Culture & Society by Raymond Williams, Sintesi del corso di Cultura Inglese I

Scarica Culture & Society by Raymond Williams e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Cultura Inglese I solo su Docsity! FOREWORD The organizing principle of this book is the discovery that the idea of culture, and the word itself in its general modern uses, came into English thinNIng in the period which we describe as that of the Industrial Revolution. The book is an attempt to show how and why this happened, and to follow the idea through to our own day. It becomes an account and an interpretation of our responses in thought and feeling to the changes in English society since the late 18th century. The book continues the enquiry which began with the founding of the review ​Politics and Letters​, which I edited, with Mr Clifford Collins and Mr Wolf Mankowitz (1946-48). Our object was to enquire into and where possible reinterpret this tradition which the word 'culture' describes in terms of the experience of our own generation During the actual writing of the book, since 1950, I have been indebted to Mr Collins, and also to my colleague Mr Anthony McLean. I gained much benefit from discussing the work in progress with Humphry House and Francis Klingender, whose valuable work survives their early deaths. Others, among many who have helped me, whom I ought to mention are Mr F. W. Bateson, Mr Henry Collins, Mr S. J. Colman and Mr H. P. Smith. My wife has argued the manuscript with me, line by line, to an extent which, in certain chapters, makes her virtually the joint author. But I cannot finally involve anyone but myself, either in my judgements or in my errors. Because of the form of the book, I have not been able to include any detailed accounts of the changes in words and meanings to which I refer. I shall publish this supporting evidence, later, in a specialist paper on Changes in English during the Industrial Revolution. The brief accounts given in my text are subject to the usual dangers of summary, and tibe reader primarily interested in the words themselves must be referred to the paper mentioned, which adds some new evidence to the existing authorities. I have been considering the directions in which further work in its field might profitably move, and it may be useful to note these. It seems to me, first, that we are arriving from various directions, at a point where a new general theory of culture might in fact be achieved. In this book I have sought to clarify the tradition, but it may be possible to go on from this to a full restatement of principles, taking the theory of culture as a theory of the relations between elements in a whole way of life. We also need, in these terms, to examine the idea of an expanding culture, and its detailed processes. For we live in an expanding culture, yet we spend much of our energy regretting the fact, rather than seeking to understand its nature and conditions. I think a good deal of factual revision of our received cultural history is necessary and urgent, in such matters as literacy, educational levels, and the press. We also need detailed studies of the social and economic problems of current cultural expansion, as means towards an adequate common policy. Finally, in the special field of criticism, we may be able to extend our methods of analysis, in relation to the re-definitions of creative activity and communication which various kinds of investigation are making possible. All this work will be difficult, but it may be helped by an understanding of the context of our present vocabulary in these matters, to which this book is offered as a contribution. Parts of the book have previously appeared, in other foims, in Essays in Criticism and Universities and Left Review. INTRODUCTION Between the 18th century and the 19th century, a number of words came for the first time into common English use with different meanings The 5 most important are ​industry, democracy, class, art ​and ​culture​. The changes in their use might be about our ​social, political ​and ​economic institutions; about the ​purposes​ which these institutions are designed to embody; and about the ​relations to these institutions​ and ​purposes​ of our activities in ​learning, education ​and the​ arts. INDUSTRY The period in which its use changes is during the Industrial Revolution. 1. Industry was a name for a particular human attribute, which could be paraphrased as “skill, assiduity, perseverance, diligence”. 2. In the last decades of the 18th century, industry became a collective word for our manufacturing and productive institutions, and for their general activities. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (3,776), is one of the first writers to use the word in this way. Industry, with a capital letter = an institution, a body of activities rather than simply a human attribute. Industrious → 19th century, by industrially describes the institutions. DEMOCRACY Its use is in common English right after the American and the French Revolution 1. It meant “jacobinism” → negative 2. Democrats were considered dangerous CLASS 1. Before → to refer to a division or group in schools and colleges: “the usual Classes in Logic and Philosophy”, 2. At the end of the 18th century → lower classes + lower orders 3. Middle classes + middling classes 4. Working classes 5. Upper classes 19th century → Class prejudice, class legislation, class consciousness, class conflict and class war 6. The upper middle classes 7. The lower middle class ART A particular group of skills, the “imaginative” or “creative” arts. promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly * I have read, since writing this paragraph, Dr Leavis's censure (in D. H. Lawrence, Novelist) on a comparison of Lawrence with Carlyle. He traces the comparison to Desmond MacCartihy, and predicts that it will 'recur.* Well, here it is, but not, so far as I am concerned, from that source. As my comparison stands, I see no reason for withdrawal love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread. Or again: The blackened brick dwellings, the black slate roofs glistening their sharp edges, the mud black with coal dust, the pavements wet and black. It was as if dismalness had soaked through and through everything. The utter negation of natural beauty, the utter negation of the gladness of life, the utter absence of the instinct for shapely beauty which every bird and beast has, the utter death of the human intuitive faculty was appalling. . . . Lawrence is here carrying on a known judgement, yet with his own quick perception and in his own distinctive accent. This kind of observation has to be made again and again, in every generation, not only because the atmosphere of industrialism tends to breed habituation, but also because (in an ironic tribute to the strength of the tradition of protest) it is common to shift the ugliness and evil of industrialism out of the present, back into the *bad old days'. The reminder that the thing is still here has repeatedly to be issued. Lawrence is little concerned, historically, with the origins of industrialism. For him, in this century, it is a received fact, and at the centre of it is the 'forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition* the common element in all the diverse interpretations of which the tradition is composed. Lawrence's starting point is, then, familiar ground. The Inherited ideas were there to clarify his first sense of crisis. When we think of Lawrence, we concentrate, understandably, on the adult Me, in all its restless dedication. That he was the son of a miner adds, commonly, a certain pathetic or sentimental interest; we relate the adult life back to it, in a personal way. But the real importance of Lawrence's origins is not and cannot be a matter of retrospect from the adult Me. It is, rather, that his first social responses were those, not of a man observing the processes of industrialism, but of one caught in them, at an exposed point, and destined, in the normal course, to be enlisted in their regiments. That he escaped enlistment is now so well known to us that it is difficult to realize the thing as it happened, in its living sequence. It is only by hard fighting, and, further, by the fortune of fighting on a favourable front, that anyone born into the industrial working class escapes Ms function of replacement. Lawrence could not be certain, at the time when his fundamental social responses were form ing, that he could so escape. That he was exceptionally gifted exacerbated the problem, although later it was to help towards solving it. Yet the problem of adjustment to the disciplines of industrialism, not merely in day-to-day matters, but in the required basic adjustments of feeling, is common and general. In remembering the occasional 'victories the escapes from the required adjustment we for get the innumerable and persistent defeats. Lawrence did not forget, because he was not outside the process, meeting those who had escaped, and forming his estimate of the problem from this very limited evidence. For him, rather, the whole process had been lived, and he was the more conscious of the general failure, and thus of the general character of the system: In my generation, the boys I went to school with, colliers now, have all been beaten down, what with the dm-dm-dinning of Board Schools, books, cinemas, clergymen, the whole national and human consciousness hammering on the fact of material prosperity above aE things. Lawrence could not have written this, with such a phrase as *all been beaten down 1 , if the pressures had not been so intensely and personally felt. In the early stages of the imposition of the industrial system, an observer could see adult men and women, grown to another way of life, being *beaten down' into the new functions and the new feelings. But once industrialism was established, an observer could hardly see this. Tension would be apparent to him, only in those who had escaped, or half-escaped. The rest, 'the masses', would normally appear to him fully formed the Beating down' had happened, and he had not seen It. It thus became possible for men in such a position to believe, and with a show of reason to argue, that the residual majority, the 'masses', had, essentially, got the way of life they wanted, or, even, the way of life they deserved the way *best fitted* for them. Only an occasional generous spirit could construct, from his own experience, the vision of an alternative possibility; even this, because it had to be vision, was always in danger of simplification or sentimentality. The outstanding value of Lawrence's development is that he was in a position to know the living process as a matter of common rather than of special experience. He had, further, the personal power of understanding and expressing this. While the thing was being lived, however, and while the pressures were not theoretical but actual, the inherited criticism of the industrial system was obviously of the greatest importance to him. It served to clarify and to generalize what had otherwise been a confused and personal issue. It is not too much to say that he built his whole intellectual life on the foundation of this tradition. A man can live only one Me, and the greater part of Lawrence's strength was taken up by an effort which in terms of ideas achieved perhaps less than had already been reached by different paths. Lawrence was so involved with the business of getting free of the industrial system that he never came seriously to the problem of changing it, al though he knew that since the problem was common an individual solution was only a cry in the wind. It would be absurd to blame him on these grounds. It is not so much that he was an artist, and thus supposedly condemned, by romantic theory, to individual solutions. In fact, as we know, Lawrence spent a good deal of time trying to generalize about the necessary common change; he was deeply committed, all his life, to the idea of re-forming society. But his main energy went, and had to go, to the business of personal liberation from the system. Because he understood the issue in its actual depth, he knew that this liberation was not merely a matter of escaping a routine industrial job, or of getting an education, or of moving into the middle class. These things, in Lawrence's terms, were more of an evasion than what lie actually came to do. Mitigation of the physical discomforts, of the actual injustices, or of the sense of lost opportunity, was no kind of liberation from the 'base forcing of al human energy into a competition of mere acquisition'. His business was the recovery of other purposes, to which the human energy might be directed. What he lived was the break-out, not theoretically, nor in any Utopian construction, but as it was possible to him, in immediate terms, in opposition alike to the Ibase forcing* and to his own weakness. What he achieved, in his life, was an antithesis to the powerful industrial thesis which had been proposed for him. But this, in certain of its aspects, was never more than a mere rejection, a habit of evasion: the industrial system was so strong, and he had been so fiercely exposed to it, that at times there was little that he or any man could do but run. This aspect, however, is comparatively superficial. The weakness of the exclusively biographical treatment of Lawrence, with its emphasis on the restless wanderings and the approach to any way of Me but his own, lies in the fact that these things were only contingencies, whereas the dedication, and the value, were in the 'endless venture into consciousness*, which was his work as man and writer. Lawrence is often dramatized as the familiar romantic figure who 'rejects the claims of society*. In fact, he knew too much about society, and knew it too directly, to be deceived for long by anything so foolish. He saw this version of individualism as a veneer on the consequences of industrialism. We have frustrated that instinct of community which would make us unite in pride and dignity in the bigger gesture of the citizen, not the cottager. The 'instinct of community* was vital in his thinking: deeper and stronger, he argued, than even the sexual instinct. He attacked the industrial society of England, not because it offered community to the individual, but because it frustrated it. In this, again, he is wholly in line with the tradition. If in his own life he rejected the claims of society', it was not because he did not understand the importance of community, but because, in industrial England, lie could find none. Almost certainly, he underestimated the degree of community that might have been available to him; the compulsion to get away was sa fierce, and he was personally very weak and exposed. But he was reject ing, not the claims of society, but the claims of industrial society. He was not a vagrant, to live by dodging; but an exile, committed to a different social principle. The vagrant wants the system to stay as it is, so long as he can go on dodging it while stall being maintained by it. The exile, on the contrary, wants to see the system changed, so that he can come home. This latter is, in the end, Lawrence's position. Lawrence started, then, from the criticism of industrial society which made sense of his own social experience, and which gave title to his refusal to be basely forced*. But alongside this ratifying principle of denial he had the rich experience of childhood in a working-class family, in which most of his positives lay. What such a childhood gave was certainly not tranquillity or security; it did not even, in the ordinary sense, give happiness. But it gave what to Lawrence was more important than these things: the sense of close quick relationship, which came to matter more than anything else. This was the positive result of the life of the family in a small house, where there were no such devices of separation of children and parents as the sending-away to school, or the handing-over to servants, or the relegation to nursery or playroom. Comment on this life (usually by those who have not experienced it) tends to emphasize the noisier factors: the fact that rows are always in the open; that there is no privacy in crisis; that want breaks through the small margin of material security and leads to mutual blame and anger. It is not that Lawrence, like any child, did not suffer from these things. It is rather that, in such a life, the suffering and the giving of comfort, the common want and the common remedy, the open row and the open maMng-up, are all part of a continuous life which, in good and bad, makes for a whole attachment. Lawrence learned from this experience that sense of the continuous flow and recoil of sympathy which was always, in his writing, the essential process of living. His idea of close spontaneous living rests on this foundation, and he had no temptation to idealize it into the pursuit of happiness: things were too close to him for anything so abstract. Further, there is an important sense in which the working-class family is an evident and mutual economic unit, within which both rights and responsibilities are immediately contained. The material processes of satisfying human needs are not separated from personal relationships; and Lawrence knew of property. Man has his highest fulfilment as a possessor of property: so they all say, really.** And from this he concludes: All discussion and idealizing of the possession of property, whether individual or group or State possession, amounts to no more than a fatal betrayal of the spontaneous self. Property is only there to be used, not to be possessed. Possession is a land of illness of the spirit. When men are no longer obsessed with the desire to possess property, or with the parallel desire to prevent another man's possessing it, then, and only then, shall we be gkd to turn it over to the State. Our way of State-ownership is merely a farcical exchange of words, not of ways. In this, Lawrence is very close to the socialism of a man like Morris, and there can be little doubt that he and Morris would have felt alike about much that has subsequently passed for socialism. Lawrence's attitude to the question of equality springs from the same sources in feeling. He writes: Society means people living together. People must live together. And to live together, they must have some Standard, some Material Standard. This is where the Average comes in. And this is where Socialism and Modem Democracy come in. For Democracy and Socialism rests upon the Equality of Man, which is the Average. And this is sound enough, so long as the Average represents the real basic material needs of mankind: basic material needs: we insist and insist again. For Society, or Democracy, or any Political State or Community exists not for the sake of the individual, nor should ever exist for the sake of the individual, but simply to establish the Average, in order to make living together possible: that is, to make proper facilities for every man's clothing, feeding, housing himself, working, sleeping, mating, playing, according to his necessity as a common unit, an average. Everything beyond that common necessity depends on himself alone. This idea of equality is "sound enough'. Yet when it is not a question of material needs but of whole human beings, we cannot say that all men are equal. We cannot say A = B. Nor can we say that men are unequal. We may not declare that A = B + C. One man is neither equal nor unequal to another man. When I stand in the presence of another man, and I am my own pure self, am I aware of the presence of an equal, or of an Inferior, or of a superior? I am not. When I stand with another man, who is himself, and when I am truly my self, then I am only aware of a Presence, and of the strange reality of Otherness. There is me, and there is another being. There is no comparing or estimating. There is only this strange recognition of pres ent otherness. I may be glad, angry, or sad, because of the presence of the other. But still no comparison enters in. Comparison enters only when one of us departs from his own integral being, and enters the material mechanical world. Then equality and inequality starts at once. This seems to me to be the best tiling that has been written about equality in our period. It gives no title to any defence of material inequality, which in fact is what is usually defended. But it removes from the idea of equality that element of mechanical abstraction which has often been felt in it The emphasis on relationship, on the recognition and acceptance of 'present otherness', could perhaps only have come from a man who had made Lawrence's particular Venture into consciousness'. We should remember the emphasis when Lawrence, under the tensions of his exile, falls at times into an attitude like that of the later Carlyle, with an emphasis on the recognition of 'superior' beings and of the need to bow down and submit to them. This 'following after power', in Carlyle's phrase, is always a failure of the Mind of relationship which Lawrence has here described: the impatient frustrated relapse into the attempt to 'determine another man's being'. Lawrence can show us, more clearly than anyone, where in this he himself went wrong. I have referred to the tensions of exile, and this aspect of Lawrence's work should receive the final stress. In his basic attitudes he is so much within the tradition we have been following, has indeed so much in common with a socialist like Morris, that it is at first difficult to understand why his influence should have appeared to lead in other directions. One reason, as has been mentioned, is that he has been vulgarized into a romantic rebel, a type of 'free individual'. There is, of course, just enough in his life and work to make this vulgarization plausible. Yet it cannot really be sustained. We have only to remember this: Men are free when they are in a living homeland, not when they are straying and breaking away. And again: Men are free when they belong to a living, organic, believing community, active in fulfilling some unfulfilled, perhaps unrealized purpose. But this in practice was the cry of an exile: of a man who wanted to commit himself, yet who rejected the terms of the available commitments. Lawrence's rejection had to be so intense, if he was to get clear at all, that he was led into a weakness, which found its rationalization. He kept wanting to see a change in society, but he could conclude: Every attempt at pre ordained a new material world only adds another last straw to the load that already has broken so many backs. If we are to keep our backs unbroken, we must deposit all property on the ground, and learn to walk without it. We must stand aside. And when many men stand aside, they stand in a new world; a new world of man has come to pass. This is the end of the rainbow: the sequel to that Rananim which had been one more in the series of attempts to evade the issues: an idealized substitute community, whether Pantisocracy, New Harmony, or the Guild of St George. Lawrence's point is that the change must come first in feeling, but almost everything to which he had borne witness might have shown how much In the head' this conclusion was. He knew all about the processes of Seating down*. He knew, none better, how the consciousness and the environment were linked, and what it cost even an exceptional man to make his ragged breatHless escape. There is something false, in the end, in the way he tries to separate the material issues and lie issues in feeling, for he had had the opportunity of knowing, and indeed had learned how closely intermeshed these issues were. It is not a question of the old debate on which conditions are primary. It is that in actuality the pressures, and the responses creating new pressures, form into a whole process, which is there. You needn't try to get behind it. As leave try to get behind the sun. Lawrence came to rationalize and to generalize his own necessary exile, and to give it the appearance of freedom. His separation of the material issues from the issues in consciousness was an analogy of his own temporary condition. There is something, in the strict sense, suburban about this. The attempt to separate material needs, and the ways in which they are to be met, from human purpose and the development of being and relationship, is the suburban separation of 'work* and life* which has been the most common response of all to the difficulties of industrialism. It is not that the issues in consciousness ought to be set aside while the material ends are pursued. It is that because the process is whole, so must change be whole: whole in conception, common in effort. The living, organic, believing community' will not be created by standing aside, although the effort towards it in consciousness is at least as important as the material effort. The tragedy of Lawrence, the working-class boy, is that he did not live to come home. It is a tragedy, moreover, common enough in its incidence to exempt him from the impertinences of personal blame. The venture into consciousness remains, as a sufficient life's work. Towards the end, when he had revisited the milling country where the pressures of industrialised were most explicit and most evident, he shaped, as a creative response, the sense of immediate relationship which informs Lady Chatterley's Lover and which he had earlier explored in The Rainbow, Women in Love and St Mawr. This is only the climax of his exploration into those elements of human energy which were denied by the 1base forcing', and which might yet overthrow it. It is profoundly important to realize that Lawrence's exploration of sexual experience is made, always, in this context. To isolate this exploration, as it was tempting for some of his readers to do, is not only to mis understand Lawrence but to expose Titm to the scandal from which, in his lifetime, he scandalously suffered. "This which we are must cease to be, that we may come to pass in another being* : this, throughout, is the emphasis. And, just as the recovery of the human spirit from the base forcing of industrialism must lie in recovery of 'the creative reality, the actual living quick itself*, so does this recovery depends on the ways in which this reality can be most immediately apprehended: 'the source of all life and knowledge is in man and woman, and the source of all living is in the interchange and meeting and mingling of these two'. It is not that sexual experience is 'the answer' to industrialism, or to its ways of thinking and feeling. On the contrary, Lawrence argues, the poisons of the *base forcing' have extended themselves into this. His clearest general exposition of this comes in the essay on Galsworthy, where he derides the proposition of *Passion*, and its related promiscuity, as alternatives to the emphasis on money or property which follows from men being 'only materially and socially conscious*. The idea of sex as a reserve area of feeling, or as a means of Byronic revolt from the conventions of money and property (a Forsyte turning into an anti Forsyte) , is wholly repugnant to Lawrence. People who act in this way are like all the rest of the modern middle-class rebels, not in rebellion at all; they are merely social beings behaving in an antisocial manner*. The real meaning of sex, Lawrence argues, is that it 'involves the whole of a human being*. The alternative to the "base forcing' into the competition for money and property is not sexual adventure, nor the available sexual emphasis, but again a return to the 'quick of self, from which whole relationships, including whole sexual relationships, may grow. The final emphasis, which all Lawrence's convincing explorations into the 'quick of self both illumine and realize, is his criticism of Industrial civilization: If only our civilization had taught us ... how to keep the ire of sex clear and alive, flickering or glowing or blazing in all its varying degrees of strength and communication, we might, all of us, have lived all our lives in love, which means we should be kindled and full of zest in all kinds of ways and for all kinds of things. Or again, as an adequate summary of the whole Venture into consciousness*: Our civilization . . . has almost destroyed the natural flow of common sympathy between men and men, and men and women. And it is this that I want to restore into life. the world of thought') that the examples which Tawney gives of this 'perversion' should be so startlingly relevant, a full generation later, to the practice of both our major political parties: When a Cabinet Minister declares that the greatness of this country depends upon the volume of its exports, so that France, which exports comparatively little, and Elizabethan England, which exported next to nothing, are presumably to be pitied as altogether inferior civilizations, that is Industrialism. It is the confusion of one minor department of Me with the whole of life. When the Press clamours that the one thing needed to make this island an Arcadia is productivity, and more productivity, and yet more productivity, that is Industrialism. It is the confusion of means with ends.7 Tawney's debt to Arnold, in this, will have been noted; as also, in another example, his debt to RusMn: So to those who clamour, as many now do, 'Produce! Produce!' one simple question may be addressed; 'Produce what?* Food, clothing, house-room, art, knowledge? By all means! But if the nation is scantily furnished with these things had it not better stop producing a good many others which fill shop windows in Regent Street? What can be more childish than to urge the necessity that productive power should be increased, if part of the productive power which exists already is misapplied? 8 In part, this observation rests on the traditional appeal for the rejection of 'illth* which RusKIn and Morris would have approved. But Tawney takes the argument an important stage further. It is not only the lack of purpose in society which distorts human effort; it is also the existence and the approval of inequality. It was in 1929 that Tawney ad dressed himself fully to this latter problem, in the lectures that were published as Equality. Here, once again, Tawney's starting point is Arnold, but as before he expands a moral observation into a detailed and practical argument, Tawney argues, basically, from the existence of economic crisis, and concludes that efforts to overcome this crisis in any lasting way are consistently brought to nothing by the fact of social inequality. He draws attention to the surprise of foreign observers at the emphasis on class in England, and continues: Here are these people, they (the observers) say, who, more than any other nation, need a common culture, for, more than any other, they depend on an economic system which at every turn involves mutual understanding and continuous cooperation, and who, more than any other, possess, as a result of their history, the materials by which such a common culture might be inspired. And, so far from desiring it, there is nothing, it seems, which they desire less. The foundations of a common culture, he insists, are economic; their condition is a large measure of equality. But to raise the question of equality in England is to encounter at once 'doleful voices and rashings to and fro'. The questioner will be told at once not only that the doctrine is poisonous, wicked and impracticable, but that in any case it is a 'scientific impossibility*. Tawney goes on: It is obvious that the word 'Equality' possesses more than one meaning, and that the controversies surrounding it arises partly, at least, because the same term is employed with different connotations. On the one hand, it may affirm that men are, on the whole, very similar in their natural endowments of character and intelligence. On the other hand, it may assert that, while they differ profoundly as individuals in capacity and character, they are equally entitled as human beings to consideration and respect. If made in the first sense, the assertion of human equality is clearly untenable. The acceptance of that conclusion, nevertheless, makes a somewhat smaller breach in equalitarian doctrines than is sometimes supposed, for such doctrines have rarely been based on a denial of it. When observers from the dominions, or from foreign countries, are struck by inequality as one of the special and outstanding characteristics of English social life, they do not mean that in other countries differences of personal quality are less important than in England. They mean, on the contrary, that they are more important, and that in England they tend to be obscured or obliterated behind differences of property and income, and the whole elaborate facade of a society that, compared with their own, seems stratified and hierarchical. Yet still, in England, the debate on equality is normally continued as if the proposition were absolute equality of character and ability. In fact, however: the equality which all these thinkers emphasize as desirable is not equality of capacity or attainment, but of circumstances, and institutions, and manner of Me. The inequality which they deplore is not inequality of personal gifts, but of the social and economic environment. Their view is that, because men are men, social institutions property rights, and the organization of industry, and the system of public health and education should be planned, as far as is possible, to emphasize and strengthen, not the class differences which divide, but the common humanity which unites them. Tawney adds two further arguments. First, that equality is not to be rejected on the grounds that human beings differ in their needs: 'equality of provision is not identity of pro vision*. Second (and in my view of the greatest importance), that in order to justify inequalities of circumstance or opportunity by reference to differences of personal quality, it is necessary to show that the differences in question are relevant to the inequalities. It is not an argument against women's suffrage that women are physically weaker than men, nor an argument for slavery that men differ in intelligence. Further, it is not an argument for economic inequality that 'every mother knows her children are not equal*: it has then to be asked 'whether it is the habit of mothers to lavish care on the strong and neglect the delicate'. Nor, finally, is it an argument for inequality that it is supported by 'economic laws'; these laws' are relative to circumstances and institutions, and these are determined by 'the values, preferences, interests and ideals which rule at any moment in a given society'. Much of the remainder of Equality is devoted to advocacy of Tawney's specific remedies; in particular, an extension of the social services, and the conversion of industry to a social function with the status and standards of a profession. It is difficult to disagree with the humanity of his arguments, but it is difficult also not to feel, as of much of the writing in this tradition, that although it recognizes what Tawney calls 'the lion in the path' it yet hopes that the path can be followed to the end by converting both traveller and lion to a common humanity. For Tawney, one of the noblest men of his generation, the attitude is evidently habitual The inequality and the avoidable suffering of contemporary society are subject, 'while men are men', to a moral choice; when the choice has been made, it is then only a matter of deliberate organization and collective effort. 'When the false gods depart', as he says in another metaphor, 'there is some hope, at least, of the arrival of the true/ Tawney, above all, is a patient exorcizer; he meets the false gods with irony, and appeals, meanwhile, over their heads to the congregation, in the accents of a confident humanism. Yet the irony is, at times, disquieting, although it accounts for much of the charm of his writing: A nation is not civilized because a handful of its members are successful in acquiring large sums of money and in persuading their fellows that a catastrophe will occur if they do not acquire it, any more than Dahomey was civilized because its king had a golden stool and an army of slaves, or Judea because Solomon possessed a thousand wives and imported apes and peacocks, and surrounded the worship of Moloch and Ashtoreth with an impressive ritual. This manner is very characteristic of his general works, and produces at times the sense of an uneasy combination between argument and filigree. The irony, one suspects, is defensive, as it was with Arnold, from whom in essentials it derives. It is not merely a literary device for good humoured acceptance, which seems incumbent on some Englishmen when they feel they are going against the grain of their society. It is also, one cannot help feeling, a device for lowering the tension when, however, the tension is necessary. It is a particular kind of estimate of the opposition to be expected, and it is, of course, in essentials, an underestimate. No believer in any god will be affected by the smiling insinuation of a missionary that the god's real name is Mumbo-Jumbo; he is altogether more likely merely to return the compliment. Tawney's manner before the high priests is uneasy. He seems to feel, as Arnold felt, that they are his kind of men, and will understand his language: if they do not, he has only to say it again. The spectacle contrasts uneasily and unfavourably with Tawney's manner in direct address beyond them: the steady exposition of his argument that contemporary society will move merely from one economic crisis to another unless it changes both its values and the system which embodies them. The manner of exposition occupies, fortunately, the bulk of his work. The discussion of 'Equality and Culture', which is obviously very important, is conducted in both moods, but we can, fairly, omit the apes and peacocks. His position is at the outset the traditional one: What matters to a society is less what it owns than what it is and how it uses its possessions. It is civilized in so far as its conduct is guided by a just appreciation of spiritual ends, in so far as it uses its material resources to promote the dignity and refinement of the individual human beings who compose it. Thus far, Tawney is saying what Coleridge or RusMn would approve. He continues, however: Violent contrasts of wealth and power, and an undiscriminating devotion to institutions by which such contrasts are maintained and heightened, do not promote the attainment of such ends, but thwart it. The new recognition Is just, and of Ms period. Tawney is concerned less with the defence of culture against industrialism than with the making of a 'common culture'. The main objection to this is the representative objection of Clive Bell: that culture depends on standards, and standards on a cultivated minority; a cultivated minority is not compatible with the pursuit of equality, which would merely be a levelling-down to mediocrity. Tawney's answer to this objection is interesting, although it is difficult to feel that he meets the point about levelling down' with more than a sidetracking device of argument. It is not really relevant to point out that England has already 'a. dead-level of law and order' and that this is generally approved. He observes, justly: Not all the ghosts which clothe themselves in metaphors are equally substantial, and whether a level is regrettable or not depends, after all, upon what is levelled.16 The argument, however, is about the levelling of standards, and on this, essentially, Tawney has nothing to say. The essence of his reply is more general. The maintenance of economic idea of a National Church. Under such precision, the ^hundred absurdities' may be seen for what they are. The observation is characteristic of the tone of the whole work. Eliot's enquiry springs from a crisis of feeling in September 1938: It was not a disturbance of the understanding: the events themselves were not surprising. Nor, as became increasingly evident, was our distress due merely to disagreement with the policy and behaviour of the moment. The feeling which was new and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation, which seemed to demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance and amendment; what had happened was something in which one was deeply implicated and responsible. It was not, I repeat, a criticism of the government, but a doubt of the validity of a civilization. Was our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so confident of its unexamined premisses, assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends? The manner of this question belongs, quite evidently, to the tradition. And the feelings of humiliation and implication remind one of earlier feelings in a different crisis: the re action to Chartism in the 1830 and 1840. A Christian community, Eliot argues, is one In which there is a unified religious-social code of behaviour*. Christian organization of society would be one In which the natural end of man virtue and well-being in community is acknowledged for all, and the supernatural end-beatitude for those who have eyes to see if. As things are, however, a great deal of the machinery of modern life is merely a sanction for un-Christian aims it is not only hostile to the conscious pursuit of the Christian life in the world by the few, but to the maintenance of any Christian society of the world. A Christian society will not be realized merely by a change of this 'machinery', yet any contemplation of it must lead to such problems as the hypertrophy of the motive of Profit into a social ideal, the distinction between the use of natural resources and their exploitation, the use of labour and its exploitation, the advantages unfairly accruing to the trader in contrast to the primary producer, the misdirection of the financial machine, the iniquity of usury, and other features of a commercialized society which must be scrutinized on Christian principles. We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may have to pay dearly. Industrialism, when it is unregulated, tends to create not a society but a mob. The religious-social complex on which a Christian organization of society may be built is thus weakened or destroyed: In an industrialized society like that of England, I am surprised that the people retain as much Christianity as it does. . . . In its religious organization, we may say that Christendom has remained fixed at the stage of development suitable to a simple agricultural and piscatorial society, and that modern material organization or if 'organization* sounds too complimentary, we will say 'complication' has produced a world for which Christian social forms are imperfectly adapted. In such a state of disintegration, or unbalance, material or physical improvement can be no more than secondary: A mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined. From Liberalism we are likely to inherit only the fruits of its disorder, while Democracy, in terms of which we tend to define our social ends, means too many things to mean anything at which a society can direct its whole life. In this criticism of Liberalism and Democracy, Eliot is essentially repeating Carlyle: that both are movements away from something, and that they may either arrive at something very different from what was intended, or else, in social terms, arrive at nothing positive at all. The Idea of a Christian Society, in its general effect, serves rather to distinguish a Christian idea of society from other ideas with which it has become entangled, or by which it is evidently denied, than to formulate anything in the nature of a programme. Eliot's business is to confess an attitude, and it is an essential part of this attitude that the formulation of programmes cannot have priority. He observes, for instance, in a passage which leads directly to the kind of enquiry undertaken in Notes towards the Definition of Culture: You cannot, in any scheme for the reformation of society, aim directly at a condition in which the arts will flourish: these activities are probably by-products for which we cannot deliberately arrange the conditions. On the other hand, their decay may always be taken as a symptom of some social ailment to be investigated. And he goes on to observe the steady Influence which operates silently in any mass society organized for profit, for the depression of standards of art and culture. The increasing organization of advertisement and propaganda or the influencing of masses of men by any means except through their intelligence is all against them. The economic system is against them; the chaos of ideals and confusion of thought in our large scale mass education is against them; and against them also is the disappearance of any class of people who recognize public and private responsibility of patronage of the best that is made and written. Yet even against this, and for the reason given, Eliot offers nothing that can be called, in ordinary terms, a proposal. It is from this point, rather, that he begins his penetrating reexamination of the idea of culture in his next book. In Notes towards the Definition of Culture, Eliot's essential conservatism is very much more evident; but I think we can assume, and many who now look to him might remember, that Ms more recent enquiry was only undertaken from the standpoint of that far-reaching criticism of contemporary society and contemporary social philosophy which The Idea of a Christian Society so outspokenly embodies. The Notes towards the Definition of Culture is a difficult work to assess. Although short, it differs very widely within itself both in method and in seriousness. At times, particularly in the Introduction and in the Notes on Education, the method is little more than an exposure of sentences which Eliot has found absurd or offensive, together with a brief running commentary which suddenly turns and assumes the status of argument. These parts of the book are the growling innuendoes of the correspondence columns rather than the prose of thought. The central chapters are very much more serious, and in parts of them there is that brilliance and nervous energy of definition which distinguishes Eliot's literary criticism. There is, however, an important difference from the literary criticism, of which a principal virtue was always the specificity, not only of definition, but of illustration. In these essays, on the other hand, the usefulness of the definitions is always in danger of breaking down because Eliot is unwilling or unable to illustrate. He makes, in the course of his argument, a number of important generalizations of a historical kind; but these are, at best, arbitrary, for there is hardly ever any attempt to demonstrate them. As a brief instance, this can be cited: You cannot expect to have all stages of development at once a civilization cannot simultaneously produce great folk poetry at one cultural level and Paradise Lost at another. The general point is clearly very important, and it is built into much of the subsequent theory. Yet, historically, one wants very much more discussion, with actual examples, before one can reasonably decide whether it is true. The example he gives is indeed almost calculated to raise these doubts; because the fact, for instance, of the coexistence, within a generation, of Paradise Lost and The Pilgrim's Progress is an obvious, and obviously difficult, case for any one who would think about levels of culture. It is not that one can be sure that Eliot is wrong, but that one can be even less sure that he is right. The substance of his general arguments is tentative and incidental, yet the manner in which they are communicated is often dogmatic to the point of insolence. For example, in his Introduction he writes: What I try to say is this: here are what I believe to be essential conditions for the growth and for the survival of culture. This is a fair claim, and the tone corresponds to what is in fact offered. But the sentence is at once followed by this: If they conflict with any passionate faith of the reader if, for instance, he finds it shocking that culture and egalitarianism should conflict, if it seems monstrous to him that anyone should have 'advantages of birth* I do not ask him to change his faith, I merely ask him to stop paying lip-service to culture. From trying to say and what I believe to be there is an abrupt movement to something very different: the assertion, backed by the emotive devices of passionate, shocking,monstrous and lip-service, that if we do not agree with Eliot's conditions we stand self-convicted of Indifference to culture. This, to say the least, is not proved; and in this jump from the academy to the correspondence column, which Eliot is far too able and experienced a writer not to know that he is making, there is evidence of other impulses behind this work than the patient effort towards definition; evidence, one might say, of the common determination to rationalize one's prejudices. Mr LasM, Mr Dent, Earl Attlee and the others in the pillory could hardly be blamed, at such moments, if they looked for Eliot not in the direction of the courtroom but alongside them, waiting to be pelted. The most important disadvantage which has followed from these faults in the book is that they have allowed it to be plausibly dismissed by those of us whose prejudices are different, while its points of real importance are evaded. The major importance of the book, in my view, lies in two of its discussions: first, its adoption of the meaning of culture as 'a whole way of life*, and the subsequent consideration of what we mean by levels' of culture within it; sec ond, its effort to distinguish between 'ilite* and 'class', and its penetrating criticism of the theories of an *6Iite'. It is an almost physical relief to reach these discussions after the foregoing irritability; yet they seem to have been little considered. The sense of 'culture' as *a whole way of life' has been most marked in twentieth-century anthropology and sociology, and Eliot, like the rest of us, has been at least casu ally influenced by these disciplines. The sense depends, in fact, on the literary tradition. The development of social anthropology has tended to inherit and substantiate the ways of looking at a society and a common life which had earlier been wrought out from general experience of industrialism. The emphasis on "a whole way of life' is continuous from Coleridge and Carlyle, but what was a personal assertion of value has become a general intellectual method. There have been two main results in ordinary thinking. First, we have learned something new about change: not only that it need not terrify us, since alternative institutions and emphases of energy have been shown to be practicable and satisfying; but also society. Certainly, in this later work although not, as we have seen, in The Idea of a Christian Society-he seems guilty of the worst kind of abstraction and failure to observe. The discussion of levels* of culture is, however, less vitiated by this failing than one would expect. In thinking of culture as *a whole way of life* Eliot emphasizes that a large part of a way of life is necessarily unconscious. A large part of our common beliefs is our common behaviour, and this is the main point of difference between the two meanings of 'culture'. What we sometimes call "culture' a religion, a moral code, a system of law, a body of work in the artsis to be seen as only a part of the conscious part of that 'culture' which is the whole way of Me. This, evidently, is an illuminating way of thinking about culture, although the difficulties which it at once exposes are severe. For, just as we could not assume a correspondence between function and ckss, so we can not assume a correspondence between conscious culture and the whole way of life. If we think of a simple, and stable, society, the correspondence is usually evident; but where there is a complication, and tension, and change, the matter is no longer one of levels, a given percentage of a uniform whole. The consciousness can be a false consciousness, or partly false, as I think Eliot showed in The Idea of a Christian Society. Where this is so, the maintenance of that consciousness, which is often likely to be to the Immediate interest of a particular class, is no longer, in any positive sense, a function. We should be wise, therefore, to distinguish between the general, theoretical relation between conscious culture and a whole way of life, and the actual relation or relations which may at any one time exist in society. In theory, the metaphor of levels' may be illuminating; in practice, because it derives from observation not only of a culture but of a system of social classes, and, further, because the degree of conscious culture is so easily confused with the degree of social privilege, it is misleading. It is evident, however, that in any conceivable society, the degrees of consciousness of even a common culture will widely vary. Eliot's emphasis on this is important to the extent that it forces a revision of some of the simpler theses of the democratic diffusion of culture. There are three points here. First, it now seems evident that the idea of not a community but an equality of culture a uniform culture evenly spread is essentially a product of primitivism (often expressed as mediaevalism) which was so important a response to the harsh complexities of the new industrial society. Such an idea ignores the necessary complexity of any T. S. ELIOT 255 community winch employs developed industrial and scientific techniques; and the longing for identity of situation and feeling, which exerts so powerful an emotional appeal in such writers as Morris, is merely a form of the regressive longing for a simpler, non-industrial society. In any form of society towards which we are likely to move, it now seems clear that there must be, not a simple equality (In the sense of identity) of culture; but rather a very complex system of specialized developments the whole of which will form the whole culture, but which will not be available, or conscious, as a whole, to any individual or group living within it. (This complex system has, of course, no necessary relation to a system of social classes based on economic discrimination.) Where this is realized, the idea of equal diffusion is commonly transferred to a few selected elements of the culture, usually the arts. It is certain, I think, that one can imagine a society in which the practice and enjoyment of the arts would be very much more widely diffused. But there are dangers, both to the arts and to the whole culture, if the diffusion of this abstracted part of the culture is planned and considered as a separate operation. One aspect of these dangers may be seen in the second point: that ideas of the diffusion of culture have normally been dominative in character, on behalf of the particular and finished ideal of an existing ckss. This, which I would call the Fabian tone in culture, is seen most clearly in an ideal which has been largely built into our educational system, of leading the unenlightened to the particular kind of light which the leaders find satisfactory for themselves. A particular land of work is to be extended to more persons, although, as a significant tiling, it exists as a whole in the situation in which it was produced. The dominative element appears in the conviction that the product will not need to be changed, that criticism is merely the residue of misunderstanding, and, finally, that the whole operation can be carried out, and the product widely extended, without radically changing the general situation. This may be summarized as the belief that a culture (in the specialized sense) can be widely extended without changing the culture (in the sense of *a whole way of life') within which it has existed. Eliot's arguments help us to see the limitations of these ideas, although he hardly presses the discussion home. What he develops has more relevance to the third point, which follows from the second, that the specialized culture cannot be extended without being changed. His words for 'change' are, of course, 'adulteration' and "cheapening'; and we must grant him, for his own purposes, his own valuations. Yet, while we may have other valuations, and see Variation* and 'enrichment* as at least equal possibilities with those which Eliot foresees, his emphasis that any extension involves change is welcome. Nothing is to be gained by supposing that the values of one way of life can be transferred, unchanged, to another; nor is it very realistic to suppose that a conscious selection of the values can be made-the bad to be rejected and the good to be transferred. Eliot is right in insisting that the thought about culture which has led to these positions is confused and shallow. Eliot, from his insistence on culture as *a whole way of life*, has valuably criticized the orthodox theories of the diffusion of culture, and there is, as he sees it, only one further obstacle to the acceptance of his general view. This obstacle is the theory, primarily associated with Mannheim, of the substitution of Elites for classes. Mannheim's argument may be seen, fundamentally, as an epilogue to the long nineteenth-century attempt to identify class with function. This took the form, either of an attempt to revive obsolete classes (as in Coleridge's idea of the clerisy) , or of an appeal to existing classes to resume their functions (Carlyle, Ruslan) , or of an attempt to form a new class, the civilizing minority (Arnold) . Mannheim, quite rightly, realizes that these attempts have largely failed. Further, he received the projects the idea of classes based on birth or money, and, emphasizing the necessary specialization and complexity of modem society, proposes to substitute for the old classes the new Elites, whose basis is neither birth nor money, but achievement. In practice, one can see our own society as a mixture of the old ideas of class and the new ideas of an 6Iite: a mixed economy, if one may put it in that way. The movement towards acceptance of the idea of elites has, of course, been powerfully assisted by the doctrines of opportunity in education and of the competitive evaluation of merit. The degree of necessary specialization, and the imperative requirement for quality in it, have also exerted a strong and practical pressure. Eliot's objections to Mannheim's theory can be summarized in one of his sentences: that 'it posits an atomic view of society*. 23 The phrase will be recognized as belonging to the tradition: the opposite to atomic is organic, a word on which (without more definition than is common) Eliot largely depends. His instinct, in this, is right: the theory of Elites is, essentially, only a refinement of social laissez faire. The doctrine of opportunity in education is a mere silhouette of the doctrine of economic individualism, with its emphasis on competition and 'getting-on'. The doctrine of equal opportunity, which appears to qualify this, was generous in its conception, but it is tied, in practice, to the same social end. The definition of culture as *a whole way of life* is vital at this point, for Eliot is quite right to point out that to limit, or to attempt to limit, the transmission of culture to a system of formal education is to limit a whole way of life to certain specialisms. If this Bruited programme is vigorously pressed, it is indeed difficult to see how it can lead to anything but disintegration. What will happen in practice, of course, when the programme is combined with a doctrine of opportunity (as it now largely Is) is the setting-up of a new Mnd of stratified society, and the creation of new kinds of separation. Orthodoxy, in this matter, is now so general and so confident that it is even difficult to communicate one's meaning when one says that a stratified society, based on merit, is as objectionable in every human term as a stratified society based on money or on birth. As it has developed, within an inherited economic system, the idea of such a society has been functionally authoritarian, and it has even (because of the illusion that its criteria are more absolute than those of birth or money, and can not be appealed against in the same way) a land of Utopian sanction, which makes criticism difficult or impossible. Eliot's objections to an 61ite society are, first, that it's common culture will be meagre, and, second, that the principle of Elites requires a change of persons in each generation, and that this change is bound to be effected without the important guarantee of any continuity wider than the Elite's own specialisms. The point rests again on the insistence that culture is s a whole way of life*, rather than certain special skills. Eliot argues that while an 61ite may have more of the necessary skills than a class, it will lack that wider social continuity which a class guaranteed. Mannheim himself has emphasized the importance of this continuity, but the idea of the selection and reselection of Elites seems to deny it, unless some new principle is introduced. Eliot's emphasis is on the whole content of a culture the special skills being contained, for their own health, within it. And certainly there is a good deal of evidence, from many parts of our educational and training systems, of the coexistence of fine particular skills with mediocre general sKUs: a state of affairs which has important effects, not only on the Elites, but on the whole common way of life. Eliot recognizes the need for 6Mtes, or rather for an Iite, and argues that, to ensure general continuity, we must retain social classes, and in particular a governing social class, with which the Site will overlap and constantly interact. This is Eliot's fundamentally conservative conclusion, for it is clear, when the abstractions are translated, that what he recommends is substantially what now exists, socially. He is, of course, led necessarily to condemn the pressure for a classless society, and for a national educational system. He believes, indeed, that these pressures have already distorted the national life and the values which this life supports. It is in respect of these recommendations (not always reached by the same paths) that lie now commands considerable attention and support. I have already indicated that I believe his criticism of certain orthodox ideas of 'culture' to be valuable, and I think that he has left the ordinary social-democratic case without many relevant answers. As a conservative thinker, he has succeeded in exposing the limitations of an orthodox liberalism' which has been all too generally and too complacent accepted. Where I find myself differing from him (and I differ radically) is not in the main in his critique of this liberalism'; it is rather in the present implications of considering culture as *a whole way of life*. It seems to me that Ms theoretical persistence in this view is matched only by his practical refusal to observe (a refusal Importance, here, is defined as the extent of the disturbance of other impulses in the individual's activities which the thwarting of the impulse involves.6 Such disturbance is disorganization. The adjustment of impulses is the process of organization. Right conduct then becomes a matter of such adjustment and such organization. Value is a question of the growth of order. When the question is transferred from the individual to the community, it can be answered in similar terms. The 'greatest happiness of the majority', in Bentham's term, becomes 'the highest degree of organization of the satisfaction of impulses'. A common standard will find some individuals above, some below it. The tensions thus set up should be resolved, not in terms of majorities, but of the actual range and degree of satisfaction which different possible systematizations of impulse yield. The danger of any public system is that it will waste and frustrate available energy. Social reform is a matter of liberation, through the Mad of organization described, al though the process wffl not be primarily conscious or planned. The importance of literature and the arts is that they offer supreme examples of such organization, and that in doing so they provide Values' (not prescriptions or messages, but examples of a necessary common process). It is through experience and attention to such values that the wider common reorganization can be initiated and maintained. It is in this sense that 'poetry can save us': it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos. Thus we return to Arnold's prescription of culture against anarchy, but both 'culture' and *the process of perfection' have been newly defined. Richards goes on from this theory of value to describe the psychology of the artist. Basically, the importance of the artist is that a wider area of experience is available to him than to the normal person. Or, to put it in another way, he is more capable of the kind of organization which has been described, and is therefore 'able to admit far more without confusion'. Yet his usefulness, in this, will depend upon his relative normality. The ways in which the artist will differ from the average will as a rule presupposes an immense degree of similarity. They will be further developments of organizations already well advanced in the majority. His variations will be confined to the newest, the most plastic, the least fixed part of the mind, the parts for which reorganization is most easy. Not all such variations can or ought to be generally followed. But often they will be significant advances which can serve as models for a general advance. Further, the existence of finely organized responses in the arts offers a continual standard by which what Richards calls the 'stock responses' can be seen and judged. At any time certain in complete adjustments, certain immature and inapplicable attitudes, can be fixed into formulas and widely suggested and diffused: The losses incurred by these artificial fixations of attitudes are evident. Through them the average adult is worse, not better adjusted to the possibilities of his existence than the child. He is even in the most important tilings functionally unable to face facts; do what he will he is only able to face fictions, fictions projected by his own stock responses. Against these stock responses the artist's internal and external conflicts are fought, and with them the popular writer's triumphs are made. The exploitation of these stock responses by commerciaLIzed art and literature, and by the cinema, is a notable fact of our own culture. While good art may serve the common process of finer organization, bad art will not only not serve it, but actively hinder it: The effects we are considering depend only upon the kind and degree of organization which is given to the experiences. If it is at the level of our own best attempts or above it (but not so far above as to be out of reach) we are refreshed. But if our own organization is broken down, forced to a cruder, a more wasteful level, we are depressed and temporarily incapacitated, not only locally but generally unless the critical task of diagnosis is able to restore equanimity and composure. On this attitude to good and bad literature, a whole subsequent critical and educational programme has been based. It remains to consider a final point made by Richards, about the social function of art. He takes the familiar theory of art as play and by redefining play returns art to a central position, instead of the marginal leisure-time' position which the description as play was meant to suggest The redefinition rests again on the criterion of organization. Art is play in the sense that in a fully developed man a state of readiness for action will take the place of action when the full appropriate situation for action is not present. Pky is the training of readiness for action, either in a special or in a general field. Art, in creating and offering us a situation, is in this sense experimental. In ordinary life a thousand considerations prohibit for most of us any complete working-out of our response; the range and complexity of the impulse-systems involved is less; the need for action, the comparative uncertainty and vagueness of the situation, the intrusion of accidental irrelevancies, inconvenient temporal spacing the action being too slow or too fast all these obscure the issue and prevent the full development of the experience. We have to jump to some rough and ready solution. But in the Imaginative experience* these obstacles are removed. Thus what happens here, what precise stresses, preponderances, conflicts, resolutions and intermanimations, what remote relationships between different systems of impulses arise, what before unapprehended and non executable connections are established, is a matter which, we see clearly, may modify all the rest of life.* The experience of Literature is thus a kind of training for general experience: training, essentially, in that capacity for organization which is man's only profitable response to his altered and dangerous condition. This summary of Richards's basic position serves to show, first, the degree to which he is an inheritor of the general tradition, and second, the extent to which, by offering a positive account, he has clarified certain of its contemporary issues. The clarification is real, as far as it goes, and its applications in criticism have been of major value. One of the most valuable points is Richards's return to that idea of the relative normality of the artist which Wordsworth had defined, but which later Romantic writing had rejected. Herbert Read also defines art as a 'mode of knowledge', and describes its social function in terms very similar to those of Richards. But Read, supported by Freud, reiterates that view of the artist's essential abnormality which as much as anything has denied art's social bearings. Read offers the model of three strata of the mind, with the artist as an example of a kind of 'fault* which exposes the strata to each other at unusual levels. In the matter of demonstrable psychology, our theories of art are still almost wholly speculative, but the crudeness of Freud's casual comment on the artist as 'neurotic* is sufficiently evident. Read's version of contact with deep levels of the mind through the "fault*, and of the actual making of art as an investment of this contact 'with superficial charms . . . lest the bare truth repel us', is similarly unsatisfactory. The whole concept of levels of the mind, even if restricted to consideration as a model, is more static than experience appears to require. If we think, rather, of moving patterns and relations, the question of Valuable derangement', and even of 'normality*, seems to be a limiting term. To separate creation and execution is the mark of the Romantic disintegration of 'art* into the separable qualities of 'imaginative truth* and 'skill*. On the whole, Richards's version of art as 'organization* both re stores the unity of conception and execution, and offers an emphasis which can be profitably investigated. We should add, however, that nearly all theoretical discussions of art since the Industrial Revolution have been crippled by the assumed opposition between art and the actual organization of society, which is important as the historical phenomenon that has been traced, but which can hardly be taken as an absolute. Individual psychology has been similarly limited by an assumption of opposition between individual and society which is in fact only a symptom of society's transitional disorganization. Until we have lived through this, we are not likely to achieve more than a limited theory of art, but we can be glad meanwhile that the starting point which has for so long misled us the artist's necessary abnormality is being gradually rejected in the memory, and almost wholly rejected, in terms of practical feeling, among a majority of actual artists. The renewed emphasis on communication is a valuable sign of our gradual recovery of community. Richards has had much that is useful to say about communication, but, in the general position within which this has been offered, there are, I think, two points of question. First, while what Richards says about the extension and refinement of organization is obviously useful, and corresponds in a general way to one's actual experience of literature, there is an element of passivity in his idea of the relationship between reader and work which might in the end be disabling. What one most wants to know about this process is the detail of its practical operation, at the highest and most difficult levels. The point can be illustrated, al though this does not in itself affect the theory, from Richards's own criticism. He is always very good at the demonstration of a really crude organization, as in the Wilcox sonnet discussed in Principles. But he has not offered enough really convincing examples of the intense realization of a rich or complex organization, which in general terms he has often described. He often notes the complexity, but the discussion that follows is usually a kind of return on itself, a return to the category 'complexity*, rather than an indication of that ultimate refinement and adjustment which is his most positive general value. One has the sense of a manipulation of objects which are separate from the reader, which are out there in the environment. Further, and perhaps as a consequence of this, there is at times a kind of servility towards the literary establishment. This seems an astonishing thing to say about the writer who in Practical Criticism did more than anyone else to penetrate the complacency of literary academicism. So much, indeed, is willingly and gratefully granted. But the idea of literature as a training-ground for life is servile. Richards's account of the inadequacy of ordinary response when compared with the adequacy of literary response is a cultural symptom rather than a diagnosis. Great literature is indeed enriching, liberating and refining, but man is always and everywhere more than a reader, has indeed to be a great deal else before he can even become an adequate reader; unless indeed he can persuade himself that literature, as an ideal sphere of heightened living, will under certain cultural circumstances operate as a substitute. "We shall then be thrown back upon poetry. It is capable of saving us/ The very form of these sentences indicates the essential passivity which I find disquieting. Poetry, in this construction, is the new anthropomorphic. Richards's general account may indeed be an adequate description of man's best use of literature, and such a use, if it comes to be articulated, will show itself in major criticism. But one has the feeling that Richards, overwhelmed, has picked out from a generally of learning. We go also, if we are wise, to the experience that is otherwise recorded: in institutions, manners, customs, family memories. Literature has a vital importance because it is at once a formal record of experience, and also, in every work, a point of intersection with the common language that is, in its major bearings, differently perpetuated. The recognition of culture as the body of all these activities, and of the ways in which they are perpetuated and enter into our common living, was valuable and timely. But there was always the danger that this recognition would become not only an abstraction but in fact an isolation. To put upon literature, or more accurately upon criticism, the responsibility of controlling the quality of the whole range of personal and social experience, is to expose a vital case to damaging misunderstanding. English is properly a central matter of all education, but it is not, clearly, a whole education. Similarly, formal education, however humane, is not the whole of our gaining of the social experience of past and present. In his proposals on education (in Education and the University) Leavis makes, very clearly, the former point, and few men have done more to extend the depth and range of literary studies, and to relate them to other interests and other disciplines. But the damaging formulation of the nature of the minority re mains. Leavis might have written: The minority capable not only of appreciating Shakespeare, the English common law, Lincoln Cathedral, committee procedure, PurceE, the nature of wage labour, Hogarth, Hooker, genetic theory, Hume (to take major instances) but of recognizing, either their successors, or their contemporary changes and implications, constitute the consciousness of the race (or of a branch of it) at a given time, If he had done so (while apologizing for the arbitrariness of the selection) , his claim that 'upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the Best human experience of the past' would have been, in some degree, more substantial. It is a matter not so much of theory as of emphasis. If, however, he had entered such dangerous lists, the whole question of the nature of the minority, of its position in society, and of its relations with other human beings, might have been forced more clearly into the open. The difficulty about the idea of culture is that we are continually forced to extend it, until it becomes almost identical with our whole common life. When this is realized, the problems to which, since Coleridge, we have addressed ourselves are in fact transformed. If we are to meet them honestly, we have to face very fine and very difficult adjustments. The assumption of a minority, followed by its definition in one's own terms, seems in practice to be a way of stopping short of this transformation of the problems, and of our own consequent adjustments. The particular view of what is valuable is taken, in experience, as a whole; the fixed point is determined; and, as in the literary criticism, a myth, a significant construction, is persuasively communicated. Leavis's myth seems to me rather more powerful than most of its competitors, but there is a point in its propagation when we begin to see its edges, and the danger, then, is that in fact we shall undervalue it. For in fact, and against what has previously been said, the myth is to a considerable extent adequate for the purposes to which Leavis actually passes. For he is faced, un like Arnold, with the twentieth-century developments of the press, advertising, popular fiction, films, broadcasting, and that whole way of living for which Middletown (from the Lynds* study of an Illinois town) becomes his symbol. The critics who first formulated the idea of culture were faced with industrialism, and with its causes and consequences in thinking and feeling. Leavis, in 1930, faced not only these but certain ways of thinking and feeling embodied in immensely powerful institutions which threatened to overwhelm the ways that he and others valued. His pamphlet, given its reference to Richards, is the effective origin of that practical criticism of these institutions which has been of growing general importance in the last quarter-century. The kind of training indicated in Culture and Environment, which is an educational manual, has been widely imitated and followed, so that if Leavis and his colleagues had done only this it would be enough to entitle them to major recognition. It is not, of course, that the threat has been removed; indeed it may even be said to have grown in magnitude. 'That deliberate exploitation ol the cheap response which characterises our civilization* is still very widely evident. But it is not negligible to have instituted a practical method of training in discrimination a method which has been widely applied and can yet be greatly extended in our whole educational system. Because the exploitation is deliberate, and because its techniques are so powerful, the educational training has to be equally deliberate. And the magnificent contrasting vitality of literature is an essential control and corollary. The Leavis who promoted this kind of work is the Leavis of detailed judgements. It is obvious, however, that the ways of feeling and thinking embodied in such institutions as the popular press, advertising and the cinema cannot finally be criticized without reference to a way of life. The questions, again, insistently extend. Is the deliberate exploitation a deliberate pursuit of profit, to the neglect or contempt of other considerations? Why, if this is so, should cheapness of expression and response be profitable? If our civilization is a 'mass-civilization*, without discernible respect for quality and seriousness, by what means has it become so? What, in fact, do we mean by 'mass*? Do we mean a democracy dependent on universal suffrage, or a culture dependent on universal education, or a reading public dependent on universal literacy? If we find the products of mass-civilization so repugnant, are we to identify the suffrage or the education or literacy as the agents of decay? Or, alternatively, do we mean by mass-civilization an industrial civilization, dependent on machine production and the factory system? Do we find institutions like the popular press and advertising to be the necessary consequences of such a system of production? Or, again, do we find both the machine-civilization and the institutions to be products of some great change and decline in human minds? Such questions, which are the common places of our generation, inevitably underlie the detailed judgements. And Leavis, though he has never claimed to offer a theory of such matters, has in fact, in a number of ways, committed himself to certain general attitudes which amount to a recognizable attitude towards modern history and society. The attitude will be quickly recognized by those who have followed the growth of the idea of culture. Its main immediate sources are D. H. Lawrence (whose relations to the earlier tradition have been noted) and the books of George Start ('George Bourne'), especially Change in the Village and The Wheelwright's Shop Walks which, while original and valuable in their observation, go back, essentially, to Cobbett. A characteristic general statement by Leavis and Thompson is the following: Sturt speaks of 'the death of Old England and of the replacement of the more primitive nation by an "organized" modem state'. The Old England was the England of the organic community, and in what sense it was more primitive than the England that has replaced it needs pondering. But at the moment what we have to consider is the fact that the organic community has gone; it has nearly disappeared from memory that to make anyone, however educated, realize what it was is commonly a difficult undertaking. Its destruction (in the West) is the most important fact of recent history it is very recent indeed. How did this momentous change this vast and terrifying disintegration take place in so short a time? The process of the change is that which is commonly described as Progress. 3 Several points in this are obscure: in particular, the exact weight of the adjective organic and its apparent contrast with organized (see note at the end of this chapter). But it seems clear, from the examples quoted in support, that the 'momentous change' is the Industrial Revolution. The 'organic community* is a rural community: The more 'primitive* England represented an animal naturalness, but distinctively human. Sturfs villagers expressed their human nature, they satisfied their human needs, in terms of the natural environment; and the things they made cottages, bams, risks, and waggons together with their relations with one another constituted a human environment, and a subtlety of adjustment and adaptation, as right and inevitable In contrast with this way of life is set the urban, suburban, mechanized modernity, on which such comments as these are possible: The modem labourer, the modern clerk, the modern factory-hand live only for their leisure, and the result is that they are unable to live in their leisure when they get it. Their work is meaningless to them, merely something they have to do in order to earn a livelihood, and consequently when their leisure comes It is meaningless, and all the uses they can put it to come almost wholly under the head of what Stuart Chase calls 'decreation*. The modern citizen no more knows how the necessities of life come to him (he is quite out of touch, we say, with 'primary production*) than he can see his own work as a significant part in a human scheme (he is merely earning wages or making profits). 6 The points are familiar, but it is impossible to feel them to be adequate. The version of history is myth in the sense of conjecture, for while on such points as the adaptation to natural environment shown in building and tools, or on a related point about such traditional crafts as the carpenters, it is possible, on the whole, to agree, it is a very different matter to assert, for instance, that the Human environment . . . their relations with one another' was in fact 'right and inevitable'. This is, I think, a surrender to a characteristically industrialist, or urban, nostalgia a late version of mediaevalism, with its attachments to an 'adjusted' feudal society. If there is one thing certain about 'the organic community*, it is that it has always gone. Its period, in the contemporary myth, is the rural eighteenth century; but for Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (i77)> it had gone; for Crabbe, in The Village ( 1783) , it was hardly 'right and inevitable'; for Cobbett, in 1820, it had gone since his boyhood (that is to say, it existed when Goldsmith and Crabbe were writing) ; for Start it was there until late in the nineteenth century; for myself (if I may be permitted to add this, for I was bom into a village, and into a family of many generations of farm-labourers) it was there or the aspects quoted, the inherited skills of work, the slow traditional talk, the continuity of work and leisure in the 1930's. What is being observed, and what, when rightly weighed, is important, is an important tradition of social and productive experience that has grown out of certain long-persistent conditions. It is useful to contrast this with the difficulties of comparable richness of adjustment to the urban and factory conditions of which experience is so much shorter. But it is misleading to make this contrast without making others, and it is foolish and dangerous to exclude from the so-called organic society the penury, the petty tyranny, the disease and mortality, the ignorance and frustrated intelligence which were also among its ingredients. These are not material disadvantages to be set against spiritual advantages; the one thing that such a community teaches is that life is whole and continuous it is the whole complex that matters. That which is commonly described as Progress' saved spirit and blood. The basic intellectual fault of such 'natural growth', as in 'culture', with particular reference to slow change and adaptation; to reject 'mechanist' and 'materialist' versions of society; to criticize industrialism, in favour of a society 'in close touch with natural processes' (i.e. agriculture). The range is too wide and too tempting to be ordinarily scanned, and the word is now commonly used by writers of wholly opposed opinions: e.g. Marxists stressing 'a whole, formed State'; Conservatives 'a slowly adapting society and tradition'; critics of machine-production *a predominantly agricultural society'; Bertrand Russell, on the other hand, *a predominantly industrial society': When we are exhorted to make society "organize", it is from machinery that we shall necessarily derive our models, since we do not know how to make society a living animal' (Prospects of Industrial Civilization) . At the very least, this complication indicates the need for caution in using the word without immediate definition. Perhaps all societies are organic (i.e. formed wholes) , but some are more organic (agricultural/industrial than others. MARXISM AND MARX Marx was the contemporary of Ruskin and George Eliot, but the Marxist interpretation of culture did not become widely effective in England until the 'thirties of our own century. William Morris had linked the cause of ait with the cause of socialism, and his socialism was of the revolutionary Marxist kind. But the terms of Morris's position were older, an inheritance from the general tradition which came down to him through Ruskin. As he told the Northumberland miners, in 1887: Even supposing he did not understand that there was a definite reason in economics, and that the whole system could be changed ... he for one would be a rebel against it. 1 The economic reasoning, and the political promise., came to him from Marxism; the general rebellion was in older terms. Marx himself outlined, but never fully developed, a cultural theory. His casual comments on literature, for example, are those of a learned, intelligent man of his period, rather than what we now know as Marxist literary criticism. On occasion, his extraordinary social insight extends a comment, but one never feels that he is applying a theory. Not only is the tone of his discussion of these matters normally undogmatic, but also he is quick to restrain, whether in literary theory or practice, what he evidently regarded as an over-enthusiastic, mechanical extension of his political, economic and historical conclusions to other kinds of fact. Engels, though habitually less cautious, is very similar in tone. This is not to say, of course, that Marx lacked confidence in the eventual extension of such conclusions, or in the filling-in of his outline. It is only that his genius recognized difficulty and complexity, and that Ms personal discipline was a discipline to fact. The outline which Marx drew, and which has proved to be so fruitful and Important, appears most clearly in the Preface to Ms Critique of Political Economy (1859) : In the social production wMch men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production cor respond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on wMch rise legal and political superstructures and to wMch correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence,, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness. . . . With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense super structure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production wMch can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or phflosopMc in short, ideological forms in wMch men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. The distinction mentioned is obviously of great importance. Even if we accept the formula of structure and superstructure, we have Maxifs word that changes in the latter are necessarily subject to a different and less precise mode of investigation. The point is reinforced by the verbal qualifications of Ms text: "determines the general character"; 'more or less rapidly transformed'. The superstructure is a matter of human consciousness, and this is necessarily very complex, not only because of its diversity, but also because it is always historical: at any time, it includes continuities from the past as well as reactions to the present. Marx indeed at times regards ideology as a false consciousness: a system of continuities which change has in fact undermined. He writes in The Eighteenth Brumaire; Upon the several forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, a whole superstructure is reared of various and peculiarly shaped feelings, Illusions, habits of thought, and conceptions of life. The whole class produces and shapes these out of its material foundation and out of the corresponding social conditions. The individual unit to whom they flow through tradition and education may fancy that they constitute the true reasons for and premises of his conduct. If then a part of the superstructure is mere rationalization, the complexity of the whole is further increased. This recognition of complexity is the first control in any valid attempt at a Marxist theory of culture. The second control, more controversial, is an understanding of the formula of structure and superstructure. In Marx this formula is definite, but perhaps as no more than an analogy. Certainly when we come to this comment by Engels there is need to reconsider: According to the materialist conception of history, the determining element in history is ultimately the production and reproduction in real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. If therefore somebody twists this into the statement that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms it into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure political forms of the class struggle and its consequences, constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc. forms of law and then even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants: political, legal, and philosophical theories, religious ideas and their further development into systems of dogma also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements, in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (i.e. of things and events whose inner connection is so remote or so impossible to prove that we regard it as absent and can neglect it) the economic element finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history one chose would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree. Here again the emphasis falls on complexity, but the result of the emphasis is a lessening of the usefulness of the formula which Marx used. Structure and superstructure, as terms of an analogy, express at once an absolute and a fixed relationship. But the reality which Marx and Engels recognize is both less absolute and less clear. Engels virtually introduces three levels of reality: the economic situation; the political situation; the state of theory. Yet any formula in terms of levels, as in terms of structure and superstructure, does less than justice to the factors of movement which it is the essence of Marxism to realize. We arrive at a different model, in which reality is seen as a very complex field of movement, within which the economic forces finally reveal themselves as the organizing element. Engels uses the word 'interaction*, but this does not imply any withdrawal of the claims for economic primacy. The point is clearly made by Plekhanov, in The Development of the Monist Theory of History ( 1895) : Interaction exists * . . nevertheless, by itself it explains nothing. In order to understand interaction, one must ascertain the attributes of the interacting forces and these attributes cannot find their ultimate explanation in the fact of interaction, however much they may change thanks to that fact. . . . The qualities of the interacting forces, the attributes of the social organisms influencing one another, are explained in the long run by the cause we already know: the economic structure of these organisms, which is determined by the state of their productive forces. Plekhanov concedes that there are 'particular laws . . in the development of human thought'; Marxists will not, for example, identify 'the laws of logic with the laws of the circulation of commodities*. All that a Marxist will deny is that the laws of thought' are the prime mover of intellectual development; the prime mover is economic change. He continues: Sensitive but weak-headed people are indignant with the theory of Marx because they take its first word to be its last. Marx says: in explaining the subject, let us see in what mutual relations people enter under the influence of objective necessity. Once these relations are known, it will be possible to ascertain how human self-consciousness develops under their influence. . . . Psychology adapts itself to economy. But this adaptation is a complex process ... on the one hand the Iron laws' of movement of the 'string 7 ... on the other, on the 'string* and precisely thanks to its movement, there grows up the 'garment of life' of ideology. 6 Evidently Plekhanov is searching here (not altogether successfully) for a model more satisfactory than structure and superstructure. He is aware of Marx's reservation about the study of ideas, and admits: Much, very much, is still obscure for us in this sphere. But there is even more that is obscure for the idealists, and yet more for eclectics, who however never understand the significance of the difficulties they encounter, imagining that they will always be able to settle any question with the help of their notorious 'interaction'. In reality, they never settle anything, but only hide behind the back of the difficulties they encounter. 7 There is then an interaction, but this cannot be positively understood unless the organizing force of the economic element is recognized. A Marxist theory of culture will recognize diversity and complexity, will take account of continuity within change, will allow for chance and certain limited autonomies, but, with these reservations, will take the facts of the economic structure and the consequent social relations as the guiding string on which a culture is woven, and by following which a culture is to be understood. This, still an emphasis rather than a substantiated theory, is what Marxists of our own century received from their tradition. n Marxist writing in England in the last thirty years has been very mixed in both quality and occasion. The political writing of the 'thirties was primarily a response to actual conditions in England and Europe, rather than a conscious development of Marxist studies. The conditions justified the response, even where it fell short of adequacy. But the result was that many English readers made their first acquaintance with Marxist theory in writings that were in fact local and temporary, both in affiliation and intention. It has of course been possible to good art can be produced in the struggle as well as in the success, which English Marxists, for obvious reasons, seem to wish to establish? The point is only of general interest in its bearings upon the basic Marxist position. Morris's 'master-process', which Thompson criticizes, is surely Marx's 'real foundation', which 'determines consciousness'. Engels spoke of 'the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the combatants"; surely, on a Maoist reading, art is one of these reflexes, Such reflexes, Engels said, 'exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form*. 'But only the form/13 insists Ralph Fox, in The Novel and the People, another Marxist view of literature. In what Marxist sense, then, has art this 'active agency in changing human beings and society as a whole? Marx and Engels did not deny the effect of the 'reflexes' back upon the whole situation, but that one of the marts might act to change 'human beings and society as a whole' is hardly consistent with their kind of emphasis. That art has this function is, however, a commonplace of the Romantic attitude: the poet as legislator. One had understood from West, however, that this was an idealist attitude based on an ignorance of social reality. It certainly seems relevant to ask English Marxists who have interested themselves in the arts whether this is not Romanticism absorbing Marx, rather than Marx transforming Romanticism. It is a matter of opinion which one would prefer to happen. Yet, in one way or another, the situation will have to be clarified. Either the arts are passively dependent on social reality, a proposition which I take to be that of mechanical materialism, or a vulgar misinterpretation of Marx. Or the arts, as the creators of consciousness, determine social reality, the proposition which the Romantic poets sometimes advanced. Or finally, the arts, while ultimately dependent, with everything else, on the real economic structure, operate in part to reflect this structure and its consequent reality, and in part, by affecting attitudes towards reality, to help or hinder the constant business of changing it. I find Marxist theories of culture confused because they seem to me, on different occasions and in different writers, to make use of all these propositions as the need serves. It is clear that many English writers on culture who are also, politically, Marxists seem primarily concerned to make out a case for its existence, to argue that it is important, against a known reaction to Marxism which had established the idea that Marx, with his theory of structure and superstructure, had diminished the value hitherto accorded to intellectual and imaginative creation. Certainly there has been a quite shocking ignorance of what Marx wrote among those who have been prepared to criticize him, and the term 'superstructure' has been bandied about, as a kind of swear word, with wholly ridiculous implications. Political prejudice, obviously, has played its part in this. Yet I do not see how it can be denied that Marx did in one sense diminish the value of such work: not that he failed to respect it, and to consider it a great and important human achievement, but he denied, what had hitherto been commonly believed, that it was this kind of work that decided human development: *it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their existence determines their consciousness*. The shock of this, to thinkers and artists who had been accustomed to think of themselves as the pioneers of humanity, was real; it was a change of status comparable to that implied for men generally by Darwin. Much of the subsequent development of Marxism, it would seem, has been determined, in the matter of culture, by this reaction. It had to be shown that Marxists gave a high value to culture, although this proof that culture was important seemed, to other thinkers at least, unnecessary. It remains surprising to others differently trained, that the normal Marxist book on, say, literature begins with a proof that literature is valuable: this had never seemed to be in any question, and one is reminded of Mill making the same point to the Utilitarians. But, while some of this writing can only be understood in such terms, a theory of culture was, of course, necessary, to the extent that Marxism became a major interpretative and active movement. Not only, it was thought, had past and present culture to be interpreted, in Marxist terms, but also (and this has been very prevalent, although whether it is altogether Marxist is doubtful) future culture had to be predicted. In England, this work has been mainly done in relation to literature, and we must consider its nature. The normal theoretical beginning is from the nature of language, as here in West: Language . . . grew as a form of social organization. Literature as art continues that growth. It Hives language; it carries on the social activity of which language in its very existence is the creation and the creator.14 Here we are at once involved in the extremely complicated question of the origins of language. West relies on Noire, Paget and Marr; Caudwell, in Illusion and "Reality, on assertion, which seems to derive from Darwin via Paget, but also from de Laguna, Linguistic theory is at once very specialized and very controversial, and the question of origins is necessarily to some extent speculative. A general stress on the social character of language can be readily accepted, and it would seem that, in practice, language does operate as a form of social organization, and that what it represents is an activity rather than a mere deposit. But the end of West's argument is already assumed in the special and extremely controversial scenes in which he understands 'organization* and 'activity'. He continues: the source of value in the work of literature is the social energy and activity which makes the writer's vision a continuation of the development of the power to see, his use of language a continuation of ... the power to speak; and not merely the consumer's use of what society has already produced. Our perception of that value is the stimulation in us of the same social energy and activity. 15 This is saying much less than it seems to say. I cannot imagine anyone whom the middle phrases would surprise. And again, the end of the argument is assumed in the form of words. For West can now continue: The value of literature springs from the fact that it continues and changes the organization of social energy; we perceive value through the awakening of the same kind of energy in ourselves. 16 And from this it is easy to identify valuable literature with that which proceeds from participation in 'the most active group and tendency of his time', and then, in contemporary terms, with the 'most creative movement . . . socialism'. 'Consequently, the criticism of our lives, by the test of whether we are helping forward the most creative movement in our society, is the only effective foundation of the criticism of literature.17 From this it is only a step (although West, to do him justice, does not take it, insisting on the reality of aesthetic judgement) to the kind of literary criticism which has made Marxism notorious: Is this work socialist or not in tend ency? is it helping forward the most creative movement in society?' where literature is defined solely in terms of its political affiliations. Marxists, more than anyone else, need to repudiate this land of end-product, in practice as firmly as in theory. But one can see how a potentially valuable argument is distorted, throughout, by an assumed need to arrive at this kind of conclusion, or at one resembling it. It is a conclusion, moreover, with which there seems no need for Marx to be saddled. Literature is quite obviously, in the general sense, a social activity, and value does seem to lie in the writer's access to certain kinds of energy which appear and can be discussed in directly literary terms (that is to say, as an intention that has become language), but which, by general agreement, have a more-than-Literary origin, and lie in the whole complex of a writer's relations with reality. It is the identification of this energy with participation in a particular kind of social or political activity which is, to say the least, not proven. The positive evidence, where this kind of energy is manifest, suggests no such simple equation. Christopher Caudwell remains the best-known of these English Marxist critics, but his influence is curious. His theories and outlines have been widely learned, although in fact he has little to say, of actual literature, that is even interesting. It is not only that it is difficult to have confidence in the literary qualifications of anyone who can give his account of the development of mediaeval into Elizabethan drama,18 or who can make his paraphrase of the 'sleep* line from Macbeth, 1 but that for the most part his discussion is not even specific enough to be wrong. On the other hand, he is immensely prolific of ideas, over an unusually wide field of interest. It is now rather difficult to know which of these ideas may properly be described as Marxist. A recent controversy among English Marxists, on the value of CaudwelTs work, revealed an extraordinary difference of opinion, ranging from George Thomson's view that Illusion and Reality is 'the first comprehensive attempt to work out a Marxist theory of art', 20 with the implication of major success, to J. D. Denial's conclusion: It is largely on account of his use of the language of popular science that CaudwelTs work has had, and still has, such an appeal to intellectuals, particularly to literary intellectuals.21 Bernal adds that the formulations in CaudwelTs books are those of contemporary bourgeois scientific philosophy . . . and not those of Marxism. 22 This is a quarrel which one who is not a Marxist will not attempt to resolve. It is worth noting, however, that the hub of the Marxist controversy about Caudwell is very much the problem that has been discussed in the preceding pages. It is a matter of some importance that a number of writers, convinced of the economic and political usefulness of Marxism, have, in their attempts to account for the work of the 'superstructure*, and in particular for the imaginative work of the arts, turned with some consistency to what other Marxists describe as an 'idealist muddle'. The difficulty comes down to one major point, which may be introduced by CaudwelLs definition of the value of art: The value of art to society is that by it an emotional adaptation is possible. Man's instincts are pressed in art against the altered mould of reality, and by a specific organization of the emotions thus generated, there is a new attitude, an adaptation. 23 The process of this, in the artist, is thus described: The artist is continually besieged by new feelings as yet unformulated, he continually attempts to grasp beauties and emotions not yet known; a tension between tradition and experience is constantly felt in his heart. Just as the scientist is the explorer of new realms of outer reality; the artist continually discovers new kingdoms of the heart. Both therefore are explorers, and necessarily therefore share a certain loneliness. But if they are individualists, it is not because they are non-social, but precisely because they are performing a social task. They are non-social only in this sense, that they are engaged in dragging into the social world realms at present non-social and must therefore have a foot in both worlds. 24 What these two worlds are, in Caldwell's view, is the basic controversy. In Illusion and Reality, he wrote: The link between science and art, the reason they can live in the same language, is this: the subject of action is the same as the subject of cognition the genotype. The object of action is the same as the object of cognition external reality. Since the genotype is a part of reality, although it finds itself set up against another part of It, the two interact; there is development; man's thought and man's society have a history. 25 It would certainly seem, at first sight, that this version of the 'genotype* interacting 'superstructure', not as the terms of a suggestive analogy, but as descriptions of reality, the errors naturally follow. Even if the terms are seen as those of an analogy, they need, as I have tried to suggest, amendment. One practical result of this kind of Maoist interpretation of the past can be seen in the persistent attempts to define the culture of the socialist future. If you get into the habit of thinking that a bourgeois society produces, in a simple and direct way, bourgeois culture, then you are likely to think that a socialist society will produce, also simply and directly, a socialist culture, and you may think it incumbent on you to say what it will be like. As a matter of fact, most of the speculation about the 'socialist culture' of the future has been no more than a Utopian habit; one cannot take it very seriously. But the point became practical in Russia, where, for example, the kind of literature appropriate to the new society has been commonly defined in advance, as an authoritative prescription. If there is a habit of thinking of the relation between literature and society as simple and direct, such a procedure seems plausible, a campaign for 'socialist realism' seems plausible, and of course literature of a kind, in response to the campaign, will always be got. But, if we are to agree with Marx that 'existence determines consciousness*, we shall not find it easy to prescribe any particular consciousness in advance, unless, of course (this is how in theory it is usually done) the prescribers can somehow identify themselves with 'exist ence'. My own view is that if, in a socialist society, the basic cultural skills are made widely available, and the channels of communication widened and cleared, as much as possible has been done in the way of preparation, and what then emerges will be an actual response to the whole reality, and so valuable. The other way can be seen in these words of Lenin: Every artist ... has a right to create freely according to his ideals, independent of anything. Only, of course, we communists cannot stand with our hands folded and let chaos develop in any direction it may. We must guide this process according to a plan and form its results.29 There is no *of course' about it, and the growth of consciousness is cheapened (as in the mechanical descriptions of the past) by being foreseen as 'chaos'. Here, it is not ultimately a question of wise or unwise, free or totalitarian, policy; it is, rather, a question of inadequacy in the theory of culture. The point can be put, finally, on a wider basis. Modem communist practice rests to a very large degree on Lenin, and it can be argued, in this matter of the development of consciousness, that Lenin is inconsistent with Marx. Lenin wrote, for instance: The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness. 30 The working-class movement, unable to develop an ideology for itself , will be 'captured' either by bourgeois ideology* or by socialist ideology, which latter is itself created by bourgeois intellectuals. So much depends, here, on the ways in which Ideology' and 'consciousness* are used, but (i) if Lenin seriously and constantly maintained that the working class cannot create a socialist ideology, Marx's account of the relation between class and ideology, and between existence and consciousness, cannot easily be maintained; (ii) if the 'bourgeois intelligentsia', working alone, can create 'socialist ideology', the relation between 'existence* and 'consciousness' has again to be redefined; (iii) if the working people are really in this helpless condition, that they alone cannot go beyond 'trade-union consciousness' (that is, a negative reaction to capitalism rather than a positive reaction towards socialism) , they can be regarded as 'masses' to be captured, the objects rather than the subjects of power. Almost anything can then be justified. It is not easy to discover any single judgement on these questions which one can take as finally and authentically Marxist. The point is vital, for it would seem to lie at the root of a number of differences between the spirit of Marxist criticism and certain observable aspects of communist policy. We are interested in Marxist theory because socialism and communism are now important. We shall, to the degree that we value its stimulus, continue to look for its clarification in the field of culture as a whole. GEORGE ORWELL It is not so much a series of books, it is more like a world/ 1 Tills is Orwell, on Dickens. It is not so much a series of books, it is more like a case/ This, today, is Orwell himself. We have been using him, since his death, as the ground for a general argument, but this is not mainly an argument about ideas, it is an argument about mood. It is not that he was a great artist, whose experience we have slowly to receive and value. It is not that he was an important thinker, whose ideas we have to interpret and examine. His interest lies almost wholly in his frankness. With us, he inherited a great and humane tradition; with us, he sought to apply it to the contemporary world. He went to books, and found in them the details of virtue and truth. He went to experience, and found in it the practice of loyalty, tolerance and sympathy. But, in the end, it was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. 2 The dust is part of the case: the caustic dust carried by the vile wind. Democracy, truth, art, equality,, culture: all these we carry in our heads, but, in the street, the wind is everywhere. The great and humane tradition is a kind of wry joke; in the books it served, but put them down and look around you. It is not so much a disillusion, it is more like our actual world. The situation is paradox: this kind of tradition, this kind of dust. We have made Orwell the figure of this paradox: in reacting to him we are reacting to a common situation. England took the first shock of industrialism and its consequences, and from this it followed, on the one hand, that the humane response was early, fine and deep the making of a real tradition; on the other hand that the material constitution of what was criticized was built widely into all our lives a powerful and committed reality. The interaction has been a long, slow and at times desperate. A man who lives it on his own senses is subject to extraordinary pressures. Orwell lived it, and frankly recorded it: this is why we attend to him. At the same time, although the situation is common, Orwell's response was Ms own, and has to be distinguished. Neither his affiliations, his difficulties nor Ms disillusion need be taken as prescriptive. In the end, for any proper understanding, it is not so much a case, it is a series of books. The total effect of Orwell's work is an effect of paradox. He was a humane man who communicated an extreme of inhuman terror; a man committed to decency who actualized a distinctive squalor. These, perhaps, are elements of the general paradox. But there are other, more particular, paradoxes. He was a socialist, who popularized a severe and damaging criticism of the idea of socialism and of its adherents. He was a believer in equality, and a critic of class, who founded his later work on a deep assumption of inherent inequality, inescapable class difference. These points have been obscured, or are the subject of merely partisan debate. They can only be approached, adequately, through observation of a further paradox. He was a notable critic of abuse of language, who himself practised certain of its major and typical abuses. He was a fine observer of detail, and appealed as an empiricist, while at the same time committing himself to an unusual amount of plausible yet specious generalization. It is on these points, inherent in the very material of his work, that we must first concentrate. That he was a fine observer of detail I take for granted; it is the great merit of that group of essays of wMch The Art of Donald McGill is typical, and of parts of The Hood to Wigan Pier. The contrary observation, on his general judgements, is an effect of the total reading of his work, but some examples may here stand as reminders: In each variant of socialism that appeared from about 1900 onwards the aim of establishing liberty and equality was more and more openly abandoned. 8 The British Labour Party? Guild Socialism? By the fourth decade of the twentieth century all the main currents of political thought were authoritarian. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realisable. 4 England in 1945? The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle class. 5 A Labour Party conference? Any local party in an industrial constituency? Trade-unions? All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. On what total evidence? The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions racial pride, leader worship, religious belief, love of war which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action. But does the shaping energy spring from these emotions alone? Is there no other 'power of action*? A humanitarian is always a hypocrite. 8 An irritation masquerading as a judgement? Take, for instance, the fact that all sensitive people are revolted by industrialism and its products. . . . AH? By all its products? I isolate these examples, not only to draw attention to this aspect of Orwell's method, but also to indicate (as all but one of them do) the quality of the disillusion which has, in bulk, been so persuasive. In many of the judgements there is an element of truth, or at least ground for argument, but Orwell's manner is normally to assert, and then to argue within the assertion. As a literary method, the influence of Shaw and Chesterton is clear. The method has become that of journalism, and is some times praised as clear forthright statement. Orwell, in his discussions of language, made many very useful points about the language of propaganda. But just as he used plausible assertion, very often, as a means of generalization, so, when he was expressing a prejudice, often of the same basic kind, he moved very easily into the propagandist's Mnd of emotive abuse: One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism* and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, paciist and feminist in England. vegetarians with wilting beards shockheaded Marxists chewing polysyllables . . . birth control fanatics and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers. Or consider his common emotive use of the adjective little': The typical socialist ... a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings. A rather mean little man with a white face and a bald head, standing on a platform, shooting out slogans. The typical little bowler-hatted sneak Strobe's 'little man'-the little docile cit who slips "home by the six-fifteen to a supper of cottage-pie and stewed tinned pears. of analysis as masterly. It is indeed a frank and honest report, and our kind of society has tied this knot again and again; yet what is being recorded, in Orwell, is the experience of a victim: of a man who, while rejecting the consequences of an atomistic society, yet retains deeply, in himself, its characteristic mode of consciousness. At the easy levels this tension is mediated in the depiction of society as a racket; a man may even join in the racket, but he tells himself that he has no illusions about what he is doing he keeps a secret part of himself inviolate. At the more difficult levels, with men of Orwell's seriousness, this course is impossible, and the tension cannot be discharged, The consequent strain is indeed desperate; this, more than any objective threat, is the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Marxist dismisses Orwell as 'petty bourgeois', but this, while one sees what it means, is too shallow. A man cannot be interpreted in terms of some original sin of class; he is where he Is, and with the feelings he has; his life has to be lived with his own experience, not with someone else. The only point about class, where OrweLL is concerned, is that he wrote extensively about the English working class, and that this, because it has been influential, has to be revalued. On such matters, Orwell is the reporter again: he is often sharply observant, often again given to possible generalization. In thinking, from his position, of the working class primarily as a class, he assumed too readily that observation of particular working-class people was an observation of all working-class behaviour. Because, however, he looked at people at all, he is often nearer the truth than more abstract left-wing writers. His principal failure was inevitable: he observed what was evident, the external factors, and only guessed at what was not evident, the inherent patterns of feeling. This failure is most obvious in its consequences: that he did come to think, half against his will, that the working people were really helpless, that they could never finally help themselves. In Animal Farm, the geniality of mood, and the existence of a long tradition of human analogies in animal terms, allow us to overlook the point that the revolution that is described is one of animals against men. The men (the old owners) were bad, but the animals, left to themselves, divide into the pigs (the hypocritical, hating politicians whom Orwell had always attacked) and the others. These others have many virtues strength, dumb loyalty, kindliness, but there they are: the simple horse, the cynical don key, the cackling hens, the bleating sheep, the silly cows. It is fairly evident where Orwell's political estimate lies: his sympathies are with the exploited sheep and the other stupid animals, but the issue of government lies between drunkards and pigs, and that is as far as things can go. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the same point is clear, and the terms are now direct, The hated politicians are in charge, while the dumb mass of 'proles' goes on in very much its own ways, protected by its very stupidity. The only dissent comes from a rebel intellectual: the exile against the whole system. Orwell puts the case in these terms because this is how he really saw present society, and Nineteen Eighty Four is desperate because Orwell recognized that on such a construction the exile could not win, and then there was no hope at all. Or rather: If there was hope, it must lie in the proles. . . .Every where stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and child-bearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing. Out of those mighty loins a race of conscious beings must one day come. You were the dead; theirs was the future. But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind. . . 17 This is the conclusion of any Marxist intellectual, in specifically Marxist terms, but with this difference from at any rate some Marxists: that the proles now, like the animals, are "monstrous' and not yet 'conscious' one day they will be so, and meanwhile the exile keeps the truth alive. The only point I would make is that this way of seeing the working people is not from fact and observation, but from the pressures of feeling exiled: other people are seen as an undifferentiated mass beyond one, the 'monstrous* figure. Here, again, is the paradox: that the only class in which you can put any hope is written off, in present terms, as hopeless. I maintain, against others who have criticized Orwell, that as a man he was brave, generous, frank and good, and that the paradox which is the total effect of his work is not to be understood in solely personal terms, but in terms of the pressures of a whole situation. I would certainly insist that his conclusions have no general validity, but the fact is, in contemporary society, that good men are driven again and again Mo his kind of paradox, and that denunciation of them Tie . , . runs shrieking into the arms of the capitalist publishers with a couple of horror comics which bring him fame and fortune' 18 is arrogant and crass. We have, rather, to try to understand, in the detail of experience, how the instincts of humanity can break down under pressure into an inhuman paradox; how a great and humane tradition can seem at times, to all of us, to disintegrate into a caustic dust. CONCLUSION The story of the Idea of culture Is a record of our reactions, in thought and feeling, to the changed conditions of our common life. Our meaning of culture is a response to the events which our meanings of industry and democracy most evidently define. But the conditions were created and have been modified by men. Record of the events Mes elsewhere, in our general history. The history of the idea of culture is a record of our meanings and our definitions, but these, in turn, are only to be understood within the context of our actions. The idea of culture is a general reaction to a general and major change in the conditions of our common life. Its basic element is its effort at total qualitative assessment. The change in the whole form of our common life produced, as a necessary reaction, an emphasis on attention to this whole form. Particular change will modify an habitual discipline, shift a habitual action. General change, when it has worked itself clear, drives us back on our general de signs, which we have to learn to look at again, and as a whole. The wrOng-out of the idea of culture is a slow reach again for control. Yet the new conditions, which men have been striving to understand, were neither uniform nor static. On the contrary, they have, from the beginning, contained extreme diversity of situation, in a high and moving tension. The idea of culture describes our common inquiry, but our conclusions are diverse, as our starting points were diverse. The word, culture, cannot automatically be pressed into service as any kind of social or personal directive. Its emergence, in its modern meaning, marks the effort at total qualitative assessment, but what it indicates is a process, not a conclusion. The arguments which can be grouped under its heading do not point to any inevitable action or affiliation. They define, in a common field, approaches and conclusions. It is left to us to decide which, if any, we shall take up, that will not turn in our hands. In each of the three major issues, those of Industry, of Democracy and of Art, there have been three main phases of opinion. In industry, there was the first rejection, alike of machine-production and of the social relations embodied in the factory system. This was succeeded by a phase of growing sentiment against the machine as such, in isolation. Thirdly, in our own period, machine production came to be accepted, and major emphasis transferred to the problem of social relations within an industrial system of production. In the question of democracy, the first phase was one of concerns at the threat to minority values with the coming of popular supremacy: a concern which was emphasized by general suspicion of the power of the new masses. This, in turn, was succeeded by a quite different tendency, in which emphasis fell on the idea of community, of organic society, as against the dominant individualistic ethic and practice. Thirdly, in our own century, the fears of the first phase were strongly renewed, in the particular context of what came to be called mass democracy in the new world of mass communications. In the question of art, the first emphasis fell, not only on the independent value of art, but on the importance to the common life of the qualities which it embodied. The contingent element of defiant exile passed into the second phase, in which the stress fell on art as a value in itself, with at times an open separation of this value from common life. Thirdly, emphasis came to be placed on a deliberate effort towards the reintegration of art with the common life of society: an effort which centred around the word 'communication'. In these three questions I have listed the phases of opinion in the order in which they appeared, but of course opinion is persistent, and whether in relation to industry, to democracy or to art, each of the three phases could easily be represented from the opinions of our own day. Yet it is possible in retrospect to see three main periods, within each of which a distinct emphasis is paramount. In the first period, from about 1790 to 1870, we find the long effort to compose a general attitude towards the new forces of industrialism and democracy; it is in this period that the major analysis is undertaken and the major opinions and descriptions emerge. Then, from about 1870 to 1914, there is a breaking-down into narrower fronts, marked by a particular specialism in attitudes to art, and, in the general field, by a preoccupation with direct politics. After 1914 these definitions continue, but there is a growing preoccupation, approaching a climax after 1945, with the issues raised not only by the inherited problems but by new problems arising from the development of mass media of communication and the general growth of large-scale organizations. A great deal of what has been written in each of these three periods retains its relevance and importance. In particular, it is impossible to over-emphasize our debt to the first great critical period which gave us, in relation to these problems, the greater part of our language and manner of approach. From all the periods, indeed, certain decisive statements stand. Yet even as we learn, we realize that the world we see through such eyes is not, although it resembles, our world. What we receive from the tradition is a set of meanings, but not all of these will hold their significance if, as we must, we return them to immediate experience. I have tried to make this return, and I will set down the variations and new definitions that have followed from this, as a personal conclusion. Mass and Masses We now regularly use both the idea of *the masses', and the consequent ideas of 'mass-civilization 7 , *mass democracy*, 'mass-commuNication' and others. Here, I think, lies a central and very difficult issue which more than any other needs revision. Masses was a new word for mob, and it is a very significant word. It seems probable that three social tendencies joined to confirm its meaning. First, there was a concentration of population in the industrial towns, a physical massing of persons which the great increase in total population accentuated, and which has continued with continuing urbanization. Second, there was a concentration of workers into factories: again, a physical massing, made necessary by machine-production; also, a social massing, in the work-relations made necessary by the development of large scale collective production. Third, there was the consequent development of an organized and self-organizing in conversation, al though this is often done. There is, I believe, no form of social activity which the use of these techniques has replaced. At most, by adding alternatives, they have allowed altered emphases in the time given to particular activities. But these alterations are obviously conditioned, not only by the techniques, but mainly by the whole circumstances of the common life. The point about impersonality often carries a ludicrous rider. It is supposed, for instance, that it is an objection to listening to wireless talks or discussions that the listener cannot answer the speakers back. But the situation is that of almost any reader; printing, after all, was the first great impersonal medium. It is as easy to send an answer to a broadcast speaker or a newspaper editor as to send one to a contemporary author; both are very much easier than to try to answer Aristotle, Burke or Marx. We fail to realize, in this matter, that much of what we call communication is, necessarily, no more in itself than transmission; that is to say, a one-way sending. Reception and response, which complete communication, depend on other factors than the techniques. What can be observed as a fact about the development of these techniques is a steady growth of what I propose to call multiple transmission. The printed book is the first great model of this, and the other techniques have followed. The new factor, in our own society, is an expansion of the potential audience for such transmissions, so great as to present new kinds of problems. Yet it is clear that it is not to this expansion that we can properly object, at least without committing ourselves to some rather extraordinary politics. The expansion of the audience is due to two factors: first, the growth of general education, which has accompanied the growth of democracy; second, the technical improvements themselves. It is interesting, in the light of the earlier discussion of "masses', that this expansion should have been interpreted by the phrase *mass-commuNication*. A speaker or writer, addressing a limited audience, is often able to get to know this audience well enough to feel a directly personal relationship with them which can affect his mode of address. Once this audience has been expanded, as with everything from books to televised parlour-games it has been expanded, this is clearly impossible. It would be rash, however, to assume that this is necessarily to Ms and the audience's disadvantage. Certain types of address, notably serious art, argument and exposition, seem indeed to be distinguished by the quality of impersonality which enables them frequently to survive their immediate occasion. How far this ultimate impersonality may be dependent on a close immediate relationsMp is in fact very difficult to assess. But It is always unlikely that any such speaker or writer will use, as a model for communication, any concept so crude as masses'. The idea of mass-communication, it would seem, depends very much more on the intention of the speaker or writer, than on the particular technique employed. A speaker or writer who knows, at the time of his ad dress, that it will reach almost immediately several million persons, is faced with an obviously difficult problem of interpretation. Yet, whatever the difficulty, a good speaker or writer will be conscious of his immediate responsibility to the matter being communicated. He cannot, indeed, feel otherwise, if he is conscious of himself as the source of a particular transmission. His task is the adequate expression of this source, whether it be of feeling, opinion or information. He will use for this expression the common language, to the limit of his particular skill. That this expression is then given multiple transmission is a next stage, of which he may well be conscious, but which cannot, of its nature, af fect the source. The difficulties of expressing this source difficulties of common experience, convention and language are certainly always his concern. But the source cannot in any event be denied, or he denies himself. Now if, on this perennial problem of communication, we impose the idea of masses, we radically alter the position, The conception of persons as masses springs, not from an inability to know them, but from an interpretation of them according to a formula. Here the question of the intention of the transmission makes its decisive return. Our formula can be that of the rational being speaking our language. It can be that of the interested being sharing our common experience. Or and it is here that 'masses' will operate it can be that of the mob: gullible, ficHe, herdlike, low in taste and habit. The formula, in fact, will proceed from our intention. If our purpose is art, education, the giving of information or opinion, our interpretation will be in terms of the rational and interested being. If, on the other hand, our purpose is manipulation the persuasion of a large number of people to act, feel, think, know, in certain ways the convenient formula will be that of the masses. There is an important distinction to be drawn here between source and agent. A man offering an opinion, a proposal, a feeling, of course normally desires that other persons will accept this, and act or feel in the ways that he defines. Yet such a man may be properly described as a source, in distinction from an agent, whose characteristic is that his expression is subordinated to an undeclared intention. He is an agent, and not a source, because the intention lies elsewhere. In social terms, the agent will normally in fact be a subordinate of a government, a commercial firm, a newspaper proprietor. Agency, in the simple sense, is necessary in any complex administration. But it is always dangerous unless its function and intention are not only openly declared but commonly approved and controlled. If this is so, the agent becomes a collective source, and he will observe the standards of such expression if what he is required to transmit is such that he can wholly acknowledge and accept it recreate it in his own person. Where he cannot thus accept it for himself, but allows himself to be persuaded that it is in a fit form for others presumably inferiors and that it is his business merely to see that it reaches them effectively, then he is in the bad sense an agent, and what he is doing is inferior to that done by the poorest kind of source. Any practical denial of the relation between conviction and communication, between experience and expression, is morally damaging alike to the individual and to the common language. Yet it is certainly true, in our society, that many men, many of them intelligent, accept, whether in good or bad faith, so dubious a role and activity. The acceptance in bad faith is a matter for the law, although we have not yet gone very far in working out this necessary common control. The acceptance in good faith, on the other hand, is a matter of culture. It would clearly not be possible unless it appeared to be ratified by a conception of society which relegates the majority of its members to mob-status. The idea of the masses is an expression of this conception, and the idea of mass-communication a comment on its functioning. This is the real danger to democracy, not the existence of effective and powerful means of multiple transmission. It is less a product of democracy than its denial, springing from that half-world of feeling in which we are invited to have our being. Where the principle of democracy is accepted, and yet it's full and active practice feared, the mind is lulled into acquiescence, which is yet not so complete that a fitful conscience, a defensive irony, cannot visit it. 'Democracy would be alright/ we can come to say, *it is indeed what we personally would prefer, if it were not for the actual people. So, in a good cause if we can find it, in some other if we can not, we will try to get by at a level of communication which our experience and training tell us is inferior. Since the people are as they are, the thing will do.* But it is as well to face the fact that what we are really doing, in such a case, is to cheapen our own experience and to adulterate the common language. Mass-observation Yet the people are as they are, the objection is returned,, Of course the masses are only other people, yet most other people are, on the evidence, a mob. In principle, we would wish it not to be so; in practice, the evidence is clear. This is the negative side of the idea of mass-communication. Its evidence is collected under the title of mass-culture, or popular culture. It is important evidence, and much of it is incontrovertible. There remains, however, the question of its interpretation. I have said that our arguments on this matter are normally selective, often to an extreme degree. I will try now to illustrate this. We are faced with the fact that there is now a great deal of bad art, bad emterfaininent, bad journalism, bad advertisement, bad argument. We are not likely to be diverted from this conclusion by the usual diversionary arguments. Much that we judge to be bad is known to be bad by its producers. Ask any journalist, or any copywriter, if he will now accept that famous definition: 'written by morons for morons*. Will he not reply that in fact it is written by skilled and intelligent people for a public that hasn't the time, or hasn't the education, or hasn't, let's face it, the intelligence, to read anything more complete, anything more careful, anything nearer the known canons of exposition or argument? Had we not better say, for simplicity, anything good? Good and bad are hard words, and we can, of course, find easier ones. The strip newspaper, the beer advertisement, the detective novel it is not exactly that they are good, but they are good of their (possibly bad) kind; they have the merits at least of being bright, attractive, popular. Yet, clearly, the strip newspaper has to be compared with other kinds of newspaper; the beer advertisement with other kinds of description of a product; the detective novel with other novels. By these standards not by reference to some ideal quality, but by reference to the best things that men exercising this faculty have done or are doing we are not likely to doubt that a great deal of what is now produced, and widely sold, is mediocre or bad. But this is said to be popular culture. The description has a ready-made historical thesis. After the Education Act of 1870, a new mass-public came into being, literate but un trained in reading, low in taste and habit. The mass-culture followed as a matter of course. I think always, when I hear this thesis, of an earlier one, from the second half of the eighteenth century. Then, the decisive date was between 1730 and 1740, and what had emerged, with the advance of the middle classes to prosperity, was a new middle-class reading public. The immediate result was that vulgar phenomenon, the novel. As a matter of fact there is in both theses a considerable element of truth. If the former is not now so commonly mentioned, it is only because it would be indiscreet, in a situation where 'good* and 'middle class* are equivalent terms. And of course we can properly see the earlier situation in its true perspective. We can see that what the rise of the middle classes produced was not only the novel but many other things good and bad. Further, now that the bad novels are all out of print, and the good ones are among our classics, we see that the novel itself, while certainly a phenomenon, cannot be lightly dismissed as vulgar. Of the situation after 1870 we are not able to speak so clearly. For one thing, since the emergence as a whole still divides us, we can resent the cultural situation for political reasons and not realize this. For another, since the period as not fallen into settled history, we can be much more subjective in our selection of evidence. 1870 is in fact very questionable as a decisive date. There had been widespread literacy much earlier than this, the bad popular press is in fact also earlier. The result of the new educational provision was in part an actual increase in literacy, in such questions are not settled within a specialized field. The content of education, as a role, is the content of our actual social relations, and will only change as part of a wider change. Further, the actual operation of the new techniques is extremely complicated, in social terms, because of their economic bearings. The technical changes made necessary a great increase in the amount and concentration of capital, and we are still on the upward curve of this increase, as is most evident in the management of newspapers and television. These facts have led, in our society, to an extreme concentration of production of work of this kind, and to extraordinary needs and opportunities for controlling its distribution. Our new services tend to require so much capital that only a very large audience can sustain them. This in itself is not a difficulty; the potential audience is there. But everything depends on the attitude of those who control these services to such an audience. Our broadcasting corporation, for example, holds, in general, a reasonable interpretation of its particular responsibilities in this situation, even if this is no more surely founded than in a vestigial paternalism. Yet we are constantly being made aware how precarious this interpretation must be, under the pressures which come from a different attitude. The scale of capital involved has given an entry to a kind of person who, a hundred years ago, would never have thought of running a newspaper or a theatre. The opportunity to exploit the difficulties of a transitional culture was open, and we have been foolish enough to allow it to be widely taken. The temptation to make a profit out of ignorance or inexperience is present in most societies. The existence, in our own, of powerful media of persuasion and suggestion made it virtually irresistible. The cheapjack, whether he is the kind of vagrant who attached himself to Huckleberry Finn, or the more settled individual of our own society, always interprets his victims as an ignorant mob; this, to him, is his justification. It is a question for society, however, whether it will allow such an interpretation and its consequent activities, not merely to lead the fugitive existence of a vagrant, but, as now, to establish itself in some of the seats of power, with a large and settled material organization. The ways of controlling such activities are well known; we lack only the will. All I am concerned to point out is that the cheapjack has had allies of a surprising kind. He has an ally in whoever concedes his interpretation of his fellow-beings. He has an ally, also, in that old kind of democrat who rested on the innate nobility of man. The delusions which led to this unholy alliance are of a complementary kind. The old democrat is often too sure of man's natural nobility to concern himself with the means of its common assurance. The new sceptic observes what happens when such means are not assured, and seeks an explanation in man's natural baseness. The failure, in each case, is a failure of consciousness of change. The old rural culture, which is so widely (and sometimes sentimentally) admired, rested on generations of experience within a general continuity of common condition. The speed and magnitude of the changes which broke up this settlement were never fully realized, and, even if they had been, the search for a new common control was bound to be slow. It is now becoming clear, from all kinds of evidence, that a society can, if it chooses, train its members in almost any direction, with only an occasional failure. The failures will be interpreted in terms of virtue or of recidivism, according to circumstances. But what is important is not that we are all mal leableany culture and any civilization depend on this but the nature and origin of the shaping process. The contributions of old democrat and new sceptic are alike irrelevant to this decisive question; and the cheapjack has jumped in on the irrelevance and the general confusion. The local newspaper, of all things, stands as a most important piece of controlling evidence. For it is read by people at least as simple, at least as poorly educated, as the readers of the worst strip paper. Yet in method and content it is still remarkably like the older journalism of minority reading, even to its faults. The devices which are said to be necessary to reach the ordinary mind are not employed, yet the paper is commonly read and understood. This is a case which, because of special circumstances, fflumines the general problem. Produced for a known community on a basis of common interest and common knowledge, the local newspaper is not governed by a *mass* interpretation. Its communication, in fact, rests on a community, in sharp contrast with most national newspapers, which are produced for a market, interpreted by 'mass' criteria. The methods of the popular newspaper do not rest on the fact that simple people read it, for then the local paper would hardly be read or understood at all. They rest on the fact that it and its readers are organized in certain kinds of economic and social relations. If we realize this we will concentrate trate our attention, not on man's natural goodness or badness, but on the nature of the controlling social relations. The idea of the masses, and the technique of observing certain aspects of mass-behaviour selected aspects of a 'public' rather than the balance of an actual community formed the natural ideology of those who sought to control the new system and to profit by it. To the degree that we reject this kind of exploitation, we shall reject its ideology, and seek a new definition of communication. Communication and Community Any governing body will seek to implant the Bright* ideas in the minds of those whom it governs, but there is no government in exile. The minds of men are shaped by their whole experience, and the most skillful transmission of material which this experience does not confirm will fail to communicate. Communication is not only transmission; it is also reception and response. In a transitional culture it will be possible for skilful transmission to affect aspects of activity and belief, sometimes decisively. But, confusedly, the whole sum of experience will reassert itself, and inhabit its own world. Mass-communication has had its evident successes, in a social and economic system to which its methods correspond. But it has failed, and will continue to fail, when its transmissions encounter, not a confused un certainty, but a considered and formulated experience. Observing this, the practitioners of mass-communication rum to the improvement of what they call their science: that is to say, to scraps of applied psychology and linguistic. It is of the greatest importance to attend to what they are doing, but at the same time any real theory of communication is a theory of community. The techniques of mass communication will be irrelevant to a genuine theory of communication, to the degree that we judge them to be conditioned, not by a community, but by the lack or completeness of a community. It is very difficult to think clearly about communication, because the pattern of our thinking about community is, normally, dominative. We tend, in consequence, if not to be attracted, at least to be preoccupied by dominative techniques. Communication becomes a science of penetrating the mass mind and of registering an impact there. It is not easy to think along different Mnes. It is easy to recognize a dominative theory if, for other reasons, we think it to be bad. A theory that a minority should profit by employing a majority in wars of gain is easily rejected. A theory that a minority should profit by employing a mass of wage-slaves is commonly rejected. A theory that a minority should reserve the inheritance of human knowledge to itself, and deny it to the majority, is occasionally rejected. But (we say) nobody, or only a few bad people, can be found to support such theories. We are all democrats now, and such things are unthinkable. As a matter of fact, mass-communication has served and is in some places still serving all the theories I have mentioned. The whole theory of mass-communication depends, essentially, on a minority in some way exploiting a majority. We are not all democrats now. Yet "exploiting', of course, is a tendentious word. What of the case where a minority is seeking to educate a majority, for that majority's ultimate good? Such minorities abound, seeking to educate majorities in the virtues of capitalism, communism, culture, contraception. Surely here mass-communication is necessary and urgent, to bring the news of the good life, and of the ways to get it, and the dangers to avoid in getting it, to the prejudiced, servile, ignorant and multiplying masses? If workmen are impoverishing themselves and others by restrictive practices; if peasants are starving themselves and others by adhering to outdated ways; if men and women are growing up in ignorance, when so much is known; if families are breeding more children than can be fed: surely, urgently, they must be told this, for their own good? The objection, as a matter of fact, is not to telling anyone anything. It is a question of how one tells them, and how one would expect to be told oneself. Nor is this merely a matter of politeness, of politeness being the best policy. It is really a matter of how one would be told oneself: telling as an aspect of living; learning as an element of experience. The very failure of so many of the items of transmission which I have listed is not an accident, but the result of a failure to understand communication. The failure is due to an arrogant preoccupation with transmission, which rests on the assumption that the common answers have been found and need only to be applied. But people will (damn them, do you say?) learn only by experience, and this, normally, is uneven and slow. A governing body, in its impatience, will often be able to enforce, by any of a number of kinds of pressure, an apparent conformity. This can on occasion be made substantial by subsequent experience; such a fact is the sharpest temptation to any dominative policy that events will substantiate what at first people would not accept. As a matter of politics, this is perhaps the most difficult contemporary issue. As a matter of communication, however, such a point only substantiates what has already been said; it will be an experience that teaches. In a society which lacks the experience of democratic practice, a zealous refonning minority will often be forced to take this kind of chance. Yet, even here, it has great dangers; the process of learning depends so much on the conscious need to learn, and such a need is not easily imposed on anyone. It is clear, on the other hand, that even in contemporary democratic communities the dominative attitude to communication is still paramount. Almost every kind of leader seems to be genuinely afraid of trusting the processes of majority discussion and decision. As a matter of practice this is usually whittled away to the merest formula. For this, the rooted distrust of the majority, who are seen as masses or more politely as the public, is evidently responsible. Democratic theory remains theory, and this practical scepticism breeds the theoretical scepticism which is again becoming, even in our own society, dangerously marked. The consequences are unsatisfactory from most points of view. If people cannot have official democracy, they will have an official democracy, in any of its possible forms, from the armed revolt or riot, through the 'unofficial* strike or restriction of labour, to die quietest but most alarming form a general silliness and withdrawal of interest. Faced with this set of facts, it is always possible to fall back on the other part of the 'mass' interpretation; to see these symptoms as 'proving* the imfitness of the masses they will riot, they will strike, they will not take an interest such is the nature of that brute, the mob. I am arguing, on the contrary, that these characteristic marks of our civilization are not interpretable in this men, and in their common efforts, it is perhaps only in caricature that one can believe in oneself. Culture and Which Way of Life? We live in a transitional society, and the idea of culture, too often, has been identified with one or other of the forces which the transition contains. Culture is the product of the old leisured classes who seek now to defend it against new and destructive forces. Culture is the inheritance of the new rising class, which contains the humanity of the future; this class seeks, now, to free it from its restrictions. We say things like this to each other, and glower. The one good thing, it seems, is that all the contending parties are keen enough on culture to want to be identified with it. But then, we are none of us referees in this; we are all in the game, and playing in one or other direction. I want to say something about the idea of 'working-class culture', because this seems to me to be a key issue in our own time, and one in which there is a considerable element of misunderstanding. I have indicated already that we can not fairly or usefully describe the bulk of the material produced by the new means of communication as 'working class culture'. For neither is it by any means produced exclusively for this class, nor, in any important degree, is it produced by them. To this negative definition we must add another: that 'working-class culture*, in our society, is not to be understood as the small amount of 'proletarian' writing and art which exists. The appearance of such work has been useful, not only in its more self-conscious forms, but also in such material as the post-Industrial ballads, which were worth collecting. We need to be aware of this work, but it is to be seen as a valuable dissident element rather than as a culture. The traditional popular culture of England was, if not annihilated, at least fragmented and weakened by the dislocations of the Industrial Revolution. What is left, with what in the new conditions has been newly made, is small in quantity and narrow in range. It exacts respect, but it is in no sense an alternative culture. This very point of an alternative is extremely difficult, in terms of theory. If the major part of our culture, in the sense of intellectual and imaginative work, is to be called, as the Marxists call it, bourgeois, it is natural to look for an alter native culture, and to call it proletarian. Yet it is very doubtful whether Bourgeois culture* is a useful term. The body of intellectual and imaginative work which each generation receives as its traditional culture is always, and necessarily, something more than the product of a single class. It is not only that a considerable part of it will have survived from much earlier periods than the immediately pre-existing form of society; so that, for instance, literature, philosophy and other work surviving from before, say, 1600, cannot be taken as 'bourgeois'. It is also that, even within a society in which a particular class is dominant, it is evidently possible both for members of other classes to contribute to the common stock, and for such contributions to be unaffected by or in opposition to the ideas and values of the dominant class. The area of a culture, it would seem, is usually proportionate to the area of a language rather than to the area of a class. It is true that a dominant class can to a large extent control the transmission and distribution of the whole common inheritance; such control, where it exists, needs to be noted as a fact about that class. It is true also that a tradition is always selective, and that there will always be a tendency for this process of selection to be related to and even governed by the interests of the class that is dominant. These factors make it likely that there will be qualitative changes in the traditional culture when there is a shift of class power, even before a newly ascendant class makes its own contributions. Points of this kind need to be stressed, but the particular stress given by describing our existent culture as bourgeois culture is in several ways misleading. It can, for example, seriously mislead those who would now consider themselves as belonging to the dominant class. If they are encouraged, even by their opponents, to think of the existing culture (in the narrow sense) as their particular product and legacy, they will deceive themselves and others. For they will be encouraged to argue that, if their class position goes, the culture goes too; that standards depend on the restriction of a culture to the class which, since it has produced it alone understands it. On the other hand, those who believe themselves to be representatives of a new rising class will, if they accept the proposition of bourgeois culture', either be tempted to neglect a common human inheritance, or, more intelligently, be perplexed as to how, and how much of, this bourgeois culture is to be taken over. The categories are crude and mechanical in either position. Men who share a common language share the inheritance of an intellectual and literary tradition which is necessarily and constantly revalued with every shift in experience. The manufacture of an artificial 'working-class culture*, in op position to this common tradition, is merely foolish. A society in which the working class had become dominant would, of course, produce new valuations and new contributions. But the process would be extremely complex, because of the complexity of the inheritance, and nothing is to be gained by diminishing this complexity to a crude diagram. The contrast between a minority and a popular culture cannot be absolute. It is not even a matter of levels, for such a term implies distinct and discontinuous stages, and this is by no means always the case. In Russian society in the nineteenth century one finds perhaps the clearest example of a discontinuous culture within recent history; this is marked, it should be noted, by a substantial degree of rejection of even the common language by the ruling minority. But in English society there has never been this degree of separation, since English emerged as the common language. There has been marked unevenness of distribution, amounting at times to virtual exclusion of the majority, and there has been some unevenness of contribution, although in no period has this approached the restriction of contribution to members of any one class. Further, since the beginning of the nineteenth century it has been difficult for any observer to feel that the care of intellectual and imaginative work could be safely entrusted to, or identified with, any existing social or economic class. It was in relation to this situation that the very idea of culture was, as we have seen, developed. The most difficult task confronting us, in any period where there is a marked shift of social power, is the complicated process of revaluation of the inherited tradition. The common language, because in itself it is so crucial to this matter, provides an excellent instance. It is clearly of vital importance to a culture that its common language should not decline in strength, richness and flexibility; that it should, further, be adequate to express new experience, and to clarify change. But a language like English is still evolving, and great harm can be done to it by the imposition of crude categories of class. It is obvious that since the development, in the nineteenth century, of the new definition of 'standard English*, particular uses of the common language have been taken and abused for the purposes of class distinction. Yet the dialect which is normally equated with standard English has no necessary superiority over other dialects. Certain of the grammatical clarifications have a common importance, but not all even of these. On the other hand, certain selected sounds have been given a cardinal authority which derives from no known law of language, but simply from the fact that they are habitually made by persons who, for other reasons, possess social and economic influence. The conversion of this Mnd of arbitrary selection into a criterion of 'good 7 or 'correct' or 'pure' English is merely a subterfuge. Modern communications make for the growth of uniformity, but the necessary selection and clarification have been conducted, on the whole, on grounds quite irrelevant to language. It is still thought, for instance, that a double negative (1 don't want none') is incorrect English, although millions of English-speaking persons use it regularly: not, indeed, as a misunderstanding of the rule, which they might be thought too ignorant to apprehend; but as the continuation of a habit which has been in the language continuously since Chaucer. The broad V, in such words as 'class', is now taken as the mark of an 'educated person', although till the eighteenth century it was mainly a rustic habit, and as such despised. Or 'ain't', which in the eighteenth century was often a mark of breeding, is now supposed to be a mark of vulgarity: in both cases, the valuation is the merest chance. The extraordinary smugness about aspirates, vowel-sounds, the choice of this or that synonym ('couch' *sofa*), which has for so long been a normal element of middle-class humour, is, after all, not a concern for good English, but parochialism. (The current controversy about what are called *U* and *non-IT speech habits clearly illustrates this; it is an aspect, not of major social differences, but of the long difficulty of drawing the lines between the upper and lower sections of the middle class.) Yet, while this is true, the matter is complicated by the fact that in a society where a particular class and hence a particular use of the common language is dominant a large part of the literature, carrying as it does a body of vital common experience, will be attracted to the dominant language mode. At the same time, a national literature, as English has never ceased to be, will, while containing this relation, contain elements of the whole culture and language. If we are to understand the process of a selective tradition, we shall not think o exclusive areas of culture but of degrees of shifting attachment and interaction, which a crude theory either of class or of standards is incompetent to interpret. A culture can never be reduced to its artifacts while it is being lived. Yet the temptation to attend only to external evidence is always strong. It is argued, for instance, that the working class is becoming ^bourgeois*, because it is dressing like the middle class, living in semi-detached houses, acquiring cars and washing-machines and television sets. But it is not t>bouRgeois* to possess objects of utility, nor to enjoy a high material standard of living. The working class does not become bourgeois by owning the new products, any more than the bourgeois ceases to be bourgeois as the objects he owns change in kind. Those who regret such a development among the members of the working class are the victims of prejudice. An admiration of the 'simple poor* is no new thing, but it has rarely been found, except as a desperate rationalization, among the poor themselves. It is the product either of satiety or of a judgement that the material advantages are purchased at too high a human cost. The first ground must be left to those who are sated; the second, which is more important, is capable of a false transference. If the advantages were 'bourgeois' because they rested on economic exploitation, they do not continue to be Bourgeois' if they can be assured without such exploitation or by its diminution. The worker's envy of the middle-class man is not a desire to be that man, but to have the same kind of possessions. We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned. The great majority of English working people want only the middle-class material standard and for the rest want to go on being themselves. One should not be too quick to call this vulgar materialism. It is wholly reasonable to want the means of life in which we had all heard, did not after all come from them. The Idea of Community development of the idea of culture has, throughout, been a criticism of what has been called the bourgeois idea of society. The contributors to its meaning have started from widely different positions, and have reached widely various attachments and loyalties. But they have been alike in this, that they have been unable to think of society as a merely neutral area, or as an abstract regulating mechanism. The stress has fallen on the positive function of society, on the fact that the values of individual men are rooted in society, and on the need to think and feel in these common terms. This was, indeed, a profound and necessary response to the disintegrating pressures which were faced. Yet, according to their different positions, the idea of community, on which, all in general agree, has been differently felt and defined. In our own day we have two major interpretations, alike opposed to bourgeois liberalism, but equally, in practice, opposed to each other. These are the idea of service, and the idea of solidarity. These have in the main been developed by the middle class and the working class respectively. From Coleridge to Tawney the idea of function, and thence of service to the community, has been most valuable stressed, in opposition to the individual ist claim. The stress has been confirmed by the generations of training which substantiate the ethical practice of our professions, and of our public and civil service. As against the practice of laissez-faire,, and of self-service, this has been a major achievement which has done much for the peace and welfare of our society. Yet the working-class ethic, of solidarity, has also been a major achievement, and it is the difference of this from the idea of service which must now be stressed. A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants. This is much more its characteristic than a training for leadership, as the stress on conformity and on respect for authority shows. In so far as it is, by definition, the training of upper servants, it includes, of course, the instilling of that kind of confidence which will enable the upper servants to supervise and direct the lower servants. Order must be maintained there, by good management, and in this respect the function is not service but government. Yet the upper servant is not to think of his own interests. He must subordinate these to a larger good, which is called the Queen's peace, or national security, or law and order, or the public weal. This has been the charter of many thousands of devoted lives, and it is necessary to respect it even where we cannot agree with it. I was not trained to this ethic, and when I encountered it, in late adolescence, I had to spend a lot of time trying to understand it, through men whom I respected and who had been formed by it. The criticism I now make of it is in this kind of good faith. It seems to me inadequate because in practice it serves, at every level, to maintain and confirm the status quo. This was wrong, for me, because the status quo, in practice, was a denial of equity to the men and women among whom I had grown up, the lower servants, whose lives were governed by the existing distributions of property, remuneration, education and respect. The real personal unselfishness, which ratified the description as service, seemed to me to exist within a larger selfishness, which was only not seen because it was idealized as the necessary form of a civilization, or rationalized as a natural distribution corresponding to worth, effort and intelligence. I could not share in these versions, because I thought, and still think, that the sense of injustice which the lower servants' felt was real and justified. One cannot in conscience then become, when invited, an upper servant in an establishment that one thus radically disapproves. Now it is true that much of this service has gone to improving the conditions of the lower servants', but, because of its nature, this has been improvement within a framework which is thought, in its main lines, inviolate. I have seen this psychology of service extend to the working class movement itself, until the phraseology of 'making a man a useful citizen', 'equipping him to serve the community', has become common form. A particular climax of this, for me, was a book called How we are Governed, written by a left-wing democrat. It is at this point, on the basis of a different social ethic, that one becomes awkward. How we are Governed, as an explanation of democracy, is an expression of the idea of service at its psychological limit. The break through to 'How we govern ourselves* is impossible, on the basis of such a training: the command to conformity, and to respect for authority as such, is too strong. Of course, having worked for improvement in the conditions of working people, in the spirit of service, those who are ruled by the idea of service are genuinely dismayed when the workers do not fully respond: when, as it is put, they don't play the game, are lacking in team-spirit, neglect the national interest. This has been a crisis of conscience for many middle-class democrats and socialists. Yet the fact is that working-class people cannot feel that this is their community in anything like the sense in which it is felt above them. Nor will education in their responsibilities to a community thus conceived convince them. The idea of service breaks down because while the upper servants have been able to identify themselves with the establishment, the lower servants have not. What 'they decide is still the practical experience of life and work. The idea of service, ultimately, is no substitute for the idea of active mutual responsibility, which is the other version of community. Few men can give the best of themselves as servants; it is the reduction of man to a function. Further, the servant, if he is to be a good servant, can never really question the order of things; his sense of authority is too strong. Yet the existing order is in fact subject to almost overwhelming pressures, The break through, into what to gether we want to make of our lives, will need qualities which the idea of service not only fails to provide, but, in its limitation of our minds, actively harms. The idea of service to the community has been offered to the working class as an interpretation of solidarity, but it has not, in the circumstances, been fully accepted, for it is, to them, inferior in feeling. Another alternative to solidarity which has had some effect is the idea of individual opportunity of the ladder. It has been one of the forms of service to provide such a ladder, in industry, in education and elsewhere. And many working-class leaders, men in fact who have used the ladder, have been dazzled by this alternative to solidarity. Yet the ladder is a perfect symbol of the bourgeois idea of society, because, while undoubtedly it offers the opportunity to climb, it is a device which can only be used individually: you go up the ladder alone. This kind of individual climbing is of course the bourgeois model: a man should be allowed to better himself. The social conscience, which produced the idea of service, argued that no greater benefit could be conferred on the working people than that this ladder should be extended to them. The actual process of reform, insofar as it has not been governed by working-class pressure, has been, in large part, the giving of increasing opportunity to climb. Many indeed have scrambled up, and gone off to play on the other side; many have tried to climb and failed. Judged in each particular case, it seems obviously right that a working man, or the child of a working-class family, should be enabled to fit himself for a different kind of work, corresponding to his ability. Because of this, the ladder idea has produced a real conflict of values witMn the working class itself. My own view is that the ladder version of society is objectionable in two related respects: first, that it weakens the principle of common betterment, which ought to be an absolute value; second, that it sweetens the poison of hierarchy, in particular by offering the hierarchy of merit as anything different in kind from the hierarchy of money or of birth. On the educational ladder, the boy who has gone from a council school to Oxford or Cambridge is of course glad that he has gone, and he sees no need to apologize for it, in either direction. But he cannot then be expected to agree that such an opportunity constitutes a sufficient educational re form. A few voices, softened by the climb, may be found to say this, which they are clearly expected to say. Yet, if he has come from any conscious part of the working class, such a boy will take leave to doubt the proffered version. The education was worth the effort, but he sees no reason why it should be interpreted as a ladder. For the ladder, with all its extra-educational implications, is merely an image of a particular version of society; if he rejects the version, he will reject the image. Take the ladder image away, and interest is returned to what is, for him, its proper object: to the making of a common educational provision; to the work for equity in material distribution; to the process of shaping a tradition, a community of experience, which is always a selective organization of past and present, and which he has been given particular opportunities to understand. The ladder, which is a substitute for all these things, must be understood in all its implications; and it is important that the growing number who have had the ladder stamped on their brows should interpret it to themselves and to their own people, whom, as a class, it could greatly harm. For in the end, on any reckoning, the ladder will never do; it is the product of a divided society, and will fall with it. The Development of a Common Culture In its definition of the common interest as true self interest, in its finding of individual verification primarily in the community, the idea of solidarity is potentially the real basis of a society. Yet it is subject, in our time, to two important difficulties. For it has been, basically, a defensive attitude, the natural mentality of the long siege. It has in part depended, that is to say, on an enemy; the negative elements thus produced will have to be converted into positives in a fully democratic society. This will at best be profoundly difficult, for the feelings involved are fundamental. The issue can be defined as one in which diversity has to be substantiated within an effective community which disposes of majority power. The feeling of solidarity is, al though necessary, a primitive feeling. It has depended, hitherto, on substantial identity of conditions and experience. Yet any predictable civilization will depend on a wide variety of highly specialized skills, which will involve, over definite parts of the culture, a fragmentation of experience. The attachment of privilege to certain kinds of skills has been traditionally clear, and this will be very difficult to unlearn., to the degree that is necessary if substantial community of condition is to be assured. A culture in common, in our own day, will not be the simple all-in-all society of old dream. It will be a very complex organization, requiring continual adjustment and redrawing. At root, the feeling of solidarity is the only conceivable element of stabilization in so difficult an organization. But in its issue it will have to be continually redefined, and there will be many attempts to enlist old feelings in the service of an emerging sectional interest. The emphasis that I wish to place here is that this first difficulty the compatibility of increasing specialization with a genuinely common culture is only soluble in a context of material community and by the full democratic process. A skill is only an aspect of a man, and yet, at times, it can seem to comprehend his whole being. This is one kind of crisis, and it can only be overcome as a man becomes conscious that the value lie places on his skill,