190
PARTISAN
R'EVIEW
inert except for the straining here and there of some ambitious soul
bent on breaking loose. The working classes were the barbarians;
"in England," he told Norton, "the Huns and Vandals will have to
come u.p-from the black depths of the (in the people) enormous
misery." He was to write a few stories and one long novel about men
and women of the servant or the working class; and in most case
their yeaming toward the superior world makes up their very sub–
stance. Unlike Flaubert of
Un Coeur Simple,
he could see nothing
but pathos and unreality in states of penury and servitude. Ignorant
and stifling as it was, this was nevertheless his impassioned point of
view, and the very narrowness of it made
him
strangely eloquent
on the subject. The appurtenances of the poor were "the merciless
signs of mere mean stale feelings." Poverty was the total failure of
the human.
He felt all this very strongly himself, as strongly as
if
he also had
once been poor and Cambridge had been a slum. The words "vulgar"
and "provincial" were compulsive with him. His snobbishness, like his
prudishness, was real-even though that was not the whole story.
Any deeper sympathies first told on his nerves; and whatever else
his stories of plebeian life may mean, they denote an extraordinary
fastidiousness on their author's part. He came in time to avow this
more openly and to treat his friends to humorously arrogant cJ.is..
plays of it. What perhaps signified to him a certain complicated
wholeness of mind on his own part could be trusted to strike them
as merely arbitrary and so shock or amuse them. "Economy of means
-economy of effect," he once said of an evening's entertainment on
which
his
hosts had skimped. "I was amazed ... , " writes Desmond
MacCarthy, "by . . .
his
remark on our leaving what appeared to
me a thoroughly well-appointed, prosperous house, 'Poor S., poor S.
-the stamp of unmistakable poverty upon everything.' ...
His
dis–
like of squalor was so great that surroundings to be tolerable to him
had positively to proclaim its utter impossibility."
His
shrinking from
the squalid was the reflex of his striving toward the gold-power,
beauty, freedom. And in his dream of an aristocracy of talents
and
money were reconciled two opposing American ideals of long stand–
ing, not to mention those of his own family.
