Page:The Modern Writer.pdf/37

 mer and get out your horn," it said.

Now I shall try to do that.

There is, you see, a modern movement in America. We are not so self-satisfied as we must often seem to strangers, to men from foreign parts. We still walk about and talk things over among ourselves. There is, if you are sensitive enough to feel it, a wistful something in the air here. You will feel it in any large crowd. At present the Modern Movement is perhaps a groping ill-defined movement but it exists. In painting there are a number of men who have stopped making pleasant enough drawings of the old swimming hole and the magazine cover lady, who have thrown overboard the tricks of realism and representation and the absorption in surface technique and who are trying to bring feeling and form back into painting. The same thing is going on in the writing of poetry. Architecture is freeing itself from imitation