Because of the limited horizons of the American artist, therefore, the rising generation aspires after the things that Messrs. Jack London, Rupert Hughes, Scott Fitzgerald, and heaven knows who else have thought good and fine; the younger generation talks like the heroes and heroines of a melodrama by Mr. Samuel Shipman, when they do not attain the higher level of comic cuts; the younger generation thrills to the type of beauty which Mr. Penryhn Stanlaws sets before its gaze. The notion that the common man despises art is absurd. The common man worships art and lives by it; and when good art is not available he takes the second best or the tenth best or the hundredth best. The success of Mr. Eugene O’Neil, one of the few playwrights of any girth who has contributed to the American stage, proves that the only way that people can be kept away from good art is by not providing it. The younger generation might just as well have had its idea-patterns shaped by Sophocles, Praxiteles, and Plato, if our genuine artists were not so aloof to their responsibilities, and if they were intellectually mature enough to accept the full burden of their vocation. It is a sign of a terrific neurosis--and no mark at all of esthetic aptitude--that our genuine art is so completely disoriented and so thoroughly out of touch with the community. We must turn to a man of such uneven parts as Mr. Nicholas Vachel Lindsay before we have anything like a recognition of the classic rôle of the artist. Art for the artist’s sake is largely a symptom of that neurotic individualism which drives the artist out of a public world which baffles him into a private world where he may reign in solitude as an unruly demiurge. Art for the public’s sake, on the other hand, substitutes the vices of the extrovert for the vices of the introvert. When I say that art must have some vital contact with the community I do not mean, let me emphasize, that the artist must cater to public whim or demand. Art in its social setting is neither a personal cathartic for the artist, nor a salve to quiet the itching vanity of the community: it is essentially a means by which people who have had a strange diversity of experiences have their activities emotionally canalized into patterns and molds which they are able to share pretty completely with each other. Pure art is inevitably propaganda. I mean by this that it is meant to be propagated, and that in so far as it fails to impregnate the community in which it exists with its ideas and images, in so far as the community is not changed for better or worse by its existence, its claims are spurious. Propagandist art, on the other hand, is inevitably impure since instead of bringing people together on a common emotional plane, as men, it tends to accentuate their differences, and to void emotions which are proper to art into a realm where the emotions of the missionary’s tent or the soapboxer’s platform hold exclusive sway. It is just because the “artist” in