MASSCULT AND MIDCULT
617
think of no more accurate one. It
is
strange how many brain–
workers we have and how few intellectuals, how many special–
ists
whose knowledge and interest are confined to their own
"field" and how few generalists whose interests are broad and
nOh-professional. A century ago Lord Melbourne, himself a
strikingly non-specialized and indeed rather ignorant intel–
lectual, observed: "A man may be master of the ancient and
modem languages and yet his manners shall not
be
in the least
degree softened or harmonized. The elegance, grace and feeling
which he
is
continually contemplating cannot mix with
his
thoughts or insinuate themselves into their expression-he
remains as coarse, as rude and awkward, and often more so,
than the illiterate and the ill-instructed." One of Melbourne's
favorite quotations was Jacques's remark, in
As You Like It,
when the rustic clown quotes Ovid:
"0
knowledge ill-inhabited
-worse than Jove in a thatched house!" One might
also
cite
Ortega y Gasset's observation, apropos of "the barbarization
of specialization": "Today, when there are more scientists than
ever, there are fewer cultured men than, for example, in 1750."
A comparison of Diderot's
Encyclopedia
with the post-1920
American editions of the
Britannica
would be interesting-al–
though, of course, Gasset's contention can never
'be
proved (or
disproved) if only because "a cultured man" is not a scientific
category. Like all the important categories.
'
XVII
In England, cultural lines are still drawn with some clarity.
The B.B.C., for instance, offers three distinct programs: the
Light (Masscult ) , the Home (Midcult) and the tactfully
named Third (High Culture). It is true that the daily papers
are divided about like ours: three good ones
(Times, Guardian,
Telegraph)
with relatively small circulations and many bad
ones with big circulations. The popular papers are not only
much bigger than ours--the
Mirror
and the
Express
have about
five million each, twice the circulation of the N.Y.
Daily News,
