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By Root 1044 0

tide of vulgarization had begun to gather full force. Grub Street (read: Madison Avenue or perhaps Sunset Boulevard) was its target and its anti-heroes were Theobald and Cibber, the former a lawyer who pretended to scholarship and the latter an actor whose vanity led him to write serious books. These dunces, who were getting away with their impostures, symbolized the confusion in the world of letters that the expansion of the audience had introduced. Two centuries later, when the goddess of Dullness has so extended her realm that one takes it for granted that most current productions will be of her kingdom, one is startled by Pope’s vindictive passion, as in the ending:

She comes! She comes! the sable throne behold

Of Night primeval and of Chaos old!

Before her, Fancy’s gilded clouds decay,

And all its varying rainbows die away.

Wit shoots in vain its momentary fires,

The meteor drops and in a flash expires.

.....

Thus at her felt approach and secret might,

Art after art goes out, and all is night.

.....

Lo! thy dread empire, Chaos! is restored;

Light dies before thy uncreating word;

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall,

And universal darkness buries all.

This is magnificent but exaggerated. With the best will in the world, we have not been able to ring down the curtain; the darkness is still far from universal. Man’s nature is tough and full of unexpected quirks, and there are still many pockets of resistance. But in some ways history has surpassed Pope’s worst imaginings. With the French Revolution, the masses for the first time made their entrance onto the political stage, and it was not long before they also began to occupy a central position in culture. Grub Street was no longer peripheral and the traditional kind of authorship became more and more literally eccentric—out of the center—until by the end of the nineteenth century the movement from which most of the enduring work of our time has come had separated itself from the market and was in systematic opposition to it.

This movement, was, of course, the “avant-garde” whose precursors were Stendhal and Baudelaire and the impressionist painters, whose pioneers included Rimbaud, Whitman, Ibsen, Cézanne, Wagner, and whose classic masters were figures like Stravinsky, Picasso, Joyce, Eliot, and Frank Lloyd Wright. Perhaps “movement” is too precise a term; the avant-gardists were linked by no aesthetic doctrine, not even by a consciousness that they were avant-garde. What they had in common was that they preferred to work for a small audience that sympathized with their experiments because it was sophisticated enough to understand them. By an act of will dictated by necessity (the necessity of survival as a creator, rather than a technician) each of them rejected the historical drift of post-1800 Western culture and recreated the old, traditional situation in which the artist communicated with his peers rather than talked down to his inferiors. Later on, they became famous and those who survived even got rich—the avant-garde is one of the great success-stories of this century—but their creative work was done in a very different atmosphere.

VI

The two great early best sellers in Grub Street’s triumph were Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. Both exploited romanticism, a new creed whose emphasis on subjective feeling as against traditional form was suitable to the democratization of taste that was taking place. But they differed interestingly. Each represented an aspect of Masscult, Scott the production line, Byron the emphasis on the artist himself. Antithetical but also complementary: the more literature became a branch of industry, the more the craving for the other extreme—individuality. Or rather, a somewhat coarser commodity, Personality.

It is hard for us to understand the effect of Scott’s novels on his contemporaries. They were commonly compared to Shakespeare, for their variety and their broad human sympathy. “A great mind unequalled anywhere who naturally produces the most extraordinary effects upon the whole world of readers,”