arts are so much under our eyes and in our ears that we fail to recognize them as decent contributions to the richness and intensity of our lives. The result, strange as it may appear to devotees of culture, is that our major arts suffer. The poets, painters, composers who withdraw equally from the main stream of European tradition and from the untraditional natural expressions of America, have no sources of strength, no material to work with, no background against which they can see their shadows.
At the same time the contempt we have for the lively arts hurts them as much as it hurts us. We have all heard of the "great artist of the speaking stage" who will not lower himself by appearing on the screen; as familiar is the vaudevillian who will call himself an artist and has hankerings for the "legit"; we have seen good dancers become bad actors, good blackface comedians develop alarming tendencies toward singing sentimental ballads in whisky-tenor voices, good comic-strip artists beginning to do bad book illustrations. The "step upward" is never in the direction of superior work, but towards a more rarefied acclaim.
As these artists suffer under opprobrium and try to avoid it by touching the field of the faux bon, their work becomes more and more refined, and genteel. The broadness, rough play, vitality, diminish gradually until a sort of Drama League seriousness and church-sociable good form are both satisfied. And all the more's the pity for the thinning out of our lives goes on from day to day and these lively arts are the only things which can keep us hard and robust and gay. In America where there is no recognized upper class to please, no official academic requirements to meet, the one tradition of gentility is as lethal as all the conventions of European society, and unlike those of Europe, our tradition provides no nourishment for the artist. It is negative all the way through.
In spite of gentility the lively arts have held to something a little richer and gayer than the polite ones. They haven’t dared to be frank for a spurious sense of decency is backed by the police, and this limitation has hurt them; but it has made them sharp and clever by forcing their wit into deeper channels. There still exists a broadness in slapstick comedy and in burlesque, and once in a while vast figures of Rabelaisian comedy occur. For the most part the lively arts are inhibited by the necessity to provide "nice clean fun for the whole family"—a regrettable, but inevitable penalty for their universal appeal. For myself I should like to see a touch
