OOKS OF THE DAY
The Men and the Idea
o the Finland Station : A Study in the Writing and Acting of History. By Edmund Wilson. (Seeker and Warburg. as.)
N the night of April r6th, 1917, Lenin arrived at the Finland ration from Germany. Before him lay Petrograd, Russia, the ance to put into practice his own version of Marxism, his portunity to change the world after observing it.
"Lenin in 1917, with a remnant of Vico's God still disguised in the Dialectic, but with no fear of Roman Pope or Protestant Synod, not so sure of the controls of society as the engineer was of the engine that was taking him to Petrograd, yet in a position to calculate the chances with closer accuracy than a hundred to one, stood on the eve of the moment when for the first time in the human exploit the key of a philosophy of history was to fit an historical lock."
It is the double theme of Mr. Wilson's book to set out the velopment of the theories that became Marxism and the lives, itations, achievements and failures of the men who con- ibuted to -the growth of the system and of the movement. both aims Mr. Wilson is usually successful, sometimes "lliantly successful ; in both he has some failures, less failures execution than failures due to initial errors in ihe plan. In eneral Mr. Wilson is more at home in the history of ideas d in the relation between these ideas and their spokesmen than general history. Fitting men and ideas into their contem- rary frame, he is less scholarly, less acute, less clear than in the ore private themes of a man alone with his own picture of world. Few of tht minor slips matter much, but they are vealing. They show Mr. Wilson content (and for his purposes ghtly content) with general approximations to historical specifi- ions for his frame of reference, while he is careful, learned d acute in all that concerns writing and writers. It is the life Marx, the ideas of Marx, less than the history of the Socialist vement, the background of 1848 and 1871, that interests him. the result is a sympathetic, but, in the true sense of the ord, critical, portrait of Marx and a rather inadequate picture the allies and enemies with whom Marx strove. The bers, weight and importance of the First International are ggerated, but no great harm is done by that since the inter- eaving of Marx's life and work is so admirably worked out. yen more successful is the portrait of Lenin, the only real hero this book. Here it is the dedicated man of action who wins Wilson's admiration, for he does not conceal his opinion t Lenin was of no real importance as a Marxian thinker. ut the common reader who does not already know some- g of the antecedents of the Russian Revolution might be a baffled by the allusive character of the historical allusions, ost as puzzled as the railwaymen of 1917 by the importance ured to Lenin in advance as the leader of the Bolsheviks, chief of the party that moved in so few years from the orderly meetings in the Tottenham Court Road to the Smolny
d the Kremlin.
Mr. Wilson is one of the generation that, once more or less pletely " sold " on the Russian Revolution, has come more
d more to doubt the validity of its theory and the success of practice. He leaves very little of Marxism in his world- e by the time he has finished undermining rather than olishing its basic dogmas, the labour-theory of value, ectical materialism, even the more naive forms of the economic erpretation of history. He is not content to show that Marx less of a Marxian than Engels and Engels less of a Marxian an are the modern orthodox, but he is in active revolt against e Hegelian base of Marxian Lought.
Mr. Wilson sees Marx as a man with a poetic vision of the ovement of history, as a writer of the same kind as Michelet with a far profounder sense of the realities of the world hose movement he describes or predicts. It is this view that tifies his devoting so much space and study to Michelet ; the on of the people is preliminary to the vision of the proletariat. even justifies his devoting space to showing the decline of e merely Moralistic or sentimental view of the process of tory in Repan and Taine. It is harder to justify the space en to Anatole France. Recent study has made the moral ins of Anatole France on our respect rather more serious. was not the literary salesman jealous of Zola who jumped claim at the time of the Dreyfus case which reactionary cs charged him with being. But he is surely far less- inter- than Zola or Barris or Wells. With the Utopian ialists, Mr. Wilson is more in the direct line of succession. beuf, Saint-Simon, Fourier, Proudhon, the American Com- st societies, these Utopians represent a permanent strain in ialist thought. It is present in Marx for all his contempt for 10, since to assert that a problem does not really exist and to ert that a simple organisational device, the phalanstery, the
co-operative commune, will solve it, are equally Utopian. The reader who wants an academic history of Socialist thought, either orthodox or unorthodox, will not find it here. What he will find is the meditation of an acute and honest mind on one of the great themes of modem history, perhaps the greatest theme. Mr. Wilson, like Mr. Eastman, is convinced that the ignorance of the West, which was common both to Marx and Lenin, their inability to think in terms of a society in which free discussion, in which even approximations to democratic control, were possible, accounts for the failures of their systems in Germany and Russia and greatly limits their utility for the Western World. Here is a judgement based not on complacency or ignorance, but on devoted study and a repeated stocktaking of the achievements of the orthodox Marxian school. It is marked by disillusionment but not by despair. And in conclusion, we are reminded that one of Lenin's first acts when he came face to face with his subordinates in 1917 was to rebuke Stalin, then one of the editors of Pravda, for his policy of fighting a Russian defensive war against Germany, instead of staking all on the revolutionary card to be played for and by the workers of the
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