OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
563
hand; while the young, hungry for "originality," read Henry Miller,
who is a copy of a copy but who is not yet "taught" rather than
Rimbaud and Joyce, whom the professors now ' have under con–
trol. They admire the revivalist energy of Dylan Thomas because he
hands out to them .at least a simulacrum of exuberance. This youngest
generation stands mute and empty-handed in a cultural situation they
cannot see into-principally because they have been led to believe
that to be "modern" is to be endlessly experimental. It is this petrified
and nostalgic generation that the intellectual should examine; it is
all
about him, and a good many pieces of the future are embedded
in it. The young, with the sound of guns just over the horizon, are
hungry for the life and variety which have been squeezed out of
formal art; and are tired of stripping nature down to its "structural
values"; but they are at once too shy and too enervated to be able to
approach nature "from the heart." They cling, therefore, to "the
modern," with all its outworn fetishes. They need an insight into
their situation which the older American intellectual, immobilized in
his own emotional and spiritual depletion, has not yet been able to
supply.
2.
"Mass culture" cannot exist, to any dangerous degree, any
more than "masses" (in the sense of a potential mob) can, in any
fluid civilization, such .as ours. That levels of social prestige exist in the
American democracy of the moment, is clearly a fact; but these
levels are constantly shifting. In today's American democracy the
flow of taste, manners and ideas seems to circle rather idly and
shallowly at the suburban level ("gracious living"); but other cur–
rents continue to run unimpeded. We tend to forget two facts: first,
that "mass" or "vulgar" influences are only partially debasing, since
they have in them elements of healthy coarse vigor without which any
culture becomes either arid or effete; and second, that a continual
seeping down .and through the culture at large, from "high" formal
levels is, at present, an active tendency. It is in the field of popular
entertainment, closely linked as it now is with advertising, that true
powers of debasement exist. In a period which, as Collingwood has
remarked, is "rotten with entertainment," the population at large is
subjected to a continual abrasion of delicacy of feeling and of value
judgment. It is the loss of the tragic sense of life which weakens the
tensions of the human spirit; it is the mechanical laugh following
