United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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ARS QUIXOTICA NEIL A. DEWAR T)ACK in the late fall of 1930, in the relatively halcyon days before - - either the Nazi nightmare or the Five-Year Plan were faits accomplis, a solemn body of martially uniformed aesthetes fore¬ gathered in the shadow of the Kremlin and announced that “the method of art is the method of dialectic materialism,” and that artists should abandon “individualism” as a “petty bourgeois atti¬ tude,” accept the viewpoint of the proletariat and develop art as one of the weapons of the working class in the universal struggle for power. Such were the cultural fruits of Stalinism. Earlier in the era the great God Lenin had displayed a distressingly bourgeois admiration for Beethoven and Bernhardt, while his satellite Trots¬ ky, had championed art’s right to be judged by its own laws; but by 1930 Lenin existed only as a mummified substitute for the Deity, and Trotsky in exile was simply a modern counterpart of the wan¬ dering Jew. A schism in the Communist party had fostered a new dispensation, which “assumed that book production can be planned in advance, like the production of textiles or steel,” and prattled glibly about “collective creation” and “the seizure of power in the arts.” Creative independence was tabooed. The new rulers de¬ nounced with vehemence those Slavic Cosmists who vainly sought “a new dazzling road for the planet,” and ridiculed with some justice, I must admit, those mystical youths who desired to “seize the reins of our wind-blown thoughts and ply to the nowhere in our charla- tansky sharabang,” while wooing a vapoury Muse whose essays in Imagism were designed to read equally well from either end. For such nebulous paronomasia, declared the Commissar, there was no place in the proletarian state, and the authorities were prepared, if necessary, to bring recalcitrant scribblers into line with the aid of a little violence. A campaign was launched in the official organ, Pravda, with headlines that screamed of “Literary Sabotage” and “Treason on the Home Front.” Men who claimed an artistic privi¬ lege of “removing the veils from reality” were compelled to exercise that privilege in solitary confinement on the Siberian steppes; men who refused to prostitute their genius for the workers’ cause were driven to the composition of swan songs in their own life-blood. Art was being put on a factory basis, under which material would be collected by reporters, collated by specialists and crystallized by hacks into an offensive blend of Social Realism and Red Roman¬ ticism, portraying the world process as an evolutionary crescendo [10]

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age are to be crammed, not twice a year, but all the year with facts and more facts. At no other time in your life will those facts stick as readily, and at no other time will they prove “the good seed that will bring forth a harvest, some thirty-fold, some sixty-fold, and some one hundred-fold.” Yes, we stand by our ancient aim. It is still up-to-date. It is the second part of our aim, set in the first part: humanistic interests and standards, and knowledge set therein. The third part of the aim has never been realized in its true perspective. If it had been, there would not have been as much bickering between the champions of cultural interests and those of practical vocational interests. Professor Dewey states the aim in, “To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness.” A nurse registers in First Year Arts. She wants the broad cultural training for her fine service later to humanity. Is there any reason that she should not be encour¬ aged all along the line of studies to find her professional specialties in cultural generalities? Will she know any less of literature if she catches visions of using that literature in passing the monotonous hours with patients, either for herself, or for the purpose of reading to them? Will her chemistry be any the less academic if it is used in nursing experimentation? She fortunately knows what she wants to do and can be expected to make the connections between culture and professional training. The majority of students do not know their aptitudes. Is this then not a new angle of approach; viz: to test out when registering and in every subject to be studied certain likes and dislikes and certain abilities and disabilities? Can we expect young people to know “what makes for breadth, for freedom, for service, for the cultivation of intellectual and personal ideals”? Why should we not cater to all and sundry, and allow them, even encourage them, to turn aside at any time in their college career, and to follow their particular “bent”? We should be expected as administrators and teachers to be able to see that “bent” at all times in a cultural background. Will not the cultural background be all the richer when the “bent” is found? Will there not be more desire on the part of the boy or girl with the “bent” to remain the full time? Then and probably not till then will the student be, as Havelock Ellis suggests he should be, “a serene spectator of the absurdity of the world, and at the same time, a strenuous worker in the ration¬ alization of the world!” But who is to try to accomplish all this? Surely educational nipples are not to be supplied to mere spectators and dawdlers! Are not the students capable of being anxious to (Continued on page 28) [9]

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towards Stalinism. The new Bolsheviki were determined to “organ¬ ize the psyche of the toiling masses,” and their triumph was magni¬ ficent: they achieved an absolute stifling of all creative endeavour between the Urals and the Caspian Sea. While this tragic opera was being enacted in the Near East, the cognoscenti of post-war letters were tilting with a futile fury at imaginary windmills, or dashing madly about in the deserts of their own creation and hiding their heads in the sands. These juvenile gymnasts were vaguely aware of the menace of materialism and seized upon science as their bete noir; they resurrected the cele¬ brated disagreement between Arnold and Huxley and proclaimed the superiority of humane letters to empirical science as a way of wisdom. Darwin and Spencer had purged the universe of poetry, while Freud and Adler were explaining creative activity as the sub¬ limation of scatological desires; and the frantic dilletantes sought to exorcize the bogey men with an old-fashioned snobbery and a new species of black magic. Mr. T. S. Eliot, dabbled in Catholic classicism, decried the “curious Freudian — social — mystical — rationalistic — higher — Critical interpretation of literature,” and yearned for some unsanitary cloister in which the man of sense would have an un¬ limited opportunity to contemplate his navel and indulge in the meticulous dissection of metaphysical hairs. Prof. Irving Babbitt denounced “Naturalism” as preached by Francis Bacon and the thoroughly un-Baconian Rousseau, declared that “all the good things which are connected with manners and with civilization” were the work of pious gentlemen, and revamped the dix-huitieme ideal of the private salon in which the man of leisure might shut himself off from harsh reality and wallow in the amenities of culture and the felicitous exchange of social gossip. When it became evident that humanity was losing faith in such literary panaceas and swinging into step with the men of science, the literati withdrew into a world of personal experience and individual ecstasy, tilled the Pamassien weed of “l’art pour l’art,” and toyed with the inept theories of undis¬ ciplined punctuation and etymological gibberish; they played the sedulous ape to mr. e.e. cummings and wrote about “the Pytha¬ gorean sesquipedelia of the panepistemion, grunted and gromwelled, ichabod, habbakuk, opanoff, uggamyg, hapaxle, gomenon, pppppffff,” or what you will. The quotation is from James Joyce’s “Work in Progress,” and anyone’s guess is as good as mine. In any case the lone consequence of this verbal revelry has been that scores of delirious undergraduates and deluded farm boys are perpetrating “poetry” upon a bewildered public, a few critical opportunists have [113