2. VAGARIES OF INDIVIDUALISM Modern art has not followed Horace very far. It has broken with conventionality as Horace did with the _clichés_ of Alexandria, but it has not yet entered upon the path of right philosophy. The _Spoon River Anthology_, a typical specimen from the individualistic school of what might be called localists or village gossips, is in the epode-stage of Horace, the stage of personalities, lubricity and garlic gruesomeness. Hopes might be entertained that _Spoon River_ and _Main Street_ and other individualistic photographs would progressively improve with Horace except for one sad deficiency: Horace had humor and laughed at others, and even at himself; modern individualists are so heavily armored with the seriousness of their own views, that they don’t even smile. To imagine the New Art laughing is impossible; if the New Art had humor and laughed, it would cease to be New Art and would join the larger brotherhood of art uncapitalized. Had the new artists a sense of humor, it would probably be their death sentence. In the course of time they might catch sight of their own art products, whether of painting or of poetry. Is it not an indication of individualism that so many recent novels are biographies, that the stage is not holding up the mirror to life but applying the scalpel to an ulcer? The biography or personal views of Scott and Shakespeare cannot be discovered in their works. The modern pamphleteer distributes his paradoxes among various mouthpieces whose only difference is in name, and this is called a play, when it is in reality propaganda. There are probably now no less than 100,000 college graduates turning college escapades and flirtations into chapters, which their authors consider typical of life because the incidents were individually experienced. And, as the long stories of the day are biographies or problems and as the drama is a diagnosis of diseases, in the same way many of the short stories are pathological, but all are tending to be individualistic. The artist makes his own subjective experience the full measure of his artistic expression and seems to imagine that his own peculiarities are good art because he sincerely expresses what he feels. Individual nature is not human nature.