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By Root 1085 0

was Goethe’s judgment. But Croce, in his European Literature in the Nineteenth Century, places his finger on the radical, the fatal defect of the Waverley novels: “There are too many of them.” He has much also to say about the monotony of Scott’s style and the “mechanical method” with which he constructed his characters. But quantity is the point. “[He was] an industrial producer, intent upon supplying the market with objects for which the demand was as keen as the want was legitimate....Is it not healthy to demand images of virtue, of courage, of generous feelings, and...to seek also to obtain instruction as to historical customs and events? Scott had the genius to carry out the commercial enterprise which supplied this want....One has the impression, when reading his biography, that one is reading about a hero of industry.” And indeed the chief interest is his enormous productivity, his big earnings, his baronial style of life, his heroic struggle to pay off his creditors after bankruptcy. “Nothing is said as to his inner life, his loves, his religion, his ideas; less than nothing about his spiritual struggles and development,” Croce continues. Any more than such topics would occur to the biographers of Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller or the present head of the U.S. Steel Corp.

For one has the impression, in reading even the greatest of the nineteenth-century popular novelists, that the demands of the market pushed them too hard. So Dickens, so Balzac, so Mark Twain. Today the pressure for production comes under the head of physics rather than of aesthetics. In the 1955–1956 season, a long-forgotten TV program called “Matinée” put on five original one-hour plays a week every week, or 260 a year; it took 100 writers, 20 directors and 4,000 actors to keep these Molochian fires stoked. The rate at which TV uses up comic talent was described by Fred Allen, a notable victim; one has merely to see a TV comedy show to realize how tragically right he was. A big publishing house like Doubleday must have hundreds of titles a year to keep its presses busy; the overhead goes on, the more books produced the cheaper to produce each one, and the fear that wakes publishers in the night is that the presses may for a moment stop. When birth control is exercised it is usually at the expense of original and distinguished manuscripts. Anything that is sufficiently banal is sure of a kinder hearing, on the assumption that a bad book may sell whereas a good one definitely won’t. The vast amount of unprofitable junk the publishers issue every year might be expected to cause some misgivings about this notion—if mere banality were a guarantee of success, every Hollywood movie would make money—but somehow the lesson is never learned. Perhaps one should investigate the publishers’ own tastes.[5]

Byron was as romantic and almost as industrious as Scott but otherwise there were few similarities. His life was as disorderly as Scott’s was respectable, his personality as rebellious as Scott’s was conventional. It was this personality that won him his mass following: he was the first bohemian, the first avant-gardist, the first beatnik. If Scott was the artist as entrepreneur, Byron was the artist as rebel, and there was less difference between these extremes, from the standpoint of Masscult, than one might have thought. For Byron was a formidable competitor. Scott began as a romantic poet, but when Byron began to publish, Scott made a strategic retreat to prose and began to write the Waverley novels. It was a shrewd decision. Marmion and The Lady of the Lake, while accomplished exercises in the romantic-historical genre, quite lacked the personal note; readers could hardly “identify with” Roderick Dhu, while Childe Harold and Manfred were not only identifiable but also seemed to express their author’s even more identifiable personality.

Byron’s reputation was different from that of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden and Pope because it was based on the man—or what the public conceived to be the man—rather than on his work. His poems were taken