THE FATE OF THE AVANT-GARDE
365
which in the past it has articulated and vivified in this country.
Although
it
is obviously not so, many intelligent people persist
in the belief that the avant-garde is self-appointed, that it is historically
gratuitous and irrelevant. It is accused of perversely
alienating itself
from what is vaguely referred to as the broad healthy mainstream of
culture. Philip Rahv has commented on this attitude in a passage
which, since it should be classic in this discussion, I quote at length:
The neo-philistines make an opportune kind of optimism their
credo; they are impatient to assume the unchallengeable reality of the
"world," and while reconciled to mass-culture they are inclined to de–
precate the traditional attitudes of the literary and artistic avant-garde
-attitudes said to arise out of negativism pure and simple and willful
indulgence in "alienation." Now the avant-garde is of course open to
criticism. It has the typical faults of its incongruous position in a mass–
society, such as snobbery and pride of caste. It is disposed to take a
much too solemn and devotional view of the artist's vocation. Its dis–
tortions of perspective result from its aloofness and somewhat inflexible
morality of opposition. But to accuse it of having invented alienation
is ludicrous. For what the avant-garde actually represents historically,
from its very beginnings in the early nineteenth century, is the effort
to preserve the integrity of art and the intellect amidst the conditions
of alienation brought on by the major social forces of the modern era.
The avant-garde has attempted to ward off the ravages of alienation in
a number of ways: by means of developing a tradition of its own and
cultivating its own group norms and standards, by resisting the bourgeois
incentives to accommodation, and perforce making a virtue of its sepa–
rateness from the mass. That this strategy has in the main been successful
is demonstrated by the only test that really counts-the test of creative
achievement. After all, it is chiefly the avant-garde which must be given
credit for the production of most of the literary masterpieces of the past
hundred years, from
Madame Bovary
to the
Four Quartets;
and the
other arts are equally indebted to its venturesome spirit.
The French Encyclopedists showed many of the characteristics of the
avant-garde, but probably, as Mr. Rahv suggests, a more distinctly
modem form of cultural advance was to be seen in the German and
English, and later in the French romantic movements. The Words–
worth-Coleridge group was avant-garde in the modem sense, and in
various countries and under varying conditions their kind of insur-
