220
DWIGHT MACDONALD
Thus at her felt approach and secret might,
Art after art goes out, and all is night.
*
-l(.
*
La! thy dread empire, Chaos, is restored;
Light dies before thy uncreating word!
Thy hand, great anarch, lets the curtain fall
And universal darkness buries all.
This is magnificent but exaggerated. With the best will
in
the world, we have not been able to ring down the curtain;
the darkness is still far from universal. Man's nature is tough and
full of unexpected quirks, and there are still many pockets of
resistance. But in some ways history has surpassed Pope's worst
imaginings. With the French Revolution, the masses for the first
time made their entrance onto the political stage, and it was not
long before they also began to occupy a central position
in
cul–
ture. Grub Street was no longer peripheral and the traditional
kind of authorship became more and more literally eccentric–
out of the center-until by the end of the nineteenth century,
the movement from which most of the enduring work of our
time has come, had separated itself from the market and was
in systematic opposition to it.
This movement, was, of course, the "avant-garde" whose
precursors were Stendhal and Baudelaire and the impressionist
painters, whose pioneers included Rimbaud} Whitman, Ibsen,
Cezanne, Wagner, and whose classic masters were figures like
Stravinsky, Picasso, Joyce, Eliot, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Per–
haps "movement" is too precise a term; the avant-gardists were
linked by no esthetic doctrine, not even by a consciousness that
they
were
avant-garde (as, Rimbaud and Whitman). What
they had
in
common was that they turned their backs on the
marketplace, preferring to work for a small audience that sym–
pathized with their experiments because it was sophisticated
enough to understand them. By ,an act of will dictated by
necessity (the necessity of survival as a creator, as against a
