208
DWIGHT MACDONALD
Dickens or Balzac was aware of when he was writing down
and when he was writing up. Masscult is a subtler problem
than is sometimes recognized.
"What is a poet?" asked Wordsworth. "He is a man speak–
ing to men . . . a man pleased with his own passions and voli–
tions, and one who rejoices more than other men in the spirit
of life that is in him." It is this human dialogue that Masscult
interrupts, this spirit of life that it exterminates. Evelyn Waugh
commented on Hollywood, after a brief experience there: "Each
book purchased for motion pictures has some individual quality,
good or bad, that has made it remarkable. It is the work of a
great array of highly paid and incompatible writers to distinguish
this quality, separate it and obliterate it." This process is called
"licking the book"- i.e., licking it into shape, as mother bears
were once thought to lick their amorphous cubs into real bears;
though here the process is reversed and the hook is licked not
into but out of shape. The other meaning of "licked" also
applies; before a proper Hollywood film can be made, the work
of art has to be defeated.
II
The question of Masscult is part of the larger question of
the masses. The tendency of modem industrial society, whether
in the USA or the USSR, is to transform the individual into the
mass man. For the masses are in historical time what a crowd
is in space: a large quantity of people unable to express their
human qualities because they are related to each other neither
as individuals nor as members of a community. In fact, they are
not related
to each other
at
all
but only to some impersonal,
abstract, crystallizing factor. In the case of crowds, this can be
a football game, a bargain sale, a lynching; in the case of the
masses, it can be a political party, a television program, a system
of industrial production. The mass man is a solitary atom,
uniform with the millions of other atoms that go to make up
"the lonely crowd," as David Riesman well calIs our society. A
