246
PARTISAN REVIEW
chilled many a young literary man with its expression of seeing casually
through a millstone." But perhaps because her ideal is gentility rather
than aristocracy, her air is rather that of Rosalind than of Lady
Mac–
beth. To see her step forth to defy Uncle Thomas Eliot over
the
question of Hardy's "diabolic tendencies" is as good as a play; but
never let Rosalind's pertness and charm deceive you into thinking she
isn't formidable: "Reasonableness: the use of the human intelligence
directed toward the best human solution of human ills; such, if you
please, was the unedifying proposal of this diabolic soul." This is no
mind to be put about by Mr. Eliot's awful pronouncement that no
one who lacks a strong sense of original sin can even understand
him.
Nor will it be put about by D. H. Lawrence's mysticism. "When you
have read this book," she says of
The Plumed Serpent,
"read
Sons
and Lovers
again. You will realize the catastrophe that has overtaken
Lawrence." Nor by Gertrude Stein's irrationalities-"form, matter, and
style," she calls them, "stuttering and stammering and wallowing along
together with the agitated harmony of roiling entrails."
Miss Porter's is, above all, a mind capable of ordering these tastes
and these ideas with great elegance. Weare not, to be sure, to look for
a sustained display of her powers in occasional essays. But there
is
something about the sudden emergence of the characteristic style of
her mind in an offhand remark which is wonderfully satisfying. You
can see that style when she remarks of rocket ships that "we may
in–
deed reach the moon some day, and I dare predict that will happen
before we devise a decent system of city garbage disposal"; or when she
observes of Gertrude Stein that "like writing, opinion also belonged
to Miss Stein, and nothing annoyed her more--she was easily angered
about all sorts of things-than for anyone not a genius [like herself] .,.
to appear to be thinking in her presence." These are characteristic
examples of the interplay of imaginative understanding and firm, com–
mon sense appraisal which constitutes the style of her mind, a style
best summed up in words Miss Porter herself wrote about another
gifted woman:
She [is] full of secular intelligence primed with the profane virtues,
with her love not only of the world of all the arts created by the
human imagination, but a love of life itself and of daily living, a spirit
at once gay and severe, exacting and generous, a born artist and a
sober craftsman; and she [has] no plan whatever for her personal
sal–
vation; or the personal salvation even of someone else.
Arthur Mizener
