Communication in Society, Volume 1 Literature and Mass Culture (Leo Lowenthal)

Literature and
Mass Culture
Literature and
Mass Culture
Communicaon in Society, Volume 1
LEO LOWENTHAL
Transaction Publishers
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Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Lowenthal, Leo.
Communication in society.
Contents: v. 1. Literature and mass culture.
1. Interpersonal communication—Philosophy—Addresses, essays,
lectures. 2. Popular culture—Philosophy—Addresses, essays, lectures.
3. Literature—Philosophy—Addresses, essays, lectures. 4. Sociology—
Philosophy—Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title.
HM258.L675 1984 302.2
ISBN 0-87855-489-0 (v. 1) 83-17888
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix
Part I: Historical and Empirical Studies
1 Historical Perspectives of Popular Culture 3
2 The Debate Over Art and Popular Culture: A Synopsis 19
Excursus A: Notes on the Theater and the Sermon 67
3 Eighteenth Century England: A Case Study 79
Excursus B: The Debate on Cultural Standards in

Nineteenth Century England 159
4 The Reception of Dostoevski in Pre–World War I

Germany 173
5 The Biographical Fashion 195
6 The Triumph of Mass Idols 211
Excursus C: Some Thoughts on the 1937 Edition of

International Who’s Who 247
Part II: Contributions to the Philosophy of Communication
7 On Sociology of Literature (1932) 255
8 On Sociology of Literature (1948) 269

9 Humanistic Perspectives of David Riesman’s
The Lonely Crowd 287
10 Popular Culture: A Humanistic and Sociological

Concept 303
Acknowledgments
The essays in this volume originally appeared in the following publications:
“Historical Perspectives of Popular Culture,” American Journal of Soci-

ology, vol. 55, January 1950, pp. 323–32.
“The Debate over Art and Popular Culture: A Synopsis” was written
as a research memorandum commissioned by the Ford Foundation’s
Implementation Committee on Television, and was completed in 1954.
“Notes on the Theater and the Sermon,” Transactions of the Sixth World
Congress of Sociology, vol. IV, 1970.
“The Debate over Art and Popular Culture: Eighteenth-Century England

as a Case Study,” Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences, ed. Mirra
Komarowsky, Free Press, 1957. Coauthored with Marjorie Fiske.
“The Debate on Cultural Standards in Nineteenth-Century England,”

Social Research, vol. 30, 1963.
“The Reception of Dostoevski in Pre–World War I Germany,” Zeitschrift

für Sozialforschung, vol. 3, 1934 (in German).
“The Biographical Fashion,” Sociologica, ed. T.W. Adorno and Walter

Dirks, Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt/Main, 1955 (in German).
“The Triumph of Mass Idols,” Radio Research 1942-43, ed. Paul F.

Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton, Duell, Sloan & Pierce, 1944.
“Some Thoughts on the 1937 Edition of the International Who’s Who,”

Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences, vol. 8, 1939 (in German).
vii
Literature and Mass Culture
“On Sociology of Literature (1932),” Zeitschrift für Sozilaforschung,

vol. 1, 1932 (in German).
“On Sociology of Literature (1948),” Communication in Modern Society,

ed. Wilbur Schramm, University of Illinois Press, 1948.
“Humanistic Perspectives of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd,”

Culture and Social Character, ed. Seymour Lipset and Leo Lowenthal,
Free Press, 1961.
“Popular Culture: A Humanistic and Sociological Concept,” The Human

Dialogue, ed. Floyd W. Matson and Ashley Montague, Free Press, 1967.
“Some Thoughts on the 1937 Edition of International Who’s Who” and

“On Sociology of Literature (1932)” have been translated from German
into English by Susanne Hoppmann-Lowenthal for publication in this
volume.
viii
Preface
The essays collected in this first volume of my writings on communica-
tion in society, though written at various times ranging from the 1930s
to the 1960s, have an underlying theme closely related to my longterm
intellectual concerns.
During my university training in Germany, immediately after the end
of World War I, I devoted four years to the study of the social sciences
and another four years to that of literature and history; throughout this
period I was also engaged in the study of philosophy. By now, I have
lived for almost half a century in the United States, and my professional
affiliations here and abroad have been that of a sociologist. These bare
facts may indicate that I can neither confess nor boast adherence to an
unequivocally defined specialization. I believe this to be an advantage.
Approaching sociological research from a humanistic angle while
retaining a sociological view of the humanities has helped clarify my
concern with cultural phenomena (which, for me, also means with
political morality). I came to focus my research on the issues of the
individual and individualism—concepts which in my lifetime have
undergone a dramatic change from the ideological heights of unques-
tioned supreme values to the gloomy relativism which questions any
meaning of history and human coherence. Obviously, except for the
genius and the charlatan, no one individual can undertake the task
of tackling all aspects and data in such a problematic field. My own
approach—partly by accident, partly by predilection—has led me
to narrow down this overriding theoretical interest to research on
literary production. In the sociologist’s idiom, it is the area of com-
munication; in the parlance of the humanist, it is the area of literature
(artistic or otherwise).
The French philosopher and political theorist Charles de Bonald
once said: “Were one to see the literature of a people whose history
one does not know, one could tell what this people had been, and were
ix
one to read the history of a people whose literature one does not know,
one could assume with certainty which one had been the basic trait of
its literature.” That is to say, literature is a particularly suitable bearer
of the fundamental symbols and values which give cohesion to social
groups and its members—in nations and epochs as well as in special
social subgroups and particular historical situations. Perceived in this
way, literature embraces two powerful cultural complexes: art on the
one hand, and a market-oriented commodity on the other.
Popular commodities serve primarily as indicators of the sociopsy-
chological characteristics of the multitude. By studying the organization,
content, and linguistic symbols of mass media, we learn about the typi-
cal forms of behavior, attitudes, commonly held beliefs, prejudices, and
aspirations of large numbers of people. At least since the separation of
literature into the two distinct fields of art and commodity in the course
of the eighteenth century, the popular literary products can make no
claim to insight and truth. Yet, although they have become a powerful
force in the life of modern man, their symbols cannot be overestimated
as diagnostic tools for studying man in contemporary society.
Literature as art is another matter. It is the creation of individuals
and is experienced by individuals qua individuals. It thus seems to be
as remote from the concerns of the social scientist as the physician-
patient relationship is from the interests of the research biochemist;
it is not surprising that social scientists usually have made a detour
around it—at least in their professional work. Yet it is my profound
conviction that particularly since the dawn of our era in the Renais-
sance, creative artistic literature presents one of the essential sources
for the study of the relation between man and society. On a previous
occasion I compared the creative writer with the authors of personal
documents such as memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, and letters, and
commented that it is the artist who portrays what is more real than
reality itself. (This is a broad, if not grandiose statement; it will be the
underlying theme of the second volume of Communication in Society.)
The present volume deals primarily (but not exclusively) with popu-
lar literature as commodity, a field where social science research has
flourished for some time. It has, however, been so preoccupied with
research techniques and methodological devices for refined data pro-
cessing that a paradoxical situation has developed. One of the many
professional specialties of our day, the study of the mass media—the
most visible, audible, and time-consuming social institutions—has not
attracted much attention from the literate public at large. This is due
x
Preface
to the reluctance of the theorists and research specialists in the mass

media field to relate their work to the general intellectual discussion of
modern mass culture on the one hand, and to its historical antecedents
on the other.
An investigation does not have to start with a tabula rasa. One of
the first tasks is to make clear that much has been written on the tablet
which now has to be deciphered and read. Modern communications
research, like so many other specialized activities in the social sciences,
has led an ascetic life—limiting itself to closely defined problems of
content analysis, effects, audience stratification, problems of inter-
and intro-media relations, and so on. Outside of this world of diligent
and conscientious specialized research, a literary discussion has been
raging, led by more or less sophisticated conributors to literary and
highbrow magazines, namely social philosophers, artists, educators,
and other agents of institutionalized and noninstitutionalized public
policy. Each group treats the other side with irony or contempt: the
writers by poking fun at the specialists, who do not see or want to
see the forest because of their jargon, and the specialists by denying
any dignity of evidence to the theorizing or moralizing literati. The
real victim in this battle is not the literary guild, which has gone on
setting its own standards of proof and speculation unruffled by the
methodological headaches of the specializing disciplinarian, but the
very social scientist who increasingly has felt the need for placing his
studies, projects, and plans in a context of socially useful theoretical
orientations. Being a scientist and not a theologian or a metaphysi-
cian, he will not gain or regain such orientation without recourse to
a historical continuum.
Indeed, popular culture has a history of many centuries, and is
probably as old as human civilization. We have only to think of the
differentiation between esoteric and exoteric religious exercises in
early oriental and occidental civilizations, of the dichotomy between
high and low tragedy and comedy on the stages of ancient Greece and
Rome, of the gulf between philosophizing elites at the estates of Roman
emperors and the circuses promoted by the very same elite, of the
organized medieval holidays with their hierarchical performances in
the cathedral, and the folksy entertainments at popular fairs, to which
the crowd surrendered immediately after participation in the services.
Popular art is not a specifically modern phenomenon. But until the
modern era it did not give rise to intellectual or moral controversies;
these arose only after the two domains had come in contact. The process
xi
that led to the change was gradual, and was associated with broad social
and technological changes which ushered in the beginnings of a middle
class. The artist, traditionally dependent for his subsistence on the direct
consumers of his art, no longer had to please only one rich or power-
ful patron; he had now to worry about the demands of an increasingly
broader, more “popular” audience. Though the process took place in
all great European nations with varying speed, there has arisen in each
of them, since the end of the eighteenth century, a class of writers and
playwrights who cater to the needs of these broader audiences. During
that century the controversies about popular culture began to rage in
earnest. We owe an even earlier formulation, in terms that have stayed
with us, to Montaigne, who was one of the most profound students of
human nature of all times. His psychological analysis of entertainment
as a means of meeting a universal human need applied to both domains
of culture, and he thus unwittingly fired the opening shot in the battle
of ideas that followed.
Montaigne’s ideas on the psychological and social function of enter-
tainment contrast with those of Pascal. His century—the seventeenth—
marks the consolidation of modern national states following the break-
down of the medieval supranational political, economic, and cultural
hierarchies. The intellectual task of the period was to reconcile the
individual’s religious and moral heritage and his basic human needs
with the requirements of the national and capitalist economy that was
replacing the feudal system. It is therefore not surprising that the phi-
losophers of this period discussed the individual’s cultural efforts and
personal needs in relation to his spiritual and emotional well-being, nor
is it surprising that it was the philosophers who played leading roles
in these discussions. Today these discussions may sometimes present
a bewildering play of speculation around the question of whether the
individual should ever be allowed to indulge in any leisure-time activi-
ties except those that may be construed as contributing to the salvation
of his soul. However rambling and general these philosophical specula-
tions may be, they nevertheless juxtapose, for the first time in modern
history, serious against relatively frivolous leisure-time pursuits, and
in so doing implicitly pose a problem.
Some of the milestones in the history of this debate on popular
culture are discussed in this volume. It is my hope that the interpreta-
tion of the social role of artistic and nonartistic products in literature
will eventually be amenable to theoretical formulation. For the time
xii
Preface
being, they remain a series of isolated concepts and basic, as yet largely
unresolved, questions.
I do not have an all-embracing formula to offer for the study of
popular culture. Indeed, I find myself here (more so than in the area
of artistic literature) caught between the prerogatives claimed by the
social sciences and the humanities. Yet despite considerable confusion,
competition, and occasional bitterness, there is probably more agree-
ment among the two groups than either is at present aware of. Students
entering one or the other field may have preconceived ideas, sometimes
contemptuous ones, about what students in the other area are doing
(indeed, this is an area that should be well-worth exploring), but they
often speak in each other’s terms without knowing it. When social
scientists who work within an academic framework draft rationales
for studies of the social aspects of mass media, they are usually guided
by the same sense of responsibility and concern for cultural and moral
values that are part and parcel of the humanists’ approach to the same
problems (in contrast to the notion that the social sciences are mere
bagatelles of commercial and political merchandising). Actually, both
groups share a concern with the role of the arts and their counterparts
in modern society, both seek standards and criteria for judgment with
regard to media output and its social role, and both believe in the
importance of studying the transmission of values through time and
space. Such emotional involvement and tension in itself suggests that
there are many concerns common to the two fields but that they have
not yet worked out efficient means of communicating with each other.
Some chapters in this volume deal with literature as commodity,
while others deal with problems of literature as art. There is, however,
a certain overlap, since the historical material, in discussing the issues
of popular arts, is quite frequently taken from the writings of leading
literary figures. An attempt has been made to refer to historical as well
as contemporary phenomena and to select sources from a number of
countries including England, France, Germany, Norway, Russia, and the
United States. The material on popular culture as offered here is pri-
marily centered on the study of intellectual debates over the arts and its
popular counterparts; however, the two papers on popular biographies
offer examples for an analysis of the popular commodities themselves.
By way of a postscript, a word on the essay on the reception of Dos-
toevski. I believe that this study was the first attempt to open up the
area of the history and aesthetics of reception (the essay was written in
xiii
the early 1930s), which has lately become a lively field in literary theory
and criticism. The two versions of “The Sociology of Literature” are to
demonstrate my own maturing process from a traditional Marxist in 1932
to what I hope is a more sophisticated version of a cosmopolitan intel-
lectual who has not given up the moral tenets of critical theory, to which
I profess a lifelong commitment from my youth to my present old age.
The material in this first volume of my writings is organized according
to subject matter rather than chronology. Part I presents a number of
studies that should be considered a contribution to an applied theory of
mass culture even though they are self-contained pieces of research. All
essays appear in their original form and have not been “brought up to date.”
I am grateful to the staff of the Book Division of Transaction for
professional assistance, and above all to its president, my friend and
colleague, Irving Louis Horowitz, who has had the great courage to
engage in a unique publishing venture and to enable a scholar to present
the entire record of his academic work while still alive and thus nurtur-
ing an old man’s impulse to remain productive for a little while longer.
Fall 1983
Part I
Historical and
Empirical Studies
1
Historical Perspectives
of Popular Culture
This chapter was written to be provocative, by one who has been

engaged in empirical research for a considerable number of years and
who has recently been charged with the administration of a large-scale
research program. The author has taken it upon himself to act as the
spokesman for an approach to popular culture which some will call
“social theory” and others “obsolete, abstract criticism.” Specifically,
this chapter deals with aspects of the historical and theoretical frame
of reference which seem to me to be a basic requirement for the study
of mass communications and yet a blind spot in contemporary social
science. I know of no better statement with which to highlight this
blind spot in contemporary analyses of mass phenomena than De
Tocqueville’s remarks on the fact-finding obsession of the American
mind a century ago:
The practice of Americans leads their minds to fixing the standard of

their judgment in themselves alone. As they perceive that they suc-
ceed in resolving without assistance all the little difficulties which
their practical life presents, they readily conclude that everything
in the world may be explained, and that nothing in it transcends
the limits of the understanding. Thus they fall to denying what
they cannot comprehend; which leaves them but little faith for
whatever is extraordinary and an almost insurmountable distaste
for whatever is supernatural. As it is on their own testimony that
they are accustomed to rely, they like to discern the object which
engages their attention with extreme clearness; they therefore strip
off as much as possible all that covers it; they rid themselves of
whatever separates them from it, they remove whatever conceals it
from sight, in order to view it more closely and in the broad light of
day. This disposition of mind soon leads them to condemn forms,
which they regard as useless and inconvenient veils placed between
them and the truth.1
3
My plea on behalf of these “veils” takes the form of five rather unsys-
tematic groups of observations: (1) I shall indicate that the discussion
of popular culture has a century-old tradition in modern history; (2)
the historical locus of popular culture today will be fixed; (3) an attempt
will be made to evaluate the over-all approach of empirical research to
the social function of contemporary popular culture; (4) the current
philosophical, qualitative, nonresearch analysis of popular culture
will be summarized briefly; and (5) some programmatic notes will be
offered on the relationship between social criticism and social research.
Popular Culture—An Old Dilemma
In a survey recently undertaken of radio-listening habits in a foreign
country, one of the respondents remarked:
Radio is the companion of the lonely. It has made gigantic strides for
almost half a century. Women in particiular, especially those with
small pensions and without other resources, who are completely
isolated, are now in touch with the whole world thanks to the radio.
They have undergone a regular transformation; they have found a kind
of second youth. They are up-to-date and they know the stars of the
headlines, of the theatre, the movies, the world of sports, etc. I have
heard village people, discussing the merits of Mozart and Chopin,
refer to what the radio had said.
In quite the opposite vein another woman revealed that she did
not have a radio set in her home. Asked to explain why, she answered:
“Because once there is a set in the house, one cannot resist. Everybody
listens idiotically, the kids and the others too. When we stay with my
friend G., my husband plays with the radio all the time.” Her view was
supported by a male respondent, who also refuses to permit a radio in
the house. He believes that studies, conversation, and activity around
the house provide enough interest, that the indiscriminate outpouring
of music and talk over the radio lowers everyone’s intellectual level.
These spontaneous remarks reveal two leitmotifs which have run
continuously through the modern era: on the one hand, a positive
attitude toward all instrumentalities for the socialization of the indi-
vidual; on the other hand, a deep concern about the inner fate of the
individual under the impact of the leveling powers of institutional and
other organized forms of leisure activity. This basic dilemma concern-
ing man’s existence beyond the requirements of biological and mate-
rial survival, the vital question of how to live out that stretch of life
which is neither sleep nor work, can be said to have found its classic
4
Historical Perspectives of Popular Culture
intellectual expression in a philosophical dialogue that never took place.

Montaigne in the sixteenth century took stock of the situation of the
individual after the breakdown of medieval culture. He was particularly
struck by the phenomenon of loneliness in a world without faith, in
which tremendous pressures were being exerted on everyone under
the conditions of a postfeudal society. To escape destruction by these
pressures, to avoid becoming lost in the horrors of isolation, Montaigne
suggested distraction as a way out:
Variety always solaces, dissolves, and scatters. If I cannot combat

it, I run away from it; and in running away I double and change my
direction. By changing place, occupation, company, I escape into the
crowd of other thoughts and diversions, where it loses my trace, and
leaves me safe.
Is it reasonable that even the arts should take advantage of and profit
by our natural stupidity and feebleness of mind? The barrister, says
Rhetoric, in that farce they call pleading, will be moved by the sound
of his own voice and his feigned emotion, and will suffer himself to be
cozened by the passion he is acting. He will affect a real and substantial
grief in this mummery he is playing, to transmit it to the jury who
are still less concerned in the matter than he. Like those men who
are hired at funerals to assist in the ceremonial of mourning, who sell
their tears and grief by weight and measure; for, although they are
stirred by borrowed emotions, it is certain that, through the habit of
settling their countenance to suit the occasion, they are often quite
carried away and affected with genuine melancholy.2
It is significant that quite a few basic concepts which we have been

accustomed to regard as very modern emerge as early as the sixteenth
century: escape, distraction, entertainment, and, last but not least,
vicarious living.
The reply to Montaigne came a century later. Commercial culture
had developed in the meantime, and the waning influence of religion,
pre- or post-Reformation, had made itself felt much more strongly in
the average way of life. Restlessness, the search for relief everywhere
and anywhere, had become a major social phenomenon. It was then
that Pascal spoke up against the complete surrender of man to self-
destroying restlessness:
Men are entrusted from infancy with the care of their honor, their
property, their friends, and even with the property and the honor of
their friends. They are overwhelmed with business, with the study of
languages, and with physical exercise; and they are made to understand
5
that they cannot be happy unless their health, their honor, their
fortune and that of their good friends be in good condition, and that
a single thing wanting will make them unhappy. Thus they are given
cares and business which make them bustle about from break of
day.—It is, you will exclaim, a strange way to make them happy! What
more could be done to make them miserable?—Indeed! what could
be done? We should only have to relieve them from all these cares;
for then they would see themselves: they would reflect on what they
are, whence they came, whither they go, and thus we cannot employ
and divert them too much. And this is why, after having given them so
much business, we advise them, if they have some time for relaxation,
to employ it in amusement, in play, and to be always fully occupied.
How hollow and full of ribaldry is the heart of man!3
Again and again he warned against what he called “diversion” as a

way of life which could lead only to permanent unhappiness:
When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distrac-

tions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves
at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and
often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness
of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in
their own chamber.
They have a secret instinct which impels them to seek amusement
and occupation abroad, and which arises from the sense of their
constant unhappiness.4
Thus the attitude toward leisure which, for Montaigne, guarantees

survival means self-destruction to Pascal. And the controversy is still
going on. Each side has its partisans on all intellectual levels in everyday
life, as illustrated in the study on radio as well as in learned treatises.
On one side there is the benevolent analyst of a mass medium who
seems to say that, while everything is not yet wonderful, it is getting
better every day:
For in the old days the artists and writers and craftsmen were not
writing at the behest of the people, but to please small powerful
groups, the kings and lords and chieftains, who drew the talent of
the time inward towards them and kept it circumscribed within the
bounds of their castles and baronies. Much of the fine art of today
remains alive only through a similar connection.
Yet, taking civilization as a whole, this ancient process is now in
reverse. There is an outward movement. Pictures, entertainment,
fun, are beginning to be seen as the rightful possession of all, and the
6
comics join in and reflect this spreading democratization. And if the

people’s standards are at present lower than those which were set by
workers around the seats of the mighty, the people’s artists will have
the satisfaction of knowing that they are identified with a vast and
forward movement, which is giving to everyday folks their right to
laugh and flourish under the sun.5
On the other hand, we find the nonconformist social critic who con-
nects the loneliness of modern man with his interest in mass media as
a setup of utter frustration:
The conditions of earning one’s bread in this society create the lonely
modern man.
Such conditions help explain the need, sometimes feverish, for an
entertainment that so repetitively presents the same reveries, the
same daydreams, the same childish fables of success and happiness.
So much of the inner life of men is dried up that they tend to become
filled with yearnings and to need the consolation of these reveries
about people who are happy, healthy, and always successful.
Hence, parallel to the retrogression of consciousness in, say, the
Hollywood writer, there is a more widespread and also more perni-
cious retrogression of consciousness in the motion-picture audience.
Social and economic conditions have established the basis for this;
the motion picture further enforces it.6
The differences in the verbalization of the dilemma are obvious. The

language of the sixteenth and seventeenth century philosophers is still
deeply steeped in religious terminology; that of the modern writers
in sociological terms; that of the nonprofessional radio listeners or
nonlisteners in the ordinary words of everyday life. But beneath these
differences in nomenclature the dilemma remains the same: perhaps
it could be called a conflict between the psychological and the moral
approaches to popular culture.
The Historical Locus of Popular Culture
This section of my discussion will be somewhat dogmatic in character,
partly for the sake of brevity but also because it ought to be permissible
to pause from time to time in our sociological routine and to specu-
late about the secular trend in which we, together with our objects of
research, find ourselves.
The counterconcept to popular culture is art. Today artistic products
are losing the character of spontaneity more and more and are being
7
replaced by the phenomena of popular culture, which are nothing but

a manipulated reproduction of reality as it is; and, in so doing, popular
culture sanctions and glorifies whatever it finds worth echoing. Scho-
penhauer remarked that music is “the world once more.” This philo-
sophical aphorism throws light on the unbridgeble difference between
art and popular culture: it is the difference between an increase in
insight through a medium possessing self-sustaining means and mere
repetition of given facts with the use of borrowed tools.
A superficial inventory of the contents and motivations in
the products of the entertainment and publishing worlds in our
Western civilization will include such themes as the nation, the
family, religion, free enterprise, individual initiative; and in the
Eastern orbit, higher production achievements, national cultures,
the moral corruption of the West. The topical differences are not
very decisive and, in any case, considerably smaller than the politi-
cal differences which keep these two worlds apart. Saint-Simon, the
great French pre-Marxian socialist philosopher, whose life extended
from the ancien régime through the Revolutiuon and the Napole-
onic era into the days of the reactionary Bourbon restoration, once
remarked that, while he had experienced the most contradictory
political systems, he realized that consistent, deeply rooted social
tendencies which were completely impervious to political change
made themselves felt in those decades. The very concept of society
rests in this insight. Rigidly and consistently different as political
systems are from one another today, there is also a complete incon-
sistency in the content of popular culture within a given political
system—and popular culture is an element of society of the first
order. The yardstick is expediency, within the total social situation,
of course, and particularly the distribution of power.
Nietzsche, who may be called the discoverer and matchless critical
analyst of modern popular culture, has formulated its relativism with
respect to content:
Modern counterfeit practices in the arts: regarded as necessary—
that is to say, as fully in keeping with the needs most proper to the
modern soul.
Artists harangue the dark instincts of the dissatisfied, the ambitious,
and the self-deceivers of a democratic age: the importance of poses. . . .
The procedures of one era are transferred to the realm of another;
the object of art is confounded with that of science, with that of the
Church, or with that of the interests of the race (nationalism), or with
8
that of philosophy—a man rings all bells at once, and awakens the
vague suspicion that he is a god.
Artists flatter women, sufferers, and indignant folk. Narcotics and
opiates are made to preponderate in art. The fancy of cultured people,
and of readers of poetry and ancient history, is tickled.7
What Nietzsche expressed in the general terms of the philosopher

of culture has its spokesmen today. In an analysis of cartoon films a
modern writer has pointed to the criterion of social expediency in the
selection of their materials:
It is just Disney’s distinguishing characteristic that he is uncritical
of what he reflects. He is quite artless. If the values by which the
society lives are still serving, if the prevailing outlook is relatively
brightfaced and aggressive, he will improvise from that—and give
us Mickey Mouse. If the time is one of crisis, and these values will
no longer serve but are in conflict and in question, if the prevailing
state of mind is a deep bewilderment, he will improvise with equal
lack of inhibition. His particular talent is that he does not embarrass
himself. This makes his dreams sometimes monstrous. But it gives
them a wide reference.8
It may be noted in passing that in the present postwar period disil-

lusionment over the lack of definitive cultural and moral solutions
has become prevalent. It finds expression in an artificial permeation
of entertainment products with religion. In the average movie the
pursuit of love almost invariably means the appearance of the clergy-
man. Nietzsche had already commented on the artificial respiration
administered to religion in an era of decadence and nihilism. When he
said, “God is dead,” he meant that the frenzied activities of modern life
produce popular culture in an attempt to fill a vacuum which cannot be
filled. Nietzsche linked the precarious role of religion with the pressure
of civilization and its neuroticizing influence on people:
In the Neighborhood of Insanity.—The sum of sensations, knowledge
and experiences, the whole burden of culture, therefore, has become
so great that an overstraining of nerves and powers of thought is a
common danger, indeed the cultivated classes of European countries
are throughout neurotic, and almost every one of their great families
is on the verge of insanity in one of their branches. True, health is
now sought in every possible way; but in the main a diminution of
that tension of feeling, of that oppressive burden of culture, is needful,
which, even though it might be bought at a heavy sacrifice, would at
least give us room for the great hope of a new Renaissance.9
9
With this quotation we return to the differences between popular

culture and art, between spurious gratification and a genuine experi-
ence as a step to greater individual fulfilment (this is the meaning of
Aristotle’s catharsis). Art lives on the threshold of action. Men free
themselves truly from the mythical relation to things by stepping back,
so to speak, from that which they once worshiped and which they now
discover as the Beautiful. To experience beauty is to be liberated from
the overpowering domination of nature over men. In popular culture,
men free themselves from mythical powers by discarding everything,
even reverence for the Beautiful. They deny anything that transcends
the given reality.10 This is exactly what De Tocqueville meant, I think,
in our opening quotation. From the realm of beauty man walks into the
realm of entertainment, which is, in turn, integrated with the necessities
of society and denies the right to individual fulfilment:
Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to
subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed
against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by
tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul
is enslaved. The master no longer says: “You shall think as I do or you
shall die”; but he says: “You are free to think differently from me and
to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are
henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil
rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by
your fellow citizens if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn
you if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will
be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow creatures will shun
you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence
will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace!
I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.”11
Men no longer surrender to illusions.

Social Research and Popular Culture
The problem is whether, and to what extent, modern social science
is equipped to deal with modern social culture. The instruments of
research have been brought to a high degree of refinement. But is
this enough? Empirical social science has become a kind of applied
asceticism. It stands clear of any entanglements with foreign powers
and thrives in an atmosphere of rigidly enforced neutrality. It refuses
to enter the sphere of meaning. A study of television, for instance, will
go to great lengths in analyzing data on the influence of television on
family life, but it will leave to poets and dreamers the question of the
10
actual human values of this new institution. Social research takes the
phenomena of modern life, including the mass media, at face value. It
rejects the task of placing them in a historical and moral context. In the
beginning of the modern era, social theory had theology as its model,
but today the natural sciences have replaced theology. This change
in models has far-reaching implications. Theology aims at salvation,
natural science at manipulation; the one leads to heaven and hell, the
other to technology and machinery. Social science is today defined as an
analysis of painstakingly circumscribed, more or less artificially isolated,
social sectors. It imagines that such horizontal segments constitute its
research laboratory, and it seems to forget that the only social research
laboratories that are properly admissible are historical situations.
This has not always been the case. Popular culture, particularly as
represented by the newspapers, has been a subject of discussion for
about a hundred and fifty years. Before the naturalistic phase of social
science set in, the phenomena of popular culture were treated as a social
and historical whole. This holds true for religious, philosophical, and
political discussions from the time of Napoleon to Hitler. Our contem-
porary social science literature seems completely void of any knowledge
of, or at least of any application and reference to, the voluminous writ-
ings produced on both the left and the right wings of the political and
cultural fronts in the nineteenth century. It seems to ignore Catholic
social philosophy as well as Socialist polemics, Nietzsche as well as the
great, but completely unknown, Austrian critic, Karl Kraus, who tried
to validate the notion of the crisis of modern culture by a critique of
popular culture. Kraus focused attention on the analysis of language.
The common denominator of his essays is his thesis that it is in the
hollowing-out of language that we can see the disintegratrion, and even
the disappearance, of the concept and existence of the autonomous
individual, of the personality in its classical sense.
Studies of the role of the press, even of such specialized problems
as readership figures, would do well to go back to the nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century analyses of the press in Germany. There they
would find, in the different political and philosophical camps, illustra-
tions of the fruitfulness of studying social phenomena in context—in
the case of the press, the relationship of the modern newspaper to
the history of the economic, social, and political emancipation of the
middle classes. A study of the modern newspaper is meaningless, in the
very exact sense of the word, if it is not aware of the historical frame-
work, which is composed of both critical materials like those of Karl
11
Kraus, writing at the end of an epoch, and optimistic attitudes like the
following, from the work of the German publicist, Joseph Goerres, at
the beginning of the nineteenth century:
What everybody desires and wants shall be expressed in the news-
papers; what is depressing and troubling everybody may not remain
unexpressed; there must be somebody who is obliged to speak the
truth, candid, without reservation, and unfettered. For, under a
good constitution the right of freedom of expression is not merely
tolerated but is a basic requirement; the speaker shall be looked
upon as a holy person until he forfeits his right by his own fault
and lies. Those who work against such freedom leave themselves
open to the charge that the consciousness of their own great faults
weighs heavily upon them; those who act justly do not shun free
speech—it can in the end lead only to “honor be to whom honor is
due”; but those who are dependent on dirt and darkness certainly
like secretiveness.12
This is not to say that the whole field of sociology has been given
over to historical ascetism. Quite a number of leading scholars in social
theory and social history have kept alive the conscience of a historical
civilization. It is worth our while to read again the following remarks
by Robert E. Park:
In fact, the reason we have newspapers at all, in the modern sense
of the term, is because about one hundred years ago, in 1835 to be
exact, a few newspaper publishers in New York City and in London
discovered (1) that most human beings, if they could read at all, found
it easier to read news than editorial opinion and (2) that the com-
mon man would rather be entertained than edified. This, in its day,
had the character and importance of a real discovery. It was like the
discovery, made later in Hollywood, that gentlemen prefer blonds. At
any rate, it is to the consistent application of the principle involved
that the modern newspaper owes not merely its present character
but its survival as a species.13
His point of view finds confirmation in an excellent study in the his-

tory of mass culture by Louis B. Wright: “If it is desirable to trace the
pedigree of the popular culture of modern America, it is possible to find
most of its ideology implicit in the middle-class thought of Elizabethan
England. The historian of American culture must look back to the
Renaissance and read widely in the forgotten literature of tradesmen.”14
One of the difficulties which have occasionally arisen in intellectual
intercourse between people of American and European backgrounds is
perhaps due to the antihistorical allergy of the former and the historical
12
oversensitivity of the latter. I can illustrate this point by a very recent

example. When I received the first two volumes of the outstanding
work by Samuel A. Stouffer and his staff, The American Soldier, I was
curious to learn how the authors would place their research within the
context of the social theories about the soldier that have been developed
from Plato on. To my amazement, I could find no historical reference
beyond a solitary quotation from Tolstoi, who wrote somewhere in
War and Peace: “In warfare the force of armies is a product of the
mass multiplied by something else, an unknown x.” The authors added
the following comment: “Thus for perhaps the first time in military
history it is possible to present statistical evidence relating to the fac-
tor x described in the quotation from Tolstoy’s War and Peace at the
beginning of this chapter.”15 They seem to have been fascinated by the
mathematical symbolism of Tolstoi’s sentence, but they successfully
resisted the temptation to compare the social situation of armies in the
time of Napoleon with modern conditions. In the face of such heroic
restraint, it seems appropriate to quote the following flippant remark
of a fellow-sociologist: “In this respect I speak of the failure of modern
psychology. I firmly believe that one can learn more about the ordre du
coeur from La Rochefoucauld and Pascal (who was the author of this
term) than from the most up-to-date textbook on psychology or ethics.”16
It seems to me that the splendid isolationism of the social researcher
is likely to reinforce a common suspicion, namely, that social research
is, in the final analysis, nothing but market research, an instrument
of expedient manipulation, a tool with which to prepare reluctant
customers for enthusiastic spending. Only twenty years ago, social
scientists were well aware of the dangers in the mass media, and they
did not consider it beyond their duty to concern themselves with the
negative, as well as the positive, potentialities of these mass media.
In the pioneering article on “The Agencies of Communication,” 1933,
Malcolm M. Willey and Stuart A. Rice wrote:
The effects produced may now be quite unpremeditated, although

the machinery opens the way for mass impression in keeping with
special ends, private or public. The individual, the figures show,
increasingly utilizes these media and they inevitably modify his
attitudes and behavior. What these modifications are to be depends
entirely upon those who control the agencies. Greater posibilities
for social manipulation, for ends that are selfish or socially desirable,
have never existed. The major problem is to protect the interest and
welfare of the individual citizen.17
13
Today, manipulation is taken for granted as an end of social science.

A publisher can now dare to praise an outstanding sociological work
with the following blurb on the jacket of the book:
For the first time on such a scale an attempt was made to direct human
behavior on a basis of scientific evidence, and the results suggest the
opening of a new epoch in social studies and in social management.
It is the editor’s hope that the value to social science will prove to
be as great as to the military, for whom the original research was
undertaken.
The problems were Army problems, for the most part peculiar to
wartime. But the implications are universal.18
Expediency and the lack of a historical or philosophical frame of refer-

ence make a sorry marriage of convenience.
Social Criticism of Popular Culture Today
No systematic body of theories is available. The situation has been
characterized very aptly by Frederick Laws:
It will hardly be denied that the condition of criticism today is
chaotic, especially when it is applied to the products of these
immense distributing machines, the new media. Much reviewing is
unselective in its enthusiasm and can with difficulty be distinguished
from advertising copy. . . . There is a lack of clearly expressed and
generally recognized standards of value. We believe that this confu-
sion is partly due to a failure to realize or accept the fact that the
social framework in which works of art are produced and judged has
changed fundamentally. It is nonsense to suppose that the means
of distribution or the size of social origin of the audience wholly
determines the quality of art or entertainment, but it is stupid to
pretend that they do not affect it.19
There is a literature on popular culture today which is thoroughly

critical. I shall try to summarize the findings of this body of writings
in a few brief generalizations. Some direct their critique against the
product, but many turn it against the system on which the product
depends. In special analyses, as in studies of a purely philosophical and
sociological character, most authors concur in their final characteriza-
tion of the products of popular culture.
The decline of the individual in the mechanized working processes of
modern civilization brings about the emergence of mass culture, which
replaces folk art or “high” art. A product of popular culture has none of
14
the features of genuine art, but in all its media popular culture proves
to have its own genuine characteristics: standardization, stereotypy,
conservatism, mendacity, manipulated consumer goods.
There is an interdependence between what the public wants and
what the powers of control enforce upon the public in order to remain
in power. Most students are of the opinion that the habit of advertise-
ment is the main motivating force in creating receptivity to popular
culture and that the products themselves eventually take on the char-
acter of advertising. There is no consensus on the taste of the populace.
Whereas some have confidence in the people’s instinct for the good,
the prevailing view seems to be that only the bad and the vulgar are
the yardsticks of their aesthetic pleasure.
There is considerable agreement that all media are estranged from
values and offer nothing but entertainment and distraction—that,
ultimately, they expedite flight from an unbearable reality. Wherever
revolutionary tendencies show a timid head, they are mitigated and
cut short by a false fulfilment of wish-dreams, like wealth, adventure,
passionate love, power, and sensationalism in general.
Prescriptions for improvement run the gamut from naïve proposals
to offer aesthetically better merchandise, in order to create in the masses
a taste for the valuable in life, to the theory that within the present setup
of social power there is no hope whatsoever for improvement and that
better popular culture presupposes a better society.
Finally, there is considerable speculation about the relations
between the product of mass culture and real life. The radio, the
movies, the newspapers, and the best sellers are, at the same time,
models for the way of life of the masses and an expression of their
actual way of life.
Theses on Critical Theory and Empirical Research
In this section, I shall present some of the theoretical motivations
which underlie contemporary philosophical speculation about mass
madia. They comprise some of the ideas which the staff of the Institute
of Social Research, under the leadership of Max Horkheimer, has tried
to apply in a number of writings.20
1. The starting point is not market data. Empirical research, it is argued,
is laboring under the false hypothesis that the consumers’ choice
is the decisive social phenomenon from which one should begin
further analysis. We first ask: What are the functions of cultural
communication within the total process of a society? Then we ask
15
such specific questions as these: What passes the censorship of the

socially powerful agencies? How are things produced under the
dicta of formal and informal censorship?
2. We do not conceive such studies to be psychological in the narrow
sense. They aim rather at finding out how the objective elements
of a social whole are produced and reproduced in the mass media.
Thus we would not accept the taste of the masses as a basic category
but would insist on finding out how taste is fed to the consumers as
a specific outgrowth of the technological, political, and economic
conditions and interests of the masters in the sphere of production.
We would want to investigate what “likes” or “dislikes” really mean
in social terms. While it is true, for example, that people behave as if
there were a large free area of selection according to taste and while
they tend to vote fanatically for or against a specific presentation of
popular culture, the question remains as to how such behavior is
compatible with the actual elimination of free choice and the institu-
tionalized repetition characteristic of all media. This is probably the
theoretical area in which one would have to examine the replacement
of taste—a concept of liberalism—by the quest for information.
3. We would question certain more or less tacit assumptions of empiri-
cal research, as, for example, the differentiation into “serious” and
“nonserious” written, visual, or auditory communications. We would
say that the problem of whether we are faced with serious or nonse-
rious literature is two-dimensional. One would first have to furnish
an aesthetic analysis of qualities and then investigate whether the
aesthetic qualities are not subject to change under the conditions of
mass reproduction. We would challenge the assumption that a higher
increase in so-called “serious” programs or products automatically
means “progress” in educational and social responsibility, in the
understanding of art, and so on. We would say that it is erroneous
to assume that one cannot decide what is right and what is wrong in
aesthetic matters. A good example of the establishment of aesthetic
criteria will be found in the works of Benedetto Croce, who tries to
show conceretely that works of art have immanent laws which permit
decisions about their “validity.” It is neither necessary nor sufficient
to supplement a study of the reaction of respondents by a study of
the intentions of art producers in order to find out the nature and
quality of the artistic products, or vice versa.
4. We are disturbed by the acceptance at face value of such concepts
as “standardization.” We want to know what standardization means
in industry, in behavior patterns, and in popular culture. We think
that the specifically psychological and anthropological character
of popular culture is a key to the interpretation of the function of
standardization in modern man.
5. In connection with the latter point, we are particularly interested
in the phenomenon of psychological regression. We wish to know
whether the consumption of popular culture really presupposes a
16
human being with preadult traits or whether modern man has a split
personality: half mutilated child and half standardized adult. We want
to know the mechanisms of interdependence between the pressures
of professional life and the freedom from intellectual and aesthetic
tension in which popular culture seems to indulge.
6. As for the problem of the stimulus and its nature, here the connec-
tion with European philosophical heritage is particularly notice-
able. Our thinking has its roots in the concept of understanding
(Verstehen) as it was established philosophically and historically by
Dilthey and sociologically by Simmel. We are inclined to think that
empirical research conceives the stimulus to be as devoid of content
as a color stimulus in a psychological laboratory. We hold that the
stimulus in popular culture is itself a historical phenomenon and
that the relation between stimulus and response is preformed and
prestructured by the historical and social fate of the stimulus as well
as of the respondent.
Notes
1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Knopf, 1945), p. 4.
2. E. J. Trechmann, trans., The Essays of Montaigne (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1935), II, p. 291ff.
3. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (London and New York: Everyman’s Library, 1931),
p. 44.
4. Ibid., pp. 39–42.
5. Coulton Waugh, The Comics (New York: Macmillan, 1947), p. 354.
6. James T. Farrell, The League of Frightened Philistines (New York: Vanguard
Press, n.d.), pp. 176–77.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, in Complete Works, II (London,
1910), pp. 265–66.
8. Barbara Deming, “The Artlessness of Walt Disney,” Partisan Review (spring
1945): 226.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits, in
Complete Works, VII, p. 227.
10. For a comprehensive theory on myth and art see Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag,
1947), passim.
11. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, p. 264.
12. Joseph Goerres, Rheinischer Merker, July 1 and 3, 1814.
13. Helen MacGill Hughes, Introduction to News and the Human Interest Story
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940), pp. xii–xiii.
14. Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1935), pp. 659-69.
15. Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier: Adjustment during Army
Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949), p. 8.
16. J. P. Mayer, Sociology of Film (London: Faber & Faber, 1945), p. 273.
17. Recent Social Trends in the United States, I (New York and London: McGraw-
Hill, 1933), p. 215.
18. Samuel A. Stouffer et al., The American Soldier, jacket of vols. I and II.
17
19. Introduction to Made for Millions: A Critical Study of the New Media of
Information and Entertainment (London: Contact Publishers, 1947), p. xvii.
20. For example, Max Horkheimer, “Art and Mass Culture,” Studies in Philoso-
phy and Social Science, vol. IX (1941); T. W. Adorno, “On Popular Music,”
Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. IX; Leo Lowenthal, “Biogra-
phies in Popular Magazines,” Radio Research, 1942-43, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld
and Frank Stanton (New York, 1944).
18
2
The Debate Over Art and
Popular Culture: A Synopsis
The purpose of this chapter is to single out some of the significant ele-
ments of the historical discussions which have centered around the
problem of art versus entertainment, as a first step toward providing
a broader base for the study of contemporary mass media, particularly
television. To present a systematic inventory of this material, which
extends over several centuries, would require the long-range and
cooperative efforts of historians, philologists, and social scientists.1
Within the framework of a memorandum it is obviously necessary
to make a careful selection from the voluminous and uncharted mate-
rial which could be provocative for our problem. Therefore, we shall
start the discussion with the development of the printing press with its
potential for becoming a mass medium; but even within this period we
shall have to make further selections both in terms of time periods and
individuals. (This may be an appropriate point, too, to remind the reader
that we are concerned here with the discussions which surrounded the
problems of art versus popular media rather than with an historical
review and analysis of the products themselves.)
Popular art as such is, of course, not a specifically modern phe-
nomenon; it has probably existed, in one form or another, since the
beginnings of stratified society. But until the modern era, this fact did
not give rise to intellectual or moral controversies because within the
framework of, for instance, the feudal structure, leisure-time activities
were firmly regulated by church and state, with a set of rules for each
class. There was no point of cultural contact between the elite and
the masses, nor was there a middle class to complicate the picture or
to bridge the gap. Within each domain, because the producer usually
belonged to the same class as the consumer, there was considerable
unity of interest, and contact or conflict between the two domains in
this or any other area of life was inconceivable.
19
Controversy arose only after the two domains had come in contact.
The exact date when that happened is difficult to determine; the process
that led to the change was gradual, but there is little doubt that it was
associated with broad social and technological changes which ushered
in the beginnings of a middle class. The artist, traditionally dependent
for his subsistence on the direct consumers of his art, no longer had to
please only one rich or powerful patron; he had now to worry about
the demands of an increasingly broader, more “popular” audience. The
process took place in all great European nations with varying speed; by
the middle of the nineteenth century there had arisen in each of them
a class of writers or playwrights who were specialized in catering to
the needs of these broader audiences. And it was about then that the
controversies about popular culture began to rage in earnest, and the
first fears about its threat to civilization were voiced. (This climatic
period had been heralded by many signs during preceding centuries,
and the beginnings of the controversy could probably be traced to the
period of the first translations of the Latin Bible into national tongues.)
Since our purpose is not to trace the history of the great cultural
change marking the modern era, but merely to single out some signifi-
cant concepts which have emerged in the course of the controversies
on popular forms of art and entertainment, we shall begin at a point
where these problems were formulated in terms that have stayed with
us. Accordingly, the first section of this chapter is devoted to Mon-
taigne’s ideas on the psychological and social function of entertainment,
which are discussed in contrast to the ideas of Pascal, the great French
seventeenth century philosopher.
By 1800, the changes which were merely incipient in the middle of
the sixteenth century had taken place: nearly all remnants of the feudal
system had been destroyed, at least in political and economic fields;
industrialization and the resulting division of labor in a predominantly
middle class society were well under way. Artists and intellectuals had
freed themselves from the bonds of both church and state and were
struggling to establish well-defined roles in this society. They experi-
enced the growing emancipation of the middle classes as a threat, and
feared that, as the middle group became more prosperous they would
use philosophy and art as a kind of mass ornament, threatening the
integrity of the scholar and artist which had been so newly wrested
from church and state. The artist or scholar was not concerned with
the salvation of the soul as were their predecessors, but with the pres-
ervation of a mission, the search for truth and beauty. The artist bent
20
The Debate Over Art and Popular Culture
his efforts, therefore, to educating this great emerging public in the

difficult task of art appreciation and, at the same time, to fighting with
all his strength against the literary manipulators and imitators who
corrupted the public before it could be educated. In this period, then,
the artist, especially the writer, felt it his mission to establish the read-
ing of great literature as the only permissible pastime on every level of
society. From the point of view of the relations between the produc-
ers and the consumers of art, these concerns reflect an intermediary
stage of development: the interests of the producers and consumers no
longer coincide, but they are not felt to be completely divergent either.
Half a century later, the rift was consummated. By then the middle
classes had achieved unchallenged rule in most of Europe and America,
and the modern form of mass society had emerged. Mass media of
communication, above all the newspapers, had established their domi-
nance, and the literary market was flooded by products designed to
attract the broadest possible public. Those writers or artists who held
a lofty conception of their mission began to be and to feel isolated, and
some of them met the challenge of the times by further accentuating
the rift, by proclaiming that true art was above mass communication,
that it was, in other words, art for art’s sake, by its very nature to be
understood and enjoyed only by the few.
Historians of literature, critics, and publicists of that time viewed
the rise of popular literature with mixed feelings. Their reaction to
it assumed three distinct forms: (1) righteous indignation, a sense
of outrage, a resolve to ignore the mass products, a conception of
the authors of these products as parasites, as polluters of the noble
ideals of art; (2) moral worries regarding the fate of our culture:
popular culture, in this context, was regarded as a phenomenon of
decay, as heralding the end of our civilization; at the same time it
was contrasted with “true” culture and genuine art; (3) attempts to
understand the new phenomenon in sociological terms, i.e., to relate
it to basic problems of politics, economics, etc., without necessarily
passing judgment.
While for the sake of clarity it seemed desirable to review each of
these forms in a separate chapter, it is apparent that all three types of
reaction appeared more or less simultaneously, and all of them are still
echoed in contemporary discussions.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the writers who viewed the new
developments with alarm were seldom contradicted. While the public
continued to buy bestsellers, the champions of higher culture seemed
21
to dominate the theoretical field. However, some opposition developed

also in this theoretical field, and there were writers who took up the
cudgels in defense of an art for and of the people.
Of the many individuals who have made notable contributions to
the discussion of popular culture, an effort has been made to select
those who were not limited to a narrow area of intellectual activities.
For the first period, as we have already indicated, Montaigne and
Pascal were the outstanding figures, the former an essayist, lawyer,
politician and civil servant in addition to being a philosopher, the lat-
ter was mathematician, theologist and spiritual leader of a religious
movement. For the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
German authors have seemed most representative as well as most
eloquent: Goethe—poet, statesman, theater manager and natural
scientist; Schiller—philosopher, aesthetician, professor of history as
well as great creative writer; Lessing—dramatist, historian, theologian
and theater critic all in one. For the latter part of the nineteenth cen-
tury, we have paid particular attention to the poet, critic and school
administrator, Matthew Arnold, and to Walter Bagehot, who was an
outstanding public and political figure. Tocqueville’s range of interest is
by now also well known—diplomat, political writer, essayist; the other
Frenchman in our group is Hippolyte Taine—historian, sociologist and
literary critic. Taine’s German contemporary, Gervinus, who is also
included in this discussion, was an active liberal politician as well as
historian of note and literary critic.
Diversion and Salvation in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries
The Need for Diversion: Montaigne
Our review begins with two literary figures who, although separated
by no more than sixty years in time are, in some respects, poles apart
in viewpoint: Montaigne, the founder of modern scepticism, and
Pascal, the forerunner of modern religious existentialism. These two
philosophers had in common, however, a quest for certainty in a world
which was no longer circumscribed and governed by one church, one
empire (the Roman-German), and by the almost unchanging economy
of feudal society. With other intellectuals of their times, they sought a
philosophy for the governing of man’s spiritual and emotional life in this
period of painful transition. Montaigne’s concern was with how man
could adapt himself to increasing societal pressures; Pascal’s was with
how man could save his soul in the face of the temptations to which he
22
is subjected in periods of profound change. Both philosophers were

concerned for the individual’s development and security, but their dif-
ferences in approach are apparent in their analyses of many problems
of life, including, as we shall see, the problems of art and entertain-
ment. These two fundamental themes, adaptation versus salvation,
have persisted, as we shall see, through most discussions of popular
culture down to the present day.
The traumatic nature of the realization that the standards of the
Middle Ages had broken down is suggested by the extent to which
Montaigne and his contemporaries felt compelled to attribute to man
a universal and inherent unhappiness. Montaigne believed that a pain-
ful inner state resulting from spiritual, social and economic insecurity
made it necessary for man to run away from himself. He even uses the
word so often applied in interpreting the gratifications in the consump-
tion of modern mass media—escape:
A painful fancy takes possession of me; I find it shorter to change
than to subdue it; if I cannot replace it by another contrary idea, I
replace it at least by a different one. . . . If I cannot combat it, I run
away from it. . . . By changing place, occupation, company, I escape. . . .
It loses my trace and leaves me safe.”2
But in order to be successful in the alleviation of inner pain, the escape

must be into diversified materials and activities. Montaigne believed
that nature has endowed man with a capacity for great variety, and that
this capacity provides him with the wherewithal, if not for saving, at
least for soothing his soul:
In this way does Nature proceed . . . for Time, which she has given
us for the sovereign physician of our passions, chiefly obtains its
results . . . by supplying our imagination with other and still other
matters.
The inner suffering attendant upon the deep moral and spiritual
uncertainties of the transition from feudal to modern society, then,
resulted in a need to escape into a variety of diversions. Montaigne then
asks himself whether the arts, particularly the literary arts, can serve
as instrumentalities for this kind of escape, and his answer is affirma-
tive. Even though they may not believe in fictional tales, Montaigne
finds that his countrymen can escape into and be carried away by “the
laments of fiction; the tears of Dido and Ariadne.” He believes (unlike
his successors in later centuries) that these fictional emotions move
23
the writer, the actor (and the barrister) just as they do the audience,
because the writers and actors share with their audiences the need to
escape from their own woes:
(They are) . . . like those men who are hired at funerals to assist at
the ceremonial of mourning, who sell their tears and grief by weight
and measure; for although they are stirred by borrowed emotions . . .
they are often quite carried away and affected by genuine melancholy.
In a tentative and exploratory way, Montaigne also turned his atten-

tion to the problem of the various levels of art, and, as many social
philosophers after him (including our contemporaries), finds much in
common between folk and high art, if not in essence in form:
The simple peasants are honest people, and honest people are the
philosophers . . . strong and clear natures, enriched with an ample
store of useful knowledge. . . . The popular and purely natural poetry
has a charm and artlessness in which it may compare in its principal
beauty with poetry perfected by art.
He seems to imply that honesty and spontaneity have a beauty all their
own, and that this beauty is to be valued nearly as much as the highest
forms of art. Both are true, and therefore beautiful expressions. He
goes on, then, to castigate the in-betweens, those who despise folk
art but are not capable of great art—dangerous, foolish, troublesome
people whose products “disturb the world.” These are the producers
of mediocrity, the “halfbreeds, who despise the first stage (folk art) . . .
and have not been able to join the others (great artists), with their seat
between two stools.” Montaigne thus tentatively established standards
for primitive and high art, and places what might be called the forerun-
ners of the mass media into a kind of limbo in-between. His criterion
for judgment can probably best be labelled as moral, growing out of
the Renaissance ideal of the intertwining of the true and the beautiful.
The Dangers of Diversion: Pascal
One of Montaigne’s greatest admirers and searching critics is Blaise
Pascal, the great seventeenth-century French philosopher, who, in his
most famous work, Pensées, often takes issue with his sixteenth century
predecessor. Pascal has no quarrel with Montaigne’s conviction that
man needs diversion, and he too realizes that this need springs from
the lack of spiritual belief and other uncertainties of the postfeudal era,
“the natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition.”3 No more than
24
Montaigne does Pascal minimize the force of this drive: men “have a
secret instinct which impels them to seek amusement and occupation
abroad, and which arises from the sense of their constant unhappiness.”
But whereas Montaigne justified entertainment and art (high and
low, if not middle), or at least accepted it as an inevitable response to
a deep-seated human need, Pascal finds this kind of escape something
to be fought against. Man is impelled to continuous motion, to “noise
and stir.” But he should fight it, for he is driven to run away from the
inner contemplations which can lead to his salvation. Far from alle-
viating suffering by diversion, Pascal thinks that he has “discovered
that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they
cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.” If they did, they “would
reflect on what they are, whence they came, and whither they go”; but
men are so frivolous, he fears, that “though full of a thousand reasons
for weariness, the least thing such as playing billiards” is sufficient to
amuse them.
Most dangerous diversion of all in Pascal’s view is the theater. It
absorbs all our senses and therefore has a great capacity for deceiving
man into believing he has all those noble qualities he sees portrayed
on the stage: “All great diversions are a threat to the Christian life, but
among all those which the world has invented, none is to be feared
more than the theater.” In a way, Pascal’s critique of entertainment
(and so far as we know he includes even great art under this category),
prefigures one of the most important themes in modern discussions
on popular culture: the view that it is a threat to morality, contempla-
tion, and an integrated personality, and that it results in a surrender
to mere instrumentalities at the expense of the pursuit of higher goals.
The difference between Montaigne and Pascal, insofar as their ideas
have a bearing on those modern discussions, may be summed up as
follows: Montaigne stands for a pessimistic conception of man—the
demands of human nature cannot be changed, and we must make the
best of them; there is no point in denying them gratifications (illusory
or real). All we can do is to try to raise somewhat the quality of the
cultural products we offer man. Pascal, his inspiration and motivation
deeply religious, stands for spiritual progress: the need for entertain-
ment and escape is not ineradicable, man’s nobler impulses must be
mobilized against it, and heightened consciousness of our inner selves,
which we can achieve only in solitude, away from the distractions of
entertainment, opens the way to salvation. Pascal’s language naturally
lends itself to translation into the language of modern reformers and
25
champions of social and cultural change; Montaigne’s superficially

resembles that of the modern box office manager—“The public wants
or needs it”; actually, Montaigne’s view goes deeper. He has a keen sense
of the audience as participant, and his conception of the function of
entertainment leaves no room for the possibility of manipulation or
passivity, which later are to become serious problems.
The Artist and His Public
The lively disputes which played so great a role in French intellectual life
between 1650 and 1750, often centered around the question whether
the theater, including Racine, Molière, and Corneille, was a frivolous
pursuit incompatible with the requirements of morality and religion.
By 1800, the problem was obsolete. All over Europe, and especially in
Germany, the threater had become an accepted institution. But partly
as a result of this firm entrenchment, a new dilemma developed: What
should be the relationship between playwright and audience?
Goethe
The seriousness with which this problem was viewed is attested by the
fact that Goethe found it necessary to precede his great metaphysi-
cal tragedy Faust with a “Prelude on the Stage,” which deals precisely
with the questions whether and to what extent an artist should make
concessions to the taste of the populace and its predilection for mere
entertainment and relaxation. The “Prelude on the Stage” is presented
in the form of a dialogue between two characters identified as the
Manager and the Poet. The matter at issue is the character of the works
to be presented to the public, and the Manager, who is interested only
in box office receipts, has some definite ideas about “art.” According
to him, the secret of success is quite simple:—“a hash, a stew—easy to
invent” will do the trick. The public, the Manager observes cynically,
is stupid, and you win its favor by “sheer diffuseness”:
Only by mass you touch the mass; for any
Will finally his bit select.
When the Poet objects that “such a trade debases,” and that to pro-
duce “botching work” is inconsistent with the artist’s pride and love of
truth, the Manager invokes the age-old principle that the end justifies
the means, and form and content must be adjusted to the audience:
A man who some result intends
Must use the tools that best are fitting.
26
The material on which the Poet works is the public, says the Man-
ager, and the public is passive: “soft wood is given you for splitting.”
People come to the theater bored, exhausted, or worst of all “fresh from
reading the daily papers.” They come “as to a masquerade,” their sole
motive is curiosity, or (this refers to the ladies) to display their finery.
He invites the Poet to have a look at his patrons’ faces—“The half are
coarse, the half are cold.”
Why should you rack, poor foolish bards,
For ends like these, the gracious Muses?
I tell you, give but more—more, ever more.
This dialogue shows how the basic components of the discus-

sions about entertainment changed from the times of Montaigne
and Pascal to that of Goethe. The two French writers looked upon
entertainment as a means for satisfying the need to escape from inner
suffering, a need to be gratified (on a high artistic plain) according
to the one, and to be denied gratification in favor of spiritual pur-
suits according to the other. Here in Faust we find the discussion
divested of its religious and moral overtones, and three new elements
introduced: consciousness of the manipulative factors inherent in
entertainment; the role of the business intermediary between artist
and public, whose criterion is success and whose goal is economic;
and a sense of conflict between the needs of the true artist and the
wishes of a mass audience. The Manager implies that the audience
will take anything so long as there is sufficient quantity and variety,
and he endeavours to convince the Poet that the audience is putty
in his hands. But unlike Montaigne, the Manager does not advise
the Poet to give his audiences variety because it is psychologically
wholesome, but because by providing something for everyone,
success is insured (if he thought more money could be earned by
moral sermons, the Manager would not hesitate to exhort the Poet
to write accordingly). Finally, whereas Montaigne makes no clear-
cut distinction between the psychological motives of artist and
audience, Goethe seems to see the artist as the spokesman for the
high standards of his “trade,” and the public in the passive role of
consumers. Similarly, when the Poet resists the Manager’s exhorta-
tions, he does not do so in the name of religious or spiritual values,
but in terms of the artist’s mission.
This divergence between the interests of the artist and those of the
public was later to lead to complete cleavage between the two. But with
27
Goethe, we are only at the beginning of the period which witnessed

both the spread of popular newspapers and magazines and an unprec-
edented flowering of great literature. At this stage, the artist and his
audience were still on speaking terms. It is not surprising, then, that
we find Goethe, not in any systematic and sustained way, but in pas-
sages scattered throughout his writings and extending over his long
lifetime, considering such problems as the character of the audience,
the nature of the mass media, the problem of artistic standards, and
the responsibilities of the artist.
On the Character of the Modern Audience. Goethe both echoes
Pascal and foreshadows a fundamental theme in modern criticism of
organized entertainment when he complains of the restlessness, the
continuous desire for change, novelty and sensation which character-
izes the modern audience. “The theater,” he says, “like the world in
general, is plagued by powerful fashions,” and fashion (we might call
it fad) consists in adoring something with great abandon, only to “ban
it later forever.”4
Not only the theater, but the newspapers reflect this restlessness:
We have newspapers for all hours of the day. A clever head could still
add a few more. This way everything, what everybody does, wants,
writes, even what he plans, is publicly exposed. One can only enjoy
oneself, or suffer, for the entertainment of others, and in the greatest
rush, this is communicated from house to house, from town to town,
from empire to empire and at last from continent to continent.5
Goethe is not disturbed because of this restless urge for novelty in itself,
but rather because it prevents the kind of ripening that is essential to
the creative process—that in the constant reading of newspapers about
the events of yesterday, for instance, one “wastes the days and lives
from hand to mouth, without creating anything.”6
A second characteristic of the modern audience noted by Goethe
is its passivity. He refers to it in the above-quoted passage from Faust,
when he has the Manager say to the Poet that the audience “is soft wood
given you for splitting.” The audience wants to be given pleasure for
their money, they have no genuine interest in the message of the play
offered them. They “throng into the theater unprepared, they demand
what they can enjoy directly. They want to see something, to wonder
at something, to laugh, to cry.”7
Another characteristic of modern mass culture singled out by Goethe
is that of conformism. He hints at it in his ironical remarks on the
28
fashionably dressed theater goers, and he anticipates Tocqueville and

other social critics such as Toennies in Germany, Ward and Cooley in
America, Karl Kraus in Austria, by his insight into the role of news-
papers in producing conformism; the so-called free press, he says, is
actually contemptuous of the public; seemingly everything is acceptable
except dissenting opinion:
Come let us print it all
And be busy everywhere;
But no one should stir
Who does not think like we.8
On the Nature of the Mass Media. For Goethe, the art which appeals to
the lower instincts of the public is not generically different from esoteric
art, but merely “botching work.” His characterizations of such artisti-
cally inferior products anticipate many of the elements of the modern
social critic’s characterization of the popular art produced for the
mass media. Inferior art, he suggests, aims only at entertainment. “All
pleasures, even the theater,” Goethe writes in a letter to Schiller dated
August 9, 1797, “are only supposed to distract, and the strong affinity
of the reading public to periodicals and novels arises out of the very
reason that the former always and the latter usually bring distraction
into distraction.” He understands well the urges of the audience, but
refuses to condone those who capitalize on them by offering inferior
products; “everyone who fools the public by swimming with the cur-
rent can count on his success” (letter to Schiller, January 3, 1798). The
works of these manipulators of popular taste are indiscriminate in their
content; they reproduce the world mechanically, in all of its details,
and appeal to the public’s lower instincts. The lack of creativity in the
common man is partly their fault.9
At one point in his career, Goethe planned a project with Schiller
which was to involve cataloguing the distinctive characteristics of such
inferior art, which they designated as dilettantism. In another letter to
Schiller, dated June 22, 1799, Goethe refers to this study of dilettantism
as a “project of the greatest importance”:
For the extent to which artists, entrepreneurs, sellers, buyers, and
amateurs of every art are steeped in dilettantism, is something I
discover to my horror only now, after we have reflected so much on
the matter and given the child a name. . . . When we open the sluice
gates, we will cause the most unpleasant rows, for we shall flood
the whole lovely valley in which quackery has settled so happily.
29
But since the main feature of the quack is incorrigibility, and since the
contemporary quacks are stricken with a quite bestial arrogance, they
will scream that we are spoiling their gardens, and after the waters
recede, they will restore everything as it was before, like ants after a
downpour. But never mind, they shall be condemned once and for all.
The result of this enterprise is a “Schema on Dilettantism” drafted by

Schiller. It consists of a table of all the arts, from poetry to the dance; the
usefulness and harmfulness of each are indicated in separate columns.
A glance at this table reveals at once that the writer had a hard time
trying to fill the “useful” column. For instance, under music, the benefi-
cent effects include “whiling away the time,” “sociability,” “gallantry,”
whereas the corresponding “harmful squares” are filled out with phrases
such as “emptiness of thought,” “lack of neighborliness,” “strumming.”
Under poetry we find in the “harmful” column such descriptions as
“platitudes,” “awkwardness,” and “mediocrity.” The Schemata never went
beyond the draft stage, but it is clear from the context that it represents
an attempt to judge what we would today call popular culture from the
point of view of classical humanistic aesthetics.
On Artistic Standards. In the eighteenth century the artist produced
for a relatively small, cultivated public whose needs and tastes were
fairly uniform; at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a new, much
larger public, which foreshadows the modern audience for the mass
media, is clamoring for attention, and this fact confronts the artist with
new problems, the most important of which is that of “true” standards.
As Goethe remarks in Xenien, “Formerly there was one taste, now there
are many tastes. But tell me, where are those tastes tasted?”
The problems of standards occupies a central place in modern
discussions about popular culture, and it is invariably connected with
the problem of the influence of public taste on the character of the
mass products. We find in these discussions some of the arguments
advanced by Goethe’s Manager. Some tend to believe that prevalent
standards originate in the dispositions and needs of the public, and seek
to determine some invariable elements in the public taste, elements that
reflect basic unchangeable features of human nature. Others claim that
public taste is not a spontaneous but an artificial product, and that it
is determined by political or economic vested interests which, via the
mass media, manipulate the consumers’ fantasies and frustrations for
specific selfish purposes. There are also those who defend an interme-
diate position: standards of taste, according to them, are determined
as a result of an interplay of these two sets of forces.
30
Goethe speaks for the artist, and his own position with regard to
standards is quite clear: he represents the humanistic tradition which
places responsibility for the fate of culture and individual morality in
the hands of the intellectual elite. This elite betrays its mission when it
plays up to the cheap instincts of the populace by producing inferior
books and vulgar plays. In other words, Goethe does not ask how the
writer could go about gaining the attention of a large public, but the
opposite: how can the public be persuaded to undertake the intellectual
effort required by true art, and what can the artist himself do to facilitate
the process. Like many artists and theoreticians since the Renaissance,
Goethe felt that the specific function of art, as contrasted with religion,
philosophy, and the sciences, is to stimulate productive imagination. One
of the implications of his criticism of cheap art as being too literal, as
catering to specific emotional needs, is precisely, as we have seen, that it
hinders creativity. In his essay on the Weimar Court Theater, he insists
that the public “should not be treated as rabble,” and that in selecting
plays for performance the guiding purpose should not be catering to the
public’s needs, but encouragement of imagination and contemplation:
the playgoer should be made to feel, Goethe says, “like a tourist, who
does not find all the comforts of home in the strange places which he
visits for his instructions and enjoyment.”10
In his emphasis on this function of art, Goethe is in agreement with
his countryman Lessing, the poet, dramatist and critic, who was also
keenly interested in the development of the German theater. In his
Laocoon11 and Hamburg Dramaturgie,12 Lessing devoted several pages
to a discussion of the differences between genuine art and imitative
art. He explicitly condemns artistic works that fail to leave scope for
the audience’s imagination. He attacks the conception (ascribed to an
ancient writer) according to which painting should be silent poetry,
and poetry, speaking painting. Such a conception, he observes, would
paralyze the imagination of temporal relationships in the case of poetry
and the imagination of spatial relationships in the case of painting.
Realizing that it is more difficult for the painter and sculptor to appeal
to the imagination than it is for the writer or playwright, Lessing recom-
mends that they portray “the most fertile moment,” i.e., the moment
that affords an optimum of free scope for imagining what precedes and
what follows the action represented in a painting or a sculpted figure.
“The more we see, the more we must be able to add by thinking. The
more we add by thinking, the more must we believe to see.” Similarly,
according to Lessing, dramatists who like Racine or Voltaire portray
31
rigid types are inferior to the ancients and to Shakespeare who portray
characters in the process of development, and enable the spectator to
identify himself with them.
Needless to say, the danger discerned by Lessing and Goethe has
become more acute with the advent of the more modern media.13 A
little epigram by Goethe could be applied almost verbatim to television:
Talking a lot of nonsense,
Or even writing it,
Will kill neither body nor soul,
Everything will remain unchanged.
But nonsense, placed before the eyes
Has a magical right:
Because it fetters the senses
The mind remains a vassal.14
Goethe believes, then, that the more a given work of art occupies the
senses of the audience, the less scope is left for the imagination; in this
respect, the impact of a bad book is infinitely less than the impact of a
bad spectacle that appeals simultaneously to the eye, and the ear, and
that reduces the spectator to almost complete passivity.15 In sum, he is
uncompromising in his standards for art and the artist; his suggestions
are confined to efforts to improve the repertoire of the theater, and to
raise the intellectual level of the audience. Unlike later writers such as
the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, who view the rising influence of
the populace with despair and expect the end of civilization, Goethe
implicitly condemns the artist who withdraws to his ivory tower. He
once said in a conversation that only in decadent ages do artists and
poets become self-centered, while in ages of progress the creative
mind is always concerned with the outer world (“Conversations with
Eckerman,” January 29, 1826). At no point, however, must the art-
ist stoop to the public; he serves it best by retaining full freedom, by
following only his own inner voice. In his essay on experimentation,
Goethe compares the artist with the scientist, whose conclusions must
be continually submitted to the public, while “the artist may be well
advised to keep his work to himself till it is completed, because no one
can readily help him or advise him with it.”
Schiller and the Social Role of Aesthetic Experience
Throughout his discussions of the problems of the artist in relation to
society, Goethe, as we have seen, maintained an olympic detachment
toward immediate social and political problems. Friedrich Schiller,
32
on the other hand, was a true son of the French Revolution, and in
both his artistic and theoretical works he paid enthusiastic tribute to
its political achievements. His central concern was with the develop-
ment of a “moral” society, and his studies on aesthetics, as well as his
analysis of the roles of art and popular culture, are all concerned with
the problems to be overcome in the attainment of such a society. While
a detailed, systematic analysis of Schiller’s writings would be most
rewarding for our purposes, we must confine ourselves here to a mere
outline of his conception of the central role of artistic experience in
attaining an ideal state.16
The Experience of Beauty as the Means to the “Good” Life. Schiller
did not believe that the individual is caught in a struggle between evil
and good forces within himself, but rather that man in all cases would
“prefer the good because it is good,” providing it does not entail trouble
or exclude the agreeable. Man knows within himself what moral good-
ness is, and it is not innate evil forces but simply our sensuous desires
for comfort and pleasure which prevent us from attaining it:
Thus in reality, all moral action seems to have no other principle than
a conflict between the good and agreeable; or, that which comes to
the same thing, between desire and reason; the force of our sensuous
instincts on one side, and, on the other side the feebleness of will,
the moral faculty; such, apparently, is the source of all our faults.17
Schiller did not believe that this conflict could or should be resolved by
a victory of one of these forces over the other; if, for instance, human
life were organized only on the basis of the gratification of instincts,
we would achieve the state described by Hobbes which (according to
Schiller) would “only make society possible by subduing nature through
nature.” On the other hand, he did not believe a moral state such as
that of Rousseau, which orders the individual to subordinate himself
to the general will, could be achieved, for such a state, though on a
higher plane, would negate individual freedom. The only acceptable
state would be one in which the freedom of each individual is fully
preserved without destroying the freedom of others, and this state,
Schiller believed, can come into being through an aesthetic experi-
ence which utilizes and reconciles the two forces in man, namely, the
experience of beauty.
This experience of beauty can be enjoyed through great art and it
produces, Schiller believed, both individual and social blessings. On
the individual level, the perception of beauty involves and unifies man’s
33
sensuous and spiritual beings, aspects of himself which are otherwise

often conflicting and unreconcilable. On the social level, genuine
aesthetic experience is the only form of communication which has a
unifying rather than a dividing effect (all other forms of communication
grow only out of self-interest and appeal only to self-interest):
It is only the perception of beauty that makes of him an entirety,
because it demands the cooperation of his two natures. All other
forms of communication divide society, because they apply exclusively
either to the receptivity or to the private activity of its members. . . .
The aesthetic communication alone unites society, because it applies
to what is common to all its members.
Today, with inferior artistic products dominating our communica-

tions, this seems an almost utopian idea. Even for Schiller the dangers
threatening genuine art (which he believed to be the only source of true
beauty) by the increasing demands of an industrialized society were a
matter for great concern.
The Problem of Mediocre Art. Schiller recognized that as society
became more mechanized, it made harsher demands on the life of
the individual. These demands exhaust both mind and body, and man
therefore requires rest and relaxation in his leisure-time:
Now labour makes rest a sensible want, much more imperious than
that of the moral nature; for physical nature must be satisfied before
the mind can show its requirements.
Beauty, it is true,
. . . addresses all the faculties of man and can only be appreciated if a
man employs fully all his strength. He must bring to it an open sense,
a broad heart, a spirit full of freshness.
Mediocre art, however, makes no such demands, he goes on. It does

not quicken but merely suspends thought:
After this, can one wonder at the success of mediocre talents . . . ?
Or the bitter anger of small minds against true energetic beauty?
They reckon on finding therein a congenial recreation and regret
to discover that a display of strength is required to which they are
unequal.
Here Schiller describes what might be called the tired businessman’s

conception of art, and foreshadows those more recent critics who are
concerned about the extent to which mediocre artistic products lull
34
the reader, listener or viewer into passivity. Such passivity, in turn,

is conducive to the experience and appreciation of form but not of
substance.
The over-development of taste (Schiller uses the word as synony-
mous with a sense for form) can grow out of aesthetic sensualism or
from a more elevated appreciation along the lines of the formalistic
theory of art (in which beauty consists only in proportion, or in the
suitability of the means employed by the artist to the end he pursues).
The danger here is that “good taste becomes the sole arbiter,” and men
merely indulge in an amusing game, becoming “indifferent to reality
and finish by giving value to form and appearance only.” Man realizes
his highest potential only when he gives free play to all of his forces.
He must not let himself become beguiled into thinking that because
taste (or sense for form) has successfully replaced or suppressed his
instinctual drives that he is free. “Taste,” he says, “must never forget
that it carries out an order emanating elsewhere.”
In discussing the ever new forms offered by a developing culture,
Schiller in a way anticipates the modern mass media and the danger
that they will, by creating new demands for form, crowd out creative
and moral thinking:
Culture, far from giving us freedom, only develops new necessities as it
advances; the fetters of the physical close more tightly around us so that
the fear of loss quenches even the ardent impulse toward improvement.
While recognizing the danger, however, Schiller remains much more

optimistic than we are today. Whereas we are inclined to believe that
the experience of true art and beauty is reserved for exclusive groups,
he is still able to envisage an “aesthetic” state or a state governed by the
concept of beauty, through which all men become free:
In the midst of the formidable realm of forces and of the sacred empire
of laws, the aesthetic impulse . . . creates a . . . joyous realm. . . . To
give freedom through freedom is the fundamental law of this realm.
Here, in essense, is the eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal-ideal-

istic concept of the potentialities of man, where political, philosophical
and aesthetic theories all converged on the potential of every man for a
spontaneous, productive and creative existence. Schiller, in short, was
aware of, but did not succomb to, the stirrings of modern scepticism
about the opportunities for individual development in a mass society
which were soon to prevail.
35
Literature for the Masses: The Academic Reaction

Between 1800 and 1830, a great flood of sentimental plays swept the
classics from the German stage, and the literary market was swamped
by a deluge of novels, short stories, popular biographies and almanacs,
all of them written with an eye to the mass reader. Goethe’s idea of
reconciling the divergent interests of artist and public by gradually edu-
cating the latter seemed completely utopian under the new conditions.
A new class of writers had arisen who no longer needed to be urged
by managers to produce trash, for they did this of their own accord,
to achieve popularity or simply to make a living. Those writers who
were faithful to their ideals, and who only a short time before had been
looked upon with veneration, were rapidly losing their audiences. The
masses preferred to read cheap imitations of their works, and Goethe
himself was not spared. Commenting much later upon the fate of the
Wanderjahre, a German historian of literature writes:
When Goethe’s Wanderjahre appeared, it caused only disappoint-
ment, even among the few who still regarded Goethe as the greatest
among the great. . . . And a Pastor Pustkuchen of Westphalia could
publish an “improved” version or parody of the Wanderjahre, which
sold more copies and found more readers than Goethe’s own book.
It almost seemed to the burgher who had in the meantime acquired
a liberal outlook that Goethe, whom his father had worshipped as a
hero, was but a glorified lackey and little more. What was almost the
whole nation had twice hailed Goethe with unanimous approval, first
on the publication of Werther, and perhaps also when the first part of
Faust saw the light of day. Later only a minority followed him, a very
small minority, and then finally the pack began to bark after him.18
This historian clearly relates the change of public taste to the change
in the political outlook of the German burgher, who by rejecting the hero
worshipped by the preceding generation, affirmed his right to follow his
own inclinations instead of bowing to higher authority. The reaction of
professional critics who witnessed this development, and who represented
the point of view of the educated minority, seems to confirm his view.
One of these early critics, Herman Marggraff, speaks of the new
writers as intruders who desecrate the lofty temple of literature, whose
very presence is a threat to German culture. For one thing, the new
literature aimed only at entertainment:
Literature at that time disintegrated into mere writing for enter-
tainment—long and short novels, short stories, and short short
stories. The process was almost frightening, it seriously threatened
36
to undermine the national significance of literature. The magazines

were brimming with this merely novelistic, merely entertaining type
of writing. One writer always imitated another.19
Marggraff found another reason for condemning these writers in

their obviously successful attempts to appeal to the lowest instincts of
the public. He was particularly indignant when he discussed Mimili,
a best-selling novel by Clauren, which was published in 1816. Like
so many other best-sellers, this novel and its author have long since
fallen into oblivion, but judging from reports by contemporary critics,
its heroine, with her deep red lips, peaches-and-cream complexion,
and perfect manners, deeply impressed the good German burghers.
Although Mimili cannot of course compete with Amber, she had and
showed enough charms to arouse the admiration of the book-buying
public, if not that of austere lovers of good literature:
The reader is warned that we are now in the period in which the
authors of almanacs and the late Clauren are leading the dance of
literature. Mediocrity, naked, unadorned, wanton, with its paunch,
wallowed on the slovenly couch of literature and on the boards of the
stage. There it stretched itself and blinked its eyes, and molded, with
the very soft wax of language, delicate little figures with kissable lips
and velvety cheeks, with dainty calves and lovely legs that could be
seen as far as the garters, for Mimili’s frock was rather short; and quite
a good deal of the bosom could be seen for the bodice was cut low.20
Marggraff also speaks with great scorn of the commercial methods

used to spread this kind of literature. He referred to its publishers
as “dealers in literary knicknacks,” who, to make their merchandise
attractive to their customers sold it in the form of almanacs that
bore fanciful titles such as “Tulips, Roses, Carnations, Amaranths, or
Forget-me-nots.” Moreover, even as early as the 1830s, more modern
methods of advertising were in vogue, which, like today’s television
programs, associated literary favorites with products of the dry goods
or food industries.21
Even authentic writers, such as Tieck and Hoffmann, succumbed to
the new fashion, and wrote for almanacs. Only a very small minority
appreciated these writers for their notable literary qualities. Comment-
ing on the reaction to Hoffmann, Marggraff says:
Everyone else read him for pleasure and as an aid to digestion. . . .
No one suspected the sad gulf that lay between the inspired writer
and his unresponsive male readers or sentimental female readers,
whose sole purpose was to feel shudders running down their spines.22
37
Such laments and irate pronouncements from the champions of great

art proved of no avail. A generation after Marggraff, popular literature
was flourishing more than ever. Critics still viewed the development
with righteous indignation, although their feelings seemed to be some-
what tempered by the realization that they could do little about it.
G. G. Gervinus, whose five-volume History of German Belles-Lettres
enjoyed a wide reputation in his time, wrote:
The manufactured goods are so inexpensive, and so indispensable for
domestic use, that it is impossible to fix any barrier high enough to
stop their flow once the intellectual consumption of these goods has
become as widespread as it is in our country. When such products
have been in circulation for a few years, they remain saleable without
any basic change in their design, and are considered all the more
distinguished and fashionable.23
In addition to the force of habit or inertia, Gervinus mentions the

need for relaxation which according to him accounted for the vogue of
cheap literature. He recognizes with regret that the tired businessman
cannot be expected to make the necessary effort to ascend the lofty
peaks of Parnassus:
We, men, caught in the monotonous routine of business activities,
need relaxation, and ultimately we should regard it as a sign of culture
and of good sense that, after performing labors that dull the mind,
we should seek intellectual refreshment. We do not wish to be unfair
to reading done for entertainment. It is undeniable that such reading
is necessary: we cannot banish from our lives the toil that makes us
incapable of effort during leisure hours. However, when we realize
that authentic literature declined suddenly almost before it had had
time to flower, we can scarcely repress our displeasure at seeing once
more confirmed a fact that we had suspected from the outset, namely,
that the scaling down of literature to the demand of the masses has
everywhere stood in the way of the highest achievements.
Unlike Schiller, whom Gervinus echoes here (no doubt unwittingly),

he sees no way out of the dilemma. The hope that the multitude will be
aesthetically educated has lost out to the conviction that great art will
forever remain inaccessible to the broad public. The genuine artist must
comfort himself with the thought that his work will remain immortal, while
popular products remain beneath the dignity of even the literary historian:
Those who consider the situation historically will find that this quotid-
ian literature stands in the same relation to true creative writing as
private life to public events. It is natural for the historian to disregard
38
the former. . . . Likewise, it is natural for us to ignore these private

literary colations although they outrank in size the tree of authentic
literature, and to take the part of the immortal against the ephemeral.
History has always been compelled to make such a choice.
Gervinus suggests still another cause for the decay of literary stan-
dards—a cause that has nothing to do with the poor taste of the public,
but which stems from the very nature of artistic creation. At a certain
point in its development, fine literature appears to have exhausted
its supply of lofty subjects; it becomes tired and turns to more earthy
matters. As Gervinus puts it:
After treating all of the great subjects pertaining to public life, fine
literature seized upon the whole range of subjects pertaining to social
life in the narrower sense, and to private life. History does not concern
itself with this domain: it deals only with the seeds which are planted
at the proper time in the public soil of a national culture and which
come to their appointed fruition. The rank weeds that grow wild in
this soil are of interest to the historian of literature only as he observes
that they divert nourishing juices from the truly valuable crops.24
The above statement, which implicitly formulates a criterion of literary

value based on subject matter, suggests that not only melodramatic
trash but also naturalistic novels seem to be excluded from the well-
trimmed garden of belles lettres. But the naturalistic novel reached
Germany only in the 1880s, that is, after the time of Gervinus, and we
cannot be sure whether he would have condemned it as a “rank weed.”
What seems certain, however, is that his negative reaction to popular
writing is largely determined by his rigid adherence to the standards
of art established by the classics. He regards these standards as fixed,
eternal canons of aesthetics, and every violation is a manifestation of
the coarser side of human nature, of weakness or evil, a wild growth that
should be rejected. At no point does Gervinus—or for that matter any
German historian of literature or the nineteenth century—attempt to
analyze the relationship between popular entertainment and genuine
art in objective sociological terms.25
The social horizon of these historians was severely limited, largely
because they lived in a period when political expression was muzzled.
They had no influence whatsoever in the conduct of public affairs, and
saw the new development as something that was taking place within
the separate domain of literature. Indeed, the very violence of their
condemnation of literary trash may reflect their frustration arising
39
from lack of outlets for social criticism. However that may be, the
reaction to the rise of popular literature which they represent is by no
means confined to Germany or to the nineteenth century. Historians
of literature and professional critics in all countries—this class of
champions of an aesthetic canon (which incidentally is rarely defined)—
arose simultaneously with the class of writers for mass consumption.
Their intellectual successors have continued to this day to condemn
popular media, whether in the form of pulp literature or radio serials,
on grounds similar to those adduced by the German critics quoted in
this chapter. This would not be worth noting, perhaps, were it not that
modern academic critics often propound the old truths as though they
were being said for the very first time. To account for this monotony,
we must infer that either the character of popular audiences has not
changed, and that they are today as exposed to the temptations of
vulgarity, escape, and passive enjoyment as they were a century and a
half ago, or that academic criticism cannot by its very nature broaden
its perspective to encompass popular media. These alternatives are of
course not exclusive of each other, and they may very well both be true.
“Culture Works Differently”
Whereas in Germany the reaction to the tide of popular literature was
largely confined to academic dismay and a sense of futility, a different
attitude came to the fore in other countries, one reflecting a broader
social outlook and greater political freedom. Particularly in England,
critics of popular art, while rejecting it on aesthetic grounds, tended
to see in it only one of many manifestations of deeper social forces.
This new attitude was formulated as early as 1800—the tide of
popular writing hit England several decades before it had reached Ger-
many—in William Wordsworth’s famous preface to the second edition
of his Lyrical Ballads. The great English poet voiced his alarm about
the extent to which the “beauty and dignity” represented in true art
was threatened by “frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies
and the deluge of idle and extravagant stories in verse.” In analyzing
the spread of this popular literature, he makes use of a psychological
construct which by now has become familiar to us: the need of modern
man for “gross and violent stimulants” tends “to blunt the discriminat-
ing powers of the mind,” whereas the function of true art is to stimulate
these powers. Popular literature reduces people to an attitude of pas-
sivity or, in the words of Wordsworth, to “a state of almost savage
torpor.” He finds these predispositions activated by social change, by
40
“the great national events which are daily taking place, and which the
increasing accumulation of intelligence hourly gratifies.”26 In the same
context, Wordsworth says that his own works are a modest endeavor
to “counteract the new degrading tendencies.”
The few sentences quoted here contain in embryo almost all of the
themes that characterize English criticism as compared with nineteenth
century German criticism of popular culture: the concern about art
is subordinated to the concern about culture as a whole; attention is
focused on institutionalized social pressures; the threat of conformism
is particularly emphasized; and an attempt is made to account for the
audience’s attitude not on the basis of some kind of inborn tendency to
passivity, inertia or debased instincts, but as the natural result of social
pressures. Finally, these critics believe that great art can counteract the
bad effects of increasing industrialization.
Matthew Arnold is perhaps the most eloquent spokesman among
the English critics. In contrast to Wordsworth, and reminiscent of
Pascal, his concern is more with spiritual than with aesthetic values:
what for Wordsworth is “beauty and dignity” is for him “spirituality
and sweetness and light.”27 Where Wordsworth evokes Shakespeare and
Milton, Arnold points to Lessing and Herder as writers who broaden
the basis for life by diffusing “sweetness and light to make reason and
the Will of God prevail.” He is deeply troubled lest the rapid spread
of industrialization overwhelm “culture,” which for him is the “idea of
perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit.” This role of
true culture, he believes, is more essential to mankind than ever before:
This function is particularly important in our modern world of
which the whole of civilization is, to a much greater degree than
the civilizations of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external and
tends constantly to become more so. . . . Faith in machinery . . . is
our besetting danger.
Having thus juxtaposed cultural goals against concern with industrial

progress, Arnold goes on to deal with specific phenomena of popular
culture. Not unlike Pascal (or, for that matter, the social critics in modern
“little” magazines), he deals with the games, sports and mass media as
various manifestations of the same trend away from the true essence of life:
The result of all the games and sports which occupy the passing gen-
eration of boys and young men may be the establishment of a better
physical type for the future to work with. . . . Our generation of boys
and young men is in the meantime sacrificed.
41
In the same context, he attacks the producers of literature for mass

consumption:
Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as they call them, an intel-
lectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper for
the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary popular literature
is an example of this way of working on the masses.
Such manipulation, he believes, is incompatible with culture which

“works differently.” He, too, singles out the newspaper (particularly
the American newspaper) for special attack, and finds its pragmatism
the very opposite to culture:
Because to enable and stir up people to read their Bible and the
newspapers and to get a practical knowledge of their business does
not serve the higher spiritual life of a nation so much as culture, truly
conceived, serves; and the true conception of culture is . . . just what
America fails in.
Walter Bagehot, in his treatise on The English Constitution, written

in 1867, says that the English inclination toward “the outward show of
life,” its remoteness from “true philosophy” exposes the nation more
and more to a style of superficiality and adoration of success. He is
concerned lest the values of British aristocracy go completely astray
under the pressure of the sorry alliance between professional politicians
and professional moneymakers, and he deplores the extent to which
this modern idolatry will also be reflected in the writings of the nation:
It is not true that the reverence for rank—at least for hereditary
rank—is as base as the reverence for money. As the world has gone,
manner has been half hereditary in certain castes, and manner is
one of the fine arts. It is a style of society; it is in the daily spoken
intercourse of human beings what the art of literary expression is in
their occasional written intercourse.28
He goes on to isolate newspaper reading as the only intellectual activ-

ity which still finds a broad audience. Just as the classical European or
American sociologists (Toennies, Max Weber, Ward or Ross), he points
at the newspapers as reinforcements of public opinion, deliberately
subservient to specific political and business interests: “Even now a dan-
gerous distinction is given by what is exclusively called public life. The
newspapers describe daily and incessantly a certain conspicuous exis-
tence; they comment on its characters, recount its details, investigate
42
its motives, anticipate its cause.” Referring to the world of politics, he

complains that the newspapers “give a precedent and a dignity to that
world which they do not give to any other,” whereas “the literary world,
the scientific world, the philosophical world, not only are not com-
parable in dignity to the political world but in comparison are hardly
worthy at all. The newspaper makes no mention of them and could not
mention them.” Bagehot, quite in line with German idealistic thinking
as developed by Schiller, believes that the source of this inclination
rests with the producers, not with the consumers, who, however, are
eventually seduced:
As are the papers, so are the readers; they, by irresistible sequence
and association, believe that those people who constantly figure in the
papers are cleverer, abler, or, at any rate, somewhat higher than other
people. . . . English politicians . . . are the actors on the scene, and it
is hard for the admiring spectators not to believe that the admired
actor is greater than themselves.
Bagehot is completely steeped in the traditional discussion about the

irreconcilable contrasts between true culture and art, on the one hand,
and popular products which lower the intellectual and moral standards
of a people on the other. In his Literary Studies, most of which were
written in the 1850s, we find an essay on the Waverly Novels (the
German critics too were keenly aware of the entertainment functions
of the novels of Scott) in which Bagehot, after having paid oblique
praise to the successful manufacturer of novels, comments as follows:
On the whole, and speaking roughly, these defects in the delineation

which Scott has given us of human life are but two. He omits to give
us a delineation of the soul. . . . We miss the consecrating power. . . .
There are perhaps such things as the love affairs of immortal beings,
but no one would learn it from Scott. His heroes and heroines are
well dressed for this world, but not for another; there is nothing even
in their love which is suitable for immortality. As has been noticed,
Scott also omits any delineation of the abstract unworldly intellect.
This too might not have been so severe a reproach, considering its
undramatic, unanimated nature, if it had stood alone; but taken in
connection with the omission which we have just spoken of, it is most
important. As the union of sense and romance makes the world of
Scott so characteristically agreeable—a fascinating picture of this
world in the light in which we like best to dwell on it—so the deficiency
in the attenuated, striving intellect, as well as in the supernatural soul,
give to the “world” of Scott the cumbrousness and temporality, in
short, the materialism, which is characteristic of the world.29
43
Schiller said that a literature which served only to gratify the reader’s
need for relaxation could not be called art. Bagehot expresses the
same idea in different terms; popular literature is to him a literature
that lacks moral and intellectual values. He criticizes Scott’s novels on
the ground that they fail to show the tension between the human soul
and the real world, that they remain on the level of the sensuous and
agreeable, instead of stressing immortality. Bagehot thus comes close
to the point of view of Pascal: art which excludes spiritual and intel-
lectual struggle is not art.30
Arnold, Bagehot, and the other critics of the times did not view
esoteric artistic production on the one hand, and substitute products
seeking the market or popularity on the other, as alternatives. Rather,
they formulated a concept of art which made it neither exclusive nor
condescending, but, at the same time, it granted no living space to the
products of popular culture. What these thinkers believed was that
art’s and particularly literature’s basic function is to bring about the
universal liberation of mankind.31
Such a concept of art, particularly of literature, as a liberating force,
goes far beyond that of the classical humanists of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries whose first concern was the individual,
organized society being viewed as an agglomerate of autonomous
moral subjects. This newer concept came to the fore after the bound-
less optimism about the potentialities of the individual had begun to
recede, and was rooted in the idea of superimposed social change which
in turn would benefit the individual. Curiously enough, writers as dif-
ferent in national origin and literary style as Matthew Arnold and Leo
Tolstoy expressed this newer concept in almost the same way when
they elaborated on the capacity of the arts and literature to provide the
basis for man’s emancipation from any sort of social manipulation by
conveying ideas of truth and freedom. Their texts are rich (as well as
astonishingly similar) in the expression of this concept (see Appendix
A for illustrative quotations).32
The Sociological Approach
For all their differences, the academic and the cultural reactions to
the rise of mass culture have one important feature in common: both
are essentially moralizing, both, that is, hark back to Pascal’s religious
condemnation of entertainment. The more modern condemnations
differ from Pascal’s in that they substitute art for religion, but art
is here conceived as a kind of divine service to truth and beauty,
44
essentially moral and spiritual in nature. Thus while popular art is

depicted as the pursuit of relaxation or the attempt to escape reality,
higher art is assumed to be a legitimate and spiritually fruitful pursuit,
which ennobles the soul, and raises it to an ideal realm. The causes
that induce men to engage in the inferior, nonspiritual activities and
the nature of that higher art which is opposed to these activities are
conceived in various ways, but in each case, explicitly or implicitly, the
spokesmen for the academic and for the cultural approach formulate
an injunction, a moral judgment, which amounts to a condemnation
of popular art.
It is perhaps no accident that another, third attitude to the new
phenomenon was for the first time formulated and applied in the
country of Pascal and Montaigne. This new attitude, which we shall
call the “sociological,” marks, in a sense, a return to Montaigne, to his
method of dispassionately studying all human phenomena, with moral
judgment suspended. The French intellectual tradition of exploring
each new idea to its ultimate consequences and to formulate it in its
most extreme form is not alone responsible for the fact that the phe-
nomenon of popular culture was studied in a spirit of dispassionate
objectivity in France before any other country. There is also the his-
torical circumstance that in France the political and social struggles
of the nineteenth century were fought with the greatest intensity and
ideological movements achieved the greatest measure of articulate
expression. The numerous upheavals which France underwent after
the French Revolution from the Napoleonic dictatorship to the Com-
munist experiment of the Commune of 1871 favored the development
of that ironic detachment in the face of social phenomena which is the
precondition of a scientific approach.
Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the precursors of the modern social
scientist, as early as 1835 analyzed the phenomenon of popular culture
and its relationship to literary art in just such a detached scientific
spirit. He does not ask whether popular art is good or bad, he merely
states that so-called superior forms of art do not find a favorable
soil in modern capitalist democracies because men “engaged either
in politics or in a profession” have neither time nor mind to allow
them more than “to taste occasionally and by stealth the pleasures of
mind” which “are considered as a transient and necessary recreation
amid the serious labors of life.” Men in the American democracy, for
instance, “can never acquire a sufficiently intimate knowledge of the art
of literature to appreciate its more delicate beauties.” Members of an
45
industrialized society are inured “to the struggle, the crosses and the
monotony of practical life.” Like many sociologists of the preresearch
era, he proceeds to infer that predispositions conditioned by the means
of earning a living in turn give rise to the need for excitement in leisure
time, in order to offset the boredom of the job. Thus he believes that
modern man “requires strong emotions, startling passages, truths and
errors brilliant enough to rouse them up and to plunge them at once,
as if by violence, into the midst of the subject.” After having rooted
the psychological needs in the groundwork of the economic situa-
tion, Tocqueville describes (without, by the way, giving any concrete
examples) the literature of the democratic age in terms of the satisfac-
tion of social needs. He believes that no true art or respect for form
will be possible, but that:
Style will frequently be fantastic, incorrect, overburdened, and loose,
almost always vehement and bold. Authors will aim at rapidity of
execution more than at perfection of detail. Small productions will be
more common than bulky books; there will be more wit than erudi-
tion, more imagination than profundity; and literary performances
will bear marks of an untutored and rude vigor of thought, frequently
of great variety and singular fecundity. The object of authors will be
to astonish rather than to please, and to stir the passions more than
to charm the taste.33
His conclusion is pessimistic. He believes that only mass com-

munications will be successful in modern societies, and that they can
only be products of popular culture, unrelated to valid intellectual,
artistic or moral criteria. The writer, then, becomes part and parcel of
a business civilization and is, in his way, just as much a manufacturer
of commodities as any other businessman:
Democracy not only infuses a taste for letters among the trading
classes, but introduces a trading spirit into literature. . . . Among
democratic nations a writer may flatter himself that he will obtain
at a cheap rate a moderate reputation and a large fortune. For this
purpose he need not be admired; it is enough that he is liked. The
ever increasing crowd of readers and their continual craving for
something new ensure the sale of books that nobody much esteems.
In democratic times the public frequently treats authors as kings do
their courtiers; they enrich and despise them. What more is needed
by the venal souls who are born in courts or are worthy to live there?
Democratic literature is always infested with a tribe of writers who
look upon letters as a mere trade; and for some few great authors who
adorn it, you may reckon thousands of idea-mongers.34
46
About two decades later, Tocqueville’s countryman, Hippolyte Taine,

elaborated on these concepts. The five volumes of his History of Eng-
lish Literature, shot through with observations about the relationship
of the writer and his public, could be reread today as a sociological
classic. The differences between pure art and popularly accepted lit-
erature are not as important to him as to his colleagues at home and
abroad, and he finds fault with English criticism because it is “always
moral, never psychological, bent on exactly measuring the degree of
human honesty, ignorant of the mechanism of our sentiments and
faculties.”35 This approach to literature comes close to being “applied
science.” Take, for instance, his analysis of Dickens which consists of
three chapters: the first analyzes the life and character of the author,
the third, the characters of his novels, while the intermediary chapter
is devoted to a phenomenology of the public of Dickens. A few ironical
lines from his chapter “The Public” will illustrate how he goes about
describing public receptivity for popular literature:
Plant this talent on English soil; the literary opinion of the country will
direct its growth and explain its fruits. For this public opinion is its
private opinion; it does not submit to it as to an external constraint,
but feels it inwardly as an inner persuasion; it does not hinder, but
develops it, and only repeats aloud what it said to itself in a whisper.
The counsels of this public taste are somewhat like this; the more
powerful because they agree with its natural inclination, and urge
upon its special course: “Be moral. All your novels must be such as
may be read by young girls. We are practical minds, and we would not
have literature corrupt practical life. We believe in family life, and we
would not have literature paint the passions which attack family life.
We are Protestants, and we have preserved something of the severity
of our fathers against enjoyment and passions. Amongst these, love
is the worst. Beware of resembling in this respect the most illustri-
ous of our neighbors. Love is the hero of all George Sand’s novels.
Married or not, she thinks it beautiful, holy, sublime in itself; and
she says so. Don’t believe this; and if you do believe it, don’t say it. It
is a bad example. . . .”36
With Taine we have nearly reached the threshold of modern times.

Going on to the turn of the century, we find the discussion on art and
popular culture centered around two schools: that of Nietzsche and that
of Karl Marx. We cannot analyze the approaches of these two schools in
any detail, but what both have in common is an attitude of negativism
with regard to present-day political and cultural civilization. In a way (at
least within our frame of reference), Nietzsche and his school are more
47
radical than the Marxists because of their belief that all intellectual life
(including the great work of the past), is besmirched by the pragmatic
utilitarianism of modern civilization. In the interests of a higher type
of intellectuality and vitality, Nietzsche and his students, above all the
Austrian writer, Karl Kraus, reject practically all literary products of the
present, finding that their style and language reveal nothing but com-
mercialism, immorality and untruth. Marx himself, who never more
than occasionally referred to literature, was still very much steeped in
humanistic tradition, differentiating between genuine artists such as
Shakespeare, Goethe and Balzac who are devoted to truth, and what he
would call lackey literature in the service of the interests of ruling groups.
Toward a Clarification of the Discussion
In reviewing the historical background of the controversies on popular
culture, we find that the field tends to have been dominated by the
Pascalian condemnation of all entertainment. Because most authors
we have so far considered have consistently equated popular literature
with entertainment, their attitude toward popular culture is, by and
large, negative. Even the representatives of what we have called the
sociological approach are far from defending popular culture, which
at best is considered a necessary evil. How is the other side of the
controversy represented?
Because of the intellectual tradition of most critics, we probably
cannot expect to discover any champions of “inferior” art as such.
A theoretical defense of popular art seems to be possible only in the
form of rebuttal, or in the form of questioning of the basic assumptions
of the defenders of “genuine” art. For example, one might question
prevalent assumptions about the function of high art; one might ques-
tion the implicit assumptions stemming from Montaigne and Pascal
that popular productions serve only to gratify lower needs; finally,
since the condemnation of popular products has always been associ-
ated with a condemnation of the mass media as such, one might ask
whether the mass media are irrevocably doomed to serve as vehicles
of inferior products.
Have any of these three potential lines of defense ever been manned?
When we try to answer this question, we feel the lack of historical
studies most acutely. Not only is there no comprehensive work on the
subject, but even those small analyses which do exist are generally
unsatisfactory, unsystematic, and often superficial. In this chapter, then,
even to a greater extent than in the preceding chapters, we can only
48
hint at the kind of insights and formulations that might be developed

in the light of serious historical research.
Questioning of Basic Assumptions about the Function of Art
If the Pascalian idea had been adopted in its original form, not only
popular art but all art would have been condemned as distractions
which block man’s path to individual salvation. Many critics of popular
art assume that high art fulfills a purpose other than that of entertain-
ment or escape and belongs on an exalted plane. There are, however,
social philosophers (as well as champions of popular art) who have
questioned this assumption. If high art is not entertainment, what,
they ask, is it? What is its content, its function, its value? No general
agreement on these matters has ever been achieved, although a great
many philosophies of art have been formulated.
Especially in France, where the most extreme theories of art
for art’s sake were developed in reaction to the rise of popular art,
esoteric art was under attack throughout the nineteenth century,
and many French critics regarded movements such as naturalism
as a healthful return to popular art. It was certainly awkward to
defend so-called art for art’s sake on the ground that it performed
a moralizing or educational function. In 1901, George Sorel, the
French social philosopher whose Reflections on Violence profoundly
influenced political thought in the twentieth century, wrote La
Valeur Sociale de l’Art (The Social Value of Art), where he suggests
that it would be difficult to defend great art on the grounds of its
educational function:
It would be impossible to find two persons who agree on the
educational value of famous works by our contemporaries. This
is also true of past works. Thus M. Brunetière [famous French
literary historian and critic] even wonders whether Bajezet and
Rodogune [classical tragedies by Corneille] do not contain adven-
tures whose proper place would be in the chronicles of crime and
licentiousness.
Arguing in the same book against another French critic, Guyot, who
maintained that “true artistic beauty is moralizing in itself and expresses
true sociability,” Sorel asks ironically: “Should we then assume that
there is a true beauty and a false beauty?”
Whether such arguments against high art are valid is beside the point
here. No doubt, they were often based on superficial views that took
too literally the pronouncements of the defenders of such art. But it is
49
pertinent that writers such as Flaubert, who are generally regarded as

champions of the esoteric and who were extreme in their rejections of
popular entertainment, held views on art that by no means coincide
with those of the academic critics. In his private correspondence where
he expresses himself freely, Flaubert often complained about the exist-
ing cleavage between the artist and the public. He regarded modern
art, including his own, as inferior to Greek art precisely because it
reflected this cleavage, and he fervently hoped that some day the situ-
ation would change:
The time for Beauty is over. Mankind may return to it, but it has no
use for it as the present. . . . It is beyond the power of human thought
today to foresee in what a dazzling intellectual light the works of the
future will flower. Meanwhile we are in a shadowy corridor, groping
in the dark. We are without a lever. . . . We all lack a basis—literati
and scribblers as we are. What’s the good of all this? Is our chatter the
answer to any need? Between the crowd and ourselves no bond exists.
Alas for the crowd; alas for us, especially. . . . But we must, regardless
of material things and of mankind, which disavows us, live for our
vocation, climb into our ivory tower, and dwell there along with our
dreams. [From a letter to Louise Colet, April 24, 1852.]
Such views were alien to the classical age, to Goethe and Schiller,
for example, who did not by any means believe that genuine art was
incompatible with a function of entertainment. Schiller, for instance,
in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind, to which we have
referred earlier in this memorandum, saw the art of the future as the
manifestation of what he called the “play instinct,” and spontaneity as
one of its main characteristics.
The French critics of the naturalistic school, and some of its branches
such as the so-called populist movement whose avowed aim was to
work toward a new literature that would adequately express modern
mass culture, turned against esoteric art the arguments its champions
used to condemn popular art, namely, that its main function was to
serve entertainment and escape. Art for art’s sake, esoteric art, in short
nonpopular art, was, in the eyes of those naturalistic critics a luxury,
a means of escape—“the private property of a kind of caste of man-
darins which jealousy defends it in order to safeguard its privileges,”
wrote Henri Poulaille, a novelist who led the populist movement in
the late 1920s and early 1930s. He championed an art of the people,
for the people, and by the people, an art that would tell the truth, and
according to him such an art had a respectable tradition, including
50
such names as Balzac, Hugo, Zola. He condemned popular trash as

the means of escape of the poor classes, and was optimistic about the
possibilities of a new nonescapist art and the potentialities of the new
mass media, which he believed would eventually release literature as
a means of escape:
A simple gramophone record transports us to the Hawaii Islands, to
China, to Mexico. We can see on the screen, at a moment’s notice,
the Fiji Islands, India, Siam. The entire symphony of the world is
available to our eyes, to our ears, if we just choose to look or to hear.
Our literature is a thing of the past. It no longer gratifies the need of
escape that summons man at every moment. At least it cannot gratify
it as well as the modern mechanical discoveries.37
Merits of Popular Art

Here again we are confronted with a welter of opinions and arguments,
which have never been systematized, and we must confine ourselves
to a random sampling. A strong case for at least the historical study of
popular art has been made by a renowned scholar, Louis B. Wright, who
thoroughly analyzed the Elizabethan age in England. Unlike Gervinus,
who refused to admit popular art to his history of literature, Wright
thinks that it is an important and fruitful subject of study, and criti-
cizes previous works on Elizabethan England on the ground that “in
all that welter of books one subject has been comparatively neglected:
the important matter of the average citizen’s reading and thinking, his
intellectual habits and cultural tastes.” Later in the book he observes that
study of such matters is important for our understanding of the pres-
ent time: “If it is desirable to trace the pedigree of the popular culture
of modern America, it is possible to find most of its ideology implicit
in the middle class thought of Elizabethan England. The historian of
American culture must look back to the Renaissance and read widely
in the forgotten literature of tradesmen.” According to Wright, and this
is another important argument in favor of popular art, entertainment
is not the sole function of this art: “The bourgeois reader liked to be
amused, but more important than the desire for amusement was the
demand for information of every conceivable sort.”38
Other authors have pointed out the possibilities of development
inherent in popular art, and even singled out some of its prod-
ucts as equal in value to those “major arts.” In 1924, Gilbert Seldes
made a strenuous and sophisticated effort to introduce the popular
51
arts—comics, movies, vaudeville, etc.—into the Parnassus of respect-

able, time-honored art. Referring to comics, for example, he says:
Krazy Kat, the daily comic strip of George Herriman is, to me, the
most amusing and fantastic and satisfactory work of art produced in
America today. With those who hold that a comic strip cannot be a
work of art I shall not traffic. The qualities of Krazy Kat are irony and
fantasy—exactly the same, it would appear, as distinguish The Revolt
of the Angels; it is wholly beside the point to indicate a preference for
the work of Anatole France, which is in the great line, in the major
arts. It happens that in America irony and fantasy are practised in
the major arts by only one or two men, producing high-class trash;
and Mr. Herriman, working in a despised medium, without an atom
of pretentiousness, is day after day producing something essentially
fine. It is the result of a naive sensibility rather like that of the douanier
Rousseau; it does not lack intelligence, because it is a thought-out, a
constructed piece of work. In the second order of the world’s art it
is superbly first rate—and a delight!39
This appraisal of Krazy Kat was echoed by Robert Warshow, in his

essay “Krazy Kat” in the Partisan Review (November-December 1946),
who finds that while most phenomena of “mass art forms” can be dis-
missed as “Lumpen Culture,” “Krazy Kat is as real and important a work
of art as any other.” It is interesting that in neither case are any serious
analyses made within the broader social and moral contexts which we
have met in the earlier discussions of these problems.
Artistic Possibilities of Popular Media
As early as 1930, that is fifteen years before the television era, Henri
Poulaille, the populist writer whom we quoted in another context,
observed that:
The motion pictures are in the process of destroying the old prejudice
of written art, on which all literatures are based. . . . Thanks to the
motion pictures, the reader of books restores his contact with objec-
tive reality, and soon we shall be able to see the effects of television,
which will further continue the training of the senses that was begun
by the motion pictures.40
More recently René Sudre, another Frenchman, has dealt with the
same problem in a provocative study on the potentialities of radio,
which deserves somewhat more lengthy discussion because it deals with
a great number of relevant problems. It is entitled The Eighth Art, and
52
it was published in 1945, when television was still in its infancy. The
primary purpose of this book is to show that radio has the potentiali-
ties of a new artistic medium, and that it can create new artistic values.
After discussing in a dozen chapters the most diversified aspects
of radio, from the physical theories of Hertz to the time allocations
of news over French radio networks, he challenges those dissidents in
modern civilization who condemn radio as the devil’s instrument for
the elimination of all values of civilization:
No, culture is not in danger because those in command of radio are

public entertainers and not educators. The tendency towards vulgarity
and towards the least effort is eternal and radio is not the instrument
for which this tendency has waited in order to compromise forever
after the work of civilization. With each invention which contributed
some pleasure or some new convenience, one has been afraid for the
spirit. Photography allegedly damaged the habit of writing letters and
the art of style; railroads and trips allegedly endangered meditation;
sports alledgedly favored the muscles at the expense of the brain; the
automobile, aviation, the cinema allegedly were schools of deprava-
tion, etc. No doubt, there was some foundation in those apprehen-
sions and morals have gained nothing by this stunning progress of
science. But the ground of human nature never has been touched.
The good passions have continued to exist next to the bad. There
always have been charitable souls and spirits eager to rise. Upon
them civilization depends.41
If we analyze Sudre’s statement, we find the following problems and

concepts in his discussion: the problem of controls; the conflict between
entertainment and education; the location of popular tastes in the inter-
play of entertainment institutions and human nature; the concept of
mass communications as one among many elements of a social whole;
the apprehension about the survival of values; the interconnection
between technological progress and popular culture. In his own cultured
way, Sudre illustrates the searching, insecure and not quite consistent
attitude which has prevailed in discussions of popular culture through
the ages and across the oceans. He begins by making radio an instru-
ment with which to challenge traditional philosophy and psychology:
The radio confuses the philosophers. What is it that I am not present
for the speaker at the microphone while he is present for me? Does
presence itself split itself up? This is a very serious psychological
problem which Pierre Janet has posed when he analyzes the troubles
of inner thought.
53
He then plunges into an ode to the listener:
Beatus solus! Happy is the solitary man. Less secluded than the man
of Pascal, he retreats in order to meditate about his salvation; your
(radio’s) devotee lets the world enter into his chamber whenever he
pleases. Without removing him from the world you favor this con-
templative attitude which becomes a refuge from modern restlessness
for an ever growing number of refined people. If he has a family you
wisely isolate it by keeping it at home. One assembles around you
protecting tubes.
This is indeed a remarkable passage. Without being aware of the

controversial aspects of his statement, this French author outlines in
a rudimentary form a conceptual framework for some much needed
research to explore the socializing or individualizing, integrating
or isolating, the family-conserving or family-destroying aspects
of residential, electronic entertainment. Furthermore (perhaps
unknowingly) he repeats within the context of modern entertainment
institutions the concerns of the sixteenth and seventeenth century
philosophers about the salutary or damaging effects of diversion. As
a matter of fact, to the best of my knowledge, this is the only instance
in our time where an author has echoed Pascal’s worries about the
potential deterioration of the individual under the impact of postme-
dieval, leisure-time activities.
The author’s attempt at introspection on radio listening leads him to
formulate two issues which are basic to the popular culture discussion:
the relationship between the instruments of mass communications
and traditional art forms, and the generic rights of a new medium. In
a chapter titled “Radio and Civilization,” he defends the radio against
professional pessimists who would indict it for “unfavorable and even
demoralizing effects on the intellectual habits of the average man, and
in a facetious comment he argues against those who characterize radio
as a “torrent of noise”: “But one could say that a library is an ocean of
blackened paper.” And he adds: “The radio does in no way do away with
our freedom of decision. To turn a button is an operation just as simple
as to close a book. We are not condemned to listen continuously.” He
refuses the thesis (not on the basis of reserarch but of speculation on
human nature) that radio drives out the reading of good books or the
enjoyment of live theater. “Books of quality which constitute noble
nourishment for intelligence or delicate treatment for sensibility are
beyond competition.”
54
For our purposes the specific value of Sudre’s essay comes to the fore
when it is scrutinized for its apparent inconsistency and arbitrariness.
After having defended radio for 200 out of 202 pages in philosophical,
phenomenological, psychological, technical, aesthetic terms, he turns
about on the last two pages and vehemently attacks the universe of
radio programs.
If there are frivolous books, pernicious books, there are also heroic
books and sublime books and this compensates. As far as radio is
concerned, one hardly notices any balance. The performance of the
Ninth Symphony or the presentation of some noble literary produc-
tion does not expiate for the disturbing stupidity, the chronic lawless-
ness of many radio programs.
And he goes on to propose a device for improvement which is half-

way between the tradition of a French enlightener and an American
tradition-minded social reformer:
We would wish for radio a permanent observer who would give us

something to think about every day. Actuality is an inexhaustible
material for education if one looks upon it from a moral angle. What
one would need is not a sceptic or pessimistic philosopher, but a man
of good will, smiling and nevertheless manly, who would understand
everything but who would not leave us in despair.
Of television at the time of the writing of this book, relatively little

was known. Still, the alert author throws out in a naive, involved and
partisan fashion some quick judgments on the future of television
without being quite sure that it would ever come to pass. In principle,
what he says here belies everything he has previously expounded as
a raison d’etre for a modern, technological instrument of popular
culture. While radio seems not to be the enemy of imagination, tele-
vision is:
Will television give us the photographic beauty of certain cinematic

productions? We must recall that true art is based on the principle
of the economy of means, namely, to suggest and not to show, not to
say everything but to leave much to the imagination.
What conclusions can be formulated in the light of this brief

exploration of our three possible lines of defense? The answer seems
obvious: the possibility for developing genuine arguments which may
lead to some conclusive answers exists, but by and large the discussion
55
has been unreal, in the sense that the pros and cons for the most part
miss each other, and that the concepts used in those arguments remain
vague, usually because a historical perspective is lacking. Take, for
instance, the last-mentioned argument advanced by Sudre to justify
his pessimistic view of television, and which seemingly goes back to
Lessing’s and Goethe’s theory on creative imagination. What Sudre
fails to see is that the concept of imagination is itself relative and
determined by the historical context. Otherwise, if he were consistent
he could just as well argue against the use of color in painting and
advocate a return to the cave drawings. In other words, the principle
of artistic economy in question is defensible only in the relative sense
that good art achieves a maximum effect with minimal means, and
not in the absolute sense that good art is defined by paucity of means.
Similar confusions can be detected all along; the very concept of
popular literature or art has been used in a variable sense, without
regard for historical determinents, as we had occasion to hint before.
And it would seem fair to say that the present discussion on popular
culture and on the possibilities of the mass media will continue to turn
in circles until a new and systematic effort is made to clear the field
from confusions, and to make real discussion possible. We certainly
cannot do that in this memorandum, but we can perhaps offer some
illustrations in terms of a few substantive problems which we have
come across in this review.
Recapitulation in Terms of Selected Problems
It may be useful to conclude this fragmentary survey with a brief sum-
mary of a few of the specific problems which have turned up repeatedly.
Again we can only be tentative, for in this memorandum we have merely
passed the narrow beam of a flashlight over a vast area; nevertheless,
even these few glimpses suggest that most of the problems raised by
the existence of the modern mass media of communication have been
with us throughout modern history, now in this guise, now in that,
each time expressed in different language, and each time with a new
emphasis, reflecting a given social configuration.
The Psychological Problem
The basic concepts which Montaigne was the first to introduce in order
to account for the need and the function of entertainment—variety,
escape, identification—can all still be found in present-day discus-
sions. But their meanings have undergone a basic change, which to
56
some extent can be related to the growing differentiation between the

consumer and producer of artistic or quasi-artistic products serving
the need of entertainment. In a modern context it is no longer possible
to view these concepts as psychological attributes of the audience,
spontaneously generated, for the factor of manipulation has assumed
increasing importance. Today, any discussion of entertainment per se
which does not take into account its close interrelationship with adver-
tising or ideological propaganda would miss essential elements of the
problem. This is not to say that spontaneity no longer exists, but rather
that the relation between spontaneity and manipulation, between activ-
ity and passivity, has become problematic. The question has become
further complicated through the fact that certain functions allegedly
performed by entertainment have become so radically changed that
one may legitimately ask whether the terms used to describe them
still have any meaning. Throughout our review we have seen much
discussion on the need for distraction through variety: does the mass
audience of media such as radio, television, or the pulp magazines
really get “variety”? Or are we confronted today with a problem that
Montaigne does not seem to have suspected, that of satiation leading,
possibly, to sensory and intellectual numbness on the one hand, and
yet more restlessness on the other?
Whatever modern answers have been given to this or similar ques-
tions are far from satisfactory. Lack of historical perspective also seems
to vitiate other concepts introduced to account for modern mass
phenomena, concepts such as those of passivity or conformism. Is a
modern radio listener who whistles the tune of a popular hit any more
passive than a seventeenth century peasant who repeated a folk song?
Is the modern reader who unconsciously adopts the editorial point of
view of his newspaper more conformist than the farmer or housewife
of a few centuries ago who listened to and repeated various items of
village gossip?
The Moral Problem
Here, too, we have witnessed shift of emphasis and a growing compli-
cation. Pascal seems to be the spokesman for an extremist position:
just as Plato banished the artists and poets from his ideal state (which
incidentally has many totalitarian features), so Pascal banishes all
entertainment, diversion, escape, vicarious living, and summons men to
devote themselves exclusively to their salvation. At a later period, when
the terms of the moral problem change, when the conflict becomes
57
translated into aesthetic categories, and is formulated as that between

genuine art and sham art, we again find that the spokesmen for true
beauty condemn inferior art or corrupt taste more sharply than the
lack of art or bad taste.42
The moral problem raised by popular culture is inseparable from
the problem of values and standards, and in the modern context, aes-
thetic standards. (In fact it does not seem too far fetched to wonder
whether the direction taken by modern art toward abstraction and
esoterism may be partly due to a conscious or unconscious reaction
to the nature and effects of popular art.) We have seen that Goethe
and Schiller were preoccupied with the problem of standards, and
Schiller’s definition of true beauty as involving all of man’s faculties
acquires full meaning only when set against his condemnations of
bad art as that which merely relaxes or diverts. The very concept of
productive or creative imagination seems to have been formulated
in juxtaposition to inferior art. It seems hardly necessary to point
out that we have here a domain whose exploration promises to be
fruitful in many respects.
Finally, increasing social pressure, and the growing importance
of the manipulative factor have modified certain terms of the moral
problem as posed by Pascal in the same sense as they have modified
the terms of the psychological problem. For instance, some mod-
ern writers condemn the so-called escapism of modern popular
culture productions not on the ground that they afford escape, but
on the ground that they afford only a sham escape, that they serve
only to reinforce the individual’s subjection to social pressure, his
conformism.
The Social Problem
Although the problems of mass communication and popular culture
began to be treated from a purely sociological point of view only
recently, we have seen that even Montaigne correlates his qualitative
differentiations with social groups. From the middle of the nineteenth
century onward the discussions of popular culture largely revolved
around the opposition between the elite and the masses. Here, too,
the emphasis has somewhat shifted. Schiller seeks the aesthetic state;
“the establishment and structure of a true political freedom” is, in his
opinion, “the most perfect of all works of art,” but “to arrive at a solution
even in the political problem the road of aesthetics must be pursued,
because it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom” (emphasis
58
provided). Wordsworth, and Arnold after him, also dreamed of a lib-

eration of mankind through art.
Today we are certainly less ambitious: our hopes are not so great
and our concerns are both more modest and practical, by and large
limited, as we have seen in our small sampling of current writing on
this subject, to the question of how mass media can be used as instru-
ments for encouraging the cultural and educational development of
broad segments of the population.
Appendix A
Literature of Other (Nonliterary)
Manifestations of Popular Culture
The role of the mass media is of course but part of an even larger per-
spective than the literary context in which it is here discussed. It has a
history of many centuries and is probably as old as human civilization.
We have only to think of the differentiation between esoteric and exo-
teric religious exercises in early Oriental and Occidental civilizations,
of the dichotomy between high and low tragedy and comedy on the
stages of ancient Greece and Rome, of the gulf between the philosophiz-
ing elites at the estates of Roman emperors and the circuses promoted
by the very same elite, of the organized medieval holidays with their
hierarchical performances in the cathedral and the folksy entertain-
ments at popular fairs to which the crowd surrendered immediately
after participation in the services.
To give an inkling of the diversified literature which would eventu-
ally have to be scrutinized to put the discussion of mass media into an
even broader context, one might start with a review of the discussions
on popular culture in the works of such encyclopedic historians or
historical philosophers as Toynbee, Rostovzeff, Burckhardt, Spengler;
many publications on the history of toys and games, or works on the
modes of life in specific epochs (there are, for instance, any number
of books on life in Paris or London in the seventeenth, eighteenth, or
nineteenth centuries). The conservative critics of liberalism and its
civilization in France, England and Germany during the first half of
the nineteenth century would also provide rich sources. The closer
one comes to the present-day scene, the richer the sources flow: all the
media, printed and otherwise, popular or serious, have been the object
of discussions in academic and nonacademic contexts in thousands of
publications, and I am not speaking here of research in the specialized
sense of the word.
59
In addition to nonresearch oriented media studies, one would

find rich descriptions and speculations about popular culture in
books describing quickly changing fads and the changes in fashions
and mores between the two last wars. Just to name a few pertain-
ing to America alone: Louis Allen’s Only Yesterday; Philip Wylie’s
Generation of Vipers; David L. Cohen’s Love in America: An Informal
Study of Morals and Manners in American Marriage; the collection
The Pleasures of the Jazz Age, edited by William Hodapp, or more
historically oriented books, such as Arthur M. Schlesinger’s Learn-
ing How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books.
The classic in this field of the description of general mores is perhaps
the richly illustrated book on England by Alan Bott, Our Fathers
(1870–1900): Manners and Customs of the Ancient Victorians, A
Survey in Pictures and Text of Their History, Morals, Wars, Sports,
Inventions and Politics.
Another particularly interesting type of nonacademic literature in
this field is represented by the critique of popular culture in the “little”
magazines and in periodicals such as the New Yorker, where the writ-
ings of the self-styled spokesmen for intellectual and moral purity tend
to become in themselves another medium of entertainment for those
who, reading their critiques, become vicariously indignant, but the
outlet for their indignation, thanks to these writers, is amusement. In
a way, such writers, by offering such an outlet, enable their readers to
become bystanders in their criticism of social practices. Such an analy-
sis could very well be supplemented by the investigation of cartoons,
some of which appear in the high-brow magazines, though more can
be found in the syndicated columns of mass-oriented newspapers,
making supercilious fun of the new habits of the modern mass com-
munications public.
No review of the broader contexts of popular culture would be com-
plete without reference to the work of the Institute of Social Research,
particularly to the writings of Max Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno,
who have contributed philosophical and aesthetic analyses on the field
as a whole and on specific issues, particularly in the realm of popular
music.43 Finally, André Malraux’s three volumes, Psychologie de l’Art
(Psychology of Art), lately published in a revised and shortened edi-
tion under the title: Les Voix du Silence (The Voices of Silence), which
discusses in many places the relationship between esoteric and popular
sculpture and painting, would also have to be analyzed were such a
broad context to be delineated.
60
Appendix B
Matthew Arnold and Leo Tolstoy
on The Social Role of Art
Matthew Arnold
“Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of
ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own professions
and party. Our religious and political organizations give an example
of this way of working on the masses. I condemn neither way; but
culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the level of
inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its
own, with readymade judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away
with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the
world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of
sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself,
freely—nourished and not bound by them.”44
Leo Tolstoy
“Art of the future, that is to say, such part of art as will be chosen from
among all the art diffused among mankind, will consist, not in transmit-
ting feelings accessible only to members of the rich classes, as is the case
today, but in transmitting such feelings as embody the highest religious
perception of our times. Only those productions will be considered
art which transmit feelings drawing men together in brotherly union,
or such universal feelings as can unite all men. Only such art will be
chosen, tolerated, approved, and diffused. But art transmitting feelings
flowing from antiquated, worn-out religious teaching—Church art,
patriotic art, voluptuous art, transmitting feelings of superstitious fear,
of pride, of vanity, of ecstatic admiration of national heroes—art excit-
ing exclusive love of one’s own people, or sensuality, will be considered
bad, harmful art, and will be censured and despised by public opinion.
All the rest of art, transmitting feelings accessible only to a section of
people, will be considered unimportant, and will be neither blamed
nor praised. And the appraisement of art in general will devolve, not,
as is now the case, on a separate class of rich people, but on the whole
people; so that for a work to be esteemed good, and to be approved of
and diffused, it will have to satisfy the demands, not of a few people
living in identical and often unnatural conditions, but it will have to
satisfy the demands of all those great masses of people who are situated
in the natural conditions of laborious life.”45
61
Notes
1. An ideal framework would be very broad indeed, encompassing not only
relations of art and entertainment but all elements of popular culture such
as manners, customs, fads, games, jokes, and sports, on which even greater
masses of material exist. See Appendix A of this chapter.
2. This and the following quotations from Montaigne are from The Essays of
Montaigne, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 1935).
3. These and the following excerpts from Pascal are quoted from his Pensées
(Everyman’s Library, n.d.).
4. Goethe, “Weimarisches Hoftheater,” in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart-Berlin:
Jubiläumsausgabe, n.d.), vol. 36.
5. Goethe, Maxims and Reflections (1829).
6. Ibid.
7. Goethe, “Weimarisches Hoftheater,” op. cit.
8. Goethe, Zahme Xenien, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4.
9. Compare this concept, for instance, with the castigations which the great
American sociologist, E.A. Ross, formulated in Social Control, around the
turn of the century: “The great agencies of Law, Public Opinion, Education,
Religion and Literature speed to their utmost in order to fit ignoble and
paltry natures to bear the moral strains of our civilization, and perhaps by
the very success of their work cancelling the natural advantage of the noble
over the base, and thereby slowing up the development of the most splendid
qualities of human nature.” Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control: A Survey
of the Foundations of Order (New York: Macmillan, 1939).
10. Goethe, “Weimarisches Hoftheater,” op. cit.
11. Lessing, “The Limits of Painting and Poetry” (1766).
12. Lessing, “Collection of Theater Reviews” (1767–69).
13. To modern critics, the stultifying effects of popular art on the imaginative
faculty are no longer a matter for speculation. One of these critics, Randall
Jarrell, observes that “the average article in our magazines gives any subject
whatsoever the same coat of easy, automatic, ‘human interest.’” He contrasts
the attitude of Goethe who said that “the author whom a lexicon can keep
up with is worth nothing,” with that of Somerset Maugham who says that
“the finest compliment he ever received was a letter in which one of his
readers said: ‘I read your novels without having to look up a single word in
the dictionary.’” And Jarrell concludes that “popular writing has left nothing
to the imagination for so long now that the imagination too has begun to
atrophy.” Randall Jarrell, Poetry and the Age, no. 4, 1953.
14. Zahme Xenien, op. cit.
15. The American sociologist William Albig, in his extremely stimulating
book, Public Opinion (New York, 1939), has discussed this problem by
contrasting the possible effects of reading versus motion picture viewing.
In his analysis of modern man’s “need for more and more stereotypes,”
he believes that stereotypes presented in the movies “influence opinions
about real persons” to a very high degree while “printed descriptions
are rarely so vivid.” He believes that “superficiality may be disarmingly
convincing when provided in pictorial forms. In reading, even at the
lowest levels, one may stop to think, or just stop at any point. In the
62
pictures, the tempo of portrayal is mechanically controlled outside the

individual. Analysis is thereby discouraged and, indeed, often frustrated.
The individual is a more passive recipient than is the case in other means
of communication.”
16. Lest this over-simplified review unwittingly distort Schiller’s breadth of
vision, we should perhaps here remind the reader that he was an outstand-
ing student of Kant and an exponent of the German idealistic philosophi-
cal school; a notable professional historian; an outstanding dramatist and
poet and an intimate associate of Goethe. He has written voluminously on
the problems with which we are here concerned, including such essays as:
“Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind”; “The Moral Utility of
Aesthetic Manners”; “On the Sublime”; “On the Pathetic”; “On Grace and
Dignity”; “On the Necessary Limitations in the Use of Beauty of Form”;
“Reflections on the Use of the Vulgar and Low Elements in Works of Art”;
“Detached Reflections on Different Questions of Aesthetics”; “On Simple
and Sentimental Poetry”; “The State as a Moral Institution”; “On the Tragic
Art”; “On the Cause of the Pleasure We Derive from Tragic Art”; “On the
Cause of the Pleasure We Derive from Tragic Objects”; “Philosophical Let-
ters”; “On the Connection Between the Animal and the Spiritual Nature in
Man.”
17. These and all subsequent quotations from Schiller are taken from Essays
Aesthetical and Philosophical, trans. from the German (London: George
Bell & Sons, 1875).
18. Eilhard Erich Pauls, Der Beginn der buergerlichen Zeit (The Beginnings of
Middle-Class Culture) (Lübeck: Otto Quitzow Verlag, 1928).
19. Herman Marggraff, Deutschlands jüngste Literatur-und-Kulturepoche
(Literature and Culture in Contemporary Germany) (1839), quoted in “Das
Biedermeier im Spiegel seiner Zeit” (Stuttgart: Bong, 1913).
20. Ibid.
21. As Pauls later reported: “Walter Scott and Jean Paul, of course, these were
the great ones who have survived. Heine jeered: ‘All Berlin talks about
Walter Scott, who is read and re-read. The ladies go to bed with Waverly
and get up with Robin Hood.’ There was a fabric called Amy Robsart, and
a Walter Scott porridge that sold ten pennies a half gallon,” Der Beginn der
Buergerlichen, op. cit.
22. Marggraff, op. cit.
23. This and the following quotations are from G. G. Gervinus, Geschichte der
Deutschen Dichtung (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1874), vol. 5, 5th edition.
24. Ibid.
25. Only recently have German historians begun to subject German popular
literature of the nineteenth century to a more objective analysis. Of par-
ticular interest is a small study by Ruth Horovitz, in which she attempts
to cast some light on the problem of manipulated taste. Gartenlaube,
the magazine mentioned in the following quotation, was the German
counterpart of our Saturday Evening Post. “The writers for Gartenlaube
who at first wanted to form the taste of their readers, and who later gave
expression to their readers’ wishes and opinions—to an extent shown by
the growing circulation of this magazine—did not come from the social
and educational stratum for which they wrote primarily. They were in fact
63
superior to their readers, both socially and culturally. Since the majority of
them belonged to the bureaucratic class, they also constituted a stationary
axis in the midst of general change, and served as a support and an example
to the strata then in the process of disintegration and transformation.”
Vom Roman des Jungen Deutschland zum Roman der Gartenlaube (The
Novel—from the Period of Young Germany to the Period of Gartenlaube),
(Breslau, 1937).
26. Quoted from An Oxford Anthology of English Prose (Oxford University Press,
1937).
27. Those and the following quotations are from Matthew Arnold, Culture and
Anarchy (Cambridge University Press, 1950), (first published in 1869).
28. This and the following quotations are from Walter Bagehot, The English
Constitution, The World’s Classics (Oxford University Press, 1944).
29. Walter Bagehot, Literary Studies (Everyman’s Library, n.d.), vol. 2.
30. It is interesting to note that John Stuart Mill, whose social and political
views are completely opposed to those of Bagehot, also condemned an art
dominated by utilitarian values. In his literary essays he praises Coleridge for
being “ontological, conservative, religious, concrete, historical and poetic,”
and attacks Bentham for being “experimental, innovative, infidel, abstract,
matter of fact, and essentially prosaic.”
31. The contemporary critic, Lionel Trilling, has made the observation that “in
the nineteenth century, in this country as in Europe, literature underlay every
activity of mind. The scientist, the philosopher, the historian, the theologian,
the economist, the social theorist, and even the politician, were required to
command literary abilities which would not be thought irrelevant to their
respective callings.” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society
(New York: Doubleday, 1953), p. 99.
32. This is the extreme all-or-nothing concept of art, implying that if art be
liked by the people it is likely to be no art. In the contemporary discussion
of the mass media one can find a quite opposite view, one which sometimes
brushes off the art Tolstoy and Arnold discussed on the grounds that it was
not for the people. Such a viewpoint is quite expressly stated, for example,
in Coulton Waugh’s book on the comics. He asks the question, “Sidestep-
ping for a moment the principal facts that the strips are successful because
they are popular entertainment, is any artistic and literary development
possible?” His answer is yes. And he goes on to say:
For in the old days the artists and writers and craftsmen were not
writing at the behest of the people, but to please small powerful
groups, the kings and lords and chieftains, who drew the talent of
the time inward towards them and kept it circumscribed within the
bounds of their castles and baronies. Much of the fine art of today
remains alive only through a similar connection.
Yet taking civilization as a whole, this ancient process is now in

reverse. There is an outward movement. Pictures, entertainment,
fun, are beginning to be seen as the rightful possession of all, and
the comics join in and reflect this spreading democratization. And
64
if the people’s standards are at present lower than those which were
set by workers around the seats of the mighty, the people’s artists will
have the satisfaction of knowing that they are identified with a vast
and forward movement, which is giving to everyday folks their right
to laugh and flourish under the sun. [Coulton Waugh, The Comics,
Macmillan, 1947.]
33. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Knopf, 1945),

vol.2, ch. 13.
34. Ibid.
35. H. A. Taine, History of English Literature, trans. from the French (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1886), vol. IV.
36. Ibid.
37. Henri Poulaille, Nouvel Age Littéraire (Paris, 1930).
38. Louis B. Wright, Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (University
of North Carolina Press, 1935).
39. Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924).
40. Henri Poulaille, op. cit.
41. These and the following quotations are from René Sudre, Le Huitième Art:
mission de la radio (Paris: Juillard, 1945).
42. The broader problem to be raised here is to what extent the function per-
formed by art serves as a substitute for that formerly performed by religion.
Hegel says somewhere that modern man does the equivalent of going to
mass when he reads his daily newspaper at breakfast—for the newspaper
makes him “feel that he is a part of a greater whole.” And as we have seen,
Schiller, before Hegel, believed that art was the only legitimate form of social
communication, precisely because it served to restore a sense of social unity,
of communion among the members of a society increasingly divided by
private interests.
43. See, for instance, their joint contribution “Kulturindustrie” (Cultural Indus-
try) in Dialektik der Aufklaerung (Amsterdam: Querido Verlag, 1947); and
Max Horkheimer, “Art and Mass Culture” in Studies in Philosophy and Social
Science (1941) vol. 9; or T. W. Adorno “Popular Music” (op. cit.). See also,
Walter Benjamin, “L’Oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mecanisée”
(The Work of Art in the Era of its Mechanized Reproduction) in Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung (1936), vol. 5.
44. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge University Press, 1950),
pp. 69, 70, 71.
45. Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? (London: Walter Scott Publishing Co.), pp. 192,
193. Trans. from the original Russian manuscript.
65
Excursus A
Notes on the Theater
and the Sermon
The following remarks originate in a long-range enterprise of the author

to inquire into the history of the social controls of the arts in Western
civilization. I have lately become interested in the ideological origins
of formal and informal censorship of artistic production. There is no
other artistic genre that has uninterruptedly remained the target of
social criticism though the sources and scope of power of the criticiz-
ing agencies has undergone enormous metamorphosis. I am speaking
about the theater, which has continued to be subjected to social and
moral criticism by the professional practitioners of the sermon, as well
as their self-styled imitators.
Clearly the sociological roots of this tournament change drastically
over time, though the sermonizers are consistently legitimizing their
position by reference to the verities of Christianity. But to say a word
about the drastic sociological differences in this particular controversy
on leisure-time culture: for the Church Fathers the theater competes
with salvation, and for the puritanic zealots it competes with the needed
internalization of work discipline in an unfolding manufacturing and
trade economy.
We shall shortly refer to the rather well-researched attacks on the
theater during the age of the Restoration and then give some examples
of the subterraneous pamphleteering which has gone on since the
middle of the eighteenth century, particularly in England and America.
Some of the authors of this pamphleteering are hard to identify but
they are obviously clergymen or church-going zealots of sectarian
Protestant persuasion.
We begin with a reference to the book by Joseph Krutch, Comedy
and Conscience After the Restoration. Krutch’s discussion is, of course,
This chapter was written with the assistance of Ina Lawson.
67
by way of an explanation of the shift from Restoration drama to eigh-

teenth century sentimental comedy. Although his primary interest is in
tracing the development of a new genre, he also reports on the debate
over the theater as a part of the process of its sociological development.
He points out
The deep-seated distrust of the theater, which at different times finds

more or less passionate expression, is in itself perpetual. It is more
deep-rooted than Christianity, and arises as a logical application of
the much more ancient doctrine of asceticism. As the seventeenth
century controversialist was fond of pointing out, not only did the
early Church Fathers thunder against the theater, but the sterner
sort of Pagans, from whom surely less was to be expected than
from Christians, were at best doubtful concerning it. True, Aristotle
wrote a treatise on the drama, but Plato banished the players from
the Republic.
Speaking of the Church Fathers, the modern sociologist should at

least get the flavor of the style of one of these, as, for example, St. John
Chrysostom’s attack on the theater, to remain aware of the continuity of
ideological positions maintained in the Christian era from the Byzantium
of the fourth century to the Boston of the twentieth. In speaking of the
Roman spectacles, our Church Father thunders:
When then wilt thou be sober again, I pray thee, now that the devil
is pouring out for thee so much of the strong wine of whoredom,
mingling, so many cups of unchastity?
As it is, all things are turned upside down. For whence are they,
tell me, that plot against our marriages? Is it not from this theater?
Whence are they that dig through into chambers? Is it not from
that stage? Comes it not of this, when the wives are contemptible to
their husbands? Of this, that the more part are adulterers? So that
the subverter of all things is he that goes to the theater; it is he that
brings in a grievous tyranny.
And as if he were speaking out against the predecessors of San Fran-

cisco’s “topless” night-club performers, he continues:
“What then? I pray thee, are we to overthrow all the laws?” Nay, but it
is overthrowing lawlessness, if we do away with these spectacles. For
hence are they that make havoc in our cities; hence, for example, are
seditions and tumults. For they that are maintained by the dancers,
and who sell their own voice to the belly, whose work it is to shout,
68
Excursus A
and to practice every thing that is monstrous, these especially are the
men that stir up the populace, that make the tumults in our cities.
For youth, when it hath joined hands with idleness, and is brought
up in so great evils, becomes fiercer than any wild beast. . . . Comes
it not hence, when men are forced to spend without limit on that
wicked choir of the devil? And lasciviousness, whence is that, and its
innumerable mischiefs? Thou seest, and it is thou who are subverting
our life, by drawing men to these things, while I am recruiting it by
putting them down.
To return to Krutch’s analysis of the stage controversy in England,

he isolates two distinct threads in the debate; one is the ascetic objec-
tion, which found its strongest bulwark in Christianity. The Stoic
contempt of pleasure became ascetic doctrine in the hands of the
Christians, appealing to a less rarified sentiment than did the Stoics.
To give up pleasure insured the heavenly reward. This asceticism was
fundamentaly opposed not only to bad plays (attacking obscenity, pro-
fanity, etc.) but to plays, as such, and to all art. As Krutch describes it,
“The more one can withdraw from life, the safer he is. The wise man
will, therefore, live in seclusion, and only a madman will . . . seek to
increase the temptations by allowing imagination to strengthen his
interest in the world.”
The second distinct thread in the controversy is the moral objec-
tion, constantly in the background, and often joining with the ascetic
element in “unstable union.” It is Krutch’s view that “the movement
for the reform of indecency was confused and even hindered by the
introduction of a purely ascetic element, and that those who wished
to purify the stage were joined in a somewhat unstable union with
those who wished to destroy it.” Although it is true that Restoration
commentary about the theater was less severe than it had been (partly,
at least, because of the political bankruptcy of Puritanism), there still
exists a body of criticism that preceded Jeremy Collier and his Short
View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) and
made him not something unexpected.
By the time Collier appeared, the ground had been well prepared.
It is Krutch’s contention that Collier was in the tradition of asceticism
and that he did not want to reform the stage, but to destroy it. Collier’s
“authorities” are Aristotle, Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, Valerius Maximus,
as well as Spartan legal measures that banished plays completely.
Lactantius, Augustine, Ambrose, and the early Church Fathers “are
ransacked for all references, weighty or trivial, against the stage or
69
shows. Authorities are piled one upon another in an effort to damn the
whole institution on the strength of traditional opposition.” The truth is
that Collier was essentially narrow in his views and yet achieved such
prominence because he arrived at an extremely opportune moment
in the history of the English stage, namely, at the height of the clash
between the decadent leisure-time culture of the landed gentry and
the new values and style of life of an increasingly prosperous class of
manufacturers and tradesmen.
So important was Collier’s book that books on the stage “became
almost a recognized department of literature, and varied from ponder-
ous and unreadable volumes . . . to modest pamphlets.” Most of the
works of controversy are anonymous, and the names we do have are
not as arresting as that of Collier.
The seventeenth century and the first twenty-five years of the eigh-
teenth were fertile ground in England for the controversy over the stage.
Every class was addressed through the innumerable works written on
this topic, and interest in the controversy cut across a large segment of
English society. Krutch says that the audience was familiar with three
“classic” questions: Is the theater a permissible institution? Is it its duty
to teach morality? Can comedies best teach morality by administering
poetic justice? Collier was received favorably by a public already pre-
disposed toward reform, a public which awoke to the realization that
Restoration comedy did not express the ideals of the age.
There were two distinct schools of opposition: there were those
who spoke from positions within the establishment of Church and
society, and there were those who spoke from the fringes of the
establishment and as spokesmen of the dissenting, nonconformist
religious groups. A particularly rewarding source for religious popu-
list undercurrents which were trying to subvert the entertainment
aspects of bourgeois leisure activities may be found in an increasing
number of pamphlets which began to appear in England and America
after the middle of the eighteenth century and have continued to do
so almost to the present time. These writings were characterized by
a spirit of dogma, a close reliance on Scriptural interpretations as
touchstones for attack, and a deep sense of the continuing tradition
of declamatory and exhortatory prose. We shall give a sample of this
kind of material.
The anonymous author who wrote The Stage, the High Road to Hell:
Being an Essay on the Pernicious Nature of Theatrical Entertainments
(1767) addressed his work to “the Reverend Mr. Madan.” Although the
70
Excursus A
essay itself is not a sermon, it is written in what might be called the

exhortatory style. Secular writers, as well as religious ones, who were
involved in the theater debate as opponents, had as their prime model
the writings of the Church Fathers. They made the Church Fathers
models not only for the lines of attack but also for their manner and
mode. For over a thousand years the pronouncements of the early
Christian writers in this matter received as little elaboration as they
did much attention. This is understandable since, for them, the Word
of God was changeless through all time and was not subject to worldly
fluctuations or critical accretions.
The author of the above work begins by saying that the arts are
proof of the degeneracy of the human species, and thus it follows that
theatrical art “must surely be allowed to be the height and summit of
all corruption, since stage . . . shews a fallen creature to himself, and,
by laying before him all the various abuses to which the depravity of
his nature has subjected him, renders him still more prone to sin.” The
author is aware of the support of the theater by those who hold that the
presentation of vice upon the stage increases man’s distaste for it, but
he argues that the stage only presents to man examples of the variety
of forms which sin can take. The idea of the theater as education in
morality is reversed by the writer; he regards it as education in the
varieties of vice. He states further: “I think it can admit of no dispute
that dramatic authors have perverted the theater, and done their utmost
to increase the temptation to vice, by shewing it in an amiable light.”
Sin, our author points out, is not only set forth on the stage in all its
varieties, but is also made to appear desirable.
As the writer warms to his topic, he turns to an examination of the
participants in theatrical production. He tells his reader that play-
wrights are second only in debauchery to actors, who are no less than
“demons in human shape.” They are “debauchers,” “greater pests of
society than murderers”—perhaps an allusion to the Scriptural admoni-
tion that those who “kill the body” are less to be feared than those who
endanger the life of the soul. No wonder, the writer argues, that acting
is considered traditionally a degraded profession, as actors are no more
than liars who assume a feigned character. As for English tragedy, it
abounds in the most flagrant instances of immorality, “calculated to
banish all principle from the minds of the young and inexperienced; to
shake the foundations of morality, and introduce the most dangerous
skepticism.” Even Shakespeare’s Hamlet concentrates on the theme of
revenge, “contrary to the dictates of religion, which expressly forbids the
71
revenging of one crime by the commission of another.” Comic writers,

he continues, are no better. Dryden is “a monster of all sorts of impuri-
ties,” Vanbrugh “a man of daring impieties,” both of whom ridicule the
clergy in their works. Adultery and cuckolding are the constant themes
of comedy and are presented in favorable terms.
The diatribe continues and builds to a climax with the description
of the French theater. The French stage is the nadir of immorality, for it
is in France that homosexuality is rampant in the theater. Molière, says
our author, was a homosexual; French figure dancers, as well as Italian
singers, are particularly prone to this unspeakable vice. The French
demonstrate that the theater breeds corruption in its participants as
well as in its audience. And it is recognized as such: In Paris, actors are
buried in dunghills and denied the sacrament if they do not renounce
the stage. Character assassination of the lowly as well as the illustrious
is easily the next step. We are informed that the actor Wilkes debauched
a Mrs. Rigers, a clergyman’s daughter. As for the remedy the legislature
should outlaw the theater and have it closed forever.
We recognize here many of the themes of the Church Fathers. The
dramatization of vice increases the incidence of vice in the audience and
in the participants. Playwrights and actors join in a demonic onslaught
on private and social morality. The tone and style are in the tradition
of the Fathers—righteous indignation and moral wrath—also the tra-
dition to seventeenth century puritan pamphleteering. The language
is powerful, strong, and direct, written from a point of unassailable
virtue. The sexual particulars are, however, a departure from traditional
material. Their aim seems to be to present a shock by naming names
and pointing fingers, in order to remove any doubts that may linger in
the reader’s mind. Apparently the “homosexual playwright” is already
an idea of some popular currency; the author is not breaking ground
on this point but seems to be playing on already established popular
tradition. He admits in the dedication that the theme of “the theater
as a moral sink” will be an unpopular one, and perhaps the sexual gos-
sip is introduced to familiarize and popularize it. Our author is not
above a little sensationalism himself to make a point. The sexual gossip
departs from the traditional body of material and may very well be a
concession to the times.
Another eighteenth century work, The Absolute Unlawfulness of
the Stage by William Law (1726), while it follows the general exhorta-
tory style of the first selection, offers a more subtle presentation and
is not as gross in manner. It avoids sensational disclosures, and, in a
72
Excursus A
more scholarly manner, uses as its touchstone argument the Scriptural

passage, “Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth,
but that which is good to the use and edifying.”
The emphasis is on the theater as a communication center. Since
corrupt communication is forbidden to individuals (and, as the author
carefully explains, offends the Holy Ghost) how much more offensive is
it to go to a place set apart for that very purpose? I think the use of the
word “communications” is significant because the playhouse is, after all,
the prime competitor of the Church as a communication center. Elabo-
rating on this theme, he writes that corrupt communication involves the
whole unit: the stage and the audience; he also includes “filthy jesting,”
“ribaldry, prophaneness, rant, and impurity of discourse”—the actual
substance of the communication—as a sub-topic in his discussion. He
adds that “vile and impure communications” can be hidden in “fine
language” so that the spoken word becomes an agent of deception, and
the divinely given act of communication is further defiled.
The first selection we considered discussed, as does this one, the
idolatry of the theater-goer by relating plays historically to heathen
worship. Once again, this writer is more subtle; to kneel before images
is bad enough, he writes, but “an image is not so contrary to God as
Plays are contrary to the Wisdom . . . of Scripture.” It is a more serious
offense to sit in the playhouse than to kneel before the voiceless golden
calf. Speech is more powerful than images.
Our first writer, in the High Road to Hell, wrote: “I am well aware that
the piece I now offer to the pubic will meet with but an unfavourable
reception, as it opposes the current of their inclinations and condemns
their favorite amusements. Conscience, however, forces me to speak,
and endeavor to stem the torrent of corruption by a feeble, but well
meant opposition.”
One hundred years later the rhetoric of tradition that in the eigh-
teenth century was out of step with this world, has been altered. In
1823 David M’Nicoll’s A Rational Enquiry Concerning the Operation
of the Stage on the Morals of Society was published and represents a
new direction in the arguments against the theater: “He who fights
against the theater, perhaps goes on to dogmatize, as if his own naked
opinion were sufficient to give law to the public; and it is well if he does
not assume a manner of illogical dictation amounting to overt acts of
uncharitableness; and thus his well meant endeavours only injure the
cause he means to support.” This writer thus criticizes his predeces-
sors and declares himself a “modern” stylist, freed from the religious
73
rhetoric of opposition. Notice the phrase, “assume a manner,” which

gives us a description of the professional disclaimer of the old style and
his deliberate “pose.” Heavy-handed pronouncements hurt the cause;
moral wrath and divine indignation can too easily be interpreted as
“uncharitableness.” Exercising a new caution, M’Nicoll represents a
softening of the implacable lines of the Church Fathers.
This writer demonstrates in his essay much of the nineteenth cen-
tury vogue. For example, he gives the opposition a wide berth, such as
would have been unthinkable a century earlier. The psychological point
of view is being introduced and the entire argumentation has a more
secularized flavor. He points out that the simple pleasure of the stage
is not to be denied, that reason tells us that immorality must be part
of the play itself in order that it achieve some semblance of probability.
What is needed to keep things in check is self-censorship: “Have such
arts no bounds?” he asks. Then follows a species of nineteenth century
sensitivity to “communications,” but now it is more elaborate than
we saw in William Law. Wicked language or writing, says M’Nicoll,
reaches the understanding; but language used by the “public actor”
reaches the passions—a potent force unequalled by the printed word.
“History abounds with instances of moral evil; but these are not to be
compared with dramatic pictures of this kind.” In this pamphlet we find
already an awareness of a much more sophisticated and astute variety,
of what makes the theater a powerful instrument of communication.
The power of the actor upon the public stage is seen as derived from
the greater size of his audience, the emotional impact of spoken words,
and the sanctity and authority given to public speech by the stage and
institution which are the contexts of this form of communication.
M’Nicoll attempts an elementary form of audience analysis. He
departs from the view that the theater acts its evil upon innocents and
entices them. Rather, his view is that contemporary society is already
in a state of corruption: “That society is in a state of actual corruption
is indisputable; and the argument is the same, whatever be the origin
of the mischief.” Therefore, he continues, the inflaming of the passions
on a “huge mass of similar corruption . . . adds momentum to an ava-
lanche.” Rough estimates of the way in which popular entertainment
achieves wide audiences is also taken into consideration: “The stage
must conform to the taste of the people. This conformity is not denied
but is freely acknowledged, and often used as an exculpation of the
poet and player.” M’Nicoll, while seemingly basing his argument on
74
Excursus A
the scientivistic mode of reasoning of the nineteenth century, makes

his essay a minor compendium of nineteenth century canons of con-
servative taste. The religious base is discarded almost totally; “reason”
has taken its place. M’Nicoll recognizes that “The popularity of the
drama leads to monstrous abuses . . . of multitudes of writers being
brought into operation, who are nearly destitute of the genius and
of the knowledge of mankind, which are necessary to a just concep-
tion of character.” Here his discussion takes an interesting twist; his
argumentation seems closely to approach the utilitarian mood. The
theater is not “useful” as an outlet for the men of reason and science;
on the contrary, it attracts those pseudo-creative elements in modern
society who feed on the need for sensationalism and distraction of the
modern audience.
On the possibility of theater reform he states: “Suppose the stage
to be completely reformed, and to continue equally popular—a
thing impossible in a corrupt state of society—it would then in its
fundamental principles be quite another thing compared with the
present theater.”
And where, we may ask, are the Church Fathers? In the conclusion,
M’Nicoll finally turns to them as little more than reference points.
There weakened status in the theater debate is obvious as M’Nicoll
spends time trying to resolve certain quibbles that have grown up
around the Fathers’ writings. Is it true (as the opposition says) that
the Fathers, in their condemnations of the theater, were really talking
only about pantomimes? And is it true that St. Chrysostom used to
sleep with Aristophanes under his pillow? And if it is true, does this
fact neutralize the validity of his opposition to public acting? Here we
see that, deprived of traditional supports, M’Nicoll’s essay deals with
the Church Fathers in the context of a kind of “sociology of ideology”
focussing on the relationship of a man’s opinions to his behavior. He
expresses some insights into the nature of popular culture which serve
only to condemn the theater further, and his generalized commentary
on theater mores brands them as morally culpable.
The stage is not without defenders, of course. A contemporary of
M’Nicoll named Mansel published, in 1814, his Free Thoughts upon
Methodists, Actors and the Influence of the Stage. Mansel is among
the defenders of what our anonymous author of High Road to Hell is
among the opposition: he is full of fire and energy, mincing no words,
but he has modulated the old-time “wrath” into modern sarcasm and
75
irony. He begins by examining the opposition’s formidable traditions:

“The Fathers have unequivocally and avowedly proclaimed their
opinion violently and diametrically in opposition to the use of the
stage. Most of its succeeding adversaries have followed their mode of
condemnation. All its present opponents, who embellish themselves
with the name of Christian, look up to the early and learned church-
men as precedents for their conduct. It behooves us, therefore, to
search more strictly into this enormous . . . display of ecclesiastical
vengeance.” In an almost Hegelian tone, but definitely in a histori-
cistic mood, he concedes one point—that the Church was correct in
condemning the abominations that existed on the stage at the time
the Fathers wrote. In addition, he calls into question “the means
they adopted to check the profligacy of the thing they condemned.”
The historical view is joined here by a psychological perspective. As
Mansel put it, St. Chrysostom “studied all the dramatic poets,” and
his famous, eloquent orator borrowed heavily from dramatic writers,
while Tertullian had a vivid imagination of his own, to which he was
prey. Tertullian, after all, did fall into heresy, and Mansel suggests
that his vehemence against the stage was one way he managed to
redeem himself. Mansel may be the first writer to call the writings of
the Church Fathers “an overwhelming of nonsense and stupidity . . .
directed against a sublime art.” By insisting on relating the Fathers’
views on the theater to the specific historical conditions of their times,
and by showing how that condemnation did not mitigate the value
of theatrical prose which even the Church Fathers utilized, Mansel
seeks to discredit these early Christian writers as spokesmen for
modern social values.
Mansel, good scholar that he was, substitutes Addison, Milton, and
Johnson as great Christians, moral practitioners, and spiritual spokes-
men whose contributions to the stage are testimony enough of its moral
fiber. Historical distance worked in Mansel’s favor; he could with ease
point to the clay feet of the Fathers and the defects revealed in their
biographies. Moreover, his defense of the stage had behind it the solid
tradition of English belles lettres and the humanistic foundations of
the English stage.
The few selections offered here need to be reinforced by additional
data covering the history of the controversy. The period 1700 to 1900,
for example, has to be studied not only in the light of the changes in
the nature of the debate but also with respect to changes in the theater
itself. After all, the arguments change in part because of changes in the
76
Excursus A
kinds of theatrical activity, and one cannot overlook the change from
Restoration to Sentimental Comedy and then to the plays Tennyson
and his contemporaries were producing in mid-nineteenth century.
In his context the great fluorescence in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries of the Realistic theater also come into play.
77
3
Eighteenth Century England:
A Case Study
The purpose of this study is to explore in detail some of the antecedents

of the popular culture issues, particularly those generated by the mass
media, which we face today. Since its source materials are the works
of writers and philosophers, and the background is one of social and
economic change in eighteenth century England, this is a chapter of
literary as well as of social history. As social scientists, we have ventured
somewhat afield to explore what writers in eighteenth century England
had to say about problems engendered when literary works began to
be produced as marketable commodities.
The eighteenth century in England was selected as the topic for this
essay not because a “mass” audience in the modern sense developed in
this period—that was to come only in the next century—but because,
from that time on, a writer could support himself from the sale of his
works to the public. In effect what took place was a shift from private
endowment (usually in the form of patronage by the aristocracy) and
a limited audience to public endowment and a potentially unlimited
audience. At the same time, the production, promotion, and distribu-
tion of literary works became profitable enterprises. These changes
affected the content as well as the form of literature, and therefore
gave rise to many aesthetic and ethical problems. Not all of these
problems were new; some had their origins deep in the seventeenth
or even in the sixteenth century when there existed a popular audi-
ence for the theater. But in the eighteenth century, questions of the
potentialities and predispositions of the audience assumed new
urgency for the writer because his audience was now the exclusive
source of his livelihood.
Coauthored with Marjorie Fiske.
79
Section one is devoted to a brief summary, for background purposes,

of the new literary forms which emerged during this period. Section two
discusses the reactions of the literati to the various audience-building
devices, largely commercial, which quickly came to dominate the liter-
ary marketplace. Section three shows how and why the optimism with
which intellectuals initially greeted the increase of writers, readers,
and reading materials gradually withered away. Section four analyzes
the specific criticisms which intellectuals brought to bear on the new
literary products and their audiences. Finally, section five shows how
they sought new standards which would be applicable in a literary
democracy.
The focus is on how writers experienced and tried to work through
these problems—in other words, the eighteenth century literary scene
is presented as they saw it. Because the source materials comprise only
small segments of the work of the writers with whom we deal, no writer
emerges to his full stature. It is our hope, however, that despite such
limitations this excursion into an area generally outside the purview
of the social sciences, while not yet in itself a theoretical contribution,
will provide some of the materials required for the development of a
theory of popular culture in our own time.*
The Literary Media
During the first few decades of the eighteenth century, the growing
industrialization and urbanization of England, together with the
cheaper production of paper and improved methods for producing
and distributing literary goods, made reading matter less costly and
more easily accessible than it had ever been before. Those who were
literate read considerably more than their counterparts in the previ-
ous century; women were proving themselves to be particularly avid
readers; and literacy was becoming a professional prerequisite for
the merchant and shopkeeper classes. By the last quarter of the cen-
tury even remote villages hired their own schoolmasters, or at least
maintained Sunday schools in which the rudiments of reading were
taught. Literacy estimates are scarce and unreliable, but it seems
* We are indebted to several scholars in English literature and the social sciences for valuable
suggestions. The senior author’s interest in sociological aspects of art stems from his lifelong
associaton with Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno at the Institute of Social Research.
This study was completed while the senior author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study
in the Behavioral Sciences. We wish to thank Edgar Rosenberg for his tireless work and incisive
criticism, and the administrative and clerical staff of the Center—Mrs. Maria Paasche in particular.
80
Eighteenth Century England
reasonable to conclude that from 1700 to 1800 the reading public

expanded from one which had included mainly the aristocracy, clerics,
and scholars to one which also included clerks, artisans, laborers, and
farmers.
Despite the fact that new literary products were developing
and that commercial competition became intense, each new form,
or variation on an old form, found a ready market. In the 1790s,
for example, the articulate though not always reliable bookseller
Lackington estimated that the sale of books had increased fourfold
in twenty years. In a glowing and much-quoted description (which,
it should be added, has not gone without challenge from historians),
he attributes this increase to the spread of literacy among the lowest
socioeconomic groups.
The poorer sort of farmers, and even the poor country people in
general, who before that period spent their winter evenings in relating
stories of witches, ghosts, hobgoblins, etc., now shorten the winter
nights by hearing their sons and daughters read tales, romances,
etc., and on entering their houses, you may see Tom Jones, Roderick
Random, and other entertaining books, stuck up in their bacon-racks,
etc. . . . In short, all ranks and degrees now READ.1
Lackington may have been unduly optimistic about the heterogene-

ity of the audience, but the fact remains that literary production had
become more highly differentiated. Many books were designed princi-
pally for the female audience; handbooks for young girls were greatly in
demand, and toward the last quarter of the century, books were writ-
ten especially for children. General periodicals almost invariably had
sections for the ladies and for youngsters, and in addition there were
professional and trade journals for lawyers, farmers, and musicians,
as well as for a variety of hobbyists.
Toward mid-century, England experienced an unprecedented spate
of encyclopedias, histories, almanacs, and other compendia, some of
which were compiled with more attention to sales potential than to
accuracy. Eminent writers (as well as many lesser) undertook compila-
tions of one sort or another, usually when in financial straits. Tobias
Smollett, for example, wrote a popularized history which met with great
success, and did so quite frankly in order to supplement his income.
This was certainly not the work of a scholarly historian, and Horace
Walpole chided the hungry public to which “seven thousand copies of
that trash were instantly sold while at the same time the University of
81
Oxford ventured to print but two thousand of that inimitable work,

Lord Clarendon’s Life”2 But Walpole had no qualms about capitalizing
on the fad himself; in 1760 he discovered that “natural history is in
fashion,” and shortly thereafter was at work simultaneously on six
different scientific volumes covering such diverse areas as botany and
husbandry.3 Since not all popular science was as sound as his, so many
absurd misconceptions of half-truths were spread about that several
of the more conscientious magazines ran special columns devoted to
correcting them.
This section comprises a brief summary of the growth of printed
products and is intended merely to sketch in a background for the
ensuing discussion. Three new or practically new forms will be touched
upon: the popular novel, the magazine, and the newspaper—the latter
two in their modern guise seeing light for the first time at the begin-
ning of the century. A brief review of pertinent features of the stage is
also included.
Magazines
It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the newspapers and the
magazines of this period. Both were likely to be folded, two-column,
single-sheet folios. At first even their contents were similar: the peri-
odical essayists (who usually edited their own periodicals) contributed
features to the newspapers; conversely, many magazines included a
great deal of news, often in the form of weekly summaries.
Two major changes took place in the periodical literature: a marked
decline in publications supported by political parties or religious
groups—the principal types prevailing in the seventeenth century—and
a notable increase in magazines supported by a paying readership and
by advertising. Indeed, prototypes of nearly all periodicals familiar to us
today were to be found in eighteenth century England. The first maga-
zine of miscellany, The Gentleman’s Magazine, including news, fiction,
poetry, social items, puzzles, and advice to the lovelorn, appeared in
the third decade. In mid-century, the first fiction magazine designed
especially for women readers, Records of Love for the Fair Sex, came off
the press, and at the same time theatrical journals, weekly news digests,
book condensations, and book reviews began to flourish.
At the close of the seventeenth century, the question and answer
column had evolved as a successful device for covering a wide vari-
ety of topics. The first magazine to adopt this format exclusively was
bookseller John Dunton’s Athenian Gazette, which catered to the
82
public demand for “information” and at the same time promoted the
bookseller’s wares. Some idea of the scope of these question-and-
answers—which were to compose a major feature of most of the variety
magazines to follow—may be gleaned from a sampling of the Athenian
Gazette: What is the best poem which was ever made? Why are rats,
toads, ravens, etc., ominous? Was it a sin for Noah to curse his son
Ham for seeing his nakedness? Which is greater, the hurt or profit
that comes from love? Where is the best place to find a husband? Very
often, the questions and answers took the form of letters to and from
the editor. On the subject of love, the problems were not very different
from those confronted by Dorothy Dix.
Ques. I have by promise of marriage engaged myself to a young lady,

and not long after my circumstances obliged me to travel, before
which I conjured my mistress to be mindful of her contract with me;
she at that time gave as great testimonies of her fidelity as I could
desire but it was not long ’ere she entertained another gentleman, and
so successful was my Rival, that doubtless he had married her, but
being discovered the very night before it was to be put into execution,
all their measures were irrecoverably broke, her Relations being bit-
terly averse thereto. At first knowledge thereof, I did not resolve what
to do, but since (after mature consideration) I so resent her Behavior,
as I believe I should be as willingly hanged as married to her, there-
fore I have secured a Discharge in writing, wherein we mutually and
voluntarily acquit each other from all the Obligations of matrimony.
Whether my unhappy contract is not void, or how far it obliges me?
Ans. Void, yes; we should be very unhappy creatures, if our vows

must be of force, whether the women proved constant or not, for they
have their share of Fickleness as well as we; and since your Reason
has had the conquest, all you have to do is to pay it such a deference
as to follow its advice in a second engagement.4
Daniel Defoe’s Weekly Review, an eight-column, single-sheet peri-

odical first published in February 1704, resembled the late seventeenth
century political periodical in many respects. Defoe introduced several
come-on devices into his paper, however, and thus paved the way for
the variety magazines of later vintage. One of his innovations was a
department called “Advice from the Scandalous Club, being a weekly
history of nonsense, impertinence, vice and debauchery,”5 and while
Defoe eventually developed a strong distaste for such deliberate bids
for popularity, his successors in the periodical field did not share his
scruples. There is considerable evidence that the Review profited from
83
government subsidies, but Defoe claimed that advertisements con-

stituted its principal means of support. As in the case of most other
magazine advertising of the period, promotion of books accounted for
about half of all commercially sold space.
At the peak of the success of Defoe’s Review, Richard Steele hit upon
an idea which resulted in a type of periodical unique to the eighteenth
century, The Tatler, to be succeeded two years later by the Spectator*
with Joseph Addison as principal editor and contributor. The Spectator,
as The Tatler before it, was published daily in the form of single essays
on social and cultural matters. Its tone was serious, its style elegant,
and the fact that it quickly became the most popular journal of its day
did much to contribute to a spirit of optimism about the potentialities
of periodical literature.
The first journal of variety, the Gentleman’s Magazine, was founded in
1731 by Edward Cave, a journeyman printer, post-office official, and one-
time author of hand-written news letters. His professed objective was:
to give Monthly a View of all the Pieces of the Wit, Humour, or Intel-
ligence, daily offer’d to the Publick in the News-Papers, (which of late
are so multiply’d, as to render it impossible, unless a Man makes it a
Business, to consult them all).6
As Cave’s announcement suggests, his was at first a journal made up

largely of extracts or summaries of news and entertainment items
featured in the newspapers or in other magazines. By 1741 it had
attained a circulation of 15,000 and was solvent enough to com-
mission original material from an impressive array of contributors.
Except for a shortlived excursion into more serious features in the
mid-nineteenth century, it continued to flourish as a magazine of
miscellany until 1907.
Imitations of the Spectator as of the Gentleman’s Magazine were
numerous—altogether, in the fifty-year period beginning in 1730,
eighty-one magazines were published in London, Edinburgh, and
Dublin.7 Among the single-essay magazines notable for their literary
quality if not for their popular appeal were the Rambler, published
by Samuel Johnson for two years beginning in 1750, and the Bee,
* One of the characters in Richardson’s novel Sir Charles Grandison distinguishes between the
literature of the late seventeenth and that of the eighteenth century thus: “The reading in fashion
when I was young was Romances. You, my children, have in that respect fallen into happier days.
The present age is greatly obliged to the authors of the Spectator.”
84
published by Oliver Goldsmith for a few months in 1759. Among the

imitators of the Gentleman’s Magazine were several which proved
to be less worthy enterprises than their model, lifting all their mate-
rial from other newspapers and magazines throughout their usually
brief lives. One or two compounded the parasitism by abstracting
and summarizing periodicals which were in themselves digests of
second-hand material.
Popular Novels
Whereas the single-essay and the miscellany periodicals represented
new literary forms, the novel, though not a new genre, found a new
popularity, particularly after the middle of the century.
During the first two or three decades, the best-selling works were
more likely to have been reprints of seventeenth century romances
than new fiction. Translations, notably from the Spanish, supplemented
the meager supply of home-grown materials, and the Arabian Nights
was published in six editions between 1708 and 1725.8 The few new
romances written during this period were dull and feeble, often nothing
but poor imitations of the seventeenth century style.
The publication of Defoe’s novels in the 1720s, but more particularly
of Richardson’s Pamela in 1740, marked a major change. With these
first novels of the middle class the form was given the impetus which
has made it a major literary medium ever since. For thirty years after
Pamela, novels were characterized by a mixture of middle-class realism
and sentimentality which the four major authors, Richardson, Fielding,
Smollett, and Sterne, expressed in varying proportions. With them the
eighteenth century novel reached its peak; after them came a period
of imitation, repetition, and poor craftsmanship, so bleak the writers
feared that this form was dying out altogether. Not so the audience,
however, for whom this entertainment continued to be popular even
when it consisted mainly of patch-works of several old volumes issued
under catchy new titles.
Toward the latter part of the century, a revival if not of great novels, at
least of more craftsmanlike work set in than had been seen in the 1720s.
Harbinger of the new era had been Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto,
which added a fillip to the worn-out novel of sentiment by placing it in
mysterious gothic settings and generously interlarding it with episodes
of supernatural terror. The English public, sickened by the endless sen-
timentalities which had been paraded before it, eventually welcomed
these innovations with enthusiasm. The fad spread, and by 1794 the
85
Buckingham Palace librarian Thomas Mathias, author of a vigorous satire

on contemporary fiction entitled Pursuits of Literature, was lamenting
the consequences: “[Walpole’s] Otranto ghosts have propagated their
species with unequaled fecundity; the spawn is in every book shop.”9
Though the most widely read—or at least most widely approved—
volume for children continued to be Pilgrim’s Progress, by the late 1780s
works more amusing if not less instructive began to become available to
young readers. One such volume was Sandford and Merton. This novel
was not written only for the juvenile market, although the two heroes
are youngsters: Sandford, a boy endowed with natural wisdom and com-
mon sense, and Tommy Merton, a fitful product of luxury. The story was
certainly didactic, though less pointedly so than its predecessors, and
suggests a philosophy of education derived from Emile.10 Toward the
end of the century the Penny Chap-books, small paper-bound volumes
illustrated with wood-blocks, long favorites with adults, began to be
issued in titles suitable for children, including nursery rhymes, fairy
tales, and extracts of longer works such as Robinson Crusoe.
As more people joined the ranks of the literate, novel writing became
an increasingly lucrative affair. During the 1790s, even a relatively
unknown writer could draw a comfortable income by writing serial-
ized novels for enthusiastic publics. The three-volume novel format
was especially popular with the ladies, it was said, because one section
could be conveniently perused in a single sitting at the hairdresser’s.11
Smallsized books of all kinds were much in evidence throughout the
latter half-century, both consequence and reinforcement of the interest
in abstracts, abridgements, and anthologies. A popular example of the
latter was Isaac D’Israeli’s excerpts from famous writers, Curiosities
of Literature (1792), designed as “an experiment whether a taste for
literature could not be infused into the multitudes.” This small book
quickly went through five editions, was revised several times over, and
often imitated. The growing taste for what Dr. Johnson called “general
and easy reading” seems to have been satisfied by these small and light
books. He himself highly approved of the development: books, after all,
should be held readily in the hand and should be easy to carry about;
heavy books give a discouraging appearance of erudition and may suc-
ceed in frightening away the public altogether.12
Newspapers
The prototype of the modern newspaper came into its own soon after
the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. Within a year or two the Whigs
86
and the Tories sponsored political newspapers, and by 1700 several

papers circulated about London and were delivered to the provinces
three times a week when the posts went out. Many English gentlemen
living abroad or in the country subscribed to “newsletters issued by
confidential sources” which in tone and substance resembled today’s
confidential and not so confidential newsletters and “dope sheets” on
politics and finance. Newsletters, more often handwritten than not,
had been a commonplace in the metropolis itself since the 1660s; in
the eighteenth century they were more likely to deal with foreign than
with domestic affairs.
At the beginning of the century the major source of news in the city
continued to be the coffee house. Each class had its favorite rendez-
vous which, whether simple or elaborate, was invariably stocked with
all periodicals available. Anyone willing to read aloud could attract a
sizable audience at a moment’s notice, and the news of whatever he
read, whether of parliamentary debates or town gossip spread rapidly.
Perhaps rightly not trusting the loyalty of their papers, the leading
politicians of the day employed “runners” who went from coffee house
to coffee house, dropping tidbits and guiding the conversations along
whatever lines their bosses happened to be espousing at the moment.
Newspapers of the first half-century were singularly short-lived. How-
ever, two tri-weekly evening papers, The London Evening Post (1727)
and The General Evening Post (1733) lasted into the nineteenth century;
and The Daily Advertiser, established in 1730 and continuing for sixty-
eight years, had by far the longest life of any daily.13
In the course of the century, the daily newspaper became self-
supporting and self-respecting: self-supporting because of the spread
of literacy, self-respecting because of a successful struggle against
religious and political control.14 In 1709 eighteen newspapers were
published once a week or more in London, amounting altogether to
some fifty issues. By 1730 the coffee house owners complained that it
was impossible to subscribe to them all. Papers grew steadily in size
as well, and in the middle of the century six-page editions were the
rule. Furthermore, as Dr. Johnson observed, almost every important
provincial town had its local organ.15
The stamp tax, imposed by the Tories in 1712 in an unsuccessful
effort to crush the Whig papers, provides a cue for measuring the
growth of the newspaper circulation. In 1776 approximately twelve
million copies were sold in the entire year. Though this amounted to
only one copy per day for every 300 persons,16 at least one member
87
of Parliament became alarmed and complained that newspapers were

treated with more respect than the spokesmen of the nation.
The people of Great Britain are governed by a power that never was
heard of as a supreme authority in any age or country before. . . . It
is the government of the press. The stuff which our weekly newspa-
pers are filled with, is received with greater reverence than Acts of
Parliament, and the sentiments of one of these scribblers have more
weight with the multitude than the opinion of the best politician in
the kingdom.17
But the average reader viewed newspapers with mixed feelings. One
correspondent to the St. James Journal for August 2, 1722, slandered
Mist’s Newspaper; a weekly, as being written only for “Porters and Cob-
blers and such dirty Customers as are his greatest patrons.” If we are
to believe a writer in another magazine of the same period, however,
Mist’s paper found an audience in more exalted social spheres.
The Two famous Universities of this Land are the grand Centers of
it: Men and Horses are employed to convey it in large Quantities to
Oxford and Cambridge; where, senseless as it is, it is constantly read
and applauded.18
On the whole those who paid attention to the growing literary

market were more concerned with its potentialities for the intellectual
and aesthetic development of the country than with the dangers of its
possible influences on public opinion. Only in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, when there were some four hundred newspapers in
England and Ireland, did the problem of the newspaper as a manipula-
tive device become a major concern to the intellectual.
Changes in the Theater
At the beginning of the eighteenth century the stage had long since
been an English institution, rising and falling in popularity and prestige
with changes in politics and religion, but always a major arena in which
a writer could present his works.
Restoration drama, with its mirroring of the manners and mores of the
aristocracy, had been sufficiently uninhibited to provide reforming pas-
tors and laymen with ample reason for attack. In fact, in the first decade of
the century neo-Puritans such as Jeremy Collier and Daniel Defoe waged
campaigns to have the theaters, “those Houses of Sin and Nurseries of
Vice” (Defoe),19 abolished altogether. Assaults against the English stage
88
were nothing new, and the moralistic and theological arguments brought
to bear on them changed very little between the sixth and the eighteenth
centuries.20 The charges handed down by the grand jury of Middlesex
in 1703 are typical.*
We, the Grand Jury of the County of Middlesex do present, that the
Plays which are frequently acted in the play-houses in Drury-Lane
and Lincoln’s-Inn-Fields in this Country are full of prophane, irrever-
ent, lewd, indecent, and immoral expressions and tend to the great
displeasure of Almighty God, and to the corruption of the auditory,
both in their principles and their practices.21
As the Restoration play gave way to middle-class themes, play-going

became more respectable and, with the licensing of the two patented
theaters at Drury Lane and Covent Garden in 1737, the stage once
more became a legitimate means of entertainment for the pious as well
as the worldly—which is not to say that the zealots ceased to attack it.
Toward the middle of the century, when Garrick took over the
management of the Drury Lane, the theater reached a new peak in
popularity and in quality of production. In addition to the sentimental
comedies of the day, Garrick brought Shakespeare back to the English
public after a long period of neo-Puritan—and later neo-classical—
obscurity. But despite the general excellence of their performances,
both patented theaters, in order to keep their attendance high, resorted
to elaborate pantomimes, “spectacular” operas, ballet operas, and a
variety of sensational devices—different more in degree than in kind
from those common in Shakespeare’s day.
While even the clergy were now found in attendance at the theater,
the actors themselves remained more or less outcast until the last
quarter of the century. More than one debate in Parliament included
attacks on the high salaries of actors, particularly those of Italian per-
formers imported for the opera. In the course of one debate in 1735, a
member of the House of Commons observed that
it was astonishing to all Europe that Italian eunuchs and signoras
should have set salaries equal to those of the Lords of the Treasury
and Judges of England.22
* And they were by no means limited to the theater. All popular amusements were assumed to
be conducive to excessive drinking, immorality, and breaches of the peace. (Vide, M. D. George,
London Life in the Eighteenth Century, New York: Knopf, 1925, New York: Knopf, p. 287.)
89
Such complaints, however, only served to whet public curiosity

about the private lives and morals of the theatrical world, a curi-
osity fed with increasing detail in the gossip-mongering parts of
the press.
It was customary in Garrick’s time to stage two performances every
evening, one more or less serious and one light. While many members
of the audience who attended the first performance sat through the
second, it is apparent from the financial records of the major theaters
that an even larger group customarily came only for the latter half of
the evening. Since the curtain rose at six, it was inconvenient for work-
ing people to attend the first performance. One “Citizen” in the 1730s
wrote a letter of complaint to the Lord Mayor of London in which he
pointed out that only the “mechanick of pleasure” could attend the
theater at such an early hour.
Gentlemen who have no employment may sleep whole days and riot
whole nights. . . . Compare the life of a careful honest man . . . with
your mechanick of pleasure who is to frequent the theater. . . . He
must be a fine gentleman, leave his work at five at the farthest . . . that
he may be drest and at the playhouse by six.23
Still more important was the prevailing custom of cutting the admis-
sion price in half after the first or “major” piece of the evening was over.
On the one or two occasions when the theaters attempted to abolish
this custom, public demonstrations and even riots quickly forced a
reinstatement. The behavior of the English audience continued to be
anything but passive. The noisiness of sailors and their girls and the
preening of fops and dandies were ridiculed in many a prologue and
epilogue and amazed more than one foreign observer.
The audience increased considerably in the course of the century.
Not only did many smaller playhouses begin to flourish in the City
and in the provinces, but theaters themselves were enlarged. The two
patent theaters together could accommodate 14,000 persons per week
in 1732, over 15,000 in 1747, and 22,000 in 1762.24 Actual attendance,
however, may have averaged considerably less than capacity.25
Audience Building
Despite the lack of reliable literacy figures, there seems little doubt
that two upsurges in reading took place among the English public
during the eighteenth century. The first was in the thirties and forties,
as the popular magazines and presently the novels began to flood the
90
market. This spurt was due more to the fact that the literate were read-
ing more material than to an increase in the numbers of people who
could read. In the last two decades of the century, on the other hand,
when the Bible societies, the political pamphleteers and the reformers
produced reams of inexpensive literature in a concerted attempt to
counteract the influence of revolutionary writers such as Tom Paine,
the increased consumption was due to a growth in the reading public
itself. In between, the village schoolteachers and the Sunday schools,
the former in order to make a living, the latter in order to spread the
Good Word, had gone about the business of teaching children of the
clerical, working, and farming classes their ABC’s.* Printing presses
in London, according to contemporary estimates, increased from
75 in 1724 to 150–200 in 1757; the annual publication of new books
quadrupled in the course of the century;26 and the profession of letters
became established as a respectable (and often very profitable) liveli-
hood, indeed so well established that as early as 1752 Samuel Johnson
labelled his the “Age of Authors.”27
Part cause and part consequence of the increase in reading and the
professionalization of the author, a number of channels for expanding
the market for literary products sprang into being or took a new lease
on life after the first quarter of the century, notably the circulating
libraries, the bookselling and publishing trade, and the book-review
periodicals. These institutions were closely related to each other as
well as to the authors whose works they promoted or exploited and,
as today, friction between authors and those responsible for the chan-
nels of distribution was not a rarity. Several noncommercial devices
also served to promote the consumption of literary goods. Literary
societies and reading groups spread throughout London and were
eventually imitated in the provinces. The coffee houses in the city and
in the towns continued to be centers where people gathered to read or
to hear newspapers and magazines read aloud, and lingered to discuss
what they had read or heard.
Some coffee houses were primarily literary resorts. Pope, for
example, spent a great deal of time talking with fellow-writers in his
favorite coffee house, until he found that the consumption of wine
* Richard D. Altick suggests, in The English Common Reader, the manuscript of which he gener-
ously made available to us, that while the consumption of reading matter certainly increased
steadily throughout the eighteenth century, it was only after the 1790s that the structure of the
reading audience became democratic. On the whole, he feels, the seventeenth century may have
had a more representative, and not necessarily a smaller, reading audience than the eighteenth.
91
was beginning to get the better of his health. Among the more notable
literary coffee clubs in the earlier part of the century was the Kit-Cat
Club, which counted numerous leading writers of the period among
its members and had Tonson, the outstanding book-seller of his time,
as secretary. This club consisted mainly of Whigs, but it went out of
its way to encourage young writers, presumably regardless of political
persuasion, with financial prizes, particularly for comedies. Swift helped
to found the Brothers’ Club, whose members were mainly Tories, but
whose interests were largely literary—and they, too, contributed to the
support of promising younger writers.28
The bluestocking clubs, organized in mid-century by a group of
literary-minded upper-class women, determined to substitute talk
of letters for card games, were eventually imitated by middle-class
women both in London and in the provinces. If nothing else, these
groups did much to make reading (and writing) among women socially
acceptable, even desirable. By the latter part of the century, informal
book-discussion and book-buying clubs throve in every part of the
country. How these clubs promoted the sale of books is described by
Lackington in his Memoirs:
A number of book-clubs are also formed in every part of England

where each member subscribes a certain sum quarterly to purchase
books: in some of the clubs the books, after they have been read by
all the subscribers, are sold among them to the highest bidders, and
the money produced by such sale is expended in fresh purchases, by
which prudent and judicious mode each member has it in his power
to become possessed of the work of any particular author he may
judge deserving a superior degree of attention.29
Although would-be purchasers in the provinces sometimes complained

that the metropolitan dealers ignored their mail orders, enterprising
booksellers visited the clubs in outlying districts, sent them catalogues
and in other ways offered moral if not material encouragement.
The principal audience-building efforts of the book dealers (who were
publishers as well) were, however, directed to commercial channels.
Circulating Libraries
The first circulating library in England was founded in 1740, the same
year in which Richardson’s Pamela was published. The establishment of
one of the major institutions for accelerating the spread of reading in the
middle class thus coincided with the first important novel of that class.
92
It was customary for the libraries to charge an annual membership

fee which entitled a subscriber to access to all books and magazines
carried by the particular establishment to which he belonged. By the
turn of the century, approximately one thousand of these profit-making
institutions were scattered throughout the country, and their custom-
ers included members of the working as well as of the middle classes.
Free public libraries, however, were noticeably lacking. The library of
the Royal Society accumulated only a fair collection, and the British
Museum, already distinguished for its collection of original manu-
scripts, made a poor showing in printed books. Edward Gibbon had
reason to complain that “the greatest city of the world was still destitute
of a Public Library.”30
The booksellers at first viewed the development of circulating
libraries with suspicion; but they soon recognized that, far from cut-
ting off the sale of books, these outlets promised to constitute both an
important market and a major advertising medium.31 Not only did the
circulating libraries provide books for families which could not afford
to buy them, but they gave readers a chance to preview a book before
investing in it.32
The ladies took to the new institution with delight. Toward the end
of the century, there is scarcely a popular novel whose heroine does
not in the course of her transports or travails select a novel from her
circulating library or send her maid to fetch one. By that time, the
booksellers were enthusiastic. Lackington was convinced that, along
with his own bookshop of course,
Circulating libraries have also greatly contributed toward the amuse-
ment and cultivation of the sex; by far the greatest part of ladies
now have a taste for books. . . . Ladies now in general read, not only
novels, although many of that class are excellent productions, and
tend to polish both the heart and the head; but they also read the
best books in the English language, and may read the best authors
in various languages; and there are some thousands of ladies who
frequent my shop, and that know as well what books to choose,
and are as well acquainted with works of taste and genius as any
gentleman in the kingdom, notwithstanding they sneer against
novel readers, etc.33
While some of the literati toward the later part of the century blamed
the circulating libraries for whetting the apparently insatiable appetite
for novels which the booksellers were eager to feed by all manner of
means, and while many writers poked light fun at the institution in
93
their own fictional works, few serious attacks on this audience-building

device were forthcoming in the course of the century.*
Bookselling
The conscientious man of letters was rather less tolerant of the booksell-
ers. Possibly his newly acquired financial dependence on the publisher
and dealer occasioned some degree of nostalgia for the days of aris-
tocratic patronage; certainly the practices of a good many booksellers
provided him with good reason for intolerance.
Messrs. Tonson and Curll represent the two extremes of prestige
and notoriety the bookseller could achieve in the days of Alexander
Pope. Tonson, the afore-mentioned secretary of the Kit-Cat Club, left
his mark on the history of the book trade as the esteemed publisher
of Paradise Lost and numerous works by Dryden and Addison. He
commanded the admiration of most of his authors, to whom he was
generous in his commercial dealings and stimulating in his intellectual
contacts.
Edmund Curll, one of the infamous names in the history of com-
merce, neither got nor deserved a modiocum of respect from the literati.
Unscrupulous and clever, he displayed a kind of stupid adroitness which
repeatedly landed him in jail and encouraged him, on his discharge,
to resume with redoubled vigor the very activities for which he had
been imprisoned. He had a special knack for exploiting the scandal-
ous, a thriving business in his as in more recent days, and while he did
publish some useful works, given the length of his publication lists,
he could hardly have avoided it. He dedicated most of his energy to a
search for attractive titles and intimately personal (often scurrilous)
advertisements for biographies and pornographic pamphlets which
were thrown together willy-nilly by hacks to whom he paid starvation
wages.34 He came in for a lot of scathing criticism in Pope’s Dunciad,
and the reasons are not far to seek. Fielding tells the following story in
the Champion about a fraud which Curll perpetrated by misusing the
name of Pope:
But the most remarkable piece if ingenuity, if it had been done by
design, was exhibited this winter, in which a poem was published
with the following title-page, printed in the same manner as it is
here inserted.
* Coleridge was later to speak scathingly of “devotees of circulating libraries” whose reading he
considered to be on a par with reading word for word “all the advertisements of a daily newspaper
in a public house on a rainy day.”
94
SEVENTEEN HUNDRED THIRTY NINE

being the sequel of
SEVENTEEN HUNDRED THIRTY EIGHT
Written by Mr. Pope
If this had been published by any other bookseller than Mr. C—1,
we should have believed that it was intended to impose the year
nine on the world as a work of Mr. Pope’s, who is I think avowedly
the author of the year eight, but the said Mr. C—1 is too well known
to have any such attempt suspected, both from the nicety of his
conscience and his judgment, which should not suffer him to hope
that he should be able to exhibit the pop of a pistol for the fire of
a cannon.35
By 1800 the bookselling and publishing trade was one of the major
industries in the country. Needless to say, both Tonson and Curll had
their share of descendants. Lackington was the most successful as well
as the most articulate book dealer of the latter part of the century: he
went into business in 1774; in 1779 he published his first catalogue of
12,000 titles and estimated that some 30,000 people a year made use
of it. It was Lackington who first hit upon the idea of remainder sales,
and by the turn of the century he was selling over 100,000 volumes a
year.36 While he conceded that he made a substantial amount of money,
he also took credit for making books available to groups who might
not otherwise have been able to afford them:
When I reflect what prodigious numbers in inferior or reduced situa-

tions of life, have been essentially benefited, in consequence of being
thus enabled to indulge their natural propensity for the acquisition
of knowledge, on easy terms: nay, I could almost be vain enough to
assert, that I have thereby been highly instrumental in diffusing that
general desire for READING now so prevalent among the inferior
orders of society.37
After 1780 the cost of books, already high, rose further.* Well-
established publishers were making their formats ever more elaborate
and costly, in part because the etiquette of the more elegant members
of the feminine audience demanded ostentatious bindings. But new
booksellers soon entered the lists and issued reprints, including small,
* Some indications of the comparative cost of books and other leisure activities may be found
in the following figures given by H. W. Pedicord, and applicable for the mid-century decades: a
seat in the first gallery at the Drury Lane 24 pence, a pot of beer 3 pence, cheapest dinner 31/2
pence, a small book 36 pence.
95
modestly priced pocket editions of the classics. Another successful

sales device adopted by the booksellers was the publishing of the clas-
sics, poetry, and fiction in newspaper-like serials, printed in weekly
installments at sixpence each.38 After allowing a suitable period for
the reader to forget the first version, the less scrupulous booksellers
did not hesitate to reissue the trashier of these works, particularly the
novels, under new titles, but otherwise unchanged.
Advertising methods ranged from the spectacularly absurd to the
eminently reasonable and included, in fact, most of the devices which
have remained the stock-in-trade of the publisher’s business to this
day. There was first the matter of the title. If it was catchy, slick, and
sensational, it could not go very far wrong. There were Beauty Put
to Its Shift, Adultery Atomized, Female Falsehood, and a thousand
other titles like them. Old books in new titles were not limited to
the folios; the salvation of many a hard-cover work came about by
the simple expedient of removing the title page, replacing it with a
more vivid or salacious one, and offering the renovated product as
“Second Edition, corrected and improved.”39 A particularly success-
ful device was to endow the author (or authoress) with qualities of
fame, mystery, or notoriety, and writers said to have been “banished
from the realm” were promoted with special avidity. Endorsements
by “men of distinction,” too, were a commonplace. On the whole
the booksellers maintained close and friendly relations at least with
their leading writers, and only one writer seems to have found his
dependence on the bookseller sufficiently restraining to endeavor to
free himself. In 1765, one John Trusler founded a Literary Society
intended to eliminate the middleman and to secure all profits for the
author by enabling him to bring out his own works independently.
This society probably helped nobody but Trusler himself who man-
aged, at most, to sell only one of his books.40 Until the middle of the
century, a great many books continued to be financed by advance
subscriptions, but these were solicited by the bookseller himself,
except for an occasional penurious and unknown author who went
knocking from door to door.
Despite the thriving enterprises of the leading booksellers in London
in the second half of the century, their influence was not particularly
strong in the provinces, except indirectly through the circulating library
and the itinerant pedlar. Lackington describes a journey to Edinburgh
in 1787, during which he made it his business to stop at every town
96
with the twofold objecive of keeping his finger on the pulse of his trade
and picking up scarce or valuable books. His trip, on the latter count,
was a notable failure: not only did he find depressingly few valuable
books, but the shelves of the provincial bookshops were littered mainly
with trash.41 When he repeated his trip a few years later, he reported
the situation very little changed.
Although an unscrupulous bookseller like Curll might arouse almost
unanimous expressions of antagonism, the writers were rather less in
agreement on the institution of book publishing itself. Both Samuel
Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith, for example, were highly dependent on
their publishers; but while Johnson was the nearest thing to grateful,
Goldsmith—at best—viewed the situation with one auspicious and
one drooping eye. Perhaps, as Krutch suggests,42 Johnson’s favorable
disposition was the result of a very happy early experience he had with
a bookseller who lent him enough money to keep him from starving.
In any case, Johnson was not sparing of his commendations. In one
of his Idler papers, for instance, he credits the booksellers rather than
the schools with “popularising knowledge” among the common orders
of England.43
In his early career as a writer, Johnson suffered from much keener
poverty than did Goldsmith, whose main problem was that his money
slipped through his fingers. Johnson’s poverty was of a more spartan
kind. We know how he wrote Rasselas: the book was dashed off in
a few days to pay for his mother’s funeral expenses. And Boswell
reports that even when Johnson was finally paid for his Dictionary
(first published in 1755) there was scarcely any money left after his
expense in compiling it had been met. Yet he countered Boswell’s
commiserations with a stout defense of the bookseller, justifying the
lack of profit to the author by citing the risks to which the publisher
exposed himself.44
Goldsmith was no party to this kind of defense. In his Enquiry into
the Present State of Learning and in two of the letters in the Citizen of
the World, one of which is devoted entirely to the dubious practices
of the bookseller, he examines the bookseller’s role in a forthrightly
critical spirit. In his Enquiry he notes at the outset that the interests
of the writer and those of the publisher are diametrically opposed:
The author, when unpatronized by the great, has naturally recourse

to the bookseller. There cannot perhaps be imagined a combination
97
more prejudicial to taste than this. It is the interest of the one to allow
as little for writing, and of the other to write as much as possible.45
And he directly attacks some of the more underhanded promotional

techniques, particularly the device of attaching impressive status, real
or invented, to the authors of books in the process of being promoted.
Booksellers “seem convinced, that a book written by vulgar hands, can
neither instruct nor improve; none but Kings, Chams and Mandarines
can write with a probability of success.”46 But it is in Letter LI of The
Citizen of the World that we find the most biting sarcasm. Here Gold-
smith describes a bookseller’s visit to the ironically ingenuous Citizen.
The bookseller begins by noting the seasonal appetites of his readers:
“I would no more bring out a new work in summer than I would sell
pork in the dog days.” He next boasts that his works are always new,
and that at the end of every season the old ones are shipped off to the
trunkmakers. If he should have a scarcity of new books, there is no
dearth of new title pages: “I have ten new title-pages now around me
which only want books to be added to make them the finest things in
nature.” He is quite willing to make a virtue of his lack of cultural pre-
tensions, modestly confessing that he has no desire to lead the public;
on the contrary, the public—and the lowest stratum of the public at
that—leads him.47
The writer’s plight vis-à-vis the bookseller trade is well epitomized
by a tragi-comic episode reported by Thomas De Quincey in his essay
on Goldsmith:
The pauperized (or Grub Street) section of the literary body, at the
date of Goldsmith’s taking service amongst it, was . . . at its very
lowest point of depression. . . . Smart, the prose translator of Horace
and a well-built scholar, actually let himself out to a monthly journal
on a regular lease of ninety-nine years. What could move the rapa-
cious publisher to draw the lease for this monstrous term of years,
we cannot conjecture.
“But think Reader,” De Quincey continues,
But think . . . of poor Smart two years after, upon another publisher’s
applying vainly to him for contributions, and angrily demanding what
possible objections could be made to offers so liberal, being reduced
to answer—“No objection, sir, whatever, except an unexpired term of
ninety-seven years to run.” The bookseller saw that he must not apply
again in that century; and in fact Smart could no longer let himself
but must be sub-let, if let at all, by the original lessee. 48
98
Book Reviews
Book reviewing came into being at the end of the seventeenth century
largely as a professional service. The review journals of that time were
limited to scientific and philosophical works, and at first their prin-
cipal purpose was to provide scholars with convenient summaries, in
English, of the works of their colleagues abroad. One of the earliest of
the eighteenth century reviews, the Memoirs of Literature (1710–1714),
published by the Huguenot refugee LaRoche, served as prototype for
the scholarly review. This periodical contained abstracts of English and
foreign works in about equal proportions. Critical comments were rare.
In 1725, reputedly with the help of a book publisher, LaRoche produced
a second journal, New Memoirs of Literature, in which he proved to be
more enterprising: this review—usually running to some seventy-five
pages an issue—not only abstracted but added comment to the works
selected for review. The Literary Magazine, first published in 1735
under the editorship of Ephraim Chambers, covered a wider range of
works, though it still limited itself to the “serious.” It went further in
comment and biographical background than had its predecessors, but
was reluctant to set itself up as judge. In the words of its editor, the
responsibility of the reviewer is
to give a faithful account of books which come into his hands. . . .

When he affects the air and language of a censor or judge, he invades
the undoubted right of the public, which is the only sovereign judge
of the reputation of an author, and the merit of his compositions.49
The first book review journal to move into the field of popular
literature and thus to qualify as an audience-building institution was
The Compendious Library, a one-hundred page bi-monthly publication
printed in Dublin (1751-52). Its steps in this direction, however, were
both rare and gingerly. In introducing Fielding’s Amelia, for example,
the reviewer first notes that romance and novels have no place in
literary journals, but in this instance he justifies the exception on the
grounds that fiction which serves “the reformation of manners and the
advancement of virtue” may be allowed, and goes on to remark that
“This seems to be one, if not the chief, point from which Mr. Fielding’s
performance ought to be considered. . . .”50
With the founding of the Monthly Review by Ralph Griffith in 1749,
the book review purporting to cover all releases from the presses got
its start. The Monthly, which at first had the reputation of being hostile
99
to state and church, soon provoked the founding of a rival journal, the
Critical Review, published by Archibald Hamilton, edited by Tobias
Smollett from 1756 to 1763, and laying claim to Tory and Church
support.Both reviews boasted eminent contributors: Goldsmith con-
tributed twenty pieces to the Monthly, and Johnson as well as Smollett
wrote for the Critical. Each journal dealt with the more important books
of the month in considerable detail; in a “catalogue” appended to each
issue, all other publications of the month were covered in three- or
four-page reviews. The objective proclaimed by the Critical could be
applied to the Monthly as well:
To exhibit a succinct plan of every performance; to point out the

most striking beauties and glaring defects; to illustrate remarks with
proper quotations, and to convey those remarks in such a manner as
might best conduce to the entertainment of the public.51
The Critical successfully competed with the Monthly until 1790, but the
Monthly managed to survive it well into the middle of the nineteenth
century. Although criticized by authors for high-handedness on some
occasions, these reviews and their competitors were inclined rather more
to praise than to criticize. Witness, for instance, the prospectus of the
New London Review, a short-lived publication of the years 1799 to 1800:
The Plan is suggested, and will be executed in the conviction, that

few performances are wholly destitute of merit; that it is more use-
ful to disclose latent excellence, than to exaggerate common faults;
that the public taste suffers less from inaccurate writing than from
illiberal criticism.
Criticism was to be reserved for the works of writers who went off any
one of a number of beaten tracks:
Though no arrogance will be indulged in this Publication, whatever

disturbs the public harmony, insults legal authority, . . . attacks the
vital springs and established functions of piety, or in any respect
clashes with the sacred forms of decency, however witty, elegant, and
well written, can be noticed only in terms of severe and unequivocal
reprehension.52
The task of covering all new books as they were released became
more and more unmanageable. One of the Monthly reviewers in 1788
complained: “The Reviewer of the modern novel is in the situation of
100
Hercules encountering the Hydra—One head lopped off, two or three

immediately spring up in its place.”53 The less conscientious journals
solved the problem by a process of selection calculated to please the chief
suppliers of their advertising revenue, the booksellers, who distributed
review copies only to the journals in which they advertised. These books
were reviewed first; time and space permitting, a reviewer might then
send his “collector” around to other houses for books possibly deserving
of his notice. Thus books often were reviewed months after they were
released; in the case of particularly popular publications which were
sold out by the time a collector arrived, no reviews appeared at all.54
As to the reviewers themselves, the Monthly and Critical and a
number of similar journals had, in addition to eminent or well-known
contributors, other conscientious ones as well. More often, however,
they were poorly paid devisers of makeshift who filled up page after
page with direct quotations, selected, as one report has it, after first
reading the preface, closing the book, sticking a pin between the leaves
at random, opening and transcribing the page so chosen, or even a few
pages, and then repeating the operation. One novelist of the 1770s
accused the reviewers of passing on the merits and demerits of an
author on the basis of the title-page alone. A correspondent to the
Gentleman’s Magazine in 1782 accused the reviewers of praising the
works of those booksellers who owned shares in their journals and
running down all others. Yet another novelist accused them of taking
bribes from authors, sometimes even going so far as to let them write
their own reviews.55
Samuel Johnson, as we might expect from his more favorable attitude
toward booksellers, was considerably more indulgent toward the review-
ers than was Oliver Goldsmith, who devoted a substantial portion of
another of his Citizen of the World letters to a castigation of their prac-
tices. Goldsmith links the undiscriminating nature of the book reviewer’s
work to the fact that he is being paid by the bookseller or, worse still, to
the fact that the bookseller himself sometimes writes reviews:
There are a set of men called answerers of books who take upon
them to watch the republic of letters, and distribute reputation by
the sheet . . . and to revile the moral character of the man whose
writings they cannot injure. Such wretches are kept in pay by some
mercenary bookseller, or more frequently, the bookseller himself
takes this dirty work off their hands, as all that is required is to be
very abusive and very dull.
101
The Chinese visitor goes on to ask his host whether this is the fate
of every writer, to which the Englishman replies, “Yes . . . except he
happened to be born a Mandarin. If he has much money, he may buy
a reputation from your book answerers.”56
Such was the ambiguous state of book-reviewing in the second half
of the century. Only with the founding of the Edinburgh Review and
the Quarterly in the early nineteenth century did the book reviewers
begin to be free of publisher influence. If they kowtowed at all, it was
likely to be in response to political party rather than to publishing
house pressures.
Stages of Reaction
The acid comments of writers about the devices used to promote book
sales did not herald an immediate negative reaction to the development
of a literary market. Alexander Pope, to be sure, made dire prophesies
about the low level to which literature was sinking; but though he was
later to be looked back upon by Henry Fielding as “King Alexandre,”
the despotic ruler of the literary kingdom, Pope’s “subjects” did not
join in his protest against changes in the literary scene until much later.
On the contrary, many literary figures in the first half of the century
founded periodicals especially designed for the growing middle-class
readership, and all of them contributed to magazines or newspapers
at one point in their careers.
Their predecessors had been writing for a more homogeneous
group: the nobility, the landed gentry, and scholars had composed
the bulk of their readers. These readers debated about the “rules”
and about good and bad writing along with the writers, just as they
debated about good and bad music, architecture, and painting;
but they did not distinguish between “high” and “low” art, nor did
they discuss differences in aesthetic appreciation among different
social segments of the audience. The growth of a broader market
did not at first change the nature of these discussions. Each form
was presumed to have its own special means of providing pleasure,
but the accepted function of all writing remained similar to that
summarized by the critic John Dennis in his discussion of “greater”
and “less” poetry:
1. The greater Poetry is an Art by which a Poet justly and reasonably
excites great Passion, that he may please and instruct. . . .
2. The less Poetry is an Art by which a Poet excites less Passion for the
foremention’d Ends. . . .57
102
Not all of John Dennis’ contemporaries in the world of letters would

have agreed with him that the excitation of great passion is the sine qua
non of great poetry, but his view that the objective of all writing is to
instruct would have evoked little controversy. The writer has a social
task; he must use his gift as a means of contributing to the elevation of
his readers. And just as the writers’ creative gifts were assumed to go
hand-in-hand with high moral responsibility, so was it assumed that
a public which is responsive to moral teachings must also be capable
of aesthetic appreciation.
This section will describe how, as writers, readers, and literary
products multiplied, such initial optimism gave way to a mood very
close to pessimism.
Optimism
Very early in the century, the English public had begun to display a
powerful bent for reform of manners and morals, not the least mani-
festation of which was its wide-spread support of organizations such
as the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and the
Society for the Reformation of Manners—groups with far-flung net-
works through which numerous pamphlets and books of a moralizing,
neo-Puritan nature were distributed.58 The ideal of the “gentleman” to
which tradespeople and aristocrats alike aspired was not the exaggerat-
edly ornamental and rakish figure which had become the stereotype
of Restoration comedy, but the virtuous Christian citizen. In such an
atmosphere it was taken for granted that the new literary forms would
edify and elevate; an aristocrat, such as the Earl of Shaftesbury, and
Defoe, a writer who saw himself as the very conscience of the middle
and lower-middle classes, could agree with the crusading Sir Richard
Blackmore that the responsibility of the writer is to “cultivate the mind
with instruction of virtue.”59 To be sure, early magazines and newspapers
were often attacked for their political bias—the fittest punishment Pope
could conjure up for one of the “low” writers he attacked in the early
Dunciad, for example, was to have him “[end] at last in the common
sink of all such writers, a Political News-paper.”60 And Addison puffed
his own journal at the expense of the newspapers, which he gently
chided for emphasizing “what passes in Muscovy or Poland,” rather
than the “knowledge of one’s self.”61
The belief that the inclination for moral uplift so apparent in the
audience presupposed a capacity for aesthetic advancement was at first
reinforced by the success of the single essay type of magazine, which
103
combined elegant writing with social and cultural purpose, and which
first came into its own with the launching of Steele’s Tatler in 1709. The
Tatler’s immediate successor, the Spectator (1711), founded as a joint
enterprise of Steele and Addison, became the most popular journal of
its day. In one of the early issues, Addison announced that his publisher
had just reported a daily circulation of three thousand copies for the
journal, and goes on to estimate with some assurance that each copy
had twenty readers (or “hearers,” as the case may be).* Addison used
these figures as a point of departure for a statement of objectives which
is not only a succinct summary of the principle of “art as a means of
instruction,” but a statement of faith in the capacities of his readers:
Since I have raised to myself so great an Audience, I shall spare no

Pains to make their Instruction agreeable, and their Diversion useful.
For which Reasons I shall endeavour to enliven Morality with Wit
and to temper Wit with Morality. . . . It was said of Socrates, that he
brought Philosophy down from Heaven, to inhabit among Men; and I
shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy
out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs
and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses.
These worlds of tea-table and coffee house were not, in Addison’s view,
limited to the gentry and the scholars; in his “fraternity of spectators”
he sees tradesmen as well as physicians, “statesmen that are out of
business” as well as Fellows of the Royal Society, and all those “blanks
of society” who until now have been “altogether unfurnished with
ideas till the business and conversation of the day has supplied them.”
Finally he envisages the whole “female world” among his readers, but
particularly the “ordinary” woman whose most serious occupation is
sewing and whose drudgery is cooking. While there are some women
who live in a more “exalted Sphere of Knowledge and Virtue,” they are
all too few, and he hopes to increase their ranks “by Publishing this
daily Paper, which I shall always endeavour to make an innocent if not
an improving Entertainment, and by that Means at least divert the
Minds of my Female Readers from greater Trifles.”62
That most of what Addison called entertainment was indeed both
morally and aesthetically “improving” is apparent to the modern
* Since there was no eighteenth century equivalent to a “continuing index of magazine circula-
tion,” these figures are debatable. Samuel Johnson (in Lives of the Poets) reckoned, on the basis of
stamp tax figures, that the Spectator had an average sale of 1,700 daily copies. Addison’s editor,
Richard Hurd, and others offer average daily estimates closer to those ventured by Addison himself.
104
reader who selects any issue of the Spectator at random. Between

them, Addison and Steele covered the spectrum of their age from
“Puritan Piety” (Addison) to “Miseries of Prostitution” (Steele). Addi-
son informed his readers that he belonged to a club which served as
a kind of “advisory committee” for the Spectator; in fact, his readers
“have the satisfaction to find that there is no rank or degree among
them who have not their representative in this club, and that there
is always somebody present who will take care of their respective
interests.” He describes a recent meeting of the club during which he
was congratulated by some members and taken to task by others. On
occasion, members of this panel try to lobby for their special interests,
but Addison hastens to assure the reader that he will remain unmoved
by such pressures:
Having thus taken my Resolutions to march on boldly in the Cause

of Virtue and good Sense, and to annoy their Adversaries in what-
ever Degree or Rank of Men they may be found: I shall be deaf for
the future to all the Remonstrances that shall be made to me on this
Account.63
Running throughout the series (the Spectator was published daily until
December 6, 1712) is a strong admixture of literary criticism, mostly
Addison’s, clearly designed to establish a link between the “wit” of the
elite classical tradition and the moral truths so in keeping with the
ethos of the rising middle class.64
But that a moral reformation was inseparable from an aesthetic one
became an assumption increasingly difficult to support. If it is true
that the Spectator eventually attained a readership of twenty or thirty
thousand, perhaps there came a point in eighteenth century England
when the literary development of many persons hung in the balance,
attracted to the refinements of an Addison who did not write down
to his readers, and not yet seduced by the sensational or sentimental
devices to be utilized by his successors. If so, it was for a relatively short
period, and subsequent events have blurred the evidence. Historians
of literature credit the essayists with high literary achievement, but
suggest that they were victims of self-delusion if they believed that
the moral concerns of their readers were in any way associated with
a capacity for—or interest in—aesthetic growth. What Addison and
the other essayists hoped for was a rapprochement between English
classicism and middle-class morality; what they paved the way for was
compromise.65
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Before the middle of the century the public was beginning to make its
preferences abundantly clear. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which was mainly
read as an adventure story, became an instantaneous bestseller seven
years after the last copy of the Spectator was printed, and it went through
numerous editions and translations during the next thirty years. In 1750,
The Oeconomy of Human Life* was published, went through twenty-one
editions in the eighteenth century (several more than that in the nine-
teenth) and was translated into six languages. This book, distinguished
for its commonplaceness of thought, achieved unprecedented popularity
and has been characterized as testimony to “the insatiable appetite of the
eighteenth century for moral platitude.”66 In the same year in which the
Spectator was founded, Shaftesbury had written, “Thus are the arts and
virtues mutually friends,”67 but that the mid-century audience thought
differently is further attested by the fate of one of the Spectator’s more
eminent imitators, The Rambler. This bi-weekly periodical was founded
by Dr. Johnson in the same year in which The Oeconomy achieved its
spectacular success. Like the Spectator four decades earlier, The Rambler
aimed at intellectual and aesthetic as well as moral refinements. But
except for one issue written by Samuel Richardson (Number 97) the
peak circulation of The Rambler was 500, or one-sixth of the circulation
claimed for the Spectator after its tenth day of publication.68
Opportunity and Opportunism
While the hundred imitations of the Spectator published between 1712
and 1750 were remarkably short-lived, the Gentleman’s Magazine, some
fifty pages of news and entertainment features, went into five editions at
its first issue in 1731. Twenty years or so later Johnson wrote of it as one
of the most lucrative publications (it then had a circulation of 15,000),
and its manager at the end of the century, John Nichols, reported it as
still a highly successful enterprise.69
With the public expressing its interests by buying certain kinds of
literary products and by not buying others, the publisher, bookseller,
and writer with a knack for gauging public opinion could become, if
not wealthy, certainly most comfortable. There were five thousand
people subsisting by writing, printing, publishing, and marketing
papers in the London of 1722,70 and those who earned a living in the
literary market by the middle of the century would probably have to
* The authorship is disputed—some historians credit Dodsley, others Chesterfield, with the work.
106
be reckoned in the tens of thousands. It was no longer necessary to be

a “man of letters” or a university graduate to be a professional writer.
Housewives and bookkeepers who wanted to make a few extra pounds
now wrote novels, as did country clergymen who had formerly dabbled
in botany or archeology. Few of these writers felt any need to defend
either their works or their profits, and few apparently were concerned
about literary standards.
No longer were elegant and polished “wits” and intellectuals
endeavoring to search out truth, beauty, and reason for themselves
and a few readers much like themselves. Instead middle-class novelists
such as Richardson and Fielding were writing for their social peers.
They, and Smollett and Sterne after them, may have been concerned
with truth and reason, at least insofar as these values were related to
morality, but they were little concerned with beauty. Their world, as
Leslie Stephen put it, had become that of “the middle-class John Bull.
. . . The generation which listens to Wesley must have also a secular
literature, which, whether sentimental as with Richardson or represent-
ing common sense with Fielding, must at any rate correspond to solid
substantial matter-of-fact motives, intelligible to the ordinary Briton
of the time.”71 Fielding himself, satirist though he often was, offered a
summation of this solemn atmosphere. Denouncing those writers who
merely amuse or shock, he made it clear that he was even not “afraid
to mention Rabelais, and Aristophanes himself,” among those who
have ridiculed the only means to moral health and wisdom: “sobriety,
modesty, decency, virtue and religion.” He then went on to state a
precept which was adhered to—with varying degrees of sincerity—by
most writers of his age:
In the exercise of the mind, as well as in the exercise of the body,

diversion is a secondary consideration, and designed only to make that
agreeable, which is at the same time useful, to such noble purposes
as health and wisdom.72
Indeed, so ingrained were these moral precepts that the majority of

midcentury writers quite uncalculatingly fulfilled the reader’s need to
be convinced that he was being improved while being amused, diverted,
or horrified. Adults told themselves that novel reading was instructive
for young people, and the upper classes were persuaded that reading or
play-going was uplifting for the lower. The actor, writer, and producer
107
Garrick, in his Bon Ton, lightly ridiculed such rationalizations in a

conversation between master and servant:
Sir John: Why, what did I promise you?
Davy: That I should take sixpen’oth at one of the theaters tonight,
and a shilling place at the other to-morrow.
Sir John: Well, well, so I did. Is it a moral piece, Davy?
Davy: Oh! Yes, and written by a clergyman; it is called the “Rival
Cannanites; or the Traedy of Braggadocia.”
Sir John: Be a good lad, and I won’t be worse than my word; there’s
money for you.73
A few writers, particularly lady novelists writing for the education of

young girls, seem to have found it unnecessary to follow the caveat “to
amuse,” with apparently no great loss in sales. Parents of the innocents
saw to it that they kept such books as Mrs. Chapone’s Letters on the
Improvement of the Mind—consisting of 200 pages of solid advice
on religion, the Bible, the affections, the temper, and politeness—
constantly by their sides. According to the moralizing novelist Hannah
More, Mrs. Chapone’s work “forms the rising age,” and another contem-
porary, Samuel Hoole, has the heroine in his Aurelia envisage an ideal
woman as one whose dressing table features Mrs. Chapone’s volume:
On the plain toilet, with no trophies gay

Chapone’s instructive volume open lay.74
At the other extreme were the sensational novelists who loaded their
works with sex and sadism, inserting, as a kind of afterthought, a warning
line or two, pointing out to the reader that his, or more frequently her,
fate will be a ghastly one if he or she slips from the path of virtue. Under
the guise of “satiric indignation,” revelations of vice and licentiousness
in high and low places were exploited in novels, on the stage, and in
the magazines as well as in the press—some true, some offered under
the pretext of being true.* Almost any device “enabled authors to pass
in satiric review various classes and professions in corrupt society.”75
Charles Johnstone (1719-1800) suggested—with disarming candor in
* An idea of the topics covered is conveyed by the titles of a few of these novels:
Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister.
The Unnatural Mother; or Innocent Love Persecuted; being the history of the fatal conse-
quences that attended the . . . passion of a gentleman . . . and a young Lady.
The Cruel Mistress; being the genuine trial of E. B. and her daughter for the murder of Jane
Buttersworth, their servantmaid, etc.
The Fatal Connexion, Colonel Digby and Miss Stanley.
108
view of the fact that he himself was the author of Chrysal, one of the
more notorious of these exposés—the extent to which the moralizing
note was merely an excuse for feeding the appetite for prurient detail:
There cannot be a stronger argument against the charge of degeneracy

in moral virtue and religion brought against the present age, than the
avidity with which all works exposing the breaches of them by the
unerring proof of facts, are read by all people.76
In his preface to the first edition of the Dunciad (1728) Pope had
made it clear through the words of a fictitious commentator on his
work (“Martinus Scriblerus”) that he was disturbed both by the ped-
ants and fops of the literary world and by the sheer numbers of authors
who cropped out all over the country once paper became cheap and
plentiful in supply:
He [our Poet] lived in those days, when (after providence had permit-
ted the Invention of Printing as a scourge for the Sins of the learned)
Paper also became so cheap, and printers so numerous, that a deluge
of authors cover’d the land: . . . our author . . . did conceive it an endea-
vour well worthy an honest satyrist, to dissuade the dull and punish
the malicious, the only way that was left. In that public-spirited view
he laid the plan of this Poem. . . .77
Thus Pope, in the early third of the century of the Enlightenment, served
as the conscience of conservatism. In challenging the idea of technical
progress as a good in itself, he anticipated the coming debate about the
defensive position of the creative individual in a mass society. His was
not an article of faith but an article of doubt, and toward the end of
the first edition he issues a strong warning not to underestimate these
changes and the people who were capitalizing on them:
Do not, gentle reader, rest too secure in thy contempt of the Instru-
ments for such a revolution in learning, or despite such weak agents
as have been described in our poem, but remember what the Dutch
stories somewhere relate, that a great part of their Provinces was
once overflow’d, by a small opening made in one of their dykes by a
single Water-Rat.
He concludes the poem with a prophecy:
Art after Art goes out, and all is Night. . . .

Thy hand great Dulness! lets the curtain fall,
And universal Darkness covers all.78
109
Fourteen years later, in the preface to The New Dunciad (1742),

Pope writes that he is setting out “to declare the Completion of the
Prophecies mention’d at the end of the former [Book].”79 By that time
his fellow authors had begun to wonder whether the first edition, outlet
for injured professional pride though it may have been, did not also
have some of the character of a true prediction.
Rising Dismay
After the middle of the century the writer faced two problems which had
not previously struck him as matters for concern. Was the expanding
audience for literary products (now beginning to reach into the lower
classes as well)* in fact capable of, or interested in, being “improved”
either aesthetically or morally by means of the written and spoken
word which it was consuming in ever greater volume? And what was
this new state of affairs—in which he depended for his livelihood upon
pleasing this broad public instead of one or two aristocratic or political
patrons—doing to the integrity of the artist?
The writers who became most disturbed by these problems were not
members of the aristocracy who might have been expected to look with
some distaste on the cultural encroachments of the nouveaux riches
and the tradespeople. Nor were they embittered men who had failed
to achieve recognition. They were those writers, mainly of middle-class
origin, who had supported themselves by producing serious works for
the very public about which they were now becoming sceptical. The
Spectator, the Tatler, and most of their imitators had tried to show
these new readers what constituted good taste—in morals, manners,
music, architecture, furniture, and landscape gardening as well as in
literature. For thirty or more years, the best had been made available
to all who could read. Those who had offered it, Garrick, Goldsmith,
Johnson, and Fielding and others, began to echo Pope’s early and not
very exalted opinion of public taste. He had worried about fashions in
taste, “snob appeal,” and the fickleness of the public:
Some ne’er advance a Judgment of their own

But catch the spreading notion of the Town.
* It is almost impossible to pinpoint the moment when the reading public began to include a
significant number of the working classes, but most literary historians put it roughly around
1760–70. Tompkins, for example, in The Popular Novel in England: 1770–1800, reports that
novel-reading had replaced story-telling in the farmhouses, and that in town “the milliner’s
apprentice, who turns up in contemporary satire with the regularity of Macaulay’s schoolboy,
spared twopence at the library for a volume of The Fatal Compliance or Anecdotes of a Convent.”
110
Some judge of authors’ names, not works, and then

Nor praise nor blame the writings, but the men.
Some praise at morning what they blame at night;

But always think the last opinion right.80
Now Fielding found the bulk of mankind “clearly void of any degree of
taste” and suggested that the common denominator of the audience
of his day was very low indeed:
It is a quality in which they advance very little beyond a state of

infancy. The first thing a child is fond of in a book is a picture; the
second is a story; and the third is a jest. Here, then, is the true Pons
Asinorum, which few readers ever get over.81
And from a less detached viewpoint a Mr. Jackson, who wrote essays
but was primarily a designer and painter of wallpaper in Battersea,
berated the level of public taste in a piece on engraving and printing:
Persons who should prefer the gaudy and unmeaning Papers (so
generally met with) . . . would prefer a Fan to a picture of Raphael . . .
It seems also, as if there was a great Reason to suspect wherever one
sees such preposterous Furniture, that the Taste in Literature of the
Person who directed it was very deficient, and that it would prefer
Tom D’Urfy [writer of scurrilous ballads and melodrama in the first
quarter of the 18th century] to Shakespeare, Sir Richard Blackmore
to Milton . . . an Anagrammatist to Virgil. . . .82
He concludes, of course, with a commercial “snob appeal”: the reader

of his essay could demonstrate his sensitive taste in literature and on
all other counts by buying Mr. Jackson’s “classical” wallpaper.
Doubts about the capacities of their audience forced writers in turn
to face the problem of the effects of a broadening market on the writer
himself. Pope, himself an author living from the sale of his works, despite
his general pessimism about the quality of much contemporary writ-
ing, was convinced that the literary genius would eventually win public
support, and, conversely, that the writer who did not live well must
also be dull. “To prove them poor,” wrote an anonymous contributor
to Mist’s Journal in 1728, Pope “asserts that they are dull; and to prove
them dull he asserts they are poor.”83 His successors were not so sure;
Johnson, Fielding, and Goldsmith were writing works that were certainly
not “dull” in Pope’s meaning of the word for an audience which made it
increasingly clear that it was not capable of awarding the good writers
111
with more popularity than the bad. How, they asked, does the author’s
conviction that his readers are both fickle and debased in their taste
affect his integrity and creativity, and how does the book and periodical
publishers’ insistence on quantity affect the level of the writer’s work?
For Oliver Goldsmith, who contributed to at least ten periodicals
and was responsible for innumerable compilations and translations
which he undertook in order to supplement the income derived from
his other works, these were not academic questions. He debated them
with all the fervor of a man who feels his professional reputation at
stake. Consciously or otherwise, the writer is influenced by the pref-
erences of his audience; it may mean, as Goldsmith said, in his early
essay Upon Taste, that
genius, instead of growing like a vigorous tree, extending its branches

on every side . . . resembles a stunted yew, tortured into some
wretched form, projecting no shade, displaying no flower, diffusing
no fragrance, yielding no fruit, and affording nothing but a barren
conceit for the amusement of the idle spectator.84 [italics supplied.]
In the course of his prolific years to come, Goldsmith reflected often

upon the ethical and artistic conflicts of the writer dependent on
popular preferences and answered his own question whether genius
must now produce only “barren conceit” alternately yes and no. His
first original work, Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in
Europe (1759), explored the dilemma in which the writer for a grow-
ing market found himself. In this book, and in his Citizen of the World
letters written during the next few years, he managed to place himself
squarely on both horns of the dilemma.
For example, on the question of financial dependence on a paying
audience, he wrote in Chapter VIII of the Enquiry:
A long habit of writing for bread thus turns the ambition of every
author at last into avarice. . . . He despairs of applause and turn to
profit. . . . Thus the man who, under the protection of the great, might
have done honor to humanity, when only patronized by the bookseller,
becomes a thing little superior to the fellow who works at the press.85
A few years later (in the meantime he had published his short-lived
periodical The Bee, written a life of Voltaire as hack-work for the book-
sellers, and received a much-needed advance of 60 pounds, presumably
with the help of Samuel Johnson, on the Vicar of Wakefield) he wrote
a paean of thanks that the patronage of the public had replaced the
112
“protection of the great.” The writer comes into his own as the crucial
shift from Patron to Public is completed:
At present the few poets of England no longer depend on the Great
for subsistence, they have now no other patrons but the public, and
the public, collectively considered, is a good and generous master. . . .
A writer of real merit now may easily be rich if his heart be set only
on fortune: and for those who have no merit, it is but fit that such
should remain in merited obscurity. [Italics supplied]
Not only will he reap his due rewards; for the first time, he can now be
self-respecting and independent:
He may now refuse an invitation to dinner, without fearing to incur

his patron’s displeasure, or to starve by remaining at home. He may
now venture to appear in company with just such clothes as other
men generally wear, and talk even to princes, with all the conscious
superiority of wisdom. Though he cannot boast of fortune here, yet
he can bravely assert the dignity of independence.86
Or again, in the Enquiry, he had written that the author who turns to
the bookseller because he can no longer find patronage gets paid for
quantity and not for quality; that “in these circumstances the author
bids adieu to fame, writes for bread . . .” with “phlegmatic apathy.”87
In the ninety-third Citizen of the World letter, on the other hand, he
pointed out that “almost all of the excellent productions . . . that have
appeared here [in England] were purely the offspring of necessity” and
went on to recommend fasting for the sharpening of genius: “Believe
me, my friend, hunger has a most amazing faculty of sharpening the
genius; and he who with a full belly, can think like a hero, after a course
of fasting, shall rise to the sublimity of a demi-god.”88
Johnson, usually less torn by conflicts between writer and market,
raised similar questions. Who is to judge the merit of an author, he
asked at about the same time that Goldsmith voiced concern about
the fate of the literary genius, and how is he to find his way to recogni-
tion in all this “miscellany”? In discussing this problem, Johnson first
described some of the needs and predispositions of a “mass” audience:
He that endeavours after fame by writing, solicits the regard of a

multitude fluctuating in pleasures, or immersed in business, without
time for intellectual amusements; he appeals to judges, prepossessed
by passions, or corrupted by prejudices, which preclude their appro-
bation of any new performance. Some are too indolent to read any
113
thing, till its reputation is established; others too envious to promote

that fame which gives them pain by its increase.
He then went on to develop a catalogue of audience reaction:
What is new is opposed, because most are unwilling to be taught; and

what is known is rejected, because it is not sufficiently considered,
that men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. The
learned are afraid to declare their opinion early, lest they should put
their reputation in hazard; the ignorant always imagine themselves
giving some proof of delicacy, when they refuse to be pleased.
If an author achieves recognition, he concludes, it will certainly not be

attributable to the discernment of his readers:
And he that finds his way to reputation through all these obstruc-
tions, must acknowledge that he is indebted to other causes beside
his industry, his learning, or his wit.89
Such an audience cannot serve as judge; the writer therefore has to

examine the literary scene himself. He must look at the works which
are being purchased at so great a rate, and he must try to determine
why the public had not soared upward on the two wings of morality
and beauty as Addison had hoped they would, and as Pope, for all his
self-assurance about the recognition of his own works, had feared they
would not.
Indictment
In asking themselves what effect the growing market for printed goods
was having on the moral, intellectual, and aesthetic development of the
individual and upon the country as a whole, English literati probably
became the first group consciously to face the problem of popular
culture in modern society. In examining the scene about him, the eigh-
teenth century critic was not so much concerned with the new format
in which literature was being produced, such as popular magazines,
newspapers, cheap editions or reprints of books; this concern was
to develop later, when these new literary shapes had become firmly
entrenched features of modern society. He tended, rather, to focus
upon changes in content which resulted from the fact that many writ-
ers were deliberately catering to the lower levels of taste in the grow-
ing audience. The very term “popular writer,” in the derogatory sense,
came into usage for the first time in this period. Oliver Goldsmith, for
114
example, used it in the Enquiry when he expressed fear that “affecta-

tion in some popular writer” would lead “others to vicious imitation.”90
While Pope did not actually use the word “popular” in his Dunciad,
he believed that the drive for popularity accounted for the low level to
which many writers of his time had sunk.91
Marked changes in the content of the drama and the novel took place
in the first half of the century, changes which amounted to a whole-
hearted espousal of character-types of the emerging middle class. The
genre which replaced Restoration drama, sentimental or “weeping”
comedy, centered around the professional and domestic problems of
middle-class characters. The hero of these “realistic” dramas was likely
to be an everyday sort of person who was a model of virtue, and the
villain an everyday sort of person with familiar and commonplace vices.
These changes may have contributed to the respectability of the theater
but, according to at least one well-qualified observer, they also made
it considerably less amusing. Fielding wrote: “In banishing humour
from the stage, which was tantamount to banishing human nature,
the dramatist made the stage as dull as the drawing-room.”92 This shift
from socially elevated characters to city merchants and apprentices in
private life—a shift epitomized by the domestic tragedies of George Lillo
in the 1730s—brought about a notable change in the experience of the
audience: it was now possible for the ordinary theater-goer to identify
with the heroes and heroines on the stage. Restoration dramatists had
created half-real people and completely unreal situations; in the new
dramas of middle-class life, realism and believability were paramount
goals.93 This possibility for identification and imitation was the basis
for many moral (as contrasted with aesthetic) anxieties which began to
harass the intellectuals of the mid-century as they attempted to assess
and to come to terms with the new literary phenomena.
It was the novel which stimulated most of the uneasiness about the
consequences of identification with fictional characters. Many more
novels were written in a year than there were plays produced, and for
many it must have been easier to read novels than to attend the theater.
A small book, to be sure, cost about three times as much as a seat in
the upper gallery at one of the licensed theaters; but books could be
borrowed from friends and from circulating libraries, and they could
be read and re-read at the convenience of the reader. Not only was the
novel a convenient form of recreation, but its length and considerably
less rigorous construction made it more suitable to the limning of the
details and nuances of middle-class life. In general, its contents differed
115
from the romance of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in

much the same way as sentimenal comedy differed from the Restora-
tion drama. Realism of character and situation was, as Samuel Johnson
pointed out in his Rambler essay, “The Modern Form of Romance,” the
distinguishing feature of the new fiction:
The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more
particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true state, diversi-
fied only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced
by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing
with mankind.
Johnson goes on to demonstrate how this stress on realism creates a

new problem for the writer. He can no longer rely on his book-learning
alone, secure in the knowledge that he is better informed than most of
his readers. He must become an astute observer of the world of people
around him. Should he make a mistake, every “common reader” will
know it, because “our present writers” are “engaged in portraits, of
which every one knows the original, and can detect any deviation from
exactness of resemblance.”94
Dangerous Realism
Restoration comedy had mirrored the foibles of the aristocracy with
a light touch, with considerable humor, and with no small amount
of caricature. The playgoer or reader may well have been amused by
the wit and elegance of these clever writings, but he would have been
hard put to identify with its highly stylized characters. And the heroic
romance of the same period, as Johnson remarked, had discouraged
identification by resorting to machines and other convenient but far-
fetched expedients such as “giants to snatch a lady away from the nuptial
rites” and “knights to bring her back from captivity.”95
While Samuel Johnson was not alone in his concern, his analysis of
the problems raised by the new stress on realism is so pertinent that
his essay on the modern novel warrants closer analysis. He asks the
question whether, in his eagerness to portray reality, the contempo-
rary novelist might not so closely interweave the reprehensible with
the exemplary qualities of a character that the reader will become as
favorably disposed to evil as to virtue:
Many writers, for the sake of following nature, so mingle good and
bad qualities in their principal personages, that they are both equally
116
conspicuous; and as we accompany them through their adventures

with delight, and are led by degrees to interest ourselves in their favor,
we lose the abhorrence of their faults, because they do not hinder
our pleasure, or, perhaps, regard them with some kindness for being
united with so much merit.
In exploring this dilemma he points out that there have been, in the
course of history, some “splendidly wicked” men whose crimes were
never viewed as “perfectly detestable” because their often agreeable
personalities cast a pleasing aura about them. He protests against
true-to-life portrayal of such characters because they are “the great
corrupters of the world, and their resemblance ought no more to be
preserved than the art of murdering without pain.”
For all his scorn of the deus ex machina, Johnson looked back with
a tinge of regret upon the highly unrealistic romances which he had
read in his youth:
In the romances formerly written, every transaction and sentiment

was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was
in very little danger of making any applications to himself; the virtues
and crimes were equally beyond his sphere of activity; and he amused
himself with heroes and with traitors, deliverers and persecutors, as
with beings of another species . . . who had neither faults nor excel-
lences in common with himself.
He then formulates the processes of identification and imitation

encouraged by the new realistic fiction.
But when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts
in such scenes of the universal drama as may be the lot of any other
man, young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention,
and hope, by observing his behaviour and success, to regulate their
own practices, when they shall be engaged in the like part.
While such processes could have unhappy consequences, Johnson

believed that identification with fictional characters might be put to
constructive use and realistic stories made a boon to the educator:
“These familiar histories may perhaps be made of greater use than the
solemnities of professed morality, and convey the knowledge of vice
and virtue with more efficacy than axioms and definitions.” Perhaps,
Johnson concluded (with notably greater emphasis on effects than on
artistic integrity), the author should manipulate reality a bit. Virtue
should be judiciously exalted, and vice, while not to be eliminated
117
altogether, should always be portrayed in a way which leaves the reader

with a feeling of repulsion:
In narratives, where historical veracity has no place, I cannot discover
why there should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue . . .
the highest and surest that humanity can reach . . . which . . . may, by
conquering some calamities and enduring others, teach us what we
may hope and what we can perform. Vice, for vice is necessary to be
shown, should always disgust,
As though he were formulating a self-regulatory code for novel-writers,

he concludes with a plea for what amounts to “all-white or all-black”
character portrayals:*
Nor should the graces of gayety, or the dignity of courage, be so united
with it [vice] as to reconcile it to the mind: wherever it appears, it
should raise hatred by the malignity of its practices, and contempt
by the meanness of its stratagems; for while it is supported by either
parts or spirits, it will be seldom heartily abhorred. . . . There are
thousands of readers . . . willing to be thought wicked, if they may
be allowed to be wits.96
Johnson was not alone in his complaints about the abuses of realism.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a writer of charming letters though not a
professional critic, touched upon the matter in a private correspondence.
Referring to the realism of the character portrayals in Richardson’s Cla-
rissa and Pamela, she singled them out as the “two books that will do
more general mischief than the works of Lord Rochester.”97 And Oliver
Goldsmith went even further than Johnson in recommending that novels
be especially adapted to youth. In an essay on education, he expressed con-
cern about the effects of true-to-life characterizations and advocated that
there be some men of wit employed to compose books that might
equally interest the passions of our youth . . . to be explicit as pos-
sible, the old story of Whittington, were his cat left out, might be
more serviceable to the tender mind than either Tom Jones, Joseph
Andrews or an hundred others.
* Johnson’s criticism of Shakespeare was based largely on the grounds that he did not do any
judicious weighing of good against evil in his characterizations. In the preface to his edition of
Shakespeare, he writes that on the contrary, Shakespeare “carries his persons indifferently through
right and wrong, and at the close dismisses them without further care, and leaves their examples
to operate by chance. This fault the barbarity of his age cannot extenuate; for it is always a writer’s
duty to make the world better . . .”
118
Instead of suggesting that professional writers adapt their works to the

educational needs of youth, Goldsmith proposed that schoolmasters
be put to work composing novels:
Were our schoolmasters, if any of them have sense enough to draw

up such a work, thus employed, it would be much more serviceable
to their pupils, than all the grammars and dictionaries they may
publish these ten years.98
While both Johnson and Goldsmith drew fairly clear distinctions

between mature and immature readers (that is, their worries about the
effects of realism were largely confined to youth), they did not draw
hard and fast lines between various levels of fiction. Moral problems,
they felt, were posed by all realistic fiction, whether the work of a
genius or of a hack.
Few writers maintained consistent viewpoints on questions of real-
ism. Henry Mackenzie, for example, the author of what has become a
proverbially sentimental novel, The Man of Feeling, followed this “all-
white” product a few years later with The Man of the World in which
the hero was from a quite different color of cloth. A contemporary
reviewer of the second novel scolded Mackenzie for not sufficiently
punishing his wayward hero, a reformed seducer, who “should either
have been sent to the devil, or his reformation should have been in
consequence of a long and bitter repentance.”99 Mackenzie himself
either changed his mind or kept his various writing selves distinctly
separate: ten years after The Man of Feeling he wrote disparagingly, in
his Lounger, of the
mingled virtue and vice which is to be found in some of the best

of our novels. Instances will readily occur to every reader, where
the hero of the performance has violated, in one page, the most
sacred laws of society, to whom, by the mere turning of the leaf,
we are to be reconciled, whom we are to be made to love and
admire, for the beauty of some humane, or the brilliancy of some
heroic action.100
Dr. Johnson, on the other hand, while he had on one occasion rec-
ommended that characters be thoroughly good or thoroughly evil, on
another endorsed realism, though it necessarily involved the picturing
of wickedness. In his Lives of the Poets, published nearly thirty years
after the Rambler essay on fiction, he insists that the writer, while
119
occasionally justified in gratifying the audience by making things pleas-

ant, is bound also to show life as it really is.*101
True-to-life portrayals could easily become boring, and writers
resorted to many devices for sustaining interest in the ordinary people
and situations portrayed in their novels and plays. Two methods for
insuring audience appeal were full descriptions of tender sentiments
and, at the other extreme, detailed spellings-out of scenes of aggres-
sion, violence, or horror. Very often, in the manner of the Hollywood
motion picture, these two sets of attractions were combined in the
same production, always making sure that the sensitive hero was the
victim and not the perpetrator of aggression.
These devices for offsetting boredom confronted the creative writer
with a number of additional problems.
First, does not the realistic portrayal of crime and violence, of which
the English audience was considered to be inordinately fond, both
reflect and encourage sadism in the audience?
Second, when everyday characters are made less boring by a gen-
erous endowment of sentimentality, are not the heads of the readers
filled with romantic notions which will stand them in no good stead as
they go about the business of making a living (or marrying a man) in
the workaday world? Worse still, may they not use identification with
the unreal world of emotion as a means of escape from the exigencies
of everyday life?
Third, perhaps again because of the very familiarity of these realis-
tic characters and situations, the audience began to attach increasing
importance to novelty and variety as values in themselves. How, asked
the writer, can we keep this desire for sensationalism from even further
debasing the taste of the public?
Fourth, with an avalanche of mass-produced material which makes
few demands on the reader and not many more on the writer, is there
not a very real danger that the world of letters may be entering a period
of mediocrity?
Crime and Violence
Though the modern media have more graphic, and more ubiquitous,
representational device at their disposal than did those of the eighteenth
* This does not mean a victory of realism over moralism in Dr. Johnson’s approach to literature.
As René Wellek points out, in his History of Modern Criticism, the two strands—together with
an element of abstractionism—were closely interwoven in all of Johnson’s criticism, but “more
frequently the moralist is dominant, to the exclusion and even detriment of the critic (V. I, p. 83).”
120
century, descriptions of sadism and brutality did not spring full-blown

from the comic book or the television set. As a matter of fact, some of
the “horror” novels which enjoyed popularity in the last three decades
of the century make those “comic” books of sex and sadism which are
sold from under the counter today look pallid by comparison.
The genre called “Gothic” romance, foreshadowed by Walpole’s
Castle of Otranto (1764), reached its peak a quarter of a century later in
M. G. Lewis’ The Monk, a romance built almost entirely around scenes
of sadism, sensuality, and fright.* Lewis’s work rapidly went through a
number of editions and set a new standard for brutality which was to
be imitated in most of the English Gothic novels to come. But while
these horror tales stirred up small furors at the time of publication,
the peak of popular as well as intellectual reaction was not reached
until after 1800.
The debate over “crime and violence” in the drama, however, was
waged with vigor throughout the eighteenth century. Concern about
the murders and tortures which had long been commonplace on the
stage had formed part of the objections to the theater raised by the neo-
Puritans. But in general neither they nor their successors differentiated
between profanity and lewdness on the one hand and criminal or brutal
behavior on the other. Furthermore, when Defoe and others referred to
the stage as a “nursery of crime,” they were as much distressed about
the behavior of the audience and about the “corrupting” environs of the
theater as they were about what took place on the stage. Among less
moralistic critics, aggression and violence on the stage were the main
objects of concern. Even Addison, who was rather tolerant of the
excesses of the opera and stage, raised the issue:
But among all our Methods of moving Pity or Terror, there is none
so absurd and barbarous, and what more exposes us to the Contempt
and Ridicule of our Neighbours, than that dreadful butchering of one
another which is so very frequent upon the English stage.
He sympathizes with French critics who had pointed to the sight of

“Men stabbed, poisoned, racked or impaled” on the English stage as
“the Sign of a cruel Temper” in the English national character. Addison
goes on to decry the favorite climax of the stage tragedies of his day,
* Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho was perhaps the outstanding novel of suspense of the
period; in contrast to M. G. Lewis, Mrs. Radcliffe explained away the supernatural by rational
means, and relied on curiosity rather than fear as the main appeal of her work.
121
wherein every prop for murder and torture is used in a grand free-for-
all of mass slaughter:
It is indeed very odd, to see our Stage strewed with Carcasses in
the last Scene of a Tragedy; and to observe in the Ward-robe of the
Play-house several Daggers, Poinciards, Wheels, Bowls for Poison
and many other Instruments of Death.102
But in spite of such disdain, the English audience’s love of blood and
violence continued to be fed. In the mid-thirties, Henry Fielding pub-
lished his skit, Pasquin, which ridiculed several of the dramatic excesses
of the day, not least the addiction to slaughter and poison. Twenty years
later, Oliver Goldsmith observed that “death and tenderness are leading
passions of every modern buskined hero; this moment they embrace,
and the next stab, mixing daggers and kisses in every period.”103 And
David Hume, in his treatise Of Tragedy, excoriated such realistic portray-
als of horror because they interfere with the main objectives of tragedy:
An action, represented in tragedy, may be too bloody and atrocious.
. . . Such is that action represented in the Ambitious Stepmother,
where a venerable old man, raised to the heights of fury and despair,
rushes against a pillar, and striking his head upon it, besmears it all
over with mingled brains and gore. The English theatre abounds too
much with such images.104
Unlike present-day discussion of this topic, no eighteenth century critic

seems to have condoned fictional or dramatic portrayals of “crime and
violence,” and reference to the Aristotelian concept of catharsis is in
this connection (though not in connection with suffering from other
causes) conspicuously absent.
Sentimentality
Goldsmith, in his Essay on the Theatre, reports the reaction of “a friend”
to the unembroidered presentation of middle-class city-types and their
practical problems. The friend left the theater in the middle of a play
about a moneylender remarking, “It is indifferent to me whether he
be turned out of his counting house on Fish Street Hill, since he will
have enough left to open shop in St. Giles’s. . . .”105 While the drama
tried to counteract such boredom with violence and other “special
attractions,” the novelists, for their part, had their own devices. Rich-
ardson had set the tone: portrayals of the plights and successes of the
middle and lower middle classes could be invested with considerable
appeal by the inclusion of detailed descriptions of their affairs of the
122
heart. Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield is generally considered to be an

outstanding work of this genre and Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling
represents the extreme of the novel which combined the ordinary and
the realistic in character and setting with detailed descriptions and
exaltations of sentiment.*
In “the novel of sentiment” and the “novel of sensibility” (which
differed from each other more in degree than in kind) the emotions
were more important than behavior, and rationality in either thought
or behavior was relegated to crude and insensitive souls. Forgiveness
and repentance were the pinnacles of human feeling, and the reasons
for actions which led to forgiveness or repentance were as irrelevant as
the murder which opens the modern mystery story. It was the detailed
and lengthy portrayals of emotions that gave rise to the first discussions
about the dangers of escapism.
Because of the improbable nature of the seventeenth and early
eighteenth century romance, and perhaps also because it had been
read by fewer people than was the novel of sentiment, few before the
middle of the century had been concerned about the effect of fiction on
the reader. Addison, to be sure, had poked mild fun at a gentlewoman
who consumed many of these fanciful tales and eventually undertook
to while away her time by re-doing her estate to resemble a romantic
grotto,106 but he was neither indignant nor alarmed about the social
consequences of such indulgence.
The stress on sentimental bliss in the novels of the second half of
the century gave rise to the more socially significant kind of concern.
Over-indulgence in fiction has two serious consequences: it keeps the
reader from useful endeavours and fills his head with romantic dreams,
which will be impossible to attain in real life. Oliver Goldsmith, despite
The Vicar of Wakefield, often warned against the dangers of living in
the transported world of sentiment. In a letter to his brother about his
nephew’s education, he even advised the father to prohibit novel reading
altogether. Such romantic pictures of the world are snares and delusions
to youth: “They teach the young mind to sigh after beauty and happi-
ness which never existed; to despite the little good which fortune has
* The prevailingly sentimental tone of the novels of this period has been attributed in part to the
fact that there was a great influx of women novelists who wrote for the largely female novel-reading
public. Certainly contemporary satire on such lady novelists was not lacking: Tobias Smollett,
among others, went out of his way, in Humphrey Clinker, to point out that the failure of one of
his characters as a novelist was excusable because the ladies had the field of “spirit, delicacy, and
knowledge of the human heart” all to themselves.
123
mixed in their cup, by expecting more than she gave.”107 The reading of
sentimental novels, in short, is not practical. But the pastime is perhaps
more dangerous for the young girl than for the young man, because she
who is fed on sentiment and sensibility will be hard pressed to love a
man whose daily life is filled with the routine demands of earning a living
for wife and family. Furthermore, as William Cowper noted with some
indignation, the young lady is likely to become so over-stimulated by
the reading of such “sentimental frippery and dream,” of “sniv’ling and
driv’ling folly,” that no mere insertion of a warning will “quench the fire.”108
The middle-class character had best be equipped with middle-aged
sentiments, for too great a concern with tender feelings ill-equips
a youth for bourgeois life. Richardson’s Charlotte Grandison argue
that “a mild, sedate convenience is better than a stark staring mad
passion. . . . Who ever hears of darts, flames, Cupids . . . and such like
nonesense in matrimony? Passion is transitory.”109
But such warnings did not stem the tide of sentimental literature
which provided readers with escape from the humdrum of everyday
life. The middle class may have wanted to see itself in a mirror but it
wanted to see its materialistic self dressed up and made more appealing
with delicate sensibilities.
Novelty and Variety
Concern about man’s search for distraction did not come into being
with the dawn of the eighteenth century and the development of sale-
able literary goods. Montaigne, and later Pascal, had debated the issue
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.* But it was Voltaire’s Essay
on Taste, published in 1757, which alerted writers and scholars to the
implications of the problem in a society rapidly becoming inundated
with all kinds of written entertainment.
Voltaire, examining the general cultural scene of his times, found that
the publick, fond of novelty, applauds their invention; but this
applause is soon succeeded by satiety and disgust. A new set of artists
start up, invent new methods to please a capricious taste, and depart
still further from nature. . . . Overwhelmed with new inventions,
which succeed and efface each other with incredible rapidity, they
scarcely know where they are . . .110
Looking at the growing market for literary product and at the mani-
fest inclinations of the audience which was purchasing them, the
* See Chapters 1 and 2 of this volume.
124
English men of letters found ample proof that Voltaire’s concern

was justified.
David Garrick faced the public demand for novelty in his three-fold
capacity as dramatist, actor, and theater manager. In the course of his
thirty-year career he found it increasingly necessary to water down his
artistic standards with “propping-up” devices and double feature billings
which would supply “the many various objects that amuse these busy
curious times.”111 Dr. Johnson devoted one of his Idler essays to “terrific”
diction—a mannerism of obscurity adopted by some writers to add a note
of novelty to the commonplace. In explaining the motivation behind this
device (which he dubs the “bugbear” style), Johnson says that the demand
to see “common things in an uncommon manner” is characteristic of the
times. The kinds of devices which popular writers resort to are those on
the order of telling time by algebra, drinking tea by stratagem, in short
“to quit the beaten track only because it is known, and to take a new path,
however crooked or rough, because the straight was found out before.”
In another Idler essay he speaks of “the multiplication of books,”
particularly of compilations, and notes that they serve no real purpose
but merely “distract choice.” He concludes, however, that such writers
do little harm in the long run because they are merely symptoms of a
short-lived fad.112
It was the magazines which most conspicuously catered to the
demand for variety, but oddly enough, these popular “miscellanies,”
whose number increased rapidly as the century wore on, were not
attacked with any consistency by the serious writers.* Oliver Goldsmith,
however, did devote one of his essays to some good-natured raillery
of the magazines. He compares his lot as an essayist who can write
upon only one subject at a time with those more “fortunate” maga-
zine writers who can write upon several and thus avoid the risk of
boring their readers. The magazine which he describes resembles the
Gentleman’s Magazine or some similar eighteenth century original of
Reader’s Digest:
If a magazine be dull upon the Spanish war, he soon has us up again

with the Ghost in Cock Lane; if the reader begins to doze upon that,
he is quickly roused by an Eastern tale: tales prepare us for poetry,
and poetry for the meteorological history of the weather. It is the
* It is possible that the intellectuals were inclined to consider the magazine beneath their notice,
just as they seem to have left criticism of the popular novels of the latter part of the century to
“middlebrow” writers.
125
life and soul of a magazine never to be long dull upon one subject;
and the reader, like the sailor’s horse, has at least the comfortable
refreshment of having the spur often changed.
Ironically complaining that he sees no reason why the magazine writ-

ers should “carry off all the rewards of genius,” Goldsmith goes on to
outline a plan for changing the format of his own essays, making them
a magazine in miniature in which he proposes to “hop from subject
to subject.” He also gives notice that, if properly encouraged, he will
decorate his magazine with pictures. The journal is to be called the
Infernal Magazine and, unlike others of the same genre, it will live
up to its advertised promise to astonish society. Obeisances are then
made to the prospective audience in the usual style of eighteenth cen-
tury prospectuses, and Goldsmith assures his readers-to-be that the
magazine is to be run by gentlemen of distinction (and means) who
will perform this public service not for personal gain but purely for
their own amusement.113
Nuances of feeling and sentiment offered one way to add appeal to
the pedestrian characters and situations which dominated the popular
writings of the time. Exotic settings provided another. The opening up
of the Far East to British trade had resulted in what was perhaps one of
the most sweeping fads England has ever experienced. Music, fabrics,
dress styles, furniture, architecture, gardening, and painting—nothing
escaped the great demand for the Oriental. The “nabob” who disap-
peared into China for a year or two and came home with his pockets full
of gold became, for a time, a hero. Writers made short shrift of turning
the situation to their own advantage. Nabobs were adulated on the
stage where they often proved to be a great dramatic convenience, and
essays, letters, and novels took the ordinary Englishman into extraordi-
nary surroundings, replete with elaborate trappings and a heavy veil of
mystery (it need hardly be added that the adventurer usually followed
tradition and remained an Englishman for all that). In these tales of
Oriental adventure, the “wisdom of the East” was often exalted, as in
William Whitehead’s prologue to Arthur Murphy’s version of Voltaire’s
L’Orphelin de la Chine (1759)—“and boldly bears Confucius’ morals to
Britannia’s ears. Accept th’imported boon.”114
A few chauvinistic voices were heard saying, in effect, “What does
the Orient offer that England cannot match or better?” But by and large
the fashion for the Oriental, which was as popular among royalty as
among shopgirls, was not considered as dangerous to the reader as was
126
indulgence in the sentimental. Furthermore, it was good for trade and

perhaps, with its tales of hard-won riches, even provided additional
incentives, if any were needed, for concentrating on the practical (and
remunerative) aspects of life.
For the most part, the world of letters confined itself to pointing to
the Chinese fad as one more proof of the public’s insatiable need for
novelty and variety. The jaded European, as Goldsmith remarked with
considerably more detachment than he had shown in his remarks about
the novel of sentiment, “has, of late, had recourse even to China, in
order to diversify the amusements of the day.”115 He himself, not without
some apology, used the Oriental touch as a device for strengthening the
appeal of his commentary on various aspects of contemporary life, as
his Citizen of the World—“letters from a Chinese philosopher residing
in London to his friends in the East”—testifies. In his introduction to
these letters, he first complains about the fickleness of the audience
and the indiscriminate way in which praise is lavished on the “mob” of
popular writers, and then reports a dream in which
the success of such numbers [of authors] at last began to operate
on me. If these, cried I, meet with favour and safety, some luck may,
perhaps, for once attend the unfortunate. I am resolved to make a
new adventure.
He then comments that, while thus far the “frippery and fireworks of
China” have merely served to “vitiate” the public taste, he will “try how
far they can help to improve our understanding.”116
Goldsmith and his fellow writers were less tolerant of the far reaches
to which the public’s desire for novelty had led in the opera and drama.
The seventeenth century theater had catered to a rather more hetero-
geneous audience than had the printed works of the time. To sustain
the interest of people with diverse tastes it had made use of a variety
of audience appeals. The “spectacular” or “sensational” devices to
which eighteenth century dramatists and theater managers resorted
were, therefore, not essentially different in kind from those used in
the days of Addison (or, for that matter, in the Elizabethan period).
Addison had, in fact, devoted more than one issue of the Spectator to
the abuses of the operatic stage, though his remonstrances were mild
in comparison with those Pope was to write in twenty years and those
of Goldsmith and Fielding forty years later. Addison found many of
the popular attention-getting devices quite legitimate—his plea was
merely for a more judicious application. Thunder and lightning, bells
127
and ghosts, all have their “proper season” and, used with restraint,
are to be applauded. The same is true of the much-maligned handker-
chief, the “principal machine” for the “moving of pity”: it should not
be eliminated, but its flutterings should have some connection with
the words of the actor.117 About one minor attraction, however, he
was not quite so tolerant. In another issue of the Spectator he writes
that it is customary to impress the audience with the lofty character
of the hero by the lofty height of the plumes on his head, as though
“a great Man and a tall Man” were the same thing. Not only is this an
affront to the audience, but most embarrassing for the actor because,
“notwithstanding any Anxieties which he pretends for his Mistress,
his Country or his Friends, one may see by his Actions that his great-
est Care and Concern is to keep the Plume of Feathers from falling
off his Head.”118
Addison’s sharpest sarcasm was reserved for the indiscriminate
mixing of the representational with the real. In ridiculing the release
of live birds from a cage on the stage of the opera house, he objected
not that they were put there in the first place but that their songs ema-
nated all too obviously from man-blown instruments hidden behind
the scenery. Apparently intending to frighten stage-managers into
their senses, he concludes with a description of where such absurdi-
ties might lead:
I found . . . that there were great Designs on Foot for the Improvement
of the Opera; that it had been proposed to break down a part of the
Wall, and to surprize the Audience with a Party of an hundred Horse,
and that there was actually a Project of bringing the New-River into
the House, to be employed in Jetteaus and Waterworks.119
Had Addison lived on to the middle of the century, he would have found
that instead of giving the stage-managers pause, he may have put new
ideas into their heads, for audio-visual claptrap became more than ever
the order of the day as the stage and opera had more strenuously to
compete with magazines and novels for public attention.
Eloquent satirizers were not lacking as the abuses multiplied. Pope
certainly did not overlook the stage as he lampooned the world of let-
ters of his time:
The play stands still; damn action and discourse,
Back fly the scenes, and enter foot and horse;
Pageants on pageants, in long order drawn,
Peers, heralds, bishops, ermine, gold, and lawn.120
128
But again it remained for Goldsmith to conduct the most thorough-

going analysis, this one in his The Chinese Goes to See a Play. First he
points out that daggers and kisses are mixed in every scene. He then
goes on to report an entr’acte episode which took place right after the
curtain fell on just such a mixture of love and sadism:
My attention was engrossed by a new object; a man came in bal-

ancing a straw upon his nose, and the audience were clapping their
hand in all the raptures of applause. To what purpose, cried I, does
this unmeaning figure make his appearance; is he a part of the plot?
Analyzing the nature of the appeal of this vaudeville-like performance,

Goldsmith postulates an ironic theory about its projective potentiali-
ties. Such a trick has something in it for everyone:
Unmeaning, do you call him, replied my friend. . . . This is one of the

most important characters of the whole play; nothing pleases the
people more than the seeing a straw balanced; there is a great deal of
meaning in the straw; there is something suited to every apprehen-
sion in the sight; and a fellow possessed of talents like these is sure
of making his fortune.
Between the third and fourth acts, the “Chinese” is surprised to see a
child of six appear, “learning to dance” on the stage. At the end of the
fourth act the heroine fell into a fit, whereupon the
fifth act began, and a busy piece it was. Scenes shifting, trumpets
sounding, mobs hallooing, carpets spreading, guards bustling from
one door to another; gods, daemons, daggers, racks and ratsbane.
But whether the king was killed, or the queen was drowned, or the
son was poisoned, I have absolutely forgotten.121
Another Citizen of the World letter is devoted to a description of

the seasonal opening of the two licensed theaters, the Drury Lane and
Covent Garden. Goldsmith first remarks on the competition between
the two houses in which
the generals of either army have . . . several reinforcements to lend

occasional assistance. If they produce a pair of diamond buckles at
one house, we have a pair of eyebrows that can match them at the
other. . . . If we can bring more children on the stage, they can bring
more guards in red clothes, who strut and shoulder their swords to
the astonishment of every spectator.
129
He ridicules the idea that the audience—despite the virtuous platitudes

of the times—can possibly derive any instruction from such perfor-
mances, and reports that, “what with trumpets, hallooing behind the
stage and bawling upon it,” he himself always gets dizzy long before
the performance is over. Calling the situation what it largely was—a
money-making proposition—Goldsmith expresses surprise that the
play-writing trade has not set up an apprentice system, since there
would seem to be nothing easier than to write for the English stage:
The author, when well acquainted with the value of thunder and light-
ning; when versed in all the mystery of scene-shifting and trap-doors;
when skilled in the proper periods to introduce a wire-walker or a
waterfall;. . . he knows all that can give a modern audience pleasure.
And—as in the case of the Infernal Magazine—he continues his essay

with some ironic advice to the author who wishes to achieve popularity.
First, he should never expect the actor to adjust to the requirements
of a drama; it is the author’s responsibility to appraise the particular
abilities of each actor, and to write his play around their respective
talents for expressing fear, pain or surprise. Such moans and groans
and exclamations are the surest way to win the applause of the audi-
ence. There is, in fact, no other way to win an audience. The author
will find his consolation in the knowledge that once having acquired
such skills, he needs no other talents, and the playgoer can relax in the
certainty that once in the theater he can “dismiss from the mind all the
fatigue of thinking.”122
To this facetious advice to the dramatist can be added a number of
other examples. In his Essay on the Theater written two decades after the
Citizen of the World Goldsmith formulates the problem of the “paying”
audience in terms so modern that they might well be taken for a mid-
twentieth century discussion of the motion picture. He begins with a
criticism of sentimental comedy and suggests that such plays are largely
popular because the dramatists go out of their way to cater to the public
demand for novelty. He then acts as his own antagonist, saying that after
all the theater is “formed to amuse mankind, and that it matters little, if
this end be answered, by what means it is obtained.” Whatever pleases
the audience is good, “success . . . is a mark of [its] merit.” Assuming
his own role once more, he then raises the question—since become
very familiar, but no more answered in our time than his—what would
happen if the audience were provided with good drama?123
130
But the English audience continued to enjoy the various devices hit
upon for its excitement and amusement. The grotesque effect of the
“intermingling of daggers and kisses” is reported by a German visitor
to a British play, in which the leading lady was so moved by her tragic
situation that she was incapacitated for the rest of the performance
and had to be carried off the stage unconscious. And the audience,

too, unable to endure the strain, departed, so that the piece had to
be finished without the leading lady, before a handful of unusually
hard-boiled spectators.124
However powerful the appeal of the tragic emotions, it was for

lavish displays that the eighteenth century audience reserved its
most unbounded enthusiasm. During Garrick’s management of the
Drury Lane, four lush pantomimes and Garrick’s own “spectacular”
The Jubilee all ran considerably longer than any serious drama pro-
duced in the same period. After a very brief initial run, most of the
genuine works of art, as Garrick regretfully remarked even of his
Shakespeare productions, had to be “propped up” by the addition of
well-advertised and ever “new” baubles such as parades, masquer-
ades, and dances.125
It was this demand for novelty from the reading and playgoing
audiences which made it possible for almost any writer to have his
day of popularity, provided only he could convince his public that
he was giving them something they had never experienced before.
Pope attempted to discourage the opportunists who cared to this
propensity by deriding them with names and titles, but he had the
advantage of perusing the scene fairly early in the century when
one book could contain them all. His successors, unable to cope
with the deluge case by case, were of necessity considerably less
specific.
Mediocrity
The idea of cyclical movements in the arts and sciences is to be
found in almost any age. In eighteenth century England, this con-
cept, together with the idea that his own period was one of decline,
seems first to have been formulated by David Hume in the essay on
The Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences (1742). He states that
when the “arts and sciences come to perfection in any state . . . they
naturally, or rather necessarily, decline . . . and seldom or never revive
in that nation. . . .”126 A few years later, somewhat less dogmatically,
131
Voltaire echoed Hume from across the Channel: “The taste of a

nation may degenerate and become extremely depraved; and it almost
always happens that the period of its perfection is the forerunner
of its decline.”127
Neither Hume nor Voltaire seem to have related their ideas about a
decline directly to the growing audience and the popular literature with
which it was being fed, though Hume did say that the public’s desire for
novelty “leads men wide of simplicity and nature, and fills their writings
with affectation and conceit.”128 But other writers of the midcentury
did connect their fears with the new tyranny of public demand and
the new spate of popular works. Among the first protagonists of this
concept, we find Pope and Swift complaining about the lack of literary
qualifications of writers in general; we find less eminent authors com-
plaining about hack novelists and their methods of production; and we
find readers as well as writers complaining about the literary unwor-
thiness of the new crop of fictional characters emerging in eighteenth
century literature. Finally, we find a group of philosophers and writers
seriously disturbed about the fact that, with the increase in literacy,
anyone and everyone can become a literary critic, that incompetents
are now passing judgment, and that literary standards may, as a result,
be shattered altogether.*
Some time before the publication of the first edition of The
Dunciad (1729), Pope wrote to Swift that it was the “little” writers of
the world who made him angry, the “party writers, dull poets, and
wild criticks.”
My spleen is at the little rogues of it; it would vex one more to be

knocked on the head with a piss-pot than by a thunderbolt. . . . But
to be squirted to death, as poor Wycherly [the eminent Restoration
comic playwright had died in 1716] said to me on his death-bed, by
apothecaries’ apprentices, by the understrappers of under-secretaries
* Thomas Carlyle, in reviewing English literature of the eighteenth century in his Lectures on the
History of Literature (1838), regretted the quackery resulting from the selling of literary goods
and reflected that it would bring about great confusion among “all men.”
“. . . an observer sees the quack established; he sees truth trodden down to the earth every-
where around him; in his own office he sees quackery at work, and that part of it which is done
by quackery is done better than all the rest; till at last he, too, concludes in favor of this order of
things and gets himself enrolled among this miserable set, eager after profit, and of no belief except
the belief always held among such persons, that Money will buy money’s worth, and that Pleasure
is pleasant. But woe to that land and its people if, for what they do, they expect payment at all
times! It is bitter to see. . . . All men will suffer from it with confusion in the very heart of them.”
132
to secretaries who were no secretaries—this would provoke as dull

a dog as Philips* himself.129
The objective of the book was, in his own words, to “dissuade the
dull and punish the malicious” authors of his day. The poem consists
of direct and often highly personal attacks not only on those writers
whom Pope considered to be second-rate, but on the booksellers,
book-puffers, and book-reviewers who by promoting such writers were
assuaging the public hunger for information and novelty. The heroine,
or better, the bête noire of the Dunciad is the Goddess of Dullness, a
“laborious, heavy, busy, bold and blind” deity who seems to be coming
into her own in the eighteenth century world of letters. In addition to
her coterie of writers and hacks, she is surrounded by a public whom
Pope categorizes as Tasteless Admirers, Flatterers of Dunces, Indolent
Persons and Minute Philosophers. Early in the poem the Goddess
requests the Dunces to instruct a group of young students who enter
the scene. The consequence of their teaching is that the youths taste
the cup “which causes total oblivion of all Obligations, divine, civil,
moral or rational” and are thus rendered unfit to play a constructive
role in life.130 In other words, the future of civilized society has become
endangered because the students, who are the hope of that society, are
being corrupted by dull, stupid, uncreative reading material produced
by incompetents.131
The second edition of The Dunciad (1743) was considerably less
personal and at the same time broader in scope than the first, going
beyond the realm of literature proper to address itself to the theater, the
opera, and even to education and politics. The two editions together
compose the major broadside against particular writers; and the popu-
lar “little rogues” of literature whom Pope attacked have, as one of his
recent editors has pointed out, all vindicated his judgment by sinking
into oblivion.132
The fear of a decline centered on both the novel and the drama. In
the case of the novel, the peaks attained by Richardson and Fielding,
and later by Sterne and Smollett, were infinitely higher than anything
achieved in the subsequent two or three decades of the century. Their
works, in retrospect, were seen not as a starting point of a new era in
the novel, but as its culmination. It was the serious-minded journal-
ists rather than the few great literary figures of the latter half of the
* Presumably John Philips, 1631-1706, a nephew of Milton, employed largely as translator and
hack-writer.
133
century who trained their sights on the cruder novelists.* To take one
instance, The Sylph, a short-lived single-essay periodical published late
in the century, devoted an issue to a lively parody of the way in which
the popular novels were being slapped together: the trick is to spread
the words mechanically across the page, shuffle them about to form
sentences, and
according to the arrangement and collection of them [they] become
narrations, speeches, sentiments, descriptions, etc. and when a very
great quantity of them . . . are wedged together after a particular form
and manner, they are denominated a NOVEL.133
Another magazine writer recommended, in the manner of Swift, that

engines be adopted to make the novel-writing process easier, and
contributors to several other respected journals of the latter half of
the century made frequent quips about the plagiarisms, repetitions,
and patchwork that often went into what was released as a novel. With
such a multitude turning out novels, grumbled one, all themes have
been used up; the novel has had its day:
The manufacture of novels has been so long established, that in

general they have arrived at mediocrity. . . . We are indeed so sick-
ened with this worn-out species of composition, that we have lost
all relish for it.134
The deterioration in the English drama after 1740 has been attrib-
uted in part to the sheer accident that no great dramatist developed
in this period; but the fact that audiences represented a broader social
background and were at the same time artistically less interested than
audiences of the first half of the century also deserves consideration.135
Furthermore, as we have already remarked, middle-class realism
tended to be more boring on the stage than in print. Another reason
ventured for the decline in the drama was that the physical alterations
made in order to accommodate larger audiences required adaptations
by playwright and actor which militated against “good theater.” The
lighting was dim, the acoustics poor, and the exaggeration required
to overcome these deficiencies lent a farcical note to the tragic and
comic alike.
* In twentieth century terminology we might say that this is a typical example of the middlebrows
criticizing the lowbrows. Highbrows, as we have seen, did not differentiate, at least not until the
end of the century when Jane Austen’s parodies of the novel of terror might be viewed as the
highbrow singling out the middlebrow.
134
But for many artists it was the multiplication of “judges and critics”
which seems to have been most portentous of a decline in the literary
world. As the ability to read spread to all ranks of society, it seemed
that anyone could become an arbiter of standards; “in short,” as one
periodical essayist remarked, “fiddlers, players, singers, dancers and
mechanics themselves are all the sons and daughters of taste.”136 Oliver
Goldsmith, in his Enquiry, which he prefaced with the remark that
he takes the decay of genius in his age for granted, placed much of
the blame squarely on the multiplying number of critics or would-be
critics.137
What rankled most seems not to have been the professionals but
the amateurs in the audience. Writers had long had the field of liter-
ary standards to themselves, and the only threat to their self-imposed
criteria was the necessity of now and then composing a paean of praise
to a wealthy patron, when they were fortunate enough to have one. In
the final analysis, this concern about the voices of the people amounted
to a rallying behind Goldsmith in his pessimistic mood—“when only
patronized by the bookseller the writer becomes a thing little superior
to the fellow who works at the press”—rather than behind his opti-
mistic formulation: “the public, collectively considered, is a good and
generous master.” Not only was “everyone” becoming articulate in the
expression of literary judgments; worse still, there were so many levels
of audience opinion that it seemed to the artists that their tastes were
irreconcilable.
From all sides came the complaint. Fielding wrote:
How is it possible at once to please

Tastes so directly opposite as these?138
And Garrick addressed the several levels of his audience as follows:
What shall we do your different tastes to hit?

You relish satire (to the pit) you ragouts of wit (to the boxes)
Your taste is humour and high-season’s joke. (First Gallery)
You call for hornpipe and for hearts of oak. (Second Gallery)139
The critic Warburton sympathized with the fate of the dramatists who
are often used like ladies of pleasure: they are received with rapture
and enthusiasm by the public on their first appearance, but on farther
acquaintance are received very coolly, though they have indeed by
this time greatly improved themselves in the art of pleasing.140
135
Cibber, speaking in his role of stage manager, was first to point out a
new way of looking at the audience, one which was eventually to effect
a compromise between the standards of the artist and the divers tastes
of the new public. In one of his Two Dissertations on the Theatres, he
speaks of the phrase “the Town” which was commonly used to designate
the audience. Ask an author or an actor (individually) whom he has in
mind when he uses this phrase, predicts Cibber, and he will tell you
that he means the “judging few”—but if you ask him to specify these
judging few you will see that each will point to his respective friends,
to “those who approve, and cry up their several Performances.” Ask a
theatrical manager and he will also refer to those opinions of the “Town”
which are most agreeable to him and which echo what he wants most
to hear. Actually, Cibber continues, the matter is not so simple. It is
necessary to distinguish several levels of influence within the audience.
Regardless of walk of life, it is those people who are interested in and
who, in their respective circles, give encouragement to the theater who
constitute the true “opinion leaders.”
I think, the Town may be supposed to include all Degrees of Per-

sons, from the highest Nobleman, to the lowly Artisan, etc., who, in
their different Stations, are Encouragers of dramatic performances:
Thus all persons, who pay for their places, whether Noble, Gentle,
or Simple, who fill the Boxes, Pit and Galleries in a theatrical Sence,
form the Town.141
In a way, Cibber’s remarks might be construed as a plea for democracy

in art. Many more gifted artists, in the face of the dilemma posed by
the growing middle- and lower-class audience, were to attempt to find
theoretical grounds for supporting this pluralistic viewpoint. But the task
was difficult, and there were class as well as aesthetic barriers to be faced.
In the early half of the century, the middle class struggled successfully
to assert its values and interests against those prevailing among the
aristocracy. The increasing industrialization and the new importance
attaching to the role of the worker in the latter half of the century,
however, brought about a shift in focus: the middle class now began to
suspect that its most dangerous enemies were below instead of above
it. And while class lines in the world of letters were not sharply etched,
neither were they altogether obscured.
During the latter half of the century the social status of fictional
characters became an object of some concern. In the 1770s this form
of snobbism was sufficiently recognized that the name tapino-phoby
136
was coined for it. In 1773 the cleric-novelist Richard Graves used the
term in his book The Spiritual Quixote; just after introducing a cobbler
into his story, he interrupted the narrative with a warning to
such readers, as are possessed with modern tapino-phoby, or dread of
everything that is low either in writing or in conversation. If he is of
the opinion that every representation of nature, that does not relate
to the great world, is to be exploded as contemptible stuff; he will
certainly repent of having read thus far; and I would exhort him, by
all means, to return in peace to his card-assembly or to his chocolate
house and pursue so low a subject no further.142
Tapino-phoby seems to have affected the literary elite as well.

G. Sprague Allen, to whom we owe the above quotation, notes that the
classicists—and here he names Goldsmith and Johnson among others—
resented that such characters as Lillo’s apprentice George Barnwell or
Richardson’s servant-girl Pamela should have serious attention paid to
them in literature.143 And the Buckingham Palace librarian, Thomas
Mathias, in his vigorous (and very popular) satire on contemporary
authors saw, among other evils accruing from the reading of novels,
the possibility that young people might not only become morally cor-
rupted thereby, but democratic as well:
Mrs. Charlotte Smith, Mrs. Inchbald, Mrs. Mary Robinson, Mrs.

etc., though all of them are very ingenious ladies, yet they are too
frequently whining or whisking in novels, till our girls’ heads turn
wild with impossible adventures, and are now and then tainted with
democracy, and sometimes with infidelity and loose principles.144
As the charity schools and the Sunday schools went about fulfilling
their missions of increasing the literacy rate among the workers and
farmers, the problem of who should read soon became even more con-
troversial than the problem of whom should be written about. In this
case the anxiety seems not to have originated with the literati*—insofar
as it can be located at all, it seems, rather, to have originated with the
nonintellectuals of the middle class. The issues they raised were not
aesthetic; they did not fear that literature might become debased in
order to meet the tastes and capacities of a working-class audience.
The problem was one of economic self-interest: if workers developed
* Samuel Johnson, for one, asked by an affluent acquaintance whether his workers would become
less industrious if they were to attend school and learn how to read, answered with an unequivo-
cal “No, Sir.”
137
a strong predilection for reading, might they not acquire a distaste for
manual work along with it?
The gist of the argument against workers reading was that the poor
will remain tractable and useful only so long as they are kept in “some
degree of ignorance.” The Bible, perhaps, might be permitted, but any
other type of reading is more than likely to make workers dissatisfied
with the “manual labor” which is “destined to occupy their lives.”145
Correctives proposed ranged from putting a complete stop to the
teaching of reading to children of the lower classes to censoring their
reading so that only religious works would be accessible to them. A
letter-to-the-editor in the Gentleman’s Magazine proposed a rather
modern-sounding method of censorship: a citizens’ book-reviewing
board should be established which would draw up approved reading
lists for youth, workers, and other “lower orders.” This committee, made
up of “worthy persons,” would peruse the novel output annually, print
their lists in “a monthly publication” and point out “such as were of an
improper tendency with candour, and recommending those of merit.”146
It was in this atmosphere of aesthetic and class concerns that the
debate about “taste” took place—what is it, who has it, how can it be
acquired?
The Defense
In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the slowly expanding
upper-middle class, composed of men of business and men of property,
had tended to identify with the aesthetic tastes and aspirations of the
aristocracy. There was no need for writers to adjust to the professed
interests of this new audience because it was indistinguishable from the
reading public which had existed before. The problems of the literati
had not so much to do with who was to judge literature as with the role
of literature in relation to other intellectual pursuits, the limits of the
genres, and the place of the poet in the wide scheme of things. Ques-
tions might be raised whether the poet excelled the philosopher in his
function as teacher (this in the sixteenth century); or about the com-
parative status of writer and scientist (this in the seventeenth century);
or whether the classical rules were the only yardsticks to be legitimately
applied in judging a work of literature (this in the early eighteenth).
By the middle of the century a middle class, not only consisting
of wealthy businessmen and landowners, but of shopkeepers, clerks,
apprentices, and farmers was becoming increasingly affluent, literate,
and ambitious. Its literary interests were not necessarily identical with
138
those of the upper classes, its educational background was certainly

more primitive and, at the same time, its cultural pretensions were
distinctly noticeable. It was, in short, an age when
all men may procure

The title of a connoisseur;
When noble and ignoble herd
Are govern’d by a single word;
Though, like the royal German dames,
It bears an hundred Christian names;
As genius, fancy, judgment, gout,
Whim, caprice, je-ne-sais-quoi, vertu;
Which appellations all describe
Taste, and the modern tasteful tribe.147
Or, in the even more pessimistic words of Oliver Goldsmith:
Without assigning causes for this universal presumption [of taste],

we shall proceed to observe, that . . . this folly is productive of mani-
fold evils to the commuity. . . . Hence, the youth of both sexes are
debauched to diversion, and seduced from much more profitable
occupations into idle endeavours after literary fame; and a superfi-
cial, false taste, founded on ignorance and conceit, takes possession
of the public.148
As a result, a reorientation in aesthetic discussions began to take place.

The change was dramatic and unprecedented in the history of letters;
its essence was a shift from neo-classical objectivism with its stress on
the rational analysis of literary works to concern with the experience
of the public.
The new audience did not, by and large, have a classical education,
and it placed more emphasis on feelings than on reason. Furthermore,
middle-class realism did not allow for pleasure in purely intellectual
pursuits. The problem was to get ahead, to improve oneself with practi-
cal information—a bent that was to reach a climax in the nineteenth
century craze for the statistical and instantly utilitarian, for the kind
of guides and manuals on every activity under the sun which Mat-
thew Arnold found so distressing and which he was to dismiss with
the lofty phrase “culture works differently.” In such a situation the
lines between art and life, between literature and persuasion, between
the aesthetic and the emotional experience became easily blurred
and often indistinguishable.149 After the middle of the century the
position of the critic is therefore by no means unequivocal. He may
139
speak about the qualities of a book, the intellectual and emotional

processes involved in producing it, the critical process of evaluating
it—but whatever approach he takes, concern with the experience of
the reader or of different types of readers is rarely absent.150 In short,
once the profession of letters depended for support entirely upon the
interest, good-will and purchasing habits of a broad public, it began
to pay serious attention to the way in which this public experienced
literary products and to raise questions about its role in the formula-
tion of literary standards. The task was to distinguish, for the writer
and for the public on which he was dependent, between the wheat of
art and the chaff of trash.
Most mid-eighteenth century writers were themselves part of the
bourgeoisie which came into its own in the course of the industrial
revolution. Its empiricist spirit informed their approach to literary
problems; and the ways in which they endeavored to cope with the
demands of an increasingly diversified public were as pluralistic as
the tastes of that public itself—ranging from Oliver Goldsmith’s belief
that the “universal presumption” to taste would have a “debauching”
effect to Edmund Burke’s faith in the idea of democracy in literary
standards. By the middle of the century almost every writer of note
could point to at least one essay—and often a volume—on the subject
of taste.
This section will indicate briefly how the man of letters formulated
the problem, how he searched for literary standards which would take
the taste of “all men” into account; how this search led, at one extreme,
to elite concepts and, at the other extreme, to the idea of diversity.
Finally, we shall see how the concept of diversity in taste and judgment
harbingered a change in the critic’s role.
The Discussion about Taste
In the debate about the validity of the classical rules, the issues had
been rational and sharply defined: Should the writer adhere to the
dramatic unities? Should he imitate the early Greek and Roman models
or was he free to express his indivduality in his own fashion? As the
century progressed, individualizing, as it were, psychological aspects
of a democratic society gradually came to take precedence over ratio-
nalist absolutes. Analyses of “wit” and “judgment,” terms which were
applied to the interplay of the sophisticated intellect with images and
ideas, gave way to analyses of such concepts as “imagination,” “enthu-
siasm,” and finally “genius.” “Genius,” in turn, became synonymous
140
with originality. Where the poet had in former times functioned as a

high artificer, he emerged, toward the latter part of the century, as an
inspired instrument of the poetic furor, working by seizure rather than
by thought. The earlier set of critical categories had placed a premium
on objectivity, reason, and knowledge; the new categories focussed on
subjective qualities of emotion and spontaneous creativity.
Addison, though he wrote in the early part of the century when the
discussion about the rules still flourished, had pioneered in the analy-
sis of imaginative writing. He spoke of “imagination” not in abstract
aesthetic terms but in terms of the appeal of imaginative works for
the reader, using concepts related to everyday human experience. He
addressed himself to all those “middle-station” people whom he con-
ceived to be fit audience for the Spectator. His essays on imagination,
indeed, predicated a great many categories which have appeared in most
subsequent discussions of popular culture, including variety, diversion,
the appeal of facts, and the emotional gratifications involved in hearing
or reading about torture and other forms of horror.151
A later, less pedagogic and at the same time less optimistic approach
than that of Addison was to differentiate among the various segments
of the public in matters of literary judgment. Goldsmith, in examining
the theater audience, observed that those who could afford seats in the
pits at the Drury lane and Covent Garden were ostentatiously eager to
“show their taste,” but “not one in a hundred,” he felt, was qualified to
do so.152 And in less class-conscious but similarly statistical terms the
critic Joseph Warton discriminated between two levels of the audience,
one which could appreciate the works of genius, another sensitized
only to commonplace products. Warton was rather more liberal in
his estimate than Goldsmith: “For one person who can adequately
relish, and enjoy a work of imagination, twenty are to be found who
can taste and judge of observations on familiar life and the manners
of the age.”153
In short, to the bewildering problem for the writer as to the kinds of
standards which were to take the place of the now discredited classical
rules, was added the cultural ambition of a public whose judgments
often seemed “false” to him. The task for the writer, then, was to search
out some means by which to reconcile these various tastes with his
own artistic integrity.
Not the least conspicuous feature of mid-eighteenth century thought
was a faith in the perfectibility of human nature which seemed to go
hand in hand with faith in material progress. Is it not possible, several
141
writers began to ask, that it is merely lack of proper education which

keeps the audience from developing into true connoisseurs?
Turning once more to Oliver Goldsmith, we find him questioning
whether “natural” good taste was not being corrupted by the numerous
examples of “false” taste which prove singularly attractive to the “unwary
mind and young imagination.”154 And this suggests, despite his disparag-
ing remarks about the actual competence of the theater audience, that
Goldsmith gave some credence to a concept of “innate” standards of judg-
ment which, if they could be corrupted, could also be improved. Fielding,
while he agreed that “natural taste” could so be corrupted, expressed even
more aptly than Goldsmith the characteristic faith in progress when he
described how the “small seeds of taste” which are present in practically
all men can be fructified by training and education. Fielding goes on to
say that he will “probably . . . in a future paper endeavour to lay down
some rules by which all men may acquire some degree of taste.”155 That
this paper was not written serves as one commentary on the obstacles
met in attempting to seek out and describe those bases of judgment
which all men were presumed to hold in common.
The Search for Common Standards
Three paths were followed in the search for common principles: (1)
recourse to a feeling of “inner conviction” that there must be such
principles; (2) attempts to prove their existence by deriving them from
certain tests; and (3) efforts to deduce them by determining how they
work. At no point, however, did any analyst of taste get so far as to
describe or define what those principles might in fact be.
The first of the three approaches—the argument of inner conviction—
started early in the century and sought validation by pointing to “simple”
people who manifested clear judgment and true taste. Anticipating
the admiration later to be accorded the “natural” man, the “noble sav-
age,” and the “unspoilt child,” the Tatler, for example, had presented a
young woman “who had that natural sense which makes her a better
judge than a thousand critics,” and the Guardian pointed to a foot
soldier as the “politest man in a British audience, from the force of
nature, untainted with the singularities of an ill-applied education.”156
Later, in a philosophical vein, Hume and Burke (the latter in his early
aesthetic writings) based their concepts of taste common to all men on
their own inner conviction that universal standards of judgment exist.
Burke, in his Essay on Taste, first defined his subject as “that faculty
or those faculties of the mind, which are effected with, or which form
142
a judgment of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts.” The
objective of his inquiry is
to find whether there are any principles, on which the imagination is
affected, so common to all, so grounded and certain, as to supply the
means of reasoning satisfactorily about them. And such principles of
taste I fancy there are. . . .157
As we shall presently see, however, though Burke continued his essay

by discussing the human faculties involved in the acquisition of taste he
neither isolated any particular principles, nor did he demonstrate that
“common” human faculties underlie them. Hume similarly postulated
the universality of taste. All people whose “organs” are sound have a
“considerable uniformity of sentiment” and from this uniformity “we
may thence derive an idea of the perfect and universal beauty.”158 But
Hume, too, failed to specify common aesthetic principles.
Even those who clung strongly to the idea of uniformity in taste in
the abstract could not avoid the evidence of considerable disagreement
when it came to judging a given work. Failing to define the common
principles they sought, they could at least describe, and attempt to
explain away, those tastes which were so deviant that they could not be
considered manifestations of the assumed principle. Burke, who was
echoed almost word for word by the Scottish literary critic Hugh Blair
a few years later, resorted to the analogy of sensory taste in discussing
these deviants. He pointed out that a man might be found who could
not distinguish between milk and vinegar or who called both tobacco
and vinegar sweet, milk bitter, and sugar sour. Such a man, said Burke,
cannot be considered a person of taste, nor can he even be called a man
of wrong taste. He is, quite simply, “absolutely mad”:
When it is said, taste cannot be disputed, it can only mean that no one
can strictly answer what pleasure or pain some particular man may
find from the taste of some particular thing . . . but we may dispute,
and with sufficient clearness too, concerning the things which are
naturally pleasing or disagreeable to the sense.*159
It remained for Lord Kames to draw most unequivocally upon inner

conviction as “proof ” of the existence of a common set of artistic
* Blair, in his Lectures on Rhetoric, writes: “If any one should maintain that sugar was bitter and
tobacco was sweet, no reasoning could avail to prove it. The taste of such a person would infal-
libly be held to be diseased, merely because it differed so widely from the taste of the species to
which he belongs.” [3 vols., Basle, 1801, V. 1, 35]
143
standards. When he attempted to demonstrate his belief, however, he

moved far from the concept of universality.
Like most critics and philosophers who tried to reduce the multi-
plicity of tastes in the eighteenth century audience to some common
denominator, Kames began by asserting that there is a “universal
conviction” in the sphere of morality and went on to state that,
“This conviction of common nature or standard . . . accounts not
less clearly for the conception we have of a right and a wrong taste
in the fine arts.” Kames disposed of the extreme exceptions in the
same way as Burke: “The individual who dislikes objects which most
people like or who conversely likes objects which most other people
dislike” is “a monster.” His principal argument for the existence of
uniform taste is the fact that works of art are acknowledged as such:
“We are formed . . . with an uniformity of taste. . . . If uniformity of
taste did not prevail, the fine arts could never have made any figure.”
A “conviction of a common standard,” he concludes, is therefore
“part of our nature.”160
2. Further validation of the inner conviction theory was sometimes
sought by the application of certain “tests.” Cultural products exist;
those which have a universal appeal and which have stood the test of
time can be accepted as proof of the existence of common standards.
Addison had anticipated the universality test: the fact that he, a cul-
tivated English gentleman, could enjoy the folk songs of all countries
in which he traveled demonstrated that whatever is enjoyed by “a
multitude” must have been judged by a universal standard: “Human
Nature is the same in all reasonable Creatures; and whatever falls
in with it, will meet with Admirers amongst Readers of all Qualities
and Conditions.”161 Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses picked up this
argument—all questions of taste can be settled by an appeal to the
“sense” which all mankind has in common. He, too, avoided the
question of what standards, principles, or criteria compose this
common sense. What he does say is that the better acquainted a
writer is with the works of various periods and of various countries,
the more likely is it that he will be able to derive these unspecified—
but uniform—standards. To the test of universality Reynolds then
added the test of permanence. “What has pleased, and continues
to please, is likely to please again: hence are derived the rules of
art.”162 If one accepts these two proofs of the existence of common
artistic standards, as most mid-century writers evidently did accept
them, it follows, as Hugh Blair put it in his Lectures on Rhetoric,
144
that it is to the concurrence of the majority that one must look for
standards of taste:
That which men concur the most in admiring must be held to be
beautiful. His taste must be esteemed just and true, which coincides
with the general sentiments of men. In this standard we must rest . . .
the common feelings of men carry the same authority, and have a title
to regulate the taste of every individual.163
Thus did the writers of the mid-eighteenth century pay their respects
to their new patrons, the great audience. But the discussion did not
end on a note of faith in a common denominator.
3. The works of Lord Kames, particularly his Elements of Criticism,
illustrate the entanglement in which those who attempted to describe the
workings of common principles found themselves.164 He begins by equat-
ing the now familiar terms—common nature, common sense, common
standards—with good taste. By and large, Kames observes, every man is
aware that such common standards exist. Like Burke and Blair, he condemns
the taste of the individual whose judgment deviates: “We justly condemn
every taste that swerves from what is thus ascertained by the common
standard.” At the same time he postulates the mysterious “we” (which also
appears in Burke’s remarks on taste) endowed with the right to condemn.
The crucial question becomes, then, who constitutes this “we,” and
here, despite his use of the term “common” standards, Kames begins to
differentiate. In the sphere of moral judgments he feels that one may rely
on “everyone’s” standards. When it comes to judgment in literature and
the arts it will hardly do to “collect votes indifferently.” In the aesthetic
domain “a wary choice” must be made. His preliminary assumption of
a “universal conviction” notwithstanding, Kames goes on specifically to
exclude the greater part of mankind from the right to contribute to the
“common” standard. “Particularly”—and here Kames establishes rigid
class lines in what seems to have started as a democratic premise—
“particularly all those who depend for food on bodily labor are totally
devoid of taste.” They can share in the formulation of moral principles
and they must comply with them, but they can have no voice in the
worlds of art and literature.* But Kames is not content to stop with the
* This is a far cry from the unqualified remarks of Addison earlier in the century, before the middle
classes were making their tastes clearly felt through purchases of literary products. Prior to his
statement that “Human Nature is the same in all reasonable Creatures,” Addison had said: “. . .
it is impossible that any thing should be universally tasted or approved by a Multitude, tho’ they
are only the Rabble of a Nation, which hath not in it some peculiar Aptness to please and gratifie
the Mind of Man.” (Spectator, No. 70.)
145
elimination of workers; there are others to be disenfranchised in cultural

matters. At the other extreme are the rich and opulent who delight in
conspicuous consumption, who are “voluptuous” both morally and aes-
thetically, and these, too, are disqualified. Since the manifest objective
of this upper crust is simply to “amaze and humble all beholders,” they
can have no understanding of the “faint and delicate emotions of the
fine arts.” All that remains are those individuals who maintain a strict
separation from the lower orders but who at the same time are free from
envy or imitation of the members of the aristocratic remnants of the
Restoration period and their obsolete style of life. Furthermore, within
this group, which by now is defined as the middle class, only those can
become judges who have “good natural taste . . . improved by educa-
tion, reflection and experience.” In other words, only the intellectual
elite are qualified to evaluate cultural products—a clear instance of the
intellectual defining his social role as the mentor and cultural leader of
the new middle-class order.
Having narrowed those capable of aesthetic judgment to a chosen
few, Kames then doubles on his tracks and once more assures his reader
that the “good” and “bad” qualities in cultural products are clearly dis-
cernible and that “mankind” is able to distinguish between them. His
elite theory becomes democratic once more by means of postponement:
you have only to wait until the standards now formulated and applied
by the select few will be recognized as universal by all mankind. And
that time, Kames is confident, is bound to come.
For David Hume it remained to summarize most succinctly the
contradictory position which was maintained by those who sought
universal criteria for the judging of art. Hume stated that the principles
of taste are universal “and nearly if not entirely the same in all men;”
but he concluded this very sentence with the observation that “few are
qualified to give judgment on any work of art, or establish their own
sentiment as the standard of beauty.”165
Kames, Hume, and Blair are foremost among the critics who, begin-
ning with the idea—or the hope—that sandards for the judging of
literary and other cultural products are held in common by all men,
arrived at a conclusion almost the very opposite: the “all” spelled out to
read a select few. Other writers and critics who looked for a common,
egalitarian principle with as little success escaped from the dilemma
by formulating concepts which may be subsumed under the rubric
“the idea of diversity.”
146
From University to Diversity

To recapitulate briefly, we have traced three phases in the discussion
about the new public and the literary goods produced for it. First, a
period of hope during which the men of letters waited for the aesthetic
proclivities of this public to catch up with their moral inclinations. Sec-
ond, a period of “opportunity and opportunism,” when new writers and
new products developed at a rapid rate, and the literati adopted a policy
of watchful waiting. Third, a period of dismay among the intellectuals
during which both audience and media were severely strictured. The
controversy over “taste” might be said to constitute a fourth period. This
discussion, as we have seen, was conducted as though the participants
hoped that the manifold differences in taste, and the obviously low
level of taste in some segments of the audience, were more apparent
than real, and that they would eventually find underlying standards on
which both artist and audience could agree. But the exploration came
to nothing more than to a more or less general agreement: those liter-
ary and artistic accomplishments which hold up through space and
time are “good,” be they folk ballads or Greek sculpture, and the fact
that some such achievements do so hold up indicates that common
standards of judgment do exist. These assertions were of little practical
avail in resolving the conflict between the integrity of the artist and
the inclinations of the public which paid the piper. What did emerge
from the exploration, however, was a widespread conviction that the
experience of this public had to be taken into account in any discus-
sions of literary standards.
As the search for common standards waned, such psychological and
descriptive concepts as perception, individual differences, national dif-
ferences, and “comparative” or “historical” views became increasingly
conspicuous in the words of the critics, who paid increasing attention
to the need for enjoyment, pleasure, amusement, and recreation. The
emphasis, in short, was placed more and more on the analysis of the
audience experience, as though in the hope that a study of reader grati-
fications would lead inductively to new knowledge about the nature
of “common” standards.
To what extent this shift in emphasis resulted from the writer’s
dependence on his audience and to what extent it reflected the absence
of powerful literary figures is a moot question. Fielding expounded a
“great man” theory in an almost sociological vein. In a Covent Garden
Journal article on the “Commonwealth of Literature,” he traced the
147
general state of literature through a variety of phases: first, an “eccle-

siastical” democracy; then a period of absolutism coexistent with the
political absolutism in the age of Henry VIII; next, an era of literary
aristocracy, headed first by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Beaumont
and Fletcher, next by Dryden, and finally by Pope, whom Fielding always
sees as literary autocrat. But in his own period, Fielding sees a decline in
literary leadership; “after the demise of King Alexandre the literary state
relapsed again into a democracy, or rather into downright anarchy.”166
While the stress on the effects of literary works on their readers
became dominant, not all of the writers, philosophers, and literary
critics involved in the discussion of standards were in agreement as
to whether the experience of the audience should be looked upon as
the only valid basis for literary criteria. Kames and Blair began their
search for standards with the assumption that beauty lies in the eye
of the beholder. Hume and Burke, on the other hand, began with the
assumption that beauty is a quality residing in the object itself.167 But
it is characteristic of the descriptive approach which came into being
at this time that even those who began with a premise of objective
standards moved from the application of general principles such as
reason, truth, and nature toward the development of long and detailed
compendia of the attributes of literary works. Such itemizations may
be found, for example, in Burke’s On the Sublime and Beautiful, in
which he isolates and describes literary qualities such as smoothness,
sweetness, variety, smallness, color, aggregate words, abstract words,
everyday words, and the like.168 These compendia, in turn, served as a
point of departure for an impressionistic analysis of reader experience.
In general, three early approaches to the problem of effects can be
distinguished. The first we might call relative; the second psychologi-
cal; the third descriptive. Needless to say, then as now these categories
overlapped conspicuously.
Relative concepts had some history in the world of letters before the
participants in the taste controversy got hold of them. The Tatler, as
early as 1710, had suggested that the way of life and the peculiarities
of a writer or a reader serve to some extent to condition their respec-
tive tastes.169 This concept of “relativity” (which is in reality a qualified
endorsement of diversity in taste) finds a good deal of application in the
works of Addison and the later writers who explored such questions
as the relationship between exposure and taste. The idea of relativ-
ity also became manifest in a new approach to the study of literature
148
itself. Pope, for example, in the preface to his controversial edition of

Shakespeare, had stressed the importance of historical, climatic, and
national factors in the conditioning of ideas as to what constitutes good
or bad literature.170 But it was Johnson who, in his Lives, set the stage
for the comparative historical study of literature as well as, incidentally,
for exact textual study.171 The comparative study of literature, in short,
went hand in hand with the comparative approach to the study of the
impact of literary works.
There was a strong relationship between such comparative or rela-
tive approaches and the psychological theories and hypotheses which
were being aired at the same time. The expression “association of
ideas” seems to have become a favorite one in the analysis of audience
experience, and there was general agreement that a great variety of
such associations could be expected when a widely assorted group of
people were exposed to the same work. Pleasure in literary experience
thus was more and more conceived as a matter of individual sentiment,
not necessarily connected with objective standards of beauty or rea-
son. Whatever a given individual with his own perceptive mechanisms
found agreeable was also acceptable.172 Even Johnson, despite his firmer
adherence to rational principles, insisted that these were subordinate
to individual response. If such principles are to be applied, he felt, they
must be applied with caution, and he goes on to speak of “the cant of
those who judge by principles rather than perception.”173
At the other extreme of the descriptive approach we find those
who brushed rules aside altogether, and justified their doing so on the
grounds that the audience reacts impulsively in the process of read-
ing and does not have time, even though it might have the capacity,
to apply them. The Monthly Review, for one, supported Lord Kames’
attack on the rules on these very grounds, and paraphrased him with
approval: “For when the mind is affected or disgusted, the affection or
aversion takes place, as it were, by impulse and gives no time for the
formal application of given principles to influence the judgment.”174
The long-range effect of this new attention to audience experi-
ence was to legitimize emotional gratifications. While it is clear that
an endorsement of emotion has persisted to the present time, it is
by no means apparent to what extent the shift from the application
of rational standards to the analysis of emotional response was the
result of the need to take into account a new mass audience and a
new group of literary products. What is clear, as a recent historian
149
has put it, is that “examination of the mechanism of the mind by more
philosophical thinkers like Hume resulted in the analysis of reason into
imagination and belief, of common sense into intuition. The basis of
classical art was shattered by these blows . . . and uncertainty paved
the way for the emphasis on emotion as the most important factor
in life and art.”175
Recognition of this kind of gratification was comparatively unknown
in the early decades of the century, when any literary or other cultural
product had to subordinate (or pretend to subordinate) pleasure to
moral uplift. For the first time in the century we find terms such as
“relaxation” and “amusement” used without apology:
Such is the nature of man, that his powers and faculties are soon
blunted by exercise. . . . During his waking hours, amusement by
intervals is requisite to unbend his mind from serious occupation.
The imagination . . . contributes more than any other cause to recruit
the mind and restore its vigor, by amusing us with gay and ludicrous
images; and when relaxation is necessary, such amusement is much
relished.176
This acknowledgment has no didactic overtones. It was as if a sense

of defeatism in the search for a common aesthetic perception in the
audience were accompanied by a sense of release from the obligation
to assist in its moral reformation. Hume, for example, discusses how
man seeks to escape from the pressures which weary him when he is
alone with his thoughts: “To get rid of this painful situation, it [the
mind] seeks every amusement and pursuit; business, gaming, shows,
executions; whatever will rouse the passions, and take its attention from
itself.’’ He proceeds to list the kinds of passion that may be aroused by
such means and remarks that whether they be agreeable or disagree-
able, happy or sad, confused or orderly, they are still preferable to “the
insipid languor” of a man thrown back upon his own inner resources.
He points to the gambling room to validate his thesis; wherever the most
exciting play is going on, most members of the company may be found,
even though that table may not have the best players. To identify with
people who are experiencing the passions of loss or gain is to relieve
oppression: “It makes the time pass the easier with them, and is some
relief to that oppression, under which men commonly labour, when left
entirely to their own thoughts and meditations.”177 Archibald Alison,
a critic writing later in the century, analyzed the various “qualities of
150
mind” which can be evoked by reading. He even distinguished between

passive and active gratifications:
The qualities of mind which are capable of producing emotion, are

either its active or its passive qualities; either its powers and capacities, as
beneficence, wisdom, fortitude, invention, fancy, etc., or its feelings and
affections, as love, joy, hope, gratitude, purity, fidelity, innocence, etc.178
As in many analyses of audience experience undertaken after the middle

of the century, one is struck by Alison’s pragmatism, which is in such
strong contrast to the moralizing tone uppermost in the middle of the
century. It was this almost scientific approach to the experience of the
audience which paved the way for a new conception of the critic’s role.
The Critic as Mediator
Dissatisfaction with the kinds of rigid and pedantic literary criticism which
had prevailed in the early part of the century had been brewing for some
time. Swift already had attacked such pedantry; his Battle of the Books
overflows with denunciations of the “malignant deity, called Criticism.” The
mixture of bookishness and glibness in these critics was of no benefit other
than to give “the coffee house wits some basis for literary pretensions.”179
Pope, who needed no inspiration from Swift on the subject (although he
apparently got a great deal of it), similarly attacked the destructiveness,
or at best the futility, of those who lived by petty and often meaningless
attacks on the writing of others. Nothing is sacred to these critics; on
any subject “they’ll talk you dead/ For Fools rush in where Angels fear
to tread.”180 Later Goldsmith, in discussing German writings, echoed the
disdain of his eminent predecessors for this type of critical hairsplitting:
Their assiduity is unparalleled; . . . they write through volumes while they

do not think through a page. Never fatigued themselves, they think the
reader can never be weary; so they drone on, saying all that can be said
on the subject, not selecting what may be advanced to the purpose.181
Again it was Addison who presaged a new concept, this time of

the critic’s role. He was to be creative and constructive: in a word, a
“revealer of beauties.” Beginning with Addison’s influential pieces on
Paradise Lost in the Spectator, almost every important author had at
least one book-length criticism written about his work entitled The
Beauties of. . . .182 This concept of a revelatory function for the critic
implied that he was to assume a role of responsibility in relation to
151
the general public as well as to his fellow writers and intellectuals, and
most of the writers and critics of the mid-century followed suit. It was
the critic’s function, as Johnson put it, to help men “to enjoy life or to
endure it.”183 At the same time, it was characteristic of the mid-century
writers—in their optimistic mood—to view the critic’s contribution
as a means of raising the aesthetic level of the public. In this light the
critic has an educational role. Goldsmith sees him—and he is speaking
of the “man of taste” as contrasted with the scholar or compiler—as
“placed in a middle station, between the world and the cell, between
learning and common sense.”
But perhaps the most far-reaching change which took place in the
concept of the critic was that a two-way function was premised for him.
Not only was he to reveal the beauties of literary works to the general
public by means of which, in Goldsmith’s terms, “even the philosopher
may acquire popular applause”; he must also interpret the public back
to the writer. In brief, the critic not only “teaches the vulgar on what
part of a character to lay the emphasis of praise,” he must also show “the
scholar where to point his application so as to deserve it.” Goldsmith
believed that the absence of such critical mediators explained why
wealth rather than true literary fame was the goal of so many writes.
The result, he feared, might be that nothing would be remembered of
the literary works of his time.184
We have observed that Goldsmith, in his endeavor to come to grips
with the dilemma of the writer, represented a variety of sometimes
conflicting views. We have seen, however, that it was likely to be Gold-
smith in his optimistic rather than in his pessimistic vein who set the
tone for what was to come. So, too, his view of the “ideal” critic, of his
function as one of mediation between the audience and the writer, was
to prevail. Critics, writers, and philosophers, such as Johnson, Burke,
Hume, Reynolds, Kames, and the Wartons, all adopted his premise as
they began to analyze the experience of the reader.
A critic must try to understand what goes on in the mind of the
readers. In Johnson’s words he must “improve opinion into knowl-
edge, and . . . distinguish those means of pleasing which depend upon
known causes.” Johnson then outlines what we might today look upon
as a scientific, descriptive approach to the study of media experience,
pointing out that “literary criticism, which has . . . hitherto known
only the anarchy of ignorance, the caprices of fancy and the tyranny of
prescription . . . can now be placed under the dominion of science.”185
152
Joseph Wood Krutch points to him as the formulator of the concept

that the critic “derives his right from the rights of the general public of
which he is a part—not from the fact that he is a critic. He will gener-
ally agree with the public’s considered judgment because literature is
to be judged, not in the light of learning . . . but in accordance with the
same common sense which guides us as we go about the business of
life.”186 It was this orientation to audience experience which opened up
an entirely new dimension in the debate over art and popular culture.
In spite of their conflicts and contradictions, the mid-eighteenth cen-
tury English writers paved the way for the nineteenth century critics
and philosophers who were to formulate the metaphysics of cultural
democracy. They were the first to recognize the importance, in an
increasingly industrialized and mobile society, of relaxation, amuse-
ment, and escape from the pressures of work, whether the individual
be a tired businessman or a manual worker, and in so doing were
far more detached than were their counterparts across the Channel.
While Hume, for one, analyzed the psychological factors involved in
“distraction” or amusement, Schiller and Goethe were to take a moral
position: the public may need distractions, but unless they find a less
passive way to achieve it, culture will surely degenerate.
Notes
1. A. S. Collins, The Profession of Letters: Study of the Relation of Author to
Patron, Publisher, and Public, 1780 to 1932 (London, Routledge, 1920), 83.
2. A. S. Collins, “The Growth of the Reading Public During the Eighteenth
Century,” Review of English Studies, Vol. II (1926), 429.
3. William Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century (New York,
Appleton, 1888), 560 ff.
4. Walter Graham, English Literary Periodicals (New York, Nelson, 1930), 35.
5. Ibid., 59.
6. George Sherburn, The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, Pt. III of
A Literary History of England, Ed. Albert C. Baugh (New York, Appleton-
Century-Crofts, 1948), 1053.
7. Collins, “The Growth of the Reading Public,” 289–90.
8. Ibid., 291.
9. Collins, The Profession of Letters, 96.
10. Ernest A. Baker, The History of the English Novel (10 vols., London, Witherby,
1934), V, 252–53.
11. Collins, The Profession of Letters,
12. Ibid., 65.
13. Sherburn, 1052.
14. W. T. Laprade, Public Opinion and Politics in Eighteenth Century England
(New York, Macmillan, 1936), 13–14.
153
15. Samuel Johnson, The Idler, No. 30. The British Essayists, Ed. A. Chalmers
(38 vols., Boston, Little, Brown, 1856), XXVII, 104.
16. A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press (London, Home and Vanthal, 1949), 6–7.
17. Lecky, I, 561–62.
18. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (A), Ed. James Sutherland (London, Methuen,
1953), 448. (Vol. V of the Twickenham edition, general editor John Butt.)
19. Daniel Defoe, The Review, Aug. 30, 1709. Defoe’s Review in 22 Facsimile
Books (New York, Columbia Univ. Press, 1938), VI, Bk. 15, 253–54.
20. Arthur Y. Trace, “The Continuity of Opposition to the Theater in England
from Gosson to Collier” (unpublished dissertation, Stanford University,
1955), 11.
21. H. W. Pedicord, The Theatrical Public in the Time of Garrick (New York,
King’s Crown, 1954), 41.
22. Lecky, I, 586.
23. M. D. George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (New York, Knopf,
1925), 14–15.
24. Pedicord, 14–15.
25. Ibid., 16.
26. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (London, Chatto and Windus, 1957), 37.
27. Adventurer, No. 115. British Essayists, XXI, 137–38.
28. Leslie Stephen, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century
(London, Duckworth, 1904), 37–38.
29. James Lackington, Memoirs of the Forty-Five First Years of the Life of James
Lackington, Written by Himself (London, 1803), 250.
30. Lecky, I, 165.
31. Collins, Profession of Letters, Ch. I, (v), passim.
32. Lackington, 225.
33. Ibid., 259.
34. Ralph Straus, The Unspeakable Curll (New York, McBride, 1928).
35. Ibid., 49–64.
37. Collins, 63–64.
38. Ibid., 58.
39. J.M.S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England: 1770–1800 (London,
Constable, 1932), 7.
40. Tompkins, 10.
42. Joseph Wood Krutch, Samuel Johnson (New York, Holt, 1944), 35.
43. Collins, “Growth of the Reading Public,” 429.
44. James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (London, Oxford Press, 1953), 217.
45. Oliver Goldsmith, An Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in
Europe (1759). The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, Ed. Peter Cunningham
(4 vols., New York, Haprer, 1881), II, 56–57.
46. Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, Letter XCIII (London,
Everyman, 1934), 255.
47. Ibid., Letter LI, 142.
48. Thomas De Quincey, “Oliver Goldsmith.” The Eighteenth Century in
Scholarship and Literature (Boston, 1877), 335.
49. Graham, 204–205.
154
50. Ibid., 208.

51. Ibid., 213.
52. Ibid., 224–25
53. Tompkins, 15.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid., 15–16.
56. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, Letter XIII, 34.
57. John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, Critical Works of John
Dennis, Ed. Edward Niles Hooker (2 vols., Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press,
1943), I, 338.
58. Sherburn, 826.
59. J.W.H. Atkins, English Literary Criticism: 17th and 18th Centuries (London,
Methuen, 1951), 102.
60. Pope, Dunciad, 165 n.
61. Joseph Addison, The Spectator, No. 10 (4 vols., London, Everyman, 1950),
I, 32.
62. Addison, Spectator, No. 10, I, 31–33.
63. Ibid., No. 34, I, 104.
64. Ibid., No. 63, I, 196.
65. Emile Legouis and Louis Cazamian, A History of English Literature
(New York, Macmillan, 1933), 738.
66. B. Sprague Allen, Tides in English Taste (2 vols., Cambridge, Mass., Harvard
Univ. Press, 1937), II, 36–37.
67. Allen, I, 87.
68. Graham, 120.
69. Ibid., 152 ff.
70. Laprade, 249.
71. Stephen, 219.
72. Henry Fielding, The Covent Garden Journal, No. 10. The Works of Henry
Fielding, Ed. James P. Browne (10 vols., London, Bickers, 1903), X, 26.
73. Pedicord, 31.
74. Chauncey B. Tinker, The Salon and English Letters (New York, Macmillan,
1915), 177–79.
75. Sherburn, 1031.
76. Tompkins, 47.
77. Pope, Dunciad, 49–50.
78. Ibid., 192 n.
79. Ian Jack, Augustan Satire, 1660–1750 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1952), 119.
80. Pope, Essay on Criticism, The Best of Pope, Ed. George Sherburn (New York,
Ronald Press, 1940), 64–65.
81. Fielding, X, 28.
82. Allen, I, 243–44.
83. James Sutherland, “Introduction,” Dunciad, xlviii.
84. Allen, II, 189.
85. Goldsmith, Inquiry into the Present State, Works, II, 57.
86. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, Letter LXXXIV, 234.
87. Goldsmith, Inquiry into the Present State, loc. cit.
88. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, Letter XCIII, 256.
89. Johnson, The Rambler, No. 2. British Essayists, XVI, 76.
155
90. Goldsmith, Inquiry into the Present State, Works, II, 47 ff.

91. Pope, Dunciad (B), 272–73.
92. Baker, IV, 15.
93. F. W. Bateson, English Comic Drama: 1700–1750 (Oxford, Clarendon Press,
1929), 8.
94. Johnson, The Rambler, No. 4, British Essayists, XVI, 82–83.
95. Ibid.
96. Johnson, The Rambler, No. 4, 84–88.
97. Mary Wortley Montague, Complete Works, Ed. Lord Wharncliffe (2 vols.,
Paris, 1837), II, 100–105.
98. Goldsmith, The Bee, No. 6. In: Citizen of the World, 399.
99. Tompkins, 74.
100. Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger, No. 20, British Essayists, XXX, 124.
101. Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, II, 135.
102. Addison, Spectator, No. 44, I, 133.
103. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, Letter XXI, 56.
104. David Hume, Of Tragedy, Four Dissertations (London, 1757), 198–99.
105. Goldsmith, A Comparison between Sentimental and Laughing Comedy,
Works, III, 380.
107. Francis Gallaway, Reason, Rule, and Revolt in English Classicism (New York,
Scribner’s, 1940), 115.
108. William Cowper, The Progress of Error, Poetical Works of William Cowper,
Ed. H. S. Milford (London, Oxford Univ. Press, 1934), 24.
109. Richardson, The Novels of Samuel Richardson (20 vols., London, 1902), XIX,
15–16.
110. Jean Marie Arouet Voltaire, Essay on Taste; Alexandre Gerard, An Essay
on Taste; With Three Dissertations on the Same Subject by Mr. de Voltaire,
Mr. d’Alembert, and Mr. de Montesquieu (London, 1759), 220.
111. David Garrick, “Prologue,” The Farmer’s Return from London, Poetical Works
of David Garrick (2 vols., London, 1785), I, 186–88.
112. Johnson, The Idler, No. 36 and No. 85, British Essayists, XXVII, 124, 297–98.
113. Goldsmith, Specimen of a Magazine in Miniature. The Miscellaneous
Works of Oliver Goldsmith, Ed. David Masson (London, Macmillan, 1925),
288.
114. Allen, II, 25–26.
115. Ibid.
116. Goldsmith, “Editor’s Preface,” Citizen of the World, 4.
118. Ibid., No. 42, I, 127.
119. Ibid., No. 5, I, 18.
120. Pope, First Epistle to the Second Book of Horace, The Best of Pope, 236–37.
121. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, Letter XXI, 56–57.
122. Ibid., Letter LXXIX, 219–20.
123. Goldsmith, A Comparison between Sentimental and Laughing Comedy, loc.
cit.
124. John A. Kelly, German Visitors to the English Theaters in the Eighteenth
Century (Princeton, Univ. Press, 1936), 55.
125. Pedicord, 135–39.
156
126. David Hume, The Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences, Philosophical
Works (4 vols., London, Tait, 1826), III, 152.
127. Voltaire, loc. cit.
128. Hume, Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing, Philosophical Works, III, 223.
129. Sutherland, “Introduction,” Dunciad, x–xi.
130. Pope, Dunciad (B), 337–38.
131. Pope, First Epistle to . . . Horace, The Best of Pope, 233.
132. Sutherland, xlii.
133. The Sylph, No. 19, qu. J. T. Taylor, Early Opposition to the English Novel: The
Popular Reaction from 1760 to 1830 (New York, King’s Crown, 1943), 43.
134. Tompkins, 5.
135. Bateson, 145.
136. Allen, I, 110.
138. Fielding, “Prologue,” The Universal Gallant, Works, III, 165.
139. Garrick, “Epilogue to Arthur Murray’s All in the Wrong,” Poetical Works, I,
173–74.
140. Pedicord, 119.
141. Theophilus Cibber, Two Dissertations on the Theatres (London, 1756), 5.
142. Allen, I, 269.
143. Ibid., I, 255.
144. Collins, Profession of Letters, 96–97.
145. Taylor, 101 ff.
146. Ibid., 97.
147. Robert Lloyd (satirist, poet, member of Trinity College) writing in The
Connoisseur, No. 135, qu. Gallaway, 277.
148. Goldsmith, Taste, Miscellaneous Works, 313.
149. René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism (2 vols. to date, London, Cape,
1955), I, 26.
150. Sherburn, 997.
151. Addison, Spectator, Nos. 411, 412, 416; III, 276–82, 290–93.
152. Goldsmith, Citizen of the World, Letter XXI, 55.
153. Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writing of Pope (1756). In: H. A.
Needham, Taste and Criticism in the Eighteenth Century (London, Harrap,
1952), 113.
154. Goldsmith, Taste, 314–15.
155. Fielding, Covent Garden Journal, No. 10, Works, X, 29.
156. Addison, Tatler., No. 165; Guardian, No. 19. British Essayists, III, 319; XIII, 162.
157. Edmund Burke, Essay on Taste, Harvard Classics (50 vols., New York,
Collier, 1909), XXIV, 13.
158. Hume, On Taste, Four Dissertations, 215.
159. Burke, XXIV, 14–15.
160. Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (3 vols., Edinburgh, Kincaid
and Bell, 1762), III, 358–65.
162. Gallaway, 53.
163. Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric (3 vols., Basle, J. Decker, 1801), I, 34–35.
164. Kames, passim.
165. Hume, On Taste, 228.
157
166. Fielding, Covent Garden Journal, No. 23, Works, X, 41–47.

167. Needham, “Introduction,” 38.
168. Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Harvard Classics, XXIV, 108 ff.
169. Richard Steele, Tatler, No. 173, British Essayists, III, 356–60.
170. Needham, 36.
171. Ibid., 52.
172. Gallaway, 347.
173. Sherburn, 1001.
174. Edward Niles Hooker, “The Reviewers and the New Criticism, 1754–70,”
Philological Quarterly, Vol. XIII (1934), 197.
175. Gallaway, 345.
176. Kames, I, 337.
177. Hume, Of Tragedy, Four Dissertations, 186–87.
178. Archibald Alison, On Taste (1790), qu. Needham, 181.
179. Atkins, 173–75.
180. Pope, Essay on Criticism, The Best of Pope, 71.
182. Sherburn, 841–42.
183. Atkins, 312.
185. Johnson, The Rambler, No. 92, British Essayists, XVII, 182.
186. Krutch, 497.
158
Excursus B
The Debate on Cultural
Standards in Nineteenth
Century England
It has lately become fashionable in sociological circles to make culture

a topic for investigation. Yet, one of the difficulties of making sociology
of culture a viable area is that it requires a commitment to historical
orientation—a source of popular infatuation on the continent and of
reactions of boredom and impatience in our country. Nevertheless, soci-
ologists have made great strides toward overcoming parochial compart-
mentalization in discovering increasingly that many of our colleagues
in literary history and criticism have spoken good sociological prose all
along, by placing literature as a cultural phenomenon in a social context.
Raymond Williams in England as well as Henry Nash Smith, Lionel
Trilling, and Ian Watt in this country are some outstanding examples.
One of the most promising sociological approaches to contemporary
culture is to study intellectuals as a professional class—in particular,
as the administrators of prevailing cultural symbolic systems. Four
British magazines from the nineteenth century have been examined—
The Quarterly Review and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, one
Whig journal, The Edinburgh Review, and The Westminster Review,
the organ of the philosophical radicals. These reflect the passionate
and partisan concern of first-rate and middle-rate writers with the
fate of cultural institutions and mores in the prevailing middle-class
climate of industrialization and urbanization. One of the most striking
features of the contributions in these magazines is their use of a kind
of primordial sociological approach in close proximity with literary
and aesthetic concerns. Juvenile delinquency and crime rate statistics,
urban developments and styles of family life, technological advances
and educational institutions are just a few of the complexes around
which arguments are built.
159
The task is to analyze intellectual statements made in a clearly

defined medium, i.e., widely distributed magazines featuring mostly
book reviews, whose contributors include almost all significant “name”
writers of the era as well as other reputable writers. What is the general
social climate, and what are the specific social circumstances operating
in the intellectual and cultural universe which induce people to write
on certain subjects in certain ways? Our chances for drawing valid
sociological inferences from these intellectual productions as indica-
tors of a social context are heightened by the fact that we deal primar-
ily with a cumulative body of writing, accepted for a given magazine
which, in turn, had editorial intentions reflected in the selection of
contributions, and marketing intentions with regard to sustaining a
sufficient circulation.
These intellectual productions are looked upon in the context of
social change, i.e., increasing industrialization; new forms of transpor-
tation and communication; urbanization; the industries of “culture”
(newspapers, publishing, theatres, adult education, etc.). It is expected
that these changes are reflected typically in the magazine material. Ideo-
logically, the sum total of this literature reproduces the inconsistencies,
antagonisms, and contradictory value judgments concomitant with the
drastic changes between 1800 and 1900 in industry and commerce, in
political as well as educational institutions, and sociological analysis
tries to interpret these “derived” social data of literary source material
as symbolic expressions of underlying social trends and counter-trends.
The problem of cultural standards certainly did not start with the
nineteenth century, but emerged with the beginning of middle-class
civilization. Its theoretical roots might be identified with Montaigne
and Pascal, and pragmatic questions on standards of taste and aesthetic
quality developed with the magazines of Addison and Steele. The
debate over culture in nineteenth century England is a continuation,
on a grander scale, of problems and issues that found expression in the
previous century. All facets of national life came in for their share of
appraisal, and often in a spirit of painful re-examination.
The debate over art and popular culture as it unfolds in these maga-
zines voices several concerns that may be briefly sketched as follows:
1. What is the effect of the dissemination of popular culture—i.e., mass-
produced culture for large masses of people—on the audience? Is it
lowering the moral taste of the nation? Is it catering to a corrupt and
degenerate taste, or is it harmless entertainment for the enslaved
160
Excursus B
workingman? Is popular culture responsible for the increasing crime

rate? Does it reflect the failure of the program for universal education,
a failure on the part of England’s educators to create a literate and
discriminating audience that can uphold and better the standards of
the past? Does it herald a decline in the moral fibre and intellectual
quality of the nation?
2. What is the relationship between popular culture and the social con-
ditions in which the lower classes find themselves? Is the quality and
large consumption of popular literature, for example, a reflection of
the impact of industrial technology on the working man, in that leisure
time becomes devoted to entertainment that has taken on an escapist
dimension?
3. What is the effect of popular culture on the serious artist? What hid-
den pressures does the situation produce? The increasing economic
disadvantage of the serious artist, in the face of the commodity value
of popular culture, becomes a touchy issue. Is it possible that the seri-
ous artist, forced to compete with his less talented and certainly more
greedy brothers, will become hasty and enter the market-place with
something less than he is capable of?
4. What is the relationship between popular culture and contemporary
criticism? Can it be said that the critics, who exist primarily for the
middle and upper classes, have not fulfilled their responsibility in view
of their lack of contact or effect on the proliferation of popular culture?
Is it a matter of literature or sociology? Art or science? What should
be the role of the critic?
5. Is it a question of economics? What can one say about an economic
system that allows wealth to be conferred on mediocrity, while the best
goes begging? (The Tory view was that democratic capitalism was a
decaying system, and that patronage was the answer.)
For purposes of our discussion, we can say that the nineteenth cen-
tury was unique, if only for the reason that the professional writer and
artist now faced, for the first time, a mass audience, in the modern sense
of the term. A consideration of the literary picture brings us immedi-
ately to the center of the whirlpool, where the serious writer and the
hack, both creatures spawned out of the new social status conferred
on the writer, confront each other. Conditions had changed since the
eighteenth century: with the decline of the patronage system, these two
professionals had to shift their dependency from the privileged classes
to reliance on the much more treacherous economic jungle in which
distribution and sale of their works to a large and uncharted audience
constituted the basis for their livelihood. This shift in the economic base
of the professional writer was, of course, given tremendous impetus
by the explosion of technologically based industry, coupled with the
161
new power of the middle class as benefactors of culture and arbiters

of taste, and the interest of the newly literate lower classes. These two
groups combined to provide an audience of great proportions. Allied
closely to the picture of the changing social composition of the audi-
ence was the development which to the nineteenth century was part
of the new creed of progress, the new “culture for the Million” as it is
called again and again—that is, the dissemination of “useful” informa-
tion and knowledge through the innumerable government and private
agencies set up for that purpose. The development began early, and by
the 1830s England was afflicted by a plague of reading clubs, societies,
workingmens’ improvement committees, and all kinds of publishing
guides, aids, hints, handbooks, digests. These provided for a new acces-
sibility of a wide range of cultural phenomena, now made available to
the middle and lower classes.
The reaction was not long in coming. This dispersal, or diffusion, of
culture results, so said the conservative critics, in the inevitable water-
ing down of cultural products; the new audience, while equipped with
rudimentary abilities and aesthetic sensibilities, can not by any stretch
of the imagination bring to cultural exchanges anything resembling a
high or sophisticated level of taste. As a result of this diffusion, medi-
ocrity in cultural products becomes the hallmark of success, and the
audience—half-educated, poorly trained, but hungry to assert its right
to contribute and participate in the cultural life of its country—confers
on the second-rate artist and on the hack the kind of success which an
age of patronage would have deemed impossible.
The serious artist, thus surrounded by such an uncongenial milieu, was
seen by the conservative group to be at a great disadvantage. Forced into
competition with those whose audiences ranged in the millions, he had
to tighten his belt or to capitulate to the clamoring market for immedi-
ate gain. The decline of the drama, and the increasing loss of interest in
poetry was cited as proof of the poor state of belles lettres. The growing
breach between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” writers was signalled as the
lamentable beginning of the exclusiveness of serious works, and their
alienation from everyday life. One critic, in paraphrasing the scholar
Courthope (with whom we shall deal presently in more detail) writes:
The modern poet is a recluse, not a man of the world, dealing with
private rather than common experiences. He withdraws from com-
panionship into solitude, from action to reflection. In the practice
of his art he becomes a law to himself instead of conforming to the
162
Excursus B
standards which have been sanctioned by antiquity. . . . The charge

thus stated against modern poetry is not without truth.1
While the lowered standards of popular taste created special social

and economic pressures on the artist and called into question the utili-
tarian approach that had dominated England’s educational systems,
conservative and liberal critics alike pointed out that the plight of the
artist was aggravated by the emphasis placed on such media as the
ephemeral quarterlies, newspapers, penny weeklies, etc.
Here then is the marvel of the present time . . . in which unparalleled

talent of every description is constantly devoted to the prosecution
of literature; but in which the new works given forth from the press
are, with very few exceptions, frivolous or ephemeral, and the whole
serious talents of the nation are turned into perishable channels of the
daily, weekly, monthly or the quarterly press. . . . Such a state of things
. . . is alarming and prejudicial, . . . [and] may, if it continues unbated,
produce . . . in the end, danger or ruin to the national fortunes.2
The rush and pressure characteristic of this type of literary work was
found to be antagonistic to the contemplation and seclusion needed for
higher orders of creative work. Reviewing Hood’s poems, a critic writes:
The constantly recurring demands of Periodical Literature are fatal

to all deliberation of view—to all care, or study, or delection of
materials. . . . The tale of bricks must be furnished by the appointed
day, let the straw be found where it will. . . . How can one—educated
under such influences—be expected to deal with composition of the
month as he would with works destined for eternity?3
The Edinburgh Review, for one, complained further of the plethora

of amateur writers, drawn from many social levels, all intensely com-
petitive, who were rapidly “using up” plots and situations so that the
serious writer had to search, or was hard put to discover fresh mate-
rial. More important, yet closely allied to this problem of the paucity
of invention and the short-lived sheets was the concern of the critics
to discover from historical example the social conditions necessary for
the creation of great works. It was an accepted dictum that creativity
cannot be hurried, that it must advance at its own pace, that the creator
cannot be harried by deadlines, or be pressed in economic competition
with writers of pot-boilers and fly-by-night productions. Creativity
was understood to be a highly individual matter, at the very opposite
163
end from the formula of quick success. The underlying question was
whether the nineteenth century, with its heavy materialistic emphasis,
could provide a nourishing milieu for the development of greatness.
The generalizations of some critics went beyond the literary frame
of reference and contain some of the more piercing appraisals of the
period. The critics lamented the disappearance of individual robust-
ness, character, and with these, the possibility of intellectual greatness.
A society whose creed of progress is based on the advance of science
and technology has changed the national character. Nineteenth century
man has become tame and enfeebled; industrialization has created a
social uniformity and a lack of living models from which the poet or
dramatist could choose:
The delineations of the poet have been copies of copies, or arbitrary

creations of fancy, only because the poet has no longer had frequent
opportunities of studying from living models. . . . The aids and appli-
ances which are now multiplied around men, enfeeble them. . . . Indus-
trialism . . . is a sedative to the passions. A certian social uniformity
ensues. . . . Men are thus, as it were cast in a mould.4
All this sounds familiar enough to our ears. As mass-produced

“art”—and street literature in particular—exerted an increasing impact
on the English social scene, concern was registered over the precise
nature of this impact. How to define and measure it? How to evaluate
it? Critics found the “penny trash of the streets” to be an agent of moral
degeneracy. A typical description of the effects of street literature reads:
Yet this is the intolerable stuff that finds tens of thousands of juvenile
readers, gilds the byways of crime, and helps to fill our reformatories
with precocious gaolbirds of the worst class. Of the worst class, as
being not only reft of all moral sense, and vitiated in mind, taste, and
affection, but possessed of cunning intelligence how to turn their
knowledge to the vilest uses.5
A direct relation between penny trash and the high crime rate of
the metropolitan areas seemed obvious. More sophisticated opinions
held that while reading about crime did not make a criminal, popular
literature at the very least made violence and passion attractive; the
moral ending neutralized nothing. The composition of the audience
itself was often loosely assumed under the rubric “the lower classes,”
or “the million.” Audience breakdowns were only slightly more specific.
The writer just quoted saw an audience composed chiefly of women,
164
Excursus B
“shop-girls, maid servants, and other such half-educated and weakly

inflammable young persons.” Richard Altick, author of the by-now-
classic The English Common Reader, points out that in comparison to
the public of Dickens and Thackeray,
these publics were eclipsed by the “unknown public” Wilkie Collins

had described in Household Words in August 1858: readers—three
million of them, he estimated—who seldom if ever bought a book,
but who formed an insatiable market for cheap weeklies of a quality
distinctly below that of Dickens. To most observers, the low liter-
ary and intellectual level of these fiction papers, read by servants,
unskilled workers, shop assistants, and their families, more than
neutralized whatever optimistic conclusions could be reached after
contemplating Cornhill’s success.6
The attachment of the three million to vulgarizations, sensationalism,

and mediocrity defied the canons of progress.
Some found this audience, pounded on by technology, utilitarian
notions of happiness, and half-baked philanthropic ideas, to be an
expression of the failure of universal education. The huge audience,
fed on pap from hucksters’ pens, spelled the end of what had been the
early hope of educators, legislators, and philanthropists for an edu-
cated and literate public, participating on a large scale in the fruits of
cultural exchange. By the 1860s the enormous rise of popular literature
as a commodity generated a bitter and long-lasting discussion on the
shortcomings of universal education, and its failure to devleop, along
with literacy, a discriminating standard of response to what is beautiful
and good in the world. Others saw in popular literature less of a threat to
the moral fibre and standards of taste of the nation than an example of
the understandable need to escape from the pressures of the industrial
age. Robbed of any experience of individuality, their senses deadened by
the insistence of their betters on the dissemination of “useful informa-
tion,” the masses could be excused if they found in popular culture the
“fancy” which was not provided elsewhere. They turned to it, innocently,
for relief, and the fact that relief was found in the form of sensational
vulgarity and pseudo-morality was certainly the responsibility not of the
audience but of the producers and disseminators. The Janusfaced effect
of widespread industrialization was noted as responsible for creating a
kind of intellectual vacuum that had inevitably been exploited by com-
mercial interests, and by the intellectual posturings of the writers of
literary trash. That the masses were content with their trash was simply
165
because, according to Contemporary Review, “there is nothing better,

of the very cheap kind within their reach.”7 Even more conservative
voices were heard that were outright pessimistic about anything being
accomplished. The contributors to the Quarterly Review particularly
held that correlation between popularity and quality can only become
more inverse. For them the shift of the pace-setters from the manor
house to women’s reading clubs means the end of a progressively healthy
cultural life. Taste is the product of leisure time, of an enlightened and
appreciative wealthy segment of society. A high standard of cultural
achievement is inevitably coupled with exclusiveness of cultural appeal;
diffusion ends in mediocrity.
While the now-familiar “but we give the public what it wants” was
a steady defense of the book trade, most critics refused to accept
such a stand. Suggestions made for alleviating the situation included
plans to flood the market with cheap editions of the classics, and to
stress the great responsibility of the purveyors of popular produc-
tions. Empson, a well-known critic, spoke vaguely about the duty
of the publishers and hawkers of the trade to “give good taste their
casting vote.”8 While legal measures and government control were
considered at times, such ideals did not make much headway. Rather,
a laissez-faire attitude seemed to come to the fore. As the critic Sped-
ding writes in the Edinburgh Review, with the disarming candor of
bourgeois class-consciousness:
The economy of the world requires characters and talents adapted to

various offices, low as well as high; and it is vain to deny that the lower
offices will be most readily undertaken and most efficiently discharged
by minds which are defective in some of the higher attributes. . . . We
must have spies as well as soldiers, hangmen and informers as well as
magistrates and law-givers, advocates as well as judges, antiquaries
as well as historians, critics as well as poets, pullers down as well as
builders up. . . . There will still be more than enough of coarse grain
and tortuous growth, whose abilities will be well enough adapted to
the narrower spheres, whose aspirations will not rise higher, and who
will rally, in performing these necessary works, be cultivating their
talents to the best advantage. Being there, the only question is how
they shall be dealt with; whether they shall be acknowledged, as good
after their kind, or cast out as unworthy of our better company; . . .
For ourselves we have no hesitation in preferring the humaner alter-
native. . . . There is in every man and in everything a germ of good,
which, if judiciously educed and fostered, may be made gradually to
prevail over the surrounding bad, and convert it more and more into
its own likeness.9
166
Excursus B
Twenty years later, in 1859 and 1860 when, as Altick points out, the
term “the million” ceased to be an hyperbole, a climax in the debate
over popular culture had been reached in these journals. The early flush
of optimism created by the new educational suffrage had faded, and
problems had now become large and starkly defined. Those attendant
on the maintenance of high cultural productivity in the face of the
broadening cultural base had not been resolved. The history of nine-
teenth century literary criticism, which so deeply involves this matter,
is a complex affair of which we shall touch only a part. Aside from the
writers-turned-critic (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, De Quincey,
Scott), the professional critics as they appear in the four journals
addressed themselves to a very large audience and were looked upon as
influential moulders of the opinion of their readership. The expansion of
the book review into a loose critical essay allowed freedom to develop
ideas, and indeed the review became a kind of forum in which “all the
second speeches in the national debate were made.”10 Central was the
notion, borrowed from Marx, that literature is a mirror of social and
economic conditions, and this was reinforced by Darwinian ideas of
culture as an evolutionary process. The old questions, “Is it normal?
Does it amuse?” gave way to something like, “Is it an accurate reflection
of our world? What does it tell us about our society?” Popular literature,
so critics reasoned, is immoral because it distorts reality and falsifies
truth. But it is also an accurate reflection of a set of new social truths
which cannot be ignored. Popular literature cannot be considered in
the same light as artistic creations; it is a symptom of a new social
epoch—if not of a social disease. The English reviewer of M. Nisard’s
book Histories des Livres Populaires writes about popular literature:
This, no doubt, is one of the great social problems of the age, hardly,
if at all, inferior in interest to that of primary education itself; because
it involves the success of that self-education, which bears even more
directly on the practical formation of character of the individual, and
the determination, for good or for evil, at the outset, of the moral
principles which whether unfelt or openly avowed, are destined to
be his guide of action throughout life. It is plain that the arbitrary
enactments of a government, or the remedial measures of a commis-
sion can but reach the externals: they deal with the symptoms rather
than with the disease.11
By the end of the century, popular literature was the province of both
social scientist and critic, combined in the person of the literary critic who
struggled to provide a rationale in the wake of extensive social change.
167
The range of critical attitudes was large. At one extreme were the
elitists with little faith in the ability of the masses ever to provide an
appreciative audience for serious works. Critical decisions and cultural
dictates have to be made at the top, in the most educated strata of
society, and eventually filter downward. At the other extreme were the
intellectual “radicals” who placed great faith in the critical taste of the
masses. They said that historically, the uneducated are slow-moving,
deliberate, conservative, retainers of the best of the culture. One has
only to consider the fame of Voltaire or Racine, to be convinced:
Although the less critical multitude is generally slow in acquiring
correctness of taste, it is also the last to abandon the cause of good
taste, when once acquired, and to follow the more mercurial leaders
of fashion into corrupt extravagance. . . . Racine and Voltaire still
continue to be, or were until very lately, the delight of the French
populace, though the “intellectual classes” had gone wandering after
the idolatries of the romantic school.12
In a similar vein, it was contended that the diffusion of culture, far

from being a levelling agent or the harbinger of mediocrity and unifor-
mity, provided a variety and multiplicity on the intellectual and spiritual
level, a stimulus to all creative work and to novelists in particular:
Civilization, which tends to make the actions of men uniform, only
multiplies varieties in their opinions and their minds. . . . There is far
more food for the philosophy of fiction in the stir and ferment, . . .
the working reason, the excited imagination that belong to this era of
rapid and visible transition, than in the times of “belted knights and
barons bold,” when the wisest sage had fewer thoughts than a very
ordinary mortal can boast of now.13
This attempt to rationalize and to answer the gloomy prophets of

culture is the beginning of that uneasy alliance between science, indus-
trialization and art that became, at the end of the century, standardized
into an expression of confidence.
Let us pause here a moment and restate the primary interest of this
study, that is, to explore whether and to what extent the concerns of the
nineteenth century intellectuals were propaedeutic to the concerns of
the contemporary intellectual scene. As radically as the underpinnings
of the social order have been changing, the problems not yet resolved
and probably unresolvable are the accommodation of past values to new
social exigencies; further, the creation of new cultural values systems,
and above all, the problem of how to deal with the values and mores
168
Excursus B
emerging partly spontaneously, partly manipulatively, among the broad

strata of industrialized populations. To state this problem merely in
terms of the conflict between culture and mass culture would lead to
sermonizing. To state it, however, in terms of the efforts of the intel-
lectuals as a class to reconcile themselves to this obvious dichotomy is
a genuine task—sociological or otherwise. The analysis of our material
shows that the attempt at reconciliation or synthesis did not succeed—
just as it has not succeeded today. Yet the detailed spelling out of this
failure would in itself be a contribution to a more sophisticated restate-
ment of today’s intellectual positions.
An article which appeared in the Quarterly Review in 1874, written
by William J. Courthope (the author of a History of English Poetry, a
book still used), provides ample demonstration of this point.14 It is
not without irony that a modern literary historian raps Courthope’s
knuckles because of an alleged foray by this author into sociology. Our
modern critic believes that this book on English poetry is “in usefulness
marred by a too strict adherence to the thesis that there is a close con-
nection between literary fashions, tastes and values, and contemporary
social and political opinions and conditions.”15
Yet the article is an important and, in a way, a very pretentious one
which attempts to “review” three books of Matthew Arnold, a book
by Symonds and one of Pater’s, and for good measure, to reevalu-
ate two of Carlyle’s classical writings. It centers around an analysis
of the concept of culture itself. The position of Courthope is one of
ambiguity—in itself paradigmatic for the intellectual kibitzer who
almost, but not quite, identifies with a cause. This kind of partisan-
ship without commitment anticipates the mid-twentieth century
intellectual rather than characterizes the nineteenth century literati.
Courthope contrasts Matthew Arnold’s thought with liberal and
Jacobinian philosophy of culture, and he does it in such a way that his
sympathies seem to lie with what he described as the liberal position. His
critique of Arnold is directed against “self-culture,” against the refine-
ment of the personality in isolation from the main stream of national
mores. He finds the same snobbish cultural isolationism in Carlyle.
Sarcastically, he calls Carlyle “the Professor,” who in raising literature to
the place erstwhile occupied by religion joins “the tendency of artists,
men of science, poets and professions of polite letters in general, to
form themselves into a priesthood for propagating a religion of ideas.”
He contrasts Carlyle’s elitism with the position of the rather radical
Frederick Harrison who, by the way, was the high priest of Auguste
169
Comte in England and who ridiculed what he called “the very silliest
cant of the day . . . the cant about Culture.” According to Harrison, cul-
ture is a very restricted area of concern which might have a function in
the scholarship of literary criticism, but “as applied to politics it means
simply a turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision
in action.” And he wraps it all up in the classical statement: “the man of
culture in politics is one of the poorest creatures alive.”
A closer reading shows that Courthope’s somewhat uneasy and not
quite committed juxtaposition of opposing evaluations of culture is
indicative of a much more crucial ideological attitude of the intellectual
toward the culture dilemmas of modern society. One might say that it
is projection when he pronounces Matthew Arnold’s famous self-image
as “wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to
be born . . . [as] important.” This is exactly the situation of the highly
sensitized intellectual facing two aspects of alienation: a cultural heritage
which has seemingly become estranged from the temper of the times,
and, on the other hand, a cultural products market courting the fickle
idiosyncracies and psychological needs of the populace which is will-
ing to pay a price if the merchandise is right. Courthope reflects this
dilemma of double alienation: he cannot accept the Carlyle-Arnold-
Pater position, this “irresponsible priesthood” which artificially enforces
an estrangement from social responsibility. Yet he also cannot accept
“the logical consequences of the law of supply and demand in literature.”
He quotes with disgust an article in the London Times which stated in
positive terms the credo of market-oriented mass culture: “If one novel
in ten, or one poem in a thousand, be worth reading at all, it is as much
as we can reasonably expect to find. It is certain, however, that the rest
supply a want which is really felt, and give undoubted pleasure to a
large class of readers. If the object of literature is to give pleasure, and
to divert the mind from the unpleasant realities of life, it is impossible
to refuse some praise to the performance which does this, for however
brief a period.”
Courthope rejects a social philosophy which makes public opinion
not only a criterion of success but also the criterion of historical judg-
ment which has to be accepted. He notes that “national taste is decay-
ing” and in Tocquevillian phraseology, he “revolts against this vulgar
and cynical despotism” of public opinion. Sarcastically, he comments
on the Times’ editorial: “If the object of literature be what is defined by
that great journal, . . . we cannot rightly refuse our praise to the art of
the procurers or the trade of the opium-monger.” Yet Courthope does
170
Excursus B
not find himself about to resolve the dilemma by either standing aloof
as the uncompromising critic or rising to the stance of the fighting
revolutionary; rather, he dissipates his argument by vaguely arguing
the possibility of genuine cultural activity through “consideration of the
instincts, the traditions, the character of the society to which we belong.”
The article is a veritable inventory of contrasting topics and themes
of the cultural debate. There is awareness of a thoroughgoing change
from the aristocratic to the middle-class style of life; there is insight into
the differential cultural demands made in a highly stratified middle-
class society; there is knowledge about the differences of cultural val-
ues reinforced by taste as an objective criterion of excellence and the
demands of the market; there is, at least germinally, a fine delineation
of the two social antagonists—the elitist and the populist, as it were—in
the codification of what culture does and should mean; and finally there
is acted out, though with many ambiguities and uncertainties, the role
of the intellectual who feels no obligation to say either an absolute yes
or an absolute no to the world in which he finds himself.
The debate over cultural standards in the nineteenth century was a
continuation of issues already current in the eighteenth. But while the
earlier century ended on a note of disillusionment,16 the nineteenth
century found its rationale. The combination of England’s emergence
as an imperialist power, and the tremendous advance in standards of
living made this possible. In the final quarter of the century the writings
in the quarterly journals take on an academic dryness; the earlier tone
of immediacy and involvement is gone. The triumph of science sup-
ported an optimism that dared challenge the premises of the critique
of cultural standards. Thus, in 1896 the Edinburgh Review reviewer
can say: “If it be true that the moral and material welfare of the masses
of the nation can only be obtained by making it more difficult for the
man of intellect to make his mark on the age, [then] the interests of
the many, must, we fear, prevail over the requirements of the few; and
we must content ourselves as best we can with securing the greatest
happiness of the greatest number.” On this sour note of uneasy trust
in the age of Science and Multitudes, the century ends.
Notes
1. Edinburgh Review, No. CCCXXXIV (April 1886), pp. 467–68.
2. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, LI (January 1842), pp. 107 ff.
3. Edinburgh Review, No. CLXVIII (April 1846), p. 383.
4. Edinburgh Review, No. CLXXX (April 1849), p. 360.
5. Edinburgh Review, No. CLXV (January 1887), p. 50.
171
6. Richard Altick, “The Literature of an Imminent Democracy,” in 1859: Enter-

ing an Age of Crises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959), p. 222.
Cornhill Magazine was a successful example of “thoughtful middle-class
journalism.”
7. Contemporary Review, XIV (June 1870), p. 459.
8. Edinburgh Review, No. CXXXII (July 1837), p. 204.
9. Edinburgh Review, No. CXXXVIII (January 1839), p. 435.
10. Michael Wolff, “Victorian Reviewers and Cultural Responsibility,” in 1859:
Entering an Age of Crises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959),
p. 270.
11. Edinburgh Review, No. CCXVII (January 1858), p. 246.
12. Edinburgh Review, No. CXXXII (July 1837), p. 151.
13. Edinburgh Review, No. CXXXVI (July 1838), p. 356–57.
14. Quarterly Review, No. 274 (October 1874), pp. 404 ff.
15. Samuel C. Chew, “The Nineteenth Century and After,” in A. E. Baugh, ed.,
A Literary History of England (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1948),
p. 1603.
16. Cf. Chapter 3 of this volume.
172
4
The Reception of Dostoevski
in Pre-World War I Germany
The plan of this study was conceived during the last year of the Weimar
Republic, and it was during this period that the research data were
collected.1 The study itself was written “in exile” after Hitler had come
to power. I make these remarks advisedly in order to warn the reader
that the motivation for this piece of work was not so much scholarly
interest per se but a political or, if you will, moral concern. Working
as a sociologist in a German academic context, I became appalled at
the increasing political and moral apathy of Germany’s lower middle
and middle classes beginning in the twenties—an apathy, if not cal-
lousness, which was hidden under the veneer of “cultural” pretensions.
I was curious to find out whether a method of scientific access could
be developed with which to study this constellation of political and
moral decay and cultural magniloquence.
Had I known at the time about advanced methods of opinion research
and projective psychology, I would perhaps have never designed this
study, for it attempts to accomplish the same ends as these method-
ologies in a primordial fashion. It assumes that the works of a writer
serve as projective devices for the display, through widely published
commentaries, of hidden traits and tendencies typical for broad strata
of a population. In other words, it studies readers’ reactions indirectly
through the medium of printed material which is inferred to represent
typical group reactions.
The “sample” of this opinion study is very representative as far as it
goes. Due to the generous assistance I had as a member of the Institute of
Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, I was able to peruse nearly
all books, all magazine articles, and even all major newspaper articles
ever written on Dostoevski for the time period under investigation. The
results of my research, which originally appeared in German, are here
presented in a somewhat abridged form.
173
During the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first
two decades of the twentieth century, no other modern author received
as much literary and critical attention in Germany as Dostoevski. There
have been other writers, of course, who have had greater influence or
who have achieved more editions, and the curve of the literary preoccu-
pation with Dostoevski shows considerable fluctuation. But not a single
year has elapsed since the end of the eighties without some significant
addition to the Dostoevski literature. Nor is this literature restricted
to the field of aesthetic criticism. Many political, religious, scientific,
and philosophic discussions have appeared along with literary essays
and critiques. Examination of the complete German bibliography on
Dostoevski (approximately 800 items)2 reveals an unusual number of
important names from literary, religious, and philosophic life, distrib-
uted among the most diverse schools (only Goethe is comparable in this
respect). The same applies to the diffusion of the Dostoevski literature
among periodicals and newspapers. Political organs ranging from the
conservative through the National-Liberal to the political left, literary
periodicals in the strict sense, even scholarly journals devoted to phi-
losophy, law, and medicine have published discussions of Dostoevski.
Such temporal continuity and social diversity suggest certain prob-
lems. Are there some particular features which condition this intensity
and breadth of interest? Are there specific elements in Dostoevski’s
works which appeal to a particular social configuration in all its diver-
sity and change?
This paper is not a study of Dostoevski. Certain ideological pecu-
liarities of the German middle- and lower-middle-class reading public
clearly do not apply to Dostoevski at all. In fact, the amount of attention
which he has received cannot by any means be explained by reference
to the content, composition, or language of his novels, by their subject
matter or aesthetic qualities alone. The complete answer must lie in
fields other than those which the literary historian ordinarily discusses.
The Ubiquitous Myth
Studying the written reaction to Dostoevski in all of its multiplicity,
one is struck by the fact that the same broad categories of interpreta-
tion have been retained throughout. The emphasis varies here and
there, to be sure, for the taste for particular works changes in time.
Certain aspects, such as the religious significance of the man and his
work, for example, did not become important until later. If one looks
hard enough, diametrically opposed statements can be found within
174
The Reception of Dostoevski in Pre-World War I Germany
these categories on many specific points. One conservative critic, for

example, stresses the nationalism of Dostoevski,3 whereas a liberal
critic tending toward naturalism emphasizes his humanism.4 But the
common viewpoints are far more apparent than any such differences.
Whether examining the commentary of the 1890s or of the 1930s,
there are the same typical judgments: Dostoevski is a special kind of
psychologist, he preaches the love of man in his own way, he tends to
reconcile contradictions among the most divergent theoretical and
practical spheres of life, his work expresses the soul of his people, and
the like. Our problem is to show the extent to which these judgments
contain basic elements of the ideology of the social groups which form
the hard core of his readership.
The reception given to Dostoevski, the evaluation of the categories
developed in the course of that reception, is positive with a few unim-
portant exceptions. Dostoevski is acclaimed. One might even say that
his popularity is less a matter of literary criticism than of willing and
pious adoration. It is significant that there is scarcely one adequate
scholarly account of his life and work by a German literary historian,
and the few comprehensive treatments which do exist betray their
opinionated character by their very design.5
From the beginning, Dostoevski is surrounded with an aura of
myth. Qualities are added to his personality and works, qualities which
transcend verifiable reality and have a super-historical character, and
a certain indestructible unity is posited between his life and novels.
They are devoid of any connection with the social process, but at the
same time they are assumed to make social life meaningful against all
historical theory and against every conception of social law.
An examination of mythical speculations in the commentaries on
Dostoevski quickly reveals a staggering number of closely related for-
mulations concerning the symbolic nature of the author and his works:
“close to primordial conditions,”6 a nature “full of the Devil and full of
God,”7 a saint on the road “from Nazareth to Golgotha,”8 a “bottom-
less pit,”9 “epileptic genius,”10 one who weaves death with life,11 “reason
with madness,”12 chaos with form.13 Certain common ideas underlie
this chaotic abundance.
First, the realm of real being appears in Dostoevski’s work, that
realm which stands outside mere contingency in human life. With
him we approach “the mystical mothers”;14 he “projects for the most
part into the new third realm of the human race”;15 “we always carry
the abyss with us.”16
175
Second, Dostoevski’s life has a symbolic meaning. It is not molded

by manifold experiences; the latter are themselves only stations in an
“existence significantly conceived according to a sinister plan,”17 stations
on his “dark road.”18 “Mysterious forces, which apparently unseen, rule
all the earthly destinies of Dostoevski,” brought him to prison.19 Through
illness Dostoevski “was thrust into the darkest abysses of unhappiness and
could taste the highest transports of ecstasy.”20 And “He was an epileptic.
What does this mean? . . . That he felt a mysterious power within him, the
demon, for a brief moment elevating him suddenly, sublimely prostrat-
ing him cruelly for days.”21 His death, too, took place under an unearthly
sign: “He died like Beethoven in the sacred uproar of the elements, in a
storm.”22 If one surveys the development of his personality, one sees that
“it grows and is formed from the dark animalic and elementary roots to
the highest consummation, and rises to the highest, most radiant peaks
of spirituality.”23 Furthermore: “It often seems as if an invisible power
presents just that man who is sensitive and receptive above all others with
the most terrible of human destinies, so that a man may at length, out
of his own experience, show his fellow men how a man of his type can
be injured, humiliated, and tortured to death, and nevertheless remain
a man. Such mysterious designs guide the destiny of Dostoevski.”24
Such arbitrariness in the choice of mythical figures, which we meet
in Christian and in pagan, in metaphysical and in sentimental form,
places public life and the whole of social existence in a context which
transcends criticism and dissatisfaction. The enjoyment of works of art
casts a veil over reality. Apart from the gratification of the fancy which
is achieved by “understanding” the deeper meaning of human life and
events in general, one is transported into a sphere in which everyone
can experience sublime pleasures. The mechanism which creates ide-
ology also transmutes the lack of a social theory into a profuse wealth
of images and fantasies. We shall see again and again that the ideology
of the middle class tends to transfigure reality by substituting for it the
inner world of the psyche. World history thus becomes private myth.
If myth as super- and prehistoricity serves to bolster the middle class
in its relationship to the upper stratum, so also can the life of Dostoevski
be interpreted to establish a line of demarcation from the lower classes.
The same characteristically private aspect is inherent in the disposition
of the life plan of the individual, of the meaning which rules his fate.
The glorification of Dostoevski’s terrible suffering, his imprisonment,
illness, and poverty, in short, every situation to which the propertyless
strata are exposed, is in the last analysis an exaltation of passivity. It is
176
absurd to struggle against suffering inflicted by powers which elude

every earthly, scientific, or social-reformist effort, and men upon whom
such suffering has been imposed acquire a luster of special dignity. Such
mechanisms console the middle classes for their own troubles by point-
ing to still greater ones. By giving full approval to the greater distress and
suffering of the lower classes, they also alleviate their anxieties about
potential threats from below to middle-class existence.
A third mythical factor is represented by the “meeting of opposites.”
Through the whole history of the reception there runs the motif that
Dostoevski the man, the intrinsic quality of his works, the essence of
his most important characters, in short, the whole compass of his life
and creation, are characterized by a union of factors generally perceived
as contradictory. Great pains are taken to show this union of oppo-
sites in the most diverse spheres. Contradictions in Weltanschauung:
Dostoevski is “a conservative writer, yet also a naturalist.”25 The action
in the Brothers Karamazov encompasses “heaven and hell”;26 “great
saintliness and great wickedness” appear in Stavrogin;27 Dostoevski
“is a nihilist and orthodox.”28 Intellectual contradictions: we find the
author “attaining the highest peak of reason and falling to the lowest
depths of the abyss of mysteries.”29 Dostoevski often “undermines his
logically constructed world of ideas in order to dash them down to an
unfathomable depth.”30 Moral contrasts: “The saint and the sinner . . .
are never opposites for him.”31 His countenance bears witness to
“diseased passions and endless compassion”;32 the religious fanatic is
steeped in guilt and the prostitute is pure.33 Contrasts of character: “We
must solve the apparent contradictions . . . in the greatness of his genius
and of his heart, and look upon them in the same way as we look upon
the contradictions in nature.”34 He “was an epileptic, a man in whom
extremes of dullness and lucidity coalesced.”35 His countenance is “half
the face of a Russian peasant, half that of a criminal.”36 Finally, there are
contradictions which cannot be subsumed under fixed categories: “Every
person . . . is only a bit of his immeasurable, indistinct personality . . .
the sharply outlined details, the naturalistic element which we think we
perceive are blurred. . . . It is the abyss in which mists brew . . . abyss
and level ground are the same.”37 “We hesitate to use the formalistic
hackneyed word ‘harmony’ of an author who permits the experience
of all manner of blessedness and deviltry with cold-bloodedness.”38
His world is “full of heights and depths, narrow places and spacious
extents, abysses and prospects.”39 “Chaos constantly takes on form . . .
but at once the form grows soft and melts away.”40
177
This mythological element illustrates a central factor in the con-

struction of every ideology, namely, the glorification of existing social
contradictions. This is the essence of the mechanism. All other factors
are more or less subsidiary and may grow out of the sociopsychological
peculiarity of the groups concerned, they may receive their emphasis
from the historical situation involved, or they may be determined by
material or cultural traditions. But the one constant is the glorification
and embellishment of social contradictions.
In the first type of myth, the realm of real being, concrete reality is
removed from sight. In the second, the role of the individual within
the social process is isolated and overestimated; but in the third, the
meeting of opposites goes straight to the social contradictions them-
selves. The ideological mechanism is developed in such a way that the
antagonistic character of a given social order is denied more or less
indirectly; an image of harmony within established order is created.
The meeting of opposites assumes a unique position within the con-
text of such ideological mechanisms. It does not deny the existence
of contradictions in the most diverse spheres of culture and life; yet it
justifies the contradictions metaphysically.
The following sentence could stand as a motto for this essay:
“Political and social problems were transformed for him [Dostoevski]
into problems of soul and faith.”41 Anti-intellectualism could hardly
be manifested in more pregnant fashion. It is not a question of car-
rying out an idea, of admitting a sentiment, of respecting an ethi-
cal or political position as the only possible one, but of attributing
equal validity to the antithetical idea, to a contrary sentiment, to a
completely different position. It is never a question of anything very
precise or certain; the diversity of life, its alleged depth and inexhaust-
ibility, gives it its peculiar attraction. This expresses the fantasy life
of social groups who cannot derive pleasure from a rational analysis
of the external world. By reading fiction, however, they can enjoy
the apparent diversity of life and resolve its social contradictions
irrationally.
Finally, the national or folk myth assumes the most varied forms in the
Dostoevski reception. “His literature is Asia . . . and even the impossible
is entirely possible for him. . . . In the last analysis Russian mysticism is .
. . yearning and fulfillment at the same time.”42 Or it is simply announced
that “theory and life are one and the same to the Russian.”43 The historian
Heinrich Friedjung makes a particularly open confession of his accep-
tance of this national mythology when he refers to Dostoevski’s creed
178
of the Russian soul: “If one applies the rules of logic to the religious and
political views of Dostoevski, they crumble into contradictions. Here,
too, the elementary is more powerful than the mere rational.”44 This
statement recalls another typical element of the national myth, the ever-
repeated assurance that Dostoevski is “one of the greatest manifestations
of the Russian folk spirit,”45 that “in him . . . the Russian soul has found
its most powerful and at the same time most intimate expression,”46 that
“in Dostoevski we learn to understand the Russian and through him the
Russian people.”47
Closer inquiry into the nature of this Russian nation leaves us in
somewhat of a quandary. We learn of the “Russian soul which splits
its thirst for God into earthly pleasure and negating reverie.”48 We are
told that there is no other nation “which is so religious in every stratum
as the Russian,”49 that the soul of the Russian manifests “itself more
directly, more impetuously, more unreservedly than ours.”50 Apart
from such vague and intangible characterizations, however, we must
be satisfied with the knowledge that Dostoevski and his work offer us
“a solution of the problem of Russia,”51 that he “depicts with particular
purity the essence of the Russian people, wondrously rich in strength
and weakness, riddles and contradictions,”52 in short, that he leads us
into the “secret of the national existence.”53
The most important documentation of this national mythology
is to be found in the writings of Moeller van den Bruck, who edited
the most widely circulated German editions of Dostoevski’s works.
Forerunner of German National Socialism, his comments represent a
classical example of the social interpretation of the national myths of
today. At the beginning of his introduction to The Possessed, van den
Bruck speaks of the Russian soul, for which “man himself is a dark
yearning after intuition and knowledge.”54 In contrast to the German,
the “born carrier of ideas” who can often enough “return as Plato
or Kant,” the Slavs are “born heralds of faith.” “If some day evening
comes to Western humanity and the German is at rest, only a Slavic
mother could again bear Buddha or Jesus out of the Eastern world.”55
The Russian Weltanschauung was transformed into great literary art
for the first time in Dostoevski. “The expression of Russian madness,
of the tragedy in Slavdom, the incarnation of all its mystical internal-
izations and hectic tension,”56 he gave Russia its proper mythology
of the soul. Russian life is determined by the “overly particularistic,
constantly decentralizing racial developments,” and on the other hand
by the Russian national character—dreamy, sentimental, and resigned
179
to fate, not active and determined. This internalized Russian nature

finds expression everywhere, “even when it is unfolded in mad, and
even atrocious, deeds.”
Dostoevski, van den Bruck continues, was one of the very few novel-
ists of the nineteenth century to say something new, more than Balzac,
Flaubert, Zola, or de Maupassant. Only Goethe is comparable. Goethe
“imbedded realism further in the spiritual and eternal by giving it a
foundation of nature and the rising natural science.”57 Dostoevski went
still further and, as “a complete naturalist, showed how modern life
too has its mysticism and fantasies.” He apprehended life “in its inner
demonism . . . with its new beauties and ugliness, its new moralities
and immoralities . . . and, instead of degrading naturalism into a mere
copy, he again resolved it into a vision.”58 The Possessed reveals the
demonism in the Russian conception of state and history, which, in
view of degenerate social conditions, feverishly drives Russian youth
to politics.
The year 1906, in which this introduction to The Possessed appeared,
marked a definite stage in growth of monopoly, industrial and political,
and the essay itself is a symptom of this ideology. If giant economic
and political structures were to be accepted by the people, the ideal of
competition among men through the development of reason and will
had to be replaced by veneration of nonrational ideals removed from
the forum of critical verification. It is one of the inherent contradictions
of modern society that the growing dominance of rational planning
in the economic and political structures should be accompanied by
increasing suppression of rational and critical elements in the social
consciousness.
Van den Bruck’s essay on Dostoevski prepared the way for the
development of a false legend about the nineteenth century. This is
particularly clear in his over-simplification of the concept of natural-
ism. He extends it into a visionary, artistic conception of the world, a
distortion which has been widely perpetuated, often with the help of
references to the widely circulated introduction to The Possessed.59 Van
den Bruck denies the relationship of Dostoevski to the great tradition
of European, and particularly French, realism and naturalism, and pos-
tulates an untenable connection with Goethe. Dostoevski is thus torn
out of the real context of the human qualities which the nineteenth
century developed, in a succession of artistic figures from Balzac to
Zola, all of whom Moeller van den Bruck summarily dismisses. Realism
and naturalism in the novel, which acknowledged the necessity for
180
taking an unequivocal stand on the social conflicts, was one of the

most important achievements of the nineteenth century. The artistic
products of this naturalism, precisely because they strive to reflect real
life, constitute an appeal for change.
But for Moeller van den Bruck the decisive element to be gleaned
from the traditions and products of the nineteenth century appear
under the vague title of “national mythologies.” It is no longer history
when he asserts that Dostoevski “encompasses in a thousand new
answers not only the whole of Russia, but also the whole Slavdom in
all its various nationalities, castes, and types, from the simple mujik
to the Petersburg aristocrat, from the nihilist to the bureaucrat, from
the criminal to the saint.”60 There is not the slightest scientific or
even rational ground for asserting that the German is a “born carrier
of ideas” (even though Plato is reckoned among the Germans), that
the Slavic soul can, in its dark, yearning fashion, create a Buddha or
a Jesus, or that the Russian national character is dreamy, sentimen-
tal, and submissive to fate rather than active and determined. More
recently, such ideologies flourished in the powerful ideologies of
totalitarian cultures.
The concept of the mythical, especially the myth of the community,
comprises the most essential feature of the Dostoevski reception in
Germany. But the material also affords concrete expression for several
other basic factors of the social consciousness of the middle class. We
shall first examine a factor which may be called passivity. This stance
reflects the growing impotence of the middle class, and it is expressed
in the glorification of the concept of duty and suffering, in the renuncia-
tion of any moral action which might be directed against social abuses.
Here one comes much closer to social praxis than in the mythical, and
the fact that important elements are most noticeable by their absence
should not be cause for wonder. Specifically, it is the sphere of activ-
ity, and especially moral and political activity, which is missing or, at
best, devaluated.
Dostoevski is used as an intellectual weapon against efforts to
reorganize society. When his political doctrines are discussed, a mali-
cious or uneasy voice is frequently heard applauding the opponent of
revolutions and revolutionaries, the man who warned against politi-
cal upheavals which bring distress, illness, and unnaturalness in their
train. Political action is either condemned as a sin against the universal
duty to submit, or transformed into mere inner exaltation, which is
declared to be the essence of man. Dostoevski is a prophet of darkness,
181
it is repeatedly said, who “foresaw the nihilist assassinations.”61 It was

after the Revolution of 1905 and after the publication of the German
translation of The Possessed in 1906, that his “baleful prophecy” revealed
the future of Russia most strikingly.62 “Many scenes from The Pos-
sessed are conceived as prophetic as if they were written during the
revolution and today.”63 The point is repeatedly made that he “stood
up so passionately and relentlessly against socialism.”64 Or: “Socialist
Utopias were not only foreign to his nature, but directly counter to it.
What inspired him . . . to the strongest loathing for socialism . . . was
the moral materialism of this doctrine.”65
It might be argued that one must not expect an activist approach
from the apostle of love and compassion for mankind. Nearly all the
literary critiques of Dostoevski do, in fact, revolve about the theme of
love and compassion—in elegant formulations such as the “surpassing
calm, through which only a sort of deeply secret sorrow vibrates, an
endless compassion,”66 or in painfully popular statements, such as “his
heart trembles with sympathy, compassion.”67 Or censoriously, “His
predilection for the oppressed and the depraved gradually assumes
the morbid form of . . . ‘Russian compassion,’ that compassion which
excludes all upright, honest working men, and extends only to pros-
titutes, murderers, drunkards, and similar blossoms on the tree of
mankind.”68
This statement may be crude, but it underscores the fact that in
Dostoevski’s work love remains a weak disposition of the soul. We have
here a situation similar to the meeting of opposites. The demand for
love and compassion could mean a realization of the existence of social
contradictions and the need for change; it could lead to the recogni-
tion of the value of justice. But the idea of action cannot enter into the
consciousness of persons in a relatively impotent social stratum, any
more than they can accept a principle of justice which destroys their
solidarity with the upper class and points to their common interests
with the masses.
It has often been said that Dostoevski had no inner relation to
politics, that he was really no political theorist.69 But how rarely has it
been pointed out that the demand for social justice is never proclaimed
in his political writings.70 The irrelevance of this category, a category
which finds powerful expression in the outstanding works of European
naturalism, that is to say in the most advanced artistic camp, is a clear
sign of the reactionary attitude of Dostoevski, and it is still more char-
acteristic of social groups which approve this silence.
182
Ubiquitous Psychology
The most frequent of all attributes of Dostoevski, acknowledged in his
reception in Germany before World War I at least, is that of psycholo-
gist. The “most learned psychologists” could “take lessons from him.”71
He was a “most subtle psychologist,”72 and “all the psychological skill
of the world” pales before Raskolnikov.73 The Possessed penetrates with
“overwhelming genius into all the depths of the human soul and its
demonism.”74 There are three answers to the question of the precise
nature of these extraordinary psychological accomplishments:
1. Dostoevski brings new, hitherto secret and dark psychological facts

to light. He knows “the most secret psychic movements of the human
soul.”75 He has an extraordinary talent for revealing “unperceived
stirrings of the soul.”76 He “divines . . . all the unconscious, atavistic,
and brute forces which stir the dark depths of faltering souls.”77
2. Dostoevski is a specialist on diseases of the soul, an incomparable
“master of pathological psychology.”78 Some of his works are all
“psychological pathology.”79 A theologian claims that Dostoevski has
“depicted the gradual outbreak of a mental illness more accurately”
than any other novelist.80 The same sentiment is expressed by a spe-
cialist: “a better expert in the sick psyche, a greater psychopathologist,
than Dostoevski” has probably never existed among novelists.81
3. Dostoevski provides a “unique psychology of crime.”82 Once again we
find a specialist saying that in “Dostoevski’s works we possess quite a
complete, faithful description of diseased mental states and criminal
types.”83
The extent to which Dostoevski may actually have enriched psy-

chological knowledge is a separate question. Like all great novelists,
he is passionately interested in psychological problems, and many of
his characterizations are masterpieces even when considered against
the more highly developed knowledge of today. What is important is
that Dostoevski as psychologist reinforces the interest of the middle
class in psychological problems. This interest has its own significant
history. Before the middle-class revolutions in France and Germany,
when there were sharp cleavages between the economic mechanism and
the forms of political domination and between the intellectual maturity
of the bourgeoisie and the feudal cultural apparatus, the protest of the
bourgeoisie was expressed in literature as a fiery profession of faith in
great passions and the importance of the independent life of the soul.
This glorification of passion is, for example, clearly manifest in Goethe’s
Werther. It was a progressive attitude toward life, yet it was incapable
183
of adequate social concretization. The security of feudal economy and

its regulated market had disappeared, and a well-developed psychology
was a necessary presupposition for a liberal economic system. One
must know one’s business partner; one must know with whom one is
dealing. The producer, now opposed by other producers, merchants,
and consumers, must know them, must be fully acquainted with their
psychology, in order to calculate their possible reactions to himself
and his enterprise. This is one of the social origins of the important
role played by conversation and discussion in the modern novel and
drama. Conversation is one indication of the psychological knowledge
which competing individuals in a modern society possess. He who is
rationally superior, more adroit, and more dexterous because of his
knowledge of the ways in which his conversational partners react, has
at his command one of the necessary conditions of economic success.
What was true in the period of middle-class absolutism is being
repeated, to a certain extent, in a later phase of German society. Broad
strata are again turning to the inner life for satisfaction, particularly
in Germany, where liberalism never really gained control because
of the merger between the feudal political power and the industrial
bourgeoisie. It is an ideological consolation for the middle classes to
indulge in psychological “discoveries” (a pleasure limited to the inner
life) in precisely the same way as they enjoy the splendor of the Ger-
man empire and, more recently, the Third Reich—as a satisfaction of
imagination.
Pleasure in psychology fits this picture. The restriction of pleasure
to one’s own inner life acquires luster the more one loses oneself in an
orgy of psychological interpretations. In this connection, the enjoy-
ment of psychopathology and criminal psychology has an ideological
significance of still another sort. The middle class cannot question the
existing social organization as a whole, but must accept and approve
it. This system, therefore, is “healthy.” Crime and disease are overheads
which are inevitable in the operation of the organism, but they are the
exceptions of a temporary or peripheral nature which prove the rule,
that is, the benign state of the whole.
The study of the reception of works of fiction thus becomes impor-
tant from a new point of view. It contributes to the study of those factors
which, over and above the mere power apparatus, exercise a socially
conservative and retarding function through their psychological power.
Desires do not disappear entirely, but they must be diverted, and art
may help to transform the instincts. The effects of such conversion, the
184
satisfaction of the fancy which the work of art gives, remain enclosed
within the sphere of the inner life.
The German commentary on the writings of Dostoevski identifies
the following psychological factors:
1. As a psychologist, Dostoevski proceeds “with the cold-bloodedness

of an anatomist.”84 The so-called psychology of Dostoevski reminds
one of a mighty laboratory with the finest, most precise tools and
machines for the measurement, investigation, and testing of the
human soul.”85 This “anatomization of human souls”86 is “almost grue-
some”87 and “exceedingly cruel.”88 No “corner of the soul”89 escapes
him.
2. From the beginning, attention was directed to the “naked realism and
naturalism,”90 the scrupulous fidelity with which Dostoevski portrays
the most “depraved characters” and the “most ghastly scenes.”91 His
genius gives him insight into the “cesspools of mankind.”92 There is
something tawdry about society in all his books. “They contain noth-
ing but usurers, liars, double-crossers, grovelling upstarts, bloated
fools, drunkards, and gamblers.”93 In his “repulsive images of dissolute
fancy,” and in his “splendidly realistic portrayal of national types of
criminal and moral monsters,”94 Dostoevski always “sees the soul
naked before him in its anxiety and its agitation.”95
3. An early critic remarks that Crime and Punishment lays “an incu-
bus on the breast” of the reader by its “portrayal of a soul burdened
with guilt,”96 and this motif of being “breathlessly” clutched by “wild
visions”97 has been maintained throughout. The precise formulations
vary, so that one writer states “that a cruel delight permits Dostoevski
to torture his reader,”98 another confesses “a very peculiar desire to
creep on all fours” after reading Dostoevski,99 still another experi-
ences “genuine Gothic humility,”100 and to a fourth it signifies that “the
horrible possibility of the fall often lives in our dreams. This abyss
is Dostoevski.”101 Through all these variations, however, one thing
always remains true of Dostoevski and his success—the atmosphere
“oppresses the heart and racks the brain.”102
The picture of the cruel, torturing anatomist, with a predilection for

the unclean and the forbidden, appeals to impulses which take pleasure
in hurting and tormenting. It also reveals a peculiar contradiction in
the reception. The mythical spell cast over the world, the emphasis
upon its enigmatic character and upon the “irrationality of the human
soul which no knowledge and no culture can set straight,”103 cannot be
reconciled with the picture of the anatomist who seeks clarity in the
darkest corners. This contradiction symbolizes the contradictory social
situation under discussion. The tendencies which transcend reality
185
by making it the symbol of a higher meaning oppose the tendencies

which create a sense of imagined power by permitting the experience
of aggressions which have no real significance. This contradiction
expresses the interrelation of the feelings of resignation and rage.
The social basis of the hymn of overflowing love and endless com-
passion in Dostoevski now becomes clear. These emotions are not
associated with any desire to transform reality, but remain mere inner
experiences. Men love or feel compassion, but no consequences are
drawn. Such feelings neither remedy a deficiency, nor demand a remedy.
Ideal nobility of the soul becomes the reflection of social impotence. It
contributes to the satisfaction of the fancy of social groups who have
been driven to the wall by reality. Love and compassion are mere social
illusions in this context.
Our discussion of the mechanisms of psychological mediation is
not complete. We have merely shown how certain impulses and needs
are transformed and achieve satisfaction in fancy. These elements of
the Dostoevski reception, however, and especially the combination of
anatomist and painter of the impure meet with the restraints raised by
the Freudian censor. Their nature is such that they are threatened with
complete repression by the requirements of morality and conscience.
In the make-up of the individual, prohibitions against the satisfaction
of impulses may lead to neurosis. This neurosis can be quite typical for
specific social strata, and to that extent, it is meaningless to speak of
illness. A large section of the middle class has just such neuroses. But
the art form of the novel, its social position, is, as it were, the reward
for getting around the restraints of the censor. The formal elements
in fiction corrupt the conscience, and, in the garb of fancy, permit
the satisfaction of impulses which would be unthinkable outside the
protective covering of aesthetic value.
Other psychological factors are also at work in the Dostoevski
reception to permit the vicarious enjoyment of censored impulses.104
Sadism acquires still greater luster if it is supposed to contribute to the
fulfillment of worthwhile human impulses. If it is crime, prostitution,
and the perversions associated with them that present an opportunity
to practice love and compassion, then they have been legitimized.
The difficulty still remains, however, that, despite all rationalization,
novels afford a vicarious enjoyment of the unclean and the repugnant.
The final justification for speaking of such things at all lies in the fact
that the common, unclean, and loathsome are assigned to declassed
outsiders. In this way, pleasure in degradation can be satisfied in the
186
fancy, and this satisfaction and glorification appears in the sphere of

politics today. In the political ideologies which are widely accepted by
the lower-middle class, great emphasis is laid on dragging the dirty linen
of one’s opponent into the light so that its “stench” may no longer defile
the air of a particular social circle. These opponents are characterized
as unclean criminal elements, as riff-raff who shun the light of day.
Ubiquitous Reception
Our discussion of the reception of Dostoevski into the ideology of
the middle classes requires at least a reference to the reception by
other groups. We shall illustrate the Dostoevski reception outside the
middle classes by examining the attitudes of three critics of Dostoevski:
(1) Rollard, contributor to a widely circulated middle-class family
journal;105 (2) the anonymous author of a postscript to the Brothers
Karamazov,106 employed by a rather progressive bourgeois publishing
house; (3) Zabel,107 contributor to one of the leading bourgeois politi-
cal journals (which was working for a unification of all conservative
and right-liberal forces),108 a member of the upper bourgeoisie by his
whole demeanor and social consciousness (in 1914 he still designated
himself as National-Liberal).109
The culture represented by Rollard remains within the framework
of simple family life when he restricts himself to the observation that
Dostoevski “was the most faithful portrayer of his contemporaries
and of the present conditions of his fatherland”; and that “a thorough
study of Dostoevski might perhaps be more appropriate for shedding
light on Russian conditions . . . which is in many respects quite unlike
the conditions of the rest of Europe.” Rollard speaks of Russia almost
as if it were a wild tribe.
The anonymous author of the postscript to the Brothers Karamazov
has a more enlightened and highly developed interest. He links the
book to the pan-Slavic movement, and even adduces it for an under-
standing of the Dreikaiserbund. Though he regrets that Dostoevski left
us in doubt “about the main lines which he had in view for the future
organization of the nation,” he believes that after the assassination of
Alexander II “ideas made headway among the Slavophiles to which Dos-
toevski, the most illustrious of all the pan-Slavists and Slavophiles, gave
living expression in his Brothers Karamazov.” This political approach
reflects a social conviction that learning can bring profit.
Zabel’s approach to Dostoevski as a source of knowledge is still more
ingenious and adequate. He ranks Dostoevski as “a highly significant
187
phenomenon in modern literature and a completely indispensable tool

for judging the Russian mind.” The “recent terrorist movement has shown
us how youth takes recourse to assassination.” In Crime and Punishment,
written in 1867, “Dostoevski introduces us to the beginnings of this
movement,” and provides “an important document for the history of our
time” which “must arouse the interest of every cultured person.” Here the
attitude shows decided partisanship. A spokesman for the upper classes
discovers a friend, so to speak, whose “life force and originality” can be
praised, whose characters “are properly crammed full of real life.” Even
Zabel’s stylistic tools (like this particular expression, “crammed full”), his
emphasis upon the “living element,” and his recognition of the “extraor-
dinary force of his fancy and his power of description,” of his grasp “of
the complete life of man,” of his “fully matured artistic nature,” lead to
a completely different social atmosphere. It is ruled by the possibility
of great enjoyment, not limited by the need for regression into more
primitive, purely illusory psychic pleasures, nor by weak and irresolute
efforts to struggle upward, as expressed in the perpetual accumulation
of knowledge. Zabel is the first German who gives the impression that
he has read Dostoevski very carefully. And it is precisely this attentive-
ness, with its feeling for nuances, with its accurate understanding of what
can be accepted and what must be rejected, in short, an attitude which,
unlike the great mass of the reception, is without psychic inhibitions and
which grasps and judges things as they are, that is characteristic of the
social consciousness of the ruling strata. Zabel finds conditions in his
own country entirely sound, and though he shares with the rest of the
critics the stock phrases about Dostoevski’s “endless sympathy for the
oppressed and demonic hatred of the oppressors,” the conditions which
arouse these feelings in Dostoevski are for him historically and nation-
ally determined. He refers to the “horrible cruelty of Russian justice,”
to the “pan-Slavis bias, the provoking insistence upon Russian manner
and custom.” It is noteworthy that not a single reference can be found
in Zabel’s essay to the whole sphere of mythical ideology.
This example of reception by the upper class finds its counterpart at
the other extreme, in proletarian circles. At first, the literary spokesmen
of the proletariat remained quite faithful to the conventional bourgeois
picture. Rosus, for example, in his article in the Neue Zeit for 1884, has
a purely didactic approach and uses the traditional literary categories.
Apart from his remark that Dostoevski portrayed the Russian Socialists
and Communists as mere “babblers and numbskulls,” Rosus repeats
the stock phrases, “cold-bloodedness of the anatomist,” “case history of
188
disease,” “naked realism.” The theoretical understanding of proletarian

writers had to reach a higher level before they could formulate a clear
and correct statement of the Dostoevski problem.
When we turn to Korn’s essay in the Neue Zeit for 1908,110 we find
that all ideological character has vanished. From a proletarian position,
Korn gives a better class analysis of Dostoevski than Zabel, with his
upper bourgeois attitude. He calls The Possessed a “reactionary poi-
soner” (with all due recognition of “Dostoevski the novelist and Welt-
anschauung-visionary”). It is absurd to look to this work of Dostoevski
for an understanding of the Russian Revolution of 1905, since there
was no “revolutionary, i.e., class conscious proletariat” in the book (nor
did such a proletariat exist in Russia at that time), but only “declassed
nobility and petty bourgeoisie, a rabble between the classes.” Korn per-
ceives the deeper ideology-forming factors in this novel, and he notes
“the paradox, bewildering at first sight, that an ideology, which in its
original form may have been an accurate reflection of the economic
and political situation of Russia in the ‘50s and ‘60s, is experiencing a
rebirth in monopoly capitalist Germany of the twentieth century.” He
realizes how little Dostoevski’s novel contributes to a real knowledge
of historical and social relationships, how little the treatment reflects
even the prerevolutionary social conditions, and how its atmosphere is
“pure intellectual and ethical chaos.” It is precisely those blurred tones
in the development, motivation, and style of the book which give it its
ideological value for the bourgeois German public: “What the literary
spokesmen of our bourgeoisie have recently proclaimed as a discovery,
namely, that it is not man’s consciousness but his subconscious which
is important, that everything worthwhile in the soul begins where the
mind ends and the depths open up—that was, in fact, the programmatic
psychology, the Weltanschauung of Dostoevski fifty years before.” It
must be remembered that Korn is not attacking the scientific activities
of psychoanalysis, which was itself subject to the unanimous opposi-
tion of the official scientific world; he is attacking the anti-intellectual
currents which appear in the myth of the demonism of the soul, in the
enchantment of personalization of reality.
In the post–World War I reception of Dostoevski we find the same
ideological factors as before the war, with even more abundant docu-
mentation. Immediately after the war, the myth of the inner life was
predominant because of the general breakdown of social organization
in Germany and, more specifically, because of the final dispossession of
the middle class. More recently, however, the national myth has come
189
to the fore as a model for the growing heroic-racial ideology. The radi-
cal tendencies of Dostoevski, though badly distorted in his writings,
exercised a measure of influence upon the young German intellectuals
immediately after the war, but this was an influence for socio-political
radicalization only where other more powerful forces had already set
in. The great mass of these intellectuals were confined to middle-class
conceptions, and Dostoevski could perform a particular ideological
service for them. Since he was labelled a product of the Russian nature
and since the study of his works was supposed to give a clear insight into
that nature, it followed that the key to the understanding of Bolshevism
had also been found. Dostoevski can be put to extensive use in providing
an imaginary solution whereby such middle-class groups can avoid a real
analysis of the problem of transforming the social system, by satisfying
anal-sadistic drives in the fancy and, at the same time, condemning
them with the help of rationalizations buried in Dostoevski’s writings.
The post-World War I phase of the reception points in two directions:
(1) Dostoevski was placed in the intellectual context of Kierkegaard,
Karl Barth, and the whole of dialectical theology. Indifference to earthly
things, glorification of the individual, his inner world, and his relation
to God, thus acquire extraordinary importance. This view is bound
up with a social consciousness which hopes for nothing more from
the present; it belongs to the circle of resigned strata. (2) The other
tendency represents the politically dominant groups. It endorsed the
national element in Dostoevski, but with limits imposed by the prevail-
ing German ideology of Dostoevski’s “racial” inadequacy.
Notes
1. Comprehensive documentation is limited to the period ending 1918.
2. Good but incomplete bibliographical references are to be found in Theod-
erich Kampmann, Dostojewski in Deutschland (Münster: 1931, first pub-
lished in 1930 as a dissertation).
3. Franz Sandvoss, “F. M. Dostojewski,” Preussische Jahrbuecher, XCII (1899),
pp. 330–41.
4. Hermann Conradi, “F. M. Dostojewski,” Die Gesellschaft, V (1889), pp. 520–30.
5. See, for example, the chapter headings in R. Guardini, Der Mensch und der
Glaube; Versuche uber die religiöse Existenz in Dostojewskis grossen Romanen
(Leipzig: 1933): “The People and Its Way to Holiness,” “Silence and the Great
Acceptance,” “Ecclesiastics,” “The Cherub,” “Revolt,” “Godlessness,” “A Sym-
bol of Christ.” Cf. titles like “Faith as the Will to Spirit,” “The Experience of
Real Being for Man: in His Relation to the Whole Egoless Thou: to God,” in
K. Nötzel, Das Leben Dostojewskis (Leipzig: 1925).
6. K. Weiss, review of several of Dostoevski’s novels, Hochland, VI (1908), p. 364.
7. O. J. Bierbaum, “Dostojewski,” Die Zukunft, XVIII (1909), p. 186.
190
8. O. Kaus, “Dostojewskis Briefe,” Die weissen Blätter, I (1913/14), p. 1353.

9. L. Beer, “Quo vadis,” Die Nation, XVIII (1900/01), p. 793; and K. H. Strobl,
“Dostojewski, Russland und die Revolution,” Die Gegenwart, XXXVI
(1907), p. 87.
10. Georg Brandes, Dostojewski, ein Essay (Berlin: 1889), p. 3; cf. Strobl, op. cit.
and Bierbaum, op. cit.
11. H. Coralnik, Das Russenbuch (Strassburg: 1914), p. 20.
12. W. Scholz, “Dostojewski,” Westermanns Monatshefte, XXXIII (1888/89),
p. 766.
13. Hermann Bahr in Bahr, D. Mereschkowski, and O. J. Bierbaum, Dostojewski:
3 Essays (München, 1914), p. 15.
14. Bierbaum, op. cit., p. 197.
15. Leo Berg, Der Übermensch in der modernen Literatur (Leipzig: 1898), p. 111.
16. Strobl, op. cit.
17. O. Stossl, “Die Briefe von Dostojewski,” Der neue Merkur, I (1914), p. 499.
18. Adolf Stern, Geschichte der neuen Literatur (Leipzig: 1885), VII, p. 550.
19. Mereschkowski, Tolstoi und Dostojewski als Mensch und als Künstler
(Leipzig: 1903), p. 39.
20. Frieda Freiin von Bülow, “Dostojewski in Deutschland,” Das Literarische
Echo, IX (1906), p. 204.
21. Bierbaum, op. cit.
22. Stefan Zweig, “Dostojewski, Die Tragödie seines Lebens,” Der Merker, V
(1914), p. 106.
23. Mereschkowski, op. cit., p. 222.
24. K. Nötzel, “Dostojewski,” März, V (1911), p. 301.
25. Stern, Geschichte der neuen Literatur, VII, p. 550.
26. M. Necker, “Dostojewski,” Die Grenzboten, XLIV (1885), p. 349.
27. Mereschkowski, Tolstoi und Dostojewski, p. 92.
28. Strobl, Die Gegenwart, XXXVI, p. 87.
29. R. Saitschik, Die Weltanschauung Dostojewskis und Tolstois (Halle: 1901), p. 9.
30. Ibid., p. 2.
31. Coralnik, Das Russenbuch, p. 20.
32. Brandes, Dostojewski, ein Essay, p. 3.
33. Kurt Eisner, “Raskolnikov,” Sozialistische Monatshefte, V (1901), p. 52.
34. N. Hoffmann, Dostojewski, eine biographische Studie (Berlin: 1899), p. 2.
35. F. Servaes, “Dostojewski,” Die Zukunft, XXXI (1900), p. 258.
36. Brandes, op. cit.
37. Strobl, op. cit.
38. Weiss, Hochland, VI, p. 364.
39. Bierbaum, Die Zukunft, XVIII, p. 196.
40. Bahr, Dostojewski: 3 Essays, p. 15.
41. Hoffmann, op. cit.
42. Strobl, Die Gegenwart, XXXVI, p. 87.
43. Joseph Müller, Dostojewski—ein Charakterbild (München, 1903), p. 183.
44. Heinrich Friedjung, Das Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Berlin: 1922), III, p. 142.
45. Joseph Melnik, introduction to A. S. Wolynski, Buch vom grossen Zorn
(Frankfurt: 1905), p. v.
46. Theodor Heuss, “Dostojewskis Revolutionsroman,” Die Hilfe, XII (1906), p. 9.
47. M. Schian, “Dostojewski,” Die christliche Welt, XXVI (1912), p. 205.
191
48. Hoffmann, Dostojewski, p. 425.

49. Müller, op. cit.
50. Bülow, Das Literarische Echo, IX, p. 204.
52. Bülow, op. cit.
53. Melnik, op. cit.
54. Moeller van den Bruck, introduction to Dostoevski, The Possessed, Piper-
Verlag edition (München: 1906), reprinted in Die Zukunft, XIV (1906),
p. 66; we shall cite the article in Die Zukunft.
55. Moeller van den Bruck, Die Zukunft, loc. cit.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., p. 68.
58. Ibid.
59. Thus Heuss, Die Hilfe, XII, p. 9, speaks of the “spiritual character” of
Dostoevski’s naturalism. Strobl, Die Gegenwart, XXXVI, p. 87, says that
naturalism is transformed into mysticism in Dostoevski: “The naturalistic
. . . becomes phantomlike as soon as we seek to focus our eyes upon it.”
60. Moeller van den Bruck, op. cit.
61. A. von Reinholdt, Geschichte der russischen Literatur (Leipzig: 1886), p. 695.
62. L. Brehm, “Dostojewskis ‘Dämonen,’” Der Deutsche, V (1906), p. 342.
64. Müller, Dostojewski, p. 131.
65. Mereschkowski, Dostojewski: 3 Essays, p. 33.
66. Conradi, Die Gesellschaft, p. 528.
67. Brehm, op. cit., p. 346.
68. C. Busse, Geschichte der Weltliteratur (Bielfeld and Leipzig: 1913), II, p. 595.
69. Cf. Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Berlin: 1920), pp.
532–44.
70. In the Politische Schriften (München: 1917), the word “just” occurs only
once, if I am not mistaken—and then in a quotation from Tolstoi (cf. pp.
232 and 234). Belief in “the solidarity of men” also appears but once—and
then it is a matter of establishing that “peace brutalizes much more than
war” (pp. 415-16). A plea for “active love” is also made—but when it is put
into concrete form, it never rises above the level of vague exhortations: “Be
but straightforward and sincere” (p. 247).
71. E. Brausewetter, “Der Idiot,” Die Gegenwart, XXXVI (1889), p. 73.
72. O. Hauser, Der Roman des Auslands seit 1800 (Leipzig: 1913), p. 165.
73. Emil Lucka, “Das Problem Raskolnikows,” Das Literarische Echo, XVI
(1913/14), p. 1099.
74. Johann Schlaf, in Buchbesprechungen des Piper-Verlags (1914)—appendix
to Bahr, Mereschkowski, and Bierbaum, Dostojewski: 3 Essays.
75. P. von Wiskowatow, Geschichte der russischen Literatur (Dorpat and Fellin:
1881), p. 44.
76. Stern, Geschichte der neuen Literatur, p. 550.
77. E. Hennequin, “Dostojewski,” Die Gesellschaft, XVI (1900), p. 337.
78. W. Henckel, “Dostojewski,” Das Magazin für die Literatur, LI (1882), p. 78.
79. G. Malkowski, “Der Hahnrei,” Die Gegenwart, XXXIII (1888), p. 408.
80. J. Leipoldt, Vom Jesusbild der Gegenwart (Leipzig: 1913), p. 339.
192
81. F. Münzer, “Dostojewski als Psychopathologe,” Berliner Klinische Wochen-

schrift, XXVII (1914), p.1943.
82. Necker, Die Grenzboten, XLIV, p. 344.
83. W. von Tschish, “Die Verbrechertypen in Dostojewskis Schriften,” Die
Umschau, V (1901), p. 961. Cf. J. Stern, “Über den Wert der dichterischen
Behandlung des Verbrechens für die Strafrechtswissenschaft,” Zeitschrift
für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft, XXVI (1906), p. 163.
84. Rosus, “Ein russischer Roman,” Die neue Zeit, II (1884), pp. 2–12.
85. Mereschkowski, Tolstoi und Dostojewski, p. 236.
86. Scholz, Westermanns Monatshefte, XXXIII, p. 766.
87. Saitschik, Die Weltanschauung, p. 9.
88. Bülow, Das Literarische Echo, IX, p. 204.
89. Münzer, Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift, XXVII, p. 1945.
90. For example, J. J. Honegger, Russische Literatur und Kultur (Leipzig: 1880),
p. 146. Rosus, op. cit., p.2.
91. Magazin für die Literatur des Auslands, XXXVI (1867), p. 317.
92. Brandes, Dostojewski, p. 7.
93. Brausewetter, Die Gegenwart, XXXVI, p. 73.
94. Reinholdt, Geschichte der russischen Literatur, p. 693.
95. R. M. Meyer, “Das russische Dreigestirn,” Oesterreichische Rundschau, XVI
(1908), p. 39.
96. Henckel, Das Magazin, LI, p. 73.
97. Brausewetter, op. cit., p. 72.
98. A. Garbell, “Ein Dostojewski-Gedenktag,” Das Magazin, LXV (1898), p. 183.
99. Max Harden, Literature and Theater (Berlin: 1896), p. 80.
100. Nötzel, März, V, p. 309. Cf. Bierbaum, Dostojewski: 3 Essays, p. 192.
101. Strobl, Die Gegenwart.
102. G. Malkowsky, “Die Besessenen,” Die Gegenwart, XXXIII (1888), p. 42.
103. Hoffmann, Dostojewski, p. 398.
104. See Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” Collected Papers, trans. supervised
by Joan Riviere (London: 1924-25), IV, pp. 152–70.
105. G. Rollard, “Dostojewskis Roman ‘Raskolnikow,’ “Das Magazin für die Lit-
eratur, LI (1882), pp. 291–92.
106. “Dostojewski,” in Brüder Karamazov (Leipzig: Grunow-Verlag, 1884), IV,
328–31.
107. E. Zabel, “F. M. Dostojewski,” Die Gegenwart, XXV (1884), p. 307 ff. reprinted,
characteristically enough, in the extreme upper bourgeois Deutsche Rund-
schau, LIX (1889), pp. 361–91. For a discussion of the social role of the latter
journal, see Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, II (1933), pp. 59–62.
108. Cf. Erich Leupold, Die Aussenpolitik in den bedeutendsten politischen
Zeitschriften Deutschlands 1890–1909 (Leipzig: 1933), especially pp. 9–10.
109. Wer ist’s? (Berlin: 1914), p. 1900; note the list of his extensive travels.
110. E. Korn, book review of Die Dämonen, in Die neue Zeit, XXVI, (1907/08),
I, pp. 503–4.
193
5
The Biographical Fashion
I
The biography (we are here excluding scholarly works of history), which
in the period after World War I rapidly took its place alongside the
traditional species of fiction as an article for literary mass consump-
tion, reminds us of the interior in large department stores. There, in the
rambling basements, heaps of merchandise have been gathered from all
sections of the establishment. These goods have become outdated and
now whether they were originally offered for sale on the overcrowded
notion counters or in the lofty silence of the luxury-furniture halls,
are being indiscriminately remaindered for relatively little money. In
these basements we find everything; the only common principle is the
necessity for fast sales. The biography is the bargain basement of all
fashionable cultural goods; they are all a bit shop-worn, they no longer
quite fulfill their original purpose, and it is no longer particularly impor-
tant whether there is relatively much or little of one or the other item.
With almost statistical accuracy, the same material has been col-
lected and displayed in about the same package. To be sure, from the
outside it looks quite different. The biographies are presented as if in the
intellectual realm they represent that which the exclusive and specialty
stores represent in the realm of consumer goods. This comparison des-
ignates the social atmosphere in which the popular biography belongs:
one of apparent wealth. It lays claim to the philosopher’s stone, as it
were, for all contingencies of history or life situations, but it turns out
that the motley mixture of generalizations and recipes is actually an
expression of utter bewilderment.
Since 1918, the political biography has become the classical literature
of the German middle-brow. To be sure, it is not restricted to German
language, nor did it make its first appearance after World War I—
Nietzsche, years before, spoke of “our time so accustomed to the
biographical contamination.”1 The best-selling German biographical
195
writers were able to record great successes outside of the boundaries of

their country and language, and the French and English tongues made
many contributions of their own during the twenties and thirties. But
nowhere did the social role of this literature become so visible as in
the German material.
An analysis of the popular biography is first of all an analysis of its
reading public, and as such it comprises a critique of late European
liberalism. Arbitrariness and contradiction have destroyed any claim
to theory; ultimately this literature is a caricature of theory. During
the ascendancy of the middle classes, when the educational novel
characterizes narrative literature, the individual vacillated between his
own potentials and the demands of his environment. The author drew
material, which represented the substance of each individual destiny,
from imagination; in only rare exceptions were data used for surface
decoration and coloration. But, while imaginative, the educational novel
was at the same time exact, because, as a product of poetic imagination,
social and psychological reality were mirrored as they were observed
within the social stratum of the author and his public. Wilhelm Meister,
Illusions Perdues, David Copperfield, Education Sentimentale, Der
Gruene Heinrich, Anna Karenina—these novels not only evoked the
readers’ experience of déjà vu, but confirmed the salvation of the indi-
vidual by demonstrating the burdens and good fortunes of an invented
individual existence in such a way as to permit the reader to experience
them for himself. In these works of art, specific individuals, consistent
within themselves and living within a concrete world, are represented
as a complex of subjects closely connected with the fate of living and
reading contemporaries. This is “reality” conceived as historians have
conceived it since the Enlightenment, and in this sense there exists a
direct relation between scientific and literary realism and the theory
of society: one formulates the concern about the individual, the other
tries to sketch the conditions for his happiness.
The biography is both a continuation and an inversion of the novel.
Documentation in the middle-class novel had the function of back-
ground—raw material as it were. Quite otherwise in the popular biog-
raphy: there documentation, the pompous display of fixed dates, events,
names, letters, etc., serves in lieu of social conditions. The individual
who is fettered by these paraphernalia is reduced to a typographical
element which winds itself through the narrative as a convenient device
for arranging material. Whatever the biographies proclaim about their
196
heroes, they are heroes no longer. They have no fate, they are merely
variables of the historic process.
II
History and time have become reified in biography—as in a kind of
petrified anthropology.
Consider, e.g., “The stronger will of history is indifferent to the inner-

most will of individuals, often involving persons and powers, despite
themselves, in her murderous game” (34/p. 117),2 or else: “the sublime
breaths of history sometimes determine the rhythm of a period at times
even contrary to the will of the genius that animates it” (20/ p. 424),
or history, “the sterness of the goddesses, unmoved and with an incor-
ruptible glance” looks over “the depths of the times and . . . with an
iron hand, without a smile or compassion” brings “events into being”
(29/p. 147), or history, “possibly the most terrible and most depriv-
ing sea journey, . . . the eternal chronicle of human sufferings” (33/p.
373), “almost always justifies the victor and not the vanquished” (33/p.
217), when she “in the ultimate sense is based on force”; or, history
acts “neither morally nor immorally” (28/p. 270); “one comes to term
with her,” so decrees the biographer personifying world-reason which,
however, does not deter him from occasionally calling history also
“the supreme judge of human actions” (34/p. 476). At times history
even permits herself to choose “from the million-masses of humanity
a single person in order to demonstrate plastically with him a dispute
of Weltanschauungen” (28/p. 134).
In statements of this kind history acquires the traits of an overpow-

ering robot, who, however, hardly seems to be the result of human
production, but with considerable stamping and with incomprehensible
arbitrariness drives mankind before it.
To be sure, compared with the imagination of film producers and
technocratic dreamers, this robot is rather paltry. The enumeration of
its qualities is its appropriate interpretation: This is a cliché-robot—even
with regard to concrete things.
For instance, concerning Erasmus, “Instinctively time chose correctly,”

in him: “time saw the symbol of calm but unceasingly operating rea-
son” (37/p. 98); during his life: “the times forced him into the tumult to
the right and to the left” (37/p. 20), and in the end: “but don’t deceive
yourself, old man, your true time is over . . .” (37/p. 165). Needless
to say, the period-cliché and the century-cliché are used extensively.
The Middle Ages, “a gloomier period” (34/p. 34), were “a cruel and
violent age” (34/p. 510); when they are over, we have “a turn of the
197
century which becomes a turn of the times” (37/p. 32). There is the
“great and contradictory nineteenth century” (4/p. 10), with “the
people of the nineteenth century” (4/p. 22), which “does not love
its youth” (29/p. 25); and it is said of the seventeenth century: “the
curious century, whose child she [Christine of Sweden] was in good
and ill, died with her” (25/p. 410).
The serious European historians of ideas had neither place nor

time for such pomp. These intellectuals wanted to be educators, to
delve into the past to better understand the present, in which definite
tasks had to be done—even if it was only the task of equipping new
philologists or historians with sharper tools. True, historiography was
exposed to the wrath of Nietzsche, who often tortured himself with
the idea that mankind was actually doomed, that “one can recognize
the basically evil nature of every human being in the fact that none of
them can bear to be scrutinized carefully and closely.”3 An historical
fatalism, which had taken hold of European middle classes long before
the authoritarian state practiced it, led him to remark that none “who
today consider themselves ‘good,’” are able to tolerate “a biography.”4
He thus evaluated in advance present-day biographers who magi-
cally produce a historical sphere, about which they profess to know
everything. They assure us that “history” or “the century” does this or
that or has this or that quality, and the historical person appears as
a mere product. With this device the popular biography—although
in a distorted form—mirrors reality: the literati and the consumers
of their products were becoming subjected to the “rigid rhythm of
world history,” the pitiless Zeitgeist, and the general expressed in these
high-sounding phrases destroys the particular of individuality. In the
biographies this is glossed over; although the mirror into which the
reader looks hangs crookedly, he nevertheless finds reflected there
something of his own historical substance. The qualities of “history”
are here described somewhat in the way the person of the authoritar-
ian “leader” and the co-ruling elite would have to be characterized:
pitiless, indifferent, only intent on success; equipped with the will and
the necessary apparatus to pronounce and execute decisions affecting
the overwhelming majority. Such historical philosophy betrays a social
attitude toward life—which at all times acknowledges its subjugation
to the highest power in command. The rules of this power, so to say
the drill book of history, are contained in innumerable generalizing
assertions with which biographical literature abounds.
198
III
The biographer is the supplier of sociology for the mass consumption.
What is happening here is a caricature of that inductive method which
attempts to develop from empirical observations reliable rules of the
game of human life across the ages. The political sociology of the biog-
raphers is the “sunken cultural heritage” of social research concerned
with laws. A cue for this sociology is the little word “always,” a favorite
in Stefan Zweig’s vocabulary, which bestows upon accidental data the
dignity of the normative. Whatever was, was always that way, is that way,
and so it will remain—this is the wisdom of all generalizing methods
and of their popular offspring as well.
The favorite themes of popular biography are politics, power, and
the leader. The new point from which the political power-apparatus
and its mechanisms are discussed is that of the spectator who cannot
do anything about them and who contents himself with observation.
These biographers behave as if actually the whole matter was of no
concern to them, as if in their wildest dreams it would not occur to
them that they themselves had a stake in the matter.
In recompense they offer the general consolation: “one who has com-
mitted himself to politics is no longer a free agent and must obey
other laws than the holy ones of his nature” (34/p. 42). A philistine
impotence hides behind the at times grandiose, at times cynical,
words, that politics ruin the character. Politics “has always been a
science of contradiction. It is forever in conflict with simple, natural
sensible solutions” (34/p. 28). It has been reified like the concept
of history: “The individual man or woman simply does not exist
for history; they amount to nothing when compared with tangible
and practical values in the great game of world affairs” (34/p. 25).
Whoever is in touch with politics, touches a dubious realm: “As always
with politicians he made a compromise with God” (3/p. 253). From
such types one cannot expect anything else but actions in accordance
with not very lofty standards; we experience “The eternal and always
recurrent spectacle . . . that politicians always become cowards as
soon as they sense that the wind is turning” (35/p. 493). It is a pitiful
trade: for instance, “the cleverest thing that a shrewd politician can
do—he vanishes” (34/p. 146).
Behind the jaundiced view of politics hides the psychological cor-

ollary of infatuation with success, consciously decried: to study the
politician requires a preoccupation with the phenomenology of power.
199
The reflection concerning the Russo-Napoleonic treaty is intelligible

from the perspective of empathy with power: “It is plain that when
two men are dividing the world between them, they will in the long
run come to blows” (20/p. 271). “It is an eternal fate of mankind that
its most memorable actions are almost always spattered with blood
and that the greatest success comes to the toughest” (33/p. 318); but
power is such a convincing phenomenon that it demands recognition.
The same social repression mechanism, which constructs reifications

out of concepts such as history, time, and politics so that they are no
longer recognizable as categories of social relationships, also affects
the concept of power. Thus we read: “Power promises, even when it
is silent and does not promise anything” (22/p. 23); “. . . a power can
persevere, but not reveal” (3/p. 175).
The language is equally eloquent when it deals with the favorite topic
of the individual in relation to society. For here is the opportunity to
speak about the universal laws of the leader.
Impartiality is self-evident: “Mussolini is a man of the most refined

politeness, like all genuine dictators” (19/p. 35). It is really not a
simple business: “It is part of the tragedy of all despots that they fear
the independent man even after they have rendered him politically
powerless and speechless” (28/p. 273). This is particularly true of the
revolutionary leaders, including religious fanatics: “This is one of the
secrets of almost all revolutions and the tragic fate of their leaders:
none of them likes blood, but they are nevertheless forced to spill
it” (32/p. 61).
Regarding the relationship of society to a dictatorship, there are

certain rules for the prehistory, for the beginning, for the climax, and
for the decline.
Before: “Every world renewal, every complete recultivation first

experiments with the moderate reformers instead of with the rabid
revolutionaries” (37/p. 98 f.). A little later: “All dictatorships start with
an idea” (28/p. 65). When it really arrives: “Always in the beginning
of a dictatorship . . . the resistance has a certain impetus” (28/p. 49).
Later on: “After the restless victory, dictators can always give human-
ity its due and more readily permit free speech after their power has
been secured” (28/p. 239). But in the end: “Never can humanity or a
part of it, a single group, tolerate the dictatorship of a single person
for very long without hating him” (32/p. 96); “dictatorships represent
in the over-all plan of humanity only corrections of short duration”
(28/p. 327).
200
Here in this spiritual department store we find a Machiavellian

sociology of politics and, in the next moment, a utopian conception
of history. It is particularly characteristic for the social function of
these biographers that they combine both of these concepts. From
the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, materialistic or idealistic as
well as optimistic or pessimistic interpretations of the course of his-
tory were clearly related to the goals of different social groups. But in
the lukewarm and tired-out political and moral climate, in which the
biographies thrive, everything goes: one puts up with the pessimistic
perspective partly by exorcising it with magic and by categorizing it, as if
the knowledge of its eternal recurrent formulas would make it harmless
to the individual involved, or by playing the role of the cynical observer,
who really is not affected. Optimism is created by the assurance that in
the end the good will win. We encounter this pluralism of viewpoints
time and again; it belongs to an attitude which takes nothing seriously,
last of all the intellect. Its ultimate wisdom is relativism.
As far as we encounter the optimistic philosophy, it runs on many
tracks. One of its versions is a “theory” of two different human types:
the bad one, the politician—the good one, the moralist. “Regardless of
what one calls the poles of this constant tension . . . their names express
basically an ultimate innermost and personal decision, as to what is
more appropriate for each individual—the human or the political, the
Ethos or the Logos, the individuality or the collectivity. This inexorable
demarcation between freedom and authority no people, no period, and
no thinking man can escape” (28/p. 14). A sidetrack is created by the
idea that perhaps after all there might be such a thing as a conciliation
between the “political” and the “moral” attitude. Emil Ludwig, who
specializes in Goethe-mottoes and in realpolitisch common sense,
must be cited foremost in this connection. Here we read: “In the long
run one can rule as little with the will for power without the idea of
the times, as with the ideas without the will for power” (16/p. 335).
However, the overriding theme of the biographers’ political sociol-
ogy, when they speak about the social fate of morality, is that after all
the good will always be victorious. This is recited in such a stereotype
and pathetic manner that it is reminiscent of the moralizing consola-
tion verses in certain popular tunes, namely, that it cannot go on much
longer in this way and that eventually things will improve. In the light
of what actually has happened it is brutally funny to be told by Ludwig
that “one can read the logic in a destiny [we are dealing with Masaryk]
201
whereby an honest man reaps what he sows” (15/p. 15). However, par-
ticularly Zweig has yet a richer list. As if it were a song entitled “Reason”
we hear: “Sometimes when the others rage drunkenly, reason must
be silent and lose her voice. But her time will come, it always returns”
(37/p. 25). “All fanaticism directed against reason aims necessarily into
the void” (27/p. 410).
Just as the moral philosophical systems, which can turn into a
critical weapon against the existing, are characteristic for progressive
tendencies of liberalistic thinking, so is the contention that truth and
freedom always come out on top characteristic for the retreat from
the sphere of action.
“Toscana defended the eternal feeling of freedom. This ideal of
freedom survives the existence of all powers at large. One day of free-
dom topples pyramids of slavery, which seem to rise into the sky for
all eternity. Freedom always returns, caresses humanity, shows it its
dignity, God in her bosom, and tests the swords” (23/p. 341); or quite
monumentally: “Truth always wins again. . . . Truth in the end always
wins! Only those who know this are immune against the apparent
eternally victorious infamy” (8/p. 326).
IV
Finally, the relationship between nature and history belongs in the gen-
eral section of this pseudosystem of a social philosophy. It is treated in
the spirit of a bad monism. It corresponds to the malaise, the ruin of
initiative, which characterized the condition of the broadest strata of
the middle class, particularly in Central Europe, during the period just
before Fascism. The history of the middle classes started as the history
of accelerated conquest of extra-human nature in the service of man,
but mastery over nature became increasingly harnessed into the service
of mastery over man, of his subjugation and destruction. I have pointed
out elsewhere that important trends in literature around the turn of the
century, particularly the concept of nature, reflected the resignation of
the ruled confronted with a technical apparatus from which the popula-
tion at large became increasingly alienated.5 When biographical litera-
ture at times speaks of the alleged identity of natural and historical laws
and at times uses natural phenomena for cliché-like comparisons with
human life, it creates thereby an atmosphere of a tired-out pantheism.
This literature takes on almost mystical traits in which anything and
everything merges into a great gray sameness. This is the mystique of
202
relativism, which is shared by victims and masters alike.6 To the latter it

is the appropriate expression for the conservation of power at any price;
the former confess almost masochistically how little they still value their
own thoughts or the application of their minds to serious intentions.
This is the place where the ideological origin of modern biography
reveals itself. It hails from that Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life)
which, with its radical rejection of the severe rules of philosophical
system, and its equally decisive opposition to any criticism of political
economy, helped to prepare for the brutal vitalism of authoritarian
practice in a typical manner. At times it hides behind assurances that
what the biographers deal with are ultimates—a rhetoric of make-
believe grandeur and magnanimity which in truth hides their own
uncertainty. As in speaking about the everlasting stream of life, eternally
in motion and yet always the same, one chatters about the original, the
eternal, and the ultimate. We hear of “the eternal man” (30/p. 377), of
“the eternal march of mankind toward the eternal goal” (6/p. 26), of
“the arch-eternal man issued from the mortal body of cultural man”
(31/p. 148), of freedom and justice, “the two archetypal forces” (36/p.
254), “the archetypal instincts of the human instinct world” (37/p. 18).
But there are also expressions which are taken yet directly from the
relativistic thought-and-language-style of the Lebensphilosophie. “Man
is a ceaseless wanderer” (6/p. 24); for man “in the last analysis the highest
goal is limitless abundance of life” (29/p. 70). This irrationalism glorifies
sentiment at the cost of thinking, and hence also at the cost of morality.
It is downright senseless “to sit in moral judgment upon an individual
[Mary Stuart] who happens to be a prey to an overwhelming passion”
(34/p. 223). The stream of life at times is also called destiny: “But it is
the tendency of destiny to mold the life particularly of the great into
tragic forms. It tests its powers on the strongest, steeply it pitches the
paradox of events against their strength, interweaves their lifespan with
mysterious allegories, obstructs their paths, in order to confirm them in
the right action. However, it plays with them an exalted game: because
experience is always profit” (36/p. 11). The rhetoric about the game is
revealing. It belongs to the relativistic aesthetization of history. It too is a
disguise of impotence, of the enforced role of the spectator. Emil Ludwig
revealed it most naively: “When the destinies of intrepid people begin
to become confused the beauty of their aspect doubles” (10/p. 245).
The biographers ventured forth to conquer the kingdom of highest
wisdom. They did not tarry for trifles—they aimed for the imperium
203
of the intellect in which the riddles of history, time, nature, politics,

morals, of life as such are solved. They returned with an herb and bottle
collection. They feel as at home in the sphere of highest abstraction as
the positivist in the realm of so-called facts. With them generalities sup-
plant facts; they hurry from observation to observation, gathering the
most divergent generalizing statements from the well-known pastures
of philosophy and the social sciences. Out of these phony facts, which
neither reflect empirical reality nor sketch its theoretical picture, a veil
is woven which transforms history into a mythology of no significance.
Quite the opposite is true of the school of Stefan George: in its esoteric
cult of heroes and prophets there comes to the fore a moment of social
rootedness: the dedication to an objective canon of aesthetic and moral
taste. This school produced luxurious “culture” articles of such a kind
that it was acceptable to an elite of social status or philosophical stat-
ure. It still fed on the great heritage of middle-class ideology and was
directed to and fighting for stated goals, and could not be deterred from
its original intent; it made its drive in the face of alternatives and knew
when to open and when to close a door. On the other hand, modern
biography is indiscriminate because it is perplexed. As numerous as
are its myths of universality, as casual are its delvings into the reservoir
of past human lives. As if anyone and everyone, generals, poets, chiefs
of police, rulers, composers, inventors, and religious founders, were
good enough to justify a consistency of the individual in which one
no longer believes. History and its contents become the occasion for
world historical chatter; its banner is a relativism which takes nothing
seriously and which no longer is taken seriously.
V
Paradoxically, this relativistic mentality of the biographers is also
present when they turn from perplexing generalities about the indi-
vidual as merely a variable of the pace of “history” to his specificity
and uniqueness. According to Hegel, the work of reason consisted in
encasing the phenomena of nature and man in adequate concepts by
searching for precise and “determined negation,” i.e., the unequivocal
designation of a phenomenon by excluding all the moments which
are neither generically nor genuinely attached to it. The biographers,
however, whose overt business is the exact portrayal of the essence
and activity of a given human being, pervert Hegel’s conceptual model
into a muddy stew where nothing and nobody is conceived in terms
of specific characteristics. True, at first sight the biographers seem to
204
pay the greatest honor to their subjects, and, alongside the speculation
about the general as the truly powerful, we find at the same time the
praise of the individual. Alongside a conviction of the radical determin-
ism by cosmic-hisorical laws and sociological rules, stands, in smooth
and unobtrusive irreconcilability the hymn of individuality. But closer
inspection reveals that the categories within which individual unique-
ness is described are closely related to universal phrases which negate
the autonomous nature of man. The hymn to the individual is a mere
pretence, and reflects a convulsive attempt to conjure up a wish dream
of the individual’s autonomy and steadfastness. But this realm of free-
dom is deceptive, for the biographer handles the person in the same way
that he handles events and objects, and under his fingers the individual
is inflated into an artificial colossus. One browses through the index of
a mail-order house which depends on a large turnover. Everything is the
best and the most expensive, the opportunity of a lifetime. People are
described as “unique” in terms of sameness, and everybody is marked
by a pricetag and a sales plug making such outrageous claims that no
single person in reality shows any specificity because the distinction
of uniqueness is conferred on all.
The outstanding quality of the “personality” merchandise (which
turns out to be a mass article) is plugged by an indiscriminate use of
the superlative. Here are some examples:
Index of Superlatives
Barthou: “the most significant statesman of Europe” (5/p. 16).
Bismarck: “the two strongest German politicians of that epoch” (i.e.,
Bismarck and Lassalle) (9/p. 268).
Burckhardt: his “Greek cultural history, the most profound that we
have on the Greeks” (12/p. 16 f.).
Calvin: “the darkest messenger of God in Europe” (4/p. 11).
Caesar: “the most sagacious Roman” (10/p. 49).
Cleopatra: “the shrewdest woman of her epoch” (10/p. 250).
Cosimo di Medici: “the mightiest man in civilian, nonmilitary dress;
the world’s wealthiest banker” (23/p. 7).
Francis Drake: “one of the most ingenious of Magellan’s heirs and suc-
cessors” (33/p. 217).
Elizabeth of England: “this most remarkable of all women” (34/p. 457).
Erasmus: “the first—and really the only—German reformer” (37/p. 20).
Fouché: “the intellectual kind of all of this most remarkable of politi-
cal beings” (32/p. 332); “the most perfect Machiavellian of modern
205
times” (32/p. 10); “psychologically the most interesting person of his

century” (32/p. 10); “the most accomplished intriguer of the politi-
cal stage” (32/p. 29); “most unreliable character and most reliable
diplomat” (32/p. 254).
Lloyd George: “most cunning, agile, and marvelous of contemporary
statesmen” (13/p. 180).
Hindenburg: “most celebrated German soldier of the last epoch” (16/p. 9).
John Knox: “perhaps the most accomplished example of the religious
fanatics” (34/p. 83).
Lenin: “the most sincere, yet at the same time the coldest fanatic of
our epoch” (14/p. 96).
Leonardo da Vinci: “in abundance of faces, Leonardo remains unique”
(14/p. 596).
Leopold of Belgium: “the only personality of first rank among all the
crowned heads of Europe” (2/p. 215).
Ludendorff: “during the war the most interesting figure and the most
dangerous” (16/p. 196).
Luther: “of all ingenious men perhaps the most fanatical—the most
indocile, unpliable, and discordant” (37/p. 190).
Magellan: “history’s greatest seafarer” (33/p. 297); “the greatest deed
of seafaring of all time” (33/p. 330).
Mary Stuart: her deed, “perhaps the most perfect example of the crime
of passion” (34/p. 259); “perhaps no woman who would have been
sketched in such an irregular form” (34/p. 7).
Marie Antoinette: “one of the most beautiful” tragedies “of this unde-
sired heroism” (35/p. 9).
Masaryk: “the great European man” (15/p. 8).
Mussolini: “in conversation the most natural man in the world” (19/p. 37).
Napoleon: “this foremost field commander of his time” (20/p. 171);
“concerned for the smallest matters, because he wants the great”
(20/ p. 48); “the burning European youth finds no greater model of
warning than he, whom, of all western men, created and suffered
the greatest shocks” (20/p. 676).
Nietzsche: “the brightest genius of the intellect” (29/p. 243).
Plutarch: “the most modern of all portrait painters” (14/p. 11).
Rathenau: “as a critic of the times, after Nietzsche almost without
competition”; of “the noblest taste” (14/p. 140).
Romain Rolland: “he will always be tied by his relation to the most
powerful” (36/p. 28).
206
Stanley: “the clearest, most sensible example of a hero” (2/p. 95); “he
accomplished the boldest and most successful reporting” (2/p. 85).
Freiherr vom Stein: “a German, the best whom the nation has produced
in its fall and deliverance” (20/p. 403).
Talleyrand: “perfection of this life as the greatest achievement possible
to man” (3/p. 347).
Tolstoi: “the most powerful . . . the mightiest of the Russian land”
(30/ p. 232); “the most human of all men” (30/p. 234); “the nine-
teenth century knows no counterpart of similar primeval vitality”
(30/p. 242).
The index of greatness is at the same time an index of monads.

Alienation hides behind a specificity which is no longer to be sur-
passed. The reification of man has been broken down into a roster of
qualities on which this commodity, man, is being measured, and each
then represents a particular kind of merchandise. What one happens
to have in stock is offered as the incomparable. It is a travesty of the
development of mankind.
This whole realm of the superlative is a wish dream of the free
economy. For each one it is important to reach the summit of the
pyramid; only when all competitors have been removed from the
field has the highest imaginable goal for an individual existence been
reached. The individualism of the superlative conveys the true social
meaning of this view: individualism rests on the exclusiveness of pos-
session of a quality.
The myths of earlier humanity express the dichotomy of the natural
and the historical; the cliché-like myths which the biographers report
of their darlings make of each man his own myth.
Relativism is only seldom the manifest belief of this literature—
but it is always present in a latent form. It is presented as an arbitrary
interchange between the general and the individual, thus making
clear the function of relativism in late European liberalism: a cloak
for the helplessness of the vanquished on the eve of the age of the
“Leaders.” The pace of world history, as well as the mythical shad-
ing of oversized individuals, do not join into one theory of man
and his destiny. This biographical jungle amounts to an ideology
of weariness and weakness; it is an ideology of tired epigoni who
lost their way.
207
Notes
1. Nietzsche, Werke, second section, vol. 10, Die Philosophie im tragischen
Zeitalter der Griechen (Fragment, Spring, 1873; Stuttgart, 1922), p. 26.
2. The numbers in parentheses refer to the biographies quoted; they are listed
at the end of this chapter.
3. Nietzsche, loc. cit., note 1.
4. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Anchor Books, p. 275.
5. See Leo Lowenthal, “Knut Hamsun,” in his: Literature and the Image of Man
(Beacon, 1957), pp. 190 ff. To be included in Volume 2 of Communication
in Society (Transaction, forthcoming).
6. See Max Horkheimer, “Der neueste Angriff an die Metaphysik,” Zeitschrift
fuer Sozialforschung, vol. VI (1937), p. 33.
Bibliography
1. Heinrich Bauer. Oliver Cromwell. München/Berlin. 1937.
2. Ludwig Bauer. Leopold der Ungeliebte. Amsterdam. 1934.
3. Franz Blei. Talleyrand. Berlin. 1932.
4. Martin Gumpert. Dunant. New York/Toronto. 1938.
5. Wilhelm Herzog. Barthou. Zürich. 1938.
6. Hermann Kesser. Beethoven der Europäer. Zürich. 1937.
7. Hermann Kesten, Ferdinand und Isabella. Amsterdam. 1936.
8. Erich Kuttner. Hans von Marées. Zürich. 1937.
9. Emil Ludwig. Bismarck. Berlin. 1927.
10. ___________ . Cleopatra. Amsterdam. 1935.
11. ___________ . Der Nil. Amsterdam. 1935.
12. ___________ . Die Kunst der Biographie. Paris. 1936.
13. ___________. Führer Europas. Amsterdam. 1935.
14. ___________ . Genie und Charakter. Berlin. 1925.
15. ___________ . Gespräche mit Masaryk. Amsterdam. 1935.
16. ___________ . Hindenburg. Amsterdam. 1935.
17. ___________ . Kunst und Schicksal. Berlin. 1927.
18. ___________ . Lincoln. Berlin. 1930.
19. ___________ . Mussolinis Gespräche. Berlin/Wien/Leipzig. 1932.
20. ___________ . Napoleon. Berlin. 1926.
21. Klaus Mann. Symphonie Pathétique. Amsterdam. 1935.
22. Valeriu Marcu. Das grosse Kommando Scharnhorsts. Leipzig. 1928.
23. __________ . Machiavelli. Amsterdam. 1937.
24. Walter von Molo. Eugenio von Savoy. Berlin. 1936.
25. Alfred Neumann. Königin Christine von Schweden. Amsterdam. 1936.
26. Franz Werfel. Verdi. Berlin/Wein/Leipzig. 1924.
27. Stefan Zweig. Begegnung mit Menschen, Büchern. Städten. Wien/Leipzig/
Zürich. 1937.
28. __________ . Castello gegen Calvin. Wien/Leipzig/Zürich. 1936.
29. __________ . Der Kampf mit dem Dämon. Leipzig. 1925.
30. __________ . Drei Dichter ihres Lebens. Leipzig. 1928.
31. __________ . Joseph Fouché. Leipzig. 1929.
32. __________ . Drei Meister. Leipzig. 1920.
208
33. __________ . Magellan. Wien/Leipzig/Zürich. 1935.

34. __________ Maria Stuart. Wien/Leipzig/Zürich. 1935.
35. __________ . Marie Antoinette. Leipzig. 1932.
36. __________ . Romain Rolland. Frankfurt a. M. 1921.
37. __________ . Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam. Wien.
1935.
209
6
The Triumph of
Mass Idols
Rise of Biography as a Popular Literary Type

The following essay is concerned with the content analysis of biogra-
phies, a literary topic which has inundated the book market for the last
three decades, and has for some time been a regular feature of popular
magazines. Surprisingly enough, not very much attention has been
paid to this phenomenon, none whatever to biographies appearing in
magazines, and little to those published in book form.1
It started before the first World War, but the main onrush came
shortly afterwards. The popular biography was one of the most con-
spicuous newcomers in the realm of print since the introduction of the
short story. The circulation of books by Emil Ludwig,2 André Maurois,
Lytton Strachey, Stefan Zweig, etc., reached a figure in the millions, and
with each new publication, the number of languages into which they
were translated grew. Even if it were only a passing literary fad, one
would still have to explain why this fashion has had such longevity and
is more and more becoming a regular feature in the most diversified
media of publications.
Who’s Who, once known as a title of a specialized dictionary for edi-
tors and advertisers, has nowadays become the outspoken or implied
question in innumerable popular contexts. The interest in individuals
has become a kind of mass gossip. The majority of weeklies and month-
lies, and many dailies too, publish at least one life story or a fragment of
one in each issue; theater programs present abridged biographies of all
the actors; the more sophisticated periodicals, such as The New Republic
or Harper’s, offer short accounts of the main intellectual achievements
of their contributors; and a glance into the popular corners of the book
trade, including drug store counters, will invariably fall on biographies.
All this forces the conclusion that there must be a social need seeking
gratification by this type of literature.
211
One way to find out would be to study the readers’ reactions, to

explore by means of various interviewing techniques what they are
looking for, what they think about the biographical jungle. But it seems
to be rather premature to collect and to evaluate such solicited response
until more is known about the content structure itself.
As an experiment in content analysis, a year’s publication of The
Saturday Evening Post (SEP) and of Collier’s for the period from April
1940 to March 1941 was covered.3 It is regrettable that a complete inves-
tigation could not be made for the most recent material, but samples
taken at random from magazines under investigation showed that no
basic change in the selection or content structure has occurred since
this country’s entry into the war.4
Biographers’ Idols
Before entering into a discussion of our material we shall briefly look
into the fate of the biographical feature during the past decades.
Production—Yesterday
Biographical sections have not always been a standing feature in these
periodicals. If we turn back the pages we find distinct differences in the
number of articles as well as in the selection of people treated.
Table 6.1 gives a survey of the professional distribution of “heroes”
in biographies between 1901 and 1941.5
The table indicates clearly a tremendous increase in biographies as
time goes on. The average figure of biographies in 1941 is almost four
times as high as at the beginning of the century. The biography has now-
Table 6.1. Distribution of Biographies According to Professions in Saturday

Evening Post and Collier’s for Selected Years between 1901 and 1941.
1901–14 1922–30 1930–34 1940–41
(5 sample yrs.) (6 sample yrs.) (4 years) (1 year)
No. % No. % No. % No. %
Political life 81 46 112 28 95 31 31 25
Business and 49 28 72 18 42 14 25 20
professional
Entertainment 47 26 211 54 169 55 69 55
Total number 177 100 395 100 306 100 125 100
Yearly average of 36 66 77 125
biographies
212
The Triumph of Mass Idols
adays become a regular weekly feature. Just to illustrate how relatively

small the number of biographies was forty years ago: in fifty-two issues
of the SEP of 1901–2 we find altogether twenty-one biographies as
compared with not less than fifty-seven in 1940–41. The smallness of
the earlier figure in comparison to the present day is emphasized by
the fact that nonfictional contributions at that time far outnumbered
the fictional material. A fair average of distribution in the past would
be about three fictional and eight nonfictional contributions; today we
never find more than twice as many nonfictional as fictional contribu-
tions and in the majority of cases even fewer.
We put the subjects of the biographies in three groups: the spheres
of political life, of business and professions, and of entertainment
(the latter in the broadest sense of the word). Looking at our table
we find for the time before World War I very high interest in politi-
cal figures and an almost equal distribution of business and profes-
sional men, on the one hand, and of entertainers on the other. This
picture changes completely after the war. The figures from politi-
cal life have been cut by 40 percent; the business and professional
men have lost 30 percent of their personnel while the entertainers
have gained 50 percent. This numerical relation seems to be rather
constant from 1922 up to the present day. If we reformulate our
professional distribution by leaving out the figures from political
life we see even more clearly the considerable decrease of people
from the serious and important professions and a corresponding
increase in entertainers. The social impact of this change comes to
the fore strikingly if we analyze the composition of the entertainers.
This can be seen from Table 6.2.
Table 6.2. Proportion of Biographies of Entertainers from the Realm of

Serious Artsa in SEP and Collier’s for Selected Years between 1901 and 1941
(In percent of total biographies of entertainers in each period).
Period Proportion Total no.
entertainers from entertainers
serious arts
1901–1914 (5 sample yrs.) 77 47
1922–1930 (6 sample yrs.) 38 211
1930–1934 (4 yrs.) 29 169
1940–1941 (1 yr.) 9 69
a
This group includes literature, fine arts, music, dance, theater.
213
While at the beginning of the century three quarters of the entertain-

ers were serious artists and writers, we find that this class of people
is reduced by half twenty years later and tends to disappear almost
completely at present.
As an instance of the selection of biographies typical of the first
decade of the century, it is notable that out of the twenty-one biogra-
phies of the SEP 1901-2, eleven came from the political sphere, seven
from business and the professions, and three from entertainment and
sport. The people in the political group are numerically prominent
until before Election Day in the various years: candidates for high
office, i.e., the president or senators; the secretary of the treasury; an
eminent state governor. In the business world, we are introduced to
J. P. Morgan, the banker; his partner, George W. Perkins; James J. Hill,
the railroad president. In the professions, we find one of the pioneers
in aviation; the inventor of the torpedo; a famous Black educator; an
immigrant scientist. Among the entertainers there is an opera singer,
Emma Calvé; a poet, Eugene Field; a popular fiction writer, F. Marion
Crawford.
If we look at such a selection of people we find that it represents a
fair cross-section of socially important occupations. Still, in 1922 the
picture is more similar to the professional distribution quoted above
than to the one which is characteristic of the present-day magazines.
If we take, for example, Collier’s of 1922 we find in a total of 20 biog-
raphies only two entertainers, but eight business and professional
men and ten politicians. Leaving out the latter ones, we find among
others: Clarence C. Little, the progressive president of the University
of Maine; Leonard P. Ayres, the very outspoken vice-president of
the Cleveland Trust Company; director-general of the United States
Railroad Administration, James C. Davis; president of the New York
Central Railroad, A. H. Smith; and the city planner, John Nolen. From
the entertainment field, we have a short résumé of the stage comedian,
Joe Cook (incidentally, by Franklin P. Adams), and an autobiographical
sketch by Charlie Chaplin.
We might say that a large proportion of the heroes in both samples
are idols of production, that they stem from the productive life, from
industry, business, and natural sciences. There is not a single hero
from the world of sports and the few artists and entertainers either
do not belong to the sphere of cheap or mass entertainment or rep-
resent a serious attitude toward their art as in the case of Chaplin.6
214
The first quarter of the century cherishes biography in terms of an

open-minded liberal society which really wants to know something
about its own leading figures on the decisive social, commercial, and
cultural fronts. Even in the late twenties, when jazz composers and the
sports people are admitted to the inner circle of biographical heroes,
their biographies are written almost exclusively to supplement the
reader’s knowledge of the technical requirements and accomplish-
ments of their respective fields.7
These people, then, are treated as an embellishment of the national
scene, not yet as something that in itself represents a special phenom-
enon which demands almost undivided attention.
We should like to quote from two stories which seem to be char-
acteristic of this past epoch. In a sketch of Theodore Roosevelt, the
following comment is made in connection with the assassination of
McKinley: “We, who give such chances of success to all that it is possible
for a young man to go as a laborer into the steel business and before
he has reached his mature prime become, through his own industry
and talent, the president of a vast steel association—we, who make this
possible as no country has ever made it possible, have been stabbed in
the back by anarchy.”8
This unbroken confidence in the opportunities open to every indi-
vidual serves as the leitmotiv of the biographies. To a very great extent
they are to be looked upon as examples of success which can be imi-
tated. These life stories are really intended to be educational models.
They are written—at least ideologically—for someone who the next
day may try to emulate the man whom he has just envied.
A biography seems to be the means by which an average person is
able to reconcile his interest in the important trends of history and in
the personal lives of other people. In the past, and especially before
World War I, the popular biography lived in an optimistic atmosphere
where understanding of historical processes and interest in successful
people seemed to integrate pleasantly into one harmonious endeavor:
“We know now that the men of trade and commerce and finance are
the real builders of freedom, science, and art—and we watch them and
study them accordingly. . . . Of course, Mr. Perkins is a ‘self-made man.’
Who that has ever made a career was not?”9 This may be taken as a clas-
sical formulation for a period of “rugged individualism” in which there
is neither the time nor the desire to stimulate a closer interest in the
organizers and organization of leisure time, but which is characterized
215
by eagerness and confidence that the social ladder may be scaled on

a mass basis.10
Consumption—Today
When we turn to our present day sample we face an assortment of
people which is both qualitatively and quantitatively removed from
the standards of the past.
Only two decades ago people from the realm of entertainment
played a very negligible role in the biographical material. They form
now, numerically, the first group. While we have not found a single
figure from the world of sports in our earlier samples given above, we
find them now close to the top of favorite selections. The proportion
of people from political life and from business and professions, both
representing the “serious side,” has declined from 74 to 45 percent of
the total.
Let us examine the group of people representing nonpolitical aspects
of life: 69 are from the world of entertainment and sport; 25 from that
which we called before the “serious side.” Almost half of the 25 belong
to some kind of communications professions: there are ten newspa-
permen and radio commentators. Of the remaining 15 business and
professional people, there are a pair of munitions traders, Athanasiades
(118)11 and Juan March (134); Dr. Brinkley (3), a quack doctor; and
Mr. Angas (20), judged by many as a dubious financial expert; Pitts-
burgh Phil (23), a horse race gambler in the “grand style”; Mrs. D’Arcy
Grant (25), a woman sailor, and Jo Carstairs (54), the owner of an
island resort; the Varian brothers (52), inventors of gadgets, and Mr.
Taylor (167), an inventor of fool-proof sports devices; Howard Johnson
(37), a roadside restaurant genius; Jinx Falkenburg (137), at that time
a professional model; and finally, Dr. Peabody (29), a retired rector of
a swanky society prep school.
The “serious” people are not so serious after all. In fact there are only
nine who might be looked upon as rather important or characteristic
figures of the industrial, commercial, or professional activities, and six
of these are newspapermen or radio commentators.
We called the heroes of the past “idols of production”: we feel entitled
to call the present day magazine heroes “idols of consumption.” Indeed,
almost every one of them is directly, or indirectly, related to the sphere
of leisure time: either he does not belong to vocations which serve
society’s basic needs (e.g., the heroes of the world of entertainment
and sport), or he amounts, more or less, to a caricature of a socially
216
productive agent. If we add to the group of the 69 people from the

entertainment and sports world the ten newspaper and radio men, the
professional model, the inventor of sports devices, the quack doctor,
the horse race gambler, the inventors of gadgets, the owner of the island
resort, and the restaurant chain owner, we see 87 to all 94 nonpolitical
heroes directly active in the consumers’ world.
Of the eight figures who cannot exactly be classified as connected
with consumption, not more than three—namely, the automobile
producer, Sloan; the engineer and industrialist, Stout; and the airline
czar, Smith—are important or characteristic functionaries in the world
of production. The two armament magnates, the female freight boat
skipper, the prep school head, and the doubtful market prophet remind
us of the standardized protagonists in mystery novels and related
fictional merchandise: people with a more or less normal and typical
personal and vocational background who would bore us to death if
we did not discover that behind the “average” front lurks a “human
interest” situation.
By substituting such a classification according to spheres of activity
for the cruder one according to professions, we are now prepared to
present the vocational stratifications of our heroes in a new form. It is
shown in Table 6.3 for the SEP and Collier’s of 1940-1941.
If a student in some very distant future should use popular magazines
of 1941 as a source of information as to what figures the American
public looked to in the first stages of the greatest crisis since the birth
of the Union, he would come to a grotesque result. While the industrial
and professional endeavors are geared to a maximum of speed and
efficiency, the idols of the masses are not, as they were in the past, the
leading names in the battle of production, but the headliners of the mov-
ies, the ball parks, and the night clubs. While we found that around 1900
and even around 1920 the vocational distribution of magazine heroes
was a rather accurate reflection of the nation’s living trends, we observe
that today the hero-selection corresponds to needs quite different from
those of genuine information. They seem to lead to a dream world of
the masses who no longer are capable or willing to conceive of biogra-
phies primarily as a means of orientation and education. They receive
information not about the agents and methods of social production but
about the agents and methods of social and individual consumption.
During the leisure in which they read, they read almost exclusively
about people who are directly, or indirectly, providing for the reader’s
leisure time. The vocational set-up of the dramatis personae is organized
217
Table 6.3. The Heroes and Their Spheres.

Number of stories Percent
Sphere of production 3 2
Sphere of consumption 91 73
Entertainers and sports figures 69 55
Newspaper and radio figures 10 8
Agents of consumers’ goods 5 4
Topics of light fiction 7 6
Sphere of politics 31 25
Total 125 100
as if the social production process were either completely extermi-

nated or tacitly understood, and needed no further interpretation.
Instead, the leisure-time period seems to be the new social riddle on
which extensive reading and studying has to be done.12
The human incorporation of all the social agencies taking care of
society as a unity of consumers represents a literary type which is turned
out as a standardized article, marketed by a tremendous business, and
consumed by another mass institution, the nation’s magazine-reading
public. Thus biography lives as a mass element among the other ele-
ments of mass literature.
Our discovery of a common professional physiognomy in all of
these portraits encouraged us to guess that what is true of the selec-
tion of people will also be true of the selection of what is said about
these people. This hypothesis has been quite justified, as we propose
to demonstrate in the following pages. Our content analysis not only
revealed impressive regularities in the occurrence, omission, and treat-
ment of certain topics, but also showed that these regularities may be
interpreted in terms of the very same category of consumption which
was the key to the selection of the biographical subjects. Consumption
is a thread running through every aspect of these stories. The charac-
teristics which we have observed in the literary style of the author, in
his presentation of personal relations, of professions and personalities,
can all be integrated around the concept of the consumer.
For classification of the stories’ contents, we decided on a four-fold
scheme. First there are what one might call the sociological aspects of
the man: his relations to other people, the pattern of his daily life, his
relation to the world in which he lives. Second, his psychology: what
218
the nature of his development has been and the structure of his per-
sonality. Third, his history: what his encounter with the world has
been like—the object world which he has mastered or failed to master.
Fourth, the evaluation of these data which the author more or less con-
sciously conveys by his choice of language. Granted that this scheme
is somewhat arbitrary, we think that our division of subject matter has
resulted in a fairly efficient worksheet, especially when we consider the
backward state of content analysis of this type.
As we studied our stories,13 we looked almost in vain for such vital
subjects as the man’s relations to politics or to social problems in
general. Our category of sociology reduces itself to the private lives of
the heroes. Similarly, our category of psychology was found to contain
mainly a static image of a human being to whom a number of things
happen, culminating in a success which seems to be none of his doing.
This whole section becomes merged with our category of history which
is primarily concerned with success data, too, and then takes on the
character of a catalogue of “just facts.” When we survey the material
on how authors evaluate their subjects, what stands out most clearly
is the biographers’ preoccupation with justifying their hero by means
of undiscriminating superlatives while still interpreting him in terms
which bring him as close as possible to the level of the average man.
Private Lives
The reader may have noticed in public conveyances a poster called
“Private Lives” depicting the peculiarities of more or less famous
people in the world of science, sports, business, and politics. The title
of this feature is a fitting symbol for all our biographies. It would be
an overstatement, but not too far from the truth, to say that these
stories are exclusively reports on the heroes’ private lives. While it
once was rather contemptible to give much room to the private affairs
and habits of public figures this topic is now the focus of interest. The
reason for viewing this as an overstatement is in a way surprising: we
learn something, although not very much, about the man’s professional
career and its requirements, but we are kept very uninformed about
important segments of his private life.
Inheritance and Parents—Friends and Teachers
The personal relations of our heroes, on which we are enlightened, are,
as a whole, limited to two groups, the parents and the friends. Both
groups are taken in a specific sense: the parents comprising other older
219
relations or forebears of former generations, the friends being more or

less limited to people who were valuable in the hero’s career. In more
than half of the stories the father or the mother or the general family
background is at least mentioned. Clark Gable’s “stubborn determina-
tion” seems derived from his “Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors” (6); the
very efficient State Department official, Mrs. Shipley, is the “daughter
of a Methodist minister” (8); Senator Taft is a “middle-of-the-roader
like his father” besides being “an aristocrat by birth and training” (101).
We are let in a little bit on the family situation of Brenda Joyce because
“somewhere there was a break-up between mamma and papa” (110).
The general pattern of the parental home, however, is more on the Joan
Carroll side, where we find the “young, quietly dignified mother . . . the
successful engineer father . . . a star scout brother six years her senior”
(143); we hear in a very sympathetic way about the old Fadimans, “the
father a struggling Russian immigrant and pharamacist, the mother
a nurse” (47); we learn a good deal about ancestors as in the case of
Clark Gable cited above. Of the Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, we
are told that her “forebears had settled all over New England between
1630-1680” (22); the female freighter skipper, D’Arcy Grant, has “an
ancestral mixture of strong-headed swashbuckling Irish and pioneer
Americans” (25); Raymond Gram Swing is the “heir of a severe New
England tradition” (42); the Varian brothers have “Celtic blood” (52); in
the woman matador, Conchita Cintron, we find “Spanish, Connecticut
Irish, and Chilean elements” (116).
The curious fact here is not that the authors mention parentage, but
that they have so much to say about it and so little to say about other
human relations. It is a good deal as if the author wants to impress on
the reader that his hero, to a very considerable extent, must be under-
stood in terms of his biological and regional inheritance. It is a kind of
primitive Darwinian concept of social facts: the tendency to place the
burden of explanation and of responsibility on the shoulders of the past
generations. The individual himself appears as a mere product of his past.
The element of passivity is also found in the second most frequently
mentioned group of personal relationships: friends and teachers. Let
us look again into some of the material. We hear that the woman dip-
lomat, Mrs. Harriman, was made “Minister to Norway because of her
many powerful and loyal friends” (14); of the friendship between the
hard-hit restaurateur, Johnson, and his wealthy doctor-friend (37); the
movie actress, Brenda Marshall, was somehow saved in her career “by
the friendship of a script girl” (161); Senator Byrnes got a good start
220
because “a disillusioned old Charlestonian . . . showed him the ropes”

(18); while Miss Perkins is “‘protected’ by her personal secretary . . .
[who] worships her” (22).
There is very rarely an episode which shows our heroes as active
partners of friendship. In most cases their friends are their helpers.
Very often they are teachers who later on become friends. Perhaps it is
stretching a point to say that a vulgarian Darwinism is supplemented at
this point by a vulgarian distortion of the “milieu” theory: the hero is a
product of ancestry and friendship. But even if this may be somewhat
exaggerated, it nevertheless helps to clarify the point, namely, that the
hero appears in his human relationships as the one who takes, not as
the one who gives.
We can supplement this statement by going back to our remark that
decisive human relationships, and even those which are decisive for
private lives, are missing. The whole sphere of the relations with the
opposite sex is almost entirely missing. This is indeed a very strange
phenomenon. We should assume that the predilection for such people
as actors and actresses from stage and screen, night club entertainers,
etc., would be tied up with a special curiosity in such people’s love
affairs, but this is not the case at all. The realm of love, passion, even
marriage, seem worth mentioning only in terms of vital statistics. It
is quite a lot to be informed that Dorothy Thompson “got tangled
up in love”; very soon Lewis “asked point blank whether she would
marry him” (9); Senator Byrnes “married the charming wife who
still watches over him” (18); the industrial tycoon, Sloan, remarks,
“Mrs. Sloan and I were married that summer . . . she was of Roxbury,
Mass.” (24); Mrs. Peabody married the Rector “at the close of the
school’s first year” (29). We are told about Raymond Gram Swing
only that he was married twice (42); as far as Lyons’, the baseball
player’s bachelor, situation goes we hear that he “almost married his
campus sweetheart” (53); while his colleague, Rizzuto, is “not even
going steady” (57). In the high life of politics we are glad to know
that Ambassador Lothian “gets on well with women” (115); and that
Thomas Dewey is “a man’s man, but women go for him” (117); we are
briefly informed that Chris Martin “married, raised a family” (121);
and that “one girl was sufficiently impressed to marry” Michael Todd,
a producer, at the tender age of 17 (131).
These statements of fact, in a matter of fact way, as, for instance,
the mention of a marriage or a divorce, are all that we hear of that
side of human relations which we were used to look upon as the most
221
important ones. If we again imagine that these popular biographies

should at a very distant historical moment serve as the sole source of
information, the historian of the future would almost be forced to the
conclusion that in our times the institution of marriage, and most cer-
tainly the phenomena of sexual passions, had become a very negligible
factor. It seems that the fifth-rate role to which these phenomena are
relegated fits very well with the emphasis on parentage and friendship.
Love and passion require generosity, a display of productive mental and
emotional forces which are neither primarily explained nor restrained
by inheritance and advice.
A rather amusing observation: we found that the eyes of the hero
were mentioned in almost one-third of the stories. It is quite surpris-
ing that of all possible physiognomic and bodily features just this one
should be so very popular. We take delight in the baseball umpire Bill
Klem’s “bright blue eyes,” in his “even supernaturally good eyes” (104);
or in the “modest brown eyes” of General Weygand (107). Miss Cintron,
the matador, is “blue-eyed” (116); the night club singer, Moffett, has
“very bright blue eyes” (119).
We are not quite certain how to explain our biographers’ bodily
preferences. The eyes are commonly spoken of as “the windows of the
soul.” Perhaps it gratifies the more inarticulate reader if the authors
let him try to understand the heroes in the same language in which he
believes he understands his neighbor’s soul. It is just another example of
a cliché served up in lieu of a genuine attempt at psychological insight.
Home and Social Life: Hobbies and Food Preferences
The heroes, as we have seen, stem predominantly from the sphere of
consumption and organized leisure time. It is fascinating to see how in
the course of the presentation the producers and agents of consumer
goods change into their own customers. Personal habits, from smoking
to poker playing, from stamp collecting to cocktail parties, are faithfully
noted in between 30 and 40 percent of all stories under investigation.
In fact, as soon as it comes to habits, pleasures and distractions after
and outside of working hours, the magazine biographer turns out to
be just a snoopy reporter.
The politicians seem to be an especially ascetic lot—Taft “doesn’t
smoke” (101); neither does General Weygand (107); the former British
ambassador, Lothian, “hasn’t taken a drink in 25 years” (115). There
is also the movie actor, Chris Martin, who “doesn’t smoke cigars or
cigarettes” (121); the German Field Marshal Milch whose “big black
222
Brazilian cigars are his favored addiction” (146). To quote some of

the favorite habits or dishes of the crowd: Dorothy Thompson is all
out for “making Viennese dishes” while her “pet hates . . . are bungled
broth and clumsily buttered tea bread” (9). We are invited to rejoice
in Art Fletcher’s “excellent digestion” (7). We hope that Major Angas
is equally fortunate, for: “Eating well is his secondary career”; he is
“perpetually hungry” (20). The circus magnate, North, also seems to
have a highly developed sense for food and what goes with it: “His
cud-cutters for a three-pound steak are a Martini, a Manhattan,
and a beer, in that invariable order, tamped down with a hatful of
radishes” (26).
As for the innocent hobbies of our heroes: Art Fletcher likes “the
early evening movies” and also “to drive about the country” (7); Sena-
tor Byrnes finds recreation in “telling of the long saltily humorous
anecdotes which all Southerners love” (18). The pitcher, Paige, is “an
expert dancer and singer” (19); Westbrook Pegler “plays poker” (28);
and his special pet foe, Mayor Hague, also “likes gambling” (36); his
colleague, the London Times correspondent, Sir Willmott Lewis, also
“plays poker” (49), while Swing takes to badminton (42). More on the
serious side is Greer Garson who “reads a great deal and studies the
theater every minute she is free” (113). The hobby of golf unites Senator
Taft (101), the Fascist Muti (114), the “Blondie” cartoonist Chic Young
(165), the baseball player Lyons (53), and Ambassador Lothian (115).
We are furthermore told who likes to be “the life of the party,” and
who does not; and also how the daily routine in the apartment or pri-
vate house is fixed. The Fletchers, for instance, “retire early and rise
early” (7); while Hank Greenberg “lives modestly with his parents” but
also “likes night clubs, bright lights, and pretty girls” (56). We hear
of the actress Stickney’s charming “town house” (145), of the “fifteen
rooms and five baths and the private elevator to the street” of political
Boss Flynn (138); of the way in which the Ballet Director Balanchine
is “snugly installed in an elaborate Long Island home, and a sleek New
York apartment” (152).
As to social gatherings: Nancy Hamilton’s parties “aren’t glittering
at all, but they are fun” (103). The newspaperman, Silliman Evans, “has
introduced the Texas-size of large scale outdoor entertainment” (39);
while his colleague, Clifton Fadiman, has “very little social life, seldom
goes to dinner parties” (47). His habits seem related to those of the
private island queen, Jo Carstairs: “. . . A few friends of long standing
make up one of the world’s shortest guest lists” (54).
223
And so it goes, through over 200 quotations, changing a study

in social relations into consumers’ research. It is neither a world of
“doers” nor a world of “doing” for which the biographical curiosity of
a mass public is evoked. The whole trend goes toward acceptance: the
biological and educational heritage; the helpful friends and teach-
ers, the physical protection of the house, and the physiological one
of eating and drinking; the security of social standing and prestige,
through social entertaining; the complete resting of mind and work-
wise energy through the gamut of hobbies. Here we come very close
to decisive trends to which the modern individual seems subjected.
He appears no longer as a center of outwardly bound energies and
actions; as an inexhaustible reservoir of initiative and enterprise;
no longer as an integral unity on whose work and efficiency might
depend not only his kin’s future and happiness, but at the same time,
mankind’s progress in general. Instead of the “givers” we are faced
with the “takers.” These new heroes represent a craving for having
and taking things for granted. They seem to stand for a phantasma-
goria of worldwide social security; for an attitude which asks for
no more than to be served with the things needed for reproduction
and recreation; for an attitude which has lost any primary interest
in how to invent, shape or apply the tools leading to such purposes
of mass satisfaction.
We cannot avoid getting something of a distorted picture of society if
we look at it exclusively through the personal lives of a few individuals.
But in the past an effort was made to show the link between the hero
and the nation’s recent history. As one of those earlier biographers put
it: “Each era, conscious of the mighty works that could be wrought,
conscious that we are all under sentence of speedy death, eagerly seeks
out the younger man, the obscure man. It has need of all powers and all
talents. Especially of the talents for creating, organizing, and directing.”14
Today the emphasis is on the routine functions of nourishment
and leisure time and not on “the talents for creating, organizing, and
directing.” The real battlefield of history recedes from view or becomes
a stock backdrop while society disintegrates into an amorphous crowd
of consumers. Greer Garson and Mahatma Gandhi meet on common
ground: the one “likes potatoes and stew and never tires of a breakfast
of porridge and haddock” (113); the other’s “evening meal is simple—a
few dates, a little rice, goat’s milk” (124); Hitler and Chris Martin “don’t
smoke” (121).
224
Just Facts
Phillips’s comments quoted above may serve as a transition from the
sociology of our heroes to their psychology. With its emphasis on the
independence and leadership awaiting the exercise of personal initia-
tive, it expresses the ideal character type of private capitalism.
There are at least two elements in this quotation, the presence of
which characterizes the psychological concept of former biographies,
and the absence of which is very meaningful for the present situation:
development and solitude.
“The young, obscure man” has something of the heritage, however
trivial in this case, of the personality as it was conceived during the rise
of the middle class culture: the individual as a totality of potentialities,
mental, moral, and emotional, which have to be developed in a given
social framework. Development, as the essence of human life, was
connected with the idea that the individual has to find himself in the
soliloquy of the mind. Human existence seemed to be made up of the
loneliness of the creature and of his emergence into the outer world
by displaying his own gifts. Our quotation is one of the late forms of
this concept: the self-developing and fighting individual with all the
chances in the world for creation and conquest.
Souls without History
In an essay on present-day man, Max Horkheimer states: “Development
has ceased to exist.”15 His remarks on the immediate transition from
childhood to adult life, his observation that “the child is grown up as
soon as he can walk, and the grown-up in principle always remains the
same,”16 sound as if they were a comment on our biographical heroes.
Among our quotations we have a collection of passages which try to
tie up the childhood of the hero with his later life. Almost every sec-
ond story brings some report on the road from childhood to maturity.
Does this not seem to contradict our general remark, is this not a
variation of the classical concept of the emerging personality? Before
answering, let us examine a few representative passages: At the age of
twelve “wrestling . . . was the answer to my problem,” says the wrestler
Allman (13). The king of horse race betting, Pittsburgh Phil, “began
betting when he was fourteen—on his own game chickens” (23). Of the
inventor Stout, it is remarked: “Wherever his family lived, he would
rig up a crude shop and try to make things” (41). At twelve, the future
actor Ezra Stone, ran a kid’s radio program “directing the actors and
225
paying them off at the end of the week” (108). For the Ringling-Barnum
head J. R. North: “a real circus was his toy” (26). The future film star
Greer Garson, “wanted to be an actress from the time she could walk”
(113). The night club singer Hildegarde’s parents “weren’t surprised
when Hildegarde . . . aged eighteen months, hummed a whole aria of
an opera they had carried her to” (135).
Childhood appears neither as prehistory and key to the character
of an individual nor as a stage of transition to the growth and forma-
tion of the abundant diversity of an adult. Childhood is nothing but
a midget edition, a predated publication of a man’s profession and
career. A man is an actor, a doctor, a dancer, an entrepreneur, and he
always was. He was not born the tender and unknown potentiality of a
human life, of an intellectual, mental, emotional creativeness, effective
for himself and for society, rather he came into the world and stayed
in it, rubber stamped with and for a certain function. The individual
has become a trademark.
In more than a third of the stories an attempt at a “theory of suc-
cess” seems to be made but no magic formula is offered which an
average individual might follow for his own good. The bulk of the
answers consists of more or less trivial suggestions that the key may
be found in “instinct” or other vague qualities. The golf player Bobby
Jones “must have been born with the deep love for the game” (11). As
to the Senator: “Leadership is Byrnes’ real genius” (18). Pittsburgh Phil
was “a good horse player by instinct” (23). The businessman Durand
N. Briscoe “seemed to have an instinct for promotion and speculation”
(24). The achievements of the football coach Kendrigan are a mystery
even to him: “How he did it he never figured” (50). The airline tycoon
Cyrus R. Smith may count on “an unerring gambler’s instinct” (51).
This key formula of instinct is supplemented by a collection of almost
tautological truisms: The Fascist Muti “loves his danger highly spiced”
(114). The sociable ambassador Lothian “likes newspapermen” (115).
Howard Johnson knows what makes a restaurant successful: “A man
that is properly supervised never goes haywire” (37). And as far as Clark
Gable’s success is concerned (and this could be applied to all the 125)
“The answer . . . is personality” (6).
We venture to interpret this pseudopsychology of success as another
aspect of the timeless and passive image of modern man. Just as child-
hood is an abbreviation of the adult’s professional career, so is the
explanation of this career nothing but an abstract, rather inarticulate,
reiteration that a career is a career and a success is a success.
226
The psychological atmosphere breathes behaviorism on a very primi-

tive level. Childhood as well as that vague realm of instincts represent,
so to speak, the biological background from which a variety of human
qualities emerge. It is a psychology which shows no need of asking
why and, precisely in the same sense in which we tried to show it for
sociology, testifies to the transformation from the worship of a sponta-
neous personality to the adoration of an existence shaped and molded
by outside forces. These people live in a limbo of children and victims.
The way leads to what we are inclined to call “a command psychology”
because people are not concieved as the responsible agents of their fate
in all phases of their lives, but as the bearers of certain useful or not
so useful character traits which are pasted on them like decorations
or stigmas of shame.
There are a few traits which seem to have some bearing on a man’s
ability to manipulate his environment. We mean the columnist who is a
“spotlight stealer” (9); the playwright and actress who never overlooks
“good spots for herself ” (103); the producer who is “his own ballyhoo
artist” (131). We mean the baseball manager who is “chemically opposed
to being on the sucker end of a ball game” (2); the smart night club star
who sees “no point in disclosing that King Gustav’s favorite singer had
been born over her father’s delicatessen store” (135); the actress who
has real “talent for meeting people” (103); the person who shows up “at
the right place at the right time” (109); who is a “great man in flying,
handshaking and backslapping trips” (21).
The majority of such attitudes are likely to evoke a slyly understand-
ing smile on the part of the observer and reader. These are the “sure-fire”
tricks on the road to success, a little doubtful, but not too bad; these
are the equipment of the shrewd man and the smart woman. But these
psychological gadgets exhaust the list of qualities pertaining to creative
and productive abilities. They generate an atmosphere of pseudocre-
ativeness in an attempt to convince us that a man has contributed his
personal, individual share to the general cause of progress. “Something
new has been added,” insists the advertisement, but beware of inquir-
ing too closely into the nature of the novelty. Thus, the good-natured
statements of a certain lack of meticulous innocence on the road to
success become for the sociological interpreter a sad revelation of a
lack of originality in productive strength.
This is brought out even more clearly when we turn to the presenta-
tion of the actual history of success. Here success is not even attrib-
uted to some happy instinct—it merely happens. Success has lost the
227
seductive charm which once seemed to be a promise and a prize for

everybody who was strong, clever, flexible, sober enough to try. It has
become a rigid matter on which we look with awe or envy as we look
at the priceless pictures in our galleries or the fabulous palaces of the
rich. The success of our heroes of consumption is in itself goods of
consumption. It does not serve as an instigator for more activity, it is
introduced as something we have to accept just like the food and drink
and the parties; it is nourishment for curiosity and entertainment.
The mythology of success in the biographies consists of two elements,
hardship and breaks. The troubles and difficulties with which the road to
success is paved are discussed in the form of stereotypes. Over and over
again we hear that the going is rough and hard. The baseball umpire goes
“the long, rough road up to that night of triumph” (104); the lightweight
champion “came up the hard way” (123); a senator knew in his youth
the “long hours of hard work” (149); and the ballet director “worked
hard” (152). In identical words we hear that the baseball manager (2)
and the great film star (6) “came up the hard way.” The “hard way” it was
for Dorothy Thompson (9) and for Billy Rose (43). We are reminded
of official military communiqués, reporting a defeat or stalemate in a
matter-of-fact tone, rather than descriptions of life processes.
The same applies to the reverse side of hardship: to the so-called
breaks. All our stories refer to successes and it is fair enough that
somehow we must be informed when and how the failures stopped.
Here the tendency to commute life data into facts to be accepted rather
than understood becomes intensified. Usually, the beginning of the
peak is merely stated as an event: A high civil servant was “fortunate in
her first assignment” (8); a cartoonist merely gets a “telegram offering
him a job on the paper” which later leads to his fame (34); a colum-
nist “bursts into certain popularity” (42); an actor “got a break” (112);
another “got the job and it turned out well” (121); for a middleweight
champion “the turning point of his career had arrived” (142). If any
explanation is offered at all, we are told that the turn occurred in some
freakish way: the night club singer gets started by “a king’s whim” (135);
Clark Gable’s appointment as a timekeeper with a telephone company
appears as the turning point in his career (6); a baseball player goes
on a fishing trip, loses his old job and thereby gets another one which
leads to his success (133a).
These episodes of repetition and freakishness seem to demonstrate
that there is no longer a social pattern for the way up. Success has
become an accidental and irrational event. The dangers of competition
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were tied up with the idea of definite chances and there was a sound
balance between ambition and possibilities. Appropriately enough,
our heroes are almost without ambition, a tacit admission that those
dangers of the past have been replaced by the cruelties of the present.
It is cruel, indeed, that the ridiculous game of chance should open
the doors to success for a handful, while all the others who were not
present when it happened are failures. The “facts” of a career are a
reflection of the lack of spontaneity. Behind the amusing, fortuitous
episode lurks a terrible truth.17 Hardships and breaks are standard
articles for the reader. They are just a better brand of what everyone
uses. The outstanding has become the proved specimen of the aver-
age. By impressing on the reading masses the idols of our civilization,
any criticism or even reasoning about the validity of such standards is
suppressed. As a social scientist the biographer represents a pitiless,
almost sadistic trend in science, for he demonstrates the recurring
nature of such phenomena as hardships and breaks, but he does not
attempt to reveal the laws of such recurrence. For him knowledge is
not the source of power but merely the key to adjustment.
Catalogue of Adjustment
When we turn to a study of the approval and disapproval which our
authors attach to the various character traits they describe, we find a
striking and simple pattern.
In tone the catalogue of these traits, like the mythology of success,
resembles a digest of military orders of the day: brusque laudations
and reprimands. There is no room for nuances or ambiguity. In
content it is on a very simple level and the criterion of approval or
disapproval is also very simple. The yardstick is social adjustment.
Once we realize the subconscious and conscious opinions of present-
day society on what an adjusted person should and should not be,
we are thoroughly familiar with the evaluation of character traits
and their owners. The yardstick has three scales: behavior toward
material tasks; behavior toward fellow men; and behavior in relation
to one’s own emotions. The one who is efficient scores in the first
sphere; the one who is sociable, in the second; the one who is always
restrained, in the third.
In a separate study of all passages mentioning character traits, we
found that of a total of 76 quotations referring to a hero’s commendable
behavior toward “things to be done,” not fewer than 70, or over 90
percent, mentioned competence, efficiency, and energy; the remaining
229
six referred to ambition. The majority read: “very capable” (154); “no
sacrifice of time, effort, or my own convenience was too great” (24);
“an inordinately hard worker” (48); “was never fired for inefficiency”
(167); “thorough and accurate” (16); “being idle is her idea of complete
torture” (140).
Out of a total of 48 quotations mentioning commendable behavior
in relation to people, all 48 quote “cooperation,” “sociability,” and “good
sportsmanship.” There is a constant repetition of such adjectives as
“cooperative,” “generous,” and “sociable.” A baseball manager is “easy
to meet, sociable, unsparing in his time with interviewers” (27). The
“sociable” Chief of the Passport Division (8); the Secretary of Labor, “a
delightful hostess” (22); the Republican candidate for the presidency
with his “liking for and interest in people” (133); the matador, “genial,
friendly, hospitable” (116); a smart actress, “amiable and friendly”
(140)—they all belong to one big happy family which knows no limits
in being pleasant and agreeable to each other. Like Don James, the
barker for sideshows, they all seem to have “hearts so huge and over-
flowing” (127).
The number of quotations pertaining to disapproved character traits
is very small, but conspicuous among them are criticisms of the unre-
strained expression of emotion. It is virtually horrible that one of our
baseball heroes “is no man for a jest when losing a game” (53); that a
movie actress “cannot bear to be teased” (105); or that our Secretary of
Labor’s “public relations are unfortunate” (22). Unrestrained behavior
traits like being “irritable and harsh” (32), “swift, often furious testi-
ness” (117), being “unbalanced” (56), or even possessing a “somewhat
difficult personality” (117) are really most unpleasant. Such faults can
be tolerated only if they are exceptional—like the man who “for once
got his feelings beyond control” (23).
The catalogue of normalcy leaves no room for individuality. This
catalogue levels human behavior by the rejection of emotional erup-
tions; the bad marks given to the poor “joiners” and the temperamental
people; the complete lack of creative and passionate behavior among
the commendable qualities. The absence of love and passion in our
catalogue of human relations finds its counterpart in this catalogue of
human qualities. It is a world of dependency. The social implications
of such atmosphere seem to be considerable because in their social
status the majority of our heroes are either their “own boss” or they
have climbed to such a high step in the social ladder that whole worlds
separate them from the average employee. Yet the few “big ones” do not
230
differ basically from the many little ones. They demonstrate, taken as
a group, not the exception, but the typical cross-section of the socio-
psychological condition of modern society.
The foregoing examples from our catalogue of character traits
should make clear why we emphasize the double feature of the
absence of development and solitude. The average man is never alone
and never wants to be alone. His social and his psychological birth is
the community, the masses. His human destiny seems to be a life of
continuous adjustment: adjustment to the world through efficiency
and industriousness; and adjustment to people by exhibiting amiable
and sociable qualities and by repressing all other traits. There is no
religious or philosophical framework according to which the character
traits are classified and evaluated. The concepts of good and bad, of
kindness and sin, of truth and falsehood, of sacrifice and selfishness,
of love and hate are not the beacons which illuminate our human
landscape. The character image on which an affirmative judgment is
passed in the biographies is that of a well-trained employee from a
well-disciplined lower-middle-class family. Our people could occupy
an imaginary world of technocracy; everybody seems to reflect a rigid
code of flexible qualities: the rigid and mechanized set-up of a variety
of useful mechanical institutions. Behind the polished mask of train-
ing and adjustment lurks the concept of a human robot who, without
having done anything himself, moves just such parts and in just such
directions as the makers wished him to do.
Formerly it was only the sick who needed handling because it
was known that their symptoms were similar to many others. Now
everyone is reduced to the same dependency. The pride of being an
individual with his own very personal ways and interests becomes
the stigma of abnormality. Interest in the consumption of others is an
expression of lack of interest in genuine consumption. The detailed
character description is dominated by the same acceptance and pas-
sivity which came to the foreground in the concept of souls without
development.
Language
Superlatives
Our analysis would not be complete without some discussion of our
stories’ language which has several characteristic features. The most
obvious one is the superlative.18 Once we are made aware of this sty-
listic device, it cannot be overlooked. The heroes themselves, their
231
accomplishments and experiences, their friends and acquaintances,

are characterized as unique beings and events. The superlative gives a
good conscience to the biographer—by applying a rhetorical gadget he
achieves the transformation of the average into the extraordinary. Mr.
Muti is “the toughest Fascist of them all” (114); Dr. Brinkley is the “best
advertised doctor in the United States” (3); our hero is the “luckiest man
in the movies today” (121); another is “not only the greatest, but the
first real showman in the Ringling family” (26). There is a general who
is “one of the best mathematicians this side of Einstein” (107). There
is a columnist with “one of the strangest of courtships” (9); another
statesman with “the world’s most exciting job” (144). There are also
the downward-pointed superlatives. Some sportsman was once “the
loudest and by all odds the most abusive of the lot” (2); a newspaper
man is “one of the most consistently resentful men in the country” (28);
another person is “one of the unhappiest women that ever lived” (154).
As if the biographer had to convince himself and his public that he is
really selling an excellent human specimen, he sometimes is not satisfied
with the ratio of one superlative per sentence but has to pack a lot of
them into a single passage. Pittsburgh Phil is “the most famous and the
most feared horse player in America” (23). The German Labor Front is
“the best led, most enlightened and most powerful labor organization
in Europe” (21). The producer, Lorentz, “demands the best writing,
the best music and the best technical equipment available” (126). The
baseball manager, Clark Griffith, “was the most colorful star on the
most colorful team in baseball” (2). Tilden is “. . . the greatest tennis
player in the world and the greatest guy in the world” (111).
This wholesale distribution of highest ratings defeats its own pur-
pose. Everything is presented as something unique, unheard of, out-
standing. Thus nothing is unique, unheard of, outstanding. Totality of
the superlative means totality of the mediocre. It levels the presentation
of human life to the presentation of merchandise. The most vivacious
girl corresponds to the best tooth paste, the highest endurance in
sportsmanship corresponds to the most efficient vitamins; the unique
performance of the politician corresponds to the unsurpassed efficiency
of the automobile. There is a preestablished harmony between the
objects of mass production in the advertising columns and the objects
of biography in the editorial comment. The language of promotion
has replaced the language of evaluation. Only the price tag is missing.
The superlative pushes the reader between two extremes. He is gra-
ciously invited to become conversant with people who are paragons of
232
human accomplishment. He may be proud that to a great extent these

wonderful people do nothing but entertain him. He has, at least in his
leisure time, the best crowd at his fingertips. But there is no road left
to him for an identification with the great, or for an attempt to emulate
their success. Thus the superlative, like the story of success itself, brings
out the absence of those educational features and other optimistic
implications which were characteristic of biographies during the era of
liberalism. What on first sight seems to be the rather harmless atmo-
sphere of entertainment and consumption is, on closer examination,
revealed as a reign of psychic terror, where the masses have to realize
the pettiness and insignificance of their everyday life. The already weak-
ened consciousness of being an individual is struck another heavy blow
by the pseudoindividualizing forces of the superlative. Advertisement
and terror, invitation to entertainment and summons to humility form
their unity in the world of superlatives. The biographer performs the
functions of a side show barker for living attractions and of a preacher
of human insignificance.
High and Low Language
The use of the superlative is reinforced by frequent references to an
assortment of mythical and historical associations, in order, it would
seem, to confer pseudosanctity and pseudosafety to the futile affairs
of modern mass culture. Clark Gable does not just make a career—he
lives the “Gable saga” (6), and the movie actress, Joyce, experiences at
least a “little saga” (110). “Historic” is the word for Ilka Chase (140)
as well as for Hildegarde (135). What happens to the softball player
Novikoff is “fabulous” (158); the fate of the actress Morison is “history”
(162); of the movie producer Wallis (166) as well as of the baseball
player Allen (45) “a miracle”; the baseball manager Griffith experi-
ences “baseball destiny,” he accomplishes “a historic piece of strategy”
(2). Greek mythology is a favorite; Clark Gable lives in “Olympian
regions” (6); the passport administrator Shipley (8) as well as the
gadget inventor Taylor (167) have an “Herculean task”; the producer
Todd is called an “Archon” (131) and James Taylor “Orpheus” (167).
Of course Christianity and the Middle Ages have to help Dorothy
Thompson “like a knight with a righteous sword” (9); the Nazi Ley is
the “Jacob of German labor” with “labor itself the Esau” (21). Vice-
President Wallace is “Joseph, a dreamer of dreams” (38); Casals is a
“good Samaritan” (106). There are no limits. Ruth Hussey sometimes
“looked a bit like a Buddha” (151); the showman Rose like a “priest of
233
Osiris” (43). And so it goes on with myths, legends, sagas, destinies,

miracles.19 And yet, in the same breath which bestows the blessings
of venerable symbols on our heroes, they and we are brought together
on the easy level of slang and colloquial speech. McCutcheon, the
cartoonist, might be called the “king” of his island possession, but
we hear that “kingship is a safe investment” (1); Fletcher, who made
history, is also “the soul—or the heel—of honesty” (7); Swing, called
“an apostle,” has also “radio’s best bedside manner” (42). When Taft’s
father was president, the “crown of Roosevelt I fitted him like a five
and ten toupee” (101). There is a boxer who finds it “good business
to be brave” (12); there is “gossip—a dime a gross” (23); there is talk
of a “personal blitzkrieg” (29); of “votes enough to elect a bee to a
beehive” (109); of the “moguls of celluloid” (137); of “that genius
business” (152). The historizing hymns of praise and transfiguration
correspond to movie “palaces” and the sport “stadiums.” It is a colos-
sal façade, a “make-believe ballroom,” as one radio station announces
its swing program. Behind the façade of language there rules, just as
behind the architectural outside make-up, a versatility of techniques,
gadgets and tricks, for which nothing is too expensive or too cheap to
serve the purpose of entertaining or being entertained.
These substitutes and successors of creative production require
a language which substitutes for elucidating, revealing, stimulating
words, a linguistic confusion that strives to produce the illusion of
rooted tradition and all-around alertness. Thus this new literary phe-
nomenon complies with the highest artistic criteria: inner, necessary,
inseparable connection between form and content, between expression
and the expressed—in short, a linguistic creation which will not permit
an anatomic clear-cut separation between words and their intentions!
These biographies as a literary species are “true.”
Especially for You
In an unpublished analysis of songs T. W. Adorno interprets the pseu-
dodirectness with which every one of the millions of girls for whose
consumption the hit is manufactured, seems to be addressed. The
pseudoindividualization of the heroes corresponds to the pseudoindi-
vidualization of the readers. Although the selection of heroes and what
is reported about them are as thoroughly standardized as the language
of these reports, there is the superlative functioning as the specifying
agent for the chosen hero and there is also, as crown and conclusion,
the direct speech as the bearer of a personal message to the reader.
234
Affably or condescendingly, everyone is personally invited to attend

the spectacle of an outstanding life. Individual meets individual; the
biographer takes care of the introduction.
Coach Fletcher and his wife “can be reached only by telegram
provided you know the address” (7). Should you happen to be a
Brenda Joyce fan: “If you come at the right time, you will see her
second-hand car” (110). Watching our election campaign: “If Hull
and Mr. Taft are the candidates, your emotion will not be fired, nor
will your sleep be disturbed by them” (109). For those interested in
film stars: “Let’s sit down with Bill Powell and listen to his story”
(112); “perhaps, girls, you would like (1) to know how Clark Gable
got that way” (6). Reporting McCutcheon’s acquisition of an island,
the author teases the reader: “So, you want to be a king” (1). For the
car owner: “You can’t help seeing Johnson’s restaurants if you drive
along main highways” (37). There is the London Times representative
Sir Willmott Lewis: “Meet him on Pennsylvania Avenue. He will stop
and talk to you as if you were a five hundred audience” (49). Umpire
Klem “knows the multitudinous rules of baseball better than you know
the alphabet” (104). Let there be no mistake: the night club singer
Moffett “went to the very best schools, my dear” (119). But let’s not
neglect her colleague Hildegarde: “If you haven’t heard her or seen
her, don’t stand there—go, do something about it” (135). Casals’s
biographer is a little less imperative: “Meet the blond bowman from
Spain” (106). Dependability is the word for Miss Fitzgerald: “. . . you
can bank on her for the truth” (105).
The direct apostrophe is similar in function to the superlative: it
creates elation and humiliation. The reader, besides being admitted to
the intimate details of the hero’s habits in eating, spending, playing,
has the peasure of personal contact. There is nothing of the measured
distance and veneration which a reader in the classics in biography had
to observe before the statesman of the past, or the poet or the scientist.
The aristocracy of a gallery of isolated bearers of unusual achievements
seems to be replaced by a democratic meeting which requires no special
honors and genuflection before the great.
But the ease of admission is not devoid of menacing features. The
“you” means not only the friendly gesture of introduction but also the
admonishing, calling voice of a superior agency, proclaiming that one
has to observe, has to comply. The language of directness betrays the
total coverage planned by all modern institutions of mass communica-
tion, “especially for you” means all of you.
235
The Reader
Magazine biographies have undergone a process of expansion as well as
of atrophy. They have become a standard institution in magazines which
count their audience by the millions. It is significant that during the
present emergency the Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s have been
able to double their sales price without incurring any serious setback
in circulation. But the scope of this expanding world of biographies has
been narrowed down to the highly specialized field of entertainment. If
we ask again what social need they serve, we might find the answer in
this combination of quantitative increase and qualitative deterioration.
An hypothesis on the pseudoeducational and pseudoscientific func-
tion of the popular biography can be formulated as follows: the task of
the social scientist is, in very broad terms, the clarification of the hid-
den processes and inter-connections of social phenomena. The average
reader who, like an earnest and independent student, is not satisfied
with a mere conglomeration of facts or concepts, but wants to know
what it is all about, seems to gain insight from these biographies, and an
understanding of the human or social secret of the historical process.
But this is only a trick, because these individuals whose lives he stud-
ies are neither characteristic of this process, nor are they presented in
such a way that they appear in the full light of it. A rather satisfactory
understanding of the reader is possible if we look upon the biography
as an agent of make-believe adult education. A certain social prestige,
the roots of which are planted during one’s school days, constantly
drives one toward higher values in life, and specifically, toward more
complete knowledge. But these biographies corrupt the educational
conscience by delivering goods which bear an educational trademark
but which are not the genuine article.
The important role of familiarity in all phenomena of mass culture
cannot be sufficiently emphasized. People derive a great deal of satis-
faction from the continual repetition of familiar patterns. There are
but a very limited number of plots and problems which are repeated
over and over again in successful movies and short stories; even the
so-called exciting moments in sports events are to a great extent very
much alike. Everyone knows that he will hear more or less the same
type of story and the same type of music as soon as he turns on the
radio. But there has never been any rebellion against this fact; there
has never been a psychologist who could have said that boredom
characterized the faces of the masses when they participate in the
routine pleasures. Perhaps, since the average working day follows a
236
routine which often does not show any change during a lifetime, the
routine and repetition characteristics of leisure-time activities serve
as a kind of justification and glorification of the working day. They
appear in the guise of beauty and pleasure when they rule not only
during the average day, but also in the average late afternoon and
evening. In our biographies, the horizon is not extended to the realm
of the unknown, but is instead painted with the figures of the known.
We have already seen the movie actor performing on the screen and
we have seen the cartoons of the competent newspaperman; we have
heard what the radio commentator has to say and have noted the
talents of boxers and baseball players. The biographies repeat what
we have always known.
André Maurois has made a wrong prophecy: “We shall come once
more into periods of social and religious certainty in which few intimate
biographies will be written and panegyrics will take their place. Sub-
sequently we shall again reach a period of doubt and despair in which
biographies will reappear as a source of confidence and reassurance.”20
The reader who obviously cherishes the duplication of being entertained
with the life stories of his entertainers, must have an irrepressible urge
to get something in his mind which he can really hold fast and fully
understand. It has been said of reading interests that: “In general, so
long as the things of fundamental importance are not presenting one
with problems, one scarcely attends to them in any way.”21 This remark
has an ironical connotation for our biographies, for it can hardly be said
that “things of importance” are not presenting us with problems today.
Yet they are scarcely attended to unless we would admit that our heroes’
parents, their likes and dislikes in eating and playing and, in the major-
ity of cases, even their professions are important data during the initial
stages of this war. But the distance between what an average individual
may do and the forces and powers that determine his life and death has
become so unbridgeable that identification with normalcy, even with
Philistine boredom becomes a readily grasped empire of refuge and
escape. It is some comfort for the little man who has become expelled
from the Horatio Alger dream, who despairs of penetrating the thicket
of grand strategy in politics and business, to see his heroes as a lot of
guys who like or dislike highballs, cigarettes, tomato juice, golf and
social gatherings—just like himself. He knows how to converse in the
sphere of consumption and here he can make no mistakes. By narrow-
ing his focus of attention, he can experience the gratification of being
confirmed in his own pleasures and discomforts by participating in the
237
pleasures and discomforts of the great. The large confusing issues in the
political and economic realm and the antagonisms and controversies
in the social realm—all these are submerged in the experience of being
at one with the lofty and great in the sphere of consumption.
Appendix
Differences Between The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s

Table 6.4 shows a considerable difference between Saturday Evening
Post and Collier’s in the occupational distribution of heroes. There are
far more “serious” people and far fewer entertainers in the Saturday
Evening Post. This corresponds to a difference in the audiences of
the two magazines.22 Surveys have shown that the average Saturday
Evening Post reader is older, wealthier, and more attached to his home
and more interested in social and economic problems than the average
reader of Collier’s.
However, the difference between the two magazines becomes neg-
ligible (see Table 6.5) when we reclassify the heroes according to the
spheres of politics, production, and consumption. For our purpose this
is a more meaningful classification. As the two magazines are rather
Table 6.4. Distribution of Biographical Subjects by Occupation in the Saturday
Evening Post and Collier’s April 1940–April 1941.
Occupations of subjects Saturday Evening Post Collie’s
No. % No. %
Politics 16 28 15 22
Business and professions 20 35 5 7
Entertainment, sports 20 37 49 71
Total 56 100 69 100
Table 6.5. Comparison of Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s Heroes

According to General Spheres of Activity.
Spheres Saturday Evening Post Collier’s
1940–1941 1940–1941
No. % No. %
Politics 16 28 15 22
Production 3 5 – –
Consumption 37 67 54 78
Total 56 100 69 100
238
alike under this classification we felt justified in treating them together

in the main text.
Below is the list of the biographies from Saturday Evening Post and
Collier’s appearing in the issues between April 1940 and April 1941.
List of Biographies Used
Saturday Evening Post
Date “Hero” Profession No.
4-6-40 John T. McCutcheon Cartoonist 1

4-13, 20-40 Clark Griffith Baseball manager 2
4-20-40 John R. Brinkley Physician 3
5-4-40 Robert Taft Senator 4
5-4-40 Jack Johnson Boxer 5
5-4-40 Clark Gable Movie actor 6
5-11-40 Art Fletcher Baseball coach 7
5-11-40 Mrs. Shipley Chief, Passport Division, 8
State Department
5-18, 24-40 Dorothy Thompson Columnist 9
5-25-40 Richard A. Ballinger Former Secretary of 10
Interior
6-8-40 Bobby Jones Golfer 11
6-22-40 Bob Donovan et al. Boxers 12
6-22-40 Bob Allman Wrestler 13
6-22-40 Daisy Harriman Ambassador 14
7-6-40 Oché Tone Slovenian immigrant 15
7-13-40 Ullstein Corp. Publishing house 16
7-20-40 Hitler Fuehrer of Third Reich 17
7-20-40 Jimmy Byrnes Senator 18
7-27-40 Satchel Paige Baseball pitcher 19
7-27-40 Angas Investment counselor 20
7-27-40 Dr. Robert Ley Head of the German Labor 21
Front
7-27-40 Frances Perkins Secretary of Labor 22
8-3, 10, 17-40 Pittsburgh Phil Professional gambler 23
(horses)
(Continued)
239
List of Biographies Used (Continued)

8-17, 24-40 24
9-14, 21, 28-40 } Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Businessman
8-17-40 D’Arcy Grant Woman sailor 25
8-24-40 John Ringling North President of Ringling- 26
Barnum & Bailey shows
9-14-40 Bill McKechnie Baseball manager 27
9-14-40 Westbrook Pegler Columnist 28
9-14-40 Endicott Peabody Rector of Groton 29
11-9, 16, 30-40 } Will Rogers

10-5, 12, 19, 26-40 Actor 31
10-12-40 James C. Petrillo Pres. Am. Fed. Musicians 32

10-12-40 Louis McHenry Presidential secretary 33
Howe
10-19-40 Jay Norwood Darling Cartoonist 34
10-19-40 Sidney Hillman Labor leader 35
10-26-40 Frank Hague Mayor of Jersey City 36
11-2-40 Howard Johnson Owner of a restaurant 37
chain
11-2-40 Henry Wallace Vice-President 38
11-23-40 Silliman Evans Newspaperman 39
11-30-40 Jesse H. Jones Secretary of Commerce 40
12-7-40 William B. Stout Inventor 41
12-14-40 Raymond Gram Radio commentator 42
Swing
12-21-40 Billy Rose Showman 43
12-28-40 Charles A. Aviator, etc. 44
Lindbergh
12-28-40 Bobby Allen Basketball player 45
1-4-41 Mrs. E. K. Hoyt and A gorilla 46
Toto
1-11-41 Clifton Fadiman Book and radio critic 47
1-18-41 Sam Rayburn Speaker, House of 48
Representatives
1-25-41 Sir Willmott Lewis London Times Emissary to U.S. 49
(Continued)
240

2-1-41 J. H. Kendrigan Football coach 50
2-1-41 Cyrus R. Smith Pres. Amer. Airlines 51
2-8-41 Varian Brothers Inventors 52
2-15-41 Theodore A. Lyons Baseball player 53
2-22-41 Jo Carstairs Island proprietress 54
3-8, 15-41 Preston Sturges Movie writer and director 55
3-15-41 Hank Greenberg Baseball player 56
3-22-41 Phil Rizzuto Baseball player 57
Collier’s
4-6-40 Robert A. Taft Senator 101
4-13-40 Mme. Chao Chinese Partisan Chief 102
Wu-Tang
4-13-40 Nancy Hamilton Playwright, actress 103
4-13-40 Bill Klem Baseball umpire 104
4-20-40 Geraldine Fitzgerald Movie actress 105
4-20-40 Pablo Casals Cellist 106
4-27-40 General Weygand General 107
4-27-40 Ezra Stone Stage, radio and screen 108
actor
5-4-40 Cordell Hull Secretary of State 109
5-4-40 Brenda Joyce Movie actress 110
5-4-40 Bill Tilden Tennis champion 111
5-11-40 William Powell Movie actor 112
5-18-40 Greer Garson Movie actress 113
5-25-40 Ettore Muti Fascist politician 114
5-25-40 Philip Kerr, British Ambassador 115
Marquess of Lothian
5-25-40 Conchita Cintron Woman matador 116
6-8-40 Thomas Dewey Politician 117
6-8-40 Athanasiades Munitions merchant 118
6-15-40 Adelaide Moffett Night club entertainer 119
6-22-40 Dutch Leonard Baseball player 120
6-22-40 Chris Martin Movie actor 121
(Continued)
241
List of Biographies Used (Continued)

6-29-40 Gene Tierney Movie actress 122
7-20-40 Lew Jenkins Lightweight champion 123
7-20-40 Mahatma Gandhi Indian political leader 124
7-27-40 Jean Arthur Movie actress 125
8-3-40 Pare Lorentz Movie producer 126
8-10-40 Don James Sideshow barker 127
8-24-40 Larry Adler Harmonica player 128
8-31-40 Ernest Bevin British Minister of Labor 129
9-7-40 Helen Bernhard Tennis player 130
9-7-40 Mike Todd Producer—show business 131
9-14-40 Ingrid Bergman Movie actress 132
9-21-40 Wendell Willkie Politician 133
9-28-40 Walters and Baseball players 133a
Derringer
10-5-40 Juan March Industrialist 134
10-5-40 Hildegarde Night club singer 135
10-12-40 Jack Grain Football player 136
10-12-40 Jinx Falkenburg Advertising model 137
10-12-40 Eddie Flynn Democratic National 138
Chairman
10-19-40 John Latouche Writer 139
10-26-40 Ilka Chase Actress; movie, radio, film 140
11-2-40 Winston Churchill British Prime Minister 141
11-2-40 Ken Overlin Middleweight champion 142
11-9-40 Joan Carroll Child movie actress 143
11-9-40 Lord Woolton Britain’s Minister of Food 144
11-16-40 Dorothy Stickney Actress—theater 145
11-30-40 Field Marshal Erhard Organizer of German air 146
Milch force
11-30-40 Barbara Ham Musical writer—college girl 147
12-7-40 Martha Scott Movie actress 148
12-7-40 Joseph H. Ball Senator 149
(Continued)
242

12-14-40 “Schnitz” Producer—jitterbug leader 150
12-21-40 Ruth Hussey Movie actress 151
12-28-40 George Balanchine Ballet director 152
1-4-41 Billy Soose Boxing champion 153
1-4-41 Carol and Magda Ex-King of Roumania and 154
Lupescu paramour
1-4-41 Annie Laurie Hollywood literary agent 155
Williams
1-11-41 Katherine Dunham Dancer 156
1-18-41 Dorothy Comingore Actress: theater and films 157
1-25-41 Lou Novikoff Softball player 158
2-1-41 Zivic Brothers Boxers 159
2-8-41 Three Young Actresses 160
actresses in
“Charley’s Aunt”
2-15-41 Brenda Marshall Movie actress 161
2-24-41 Patricia Morison Movie actress 162
3-1-41 Marilyn Shaw National ski champion 163
3-15-41 Cliff Thompson Hockey coach 164
3-15-41 Chic Young Comic strip cartoonist 165
3-15-41 Hal Wallis Movie producer 166
3-29-41 James Taylor Inventor of gadgets 167
3-29-41 Bob Riskin Scenario writer 168
Notes
1. Cf. Edward H. O’Neill, A History of American Biography (University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1935). His remarks on pp. 179 ff. on the period since
1919 as the “most prolific one in American history for biographical writing,”
are quoted by Helen McGill Hughes, News and the Human Interest Story
(University of Chicago Press, 1940, pp. 285 f.). The book by William S. Gray
and Ruth Munroe, The Reading Interests and Habits of Adults (New York:
Macmillan, 1930), which analyzes readers’ figures for books and magazines,
does not even introduce the category of biographies in its tables on the con-
tents of magazines, and applies it only once for books in a sample analysis
of readers in Hyde Park, Chicago. The only comment the authors have to
offer is: “There is some tendency to prefer biographies and poetry, especially
in moderate doses to other types of reading except fiction” (p. 154). Finally,
243
I want to quote as a witness in this case of scientific negligence, Donald A.

Stouffer, The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England (Princeton
University Press, 1941), who in his excellent and very thorough study says:
“Biography as a branch of literature has been too long neglected” (p. 3).
2. Up to the spring of 1939, 3.1 million copies of his books were sold: 1.2
million in Germany, 1.1 million in the U.S., 0.8 million elsewhere. (Cf. Emil
Ludwig, Traduction des Œuvres [Moscia, 1939], p. 2.)
3. It should not be inferred that the results as presented here are without
much change applicable to all other magazines which present general and
diversified topics. From a few selections taken from less widely circulated
and more expensive magazines, ranging from The New Yorker to the dollar-
a-copy Fortune, it seems very likely that the biographies presented there
differ in their average content structure and therefore in their social and
psychological implications from these lower-priced popular periodicals.
The difference in contents corresponds to a difference in readership.
4. Cf. note 12 of this chapter.
5. For the collection of data prior to 1940 the writer is indebted to Miss Miriam
Wexner.
6. We have omitted from our discussion and our figures a number of very
short biographical features which amounted to little more than anecdotes.
These were published fairly regularly by the SEP until the late 1920s under
the headings “Unknown Captains of Industry,” “Wall Street Men,” sometimes
called “Bulls and Bears,” “Who’s Who and Why,” “Workingman’s Wife,”
“Literary Folk.”
7. See, for instance, the SEP, September 19, 1925, where the auto-racer Barney
Oldsfield tells a reporter details of his racing experiences and of the mechan-
ics of racing and automobiles; September 26, 1925, in which the vaudeville
actress, Elsie Janis, comments on her imitation acts and also gives details
of her techniques. The same holds true for the biography of the band leader
Sousa in the SEP, October 31, 1925, and of the radio announcer Graham
McNamee, May 1, 1926; after a few remarks about his own life and career,
McNamee goes on to discuss the technical aspects of radio and his experi-
ences in radio with famous people.
8. Saturday Evening Post, October 12, 1901.
9. Saturday Evening Post, June 28, 1902.
10. Here and there we find a casual remark on the function of biographies as
models for individual imitation. Cf., for instance, Mandel Sherman, “Book
Selection and Self Therapy,” in The Practice of Book Selection, ed. Louis
R. Wilson, University of Chicago Press, 1939, p. 172. “In 1890 a book
appeared entitled Acres of Diamonds, by Russell H. Conwell. This book
dealt especially with the problems of attaining success in life. The author
attempted to encourage the reader by giving examples of the struggles and
triumphs of noted successful men and women. This pattern of encouraging
the reader by citing examples of great men has continued, and in recent
years a number of books have appeared in which most of the content dealt
with case histories of noted individuals. Some psychologists have suggested
that interest in autobiographies and biographies has arisen in part from
the attempts of the readers to compare their own lives with those about
whom they read, and thus to seek encouragement from the evidence of the
244
struggles of successful people.” Helen McGill Hughes in her suggestive study,

News and the Human Interest Story, has not avoided the tendency to settle
the problem of biographies by rather simplified psychological formulae. By
quoting generously O’Neill, Bernarr MacFadden, and André Maurois, she
points to the differences of the more commemorative and eulogistic elements
in earlier biographies and the “anxious groping for certainty of people who
live in times of rapid change,” which is supposed to be connected with the
present interest in biography (see especially p. 285).
11. The figures in parentheses refer to the bibliography of stories studied, see
Appendix. Figures 1 to 57 refer to the SEP and 101 to 168 to Collier’s. On
the difference between the SEP and Collier’s, see Appendix, Tables 6.4, 6.5.
12. It will be very important to check how far the war situation confirmed,
changed, or even reversed the trend. A few casual observations may be
mentioned. (1) The New York Times Magazine, on July 12, 1942, published
an article “Wallace Warns Against ‘New Isolationism.’” The vice-president
of the United States is photographed playing tennis. The caption for the
picture reads “Mr. Wallace’s Serve.” This picture and its caption are a very
revealing symbol. The world “serve” does not refer to social usefulness,
but to a feature in the vice-president’s private life. (2) This remark can be
supplemented by quoting a few issues of the SEP and Collier’s, picked at
random from their publications during the summer of 1942. While every-
where else in this study we have limited ourselves to the analysis of strictly
biographical contributions, we should like, by quoting some of the topics of
the entire issues which we have chosen for this year, to emphasize the overall
importance of the spheres of consumption. Not only has the selection of
heroes for biographies not changed since America’s active participation in
the war, but many other of the nonfictional articles are also still concerned
with consumers’ interests. (3) Of the ten nonfictional articles in the SEP,
August 8, 1942, five are connected with the consumers’ world: a serial on
Hollywood agents; a report on a hometown circus; a report on roadside
restaurants; an analysis of women as book readers; and an essay on the horse
and buggy. In an issue one week later, August 15, 1942, there is a report on
the International Correspondence School; the continuation of the serial on
the Hollywood agents; and a biography on the radio idol Kate Smith. Or
let us look at Collier’s, which as a whole, devotes a much higher percentage
of articles to war topics than the SEP. Out of nine articles in the issue of
July 4, 1942, five belong to the consumers’ world. There is again one on the
horse and buggy, another one on a baseball hero, a third one on an Army
comedian, a fourth one on a Broadway producer, and finally, one on budget
buffets. Three weeks later, on July 25, out of ten articles, again five belong to
the same category. (4) In other words, out of 37 articles found in four issues
of two leading popular magazines during the present crisis, not less than
17 treat the gustatory and entertainment features of the average citizen.
(5) There appears to be some cause for concern in the fact that so much
of the fare presented to the reading public during the times immediately
preceding the war and during the war itself is almost completely divorced
from important social issues.
13. We proceeded to collect all the passages in the 125 stories pertaining to
our four categories. It is not intended here to analyze the 2,400 quotations
245
exhaustively, but merely to present in the following chapters a few observa-

tions or hypotheses which their study suggested to us and which we hope
may be stimulating to further research in content analysis.
14. D. G. Phillips, “The Right Hand to Pierpont Morgan,” Saturday Evening Post,
June 28, 1902.
15. Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” in Studies in Philosophy and Social
Science, vol. IX, no. 3 (1941), p. 381.
16. Ibid.
17. The spectacle of success, hardships and accidents is attended in the biog-
raphies by an assortment of numbers and figures which purport to bestow
glamour and exactness to the narration. Calculability is the ideal language
of modern biographies. They belong to the scientific mentality which sees
its ideal in the transformation from quality into quantity. Life’s riddle is
solved if caught in a numeric constellation. The majority of figures refer
to income, to which may be added relatively few data on capital. The other
figures pertain to the spectators of a ball game, to the budget of a city, to
the votes of an election, etc.
18. A study of this writer on popular German biographies, which appears in
this volume as Chapter 5, shows that the use of superlatives also character-
izes them. These books by Emil Ludwig, Stefan Zweig and others, are on
a different intellectual level, yet it seems probable that similar sociological
implications hold for them as for magazine biographies.
19. Helen McGill Hughes, News and the Human Interest Story, p. 183, is aware
of the fact that the association of “classical” names has a stimulating effect
on what she calls “the city demos”: “Stated in terms of his popular literature,
the mind of modern man lives in the present. And as the present changes,
so his news is voluminous and rapidly succeeded by more news. But what
fascinates him is the news story—the true story—even though it may dupli-
cate Bluebeard or Romeo and Juliet so exactly that the headline tells the news
just by mentioning the familiar names. The human interest of the common
man in the modern world will, and does, ensnare him into reading folktales
or even the classics, dull and unreal as he finds them in themselves, if they
are paraphrased as the careers of twentieth century Electras, Macbeths and
Moll Flanders, for he is preoccupied with the things that depart from the
expected and make news.”
20. André Maurois, Aspects of Biography (New York: Appleton-Century, 1939),
p. 203.
21. Franklin Bobbitt, “Major Fields of Human Concern,” quoted in Gray and
Munroe, The Reading Interests, p. 47.
22. A qualitative study of magazines: Who Reads Them and Why (McCall
Corporation, October 1939).
246
Excursus C
Some Thoughts on the 1937
Edition of International
Who’s Who
One might well ask whether the liberal belief in harmony is still valid
today. Why, especially today, should our faith in the free development
of the individual, in the individualistic doctrine of the vital rights and
potentialities of each and everyone which has become common stock,
have lost its social basis? Is it indeed true that people today are orga-
nized like herds, distinguished for their “breeders” only by the color
of their skin, the cut of their wool: mere raw material without the gift
of spontaneity? A cursory survey of the media of our times seems to
refute any such theoretical propositions as the end or even the crisis
of liberalism and individualism.
Individuality consists first of all in a name; it is insufficiently
described, however, if it is only attributed to the human species.
A proper concept of individuality only arises when defined as pertain-
ing to the unique exemplar which is nothing else but itself. Our age
seems to live in a literal frenzy of individual name-giving. We are told
that the Renaissance was the age of the discovery of the individual.
Adolescents, students and even adults continue to discover themselves
according to this historical model. It is a familiar manner of expres-
sion among educated people to refer to the nature of a Cesare Borgia
when they see someone excel in cunning, or to a Lucretia Borgia when
they want to comment on spicy erotic fantasies. Equally familiar are
testimonies of cultural sophistication on the part of those who in pri-
vate and public see themselves surrounded by faces, limbs and souls
reminiscent of brush strokes of Botticelli, Raphael, Dürer and Holbein
or of the chisels and carving knives of Donatello and Riemenschneider,
as if they were discovering reincarnations of those artistic creations.
Such rhetoric, however, might still be seen as an expression of a sort of
247
civilized modesty informed by a certain respect for the famous name

which carried so much more weight than one’s own. In addition, until
recently the historical consciousness of the educated was sustained
by concrete historical concepts which were not limited to notions of
antiquity or the Middle Ages but by very specific references such as
the ages of absolutism, the counter-reformation, the French Revolu-
tion, or the nineteenth century. To mention Cromwell or Robespierre
when actually the bourgeois revolutions were meant, was considered a
somewhat precious affectation—as if one were on personal terms with
the historically significant.
While we are not all brothers, we are also no longer strangers to
each other in as much as we learn the names of many of our fellow
men. Man steps out of the dark of history into the glaring floodlights
seemingly illuminating his specifically named individuality. The wor-
thiness and uniqueness of each individual involved in the making of a
film finds expression in the film’s credit lines. These indicate not only
the names of the director and actors, but also of those who handled
the lighting, manipulated the film in the darkroom, sewed the famous
star’s costumes and who pushed various pieces of equipment here and
there, who engineered the sounds of railroad cars, cowbells and cata-
strophic explosions; all these are made dear to us and, for seconds at
least, familiar. The press is not different in this regard. Where formerly
the talk was of great powers, economic constellations and parties,
these various issues nowadays are discussed in terms of the names
of statesmen, party activists, economic leaders and their helpers who
are constantly quoted with this or that statement. Today, the message
of John: in the beginning was the word, is repeated a thousand times
over. And the religious message that man is created in the image of
God seems endlessly repeated on the front pages of newspapers where
a daily history of creation is reported through the comments of Mr.
Smith and Reverend Jones. The circle of those whose names are worthy
of mention is no longer restricted to the members of the power elite.
Rather, the very mention of a name in the media nowadays seems to
bestow a semblance of worthiness to the countless members of insig-
nificant technicians, dilettantes, amateurs, reporters, announcers,
administrators, politicians; but their significance fades with the deluge
of tomorrow’s names.
This avalanche of a vulgarized Who’s Who takes on ludicrous pro-
portions. The fog of anonymity is seemingly lifted from the name- and
248
Excursus C
faceless crowd of the work force. A sign in the window of a ticket

counter names the agent, a sign on her desk the secretary, a nametag
on his lapel that of the elevator operator, railroad conductor, barber,
hairdresser, bartender, gas station attendant, convention participant.
Who has not yet been delighted with the concern of his fellows when—
on his birthday—he not only received greetings from his friends but
also from his insurance agent? The “human touch” has dignified and
ennobled the business of advertising and public relations. Out of the
goodness of his heart the contractor or developer will build this lovely
house for this couple; the loyal bank manager confides in you just how
much your welfare and that of your loved ones mean to him. Modern
printing equipment permits the reproduction of letters in such a way
that each letter appears individually written on a typewriter so as to
give it a “personal touch.” The only individualized aspect of this proce-
dure is the personal address of the recipient which can be executed on
a typewriter without visible difference between the typed and printed
parts of the letter. The trick is known to many of the recipients, but to
many it is not. They believe that not only the greeting but the substance
of the letter was intended for them alone.
The fiction of this individuality which demands that its name
be noted by others, is certainly not limited to the described social
spheres where the private becomes public and is turned into a ritu-
alistic formula which has lost its social grounding. It is not without
cruel irony, that the blows which the liberal political and cultural
system is presently enduring find expression in totalitarian politics
through a greeting that incessantly invokes the name of its “Führer.”
The people of a country which is a breeding ground of collectivism
greet each other by pledging allegiance to the name of an individual
while—paradoxically—the country which still prides itself on its
individualism, is also the home of the most indiscriminate, faceless
greeting, the “hello.”
There is something terrifying in this lifting of anonymity. If previ-
ously a name meant the familiar and opened a friendly door through
which we were invited to enter, the name of the person presented to us,
of the artist whose work we were about to encounter, the productive
person who has opened new vistas, now the name of the Führer has
become a symbol of sinister muteness. The greeting invoking his name
connotes the uniform, uniformity itself; caution is required, a retreat
and withdrawal into the nameless shadow of the masses.
249
The trend to substitute the commitment to critical insight and care-

ful analysis with the dropping of a name might also be detected among
the emigrants who have escaped the totalitarian systems and yet seem
compelled to compete with them. I mean the tendency to aggrandize
themselves by invoking the names of great writers, philosophers, scien-
tists or charismatic pacifists. Why, for instance, the proposal to name
the umbrella-organization of all the diverse political and cultural exile
groups the Hellmuth von Gerlach Organization rather than, e.g., the
Association of Free Germany in Exile? This tendency has its precedence.
It began during the French Revolution and continued throughout the
history of the groupings and group conflicts of the leftist movements
since the middle of the nineteenth century, as for instance in such
designations as “Bakunists” and “Lassallians.” A similar tendency to
substitute names of leaders, founders, innovators for philosophical
schools or religious movements has become more and more prevalent
in our time.
In truth, this new world of names is nameless. There was once an
immediate relationship between justification through faith and the
believer, between the pietistic hymns of spiritual peace and the small
craftsman, between the proclamation of the rights of man and the rights
of this or that person, between classicism and romanticism and indi-
vidual cultural needs. The object-related language of bygone centuries
reflects a stronger and more authentic confidence in the potential of
the individual than the noisy and cheap glorification of the multitude
of names surrounding us today.
The tenuousness of this alleged individuality manifests itself in such
minor responses as the irritation we experience if, for instance, our
name is but slightly mispronounced or mistaken. In fact, the hypertro-
phy of the name-giving cult is but another reflection of the continuing
disintegration of the individual whose unconscious is all too aware of
the ever-increasing indifference of our fellow-man to which we are
exposed. The ubiquitous name-cult is as inauthentic in its intimacy as
it is inauthentic in its egalitarianism. The verbal reverence which today
still refers to “a” Goethe and “a” Bismarck for instance, conceals the
futile desire to acquire for oneself a small measure of uniqueness in a
world in which the fate of the venerator is equal to that of the indefinite
pronoun which actually denotes anonymity.
He who speaks of the leaders speaks of his own impotence. As we
are increasingly overwhelmed with facts demanding unquestioned
250
Excursus C
authority and subjugation of our independent judgments and feel-

ing, names and more names, along with our own, are added to this
authoritarian learning process. The names are to be forgotten as soon
as they are learned. Looking at Who’s Who in 1937 these thoughts take
on a terrifying aspect.
251
Part II
Contributions to the
Philosophy of Communication
7
On Sociology of Literature
(1932)
I
History of literature is in a unique way subject to the difficulties which
arise with every historical effort. Not only is it implicated in all theoreti-
cal discussions concerning the conceptual meaning and material struc-
ture of history, but, in additon, its object of study falls into the realm
of numerous scientific disciplines. Over and beyond the techniques
involved in the critical analysis of sources, numerous disciplines step
forward with a variety of claims, among them philosophy, aesthetics,
psychology, pedagogy, philology and even statistics. When we turn to
day-to-day practice, however, we find that literary studies have become
scientific jetsam. Everybody, from the “naive reader” to the presum-
ably legitimate teacher with special expertise, is prepared to launch
interpretations of literary texts in the most arbitrary and capricious
ways. Knowledge of a language combined with the conviction that an
adequate technical terminology can be dispensed with, are considered
sufficient prerequisites to engage in such ventures. On the other hand,
academics have thus far not developed methods of research and analysis
which would do justice to the complexity of their object of study. This
is not a wholesale indictment of every single specialized work; rather,
what I am concerned with here are the prevailing principles underlying
today’s study of literary history and literary criticism.
Virtually all of the scholars who contributed to the collection of
essays Die Philosophie der Literaturwissenschaft1 (The Philosophy of
Literary Studies) are in agreement that a “scientific” approach to the
history of literature would lead nowhere. Not only do they believe—and
rightly so—that each literary work contains some nonrational elements,
they also consider any rational approach inadequate with regard to the
very nature of the object under investigation. Consequently, the study of
255
literature as it was founded in the nineteenth century is condemned and

rejected as “historical pragmatism,”2 as “historicizing psychologism,”3
and as “positivistic method.”4 Certainly, Hermann Hettner’s or Wilhelm
Scherer’s works lack absolute validity; indeed, they would never have
claimed it. But all attempts to deal with literature which profess to a
scholarly character have to draw critically on the scientific methods
of the nineteenth century.
Isolation and simplification of a literary historical object is admit-
tedly achieved in an exceedingly sublime process. Author and work
become abstracted from the matrix of historical circumstances, and
molded into a kind of predictable coalescence from which the diverse
manifold of details and dimensions has been drained. Through this rei-
fication they acquire a dignity and worthiness which no other cultural
phenomenon can boast. “In the history of literature acts and actors
are ‘givens,’ whereas in world history we are presented with more or
less falsified accounts of mostly shady dealings by rarely identifiable
dealers.”5 True dignity is reserved only for such historical phenomena
which are a manifestation of the mind, or may be perceived at least
as existing in a unique domain.6 Of course, only when an object of
investigation is not considered part of inner and outer nature and its
variable conditions, but instead has to be ontologically conceived as a
creation of a higher kind, do positivistic methods prove fundamentally
insufficient. With the confidence of a philosophical instinct, the con-
cept of structure introduced by Dilthey, which was based on historical
contextuality, is abandoned and replaced by the concept of the organic
“that clearly, unambiguously and decisively characterizes the spiritual
as the individualization in history determined by unity of meaning.”7
Ambiguous terms such as “work,” “form,” “content,” proclaim a meta-
physically grounded unity of author and work, transcending and negat-
ing all diversity. This radical estrangement from historical reality finds
its purest expressions in concepts such as “classicism” and “romanti-
cism” which are not only relegated to history, but also metaphysically
transfigured. “Like the superordinate concept of eternity, both the
concept of perfection and of infinity are derived from historical and
psychological experience as well as from philosophical knowledge.”8
This rigid and in itself irrational stance on the part of those represent-
ing literary scholarship today presumes its legitimation in the fact that
the “methods of the natural sciences” analyze their object into bits and
pieces, and when attempting to define its “vital poetic soul,” these meth-
ods cannot help but miss entirely its “secret.”9 The significance of these
256
On Sociology of Literature (1932)
statements is hard to grasp. For nobody has ever demonstrated why, and
to what extent, an object would be harmed or distorted by a rational
approach. Any study of a phenomenon can be mindful of its wholeness,
its “Gestalt,” while being conscious of a selective methodology. Admit-
tedly, such an analysis will only yield the elements of a mosaic whose sum
never represents the whole. But where on earth does scientific analysis
exhaust itself in nothing but a summation of fractured parts? And are the
methods of the natural sciences exclusively atomistic in nature? Certainly
not, and neither do methods of literary analysis have to be, if they are
inappropriate to a specific task. On their journey into the vagaries of
metaphysics, the literary scholars also appropriated the concept of law.
However, rather than to identify law with order and regularity which can
be submitted to scrutiny and observation, the concept, from the start,
is burdened with a troublesome new and vague meaning. Instead of the
search for regularity there appears a “unity of meaning,” and the “artistic
personality” and the “poetic work”10 are identified, among others, as the
major problems of literary studies, problems which seem to be resolved
before they have been investigated. Yet, personality and work belong to
those conceptual constructs which thwart any theoretical effort precisely
because they are opaque and finite.
In as much as these fashionable literary scholars point to the pit-
falls involved in seeking to understand the relationship of author and
work through, for instance, mere philological data analysis, I have no
quarrel with this antipositivistic attitude. But precisely when it comes
to an evaluation of a work of art and its qualitative aspects, an under-
standing of its intrinsic merit and its authenticity—questions so much
at the center of the concerns of these scholars—their methods reveal
their utter inadequacy. The question of whether and to what extent
the literary artist consciously applies conventions of form, can only
be explored by rational means. But the metaphysical mystification so
prevalent in contemporary literary studies impedes any sober reflec-
tion and scholarship. Its tasks are not only historical in nature; I would
like to refer to Dilthey’s concept of Verstehen (understanding) and its
particular emphasis on the relationship between the author and his
work. Admittedly, the demystification of investigative approaches to
literature cannot be achieved by means of a formal poetics alone. What
is needed above all is a psychology of art, i.e. a study of the psychological
interaction between artist, artistic creation and reception. What is not
needed, however, is a psychology that places the “great work of art” in
a mystical relationship “with the people,” and that finds the “personal
257
biography of the author . . . interesting and necessary, but unessential

with regard to the act of artistic creation.”11
II
In contrast to the vague declamatory statements so characteristic of
Jungian psychology, the classical Freudian model of psychoanalysis
has already made important theoretical contributions to a psychol-
ogy of art. Some of its proponents have discussed central questions
of literature, particularly those dealing with the psychic conditions
under which great works of art originate, specifically the origins and
structure of artistic imagination, and last not least, the question of
the relationship between the artistic work and its reception which so
far has been ignored or at least insufficiently explored.12 Admittedly,
some of these psychoanalytic propositions are not yet polished and
refined enough and remain somewhat schematic. But to reject the
assistance of scientific psychology in the study of art and literature does
not provide protection from “a barbarian assault of conquerers,”13 as
one contemporary literary mandarin put it, but rather is a “barbarian”
argument itself!
Coupled with the condemnation of “historicizing psychologism,”
which cannot explore the secret of the “authentic poetic soul,”14 is the
repudiation of accepted historical methodology and particularly of
any theory of historical causality, in short, what in modern literary
scholarship is anathematized as “positivistic materialism.”15 But as in
the case of psychology, the trend setters take liberties: modern liter-
ary scholarlship has no qualms and even consistently makes use of
grand historical categories such as “folk, society, humanity”16 or the
“pluralistic, aspiring” and the “spiritualizing, articulating experience.”17
There is mention of “associations of essence and fate,” of “perfection
and infinity” as “conceptual basis” of “historical experience”;18 while the
phraseology of the “age of Homer, Pericles, Augustus, Dante, Goethe”19
is acceptable, any historically and sociologically oriented theoretical
approach will meet with scorn and contempt when it attempts to
understand literature as a social phenomenon in combination with the
positivistic and materialistic methods which evolved out of the histori-
cal scholarlship of the nineteenth century. The bluntly stated objective
is “the abandonment of the descriptive vantage point of positivism
and the return to a commitment to the metaphysical character of the
Geisteswissenschaften (humanities).”20 We shall see that such “abandon-
ment” is demanded with even greater determination once the theory of
258
historical materialism replaces traditional historical description. Even

the boundary between scholarship and demagogery is obscured when
the anti-historical transfiguration of a work of art has to be maintained:
“Historical pragmatism may perhaps conclude that syphilis led to
the disappearance of Minnesang and its polygamous convention, or
that the currency reform of 1923 gave rise to Expressionism. . . . The
essence of Minnesang and Expressionism remains unaffected by such
findings. The question here is not why is it but what is it? The ‘why’
would simply lead to an infinite regress: Why at the end of the Middle
Ages was lues spread, why at the beginning of 1924 was the Reichsmark
introduced, and so on until the egg of Leda.”21 This kind of rhetoric
makes a caricature of any legitimate scholarly inquiry. By no means
do causal questions require infinite regress; clearly stated they can
be precisely answered, even if new questions might be posed by this
answer. An investigation of the reasons for Goethe’s move to Weimar
does not require an investigation of the history of urban development
in Germany!
Considering the current situation of literary scholarship as sketched
in the preceding outline, its precarious relationship to psychology,
history, and social science, the arbitrariness in the selection of its
categories, the artificial isolation and scientific alienation of its object,
one might agree with a modern literary historian who, dissatisfied with
the “metaphysicalization” that has invaded his discipline, calls for the
return to strict scientific standards, a passionate devotion to material,
a deep concern for pure knowledge; in short, a new “appreciation of
knowledge and learning.”22 If Franz Schultz, however, simultaneously
rejects any overarching theory,23 he does not have the courage of his own
convictions. In fact, it is possible to conceive of a theoretical approach to
literature which remains faithful to “knowledge and learning” and inter-
prets literary works historically and sociologically, avoiding the pitfalls
of both either descriptive positivism or mere metaphysical speculation.
III
Such concern with the historical and sociological dimensions of lit-
erature requires a theory of history and society. This is not to say that
one is limited to vague theorizing about the relationships between
literature and society in general, nor that it is necessary to speak in
generalities about social conditions which are required for the emer-
gence of literature. Rather, the historical explanation of literature has to
address the extent to which particular social structures find expression
259
in individual literary works and what function these works perform in

society. Man is involved in specific relations of production throughout
his history. These relations present themselves socially as classes in
struggle with each other, and the development of their relationship
forms the real basis for the various cultural spheres. The specific struc-
ture of production, i.e. the economy, is the independent explanatory
variable not only for the legal forms of property and organization of
state and government but, at the same time, for the shape and quality
of human life in each historical epoch. It is illusionary to assume an
autonomy of the social superstructure, and this is not altered through
the use of a scientific terminology claiming such autonomy. As long
as literary history is exclusively conceived as Geistesgeschichte, it will
remain powerless to make cogent statements, even though in practice
the talent and sensibilities of a literary historian may have produced
something of interest. A genuine, explanatory history of literature must
proceed on materialistic principles. That is to say, it must investigate
the economic structures as they present themselves in literature, as
well as the impact which the materialistically interpreted work of art
has in the economically determined society.
Such a demand along with the social theory which it presupposes,
has a dogmatic ring unless it specifies its problematic. This has been
achieved to a large extent in the fields of economics and political his-
tory, but even in the area of literary studies fledgling attempts have
been made. Worthy of mention are Franz Mehring’s24 essays on literary
history which, sometimes using a simplified and popular, sometimes a
narrowly defined political approach, have for the first time attempted
to apply the theory of historical materialism to literature. But as in the
case of the aforementioned psychological studies, the work of Meh-
ring and other scholars of his persuasion has either been ignored or
even ridiculed by literary historians. A sociologist of culture recently
referred to “such a conceptual framework not only as unsociological
or incompatible with scientific sociology,” but also comparable to “a
parasitic plant” that “draws off the healthy sap of a tree.”25
The materialistic explanation of history cannot afford to proceed
in the simplifying and isolating manner so characteristic for the aca-
demic establishment of literary history, interpretation, and criticism.
Contrary to common assertions, this theory neither postulates that
culture in its entirety can be explained in terms of economic relations,
nor that specific cultural or psychological phenomena are nothing but
reflections of the social substructure. Rather, a materialistic theory
260
places its emphasis on mediation: the mediating processes between a

mode of production and the modes of cultural life including literature.
Psychology must be considered as one of the principal mediating pro-
cesses, particularly in the field of literary studies, since it describes the
psychic processes by means of which the cultural functions of a work
of art reproduce the structures of the societal base. In as much as the
basis of each society in history can be seen as the relationship between
ruling and ruled classes and is, in fact, a metabolic process between
society and nature, literature—like all other cultural phenomena—will
make this relationship transparent. For that reason the concept of ide-
ology will be decisive for the social explanation of all phenomena of
the superstructure from legal institutions to the arts. Ideology is false
consciousness of social contradictions and attempts to replace them
with the illusions of social harmony. Indeed, literary studies are largely
an investigation of ideologies.
The often-voiced criticism that the theory of historical materialism
lacks methodological refinement and possesses a crude conceptual
apparatus can easily be countered: the proponents of this theory
have never avoided the discussion of its flaws. Its findings and results
have always been open to the scrutiny of other scholars, as well as to
possible theoretical changes prompted by new experiences in social
reality. Historical materialism has certainly not taken refuge in quasi-
ontological imagery which, seductive and enchanting as it might be,
connotes a spurious philosophy of knowledge. As long as a theory does
not consider itself finite but rather continuously sustained and possibly
altered by new and different experiences the frequent accusation that
historical materialism ultimately contains an element of faith seems
of little consequence.
IV
The following examples are intended to illustrate the application of
historical materialism to literary studies and will address questions of
form, motif, and content.
Beginning with the issue of form I should like to consider the problem
of the encyclopedic novel as it exists in Balzac’s Comédie Humaine or
in Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart. Both seek to represent, through their
all-encompassing narratives, the society of their time in its entirety
with all its living and dead inventory, occupations, and forms of state,
passions, and domestic furnishings. Their aim appears anchored in the
bourgeoisrationalist belief that, in principle, it is possible to possess
261
the world through thought and to dominate it through intellectual

appropriation. In the case of Balzac, this rationalism is mediated by
his adherence to a mercantilist model of the economy which suppos-
edly allows government to regulate society in an orderly fashion—a
Balzac anachronism rooted in his peculiar psychological infatuation
with the ancien régime. In the case of Zola, however, one faces a criti-
cal orientation toward the capitalist mode of production and the hope
of remedying its deficiencies through a critical analysis of the society
it conditions. The breadth of each of these cyclic novels reveals just
as much about the author and his place in a class society as it does
about the theoretical and moral position he adopts toward the social
structure of his time.
Social meanings present themselves in more specific issues as well.
The same literary form, for instance, can have a completely differ-
ent social meaning in different contexts. One example would be the
emphasis on dialogue and the resulting limitation of the narrative
voice or commentative inserts in the text. The works of Gutzkow and
Spielhagen and the impressionist writers are paradigmatic for this style.
Gutzkow was probably the first to introduce into German literature the
modern bourgeois dialogue. The history of the dialogue in narrative
texts is that of a development from a tradition of stiff conventions to
the spontaneous, open conversational technique of the present. The
dialogue is in reality the criterion of the varying degrees of psycho-
logical astuteness which the freely competing members of capitalist
society, at least in its liberal epoch, are able to demonstrate. Those who
are more adroit and possess superior insight into the response mecha-
nisms of their interlocutors also have superior chances of economic
success, so long as the situation is not controlled by crude power rela-
tions which would make any discussion impossible in the first place.
The function of the conversational form in the literature of the Junges
Deutschland (Young Germany: the liberal intelligentsia of the 1830s
and 1840s), which was almost entirely oblivious of its social context,
is only indirectly identifiable, and in Spielhagen appears burdened by
a kind of theory. The epic narrative insert has been reduced to a mini-
mum, creating the impression that the author’s arrangement of events
has been dictated by the demands of reality, i.e. the verbalized inter-
actions of the novel’s characters, and that he has drastically reduced
authorial interference through actions, events, and incidents as well
as their authorial interpretation. Beginning with the later Fontane and
Sudermann up until Arthur Schnitzler’s last novellas, the impressionist
262
novella makes extensive use of the uncommented dialogue. But this

“renunciation of the privileges of the interpreting and supplementing
narrator”26 has one meaning and function in Spielhagen and another
in the German impressionists.
Spielhagen’s technique is based on the conviction that through
the conversations of people social reality becomes transparent to the
reflective reader who then will discover their underlying theory about
human and societal relations. A bourgeois idealist, Spielhagen believes
in the power of the objective mind which materializes in the articulated
thoughts of men so that the free exchange of dialogue can leave no
doubt as to the substantive convictions of the author. In contrast, the
ascetic absence of commentary characteristic for the impressionists, is
an expression of the self-criticism liberal bourgeois society pronounced
on itself since the beginning of the twentieth century. The inability to
formulate a theory of society, the increasing insecurity, if not helpless-
ness, of the German middle class, resulted in fact in a mentality of
relativism, a loss of confidence in the subjective mind which believed
in the possibility of universally applicable knowledge. While Gutzkow’s
groping increments in dialogue reflect the economic gropings of a
liberal bourgeoisie in Germany in the first stages of upward mobility
and while the novellistic technique of Spielhagen celebrates its social
victory, the impressionist style reflects its crisis: it either hides this crisis
with an ideological film or admits to it through pointless conversations
which lead nowhere.
Other class relationships reveal themselves when one compares the
technique of the narrative frame in the novellas of Theodor Storm and
C. F. Meyer. This literary device fulfills radically opposed functions in
the work of these authors. Storm assumes a posture of resignation, of
renunciatory retrospection. He is the weary, petty bourgeois pensioner
whose world has collapsed, a world in which he could hope to engage
in affairs of social importance. Time has run out; the only sustenance
the present still offers are “framed,” idealized remembrances of the past.
Memory is capable of recovering only those fragments of the past that
do not immediately bear on the gloomy present and therefore do not
have to be repressed. In the case of Meyer, on the other hand, the narra-
tive frames of his novellas quite literally serve as the magnificent frames
of a glorious painting, and as such function as indicators of the worthi-
ness of the image they enclose and are meant to separate the unique,
which is all that matters, from the indifferent diversity of appearances.
The same stylistic device which in Storm’s world symbolizes the modest,
263
the small and the waning, is used by Meyer as the symbol of vital reality.
While the petty bourgeois soul of Storm quietly mourns, Meyer thrusts
his characters into a world that corresponds to the feudal daydreams
of the German upper classes in the 1870s.
As a final example of the sociological implications in problems
of form, I shall briefly consider the use of pictorial imagery. For
Lessing the aesthetician, the pictorial has no place in literary arts.
For Meyer it is a favorite artistic device. The progress of humanity in his-
torical time, the development of mankind are the important issues for
Lessing, who was a firm believer in the future. He was an early champion
of a rising bourgeois society which saw in the tensions and resolutions
of a drama the paradigm for the conflicts and possible resolutions in
society. Meyer is the heir to this dramatic tradition, but the surviving
victors are now limited to the members of the upper class. Where
Lessing is a dramatist, Meyer has become a sculptor. Where the former
animates, the latter in fact halts the motion of progress. If for Lessing
art expresses a universalist morality binding for all men, a morality
which transcends individual idiosyncracies, it is for Meyer the extraor-
dinary and the unique in selected individuals that finds expression in
art. Magnificently framed, the infinite diversity of reality is condensed
into the great moments of great individuals and eternalized as in a
painting, transcending time and place. This ideological position mirrors
precisely the self-image of the dominant strata of the bourgeoisie in the
last third of the nineteenth century, for which the social world is but
an opportunity for the development of the great personality, in short,
the social elite. Its members stand aloof from trivial everyday cares
and live surrounded by significant people, great ideals and important
affairs which all reflect and confirm their uniqueness.
A motif that likewise serves to glorify economic power positions is
the motif of boredom in the novels of Stendhal. Boredom is as fatal as
death for “the happy few” who alone are entitled to read his books and
for whom alone he chooses to write. These happy few, far removed from
the consequences of an economically limited existence, are entitled to
pursue their happiness according to their own autonomous morality.
Just as Stendhal is the supreme novelist of the bourgeois aristocracy in
the age of Napoleon, so Gustav Freytag sings the praise of the German
mid-nineteenth century bourgeoisie which he transfigures by denying
any knowledge of its contradictions that are evident in the division,
organization and remuneration of labor. In as much as Freytag applies
an undifferentiated concept of “work” to the equally undifferentiated
264
concept of “the people,” (two concepts Stendhal would have never used)
he successfully overlooked, in a literal sense, the antagonistic social
order with its competing and feuding classes. Ideology comes to the
fore at the very beginning of his major work Soll und Haben (Debit and
Credit) which has as its motto the words of Julian Schmidt: “The novel
ought to look for the German people where they are at their virtuous
best, that is, at work.”
I should like to touch upon the death motif as it is struck repeatedly
in Mörike’s Maler Nolten (Painter Nolten) and Meyer’s Jürg Jenatsch.
Mörike’s world is that of the Biedermeier of the honest man, the not
yet politically emancipated bourgeois in the period of the Vormärz,
i.e. in the period between the Vienna Congress and the, in fact, abor-
tive revolutions of 1848–49. In his novels, the death motif may be
interpreted as a harbinger of the political defeat of the bourgeoisie
in his generation. The motifs of transience, fate, and death serve as
ideological metaphors for the political impotence of the middle class
in his time of which he himself was a prototype. By contrast, in the
stories of Meyer, death takes on the aspect of a highly intensified
moment in the fullness of life. When Lucretia kills Jürg Jenatsch this
deed marks also the beginning of her own physical destruction. What
is in fact a violent double murder is presented as the expression of
heroic lifestyles. Only Jürg and Lucretia are worthy of one another,
they represent a rare and perfect balance of character and fate; only
by virtue of this singular congruity do these two have the right to
eliminate each other. The solidarity of the international ruling minor-
ity proves itself unto death.
Finally, turning to content, I once more refer to Freytag and Meyer.
Both wrote historical novels and short stories. Freytag’s collected
works might be called the textbook of the conformist middle class,
exhorting the virtues and perils of its members. The study of history
is not seen as an occasion for intellectual enjoyment for its own sake,
but for its pedagogic values. Either for the purpose of warning or
emulation, it contains the history of individuals and groups intended
to teach future generations lessons of social competence which might
help them avoid the dubious fate of the aristocracy or the sordid fate
of the lower classes. If this stance toward history is a manifestation
of the self-image of a bourgeoisie struggling for its existence with
tenacious diligence, then, by contrast, Meyer’s selective approach to
history may be dubbed a “historicism of the upper bourgeoisie.” When
history is constituted randomly from disjoint events, the abundance
265
of historical phenomena is forced into a dim twilight and the chain

of diachronic experiences itself has no significance at all. There is
no continuum of events of any interpretable character, be it causal,
theological or otherwise teleological in nature. Political, economic
cultural changes carry no weight and the flow of history is in itself
without importance. The historian turns spectator taking pleasure in
observing the singular like a magnificent drama. Thus the category of
play penetrates real history as much as historical research to the extent
that history’s diversity and complexity is reduced to a puppet theater
of heroes whose lives and activities are reconstituted for the playful
enjoyment of the spectator-interpreter. An upper-class bourgeois likes
his favorite historian to be an aesthete.
Another example for the exploration of content is the question of
politics. In Gottfried Keller we find an almost bold disregard for eco-
nomic realities, but considerable emphasis is placed on the political
sphere, whether in occasional caricaturization of armchair politics
or in the informed and competent conversations of the burgher in
the Fähnlein der sieben Aufrechten (The Seven Upright) on topics of
general import. To identify politics as the supreme, if not exclusive
arena for the confrontation and final settlement of public affairs, is
characteristic for social groups which, on the one hand, experience
themselves as economically secure, but whose social mobility, on
the other hand, is limited. All through the nineteenth century the
middle class is inclined to look at politics as a resource for arbitration
between competing groups and individuals, as, literally, a “middle”-way.
This notion of the middle station, incidentally, was already fervently
glorified in the fictional and pamphlet literature read by the English
middle class in the eighteenth century. In the case of Stendhal, politics
does not function as an ideological device, rather, consciously or not,
he acts as spokesman for the upper class of his time who considered
political dealings part of economic transactions and conflicts, and gov-
ernments nothing more than business partners of big business itself.
It has always been of great interest to me why a task as important
as the study of the reception of literature among various social groups
has been so utterly neglected even though a vast pool of research mate-
rial is available in journals and newspapers, in letters and memoirs.
A materialistic history of literature, unhampered by the anxious protec-
tion of the literary arts by its self-styled guardians and without fear of
getting stranded in a quagmire of routine philology or mindless data
collection, is well prepared to tackle this task.
266
Notes
1. Emil Ermatinger, ed., Die Philosophie der Literaturewissenschaft (Berlin,
1930).
2. Herbert Cysarz, “Das Periodenprinzip in der Literaturwissenschaft”
(The Principle of Periodization in Literary Studies), in Die Philosophie, p. 110.
3. D. H. Sarnetzki, “Literaturwissenschaft, Dichtung, Kritik des Tages” (Literary
Study, Literary Work, Contemporary Criticism), in Die Philosophie, p. 454.
4. Ermatinger, Die Philosophie, passim.
5. Cysarz, op. cit.
6. See Werner Ziegenfuβ, “Kunst” (Art) in Handwörterbuch der Soziologie
(Encyclopedia of Sociology), (1931), p. 311.
7. Emil Ermatinger, “Das Gesetz in der Literaturwissenschaft” (Law in Literary
Study), in Die Philosophie, p. 352.
8. Fritz Strich, Deutsche Klassik und Romantik (German Classicism and
Romanticism), (Munich, 1924), p. 7.
9. Sarnetzki, op. cit.
10. Ermatinger, op. cit., pp. 363f.
11. C. G. Jung, Psychologie und Dichtung (Psychology and Literature), qu. in
Musch (see n. 13 below), p. 330.
12. See the important publication of Hanns Sachs, Gemeinsame Tagträume
(Shared Daydreams), (Leipzig, 1924), esp. pt. I.
13. Walter Musch, Psychoanalyse und Literaturwissenschaft (Psychoanalysis
and Literary Study), (Berlin, 1930), p. 15.
14. Sarnetzki, op. cit.
15. Ibid.
16. Ziegenfuβ, op. cit., p. 337.
17. Herbert Cysarz, Erfahrung und Idee (Experience and Ideal), (Vienna/Leipzig,
1922), pp. 6f.
18. Strich, op. cit.
19. Friedrich Gundolf, Shakespeare (Berlin, 1928), vol. 1, p. 10.
20. Ermatinger, op. cit., p. 352.
21. Herbert Cysarz, “Das Periodenprinzip,” p. 110.
22. Franz Schultz, Das Schicksal der deutschen Literaturgeschichte (The Fate of
German Literary History), (Frankfurt/Main, 1928), p. 138.
23. Ibid., pp. 141ff.
24. Franz Mehring, Schriften und Ausfsätze (Writings and Essays), vol. 1 (Berlin,
1929); vol. 2, Über Literaturgeschichte (On Literary History), (Berlin, 1929);
Die Lessinglegende (The Lessing Legend), (Berlin, 1926).
25. Ziegenfuβ, op. cit., pp. 330f.
26. Oskar Walzel, Die Deutsche Literatur von Goethes Tod bis zur Gegenwart
(German Literature from Goethe’s Death to the Present), (Berlin, 1918),
p. 664.
267
8
On Sociology of Literature
(1948)
The sociological interpretation of literature is not a favorite son of orga-

nized social science. Since the emancipation of the study of literature
from the rigid research dicta and historically cogent laws of philology,
almost everybody with a fair access to reading and writing feels entitled
to offer historical, aesthetic, and sociological criticism and generaliza-
tion. The academic disciplines which have been traditionally charged
with the history and analysis of literature have been caught unaware by
the impact of mass literature, the best seller, the popular magazine, the
comics and the like, and they have maintained an attitude of haughty
indifference to the lower depths of imagination in print. A field and a
challenge have thus been left open and the sociologist will have to do
something about them.1
The following remarks, making no claim to systematization or
comprehensiveness, are intended as an attempt to survey work done
and to be done.
Areas of Analysis
Literature and the Social System

The problems envisaged under this heading are twofold. The primary
aspect is to place literature in a functional frame within each society
and again within the various levels of stratification of that society. In
certain primitive as well as in some culturally highly developed societ-
ies, literature is integrated into other social manifestations and is not
clearly differentiated as an independent entity apart from ceremonials
of cult and religion. It is rather an outlet of these institutions as, for
example, tribal chants, early Greek tragedy, or the medieval passion
play. In contradistinction, literature in the middle-class world leads
an existence clearly separated from other cultural activities, with
269
many functional differentiations. It may become the escapist refuge

of politically frustrated groups, as in early romanticism, or of social
frustration on a mass scale, as in the current phenomenon of liter-
ary mass entertainment. Then again, literature may function as an
ideological instrument in the proper sense of that word, by exalting
a specific system of domination and contributing to its educational
goals, as was the case with the Spanish and French dramatists in the
era of absolutism.
A secondary aspect, perhaps less fertile in terms of research mate-
rials but no less rewarding in social perspectives, lies in the study of
literary forms. The epic as well as lyric poetry, the drama like the novel,
have affinities of their own to a particular social destiny. The solitude
of the individual or the feeling of collective security, social optimism
or despair, interest of psychological self-reflection or adherence to
an objective scale of values, may be mentioned as starting points of
associations that lend themselves to a reexamination of literary forms
in terms of social situations.2
An example for studies in this area is taken from the field of mass
communication. It deals with the role of the popular biographies that
have become prominent features in magazines intended for large-scale
consumption. In comparing the different “heroes” of biographies during
the last forty years it could be ascertained that in the first fifteen years
of the present century about 75 percent of the subjects were taken from
political life, business and the professions, whereas in 1941 73 percent
of the “heroes” come from the “spheres of consumption,” that is to say,
from the entertainment, sports and communication fields. It seems
that this change of literary taste is closely connected with a change in
the social situation of the reading public. Whereas forty years ago they
bought information about the agents and methods of social production,
today they buy information about the agents and methods of individual
consumption. This change is reinforced by a parallel change in topical
material. A generation ago the reader was told about the special politi-
cal, business or professional activities of his heroes; today he is held
spellbound by their private lives, their hobbies and food preferences,
their friends and acquaintances, and so on.
The major sociological conclusion to be drawn from this change
is that the little man, who has been expelled from the Horatio Alger
dream, who despairs of penetrating the thicket of grand strategy in
politics and business, finds comfort in seeing his heroes as “a lot of
guys” who like or dislike highballs, cigarettes, tomato juice, golf and
270
social gatherings—just like himself. He knows how to converse in the

sphere of consumption and here he can make no mistakes. By narrow-
ing his focus of attention, he can experience the gratification of being
confirmed in his own pleasures and discomforts by participating in the
pleasures and discomforts of the great. The large confusing issues in the
political and economic realm and the antagonisms and controversies in
the social realm are submerged in the experience of being at one with
the powerful and great in the sphere of consumption.3
The Position of the Writer in Society
The creative writer is the intellectual per se, for whom objective source
materials are merely an arbitrary arsenal of reference of which he makes
use, if at all, according to his specifically aesthetic aims. He thus rep-
resents the prototype of intellectual behavior and the lively discussion
among sociologists about the role of the intelligentsia could perhaps be
extended to a more concrete level if it were supported by a historically
documented analysis of both the socially relevant self-portrait and the
specific functions of one of the oldest groups among the intellectual
professions.
It must suffice here to enumerate a few points of departure and
to mention under the heading of subjectivity the phenomena of the
prophetic, the missionary, the entertaining, the strictly handicraft
and professional, the political or money-making self-conceptions of
literary producers. On the objective level we shall have to inquire into
the sources of prestige and income, the pressure of institutionalized
agencies of social control, visible or anonymous, the influence of tech-
nology and the market mechanisms, all with regard to the stimulation
and dissemination of artistic writing and to the social, economic and
cultural situation within which writers find themselves at various his-
torical stages. The relationships of the princely courts, the academies
and salons, the book clubs and the movie industry to the literary craft
exemplify the relevant topics for systematic discussion.4 Then there
are problems which cross the subjective and objective aspects, such as,
whether under conditions of modern book and magazine production
the writer is still an independent entrepreneur or in fact an employee
of his publisher and advertiser.
Society and Social Problems as Literary Materials
Here we enter the traditional area of sociological research in literature.
There are innumerable books and papers on the treatment of the state
271
or society or the economy or this and the other articulate social phe-
nomenon by any number of writers in any number of countries and
languages. These more or less reliable repositories of factual informa-
tion, though written for the most part by literary people and therefore
more or less haphazardous in matters of social theory, cannot be dis-
missed lightly. They evaluate literature as secondary source material
for historical analysis and become all the more valuable the scarcer the
primary sources for any specific period. Furthermore, they contribute
to our knowledge of the kind of perception which a specific social
group—writers—has of specific social phenomena, and they belong
therefore to propaedeutic studies of a history and sociology of social
consciousness.
Nevertheless, a sociologist with literary interest and analytical
experience in the field of belles-lettres must not be satisfied merely to
interpret literary materials which are sociological by definition; his task
is also to study the social implications of literary themes and motives
which are remote from public or publicly relevant affairs. The specific
treatment which a creative writer gives to nature or to love, to gestures
and moods, to situations of gregariousness or solitude, the weight given
to reflections, descriptions or conversations, are all phenomena which
on first sight may seem sterile from a sociological point of view but
which are in fact genuinely primary sources for a study of the penetra-
tion of the most private and intimate spheres of individual life by the
social climate, on which, in the last analysis, this life thrives. For times
that have passed, literature often becomes the only available source of
information about private modes and mores.
The shortcoming of fashionable biographies of today stem in part
from their increasing attempt to explain literary figures (and for good
measure the entire social situation in which they were created) by
short-circuited conclusions made up of analogies with the psychol-
ogy of present-day man. But women like Faust’s Gretchen, Madame
Bovary, or Anna Karenina cannot be interpreted by mere analogy: their
problems simply cannot be experienced today because the atmosphere
out of which their conflicts grew has passed. The social data of the
period in which they were created and the social analysis of the char-
acters themselves are the very material from which the meaning and
the function of the works of art can be understood. If our would-be
psychologists in the literary field were to be completely sincere, they
would have to confess that every one of these women, if alive today,
272
would be considered stupid, frustrated neurotics who ought to take a

job or undergo psychiatric treatment to rid themselves of their obses-
sions and inhibitions.
It is the task of the sociologist of literature to relate the experience
of the imaginary characters to the specific historical climate from
which they stem and, thus, to make literary hermeneutics a part of the
sociology of knowledge. That sociologist has to transform the private
equation of themes and stylistic means into social equations.5
Some fifteen years ago, I made a study of Knut Hamsun which inci-
dentally turned out to be a case of successful sociological prediction
in the field of literature.6 The particular task consisted of analyzing
themes and motives having no direct connection with public issues,
for they were domiciled in the private sphere. The study showed that
Hamsun was intrinsically a Fascist. Events have proved that, this once
at least, prediction is possible for a sociologist of literature. To the
surprise of most of our contemporaries, Hamsun turned out to be a
close collaborator of the Nazis.
Here only a few rather disjointed examples of this type of analysis
can be given. Of special interest seems to be Hamsun’s treatment of
nature. In the authoritarian state, the individual is taught to seek the
meaning of his life in “natural” factors like race and soil. Over and over
again he is told that he is nothing more than nature, specifically, than
race and “natural” community. The pantheistic infatuation with nature
which Hamsun demonstrates and accepts leads to this dictated identity
between the individual and “natural” forces. The route is circuitous in
appearance only.
The shift from the dream world of naturalness to the social reality of
Fascism is inherent in the forms in which the uproar of the elements,
brutal nature, is experienced. Hamsun writes (and the following is
merely a sample repeated in endless variations):
A wind comes up, and suddenly it rumbles far and wide. . . . Then
lightning flashes, and . . . the thunder rolls like a dreadful avalanche
far beyond, between the mountains. . . . Lightning again, and the
thunder is closer at hand; it also begins to rain, a driving rain, the
echo is very powerful, all nature is in an uproar. . . . More lightning,
and thunder and more driving rain.7
Immanuel Kant had defined his conception of the sublimity of

nature in a storm in such a way that man, in experiencing his own
273
helplessness (as a being of nature) in the face of the superior might of

natural phenomena, simultaneously experiences the inferiority of the
latter in the face of his own humanity, which is greater than nature.
Man can indeed succumb to nature, but that is only incidental and
external to the power of his soul and mind.8
Kant’s social consciousness bids nature be silent, as it were, about
what it experiences from man and what it can do for man. But for Ham-
sun the storm can hardly shout loudly enough to drown out individual
and social impotence. The storm is the occasion for experiencing and
formulating the insignificance of the individual—the exact opposite
of Kant’s conception:
When a moment of sadness and realization of my own worthlessness

in the face of all the surrounding powers comes over me, I lament
and think: Which man am I, or am I perhaps lost, am I perhaps no
longer existent! And I speak aloud and call my name, in order to hear
whether he is still present.9
Anxiety appears to be a sort of secret emotion bound up with this late

pantheism. Kant’s pride in human autonomy has no place for the senti-
mental uneasiness which is announced in every fear of a thunderstorm
and which appears in Hamsun as a promiscuous jumble of mawkish
sympathies for both natural objects and spiritual difficulties.10 Hamsun’s
storm world foreshadows the affinity between the elements of brutality
and sentimentality, which are united in Fascist behavior.
The law of rhythm is of particular significance for Hamsun’s concept
of nature. The rhythmic cycle of the seasons is noted in the novels
incessantly, as if in imitation of the phenomenon itself. “Then came the
autumn, then came the winter.”11 “. . . but the road leads on, summer
follows spring in the world.”12 In the end, the rhythmic principle takes
on a normative character. What is wrong with certain people is that
“they won’t keep pace with life . . . but there’s none should rage against
life.”13 Even sexual relationships are oriented to the regularity of nature.
The shepherdess will walk past the hunter’s cabin in the autumn just as
infallibly as she comes to him in the spring. “The autumn, the winter,
had laid hold of her too; her senses drowsed.”14
We have attained the extreme opposite of human self-consciousness
before nature if man can and must never disturb the natural cycle at any
point. In this new ideology, which seeks to transfigure helplessness and
subjection, the individual lays down his arms before a higher power in
274
seemingly free volition. Man must expect the terrors of a meaningless

life unless he obediently accepts as his own what may be called the
alien law of nature. The social solution to the puzzle of natural rhythm
is blind discipline, the rhythm of marches and parades.
Concerning love and womanhood one might say of Hamsun’s atti-
tude that woman attains her proper character and happiness when she
unites the home with the naturalness of true existence in her functions
as housewife and mother. We find in Hamsun unmistakable traces of the
tendency to reduce the role of woman to merely biological functions,
the duty to bear many children. This trend is part of his ideal counter-
part to liberal society—the Fascist reality. “A real girl will marry, shall
become the wife of a man, shall become a mother, shall become fertility
itself.”15 The apotheosis of biological functions inevitably leads to bit-
ter hatred of all reforms, emancipation, or spirituality which woman
might desire,16 to contempt for “the modern woman.” Real individual
satisfaction seems possible only in the sexual sphere, but not because
sensual pleasure has a specific connection with the development of the
personality. It is rather hatred and malice, associated with great disdain
for woman, which are operative in this relationship.
“Come and show me where there’s cloudberries,” said Gustaf. . . .

And how could a woman say no? . . . Who would not have done the
same? Oh, woman cannot tell one man from another; not always—
not often.17
Hamsun dresses the role of promiscuous sexuality in all kinds of

natural myths. There is a complete lack of interest in one’s partner’s
happiness. Sexual relations are ruled by complete passivity, a sort of
service which man obeys:
He broke through all rules of propriety and was very friendly, picked
the hay from her bosom, brushed it from her knees, stroked, petted,
threw his arms around her. Some call it free will.18
Even when man is occupied with love, Hamsun maliciously reminds him
of his mere naturalness, a true disciple of Fascism’s moral relativism.
When we turn to his treatment of marginal figures, we soon dis-
cover that, next to the peasant, Hamsun has particular sympathy for
the vagabond. In the prehistory of Fascism in Germany, yeoman work
was done by a conceited, individualistic group of uprooted literati who
played with the cult of the hero. In the anticipation of Fascism which
275
we find in Hamsun’s novels, the vagabond is a forerunner of the brutal

man who weeps over a dry twig and bares his fist to his wife. Flirtation
with the anarchistic vagabond is a coquettish and spiritualized expres-
sion of the veneration of heroic forces. There is abundant evidence
from every period of Hamsun’s career, as in a late novel in which the
vagabond August longs “to shoot the knife out of the hand of a man
who was trying to make off with his wallet” because that would be a
thrill for the “children of the age” in their dreary existence;19 or in his
prewar writings where he plays the same romantic game without intro-
ducing heroic crime,20 and where he ridicules the notion of bourgeois
efficiency as poverty-stricken (“no thunderbolt ever falls”);21 or even in
his earliest work, where he cries for “gigantic demi-gods” and blunders
into a political program for which the way has been cleared by this
very heroic ideology: “The great terrorist is greatest, the dimension,
the immense lever which can raise worlds.”22 It is but a short step from
here to the glorification of the leader.
Finally a word about Hamsun’s relationship to mankind as a whole.
It is most ironic that the biological comparison with the anthill, so
popular in liberal reformist literature as a symbol of higher social aims
and organization, is completely reversed by Hamsun and made into
the image of the planlessness of all human existence:
Oh, that little anthill! All its inhabitants are occupied with their own
affairs, they cross each other’s paths, push each other aside, some-
times they trample each other under feet. It cannot be otherwise,
sometimes they trample each other under feet.23
This picture of life and of man’s aimless crawling closes the ring of
antiliberal ideology. We have returned to the starting point, the myth
of nature.
Social Determinants of Success
By and large the legitimate business which the sociologist of literature
may have in the field of communications research consists in formulat-
ing hypotheses for research on “what reading does to people.”24 But he
cannot simply pass the buck to his colleague, the empirical researcher,
after having done his historical, biographical and analytical work. There
are certain factors of social relevance which, though very decisive for
the measurement of effects, will have to undergo sociological explora-
tion on the level of theory and documentary study.
276
There is, first of all, the problem of finding out what we know about
the influence of all-embracing social constellations on writing and the
reading public. Are times of war or peace, of economic boom or depres-
sion more or less conducive to literary production? Are specific types of
the literary level, literary form, and subject matter more or less prepon-
derant? What about the outlets of distribution, the publishing house,
the circulation figures, the competition between books and magazines
in these various periods? What do we know about readership figures
in public and university libraries, in the army and the hospitals—again
broken down according to changing social conditions? What do we
know, qualitatively and quantitatively, about the ratio between literature
distributed and consumed and other media of mass communication,
or even nonverbalized forms of organized entertainment?25
A second auxiliary source lies in the area of social controls. What
do we know about the influence of formal controls of production and
reading? We must deal with the worldwide phenomenon of the use
of tax money for public libraries, with the European practice of gov-
ernmental subventions for theaters, with the American experience of
supporting creative writers out of public funds during the New Deal
administration, to cite a few examples. We have to study the impact
of selective and cherished symbols of public rewards, from the Nobel
Prize for literature to the contests arranged by publishing houses,
from the Pulitzer Prize to the honors bestowed by local or regional
communities on successful authors whose cradles were fortunately
situated in particular localities. We should study “manipulated con-
trols”: publishers’ advertising campaigns, the expectations of profit
tied up with book clubs and film production, the far-flung market of
magazine serializations, the reprint houses and so on. We must not
forget the area of censorship, of institutionalized restrictions from the
index of the Catholic Church to local ordinances prohibiting the sale of
certain books and periodicals. And, finally, we would have to analyze
and systematize what we know about the impact of informal controls,
of book reviews and broadcasts, of popular writeups of authors, of
opinion leadership, of literary gossip and private conversations.
A third, and certainly not the least, social determinant of success
is connected with technological change and its economic and social
consequences.26 The phenomenal development of the publishing busi-
ness, putting out literary products on all levels in the low price field is
surpassed only by the still more spectacular modes of production in
277
other media of mass communication. Thus, it would be worth studying

whether the financial returns received by writers in the last few decades
can be attributed in large measure to improved technical facilities,
including the author’s working instruments, and whether this change in
technique has changed the social status of writers as a group. Relatively
little is known about the cumulative effects of technological improve-
ments from one medium to the other. Do more people read more books
because they see more pictures or listen to more broadcasts or is it the
other way around? Or is there no such interdependence?27 Is there a
relationship between the high degree of accessibility of printed material
and the methods by which educational institutions avail themselves of
this material at all age levels?
As an illustration for social determinants of success the broad,
diversified and articulated response in Germany to Dostoevski may be
cited. An examination of available material in books, magazines and
newspapers showed that certain psychological patterns in the German
middle classes were apparently highly gratified in reading Dostoevski.28
Unlike the study of Hamsun, here we are not concerned with the work
of the writer, but with the social character of his reception.
The peculiar fate of the German middle classes, which had never
experienced any sustained periods of liberal political and cultural life,
kept them wavering between the mechanisms of identification with
an aggressive, imperialistic, domineering set of ruling groups and a
mechanism of defeatism and passivity, which, despite all the tradi-
tions of philosophical idealism, constantly induced them to attitudes
of willing submission to what they sensed to be superior leadership.
The ensuing sadomasochistic reactions found pliable material for acts
of identification in the self-torturing and torturing protagonists of
Dostoevski’s novels.
The active life process of human society, all its progressive forces,
indeed, the whole compass of the productive forces in general, hit a
blind spot in the vision of these German masses. This is apparent,
for example, in their failure to notice a gap in Dostoevski’s themes,
namely, earthly happiness. Happiness, measured socially, presup-
poses an active transformation of reality, that is to say, the removal
of its gross contradictions. That would require not only a complete
transformation of existing power relations but also a reconstruction
of social consciousness. Really to direct one’s impulses toward the
278
realization of social happiness is to enter sometimes into direct oppo-

sition to the existing power apparatus. The insignificant role which
the category of happiness played in the social consciousness of the
German middle classes can be understood only from the totality of
their social relationships. A satisfying social organization was closed
to them as a declining class and, therefore, it must also be shut out
from consciousness in its true meaning as happiness.
It might be argued against this conception, which uses Dostoevski
as evidence of a nonactivist ideology devoid of moral deed and social
solidarity, that one must not expect such an approach from him, the
apostle of love and compassion for mankind. Nearly all the literary
critiques of Dostoevski do, in fact, revolve around the theme of love
and compassion, whether in elegant formulations, like the “surpassing
calm, through which only a sort of deeply secret sorrow vibrates, an
endless compassion . . .”29 or in painfully popular statements, like his
“heart trembles with sympathy, compassion.”30 A very naive passage
will serve to indicate the social significance:
His predilection for the oppressed and the depraved gradually

assumes the morbid form of . . . “Russian compassion,” that compas-
sion which excludes all upright, honest working men, and extends
only to prostitutes, murderers, drunkards, and similar blossoms on
the tree of mankind.31
This statement may be crude, but it points to something very true.

The reception of Dostoevski was not bothered by the fact that in
his works love remains a weak disposition of the soul, which can be
understood only by prersupposing a frantic defense against all social
change and a fundamental passivity in the face of every truly moral
act. The demand for love and compassion could mean a realization of
the existence of social contradictions and the need for change; it could
be the effective approach to the activity of men in their thoughts and
actions. Instead, it remains a matter of mere sentiment, a permission,
not a demand. That is perhaps the clearest sign of the ideological role
of such a concept of love. Demand and the power to act cannot enter
into the social consciousness of relatively impotent social strata any
more than they can accept a principle of justice which must destroy
their solidarity with the rulers and point to their common interests
with the ruled.32
279
Some Challenging Tasks

If a sociologist of literature wants to hold his claim to be heard in the
field of modern communications research, the least he can do is to dis-
cuss a program of research that can be located within the areas proper
to his field and at the same time joins up with the scientific experiences
already accumulated for the other mass media. Four possible fields of
research paralleling the four areas of analysis will be outlined here.
Functional Content
Obvious as it may be, the point must be made that the basic require-
ment for finding out what kind of gratification people expect from
mass literature in a given social framework, or better, at a specific
historical moment, is to have exact knowledge of the content of these
works. What we need are qualitative and quantitative inventories of
the contents of popular works on a comparative scale, beginning not
later than the early nineteenth century. Studies made so far are scanty,33
though speculative ideas about the assumed content are overabundant.
Take the commonly accepted notion that the main function of mass
literature is to provide an outlet for the escapist drives of frustrated
people. How do we know that this was ever true or is still true today?
Perhaps the functional content of the novel today is much less escapist
than informative: literature has become a cheap and easily accessible
tool for orientation in a bewildering outside and inside world. The
reader is looking for prescriptions for inner manipulation, an abridged
and understandable psychoanalytical cure, as it were, which will permit
him by way of identification and imitation to grope his way out of his
bewilderment. Escape involves an attitude of self-reliance and is much
more likely to be found in times of individual stability than in our pres-
ent period, characterized by ego-weakness needing alien crutches for
survival. Whether this hypothesis is justified or not, it might fruitfully
be pursued in studying the patterns of identification and imitation
offered by mass literature. One might find that, in contrast to earlier
literary products, the contemporary novel has a much higher density
and velocity of action and an accelerating recession of reflection and
description.
It would be interesting, for example, to compare the popular histori-
cal novel of today and a generation ago. We would perhaps discover that
the older works tried to transmit a panorama-like picture of a period
in which the reader could sit restfully next to the historical protagonist
280
around whom the panorama developed. Today, however, this picture

dissolves into a multitude of figures, situations, and actions which leave
the reader without the enjoyment of sitting invisibly with one selected
protagonist, who used to be the measure and yardstick for the literary
materials that a writer conjured up. The pressure of modern life, which
produces the very weak egos who are in turn exposed to the pressure,
makes it necessary to forego identification with just one figure, or with
the inner processes of the soul, or with theoretical ideas and values.
Thus the classical situation of literary consumption, in which the reader
shares the solitude of choice or fate with the solitude and uniqueness
of the one and unrepeatable work of art, may be replaced by collective
experience of well-organized activity in the direction of adaptation
and the acquisition of the tricks of self-manipulation. More and more
studies are making source materials available,34 but their systematic
sociological exploration remains to be done.
The Writer’s Attitude
What the reader is looking for in literary communication is one thing;
what the author delivers beyond the conscious awareness of the reader
is something else again. The case of Knut Hamsun illustrates this kind
of problem.
Wheher and to what extent opinions and attitudes are influenced by
the literary avalanche depends not only on its manifest content but also
on its latent implications. It is true, to lift them from their formulated
content is a task to be undertaken with untried tools. Nevertheless, an
extremely inexpensive social laboratory might be suggested where no
living beings need be interviewed with all the paraphernalia of money-
and-time-outlay. More or less consciously, usually less, the author is a
manipulator who tries to get over certain messages that reflect his own
personality and personality problems. To find out where he stands, it
might be worth while reviving him and the figures of his imagination
with artificial respiration and subjecting them to questions and psy-
chological experiments on the most advanced level.
With the help of standardized ideological questionnaires, for
example, we might scan through a well-chosen sample of mass litera-
ture and find out about the author’s attitudes, about his points of view
on human nature, on group tensions, on historical and natural catas-
trophes, on sex, on masses versus great individuals, and so forth. We
might then, in scoring the answers, get a qualitative and quantitative
281
yardstick with which to locate the social position of the writer and thus
be able to make predictions about his behavior as a person and about
the kind of production with which he will follow up work previously
done. If we enlarge our sample sufficiently we might learn much about
the self-identification of these agents of mass communication and of
the potential influence of these hidden self-portraits on the readers.
Such a laboratory experiment could be implemented by analyzing
the character structure of the protagonists in the fictional material.
Recent work in social psychology has furnished us with a set of structure
syndromes to be gathered from responses to ideological and projective
interview procedures, by which we can diagnose with a high degree
of reliability whether a person is authoritarian or anti-authoritarian in
type. These findings have an obvious bearing on prognostications of
political, moral and emotional behavior. Surface descriptions are very
often misleading and can be corrected by these new methods.35
Cultural Heritage
In studying the direct and indirect social content of popular literature
the marginal media deserve far more attention than they have received
so far, particularly the comics36 and perhaps some other products the
enjoyment of which is shared by adults and juveniles alike. A thorough-
going content analysis of these materials should result in a number of
valuable hypotheses on the continuing significance of ideas, values
and emotions stemming from situations that have become completely
obsolete.
It would be necessary to study not only the obviously archaic and
infantile motives of the fairy world of subhuman and superhuman
serials, but also those materials in which, under the guise of everyday
misery or everyday enjoyment, values become visible which were
associated with earlier stages of modern society, and especially with
the more serene style of life in the nineteenth century. Measuring such
material against the ideological and emotional content of traditional
and respectable fiction, we might gain added insight into the wavering
of modern readers between the necessity of learning the mechanisms
of adaptation and conformity and the daydreams of a happier, though
unattainable or historically impossible, way of life. Taking “adult”and
“preadult” contents together we might be able to develop hypotheses
that would open up systematic exploration of likes and dislikes on levels
of awareness, as well as of deeper psychological levels.
282
The Role of Social Environment

In the area description three aspects of social determinants of success
were noted, two of which should be referred to here in order to clarify
the type of research envisaged.
There is first of all the problem whether different stages of the
economic and political cycle leave distinguishing marks on literary
products. The research task would involve a modification of the studies
in functional content mapped out earlier in this section. An inventory
should be taken of a literary sample in times of depression and boom, of
war and peace. This inventory would not be limited to an enumeration
of fictional topics, but would be particularly concerned with emotional
patterns which may safely be assumed to be closely tied up with the
specific gratifications and frustrations of the readers. As a very tenta-
tive example, the hypothesis is ventured that the use of happy or not
so happy endings is a point of difference. At the height of an economic
depression, escapist identifications with lovely daydreams of unchal-
lenged happiness may characterize the literary scenery. Today, however,
a pseudotragic ending on a note of unsolved problems is by no means
rare because the relative prosperity permits fictional experiences with
a higher degree of reality and even some insight into our psychological
and cultural shortcomings.
Many other situations may have to be selected before one can con-
struct an index of content and motive preference for various overall
situations. A study comparing the two postwar booms and the two
prewar depressions of the last thirty-five years might actually lead to
a point from which future predictions of preferences in fiction would
be possible. Educational and professional inferences which could then
be drawn are so obvious that they need not be gone into here.
In the field of technological determinants it would be worth studying
the reading ability of the average man and the way it has been modi-
fied by his experiences with auditory and visual media. We know a lot
about clinical reading disabilities but we know relatively little about
intellectual selectivity in reading.37 Similarly it would be interesting to
study what is read and remembered and what is more or less slurred
over or not read at all. A more precise knowledge about “content-
reading” abilities and disabilities could become a labor-saving device
for writers; as for sociologists they would gain corroborating evidence
to the findings of functional content analysis.
283
Blueprinting research tasks has all the shortcomings of any set of

unfulfilled promises. The expert in communications research might,
however, become interested in the troublesome achievements and
tasks of a neighboring branch of study and its potential contribution
to his own field.
I should like to conclude with a personal experience. A sociologist
treating literature in the classroom is bound to encounter a divided
reaction: Students will display an eager interest in a new scientific
experience, but, as instruction goes on, some of them will protest
against the analytical “dismembering” of poetic material. The students
are eager for guidance in an uncharted sea since they never have been
quite able to find out what is good and what is not so good. Somehow
they look forward to getting possession of a foolproof formula that
will set them straight once and for all regarding this vague and vast
field situated somewhere between education and mere entertainment.
What the students do not know is that their initial approach is already
a manifestation of the particular stage at which sociological interpreta-
tion of literature still finds itself.
Notes
1. Characteristically enough, the one existing bibliography in the field of the
sociology of literature that aims at a comprehensive survey is available
only in mimeographed form: “Annotated Bibliography on the Sociology of
Literature, with an Introductory Essay on Methodological Problems in the
Field,” by Hugh Dalziel Duncan (The University of Chicago Press, 1947).
2. The most suggestive study of this aspect is unfortunately inaccessible in
English: Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans (Berlin, 1920). Themati-
cally the problem has also been posed by Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy
of Literary Form (Louisiana State University Press, 1941).
3. See Chapter 6 in this volume (“The Triumph of Mass Idols”).
4. Valuable suggestions for the study of the objective aspects of this area may
be found in Albert Guérard, Literature and Society (Boston, 1935).
5. I should say that the work of Eric Bentley, The Playwright as Thinker
(New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946), is a highly successful attempt to
translate private into social scenes and then to interpret them in sociologi-
cally meaningful terms.
6. See Leo Lowenthal, “Knut Hamsun: Zur Vorgeschichte der autoritären
Ideologie,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. VI, no. 2 (1937).
7. The Last Joy (German edition), p. 310.
8. See Kant, Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, trans. J. C. Meredith (Oxford,
1911), pp. 110–11.
9. The Last Joy, p. 311.
10. See, for example, Pan, trans. W. W. Worster (New York, 1921), pp. 23–24:
“I pick up a little dry twig and hold it in my hand and sit looking at it, and
think my own thoughts; the twig is almost rotten, its poor back touches
284
me, pity fills my heart. And when I get up again, I do not throw the twig far
away, but lay it down, and stand liking it; at last, I look at it once more with
wet eyes before I go away and leave it there.”
11. The Road Leads On, trans. Eugene Gay-Tifft (New York, 1934), p. 46.
12. The Ring is Closed, trans. Eugene Gay-Tifft (New York, 1937), p. 152.
13. Growth of the Soil, trans. W. W. Worster (New York, 1921), vol. II, p. 246;
cf. Rosa, trans. A. G. Chater (New York, 1926), p. 18: “‘What are you sitting
here for?’ ‘Ah, young man!’ he said, holding up the palm of his hand. ‘What
am I sitting here for? I sit here keeping pace with my existence. Ay, that’s
what I’m doing.’”
14. Pan, p. 164.
15. The Last Joy, p. 344.
16. Cf. Chapter the Last, trans. A. G. Chater (New York, 1929), pp. 105–7.
17. Growth of the Soil, vol. II, p. 92.
18. Chapter the Last, p. 102.
19. The Road Leads On, p. 409.
20. See The Last Joy, p. 298.
21. Children of the Age, trans. J. S. Scott (New York, 1924), p. 82.
22. Mysteries, trans. A. G. Chater (New York, 1927), p. 51.
23. The Women at the Pump, trans. A. G. Chater (New York, 1928), p. 5.
24. See the spadework study under that title by Douglas Waples, Bernard
Berelson, and Franklyn R. Bradshaw (University of Chicago Press, 1940).
25. See Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Radio and the Printed Page (New York: Duell, Sloan
& Pearce, 1940).
26. Theoretical groundwork for the study of modern technological change and
its social consequences in the artistic field has been laid in the article by
Max Horkheimer, “Art and Mass Culture,” Studies in Philosophy and Social
Science, vol. IX (1941), to whom the author is indebted in many ways for
his thinking in the sociology of literature.
27. The impact of technological change on production and reproduction in
the sphere of visible and audible artistic production has been exposed in
a masterly fashion by T. W. Adorno in the field of music and by Walter
Benjamin in the field of motion pictures. See, e.g., the former’s article “On
Popular Music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. IX, no. 1 (1941),
and the latter’s “L’oeuvre d’art a l’epoque de sa reproduction mécanisée,”
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. V, no. 1 (1936). Valuable information
on the interchange between films and literary production may be found in
S. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German
Film (Princeton University Press, 1947).
28. See Leo Lowenthal, “Die Auffasung Dostojewskis im Vorkriegsdeutschland,”
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, vol. III, no. 3 (1934). Reprinted as Chapter 4
in this volume.
29. Hermann Conradi, “Dostojewski,” in Die Gesellschaft, vol. 6 (1889), p. 528.
30. L. Brehm, “Dostojewskis ‘Dämonen’,” in Der Deutsche, vol. 5 (1906), p. 346.
31. C. Busse, Geschichte der Weltliteratur (Bielefeld and Leipzig, 1913), vol. II,
p. 595.
32. Books and articles on Dostoevski which have appeared in this country since
the end of the war offer a good opportunity for comparison with European
experiences. My impression is that several of these publications show an
285
atmosphere of malaise and frustration which, for the sociologist, reveals

trends of spiritual needs and confusion not unrelated to the European
experience with Dostoevski a generation ago.
33. I am indebted to Ralph H. Ojemann of the State University of Iowa for
bringing to my attention the excellent master thesis, written under his
supervision, by Evelyn Peters: “A Study of the Types of Behavior toward
Children Approved in Fiction Materials,” 1946.
34. See, e.g., Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes (New York: Macmillan, 1947);
Alice Payne Hackett, Fifty Years of Best Sellers (New York: Bowker,1945);
Edward H. O’Neill, The History of American Biography (University of Penn-
sylvania Press, 1935), and so on.
35. These studies were published jointly in 1949 by the Berkeley Opinion Study
Group and the Institute of Social Research, under the title The Authori-
tarian Personality (T. W. Adorno, Else Brunswick, Daniel Levinson and
R. N. Sanford, authors).
36. See, however, the book by Coulton Waugh, The Comics (New York: Macmillan,
1947).
37. See Rudolf Flesch, The Art of Plain Talk (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1946).
286
9
Humanistic Perspectives
of David Riesman’s
The Lonely Crowd
I
Titles as well as books have a significance that it behooves the critic
to trace and interpret. What specific connotations the authors of The
Lonely Crowd had in mind in electing for the title of their book a poetic
image I do not know. But it is a rare social scientist indeed who has
the courage to choose that conspicuous symbol of his contributions, a
book title, from the humanities and, as if that were not daring enough,
from poetry itself. In so doing, the authors of The Lonely Crowd have
identified themselves with that small minority that cannot understand
how social science, as a science of man, can be anything else but a
profoundly humanistic endeavor.
While the relationship of the humanities and the social sciences is a
problem extending beyond the work under discussion, it is neverthe-
less a significant document in the struggle to break through the narrow
definitions of academic disciplines. It seems appropriate, therefore,
to use The Lonely Crowd as a welcome opportunity for offering some
observations about this relationship.
The discussion of the ordering of fields of knowledge can be traced
back to Plato, who was concerned primarily with educational impli-
cations. Aristotle’s concepts of “physics” and “metaphysics” guided
the discussion into the theoretical sphere. During the Middle Ages
the controversy over what comprised the scope and responsibilities
of scientific specialties was blurred for a time by the use of a blanket
term, “the seven liberal arts.” But the development of mathematics and
theoretical physics during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
brought the boundary line issue surging back to life. With Descartes,
287
reality was split into two distinct spheres, one subjected to insights of
mathematics and the natural sciences and the other to those of phi-
losophy—or, to use Descartes’s terms, into extension and cogitation.
This trend was apparent even in political theory, where thinkers were
oriented toward one or another side of Descartes’s dualism: toward
the natural sciences (e.g., Hobbes) or toward applied moral philoso-
phy (e.g., the French moralists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries). The Cartesian demarcations of the sciences still remain
discernible in the traditional division of higher learning in France into
“sciences” and “letters.”
Around the turn of the nineteenth century German philosophers
and writers systematized the concept of political and intellectual his-
tory as a science. Concurrently, the concepts of culture and cultures, of
Zeitgeist and Volksgeist (already introduced by Montesquieu and
Herder), were further developed and the relationship among the sci-
ences was reformulated: the pole occupied by mathematics and the
natural sciences remained unchanged, but the substance of philosophy
proper acquired a predominantly historical character in place of its
erstwhile metaphysical aspect.
Dilthey, Windelband, and Rickert, the founders of Geistes- and
Kulturwissenschaften, were the outstanding proponents of this redefini-
tion. Though differing in minor respects, they agreed in principle: the
natural sciences deal with the recurrent and are oriented toward the
establishment of universally valid laws; the humanistic fields are con-
cerned with individual events and persons, and are characterized by a
view of the individual as the representative of prevailing value systems,
changing from period to period, and, within an era, from one group
to another. Simmel’s concept of the “individual law” (an intentionally
contradictory proposition), and Max Weber’s dual role as sociologist
and historian, are prime witnesses of this tradition.
The situation today is dominated by the intellectual innovations
contributed by the American social (or behavioral) sciences. New
disciplines are interposed between the humanities and the natural
sciences, and, unlike the earlier phases of the discussion, few classifi-
cation schemes have yet been proposed for defining and clarifying the
interrelationships between the new and the old fields. That the need
for redefinition of the scientific universe is strongly felt, however, is
evidenced by numerous programmatic statements about the desirability
of “cross-fertilization” of the sciences, and expressions (ritualized at
times) of the need for interdisciplinary research.
288
Humanistic Perspectives of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd
Thus, we are entering an era of clarification of the relation between

the scientific and the intellectual universe, though this trend has never
been made an object of historical and systematic studies. The symptoms
are unmistakable. Whether we think of the intertwining of medicine
or religion with social and individual psychology, of aesthetic theory
with sociology, of social research with anthropology, or whether we
think of some of the learned institutions of technology introducing
humanistic as well as social science courses in their curriculums, all
this seems to indicate that we are experiencing again the old craving
for a new concept of a scientia universalis.
It is characteristic of contemporary democratic society that these
comparatively new intellectual programs and their applications are
not justified by philosophical concepts, but by concepts of applicabil-
ity—serving social as well as individual needs. This article of faith of
the social scientist is consciously shared, in the United States, with
practitioners in political and social institutions—witness, for example,
the incorporation of psychology into the curriculum of clergymen,
relationships between medicine and the theory and practice of social
work, and the role of political science and economics in applied
anthropology.
The heat of the discussion seems now to be generated not by the
problem of the relationship between natural and “nonnatural” sci-
ences, but by that between the social and behavioral sciences and the
humanities. The natural sciences, ever since the seventeenth century,
have searched for laws of the physical world sufficiently valid to allow
for prediction; the behavioral sciences of today substitute a human
for a natural realm, but keep constant the search for laws and reliable
norms for prediction.
This has led to serious intellectual cleavages both here and abroad.
With the exception of a few hesitant attempts to import the methodology
and skill of American research into western and central Europe, Euro-
pean sociologists still move in the atmosphere of Dilthey and Rickert.
By their concentration on problems that we usually subsume under the
rubric “sociology of knowledge,” they perpetuate the preoccupation
with the history of ideas and the speculations about the hierarchy of
values. Some European sociologists may believe that, in their historic
orientation, they have made the “right” choice in accepting for their
field Bergson’s historical time, while in their opinion the majority of
their American colleagues are dangerously close to applying physical
time concepts. And they have a point.1
289
On this side of the Atlantic it is among the representatives of human-

istic disciplines that we are likely to find concepts about modern social
science resembling those prevailing in traditional European sociology.
Their views on current social science, at the extreme, would probably
be couched in terms of statistical gadgeteering and polling which ties
up millions of dollars for research, which is lacking in historical and
spiritual concepts, and which is void of any universal intellectual inter-
est.2 It is likely that many social scientists, for their part, reciprocate with
the disdainful belief that all humanists do is to propound unverifiable
generalizations on the basis of spurious evidence.
The current definitions of the two disciplines that seem to have
the most bearing on the interrelationship are: (1) that the social sci-
ences should strive for theorems as exact as those of mathematical
and physical theory and for the formulation of findings in terms of
predictions; and (2) that the humanities should work for meaningful
analyses of important individualities, be they events, documents,
or persons. But the boundaries are this clear-cut only on the most
superficial level. Consider, for example, the disparate functions that
such authors as Balzac, Taine, and Zola ascribed to literature—that
it should comprise natural history, quasibiological analyses, and
universally valid prescriptions for the behavior of the human race.
Or Wilhelm Dilthey’s hopes that the final objective of the “cultural
sciences” (Geisteswissenschaften), devoted to the hermeneutics of the
individual, should be the planning and directing of social development.
And one must not overlook the body of writing, centered around
the idea of a cultural crisis, that followed in the wake of the French
Revolution, represented by so varied a group as De Maistre, Carlyle,
Nietzsche, and—in our time—Spengler, whose forays into the field of
predictions should make many a social scientist envious. Such literary
and philosophical approaches testify to a long tradition behind the
notion that the humanist and social scientist must not necessarily be
strangers to each other.
Or consider the problem of the socialization of the individual, in
which the humanistic biographical arts excel and the social sciences
do not. Freud is an exception. Psychoanalytical theory, at least in its
classical period, describes the dynamics by which a specific social envi-
ronment asserts itself in individuals. It is true that from a sociological
point of view this model operates on rather limited extremes of the
social continuum—at one pole an individual’s family and at the other
the archaic prehistorical stage of mankind. Nevertheless, the Oedipus
290
complex is a good sociological model because it explains specific

mechanisms by which an individual is related to social structures. Bet-
ter, it serves to explain how the psychological structure of an individual
manifests itself as, in part, a derivative of societal structures with which
he interacts on various levels of consciousness. This psychoanalytical
model illustrates by contrast the social scientist’s shortcomings because
(in spite of Freud’s “naturalism”) it synthesizes broad historical trends,
in which the history of the species as a whole is a necessary but not a
sufficient referent for the understanding of the unique moment of time
represented by a specific individual. In this sense Freud’s theory deals
with more than psychology—it deals with culture, as did Dilthey. A
concern with the historical dimension of societal structures, including
a concern with the representation of these structures in individuals,
constitutes a sociology of culture.
II
Riesman and his associates are American sociologists who deal in
earnestness with problems of culture. Their work also joins with other
contemporary studies on the effect of the development of mass or popu-
lar culture, and the impact of popular culture on the general cultural
level of society. These two trends reverse the previous pattern, dominant
in the social sciences in the late thirties and forties, of a preeminent
concern with methodology and with the construction of theoretical
models. The claim of positivistically oriented empiricists is that their
endeavors, for which they coined the term of “hard” analysis, alone
deserve to be called scientific. They leave no more than a condescending
smile (if that) for the social theorist whose orientation is humanistic.
The Lonely Crowd offers a remarkable occasion to reopen the debate
on the humanistic implications of social theory. The shift in emphasis
that it represents looks back toward Plato and Aristotle; that is, toward
an analysis of the individual in his society. The Lonely Crowd differs
sharply from a-historical sociological studies, and its intellectual style
brings it close to the European, particularly the German, “cultural
sciences” in theoretical as well as empirical orientation. Unfortu-
nately, the thinker to whom the methodology of the book is most
closely related is fairly unknown in this country, and the translation
of his principal works is still an unfulfilled task. This man, whose life
work was dedicated to a synthesis of history and psychology, and to a
scheme of interpretation in which individual human experience was
to be correlated, in terms of psychological typologies, to historical
291
epochs, was Wilhelm Dilthey. In his conception, the net woven of

individual expression, cultural institutions, and political and religious
modes was a manifestation of unique historical periods. Through this
interpenetration of spatial and temporal constituents of the social
universe Dilthey (and not he alone) countered the positivistic infatua-
tion with general laws based on endless observations on the one side,
and a mystic historicism (which has triggered the positivistic plague)
void of any general concepts on the other.3 This European tradition
(with Dilthey as its most brilliant exponent) has continued, to some
extent, in cultural anthropology, which undertakes to blend a study of
cultures and their artifacts with a study of personality within a given
social context. Indeed, The Lonely Crowd studies the universal trends
of the age of industrialization by searching out the meaning of human
behavior and character within this society, and in the last analysis it is
a study of mass society (although the term itself is hardly used in the
book) as the latest stage in the development of the industrial world.
Riesman and his coauthors face the same frustrations and per-
plexities that were encountered by the leading representatives of the
“cultural sciences”—the difficulty of interpreting within one concep-
tual framework the uniqueness of an historical period and the general
features of human behavior prevailing in it—features which, if they
change at all, change at an infinitely slower pace than the events in
the polity and many institutions of society. But this dilemma has to
be faced if one wants to understand uno actu individuals both in their
social roles and in their personal imagery. Today, the main feature of
this nexus is the antagonistic display of individualistic estrangement
and group identification.
The Lonely Crowd is a major contribution to the understanding of
alienation and conformism. The generally observable features of only
incidental relatedness of modern man to his work and his simultaneous
eagerness to hide this estrangement behind a continual display of peer-
oriented, optimistically toned behavior are explained by the objective
roles that modern industrial society prescribes for its members. The
problem posed by this book is: what is the impact of this society on
the social and private experiences of individuals? While I referred to
Dilthey, it is quite evident that the study of modern man as he becomes
conditioned by industrial society has also a very specific sociological
ancestry in Marx and Max Weber, in Veblen and Sombart, and above
all in Simmel.
292
True, this body of theories had produced many vague symbolic

references; and it is an easy, though I believe unworthy, pastime to
dismiss European, and particularly German, philosophy of history and
society during the nineteenth century as just so many manifestations
of metaphysical double-talk. It is too readily forgotten that, during this
century, history as a scene of social struggles and society as a product of
historical trends and pressures became, for the first time, manageable
scholarly concepts. However, we have learned in the meantime (and
this is a great contribution of sociological theory in the first decades
of the twentieth century) slowly to replace ambiguous theoretical and
analytical notions with specific scientific approaches; and The Lonely
Crowd participates in this process of scholarly specification, in which
we are no longer satisfied to discuss the “spirit” of an epoch without
at the same time specifying such components as consumption habit,
education, group life, political behavior, and the like.4 Indeed, The
Longely Crowd adds new dimensions to the process of specification
in its elaborate and enlightening references to specific contemporary
institutions, such as the mass media, the political broker, the inside
dopester, the nursery school, and so on.
The great question that always arises in connection with social theory
is the scope of its applicability. The Lonely Crowd takes its material pri-
marily from the American scene. To be sure, this approach is a bit on
the parochial side. Granted that the United States today occupies the
place of a model of Western society, as England did at the time of Marx.
But we may be more general. If certain character types are determined
by industrial society, then any such relationship must extend to this
society as a whole and not only to one country. This is not to say that
all the member cultures of our era display the same features, traits, and
institutions at one and the same time with the same amount of inten-
sity; but it does mean that related, if not identical, social characteristics
must be found in some form or fashion at some time everywhere within
the Western world. In addition, Riesman and his collaborators are
subjected to a dilemma always encountered in theoretical constructs
of the “cultural sciences.” Such constructs tend to be static rather than
evolutionary, and to focus the trends of an age as in a still picture. (This
is, for instance, the case in various interpretations by other writers of
seemingly monolithic, “timeless” periods, such as the Renaissance or the
Greek World.) The static implications of The Lonely Crowd, however,
are not so much apparent in a predilection for collapsing historical
293
dynamic into an idealized portrait of a timeless age, as in a collapsing

of worldwide trends into an insular portrait. True, this method has
its rewards, because it allows for a minute elaboration of one clearly
circumscribed area. In its concentration on the specific, the analytic
methods of the book are close to those of Simmel.5
I do not wish to be censorious. On the contrary, a good case can be
made (and I think this book implicitly makes it) for saying that while we
deal here with phenomena that are not limited to a single country, nev-
ertheless the peculiar situation of the United States, which in contrast to
Europe did not have to assume the mortgages of various value systems
inherited from feudal and absolutistic periods, allowed this country to
adopt the style of life of a commercial society more quickly and with
less friction than on the Old Continent—a phenomenon, by the way,
which made many European observers both jealous and furious. I agree
with the interpretation of Tocqueville by the authors of The Lonely
Crowd; in stressing traits of conformity, he was not merely diagnosing
the prevailing social climate of America in the 1830s but foreseeing
certain developmental features that seemed to fit into a coherent picture
of Western civilization as it was and as it was to become. As did every
constructive theorist of human events, Tocqueville could perceive the
almost imperceptible in human behavior. I think that there is a very
high affinity between the mentality of a social theorist who is willing to
take intellectual risks, and aesthetic creativity, the essence of which is
the creation of something unique as a symbol of something general if
not universal. It is hard to say whether we owe more to Tocqueville for
diagnosis or for prognosis; for an understanding of the United States
as a special historical phenomenon or as a breeding ground for special
character types; for being a humanist who analyzes culture or a social
scientist who analyzes people in the context of their social roles. I do
not consider such questions very relevant, though in themselves they
are a symptom of the larger process of alienation, since for most social
scientists the study of the meaning of human existence, in general or
at a given moment of time, has tended to become discredited as being
meaningless, as has a critical evaluation of the relation of the individual
to himself and his world of work and leisure.
III
The basic dichotomy of the autonomous personality and of otherdi-
rectness, which, at least for a philosophy of contemporary society, is
perhaps the most relevant concept in Riesman’s work, has a venerable
294
intellectual tradition, dating back to the Romantic period in England

and Germany. It assumed the form of a concern over the threat posed
by the emerging instrumentalities of conformist middle-class styles
of life, including the products of popular culture, to the autonomous
spirit and creative personality. Artists and writers feared that the public
would lose its ability to discriminate between valuable cultural creations
and mere merchandise designed to induce relaxation. Such concerns
found expression in the public and private statements of Goethe and
Schiller in Germany, and of Wordsworth and Coleridge as well. Other
and more enterprising English literati, though politically opposed to the
Tory spirit of the Lake Poets, expressed the same fears, mainly through
the medium of the Edinburgh Review. What these artists and writers
shared was the awareness of a threat to the artist as he embarked on
an aesthetic and moral mission, subjected to no jurisdiction other than
that of excellence.
The intellectual (most of all the artist) has been exposed to very
significant cross-pressures ever since his separate status was estab-
lished. At the turn of the eighteenth century philosophers and poets
alike ascribed to themselves the mission of guardianship over the
moral and aesthetic values of the nation, if not the human com-
munity as such. At the same time they, as well as other groups of
intellectuals, gained increasing access into professional positions in
the institutions of learning, in governmental agencies, and above all
became producers for a market mediated by periodicals, publishing
houses, public and private art galleries, and the like. Finally, in our
own day, the stress is on an almost complete professionalization for
intellectual skills. This development is characterized by the desire to
reconcile the ethos of individual independence and integrity with the
inexorable social power of a demand and supply economy. One of the
consequences of the ambiguity in the social role of the intellectual has
been the increasing tendency to claim the prerogative of an exempt
situation and philosophy of life and to deny that the determinants
of social stratification are equally applicable to the practitioners of
intellectual pursuits. Karl Mannheim’s concept of the free-floating
intelligentsia is a case in point. The infatuation of a great number of
intellectuals, from the Romantics to the present-day advocates of the
New Conservatism, with the allegedly autonomous status of culture
in feudal and aristocratic societies may be attributed to a tendency
of intellectuals to locate themselves in some idealized utopia of the
past;6 intellectuals (like everybody else) are, in fact, located in the
295
harsh realities of a social system whose prevailing character types are

eloquently described in The Lonely Crowd. The debates on culture and
taste, on public opinion and urbanization, that pervaded the writings
of the literati, at least in western Europe, all through the nineteenth
century comprise a telltale document for the dilemma of the intel-
lectual. In this debate the artist, and particularly the critic, plays a
key role. Once again I wish to point out the significance of the fact
that, of all the possible symbols of reference, Riesman and his col-
laborators choose as their title emblem an artistic image. If there is
any single phenomenon that most pointedly attests to what is called
other-directedness, it is alienation from artistic experiences.7
I agree with most of S. M. Lipset’s chapter in Culture and Social
Character,8 which traces trends of other-directedness back to American
public and private behavior patterns in the nineteenth century, but I
do not believe that these trends are exclusively and predominantly a
phenomenon specific to the United States. What we are dealing with
all through the nineteenth century and all over the Western world are
the birth throes of the prevailing character types of our contemporary
society, or better, the antagonisms and struggles between traditional,
self-reliant human models on the one hand and group orientedness on
the other. This is as true for Europe as it is for the United States. With
reference to Mr. Lipset’s observations, I would submit as a hunch that
his quotations from European sources, testifying to observed features
of other-directednèss in America, could easily be counterbalanced
by any number of American writers (I will just name Ralph Waldo
Emerson and the whole school of New England Transcendentalism)
who testify to the task of displaying independence and individualism
as the foremost moral obligation of the citizens of the New World.
More than that, the very same trends (whether formulated in terms of
accusation or admiration) ascribed to America by European authors
are continuously and consistently attributed by other European intel-
lectuals to the behavior and attitudes of people in their own countries.
From the point of view of historical psychology, I would assume that
a good deal of the very interesting material for which we are indebted
to Mr. Lipset must be interpreted as merely projective: observers are
not free of the distortion of culturally determined perception, which
makes them see elsewhere the very features of modernity to which they
close their eyes in their own countries.
I take the liberty of inserting here an anecdote. In lecturing on
the nature of the stereotype, I have frequently quoted the following
296
excerpt from a letter of Abigail Adams, the wife of the second presi-
dent of the United States; she wrote during a European journey on
November 21, 1786:
The accounts you gave me of the singing of your birds and the prattle
of your children entertained me much. Do you know that European
birds have not half the melody of ours? Nor is their fruit half so sweet,
nor their flowers half so fragrant, nor their manners half so pure nor
their people half so virtuous; but keep this to yourself, or I shall be
thought more than half deficient in understanding and taste. . . . Far
removed from my mind may the national prejudice be, of conceiving
all that is good and excellent comprised within the narrow compass
of the United States.9
Only that on first reading I falsify the source by claiming that the
letter was written by a recent European newcomer to the United
States, and I reverse the references to Europe and America. Invariably
I encounter an indignant reaction among the native-born part of the
audience and a snickering of agreement on the part of European-born
people. This experiment has always struck me as a particularly suitable
illustration for the mechanism of cultural projection.
This mechanism deserves attention. At least in a germinal form,
nineteenth century writers understood it quite well. To give an example:
one of the favorite pastimes of literary criticism in English nineteenth
century journals was to develop a kind of proto-sociological chapter on
personality and social structure. A journal such as the Edinburgh Review
would abound in essays explaining what appears to the writers to be the
most important trait in, for example, Goethe or Balzac as conditioned
by the German or French “national character”—a term one finds in this
periodical, with capitalized letters, as early as 1825. One contribution
tries in all earnestness to explain Wilhelm Meister as primarily a typi-
cal manifestation of German taste and German habits. Yet while the
author of this article goes to great length not only to analyze Goethe’s
novel as a product “made in Germany” but also his German critics as
ruled by a spirit of “German idolatry,” he admits (and thereby almost
destroys his thesis) that
different nations . . . will judge of their own productions and those of

their neighbours, according to that standard of taste which belongs to
the place they then hold in this great circle;—and that a whole people
will look on their neighbours with wonder and scorn, for admiring
what their own grandfathers looked on with equal admiration,—while
297
they themselves are scorned and vilified in return, for tastes which will
infallibly be adopted by the grandchildren of those who despise them.10
Incidentally, all through the century there is unanimity in looking at the

newspapers as the most powerful equalizer of opinions and attitudes.
While occasionally a timid attempt is made to burden America with
the stigma of their “most pernicious influence,” the main line remains
that “the condition of our own Daily Press” is a “morning and evening
witness against the moral character of the people.”11 To be sure, these
very traits in Europe are overlaid by cultural tradition. Yet, modernity
wins out. Incidentally, the historians of European culture and mores
have neglected to comment on these new commonly shared quasi-
cultural phenomena of the Western world. Why this is so is in itself
a sociologically pertinent problem. Perhaps the mechanisms of self-
defense are as operative in the intellectual as a professional as they are
in his (as well as in anybody else’s) private life.
For the spread of other-directedness in the old country, Wordsworth
is a primary source in time and scope. In his preface to the 1800 edi-
tion of the Lyrical Ballads, and again in his “Essay Supplementary to
the Preface” (1815), he speaks of the jeopardy in which the artist finds
himself as he tries to ward off the effects of the mediocre bourgeois
style of life. He looked upon his own work as “a feeble endeavor” to
counteract a “tendency of life and manners” that is about “to blunt
the discriminating of the mind and . . . to reduce it to a state of almost
savage torpor.” He regrets “the increasing accumulation of men in cit-
ies, where the uniformity of their occupation produces a craving for
extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence
hourly gratifies.” In drawing a fine line between the “people” and the
“public” he defines the prevailing type of individuals as those who follow
“a small though loud portion of the community” which manipulates
“the changing humour of the majority.”
This influence of opinion leaders, which subverts the spontaneity
of individual judgment, becomes a leitmotif from now on. One finds
classical formulations in the writings of John Stuart Mill, particularly
in his critique of the “despotism of public opinion”12 and of “society”
at large, which
practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of
political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme
penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape . . . there needs protection
also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against
298
the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties,

its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent
from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the
formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and com-
pel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.13
The reader will appreciate the similarity between Mill’s characterization

of the English social climate and Tocqueville’s famous words about the
cruel tyranny of public opinion in the United States. The very same Toc-
queville and many of the writers treated in Lipset’s article are quite ready
to criticize the disfavor with which independent thought was regarded
in America. But we should be cautioned against prematurely limiting
generalizations to the United States. As early as 1811, a contributor
to the Edinburgh Review bitterly complains that “the profounder and
more abstract truths of philosophy . . . are apt . . . to fall into discredit
or neglect, at a period when it is labour enough for most men to keep
themselves up to the level of that great tide of popular information,
which has been rising, with such unexampled rapidity, for the last forty
years.” The writer stresses the inclination of the contemporary reading
public to forego “the pursuit of any abstract or continued study,” which
is now replaced by “the dissipation of time and of attention” where
“various and superficial knowledge is now not only so common that
the want of it is felt as a disgrace” but where it helps the average person
to participate in “much amusing and provoking talk in every party.”14
Such complaints about the atrophy of serious intellectual application
find their most articulate expression in an article published in 1849;
and I do not know of any more eloquent formulation of the entrance
of the other-directed character into the modern world than these
sentences, which, moreover, indict the gadget-minded style of life in
an industrial civilization:
The aids and appliances which are now multiplied . . . enfeeble them
[modern society]. . . . The division of labour has forestalled the neces-
sity of intellectual self-reliance, and of that large yet minute develop-
ment of faculties which was produced when, for the work of one man,
the most opposite qualities were required. Industrialism, likewise—
while the prosperity which is its just reward too often betrays it into
selfishness,—is a sedative to the passions. A certain social uniformity
ensues, exercising a retarding force like the resistance of the air or
the attrition of matter, and insensibly destroying men’s humours,
idiosyncrasies, and spontaneous emotions. It does so, by rendering
their concealment an habitual necessity, and by allowing them neither
299
food nor sphere. Men are thus, as it were, cast in a mold. Besides—the
innumerable influences, intellectual and moral, which, at a period of
diffused knowledge like the present, co-exist and cooperate in build-
ing up our mental structure, are often completely at variance with
each other in origin and tendency: so that they neutralize each other’s
effects, and leave a man well-stored with thoughts and speech, but
frequently without aim or purpose.
In other words, the British national character has changed from “indi-
vidual robustness,” from “intellectual greatness,” to one of complete
conformity, wiping out the nuances of individuality. The writer of this
article continues his argument in stating that the “tameness” of modern
character is rooted in “subserviency to Opinion—that irresponsible life
which makes little things great, and shuts great things out from our
view.” And he concludes by stating that the breakdown of individuality
also ruins the great educational mission of art: “Art becomes decorative
merely; and the poetic delineation of man, in losing its sublime naked-
ness, retains but a feeble hold of the true and the real.”15
This statement is quoted here at some length because it leads us
back to the most important theoretical aspects of The Lonely Crowd,
pointed out earlier, namely, the correlation of specific psychologi-
cal types of behavior with specific social institutions. One irritating
mannerism of criticism a historical sociologist easily encounters
is the facile comment that, after all, this or that construct of social
correlates is nothing new, because it can also be observed in this or
that period. The decisive question, however, lies always in the speci-
ficity of a social context in a given historical period. Trend analysis
in historical sociology must learn from the historian to remain close
and faithful to the singularity and uniqueness of data that accrue to a
body of knowledge about a definite time span. Applying this obser-
vation to The Lonely Crowd, it is of course quite easy to point in a
loose way to an endless number of historical phenomena that may
easily be interpreted with the help of some of the basic categories of
this book. People always have paid attention to what neighbors say
or might think and have adjusted appearances and mores accord-
ingly. This is as true for all peasant societies as it is conspicuous in
aristocratic circles—particularly (as Stendhal has shown in some of
his novels) when the latter have felt threatened by the middle classes.
The significant contribution of Riesman and his associates lies in the
very specific interpretation of prevailing social patterns. They are not
speaking about human nature in general or recurring epiphenomena
300
within the frame of a motley collection of social systems and subsys-

tems. They analyze human existence under the condition of modern
Western industrial society. In that respect—perhaps because of the
background of the authors, or their focus of interest—they have
leaned over backwards in the direction of caution and have more or
less restricted themselves to data from the American scene. What I
wish to suggest is that while they deserve credit for having resisted
the temptation to apply their theories in the grandiose universal
manner, they may—as I intimated earlier—perhaps be a bit parochial
in restricting themselves to claim for the development of American
society what rightfully, though with certain qualifications, extends
to a wider area. It may very well be that the authors of The Lonely
Crowd have achieved a richer return than they bargained for; their
observations on the development of character types in American
society may very well turn out to be a description of a secular trend
of modern industrial society as a whole.
Notes
1. What T. M. Knox has to say about certain English philosophers, apropos
his brilliant discussion of the works of Collingwood, should be addressed
to many an American sociologist: “It is not too much to say that after these
books English philosophers will be able to continue ignoring history only
by burying their heads in the sand.” (See his preface to R. G. Collingwood,
The Idea of History [New York: Oxford Galaxy, 1956], p. viii.)
2. See, e.g., Norman E. Nelson, “Popular Arts and the Humanities,” College
English (May, 1955), p. 482: “The sociologists may not be the monsters that
literary people imagine them to be, but they may well be creating a monster
that will overshadow the hydrogen bomb. They are building an impersonal
machinery for analyzing human beings into standard interchangeable
parts in order to sort them into handy pigeonholes and reassemble them
to specification—at the behest of anyone with enough money or political
power to rend or commandeer the machinery.” There are, however, brilliant
exceptions. Quite a few significant scholars in the field of English literature
have made important contributions toward a synthesis of humanistic and
social science approaches. I have only to mention the writings of Richard
Altick, Harry Levin, and Ian Watt.
3. Dilthey, however, never tore himself completely loose from positivism. See
Max Horkheimer, “The Relation between Psychology and Sociology in the
Work of Wilhelm Dilthey,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, 8 (1939),
430 ff.
4. I agree with H. Stuart Hughes’ comment on the contributions of the
“cultural sciences” to social theory: “The middle level of social study, how-
ever, the level of careful synthesis and the modest testing of hypothesis,
tended to drop out entirely.” See his Consciousness and Society (New York:
Knopf, 1958), p. 186.
301
5. See the profound observations of the relationship of Dilthey to Simmel in

Collingwood, op. cit., pp. 174–75; also Horkheimer, loc. cit., p. 432.
6. Karl Mannheim calls it “false traditionalism.” See his posthumously edited
Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956),
p. 119.
7. See, for the beginnings of the alienation of a middle-class public from the
autonomous experience of art, Leo Lowenthal and Marjorie Fiske, “The
Controversy over Art and Popular Culture in 18th Century England,” in
Common Frontiers of the Social Sciences, edited by Mirra Komarovsky
(Glencoe: Free Press, 1957). Reprinted as Chapter 3 in this volume. Also,
with regard to Goethe, the section “World Literature and Popular Culture,”
in Leo Lowenthal, Literature and the Image of Man (Boston: Beacon Press,
1957).
8. S. M. Lipset, “A Changing American Character?”
9. Quoted from Philip Rahv (ed.), Discovery of Europe (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1947), p. 49.
10. The Edinburgh Review, vol. 42, article VII, August, 1825.
11. The Edinburgh Review, vol. 76, January, 1843.
12. See John Stuart Mill, On Bentham and Coleridge (1838), (London: Chatto
& Windus, 1950), p. 85.
13. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), (New York: Oxford World’s Classics), p. 9.
14. The Edinburgh Review, vol. 17, article IX, 1810–1811.
15. The Edinburgh Review, vol. 89, article III, April, 1849.
302
10
Popular Culture: A Humanistic
and Sociological Concept
If one speaks today about communication, one is almost forced into

a controversy over the mass media. The media are, of course, merely
the instruments of possible communication—they are the tools our
technology has developed and whose right application is in question.
Technology has extended our access to the world as never before. Yet
despite telephones, radios, television, increased literacy, expanded
circulation of books, newspapers, and periodicals we are lonelier than
ever before—and certainly our common human need for world peace
seems further removed than ever. Deterioration of our intellectual and
moral heritage has not only accompanied the quantitative growth of
mass media in modern society but has been a result as well. It is my
contention that an awareness of these problems is essential to the
preservation of the dignity and growth of the individual.
We have learned very little from the social sciences about how
communication has affected man’s humanity. In fact, the discussion
of communications, precisely because it is mainly a discussion of
mass media of communication, has seriously jeopardized productive
discourse between social scientists and humanists. Yet stereotypes of
the humanities to the contrary, there are now some social scientists
who believe that to get at the meaning of communication in our time
we had better turn toward the realm of symbolic expression—to the
arts and religion. The humanists, sometimes quite rightly, suspect that
all the social scientists care about are quantifiable aggregates of people
and facts or rather people as facts. A temperamental illustration of the
humanist’s attitude we owe to W. H. Auden. To quote from his poem
“Under Which Lyre”:
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires

Or quizzes upon World-Affairs
303
Nor with compliance

Take any test.
Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.1
In prose, the poet is echoed by a worthy professor of English who wrote

in College English:
Little did I know, and my colleagues less: the social sciences have these
many years been studying the popular arts as mass media of commu-
nication. In some vague way we had all heard of it, but what man of
sensibility reading the words mass media and communication would
attach any meaning to them: he would shudder at the vulgar jargon
and turn away. I have since spent many a long hour over sociological
monography, many of them as empty as they are execrably written. If
I may say so without reflecting on any one—least of all myself—the
study of mass communications does not attract the best minds.
Communication has been almost completely divested of its human

content, a content suggested by the word itself. For true communica-
tion entails a communion, a sharing of innermost experience. The
dehumanization of communication has resulted from its annexation
by the media of modern culture—by the newspapers first, and then by
radio and television.
That this dehumanization should have been brought to near
perfection in a society that professes an ultimate commitment to
the sanctity and autonomy of the individual is one of the grotesque
ironies of history. When an individual appears in the media of com-
munication he is insidiously separated from his humanity. Mass
communication relies upon the ideological sanction of individual
autonomy in the very process of exploiting individuality to serve
mass culture. Note how, in the following advertisement of Young
Readers of America, a branch of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc.,
Dr. Gallup’s private achievement, his particularity, is annulled by his
being made into an instrument of persuasion: “As Dr. George Gallup,
a former psychology professor himself, points out in a recent article
in the Ladies’ Home Journal, if a child can acquire the habit of book
reading, it will be invaluable in helping him to cope successfully with
all his later experiences in life.”
The passage borrows the halo of mass culture as reflected in public
opinion surveys to make palatable the intake of high culture. In citing
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Gallup as an authority on the value of culture pursuits one relies for

the “finer” things in life on the master mass diagnostician who knows
what is in the mind of the “public” and, by implication, what is best
for it. To identify him as a former psychology professor implies that
he has a good educational background and a respectable professional
career but invokes simultaneously the sanctions of the intellectual and
the successful businessman.
There is a new venture named “Time Books.” This enterprise prom-
ises a “Time Reading Program.” The cost? Only $3.95 for each package
of three or four books and for this monthly charge you will partake in
“a planned approach,” which guarantees that “though your time may be
limited you will be reading widely and profitably . . . books which are
truly timeless in style and significance.” The reliability of the selection
is beyond any doubt: “This plan draws its strength from the fact that
the editors spent thousands of hours finding the answers to questions
that you too must have asked yourself many times. . . . It is part of their
job to single out the few books that tower over all others.” Meaning,
quality, and importance of these publications are assured: “In each
case the editors will write special introductions to underline what is
unique in the book, what impact it has had or will have, what place it
has earned in literature and contemporary thought.” In addition, a kind
of religious sanction attaches to the wrappings of the enterprise: “The
books will be bound in durable, flexible covers similar to those used
for binding fine Bibles and Missals.” This circular, which must have
come out in millions of copies, claims that “this letter” was “written
only to people whom we know to be thoughtful readers.” The circular
is called a “letter,” the most personal genre of individual communica-
tion in writing—an example within an example of the perversion of
communication in mass communications.
The social scientists of the last two generations have evaded moral
commitment by pretending to engage in value-free research—some-
thing that exists neither in logic nor in history. In an era of increasing
positivistic infatuation (which includes a large share of the teachers in
humanistic fields, who should know better), the inalienable birthright
of the intellectual as a critic, trivial as it may sound, must be energeti-
cally asserted. Plainly the communications set-up of the modern world
has corrupted human communication, and its images have penetrated
perniciously and painfully the private realms of individuals in their
most intimate spheres of discourse. Conversation becomes “a waste
of time.” The coffee house, since Queen Anne’s time the refuge of the
305
most delicate or indelicate personal dialogue, has been observed to

be on its way out in Europe and ironically to be on its way into the
American scene—yet as an only slightly veiled version of the desolate
Third Avenue bar, home of the homeless isolates who make up a sig-
nificant part of the populace. And it would be parochial snobbery to
characterize the decay of language as genuine experience, including
the downgrading of unplanned conversation, as merely a phenomenon
of American civilization.
Here is a response cited in a survey recently made in Japan:
For example it is night and you are sitting alone at your desk with a
textbook open. . . . So you switch on the radio, and without seeming
to listen you begin to hear the late-late jazz program. And then the
rhythm of the music appropriately puts a part of yourself to sleep
and banishes excessive worry and longing; and riding to its pace as
though mounted on a belt-conveyor, your studies begin to advance
a little as though they were automates.
But memorizing one’s homework is not cultivating one’s memory.

Memory is man’s receptacle of living language and language lived by
him and his fellow man through human history. Modern man, however,
suffers a shrinkage of memory. It often seems limited to the news of
yesterday’s, if not today’s, newspaper or television shows. Not only
automobiles and washing machines but also language itself suffers
today the fate of planned, or at least factual, obsolescence. What is
remembered and what is forgotten seem almost indistinguishable, left
to chance without any significance.
Toward the end of the dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates tells the story
of the inventor-god Theuth, who boasts to Thamus, the king-god of
Egypt, about his innovations. They sound almost like the enumera-
tion of the basic features of our modern life style—an obsession with
technology as well as with organized leisure time. “He it was who
invented numbers and arithmetic and geometry and astronomy, also
the game of checkers and dice”—laying the groundwork as it were for
the radiation laboratories and the gambling casinos. What Theuth
is most proud of is the invention of the alphabet: “This invention
will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for
it is an elixir of memory and wisdom that I have discovered.” The
wise king, however, spots in the invention of writing the dismal
seeds of rote, repetition, and renunciation of self-reliance. Plato’s
genius discovers in the achievements of civilization its very threat
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Popular Culture
to culture. Not the spoken word but its written coagulation contains
the germ for scholarship and the literary arts, as well as for the
derivative products of mass communications—from newspapers to
comic books, from Time Reader leaflets to billboards (those frozen
highwaymen of our time). Thamus throws back at Theuth the con-
cept of the written alphabet as elixir (the pharmakon, as it is called
in Greek) and instead of accepting it as a medication predicts its
potential deadly powers:
For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those

who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their
trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part
of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within
them. You have invented an elixir not of memory but of remind-
ing and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true
wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will
therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most
part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise,
but only appear wise.
As if Plato had wished to tell us with emphasis that communication only

exists as shared experience, shared with one’s own self and the selves
of others, he applies the technique of the dialogue within the dialogue:
Socrates speaks to Phaedrus about Theuth and Thamus speaking to each
other. This technique is an emblem of conversation—turning to each
other and striving for the common. It is the emblem of the open heart,
the open mind, the very opposite of the prejudice and stereotype that
are forever present in mass communications and their precipitations
on modern man and his life style of borrowed experience. Memory is
a bench mark for human, or better, humanistic behavior, as opposed
to the quasi-biological, day-by-day, futile-moment-by-futile-moment
existence to which modern man seems to have committed himself. The
continuity of scholarship, the timelessness of the symbolic mementos
of the arts, the tradition-laden connotations of religions, the faithful
and solidary behavior of an individual—all these elements are varia-
tions on the theme of memory, which I am inclined to equate with
communication truly understood, as Plato equated it with philosophy.
All these concepts—memory, communication, philosophy—refer
to genuine experience. After 2000 years John Smith, the Cambridge
Platonist, restated in 1660 this Platonic credo: “As an organizing argu-
ment I suggest the need for the scrupulous education of man. There is
307
no easy road. For our words must refer to our experiences if we are to
know whereof we speak and they must evoke the experiences of our
peers if we are to be understood.”
I am tempted to say that the Platonic dialogue embraces the idea of
the divine coffeehouse; in any case, Plato’s insistence on the cultivation
of memory as the touchstone of individuality and creative participation
in human communication does not appear by chance in a dialogue
whose essential theme is the philosophy of the beautiful.
True, the humanistic meaning of communication is not entirely for-
gotten and interred. Ezra Pound (who, in spite of his aberrations, retains
the stature of the poet and humanist) writes: “As language becomes
the most powerful instrument of perfidy, so language alone can riddle
and cut through the meshes. Used to conceal meaning, used to blur
meaning, used to produce the complete and utter inferno of the past
century [and I may add the present as well] . . . against which, SOLELY
a care for language, for accurate registration by language avails.”
A story yet to be written is a social history of the intellectual debate
on the style of modern life and more specifically on the fate and vicis-
situdes of the standards of culture, taste, and morality under the impact
of urbanization and industrialization. This debate comes to a head
in the critical analysis of the role and substance of the arts and their
degraded counterparts or, to use these vague contemporary terms,
on the relationship of high culture and popular culture. At least since
Montaigne and Pascal and most articulately in individual works, in the
magazines of the professional writers in England in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries and also in Continental Europe, a lively discussion
arose around the very same issue that Plato so provocatively put before
Western man: What is going to happen to us when the very ego, this
precious invention of idealistic philosophy, romantic poetry, and the
spirit of capitalist enterprise, becomes increasingly enmeshed in the
mechanisms of conformity—the whole network of institutional and
psychological controls? It would reflect a painful misunderstanding
of the significance of this widely ramified discourse and debate if we
filed it away under the rubric “problems of leisure time.” The very fact
that the concern of these eighteenth-and nineteenth-century writers
again and again turns toward the social supplies of leisure time—the
novels, the theaters, the magazines, the newspapers, sports and games,
and what have you—means that the worried and troubled intellectuals
examine critically that space of life within which man is supposedly
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Popular Culture
free, his “free time.” Although, of course, the supporters of conformity

who sell their talents to the highest bidders are not absent among the
intellectuals, the emphasis remains on the open wound, the wound of
imitation—not the imitation of Christ but the almost mimetic imita-
tion of what one is supposed to imitate. Whether or not the discus-
sants consider a solution of the crisis of man and society possible,
whether improvement of education or return to romanticized forms
of agricultural society or withdrawal to the ivory tower or “No Exit”
is the powerless recommendation of the critics—the essential verdict
(long before Ezra Pound) is directed toward the decay of language,
the limbo of human communication. This theme was as essential for
Goethe as for Flaubert, for Wordsworth as for Eliot, for Coleridge as
for Nietzsche—or for that matter for a large list of contributors to The
Edinburgh Review as well as to other journals of sophisticated opinion.
This truly humanistic critique turns against instrumentalist language
(as means to an end) and advocates the autonomous character of the
human word as an end in itself. But as a human end indeed! Language
qua language must retain the sacred dignity of the human condition.
This paradoxical statement is made with intent. Language is indeed ide-
ally the definitive logos. There is nothing else available to us for ultimate
expression and true manifestation of the individual than language. In
this view, I agree with Jakob Burckhardt, whom one cannot reproach
for being insensible to nonverbal creative artifacts, who once said: “If it
were possible to express in words the quintessence, the idea of a work
of art, art itself would become superfluous, and all buildings, statues,
and pictures could as well have been unbuilt, unsculpted, unpainted.”
The symbolic language of Judaeo-Christian religion has continuously
emphasized the noninstrumental essence of language by endowing it
with divine origin. Whether you look at Psalm 139 (“For there is not a
word in my tongue, but, lo, O God, thou knowest it altogether”) or at
Sermon 79 of John Donne (“The Holy Ghost is an eloquent author, a
vehement and an abundant author but yet not luxuriant; he is far from
a penurious but as far from a superfluous style too”), man is viewed as
created in the image of God because it is language that allows him to
partake in the divine. There is a biblical passage that conveys archetypi-
cally the humanistic meaning of language. It is found in the First Book
of Kings, chapter 19: “And, behold, God passed by, and a great and
strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before
God; but God was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake;
309
but God was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire;
but God was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice,” the
voice of the Lord. When we talk about communication today, we are
inclined to mean the strong wind and the earthquake and the fire of the
mass media of communication, of manipulation, of advertisements, of
propaganda, mass circulation, and so forth. Yet human communication
is truly the “still, small voice.”
The meaning of the sacred in language is paradoxical. The instrumen-
talist concept of language (so frequently practiced in mass communi-
cations but, alas, in the scholar’s world as well) conceives of language
as a tool, and as such it must be as near perfect as any sophisticated
technological product. Its ideal would be speed reading and writing,
the teaching machine, the computer. But these ideals are—to turn a
theological phrase—the ideals of the devil because language as the
expression of the creative individual must also be the witness of his ever
present incompletion. Mortal as we are, our language must reflect our
limitations as well as the ever present tasks, possibilities, and potentiali-
ties before us. This function is exactly what is betrayed or at least denied
in the products of popular culture. When the motion picture is finished
or The Reader’s Digest is read or the crooner’s songs are heard, there
is nothing to be said or seen or heard any more. Creative imagination
has become muted. The patterned communications mechanism has
as its logical and psychological end the switching off of the projector,
the radio set, and the television box or the final mute grimace of the
singer. But the true meaning of communication, which is upheld by
the literary artists and above all by the poets, insists on productive
imagination, on ambiguity, even on silence. Today the communications
conscience of man is kept alive by the artist who communicates the
very breakdown of communication: James Joyce, for instance, when
he explores the archaic secrets of word and syntax, or the dramatists
of the Theater of the Absurd when they explore the radical gulf that
separates word and meaning.
There is no need, however, to take recourse to the messages of the
avant-garde. The scene is as of old, and the witnesses are available in
more familiar places.
One hundred and fifty years ago Coleridge wrote a letter to his
friend Southey aiming at a harmless act of manipulation. He requested
Southey to write a letter to his magazine The Friend in a “humorous
manner” so that he, Coleridge, would be able to reply and explain
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Popular Culture
his attitude toward style in the same periodical. What Coleridge

wanted to achieve by this planted interchange of letters was “in
the answer [to Southey] to state my own convictions in full on the
nature of obscurity.” Needless to say, “obscurity” is used here in an
ironical manner. Coleridge’s intent was to stress the commitment of
the true writer, the genuine communicator, toward the connotative
character or, to speak in aesthetic terms, the ambiguity of language.
This letter of Coleridge, written October 20, 1809, is a classic and
valid statement on the theme to which this paper addresses itself.
Here are the main elements: the absence of a responsible cultural
elite that would serve as the guardian and taskmaster of intellectual
creativity; the decreasing intellectual demands made on the reading
public at large; and finally the all-embracing emergence of a one-
dimensional, nonconnotative, unambiguous language of efficiency
and predigested derivative thought, which (as Plato stated) leaves no
room for the unique and idiosyncratic, for productive imagination
and the dissenting voice:
No real information can be conveyed, no important errors radically

extracted, without demanding an effort of thought on the part of
the reader; but the obstinate, and now contemptuous, aversion to
all energy of thinking is the mother evil, the cause of all the evils in
politics, morals, and literature, which it is my object to wage war
against. . . . Now, what I wish you to do for me . . . is . . . to write a
letter to The Friend in a lively style, chiefly urging, in a humorous
manner, my Don Quixotism in expecting that the public will ever
pretend to understand my lucubrations, or feel any interest in subjects
of such sad and unkempt antiquity, and contrasting my style with the
cementless periods of the modern Anglo-Gallican style, which not
only are understood beforehand, but, being free from all connec-
tions of logic, all the hooks and eyes of intellectual memory, never
oppress the mind by any after recollections, but, like civil visitors,
stay a few moments, and leave the room quite free and open for the
next comers. Something of this kind, I mean, that I may be able to
answer it so as, in the answer, to state my own convictions at full on
the nature of obscurity.
It is with consummate irony that Coleridge calls his philosophy of

communication an act of Don Quixotism; he hardly could have found
a more convincing metaphor to stress the productive ambiguity of
artistic symbols than the reference to the noble knight who stands
for the condemnation of banality and triviality and the unshakable
311
commitment to the idea of men by artistically manipulating a world of

trivial objects and persons—very much the archetype and pioneer of
the modern absurdists. As if he had to answer the spurious arguments
of the managers of the motion-picture industry and their confreres in
other fields of mass entertainment who try to convince themselves that
they have to follow the cues of the masses, Coleridge clearly indicts the
manufacturers of information and entertainment for not “demanding
an effort of thought on the part of the reader”—an issue as much with
us today as it was in the time of Coleridge or of Goethe and Stendhal,
to name two of his comrades-in-arms.
It is predominantly the poet who in our time has remained the
committed spokesman for language as the ever given realm of human
fulfillment and the ever present realm of human frustration, creating
higher levels of aspiration and attainment. Earlier Ezra Pound and Eliot
were mentioned. Eliot created definitive lines for “demanding an effort
of thought on the part of the reader,” as well as of the writer himself. In
“East Coker” he reports “trying to learn to use words”:
every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learned to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate.2
What comes to the fore in this generalized autobiography of the poet

is the infinite care man owes to his most specific human endowment.
It is important that we attempt to “raid” the inarticulate—that vast part
of the self in which (it so often seems) the self most truly is and that is
denied altogether by the pat, mechanical, and soporific oversimplifica-
tions of “mass communications.” It is the “spiritual” dimension of life,
the mystery at the very heart of being, that we betray by the hideous
impoverishment of the vocabularies and instruments of our thought
and feeling implicit in the mass enterprise of mass communications
(to which we are all party in some measure).
Two thinkers as different as John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Nietzsche
have voiced their sorrows over the style of modern life aided and abetted
by literary mass production, which seems to leave the public no choice
but an almost neurotic gobbling-up of an endless stream of sounds and
sights and words—not to be remembered, not to be translated into
productive enrichment, and not to be translated into “dreams,” that
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Popular Culture
“stuff ” of which, according to Shakespeare, our world is made. In an

article “Civilization,” which appeared in the London and Westminster
Review of April, 1836, John Stuart Mill wrote:
The world . . . gorges itself with intellectual food, and in order to swal-
low the more, bolts it. Nothing is now read slowly, or twice over. . . .
He . . . who should and would write a book, and write it in the proper
manner of writing a book, now dashes down his first hasty thoughts,
or what he mistakes for thoughts, in a periodical. And the public is
in the predicament of an indolent man, who cannot bring himself
to apply his mind vigorously to his own affairs, and over whom,
therefore, not he who speaks most wisely, but he who speaks most
frequently, obtains the influence.
And in a similar vein, though in a most different style, Nietzsche wrote

in the preface of The Dawn of Day:
I have not been a philologist in vain; perhaps I am one yet: a teacher

of slow reading. I even come to write slowly. At present it is not only
my habit, but even my taste, a perverted taste, maybe—to write
nothing but what will drive to despair every one who is in a hurry . . .
philology is now more desirable than ever before; . . . it is the highest
attraction and incitement in an age of “work”: that is to say, of haste, of
unseemly and immoderate hurry-scurry, which is intent upon “getting
things done” at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology
itself, perhaps, will not “get things done” so hurriedly: it teaches how
to read well: i.e. slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner
thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes.
To sum up what has happened in our day and age: Communication has
become part of a consumers’ culture in which those who produce and
those who receive are hardly distinguishable from each other because
they are both the serfs of a life style of conformity and regulation. It is the
basic tragedy and paradox of modern civilization and particularly of our
own phase that the sermon of individualism has turned into the practice
of conformity, that the ideology of education and persuasion through
the spoken and printed word has become the reality of insensibility
and numbness to meaning, and that the professed belief of the powers
that be in all spheres of public life—political or cultural or economic—
in the persuasive influence of the worded message is answered by
increasing skepticism if not outright disbelief in the world itself.
I don’t have any prescriptions or utopias to offer, but I have sum-
moned some of the witnesses who, although rather weak as social
313
powers, are yet with us as the ever-present conscience of true human

consciousness. If in the beginning I have intimated my pessimism
in regard to the communications research we social scientists have
been conducting, I should like in the end to regain at least some of
the territory I have voluntarily ceded. None less than the great John
Dewey, philosopher and social scientist as well, in his brilliant essay
“Democracy and Education” presented us with a definition of com-
munication that I predict will still live when many of the data of mass
media communications research have collected dust:
Society not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication.

There is more than a verbal tie between the words common, com-
munity, and communication. Men live in a community in virtue of the
things which they have in common; and communication is the way
in which they come to possess things in common. . . . To be a recipi-
ent of a communication is to have an enlarged . . . experience. One
shares in what another has thought and felt, and in so far, meagerly
or amply, has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who com-
municates left unaffected. . . . Except in dealing with commonplaces
and catch phrases one has to assimilate, imaginatively, something of
another’s experience in order to tell him intelligently of one’s own
experience. All communication is like art.
Notes
1. “Under Which Lyre,” © 1946 by W. H. Auden. Reprinted from Nones, by
W. H. Auden, by permission of Random House, Inc., and of Faber and
Faber, Ltd.
2. This portion of “East Coker” reprinted from Four Quartets, by T. S. Eliot, by
permission of Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., and of Faber and Faber, Ltd.
314

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Literature and

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 83-17888

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Part I: Historical and Empirical Studies

1 Historical Perspectives of Popular Culture 3

2 The Debate Over Art and Popular Culture: A Synopsis 19

Excursus A: Notes on the Theater and the Sermon 67

3 Eighteenth Century England: A Case Study 79

Excursus B: The Debate on Cultural Standards in

4 The Reception of Dostoevski in Pre–World War I

5 The Biographical Fashion 195

6 The Triumph of Mass Idols 211

Excursus C: Some Thoughts on the 1937 Edition of

Part II: Contributions to the Philosophy of Communication

7 On Sociology of Literature (1932) 255

8 On Sociology of Literature (1948) 269

10 Popular Culture: A Humanistic and Sociological

“Historical Perspectives of Popular Culture,” American Journal of Soci-

“The Debate over Art and Popular Culture: Eighteenth-Century England

“The Debate on Cultural Standards in Nineteenth-Century England,”

“The Reception of Dostoevski in Pre–World War I Germany,” Zeitschrift

“The Biographical Fashion,” Sociologica, ed. T.W. Adorno and Walter

“The Triumph of Mass Idols,” Radio Research 1942-43, ed. Paul F.

“Some Thoughts on the 1937 Edition of the International Who’s Who,”

“On Sociology of Literature (1932),” Zeitschrift für Sozilaforschung,

“On Sociology of Literature (1948),” Communication in Modern Society,

“Humanistic Perspectives of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd,”

“Popular Culture: A Humanistic and Sociological Concept,” The Human

“Some Thoughts on the 1937 Edition of International Who’s Who” and

to the reluctance of the theorists and research specialists in the mass

This chapter was written to be provocative, by one who has been

The practice of Americans leads their minds to ﬁxing the standard of

intellectual expression in a philosophical dialogue that never took place.

Variety always solaces, dissolves, and scatters. If I cannot combat

It is signiﬁcant that quite a few basic concepts which we have been

Again and again he warned against what he called “diversion” as a

When I have occasionally set myself to consider the diﬀerent distrac-

Thus the attitude toward leisure which, for Montaigne, guarantees

comics join in and reﬂect this spreading democratization. And if the

The diﬀerences in the verbalization of the dilemma are obvious. The

replaced by the phenomena of popular culture, which are nothing but

What Nietzsche expressed in the general terms of the philosopher

It may be noted in passing that in the present postwar period disil-

With this quotation we return to the diﬀerences between popular

Men no longer surrender to illusions.

His point of view ﬁnds conﬁrmation in an excellent study in the his-

oversensitivity of the latter. I can illustrate this point by a very recent

The eﬀects produced may now be quite unpremeditated, although

Today, manipulation is taken for granted as an end of social science.

Expediency and the lack of a historical or philosophical frame of refer-

There is a literature on popular culture today which is thoroughly

such speciﬁc questions as these: What passes the censorship of the

his eﬀorts, therefore, to educating this great emerging public in the

to dominate the theoretical ﬁeld. However, some opposition developed

is subjected in periods of profound change. Both philosophers were

But in order to be successful in the alleviation of inner pain, the escape

In a tentative and exploratory way, Montaigne also turned his atten-

champions of social and cultural change; Montaigne’s superﬁcially

This dialogue shows how the basic components of the discus-