The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Comment (September 1923)

COMMENT

PROFESSOR MUENSTERBERG once defined the three stages of a nation's development as provincial, cosmopolitan, and national, and placed America—if we remember rightly—in a phase of transition between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. But nationalism is simply a fusion, a reconciliation, of the two preceding stages: nationalists being men who see their environment from both "close up" and "long shot." At the present time there are varying shades of such nationalists concerning themselves with belles-lettres in America, the two prominent divisions being the surviving members of the Seven Arts, and the "pure" artists, or what Gorham B. Munson has called the "skyscraper primitives." There are also several shades of people who are writing local colour stories, or stories with or without happy endings, or stories with a surprise in the last paragraph, or poems in dialect, et cetera—and we pass on in haste and embarrassment.

Looking back over the old futurist pamphlets of 1909, one is astonished to find that nothing new has come into the world since that time, and the skyscraper primitives have taken over, more or less articulately, the entire futurist credo. Their essential programme is one of dogged optimism. They can find, in advertising, movies, political buncombe, jazz, corrupt business tactics, bootleg, Billy Sunday, and so on, an endless "wealth" of striking and picturesque material. Leaving aside the humanistic consideration, they try simply to re-give the sensational values which are thrown into relief by such material. There is no beauty, there is only intensity. And a city like New York can claim their enthusiasm, not because it is a harmonious unit functioning in such a way as to produce the most widely developed type of human life (which they know well enough it is not) but because it is so intensely, so characteristically, itself.

The negative quality in the criticism of the Seven Arts group is caused by their hankering after traditional beauty, beauty with the connotations which the word has traditionally held. There is nothing in Bertrand Russell's article of last month's Dial to conflict essentially with their attitude. Indeed, any humanistic approach to the present state of society must emphasize the negative quality of criticism; so that the skyscraper primitives, in order to obviate this negativism, have decided to alter their approach. One can enjoy the whirr of a smoothly running motor, or one can see only the wreckage in human life which lies behind that motor—and one is respectively skyscraper primitive or Seven Arts. Or on a wider plane, one could make the distinction between writing a book in which there are good actions and bad actions, and writing a book in which there are simply interesting actions.

It is no place here to toss up between the two. While pudency forbids us to learn from The Literary Review and discover that yes and no, both sides are right and both are wrong. But we do suggest that the skyscraper primitives have taken the harder task, for they must always tread on the uncomfortable verge of writing a Chamber of Commerce literature. As to their omission of humanism, they can answer that it is not the province of the artist to decide whether a given sensation is an asset or a detriment to the community. They accept the sensation simply as a fact, and exploit it. Which they can do with impunity, provided that they are content to leave art on the plane of chess playing or baseball, simply one more outlet for human energy. (This fact underlies the growing prevalence among the intellectuals for the detective story or the adventure story, where the display of skill without content is "purest.") Because there is a great deal of this element in art, they postulate (if they are thorough enough) a special aesthetic sense, and see art as the minister to that sense.

In either case, both Seven Arts and skyscraper primitive have gained the faith to turn intently upon their own situation. For they are aware that the machine is the dominant factor in contemporary life, and that America is the most highly mechanized country in the world, so that for better or worse the course of society for the next era is most likely to be settled in American terms. Perhaps this is the one allowable form of patriotism.