MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
221
technician) each of them rejected the historical drift of post-
1800 Western culture and recreated the old, traditional situa–
tion in which the artist communicated with his peers rather than
talked down to his inferiors. Later on, they became famous and
those who survived even got rich- the avant-garde is one of the
great success-stories of this century- but their creative work was
done in a very different atmosphere. In the second part of this
article, I shall deal at length with this phenomenon, especially
the assumption of the avant-garde into the Midcult heavens.
Where are the avant-gardists of yesteryear? Doing very nicely,
thanks.
VI
The two great early best-sellers in Grub Street's triumph
were Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Both exploited romanti–
cism, a new creed whose emphasis on subjective feeling as
against traditional form was suitable to the democratization of
taste that was taking place. But they differed interestingly. Each
represented an aspect of Masscult, Scott the production line,
Byron the emphasis on the artist himself. Antithetical but
also
complementary: the more literature became a branch of indus–
try, the more the craving for the other extreme- individuality.
Or
rather, a somewhat coarser commodity, Personality.
It is hard for us to understand the effect of Scott's novels
on his contemporaries. They were commonly compared to
Shakespeare, for their variety and their broad human sympathy.
"A great mind unequalled anywhere who naturally produces the
most extraordinary effects upon the whole world of readers,"
was Goethe's judgment. But Croce, in his
European Literature
in the Nineteenth Century)
places his finger on the radical, the
fatal defect of the Waverley novels: "There are too many of
them." He has much also to say about the monotony of Scott's
style and the "mechanical method" with which he constructed
his characters. But quantity is the point. "[He was] an indus–
trial producer, intent upon supplying the market with objects for
