OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
595
is neither an end in itself nor the chief purpose of either
literatur~
or revolution. Who, apart from the intellectuals who make these
extraordinary revelations, is helped, comforted and illuminated?
During a period of economic prosperity, the middle class has no
more need of intellectuals to defend it than the editors of
The Satur–
day Evening Post
need James Joyce as a novelist, Pablo Picasso as
an illustrator, and T. S. Eliot as an editor.
I make an especial point of the uselessness of an intellectualized
conformism because of the crucial and growing need of a critical
non-conformism. Mass culture and the New Criticism, different as
they are, both make more acute the need of the intellectual as a
critical non-conformist. It is obvious enough that the intellectual is
necessary to sustain the traditional forms of culture amid the rank
and overpowering growth of mass culture. It is perhaps less clear
that as the New Criticism naturally tends to attach literature to
the university, so only a critical non-conformist intelligentsia, in–
side .and outside the university, can right the balance and keep
serious literature from becoming merely a set of courses in the
departments of English and comparative literature. To this actual
situation, in which the vested reality of mass culture, formal educa–
tion, and the New Criticism prevail, we must add the pious hope of
a possibility, the fulfillment of which also requires a critical non–
conformist intelligentsia. It is the possibility that universal education,
in combination with the very mechanical agencies which make mass
culture profitable, may create and sustain a genuine educated class
partly by the mere increase in the number of intelligent readers. The
reasonable and logical basis of this hope is modest indeed, as modest
as any assumption can be: the hopeful, modest assumption is that
.as the number of human beings who can read increases, the number
of intelligent readers will also increase, though certainly not in the
same proportion. Thus if the so-called reading public of fiction rose
to twenty million readers, there might be fifty thousand readers
interested in serious fiction; a like thing has certainly come to pass
in music where the radio, for all its infamy, has certainly enlarged
the audience for good music by making it available for a small
fraction of each week. But any such realization and fulfillment
cannot come about or last through a mere quantitative increase: it
requires the existence of a critical, non-conformist minority, con-
