COMMENT
IF the New York Times had not mentioned it we should never have believed that Mr Spingarn's New Manifesto (The Freeman, 7 June) was directed against The Dial. Certain phrases, certain stresses have led hasty readers to believe that the Manifesto is a recantation. We do not find it so at all; it even seems to us that Mr Spingarn is deliberately unfair to himself when he adds "And now the day of Revolt for Revolt's Sake is over" to this analysis of his earlier position:
"It was necessary to destroy the academic dry rot that was undermining the creative and intellectual spirit of the nation. It was necessary to rid ourselves of the last remnants of the older American 'moralism' in thought and taste and action. It was necessary to destroy, not discipline, character, morals, imagination, beauty, freedom, but the sterile forms which were made to serve instead of these ealities. Not by making a faith of these dead forms can we breathe the breath of a new life into the soul of man, but only by ridding ourselves of their spiritual burden, so that the spirit of life may once more be unhampered in the search for truth and beauty."
The change to the present tense in the last sentence cannot be an error; Mr Spingarn knows that however his words were taken he did not call upon young men for rebellion for the sake of rebellion; and he knows that, although he must face the implications of his present Manifesto, he is not now calling upon them for faith in the interest of faith. His whole essay reasserts the dignity and the excellence of the creative life against the gross and trivial things of the acquisitive life which make the creative life so harsh and difficult.
The chief implication which Mr Spingarn must meet is that he is attacking youth. Actually he is attacking those "who think that the fragile and ephemeral moment of physical youth is . . . the sole test of excellence." He attacks not "modernity," but the habit of mind which holds that "the test of ideas is not truth or the test of art, excellence, but the only test of both is 'modernity.'" He
