POPULAR AND UNPOPULAR ART
397
experts who tend the complicated machinery of modern civiliza–
tion."
One characteristic of the Bouvard-Pecuchet sort of enthu–
siasm is the violent repuduation after violent interest of one
craze after another when the satiation point is reached. The
revulsion shown by the intellectual toward the artist, during
recent years, resembles this sort of compensating tendency. The
too-great emphasis of emotion and hope placed upon the artist
in the preceding period is lifted and placed at an opposite point.
The D. H. Lawrence, Proust, Hart Crane kind of semi-worship
went over, for a time, to Malraux; and then became transformed
into something else. The very complexity of the artist's equip–
ment became as much a target for -the subsequent badgering and
denigration as the non-material quality of his aims. It is moral
blame of the most childish kind that we find most frequently
expressed; and real puzzlement, also at a childish level. The
atmosphere of former religious paroxysms and squabblings re–
turns; the old fights between established religion and the sects
and between the sects themselves; the old tiresome yet danger–
ous extremes of the persecutory centuries.
Now, one would think that the unstable intellectual should
stand out against all these moral acrobatics and tergiversa–
tions: if not as judge, at least as arbiter.
If
he cannot remain
firm, he should at least be in another part of the field, out of the
melee and ahead of it. But as things turn out, he is either
squarely
in
the mix-up, name-calling with the best or, making
motions of advancing the while he has managed rapidly to
retreat into something truly comforting in the way of pre–
Copernican scholasticism; or has made a full flight back to
Aristotle.-And if he is of no real use in reconciling embattled
sects, perhaps he could do a little simple journeyman's work in
keeping entrepreneurism in its place. But here he rather fails
us, too.
At this point it is necessary to remember that the middle–
class has produced, at the expense of much time and effort, a
whole literature of its own. Its own writers, bred out of its own
bone and flesh, educated in its own schools and amenable to its
own scheme of manners and customs have fanned out into the
