628
DWIGHT
MACDONALD
ican mentality, taste, belief, breathing into it a new life, giving
it decision, affecting politics far more than the popular super–
ficial suffrage.... For know you not, dear, earnest reader, that
the people of our land may all read and write, and may all
posssess
the right to vote-and yet the main things may be
entirely lacking? .. . . The priest departs, the divine literatus
comes."
The divine literatus is behind schedule. Masscult and Mid–
cult have so pervaded the land that Whitman's hope for a
democratic culture shaped by a sacerdotal class at once so
sublime and so popular that they can swing elections--that
this
noble vision now seems absurd. But a more modest aspiration
is
still open, one adumbrated by Whitman's idea of a new cul–
tural class and his warning that "the main things may ·
be
entirely lacking" even though everybody knows how to read,
write and vote. This
is
to recognize that two cultures have
developed in this country and that it
is
to the national interest
to keep them separate. The conservatives are right when they
say there has never been a broadly democratic culture on a high
level. This is not because the ruling class forcibly excluded the
m~this
is
Marxist melodrama- but quite simply because
the great majority of people at any given time (including most
of the ruling class for the matter) have never cared enough
about such things to make them an important part of their lives.
So let the masses have their Masscult, let the few who care
about
good
writing, painting,
music,
architecture, philosophy,
etc.,
have their High Culture, and don't fuzz up the distinction
with Midcult.
Whitman would have rejected this proposal as undemo–
cratic, which it is. But his own career is a case in point: he
tried
to be a popular bard but the masses preferred James Whit–
comb Riley and his first recognition, excepting Emerson's
lonely voice, came from the English pre-Raphaelites, a deca–
dent and precious group if ever there was one.
If
we
would
create a literature "fit to cope
with
our occasions," the ·orily
