If the _bourgeois_ tradition then will not serve, there is a popular
tradition which is still live and passionate and which may perhaps
persist. Unhappily it has a formidable enemy in the organization and
development of industry, which is far more dangerous to art than
Communist doctrine. Indeed, industry in its early stages seems
everywhere doomed to be the enemy of beauty and instinctive life. One
might hope that this would not prove to be so in Russia, the first
Socialist State, as yet unindustrial, able to draw on the industrial
experience of the whole world, were it not that one discovers with a
certain misgiving in the Bolshevik leaders the rasping arid
temperament of those to whom the industrial machine is an end in
itself, and, in addition, reflects that these industrially minded men
have as yet no practical experience, nor do there exist men of
goodwill to help them. It does not seem reasonable to hope that Russia
can pass through the period of industrialization without a good deal
of mismanagement, involving waste resulting in too long hours, child
labour and other evils with which the West is all too familiar. What
the Bolsheviks would not therefore willingly do to art, the Juggernaut
which they are bent on setting in motion may accomplish for them.
The next generation in Russia will have to consist of practical
hard-working men, the old-style artists will die off and successors
will not readily arise.
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