So far as we are concerned, then, the case is made out against absolutism, commercial oligarchy, and unquestioned creeds. The Rebel program is stated. Scientific invention and blind social currents have made the old authority impossible in fact, the artillery fire of the iconoclasts has shattered its prestige. We inherit a rebel tradition. The dominant forces in our world are not the sacredness of property nor the intellectual leadership of the priest; they are not the divinity of the constitution, the glory of the industrial push, Victorian sentiment, New England respectability, the Republican party, or John D. Rockefeller.... In the emerging morality the husband is not regarded as the proprietor of his wife, nor the parents as autocrats over the children.... There is a wide agreement among thinking people that the body is not a filthy thing, and that to implant in a child the sense of sin is a poor preparation for a temperate life.
The battle for us, in short, does not lie against crusted prejudice, but against the chaos of a new freedom.
That is very good reasoning, if you grant the premise—which I do not. I think the old authority is just as apparent as ever; its methods and nature have merely changed. Mr. Lippmann lives among the small minority—the people who have ideas. They represent about one tenth of the population. Of the rest, five tenths have no ideas and the other four tenths have something they call ideas: the rock of ages. It is still there. The new authority is quite as strong as the old, and more insidious because it is more subtle. Young people used to be disinherited when they disagreed with their parents; now they are argued with. The former method left their minds clear; the latter befogs them—and they disinherit themselves. That is the difference. One worked from without in; the other works from within out. Of course it’s much better this way. But this is not the most important problem—this of the old rock of ages. The horrible joke of modern life is that we have been presented with a new rock of ages!
The rebel program is stated—exactly. More than that, it is in action. The difference between the new issues and the old, to Mr. Lippmann, is that we have now learned what we must do; to me, it is that we must learn to do something else. The battle lies not against the chaos of a new freedom, but against the dangers of a new authority.
Before I define, let me illustrate. About two months ago I spent four days in one of our second-large cities—a place of about two hundred thousand people. If I could only describe those four days and their stimulation—to fresh rebellion! The people I saw belonged to the supposedly enlightened inner circles—the representative upper middle class: the ones that still loom very large in comparison to the thinking minority from whom Mr. Lippmann draws his conclusions. Well, I had not forgotten how ignorant people can be, but I had forgotten how cruel they can be. I had not expected their knowledge to have increased, but their hypocrisy to have lessened. I had not looked for vision but at least for a beginning of sight; not for Truth, but perhaps for a willingness to stop lying. And I found scarcely a glimmer of these things. It was ghastly! But the strange part was this: all the time I found I was thinking not of the great faults of their opinions but of the great barrenness of their lives. Over and over the thought kept running through my head: There is no poetry of living in this place!
This brings me to my point. The new rock of ages is that wholly false perspective which assumes that what one thinks is more important than what one feels. It has been set up, quite unconsciously, by the very people who have trying to blast the old one. It is that perspective which the new generation must fight not only with the old, but in its own ranks! Here is the interest of the new battle! Our next renaissance will be concerned with changing that perspective; the genius of the future must be directed toward that end. And that is why I think it is not enough to say that there will come a time when men will think of nothing but education. There will come a time when men will think of nothing but education in imagination! And since there is no such thing as education in imagination, but only procreation of it,—well, the time will come when men will think of nothing but art. The crimes of ignorance are not comparable to the crimes of philistinism: there is no philosophy that will ever reach beyond that of the personality or of the artist.
The dominant forces in the new rock of ages are not of course the intellectual leadership of the priest, the divinity of the constitution, Victorian sentiment, or the Republican Party, but the intellectual leadership of cleverness, the divinity of cults, no sentiment, and the Practical Plan. They are endorsed by the most promising element in modern life: the young intellectuals who are working valiantly to create here what Europe has given to the arts and sciences,—and working in the wrong direction. Our inferiorities to the other civilizations they attribute to our puritanism, our speed, our economic evils. Oh, I get so sick of their failure to reach to the real cause! It is so silly to keep on insisting that we need poets like the French or philosophers like the Germans or musicians like the Russians, etc., etc., if we don’t begin soon to understand why we haven’t got them. We haven’t got them because, in this curious country, we haven’t got people who feel.—Think of an Irish peasant walking under the stars....
I grant you that it also becomes silly to talk eternally of “feeling” without qualifying or defining. It is like taking refuge behind that vaguest phrase in the language—“life itself.” But by “feeling” I mean simply that flight of wings which makes walking unnecessary; that dazzling tight-rope performance which takes you safely over the chasm of Experience but leaves you as bruised as though you had fallen to its depths. Feeling is that quality of spirit which will save any artist from the philosophical redundancies of a De Profundis. The torturing need of expressing something that far outstretches one’s capacity for expression is the foundation of art. That’s why we have so little of it in this country. There may be some Americans in whom the perspective has retained its proper balance. I happen to know of one.
It is for some such need as this that The Little Review exists: to create some attitude which so far is absolutely alien to the American tradition. I have been going to the lectures of John Cowper Powys, which are spoken of in other places in this issue, and that appreciative man gave me an interesting idea the other day. I should like to see him as editor of a literary magazine whose policy was to cut off the subscription list everybody who speculated about his pose or his insincerity and failed to miss the great beauty of his words. Now Mr. Powys is as unstable as water: that is his value. He feels entirely too much ever to be fully sane. His hypothetical magazine would gather an audience that could fight successfully the great American crime which may be described briefly as missing the point. Thus we might establish a reign of imagination which would make stupid things as impossible as cruel things, which would consider a failure to catch some new beauty or a “moral lynching of great and independent spirits” as greater crimes than murdering a man in a dark corner.
On this basis we shall continue. If we must be sensible at least we shall make it, in Shaw’s phrase, an ecstasy of common sense. And out of all this chaos shall we produce our dancing star.