ARTIST AGAINST SOCIETY
67
the entire elite in the year 1800. We now sacrifice the minority as
formerly it sacrificed the majority.
The artistic problem is thus intertwined with the great, the
overriding problem of the mass age-the problem of numbers. A
huge increase in the number of people, in the number of activities
and possibilities, of desires and satisfactions, is the great new fact.
It-and not any greater wallowing in sensuality- is what makes us
complain of intellectual decadence. It-and not any falling away
from a common controlling faith-produces our sense of helpless
confusion. For the world has always been confused and decadent,
but the number of humans on the planet has never been so great,
their individual weight has never before been presumed equal each
to each, and the consciousness of chaos has never been re-echoed
from so many minds simultaneously, to become a burden added on
top of the fact itself.
In the domain of culture we are never allowed to forget these
numerical facts and democratic assumptions. It was only a short time
ago that the proposed deferment of college students aroused angry
protests, led by the presidents of Harvard and Princeton. The
words "privilege," "caste," "elite" were freely used to indicate the
abominations that would ensue if intellectual occupations set apart
for a few months an admittedly valuable group of the nation's
youth. Yet at the very same time we are not allowed to disregard
the masses' "right" to culture, even though they may scorn it. We
are committed to nursing the possible germ of interest or talent
in much the way that we keep working over a drowned man. We
educate, we encourage, we expose, and there is undoubtedly a large
if not a great harvest of intellect and love of art. Who can remain
unmoved on hearing that in one great university of the Middle
West some two thousand students have taken up painting? Here
again we seem to outdo at one bound any previous achievement of
the kind, and even to be recovering one of the natural functions of
art,
which is to give enjoyment to the maker.
But when we speak of art and artists we still tend to mean
professional art, the high art of the bourgeois epoch since the
Renaissance, and we continue to force that interpretation upon
the young. They espouse it, ,and the result is an enormous number
of people who paint, write, and compose with professional skill; then
