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By Root 1107 0

worse and more pervasive than ours, a fact which is often not recognized because in form Soviet Masscult is just the opposite, aiming at propaganda and pedagogy rather than distraction. But like ours, it is imposed from above and it exploits rather than satisfies the needs of the masses—though, of course, for political rather than commercial reasons. Its quality is even lower. Our Supreme Court building is tasteless and pompous but not to the lunatic degree of most Soviet architecture; post-1930 Soviet films, with a few exceptions, are far duller and cruder than our own; the primitive level of serious Soviet periodicals devoted to matters of art or philosophy has to be read to be believed, and as for the popular press, it is as if Hearst or Colonel McCormick ran every periodical in America. Furthermore, while here individuals can simply turn their back on Masscult and do their own work, there no such escape is possible; the official cultural bodies control all outlets and a Doctor Zhivago must be smuggled out for foreign publication.

V

Masscult first made its appearance in eighteenth-century England, where also, significantly, the industrial revolution was just beginning. The important change was the replacement of the individual patron by the market. The process had begun in Elizabethan times, when journalists like Nashe and Greene made a hard living from the popular sale of their pamphlets and when the theatre depended partly on subsidies from noble patrons and partly on paid admissions. But Masscult’s first sizable body of professionals were the hacks of Grub Street, ready to turn their hand to ballads, novels, history, encyclopedias, philosophy, reportage or anything else the publishers thought might go. Dr. Johnson was one of them in his impoverished youth, and his letter to Lord Chesterfield (who had neglected Johnson while the dictionary was being compiled and who, when it was finished, tried to wangle a dedication) was the consummate expression of the change.

Seven years, my Lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron before....

Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; But it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.

I hope it is no very cynical asperity, not to confess obligations where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself....For I have been long wakened from that dream of hope, in which I once boasted myself with such exultation, my lord—

Your lordship’s most humble, most obedient servant.

Sam. Johnson

This Declaration of Independence, written eleven years before our own, made a similar point: Sam. Johnson found the noble lord as superfluous to his existence as the American colonists did His Britannic Majesty.

It must be added that, however defective as a patron, Lord Chesterfield reacted in the grand manner. Far from crushing him, the muted thunders of Johnson’s letter seem to have delighted him as a connoisseur. When the bookseller Dodsley called on him soon afterward, he found the letter open on a table for his lordship’s visitors to enjoy. “He read it to me,” Dodsley writes, “said ‘this man has great power,’ pointed out the severest passages, and observed how well they were expressed.” Boswell thought Chesterfield’s reaction “glossy duplicity,” but there was more to it than that. The old order went out on a high note of aristocratic