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
