74
PARTISAN REVIEW
had the best professional in Los Angeles teach his wife and daughter
the tennis strokes he himself talked of with wearying authority; who
never in his life had gone through a doorway before anyone over the age
of seven-this well-dressed, well-mannered, traveled, urbane, educated
gentleman said placidly: "1 don't believe I've heard of them." For so
far as literature, the arts, philosophy and science were concerned, he
might better have been the policeman on the corner. But he was per–
fectly correct
in
thinking- not that he had ever thought about it–
that a knowledge of these things is not an essential requirement of
the society of which he is a part. We belong to a culture whose old
hierarchy of values-which demanded that a girl read Pope just as it
demanded that she go to church and play the pianoforte-has virtually
disappeared; a culture in which the great artist or scientist, in the rela–
tively infrequent cases in which he has become widely known, has the
status of Betty Grable, or of the columnist who writes that, the night
before, he met both these "celebrities" at the Stork Club.
When, a hundred and fifty years ago, a man had made his fortune,
he found it necessary to provide himself with lace, carriages, servants,
a wife of good family, a ballerina, a fencing master, a dancing master,
a chaplain, a teacher of French, a string quartet perhaps, the editions
of Pope and Steele and Addison through which he worked a laborious
way on unoccupied evenings: there was so much for him to learn to
do,
there in his new station in life, that he must often have thought with
nostalgia of the days in which all that he had to do was make his fortune.
We have changed most of that: in our day the rich are expected not to
do but to be; and those ties, tenuous, ambiguous and immemorial, which
bound to the Power of a state its Wisdom and its Grace, have at last
been severed.
When Mill and Marx looked at a handful of workingmen making
their slow firm way through the pages of Shelley or H erbert Spencer or
The
Origin of
Species,
they thought with confident longing, just as
Jefferson and Lincoln had, of the days when every man would be
literate, when an actual democracy would make its choices with as
much wisdom as any imaginary state where the philosopher is king;
and no gleam of prophetic insight came to show them those working–
men, two million strong, making their easy and pleasant way through
the pages of the New York
Daily News.
The very speeches in which
Jefferson and Lincoln spoke of their hope for the future are incom–
prehensible to most of the voters of that future, since the vocabulary
and syntax of the speeches are more difficult-more obscure-than any–
thing the voters have read or h eard. For when you defeat me in an
