800 KS
mantlclSm. Indeed their connection is continually emphasized : the view
that the industrial revolution, separating work and production from
enjoyment, resulted in both the identification · of art and life that per–
vades romanticism and the dissociation of art and life, the "boredom,"
"passivity," "depersonalization," and "loneliness" whose projective sym–
bol is the "scientific" view of experience. Romanticism is "high" cul–
ture in the clinical sense of a disparity of manner and substance: the
melancholy of Keats and the unctuousness of Wordsworth, for instance,
and of course the voluntarism of Fichte
&
Company. It is a type of suf–
fering, as critics have said, no doubt the only presentable or even sociable
type.
(If
this phenomenon had a social equivalent, it would be called
mass culture.) Form or style contains, perhaps, the inexpungeable sug–
gestion of an integrated society; but the romantic writers find the
dilemma of industrialism insoluble despite or perhaps in virtue of the
multifariousness of their production. The separation of sensibility and
technique tends to make art frivolous and factitious even, or mostly, at
best. The paradox is contained in Mr. Van den Haag's opinion of art as
"realistic" and morally "creative" as against the fantasy and stereotypes
of popular culture. One may pause over the association of "realistic" and
"creative"; but the idea that morals partake of the "creativity" of art, or
of its "realism," or even of the peculiar insight of science, is precisely the
depletion and corruption of modern sensibility. Morals concern exactly
those exigencies where "creativity" is frivolous. But the real irony is
the pleasure many of these writers take in the association of "high" art
and "high," or bourgeois, society; although the fact that art as an in–
stitutional "form" requires an avant-garde keeps some of them from
comprising a coterie. One is tempted to say that the epitaph of indi–
vidMalism, if it is half-hearted or gauche enough to need one, should
be a volume like this.
It is an excellent work in that the selections are consistently intel–
ligent. There are no less than forty-nine contributors, including Walt
Whitman, de Tocqueville, and Ortega y Gasset on the general ques–
tion; Edmund Wilson and George Orwell-both supplying exceptionally
interesting essays-on detective fiction; two points of view on Mickey
Spillane
(!);
a psychoanalytic approach by Brodbeck and White to Li'l
Abner; exhaustive studies of certain aspects of the motion picture by
Siegfried Kracauer, ·Wolfenstein and Leites, .Larrabee and Riesman; and
many bibliographies. But there is no inclusive account of any popu–
lar art. Indeed it is hard to suppose a textbook in this field. Perhaps
it would be less interesting than this volume, which is often as di–
yerting as its subject. It is more in the nature of a source book or .a
