New means
of testing preconceived opinion are theirs, and they are using
them. The numbers which can be called intelligent are tremendously
augmented and the race to secure material comforts has become a
mass movement which will not cease until the objective is won.
In the meantime, there is only one road which is clear--the road
of material progress, and whether its end lies in the new
barbarism of a mechanistic state where the mental and physical
faculties will decline in proportion to the means discovered for
healing their ills, or whether it is merely a path where the
privileged leaders must mark step for a while until the
unprivileged masses catch up with them in material welfare, no one
knows and few that are really competent care to inquire.
Now this obsession with material welfare is the underlying premise
with which all discussion of contemporary literature, and
particularly American literature, must begin. Ours is a literature
of an age without dogma, which is to say without a theory of
living; the literature of an inductive, an experimental period,
where the really vital attempt is to subdue physical environment
(for the first time in history) to the needs of the common man.
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