Our desired rehabilitation of the traditional and also of the new
arts may in the last analysis depend upon the creation _within_ our
democracy of the right sort of an aristocracy. Here we are back to
the central problem of humanism--how to produce a superiority that
is generally accepted and socially available. If we can make such
an aristocracy, it will foster the artist and the arts justly and
generously; it will provide a world in which the creative artist is
no longer a tolerated alien but solidly at home. Whenever such an
aristocracy has a clear and noble vision of the good life, it will want
symbols for its ideals, and will call upon the only man who can provide
such symbols--the artist.
One would like to think that the oncoming generation, with unparalleled
advantages in museums and in collegiate instruction in art, endowed
with a great open-mindedness, audacity, and hopefulness--one would like
to think, I say, that this young generation will provide the needed
humanistic support for art. But association with youth, delightful as
it is, gives me no very clear hope in any humanistic direction. The
most typical and engaging youths and maidens of to-day illustrate
merely the lovelier and more attractive traits of the barbarian. They
have an unlimited confidence, very beautiful in its way, with the
smallest background of lived or imagined experience. They think life is
so simple that they may ignore all the traditional solutions for its
manifold problems, trusting to their own instinct of the moment to meet
emergencies that have engaged the best wits of generations of sages
and saints. We have, characteristically tinged with humanitarianism,
the mentality of the noble bandit sheik or the generous sea rover,
who knows what he wants and asks nothing from tradition or authority.
To make humanists of this generation of self-elected spiritual
adventurers implies preliminary contrition and moral rebuilding. There
was a better chance really of making humanists out of my own somewhat
over-sophisticated and _fainéant_ generation. At least we started
from the sound postulate that life was complex, and the problem of
living a problem of delicate adjustment in which one needed whatever
help he might draw from any time or source. So I am really glad that
I shall probably not see the young generation when it passes the
forties. Bruised in its self-confidence, perplexed and baffled by a
life envisaged too simply, it is all too likely to manifest a general
revulsion to indiscriminately chosen formalisms--social, political, and
religious--with the result that the middle-aged dull dog of to-day will
be as nothing in view of his successor of twenty years hence. On the
better side, a general return to formalism may be the opportunity for
an intelligently aggressive humanism. It will be an advantage to find,
what we to-day sadly lack, a basis of agreement on any traditional
plane, however narrow. Thus the new generation may after all serve the
ends of a future humanism, if only by living into entire discredit
their barbarous programme of individualism.
In fine, the problem of a humanistic art is no discrete problem, but
rather that of humanism generally. It has been my task merely to define
the issue in a single aspect, and not at all to find a solution that
could be adopted to-morrow. The deep gap that isolates the serious
artist from a public content with the puerilities of the radio and
the “talkie,” will scarcely be bridged to-morrow or the day after.
Many critics, indeed, hail the latter-day individualist as the finally
liberated artist, and bid us joyously expect even more individualism
than that which has already been so generously vouchsafed us. This
may be a true prognosis. No one can safely deny the possibility that
art may be permanently “on its own.” If so, art will of course become
merely an eccentric activity, an indulgence and luxury of coteries,
hence of no more concern really to the humanist than the trade, say,
of the perfume maker. On the other hand, no one can safely deny the
possibility that art may once again be profoundly integrated with
society. Every contributor to this volume is perforce thinking toward
that reintegration, even if the theme be not in his mind nor the words
on his pen. To my younger colleagues, then, in whom the hope of a
new humanism lies, I leave the problem and the solution, with that
chastened confidence which befits a humanist grown old in the most
unpopular of faiths.
_The Dilemma of Modern Tragedy_