us with a predestined harmony.

The point I am seeking to make is that what is called the "critical
attitude" towards new experiments in art is the extreme opposite of
the mood required in genuine criticism.

That negation of interest in any given new thing which is not only
allowable but commendable, if we are to preserve the outlines of our
identity from the violence of alien intrusion, becomes a sheer waste
of energy when it is transmuted into ponderous principles of
rejection.

Give us, ye gods, full liberty to pass on our way indifferent. Give us
even the illuminating insight of unbounded hate. But deliver us--that
at least we pray--from the hypocrisy of judicial condemnation!

More and more does it become necessary, as the fashion of new
things presses insolently upon us, to clear up once for all and in a
largely generous manner, the difficult question of the relation of
experiment to tradition.

The number of shallow and insensitive spirits who make use of the
existence of these new forms, to display--as if it were a proof of
aesthetic superiority--their contempt for all that is old, should alone
lead us to pause and consider.

Such persons are as a rule quite as dull to real subtleties of thought
and feeling as any absolute Philistine; and yet they are the ones who
with their fuss about what they call "creative art" do so much to
make reasonable and natural the ordinary person's prejudices against
the whole business.

They actually have the audacity to claim as a mark of higher
aesthetic taste their inability to appreciate traditional beauty. They
make their ignorance their virtue; and because they are dull to the
delicate things that have charmed the centuries, they clamorously
acclaim the latest sensational novelty, as though it had altered the
very nature of our human senses.

One feels instinctive suspicion of this wholesale way of going to
work, this root and branch elimination of what has come down to us
from the past. It is right and proper--heaven knows--for each
individual to have his preferences and his exclusions. He has not,
one may be quite sure, found himself if he lacks these. But to have
as one's basic preference a relinquishing in the lump of all that is old,
and a swallowing in the lump of all that is new, is carrying things
suspiciously far.

One begins to surmise that a person of this brand is not a rebel or a
revolutionary, but quite simply a thick-skin; a thick-skin endowed
wit