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DWIGHT MACDONALD
Olivier, who can actually impersonate, with style and passion,
all kinds of other people, from Henry V to the seedy song-and–
dance man of
The Entertainer.
Of course it wasn't really Byron
himself but a contrived
persona
which fitted into the contempor–
ary public's idea of a poet. Goethe was as obtuse on Byron as
he was on Scott; he praised him as a great poet but added the
well-known proviso: "When he thinks, he is a child." The
reverse was the truth: as a "great poet" Byron was banal-who
reads his "serious" poetry now?-but when he thought, he was
not at all childish; that is, when he (one senses with some relief)
dropped the pretense of romantic passion and let
his
realistic
18th-century temperament play around, as in
his
diaries and
letters and in
Beppo
and
Don Juan.
There were two Byrons, the
public swashbuckler of
The Corsair
and
Childe Harold's Pilgrim–
age
and the private mocker of the same romantic attitudes, and
this split between the two was to become congenital. One
thinks of Mark Twain, with his public pose as the genial home–
spun philosopher and
his
private hell of nihilist despair.
VII
Or of John Barrymore, whose profile and sexual-romantic
prowess were as famous as Byron's and whose Masscult
persona
bound him to the wheel of endless portrayals of The Great
Lover and repressed his real talents, which were a beautiful
diction and a distinguished stage presence (as in his
Hamiet) ,
sensitivity as an actor (as in the movie of
A Bill of Divorce–
ment)
,
and a gift for light comedy curiously analogous to
Byron's flair for burlesque. The latter glittered in a few scenes
of sardonic, graceful mugging in such routine movie farces as
The Man from Blankley's
and
Twentieth Century.
Since in a mass society people are related not to each other
but to some abstract organizing principle, they are often in a
state of exhaustion, for this lack of contact is unnatural.
So
Masscult attempts to provide distraction for the tired business
man--or the tired proletarian. This kind of art is necessarily at
