We speak loosely of the Chartist "movement," but few of us look on Chartism as a movement; that is, as a developing class struggle having definite origins, having relations to the changing class conditions of the England of that day, having definite aims. Yet this was precisely how Marx and Engels regarded Chartism.

They themselves were "Chartists." Their own political tactics they based largely on the experience of the Chartists. They studied every development of Chartism, had opinions on every Chartist leader. Yet no one has ever troubled to find out what were the ideas of the founders of revolutionary Communism upon revolutionary Chartism and its leaders. Indeed, in our press, in our literature we find ideas which are absolutely the opposite of those of Marx and Engels on Chartism....

The English working class was the best organized, the most advanced in Europe. If the six demands of its Charter were those of the democratic revolution and not of the social revolution, the workers were not long in making it clear that they were fighting for the democratic revolution, not in order to pull chestnuts out of the fire for a cowardly bourgeoisie, but in order to establish themselves, the workers, as the ruling class in order to start the social revolution. The day had passed when the democratic revolution could be realized in England without leading directly to the emancipation of the proletariat.

"The whole struggle of the workers against the factory owners," writes Marx in 1848, "which has already lasted eighty years, a struggle which began with machine-breaking and then went through the stages of combinations, separate attacks on the persons and property of factory-owners and the few workers devoted to the factory-owners, through more or less big revolts, through the insurrections of i839 and 1842, has developed into the most conscious class struggle which the world has ever seen-the whole of this class struggle of the Chartists, the organized party of the proletariat, against the organized State power of the bourgeoisie .... is a social civil war."

A little earlier Marx had written that in the Chartists the workers had formed a political party whose fighting slogan could in no case merely be "monarchy or republic?" but "the rule of the working class or the rule of the bourgeoisie?"

At this time all the political efforts of the bourgeoisie were concentrated on winning free trade through the repeal of the Corn Laws. The Chartists, the real banner-bearers of the democratic revolution, were never for a moment deceived by the efforts of their class enemies to draw them into this "fight for freedom." They fought equally hard on two fronts against both the free trade exploiters and the protectionist exploiters. The Chartists forced the Corn Law Leaguers to hold their meetings by ticket in guarded halls, drove them off the streets and out of their press. They ironically compared their liberal words with their reactionary practice. "Everyone knows," Marx said, "that in England the struggle between Liberals and Democrats takes the name of the struggle between Free Traders and Chartists."

What were the personal relations of Marx and Engels to the leaders of Chartism? Max Beer and Rothstein would have us believe they were quite uncritical, or that where they criticized they were wrong. Groves follows them in making idols of Harney and Jones, while J. P. Lilburne accepts the Beer-Rothstein estimate of O'Brien.

O'Connor they rightly considered a brilliant agitator and journalist, but his political role was reactionary. "A true representative of old England. By his nature he is conservative and fosters a fully determined hatred both to industrial progress and to revolution. All his ideas are thoroughly permeated with a patriarchal petty-bourgeois spirit." O'Connor in many ways resembled Cobbett. He represented the revolt of the dying hand-weaver, or preindustrial-revolution England against the triumph of the new industrial bourgeoisie.

O'Brien, the other petty-bourgeois Chartist leader, Marx and Engels always considered the least talented of the Chartists. Engels told Belfort Bax that O'Brien's Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery was the least valuable production of the whole movement. As a politician O'Brien was beneath contempt, moved by personal spites and intrigues and even in his best period, that of the first Convention, having no fixed policy. He was a Roman Catholic, a currency crank and land reformer. His followers in the First International, who believed in land nationalization, were sometimes used by Marx as a counter to the trade union element. Some O'Brienites survived into the S.D.F., and Hyndman praised them extravagantly. His ideas on the class struggle were only those of the Chartist movement in general and had no particular influence on Marx and Engels.

Harney, who was a real revolutionary and a close collaborator of Marx and Engels, was also judged by them ° very critically. Once even they called him, not without reason, "a lousy little fellow." Harney was something of a phraseur. He never took the leading part in the Chartist movement his abilities entitled him to, and he lacked political sense. After 1848 he became a worshipper of Louis Blanc, and in a few years had become a petty-bourgeois radical. He sent a subscription to the First International, but never worked for it.

Such was Russia in November 1905, when Lenin returned from his first exile. From his hiding-place he quickly got in touch with his party and its Press, vigorously assumed the leadership. Kronstadt had been cleverly broken by a few concessions. There remained Sevastopol. "The time has gone for ever," Lenin wrote, "when the Russian army, as in 1849, went over the Russian frontiers in order to suppress revolution." The garrisons of Petersburg and Moscow were in a ferment; from the Far East came news of a movement among the returning soldiers, who all along the dreary Siberian railway were fraternizing with the workers.

The Kaiser was hastily mobilizing naval squadrons and army divisions for intervention on behalf of "Cousin Nicky." In Austria a general strike for universal suffrage had broken out; the powers and thrones were uneasy in their places. "You are not alone, workers and peasants of all Russia!" Lenin closed his last article from Switzerland. "And if you succeed in throwing down, defeating, and destroying the tyrants of feudal, police, landlord, and Tsarist Russia, then your victory will be a signal for a world struggle against the tyrants of capital, a struggle for full, not mere political, but for economic freedom of the toilers, a struggle for the ridding of humanity of poverty and for the realizing of Socialism." If the Tsar had his reserves in the Kaiser Wilhelm's battalions, Lenin had his in even mightier battalions.

A few days after he returned he made his first public appearance, disguised by shaving off his beard, and,under another name, at the meeting of the Petersburg Soviet on 27 November. The workers had demanded an eight-hour day, the employers had answered by a lock-out, and the Tsar won his first victory in the counter-attack. The industrial bourgeoisie deserted the revolution, rallied to the manifesto of 17 October, and took the offensive against their workers.

Here is not only a formula for the historian, but also for the novelist. For the one concern of the novelist is, or should be, this question of the individual will in its conflict with other wills on the battleground of life. It is the fate of man that his desires are never fulfilled, but it is also his glory, for in the effort to obtain their fulfilment he changes, be it ever so little, in ever so limited a degree, life itself. Not X = 0 is the Marxist formula for the fate of man, but "on the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this degree involved in it."

The conflict of wills, of desires and passions, is not, however, a conflict of abstract human beings, for Engels is careful to emphasize that man's desires and actions are conditioned by his physical constitution and, finally, by economic circumstances, either his personal circumstances or those of society in general. In his social history it is, in the last resort again, the class to which he belongs, the psychology of that class, with its contradictions and conflicts, which plays the determining part. So that each man has, as it were, a dual history, since he is at the same time a type, a man with a social history, and an individual, a man with a personal history. The two, of course, even though they may be in glaring conflict, are also one, a unity, in so far as the latter is eventually conditioned by the former, though this does not and should not imply that in art t4e social type must dominate the individual personality. Falstaff, Don Quixote, Tom Jones, Julien Sorel, Monsieur de Charlus, are all types, but they are types in whom the social characteristics constantly reveal the individual, and in whom the personal hopes, hungers, loves, jealousies and ambitions in turn light up the social background.

The novelist cannot write his story of the individual fate unless he also has this steady vision of the whole. He must understand how his final result arises from the individual conflicts of his characters, he must in turn understand what are the manifold conditions of lives which have made each of those individuals what she or he is. "What emerges is something that no one willed," how exactly that sums up each great work of art, and how well it expresses the pattern of life itself, since behind the event that no one willed a pattern does exist. Marxism gives to the creative artist the key to reality when it shows him how to discern that pattern and the place which each individual occupies in it. At the same time it consciously gives to man his full value, and in this sense is the most humanist of all world outlooks.

Wells is the voice of the intermediate sections of modern society, this is his great importance. They long for escape from the contradictions and antagonisms of modern life, but themselves possess neither the organization nor the possibility for solving those contradictions and destroying those antagonisms. They understand well enough that only Socialism can do this and in Socialism they believe with great sincerity. But Socialism must come because they will it, because it is "reasonable." The truth remains that to-day nothing stands in the way to the attainment of universal freedom and abundance but mental tangles, egocentric preoccupations, obsessions, misconceived phrases, bad habits of thought, subconscious fears and dreads and plain dishonesty in people's minds-and especially in the minds of those in key positions. That universal freedom and abundance dangles within reach of us and is not achieved, and we who are Citizens of the Future wander about this present scene like passengers on a ship overdue, in plain sight of a port which only some disorders in the chart-room prevents us from entering. Though most of the people in the world in key positions are more or less accessible to me, I lack the solvent power to bring them into unison. I can talk to them and even unsettle them but I cannot compel their brains to see.

Complete Communism is still a long way off, but socialist society, in which the seeds of the future society are ripening, is no longer a mere slogan or a dream, but a practical reality. Very soon after the socialist revolution had become victorious in the former empire of the Tsars Lenin wrote that "if Russia is covered with a thick network of electrical stations and powerful technical equipments, then our Communist economy will become an example for the coming socialist Europe and Asia."

It used to be considered that it was impossible for socialism to come save as the result of a simultaneous revolution in several of the most advanced capitalist countries. Lenin always combated such an idea as being utterly out of accord with the realities of modern imperialist capitalism. The very powerful development and centralism of capitalist dictatorship behind the cover of parliamentary "democracy," the ruthless and efficient military machine at its disposal, made it unlikely that the workers of the most advanced countries would be the first to break through, however theoretically advisable that might be. The whole development of capitalism, moreover, is uneven to the last degree, not only as between different countries, but within each country, within each branch of industry, even as between the level of consciousness of the working class and their preparedness for struggle., From this Lenin drew the conclusion that it is impossible for socialism to be victorious in all countries simultaneously. It must first be victorious in one or a few countries, and these not necessarily the most advanced, but rather the weaker links in the capitalist chain.

Born in 1873, Henri Barbusse was formed by the pre-war generation of French intellectuals. Their despair, their aesthetic pessimism were his.

Poet and novelist, the young literary editor of a fashionable journal; he had neither contact nor sympathy with the masses, only, even then, a deep sincerity and feeling for the tragedy of human life.

He was, as Lenin has said, quite ignorant, oppressed by his own ideas and prejudices, a peaceful, modest, law-abiding member of the middle classes.

Barbusse was transformed by a crime. The crime of the imperialist war. He became, to use Lenin's words once more, a remarkably strong, talented and just character.

His book, Le Feu (Under Fire), was the first protest against the war, a protest which showed that its author, in the hell of the trenches, had seen through to the end.

For Le Feu, cautiously, still a little uncertainly, but quite clearly and unmistakably, drives home one lesson alone, that the crime of the war can be expiated only by a war to the death against the criminals in each country who are driving the masses to the slaughter.

Written in 1917 by a serving soldier, an officer, it was an act of remarkable individual and social courage. Lenin always emphasized that Barbusse's Under Fire and its sequel, Light, were among the most striking symptoms of the revolutionizing of the masses in the West.

Barbusse from then on knew only one path, that of revolutionary struggle for Communism. His health, shattered by the war, his personal life far from happy, he devoted himself and his talent utterly to the working-class.

Life has gone by very slowly and somewhat monotonously since I arrived here. The French who came with me have departed for a nearby village, and the friends who came yesterday are about to join them. So I remain on alone, all because some people think it would be nice if I put on a pair of red tabs, which is the last thing I want to do.

This little town is very quiet, and one knew far more in London about what is happening in Spain. Indeed I never was so cut off in my life from the great world.

What is happening here is really the greatest thing since 1917. Victory means the end of Fascism everywhere sooner or later, and most likely sooner. In any case, the very fact of the resistance has wakened up the Democratic forces, encouraged them and weakened the enemy to an extent we don't quite yet realize. So however hard one's work may be, and exasperating, we do feel it counts, is history, and must be effective. When this job is over, life will be easier for everyone.

Still stuck in this place, though all the boys are now at another village where I hope to join them soon. This is a funny little town, rather like the Russian provincial town of ten years ago. Little two-storey houses, mostly of an early nineteenth-century character, narrow streets, cobbles and lots of mud. At night and at early morning there are strong frosts, in the daytime, blue skies and lots of sun. It is a pretty healthy climate. The Spanish militia are interesting to watch. Dressed in every variety of uniform or no uniform at all, with all kinds of arms, no particular march discipline, but tough, wiry looking fellows. If some genius could arise to organize them they would certainly play hell with Franco, a revolutionary General Gordon perhaps.

The position at the front is interesting and many things which seemed so odd and inexplicable at home, are clearer here. However, in general we had the right ideas about things at home. I don't know when the stalemate will break, but it should not be long. I am sure it is still true that one severe defeat for the Fascists would win the war. Not at once of course, but their morale, already weakened, won't stand defeat.

The whole atmosphere is revolutionary, the very streets full of the people, few signs of any bourgeoisie, and out of all this talking, gesticulatory, variegated crowd, the energy of the workers will surely create something firm and stable in the end. The Party here grows daily, though their difficulties are naturally enormous.

The comrade coming on leave is bringing this letter to you. This is a most wonderful experience. We left Paris in two special coaches, and all the way across France people were greeting us with clenched fists, not even waiting for us to salute first, but knowing where we were going and wishing us "bonne chance." The defence of Madrid has saved Europe. The spirit in France is quite different to what it was a few weeks ago.

In Barcelona we marched through the town, passed the Party and Anarchist headquarters, greeted everywhere by the people...

Our little army is of every nation, French, Belgians, Germans, and Poles predominating. I have talked to Ukrainians from Poland, fellows who have been soldiers nearly all their lives, happy at last to be fighting for something worth while.

For years, the Liberal bourgeoisie has talked about a League of Nations' army to impose Peace on the world. Well, we have created the first International Army to fight for Peace and Freedom. At present I am on the staff at the Brigade Headquarters here. Hanging around makes me fed up, but they promise that as soon as the English are all here I shall join as Political Commissar.

I am now doing much more interesting work as Political Commissar at the base for English people. I have the job of educating the political workers for our force as they come, and look forward to it immensely. But it is all very topsy turvy - five or six hours' sleep at the best, and meals if and when one can.

Still it is, when we really get our men going, to be such work as we never did before in our lives, any of us. I am a general nurse, mother, teacher, and commander to all the English as they pass through, and it is wearing. It will be some time before we go to the front.

When I got there (Albacete), there were already British volunteers there, including a British Company that had been formed and incorporated into a French volunteer [14th] Battalion commanded by a French officer called Delasalle. The political commissar of that battalion was Ralph Fox, the English writer, a well-known writer who was a member of the Communist Party.... Just before Christmas, Delasalle's battalion moved off to the southern front, near Cordoba, and I remember Springhall and myself spending some time with Ralph Fox having coffee and a talk. A few days later, after they had gone south, I was called to Brigade headquarters and sent off to the southern front. They were asking for some responsible people to go down to inspect the situation and to report back. It was quite a long car journey and we arrived at a small village not very far from Cordoba called Lopera, and as we approached the front we were coming through trees. I was a bit worried because my interpreter was a young chap, aged 18 or 19, who spoke French very fluently. He was the son of Professor Haldane, or rather he was the son of the wife of Professor Haldane (Charlotte Haldane). Ronnie Burgess was his name and the bullets were coming thick and fast and I thought, what would happen if this young boy gets hurt?

As we approached the front through these trees we saw General Walter. That was my first dealings with him. He was a little man and a very capable, likeable person. I saw him talking to some of the French soldiers, members of the brigade who were obviously coming back from the front, and I soon realized he was trying to convince them to go back into the line. I spoke to his Chief of Staff, an Italian called Marande, and he explained that there had been heavy fighting and that the fascists were occupying a high ridge and our troops were below them. Anyway we never saw Delasalle. I learned latter that his battalion headquarters was behind the line, further back from the front. When we got up to the frontline we discovered it was an olive grove. They were dug in small, shallow holes behind rather thin little trees. There we had the company headquarters of the British Company; Nathan was in charge and everything was under control. He told us there had been very heavy fighting and that unfortunately they had to launch attacks over open ground, with the fascists and their machine guns pinning them down. There had been quite a few casualties and Ralph Fox had been killed. He had given me some papers that had been taken off his body, but they hadn't been able to retrieve the body. Nathan promised me that during the night they would get the body back.

The English-speaking company was based in the small town of Madrigueras and was sent to the Cordoba front in southern Spain on Christmas Eve 1936, where they were involved in an attempt to capture the town of Lopera, about 30 miles to the west of Cordoba. Many recruits had not handled a weapon before their arrival at Andujar railway station, near Lopera, when they were presented with Austrian Steyr rifles, constructed at the turn of the century. On 28 December, the poorly armed and trained British company advanced up the hill towards the town, to find it heavily defended by rebel forces. For John Tunnah, a postman from Edinburgh who had arrived the previous November, his first experience of action in Spain was terrifying: "We were moving against a town called Lopera. And the resistance stiffened... at times I could see parts of the town just coming out of the trees and little else. And it seemed as if every point of it was spouting fire - mainly at me."Faced with a superior enemy force - in particular from enemy aeroplanes, which machine-gunned the British lines causing considerable panic and confusion - the British had little alternative than to make what Bill Alexander later described as an "orderly and controlled" retreat, during which heavy casualties were inflicted. The company commissar, Ralph Fox, a talented author who wrote a regular column for the Daily Worker, and the "poet-intellectual" John Cornford were both killed. Without the experience of George Nathan, who managed to organise the withdrawal under a heavy rebel artillery barrage, the number of casualties would probably have been much higher. Nathan was an experienced officer, of whom other volunteers spoke highly, "resourceful, brave as a Lion and respected by all". The battalion moved backwards and forwards over the next three days, repeatedly reoccupying positions as the rebels launched their own powerful counter-offensives. However, any hope of capturing Lopera had long since passed.

Ralph Fox, the well-known English Communist writer, was killed in the fighting near Lopera in Andalusia, while he was acting as Assistant Political Commissioner to a brigade of the International Legion.

The Fascists had advanced from the direction of Cordova and the Government had thrown special troops into action for a counter-attack. Lopera is the first village in the province of Jaen on the road to Cordova. The country is hilly, with gigantic, ragged mountains in the distance. The lox- hills are covered with olive-groves, planted in endless, symmetrical rows. The most furious fighting was among the trees in the olive-field, covering what is now to be called "English Crest." One can imagine how intensely Ralph must have appreciated the beauty of this country.

The counter-attack in which the English-speaking company played a prominent part was made from the bottom of a hill. The Government troops, taking cover behind the olive-trees from the hail of rifle fire from the enemy positions on the crest and also from the dozens of German Junker planes bombing and flying low, machine-gunning with explosive bullets. Ralph Fox was with the brigade commander on the road half-way up the hill, when it became evident that there was an unforeseen possibility of our machine-gunners establishing invaluable positions covering the enemy's right flank. Fox set off running, bending low across some open ground, to organize this manoeuvre. It was a supremely brave thing to do; the bombing and machine-gun fire were at their most intense, and it was almost certain death for anybody to leave cover.

Fox knew this, but he considered it necessary to take the risk. Later the whole front changed, and this open ground became No-Man's Land in the centre of the cross-fire. That night a soldier was instructed to crawl out and bring in the papers from the pockets of our dead. Among the things he collected were Ralph Fox's note-book and a letter addressed to him. The next day a group of comrades were organized to go out at night to identify the bodies, but unfortunately the whole brigade was moved to a new sector that afternoon, and this could not be done.

The military commander with whom Ralph worked said that it was difficult for him to find words to describe Fox's amazing bravery. He said: "He was an exceedingly brave man, and it was very largely due to his example that we were able to hold the enemy and save as many of our men as we did. I am not just paying a conventional tribute to a dead man when I say that he was a real hero."

Pollitt encouraged volunteering by his political explanation of the significance of the war. Party officials and leading members who volunteered did so on their own initiative. If individuals asked for advice he said they should make their own decision after taking all circumstances into account. Oxford comrades who responded to Pollitt's appeal for binoculars, when they heard of the death of the writer Ralph Fox, felt that they ought to do more-to volunteer themselves. They went to see Pollitt about it. One of them wrote, "We discussed very thoroughly. Pollitt advised us to think it over very seriously, to remember that we needed revolutionary intellectuals here and could not afford to send everyone to Spain. He said we must make our own decision, he would not like to be the one responsible for sending us."

There was no personal economic reason why Fox should have joined the Communist Party. He did so from a deep sense of intellectual conviction, and from the moment he took out his Party card, his life was dedicated to the cause of Communism. Whether as author, journalist, or instructor of our factory groups in various parts of London, Fox undoubtedly influenced the thought of thousands of working men and women, and also of a big section of the professional classes of this country.Fox had, what so many of the members of our Party lack - the recognition that the supreme aim of his work must be to build the Party to which he belonged, for he recognized that as a necessity, not in some narrow and sectarian way, but because he understood that the more powerful the Communist Party becomes, the more powerful the working class as a whole becomes in its historical struggle against capitalism.

I received the tragic news of Ralph's death just before addressing a Madison Square Garden meeting, here in New York. He was one of my best friends. I mean, outside of all questions of political sympathy, he was a man I naturally delighted to be with. Behind all the enormous panoply of that meeting, the vast hall, the gigantic machine of vulgar yet impressive sound passing out of the organ, booming and wailing across the ceiling, the banners of defiance hung around the balcony, the piles of military clothing, the ambulances-behind all the surging excitement that hung before me, there was the remembrance of my friend as I last saw him sitting at my table in London.

And then, during the meeting, Professor Dewey asked everyone to stand in memory of those who had fallen in defence of the world's liberty. With a noise like-strange how the imagination will not outlive it, childhood's symbols though the mature mind rejects them-with a noise like a rushing wind twenty thousand people stood to the known and the anonymous dead. Ralph was not anonymous to me, nor to thousands present - but it was not the landscape of shattered olive-trees among which he had died that I thought of, but again his boyish laugh and the love of a boyish tale. For that is how we had talked, the five of us, that evening, in London, before we all went off to Spain.

Ralph had been longing to go to China. I say longing, because though he had no trace of romanticism in his nature, he never accepted any idea with a merely intellectual and dry assent. I suppose that China for him, as Spain for me, represented two things, escape and reality. Ralph was one of those magnificent fortunate men who escape into reality. He could not go to China, which he already knew and loved. Instead he met his death in Spain.

I think I described his character correctly in the first improvisatory attempt I made in telling another friend of his death. Standing in a room high above Fifth Avenue I said, to another friend of ours, Rebecca West:

"He was a mature boy," I said and Rebecca answered, "I expected to find him quite a young man when I first met him. After that conference I went out and bought all of his books." That was the effect Ralph always made on people. She was speaking of the International Association of Writers in Defence of Culture at which we were all present. In Defence of Culture! Less than six months later he had died defending it!

At that dinner in my flat we fell into excited argument, as we often did. The writing of an encyclopaedia had been proposed by Andre Malraux. Ralph was enthusiastic, I less so. "No, no, no," I said, "in less than three months we shall have a Fascist rising in Europe." I expected the seat of that rising to be France, yet within three weeks it had broken out and Andre, Ralph and I were all in Spain.

I do not want to write about his books because I cannot regard them as separate from the man. I had enjoyed all of Storming Heaven with its intense sincerity and superb direction, Lenin and Genghis Khan, and his latest and perhaps most beautiful piece of work, Conversation with a Lama, all of wise things, expressed his character for me. He was a fine writer and would have done splendid things. He died in Spain, defending the light that no writer may dare to let flicker out.

Ralph Fox, James Hanley and I shared the same hotel room in Paris during the International Writers Congress, held in the spring of 1935.

Hitherto I had known Ralph only through his writing; in left literary circles here, he was building a reputation as a Marxist scholar, journalist and artist of the first rank. The bourgeois magazines of literary America, too, had received his books with great respect.

Ralph had done a great deal of the dogged, loyal, day-by-day Communist work that few writers buckle down to. I knew that, also, and am ashamed to confess that I thought of Ralph as less writer than active political worker. One day with Ralph, and I blurted it out to him.

"Damn it," he said, "everyone thinks it of me! I must write a string of novels to break down the silly notion!"

We are in the century of the great social change, a time of war and revolution. The writer who has purged himself of the poisonous drug of bourgeois complacency, and has come out of the rancid atmosphere of the Ivory Tower into the strong winds of nature and society; the writer whose human feelings are alive, who cannot stand by while Fascists threaten all that is dear to freemen, that writer, like Ralph Fox, finds himself involved in a mental conflict.

Ralph, I discovered, was a true writer by temperament; not only because of his anti-Philistine gaiety, his thirst for experience, his sensitive response to human beings, his deep interest in the technique of writing. Ralph also had that strange and irrational passion of the true-born writer, who lusts for experience, but cannot feel it is completed until it has been re-distilled in artistic form. The world is well lost to such people unless they are fulfilling themselves daily at the task of writing. But Ralph, like so many others in our ranks, found himself torn between this and another, newer passion that said: Take your place in the ranks! Organize! Educate! Fight! Freedom needs every soldier, and books are not enough!

The bourgeois critics demand at least a Shakespeare or Goethe of us to prove our claim to a proletarian literature. But our writers are of a new pattern; they claim none of the privileges of the neutral bourgeois writer; they are proud to be in the ranks of the People, serving the People in whatever way the time demands, by pen or by sword. If they die, like Ralph Fox, it is a great loss to literature. But they know that if Fascism wins, all literature will die, so they go into the battle gladly.

Americans are taught in childhood to have an anti-British prejudice. It is the vulgar snobbery, the affectation and hypocrisy, the vile, endless, historic treachery of the British upper class that we know and hate best. But three Englishmen helped change this feeling in me : Tom Mann, John Strachey and Ralph Fox. Ralph loved England; some of our many discussions in that Paris hotel were of England. He claimed that the British upper class is, even racially, a foreign group of invaders; the true historic nation has always been oppressed by them, and always had to fight them for its liberties. It is the masses who are England.

Ralph Fox was fighting for English liberty on the barricades of Madrid. The British rulers, naturally, are on the side of the Fascists; but they will lose, both in Madrid and in London. The masses are at last taking possession of their own home, the world. They will root out the usurpers - who have so long fouled this beautiful home.

We grieve for dear Ralph Fox, good friend, good soldier. But many more of us mean to fight and even die like him before this thing is finished. The carpenter will leave his hammer and plane; the coal-digger his pick; the scientist his test-tube; the writer his pen; and go out to crush the beastly parasites of international Fascism.

Fox knew this, but he considered it necessary to take the risk. Later the whole front changed, and this open ground became No-Man's Land in the centre of the cross-fire. That night a soldier was instructed to crawl out and bring in the papers from the pockets of our dead. Among the things he collected were Ralph Fox's note-book and a letter addressed to him. The next day a group of comrades were organized to go out at night to identify the bodies, but unfortunately the whole brigade was moved to a new sector that afternoon, and this could not be done.

The military commander with whom Ralph worked said that it was difficult for him to find words to describe Fox's amazing bravery. He said: "He was an exceedingly brave man, and it was very largely due to his example that we were able to hold the enemy and save as many of our men as we did. I am not just paying a conventional tribute to a dead man when I say that he was a real hero."

It is nearly three years ago that I first met Ralph Fox, although I had known and admired some of his works, chief among them the remarkable biography of Lenin, many years before. These books had prepared me for a powerful mind; but one of the things that impressed me most during our early meetings, apart from his friendliness and ease of manner, was the intense interest in literature as literature which he showed. This was a surprise to me then, chiefly I think because I was not yet free of the delusion, common among my contemporaries, that Marxists had a cut-and-dried method of dealing with literature, and were really only interested in it insofar as it proved something political.

Talking with Ralph Fox soon made me see how stupid this idea was, and opened, too, an entirely new and exciting world to me. He was as intolerant as anyone of those who dismissed half the classics of the world as "bourgeois propaganda" or "counter-revolutionary," and who believed that the smallest trifle written about the struggles of the masses was of greater aesthetic value; and for far clearer and more carefully grounded reasons. The novel was his passionate interest, and he would talk about any English novelist, from Fielding to D. H. Lawrence, for as long as you liked, expatiating on beauties of style and description, or brilliance of character-creation in a way that showed, not only how real and important these things were to him, but also that he had a novelist's instincts himself. It was clear from his conversation that he liked to read and re-read a novel, digesting it slowly, until he felt that he understood every side of the author's achievement. And it was the same with French and Russian literature, in both of which his reading and knowledge were immense. Essentially, the secret of his literary perception was that he let himself be passive to a story or novel, allowing his critical intelligence to come in only afterwards; and he despised those who approached literature with preconceived ideas and prejudices that had little to do with esthetic pleasure.

But if he took a delight in every kind of imaginative writing, provided it was good, he had no fog in his mind about the vitally important part literature could and did play in the shaping of men's minds, and therefore of history. His critical sense seemed to me to be very keen; he never let himself deliver a slapdash verdict in conversation on any point, however small, and he would suggest where one had gone wrong oneself perfectly unpretentiously, but at the same time incisively. And what gave his judgment so often convincing depth and force, though I do not think he felt by any means that he was at the end of his explorations, and was always open to new ideas, was that he had as a critic not merely a lively intelligence and fine emotional reactions, but also a profound unifying philosophy of literature, to which his Marxism had led him. There is a passage in The Novel and the People, where he says that Marxism "consciously gives to man his full value, and in this sense is the most humanist of all world outlooks;" and he adds in a later chapter: "there is no human character, no emotion, no conflict of personalities outside the scope of the revolutionary novelist. Indeed, he alone is able to create the hero of our time, the complete picture of modern life, because only he is able to perceive the truth of that life." This seems to me to put in a brilliantly concise and inspiring way the dynamic effect a revolutionary, materialist philosophy, properly understood, can have on a modern writer.

The task of the artist and writer is to open our eyes; to liberate our spirits from the death grip of custom and prejudice, from the long slow poison set working through every channel of culture to-day, dulling our perception of the dangers which threaten us. But thought and vision cannot free us unless we also create the conditions in which "liberty, which is the nurse of all great wits," can flourish. It was thanks to the new form of government won by overthrowing tyranny that, as Milton told the Parliament of England, "our hearts are now more capacious, our thoughts more erected to the search of greatest and exactest things."

This was why the Soviet Union, which Ralph knew intimately at every stage of the last fifteen years, was such an inexhaustible inspiration to him; here man was becoming "sovereign of circumstance" and showing us the way to enter into our own heritage of liberty.

In the last months of his life, especially, Fox's thoughts dwelt very much on the "great refusal" of present-day writers to face reality as a whole, the cynicism and atrophy which leave the way open for the enemy. This "fear of life, the effort to keep out of the community of humanity," means self-exile from the greatest spirits of all ages, from the "spiritual community binding together the living and the dead" which is our cultural heritage. "We would not be rejected from this community: and therefore do we hope," says Wordsworth. "Hope," writes Fox, "will return on that condition alone, that we are not rejected from the community."