Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/405

Rh humanity being what it is, and the given character moving inside its own limitations there is no easy way out; the given situation has arisen, and will continue to arise; the impasse is a biological impasse. Human capacity, perseverance, endurance continuing static, it will continue to be an impasse. Hence the idea of literature assuming the duties of a science—despite the sentimentalist's shudder and the lazy man's objection to the term "science." I take it that good poets have always believed this, but that the light has come to few prose-authors.

The society of Bel Esprit has been founded in Paris, a sort of consumers' league to pay for quality rather than quantity in literature and the fine arts. If it does not restart civilization it has at least provided an instrument for calling bluffs, for weighing to the utmost milligram and testing to the last degree of fineness a given person's interest in "art" or in "literature."