MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
223
to cause some misgivings about this notion-if mere banality
were a guarantee of success, every Hollywood movie would make
money-but somehow the lesson is never learned. Perhaps one
should investigate the publisher's own tastes."
Byron was as romantic and almost as industrious as Scott
but otherwise there were few similarities. His life was as dis–
orderly as Scott's was respectable, his personality as rebellious as
Scott's was conventional. It was this personality that won him
his mass following: he was the first bohemian, the first avant–
gardist, the first beatnik.
If
Scott was the artist as entrepreneur,
Byron was the artist as rebel, and there was less difference be–
tween these extremes, from the standpoint of Masscult, than one
might have thought. For Byron was a formidable competitor.
Scott began as a romantic poet, but when Byron began to pub–
lish, Scott made a strategic retreat to prose and began to write
the Waverley novels.
It
was a shrewd decision.
Marmion
and
The
Lady
of the Lake,
while accomplished exercises in the
romantic-historical genre, quite lacked the personal note; readers
could hardly identify with Roderick Dhu, while Childe Harold
and Manfred were not only identifiable but also seemed to ex–
press their author's even more identifiable personality.
Byron's reputation was different from that of Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and Pope because it was
based on the man-or what the public conceived to be the man
-rather than on his work. His poems were taken not as artistic
objects in themselves but as expressions of their creator's person–
ality. Similarly, Clark Gable acts himself rather than any specific
role; his classical opposite number is the Protean Laurence
7 Another possibility is that every editor and publisher is daily buried
under such an avalanche of nonsense that he loses his bearings. As anyone
who has ever taught a course in "creative writing" knows, it is a demo–
cratic right of every freeborn American to be a "writer." The obliteration
of standards in the Masscult world is nowhere shown more clearly than
in this innocent conviction. In the year 1956, for example,
The Ladies
Home Journal
received 21,822 unsolicited manuscripts, of which it accepted
16. And even the 16 lucky hits might not be considered worth the ink and
paper by some critics.
