There was more hardship perhaps but also more
clear beauty in Colonial days than in our own. More clear beauty,
we say, because the present has its own vigorous beauty, more
complex than what went before, but not yet clarified from the ugly
elements that are making it. The forests and the skyscrapers are
beautiful in America, but pretty much everything else below and
between is soiled or broken by progress and prosperity.
And it is of the things in between, of America in the making, that
these new writers, whose lack of pure beauty we deplore, and whose
occasional gratuitous ugliness we dislike, are writing. They are
protesting against its sordidness and crudity far more effectively
than the cloistered reader who recites Shelley, saying "Why can't
they write as he does." Like all that is human they share the
qualities of their environment, like all fighters they acquire the
faults of the enemy. They hate, often enough, the ugliness which a
generation of progress has implanted in their own minds. They have
been educated, perhaps, by the movies, Main Street conversation,
formalized schools, and stale Methodism, and they hate their
education.
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