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not as artistic objects in themselves but as expressions of their creator’s personality. Similarly, Clark Gable acted himself rather than any specific role; his opposite number is Laurence Olivier, who can actually impersonate, with style and passion, all kinds of other people, from Henry V to the seedy song-and-dance man of The Entertainer. Of course it wasn’t really Byron himself but a contrived persona which fitted into the contemporary public’s idea of a poet. Goethe was as obtuse on Byron as he was on Scott; he praised him as a great poet but added the well-known proviso: “When he thinks, he is a child.” The reverse was the truth: as a “great poet” Byron was banal—who reads his “serious” poetry now?—but when he thought, he was not at all childish; that is, when he (one senses with some relief) dropped the pretense of romantic passion and let his realistic eighteenth-century temperament play around, as in his diaries and letters and in Beppo and Don Juan. There were two Byrons, the public swashbuckler of The Corsair and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and the private mocker of the same romantic attitudes, and this split between the two was to become characteristic. One thinks of Mark Twain, with his public pose as the genial homespun philosopher and his private hell of nihilist despair.

VII

Or of John Barrymore, whose profile and sexual-romantic prowess were as famous as Byron’s and whose Masscult persona bound him to the wheel of endless portrayals of The Great Lover and repressed his real talents, which were a beautiful diction and a distinguished stage presence (as in his Hamlet), sensitivity as an actor (as in the movie of A Bill of Divorcement), and a gift for light comedy (curiously analogous to Byron’s flair for burlesque) which glittered in a few scenes of sardonic, graceful mugging in such movie farces as The Man From Blankley’s and Twentieth Century.

Since in a mass society people are related not to each other but to some abstract organizing principle, they are often in a state of exhaustion, for this lack of contact is unnatural. So Masscult attempts to provide distraction for the tired businessman—or the tired proletarian. This kind of art is necessarily at a distance from the individual since it is specifically designed to affect not what differentiates him from everybody else—that is what is of liveliest interest to him—but rather to work on the reflexes he shares with everybody else. So he is at a distance.

But people feel a need to be related to other people. The simplest way of bridging this distance, or rather of pretending to bridge it, is by emphasizing the personality of the artist; the individual buried in the mass audience can relate himself to the individual in the artist, since they are, after all, both persons. So while Masscult is in one sense extremely impersonal, in another it is extremely personal. The artist is thus charismatic and his works become the expression of this charisma rather than, as in the past, objective creations.

In his alcoholic last years, John Barrymore gave an extreme illustration of this principle.

Six months ago [ran a story in Time of November 6, 1939] a ham show opened in Chicago. Last week it was still running there. It had become a civic institution. It had played to 150,000 people and grossed over $250,000. The theater was sold out three weeks in advance....

The answer was...that the leading man [was] the great John Barrymore—sometimes ill, sometimes tight, but always a trouper....“Yep,” says the doorman, “he arrives every night, dead or alive.”...He says anything that comes into his head. When he is well wound up, My Dear Children may bumble on till after midnight. Once a fire engine sounded in the street. Sang out Barrymore: “I hope they get to the fire in time.” Once he saw Ned Sparks in the audience. Walking to the footlights, Barrymore shouted: “There’s that old bastard Ned Sparks.” Once he couldn’t hear the prompter in the wings, yelled: “Give those cues louder!” [etc.] Once, unable to stand up, he played the whole show sitting down. Another time, when