Equipment for Living. Kenneth Burke

in terms of sickliness, one could hardly resent the rather Spartan distrust of art which the bourgeois adopted as a consequence. The aesthetic attitude, it seems to me, is defensible only if it can be advocated as a more complex form of utility. (Religion, for instance, insofar as it assists in the forming of a set of moral imperatives, is useful. “Religiosity,” an attitude without theological dogma, is “aesthetic.” It would be as useful a social force as religion, but religion in the past has proved simpler and more practical as a method of procuring the required minimum of order. But the value of the practical religion is limited, and the whole conditioning is so unpliant that, when established on this plane, it can like patriotism be easily converted to anti-social ends. The aesthetic “religiosity” at such times proves more practical, because more complex and thus more pliant. The “aesthetic” might thus be defined as an attempt—in terms of play, as in the “preparations” of childhood—to extend the biological adequacy of both the individual and the group.)

      We suspect that the almost mechanical antinomy between “business” and “art,” so pronounced a few years ago, was at bottom an economic matter, involving a political opposition which has been allowed temporarily to languish under the comparative quiescence of labor disturbances and jingoism. The “intellectual,” perhaps as a Tolstoyan importation, had assumed a fraternity with the American “worker and peasant” which existed only insofar as they might have certain enmities in common. Once this negative bond had weakened, the many divergencies between the two groups were quick to assert themselves. Meanwhile the bourgeois, being rich, and generally virtuous, finds it impossible to occupy his time between the hours of five and twelve with anything but art, so that “expression” becomes a major industry. (Which it always was; but now, in the general prosperity, there are crumbs even for the most “select” artists—the whole scale being raised—and the élite are content to let Harold Bell Wright banquet if only the same conditions permit them to lunch. And thus, in Europe, we find art distrusted on the grounds that art and bourgeoisie are synonymous!) Further, the class which voiced such strong objections against the bourgeoisie were pledged by the very framing of these objections to avoid all standardized motions, and would thus have to deny themselves the right of repeating over a protracted period any slogan, even if it embodied their profoundest convictions, so that the attitude of “protest” could subside without necessarily indicating that the situation had altered correspondingly. And “less true” may only mean “less in demand.”

      Nor does the other aspect of his “indictment” (“the blighted career, the arrested career, the diverted career are, with us, the rule”) seem any less “true.” Did not the editors of this very magazine, but a few months back, editorially look in vain not for the important writers which Mr. Brooks had hoped for, but merely for “interesting” writers? Yet somehow the morale behind it all has changed—and hope and hopelessness as to the future seem to have vanished together. Artists are now well documented in their predicaments which, like prolonged plagues, though they may continue to destroy, finally cease to dismay. Whereas an editor, through a sense of justice, may deplore the circumambient mediocrity, a writer, through a sense of embarrassment, must refrain from doing so. In such plaints, for him, there is no longer catharsis. The problem has been reduced to doggedly simple terms: to write as best he may, not as the result of an ancestral hunger after izzat, nor as the expression of any driving need for vicarious existences, but because, under a continued failure to be coherent, he becomes uneasy.

      Belief and Art

      Experience and Art by Joseph Wood Krutch. Harrison Smith & Robert Haas

      The Nation, November 1932, 536–537

      One who has read Mr. Krutch’s The Modern Temper before reading his newest volume, Experience and Art, must be struck by an interesting change in the critic’s point of view. The earlier book was built around the thesis that poetry is dying because “poetry illusions” are dying. The author held that certain beliefs are inherently “poetic,” and that, since we can no longer believe these “poetic” beliefs (as the belief that the world is the center of the universe), the very basis of poetic dignity is destroyed. In contrast with this attitude, he now says, in his introduction to his newest volume: “Whatever man is capable of believing is potential material for literature.” And his volume is built around the ramifications deducible from this shift in position. He relates art to life by showing that art utilizes for its effects the same “premises” as people live by, that the artist moves his readers by exploiting the convictions and preferences which influence their conduct in actual life. Hence, the rise of different schools which stress different aspects of “consciousness” can determine “to a far greater extent than is generally realized both how people are going to act and what . . . it is going to feel like to live.” And by this schema, it is generally the work of the literary critic to study the processes of literary appeal and to orientate these with reference to other biological or social processes.