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By Root 1058 0

or harmonized. The elegance, grace and feeling which he is continually contemplating cannot mix with his thoughts or insinuate themselves into their expression—he remains as coarse, as rude and awkward, and often more so, than the illiterate and the ill-instructed.” One of Melbourne’s favorite quotations was Jaques’s remark, in As You Like It, when the rustic clown quotes Ovid: “O knowledge ill-inhabited—worse than Jove in a thatched house!” One might also cite Ortega y Gasset’s observation, apropos of “the barbarization of specialization”: “Today, when there are more scientists than ever, there are fewer cultured men than, for example, in 1750.” A comparison of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia with the post-1920 American editions of the Britannica would be interesting—although, of course, Gasset’s contention can never be proved (or disproved) if only because “a cultured man” is not a scientific category. Like all the important categories.

XVII

In England, cultural lines are still drawn with some clarity. The BBC, for instance, offers three distinct programs: the Light (Masscult), the Home (Midcult) and the tactfully named Third (High Culture). It is true that the daily papers are divided about like ours: three good ones (Times, Guardian, Telegraph) with relatively small circulations and many bad ones with big circulations. The popular papers are not only much bigger than ours—the Mirror and the Express have about five million each, twice the circulation of the New York Daily News, our biggest—but also much worse. One must go to London to see how trivial and mindless the popular press can become. But if the masses have their dailies, the classes have a type of periodical for which there is no American analogue, and I think the vulgarity of the mass press and the high quality of the class press are both the result of the sharper definition of cultural lines there.

This is a magazine-reading country. When one comes back from abroad, the two displays of American abundance that dazzle one are the supermarkets and the newsstands. There are no British equivalents of our Midcult magazines like The Atlantic and the Saturday Review, or of our mass magazines like Life and The Saturday Evening Post and Look, or of our betwixt-&-between magazines like Esquire and The New Yorker (which also encroach on the Little Magazine area). There are, however, several big-circulation women’s magazines, I suppose because the women’s magazine is such an ancient and essential form of journalism that even the English dig it.

The one kind of magazine we haven’t had over here since the liberal weeklies stubbed their toes on the Moscow Trials is the serious, widely read weekly. The English have at least seven: The Spectator, the New Statesman, The Economist, The Times Literary Supplement, The Listener, The Observer and The Sunday Times. The first four have circulations between 40,000 and 90,000. The Listener has, I believe, over 200,000; it is published by the BBC and is made up almost wholly of broadcast material—how long would it take to accumulate a similar issue from our own radio and television? Months? Years? The Observer and The Sunday Times (no connection with the daily Times, which doesn’t come out on Sunday) are really Sunday magazines in a newspaper format; their special articles and their extensive review sections are on the level of the other weeklies; and they have circulations of over 700,000 and 1,000,000 respectively. (They are postwar phenomena, analogous to our boom in quality paperbacks.) These British weeklies have large enough circulations to be self-supporting and to pay their contributors a living wage. Their nearest parallels here, in quality, are our Little Magazines, which come out either quarterly or bimonthly, have small circulations (5,000 is par, 15,000 prodigious), run at a chronic deficit and pay contributors and editors meagerly.

What must be done here marginally, with help from “angels” either personal or institutional, can be done there as a normal part of journalism. Although a much smaller percentage of the English population