58
PARTISAN REVIEW
altogether in the world" and whose taste ran to "splendor." The
most explicit statement of Mrs. Radcliffe's genteel position occurs in
The Italian,
in which Ellena, of excellent breeding but pressed for
cash, "passed whole days in embroidering silks, which were disposed
of by the nuns of a neighboring convent, who sold them to the
Neapolitan ladies, that visited their grate, at a very, high advantage."
This ladylike traffic at two removes epitomizes Mrs. Radcliffe's esteem
of bourgeois virtues without bourgeois disabilities. Emily, of course,
never handles money, nor do any of Mrs. Radcliffe's heroines.
By the same Veblenesque token the arts themselves become
otiose'--testaments of leisure, and of the discord between art and
society. In her room adjoining the greenhouse Emily kept "her books,
her drawings, her musical instruments, with some favorite birds and
plants. Here she usually exercised herself in elegant arts, cultivated
only because they were congenial to her taste"-i.e., useless, and
economically as insignificant as the arts really are in St. George's
Guild or in the visionary society of Morris. St. Aubert and Valan–
court read Homer, Horace, and Petrarch because a concern with
Homer, Horace, and Petrarch is of no practical effect. The
arts
are
thus a form of commodity-fetishism. The peasants of the novel, though
they dike and delve, have no ability to hunt even when they are
hungry.
An
especially "romantic" form of socio-economic callousness
appears in the idyllic scenes of peasant life, and in Emily's insistence
that "poverty cannot deprive us of intellectual delights-so
long as
we are not in want of necessaries"!
The Count de Villefort, with
his
fan1ily and Emily, go, of an evening, to the woods to enjoy "the
festivity of the peasants" in a gaily festooned glade provided with
· "seats for the count and his family." This brand of Theocritean myth
in
1794
was one aspect of a prevailing bourgeois-deistic religion of
"nature." On a "still and beautiful night" Emily's well-bred mind
would arise "to the adoration of the Deity, in his goodness and power:
wherever she turned her view, whether on the sleeping earth, or to
the vast regions of space, glowing with worlds beyond the reach of
human thought, the sublimity of God and the majesty
Of
his presence
appeared. Her eyes were filled with tears of awful love and admira–
tion.... " The pastoral response to peasants and starlight is actually
an aesthetic one, although it implies social and religious attitudes.
It is not actually Theocritean, since a legitimately Theocritean response
is a conscious, sophisticated suspension of disbelief, essentially aesthetic
and recreative, and for the most part dissociated from religious or
ethical values. The ambiguities within a genuinely Theocritean atti-
