MA'SSCUtT' AND MIDCULT
593
ambiguity that makes Midcult alarming. For it presents itself
as part of High Culture. Not that coterie stuff, not those snob–
bish inbred so-called intellectuals who are only talking to
themselves. Rather the great vital mainstream, wide and clear
though perhaps not so deep. You, too, can wade in it for a
mere $16.70 pay nothing now just fill in the coupon and
receive a full year six hard-cover lavishly illustrated issues of
Horizon: A Magazine of the Arts,
"probably the most beautiful
magazine in the world . . . seeks to serve as guide to the long
cultural advance of modem man, to explore the many man–
sions of the philosopher, the painter, the historian, the archi–
tect, the sculptor, the satirist, the poet ... to build bridges be–
tween the world of scholars and the world of intelligent readers.
It's .a good buy. Use the coupon
now." Horizon,
now com–
pleting its second year, already has some 160,000 subscribers,
which is more than the combined circulations, after many years
of effort, of
Kenyon, Hudson, Sewanee, Partisan, Art
N~ws,
The Arts, American Scholar, Dissent, Commentary,
and half
a dozen of our other leading cultural-critical magazines.·
Midcult is not, as might appear at first, a raising of ,the
level of Masscult. It is rather a corruption of High Culture
w.hich has the enormous advantage over
Ma~cult
that while
also in fact "totally subjected to the spectator," in Malraux's
phrase, it
is
able to pass itself off as the real thing. Midcult
is the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, put out several
years ago under the aegis of the Yale Divinity School, that
destroys our greatest monument of English prose, the King
James Version, in order to make the text "clear and meaning–
ful to people today," which is like taking apart Westminster
Abbey to make Disneyland out of the fragments. Midcult
is
3. H
oTi~on
is not as bad as its blurb ; the illustrations are indeed remark–
able and the articles are usually competent; but they are mostly
his–
torical and the few contemporary themes are dealt with journalistically
rather than critically.
H
oTi~on
is a periodical encyclopedia, not really
a magazine at all.
