PARTISAN REVIEW
utter loudly about society when he stood barefooted in the street
there. He felt responsible, the fanatical Quaker of the Revolution
who hated both parties in it. And society (you remember), the herd,
lowed back more kindly I think than he deserved: "George, George,
what hast done with thy shoes?" And then across the square slouches
that puddingy, porridgy figure of Dr. Johnson who utters at large–
and very large-all his life. The tub thumper and the table thumper
-vision and opinion were their daily meat; but mark that Fox w.as
not an imaginative writer (though his
]
ournal
is the work of an
imaginative man) but a preacher; and the Doctor was an egotist by
affliction. A greater writer than either, vain as a dragon fly, stands
across the square with the rain dripping down his coppery back; an
exquisite with a lop-sided face, bibulous eyes, turn-up nose-like a
pot hook and a wonderfully caddish swagger- Boswell, the fool of an
inordinate devotion, the unconscious revolutionary (as Peter Quennell
pointed out in his admirable portrait ) . I doubt if Boswell ever re–
flected on "the challenge of
his
time" and we must suppose he never
thought much about the relation of the writer to society for, in the
eighteenth century, all the great questions had been placed in the
pigeon holes. Boswell responded to his time in his own way. And that
perhaps is the answer we need, do you think?-that there must be a
response?
V. S. Pritchett to Elizabeth Bowen
... I reject the argument put up in the 'thirties that, in our
revolutionary times, the conditions necessary for imaginative work
do not exist and that we must down tools to work for the proper con–
ditions. The conditions are bad and they get worse; but I read today
of the extraordinary revival of the art of tapestry in France during
the German occupation. I do not remember that Goya stopped paint–
ing during the French occupation of Spain. In Russia, where the
opinion I have mentioned has, with intervals, prevailed, there appears
to have been a long decline in prose literature; though it is also true
that the decline from the great age of the Russian novel had begun
long before 1917. The argument was really .advanced so that we might
gang up politically; once we were ganged up, we would be easier to
control. But sectarianism is sterilizing. The lesson of the thirties seems
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