Mobile Vulgus

KING MOB--Frank K. Notch--Harcourt, Brace ($2).

Author Notch has harsh things to say about the Mob, thinks it is gaining control of civilization, is not happy about it. Says he: "A mob is made up of a group of persons unable to think straight because they are affected by the consciousness of their own numbers. . . . The Mob destroys spiritual values by accepting them; it destroys great men by adopting their principles." Because he is a writer, Author Notch's prime examples of mob-rule are taken from the literary racket.

Says he: Publishers Simon & Schuster have most successfully developed the art of "panicking" the public into buying their books--books often intrinsically worthless. Says Critic Notch: "Anyone who reads Trader Horn at a distance of years sees it for what it is: senile drivel touched up with loving skill by a third-rate novelist." Notch attacks the Book Clubs: "The intellectual appeal of the Book Clubs is simple, frank--and dishonest. . . . Here [in having well-known critics select the books] is a calculated misunderstanding of the critic's function: which is to produce good literature of his own on the subject of books, pictures, music, etc. . . . good books are not produced frequently and regularly." For such popularizers as Will Durant (Story of Philosophy}, Lewis Browne (This Believing World), Hendrik Willem Van Loon (The Story of Mankind), Critic Notch has less than no admiration; calls their books "an assault upon the world's cultural values."

Colyumist Arthur Brisbane most rouses the Notch ire. Brisbane's manner of commenting upon world events is thus described: "Two subway diggers, or two stockbrokers, exhausted by the day's work, stand, half-comatose, at the bar of an old-fashioned saloon; between long, refreshing pulls at their schooners they utter, effortlessly and comfortingly, their dazed views on the fall of empires and the rise of Henry Ford." He has little respect for Tycoon Ford, calls him "a typical specimen of the anti-cultural American." The Mob, says Critic Notch, is influenced by scientific discoveries, but its science is anachronistic. "The discarded scientific concepts of the last three centuries are on the grow. The scientist cannot stop them from growing because they are too easy, too plausible and too teachable. . . . [The Mob character] is a cockney character, self-confident, contemptuous and anti-cultural; it is very knowing and knows very little." But no yearner after yore is Critic Notch; he thinks the present age "most fascinating in human history;" despising and fearing Mob ascendancy, he wants "an emphasis on the nonutilitarian element in education." believes the basis of education should be "the self-sufficiency and self-reliance of the individual soul."

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