Popular culture

“ Perhaps I am soured by not being popular? But suppose I AM popular. Suppose my works never fail to attract. Suppose that, whether they are exhibited by natural light or by artificial, they invariably draw the public. ”

“ The few gifts which society often grudgingly grants are a thousandfold repaid by the poetical imagination of the people, by that literature which they have made their own, and which they return to the givers, in a purified, elevated, and more dignified form. Thus by that mutual play of popular and classical literature, the written and the spoken, the literature of the classes and that of the masses, by constant interchange, by borrowing and lending, the most beautiful chapter in the history of man is written. ”

“ Thus suiting the taste and genius of the people, and in some degree comporting with what they had been accustomed to, at the same time assuming great affability of manner, both in private and in the discharge of his public duties, he rendered himself extremely popular with both populations. ”

“ If we want a formula or golden rule for arriving at popularity, I should propose this: Let the work have a Message. Let it have a thing to say, a story to tell, a living Man or Woman to present, a lesson to deliver, clear, strong, unmistakable.
"The demand for reading is enormous, and it increases every day. I see plainly—as plainly as eyes can see—a time—it is even now already upon us—when the popular writer—the novelist, the poet, the dramatist, the historian, the physicist, the essayist—will command such an audience—so vast an audience—as he has never yet even conceived as possible. ”

“ I ask also for simplicity in art. Our art and our literature are reserved for the privileged few of education and fortune. But do not misunderstand me. I do not ask poets, novelists, and painters to descend from the heights and walk along the mountain-sides, finding their satisfaction in mediocrity; but, on the contrary, to mount higher. The truly popular is not that which appeals to a certain class of society ordinarily called the common people; the truly popular is what is common to all classes and unites them. ”

“ But the multitude are abundantly able—none more so—to respond with admiring interest to the impression of original power, recognize the broad outlines of a sublime and fiery soul, thrill under the general signs of genius, and pay deserved tribute to popular exhibitions of skill. ”

“ However, let us leave what is really a very sordid side of the subject, and return to the question of popular control in the matter of Art, by which I mean Public Opinion dictating to the artist the form which he is to use, the mode in which he is to use it, and the materials with which he is to work. ”

“ If it makes us proud to go into our bookstores, and see thousands upon thousands of tomes waiting for customers; if our bosoms swell with delight to see the quiet and palatial homes of our cultured society overflowing with the most expensive wall-papers and the costliest articles of virtue; if we take an ineffable enjoyment in the thousand indications of a growing refinement in the midst of us,—vaster still must be the pride, the rapture, we feel when we behold our intellect and our culture paying the tribute of adoration to the circus. ”

“ In my public life I was striving after the emptiness of popular fame, going so far as to seek theatrical applause, entering poetic contests, striving for the straw garlands and the vanity of theatricals and intemperate desires. ”

“ Such a vast amount of human life, so complex a society, so powerful a body of custom and tradition stand behind them, that the spectacle becomes the most solidly brilliant, the most richly suggestive, of all great social shows. ”

“ The republic of literature, like society, has its aristocratic, its middle, and its lower classes. No one has combined, in one performance, the refinement applauded in the universities, with the practical purpose, popular among those who toil to live, and live to toil. The populace are my choice—of them I am one, and, like a recent premier, Earl Grey, am disposed 'to stand by my order.' I write for this class both from affection and taste. ”

“ In the second or Imitative, the audience is cultivated, and form is to them the luxury and ornament of literature. In the Critical, the form becomes subservient to the matter; the audience is neither to be enchanted by the beauty, nor charmed by the luxury, of literature; it is neither devout nor cultivated; it demands to be interested and informed. Literature is no longer the business of a festival, or the ornament of elegant culture: it is the thing of every day, and to be criticised by every-day rules. ”

“ You can see a role for highbrow, state-supported media or publicly financed artworks, but your initial working assumption is that the final arbiter of culture should be the people who watch, read, and listen to it, and who remake it every day. ”

“ One of the strong points of that national tradition which these highest circles defended and endeavoured to continue, was the recognition of talent in every shape; they envisaged literature and art with many-sided culture and wide sympathy. ”

“ This fault which I have admitted, this want of universality is not surprising, since it was necessary for these three poets to stand apart from the tide of opinion, and disregard the popular tastes, in order to attain firmness, depth, or permanent beauty. And they being, as I have said, the pilot-minds of their time, their works enjoy a growing, though not a rapidly growing, popularity. ”

“ And 'real' life, purged of monotony by the wit, discrimination or extravagance of the artist, or—on a lower plane—by the combination only of approved comical or sentimental or melodramatic elements, is the most popular and marketable of all subjects. ”

“ The literary taste of your community is a reflection of your own as shown forth in your own institution—its collection of books, the assistants with which you have surrounded yourself, your attitude and theirs through you toward literature and toward the public. ”

“ Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. ”

“ I shall simply beg leave to acknowledge freely, to acknowledge without a blush, that what is known as popular success is, I believe, greatly coveted, sternly fought for, by even the most earnest of those writers who deal in the commodity labelled "modern British drama." ”

“ What does it do for our life, our mind, our manners, our morals—what does it do that history, poetry, philosophy may not do, as well or better, to warn, to comfort and command the countless thousands for whom and by whom it comes into being? We seem too often left with our riddle on our hands. The lame conclusion on which we retreat is that “stories” are multiplied, circulated, paid for, on the scale of the present hour, simply because people “like” them. ”

“ In our own generation the heroes and heroines of fiction begin to appear in real life, in dress and manner, while they are still warm from the press. The popular heroine appears on the street in a hundred imitations as soon as the popular mind apprehends her traits in the story. ”

“ When, fourteen years ago, the speaker took part in founding the Folk-lore Society, for the preservation and publication of popular traditions, legendary ballads, local proverbial sayings, superstitions, and old customs, and all subjects relating to them, he as little as others anticipated how many volumes of such matter it would produce, or of how great value they would be, as to the main purpose of tracing the development and diffusion of popular tradition and fancy, and as to the incidental knowledge of man which is preserved in them. ”

“ If not only knowledge and art, but at the same time moral and political excellence, be taken into consideration, it becomes yet harder to reckon on an ideal scale the advance or decline from stage to stage of culture. ”

“ They are now all defunct but the parent chapter, and that is in a prosperous condition.
The society proclaims its object to be social and literary culture and the exalting of the Western standard of literary excellence. ”

“ Audiences show great enthusiasm over rivalries of art, of actors, of authors, of opinions, and every once in a while applaud or boo a sentiment that touches the sacred foundations of the social and political order. ”

“ It pays to cultivate popularity. It doubles success possibilities, develops manhood, and builds up character. ”

“ All genuine, popular Tales, arranged with local and national reference, cannot fail to throw light upon contemporary events in history, upon the progressive cultivation of society, and upon the prevailing modes of thinking in every age. ”

“ The latest thing in politics, painting, flying, in feminism or call-of-the-wild, in music, scouting, cubism, futurism, feeding, dancing, clothing, ancient philosophy redressed, or modern pulpit pretending to be neo—everything that thrills the public to-day, from pageantry and Eurhythmics to higher thought and psychism, they touched with clever condensing accuracy of aim, and grew fat upon the proceeds. ”

“ Each has drawn to himself a sort of international public, held together by ties of education, by taste and by the spirit of the age—such a public as a novelist might collect, but which one would never have predicted for a playwright. ”

“ I will therefore first speak of those things by which the public is particularly excited; of those two hereditary foes of all comfortable life, and of all cheerful, self-sufficient, living poetry,—I mean, satire and criticism.
In quiet times every one wants to live after his own fashion: the citizen will carry on his trade or his business, and enjoy the fruits of it afterward; thus will the author, too, willingly compose something, publish his labours, and, since he thinks he has done something good and useful, hope for praise, if not reward. ”

“ The national literature reveals the myriad shades and hues of private and public feeling, and the more truthful this literary record, the more delicate and noble become the harmonies of local and national thought or emotion with the universal instincts and passions of mankind. ”

“ Only those who know the supreme educative value of dramatic representations for those actively interested in them, will appreciate all that these plays meant for popular education in the best sense of the word, but all can readily understand how much they stood for in popular occupation of mind with high thoughts and how {247} much they must have acted as a preventive of debasing dissipations. ”

“ Hence its power and its popularity over the whole face of the earth. Hence also, to descend from great things to small, and from the destiny of man to that of the drawing-room, hence the seductiveness of that epoch and the charm it scattered over social, life. ”

“ As we have already observed, this élite, gathered from century to century, and always adding to itself, at last makes up a number, becomes in time a multitude, and composes the supreme crowd,—the definitive public of men of genius, sovereign like them. ”

“ But this country has had no academy of literature. The public mind, for centuries, has been engrossed by party and faction; by the madness of many for the gain of a few; by civil wars, religious dissensions, trade and commerce, and the arts of accumulating wealth. Amidst such attentions, who can wonder that cold praise has been often the only reward of merit? ”

“ Live for your Art, not for that limited, narrow, uncharitable, scandalmongering section of the great public [Pg 350] which calls itself "Society," and which loves to patronize Art in any form at the least possible cost to itself. ”

“ Popularity is nowhere a greater snare than it is in this region of work, and magazine articles, and review articles, the romance of history, and historic scenes and characters, are produced with great facility when the principal object is to attract the half-educated to read. ”

“ Where is the poet who shares half the popularity of Warren, Turner, or Day and Martin, whose ebony fames are spread through every dirty little village in England? These instances of the trifling and ridiculous made as much noise and stir in their day as the best, and noise and bustle are the essence and soul of popularity.
The nearest akin to popularity is common fame. I mean names that are familiar among the common people. It is not a very envious species, for they seldom know how to value or appreciate what they are acquainted with. ”

“ If for one chapter in our texts or for one semester in our institutions of learning the joy of creating for the mere love of it, for the sheer beauty of it, had been glorified as we glorify popularity and commercial success, what a buoyancy of spirit we could have engendered, what a fluttering of young wings! ”

“ What an audience the writer of the first romance to star a spectacled hero will have. All over the country thousands of short-sighted men will polish their glasses and plunge into his pages. It is absurd to go on writing in these days for a normal-sighted public. The growing tenseness of life, with its small print, its newspapers read by artificial light, and its flickering motion pictures, is whittling down the section of the populace which has perfect sight to a mere handful. ”

“ But the cultivation of the finer arts redeems society from its grossness, spreads an unconscious moderation and charm around it, softens the asperities of human intercourse, elevates our ideals, and imparts a sense of serene enjoyment to all social relations. ”

“ Society did not lack vigor, nor literature talent; men of the world were polished, writers inventive. There was a court, drawing-rooms, conversation, worldly life, a taste for letters, the example of France, peace, leisure, the influence of the sciences, of politics, of theology—in short, all the happy circumstances which can elevate the mind and civilize manners. ”