
literature always show, at least immediately, much awareness of
an epoch's technological changes: the Industrial Revolution
penetrated English novels only in the forties of the nineteenth
century (with Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley, and Charlotte Bronte),
long after its symptoms were plainly visible to economists and
social thinkers.
The social situation, one should admit, seems to determine
the possibility of the realization of certain aesthetic values, but
not the values themselves. We can determine in general outlines
what art forms are possible in a given society and which are im-
possible, but it is not possible to predict that these art forms will
actually come into existence. Many Marxists—and not Marxists
only—attempt far too crude short cuts from economics to litera-
ture. For example, John Maynard Keynes, not an unliterary
person, has ascribed the existence of Shakespeare to the fact that
"we were just in a financial position to afford Shakespeare at the
moment when he presented himself. Great writers flourished in
the atmosphere of buoyancy, exhilaration, and the freedom of
economic cares felt by the governing class, which is engendered
by profit inflations." 25 But profit inflations did not elicit great
poets elsewhere—for instance, during the boom of the twenties
in the United States—nor is this view of the optimistic Shake-
speare quite beyond dispute. No more helpful is the opposite
formula, devised by a Russian Marxist: "Shakespeare's tragic
outlook on the world was consequential upon his being the
dramatic expression of the feudal aristocracy, which in Eliza-
beth's day had lost their former dominant position." 26 Such contradictory
judgments, attached to vague categories like optimism
and pessimism, fail to deal concretely with either the ascertain-
able social content of Shakespeare's plays, his professed opinions
on political questions (obvious from the chronicle plays), or his
social status as a writer.
One must be careful, however, not to dismiss the economic
approach to literature by means of such quotations. Marx him-