104
PARTISAN REVIEW
gets produced, after it has been edited to suit the popular taste. He
becomes, in the end, a success, which was what he and Mrs. Elliot
wanted for him, but being a "success" is the ultimate absurd ignominy.
"Turned out to be Bernard Shaw, after all, eh?" says Mrs. Elliot's hus–
band, Percy, contemplating the box office returns; George, in short, has
compelled the admiration of "a small, mean little man" by the vulgarity
of making good. He has moved, like a clown, from the cliche of failure
to the platitude of success, and indeed he is trapped in cliches and plati–
tudes, detected by his ear but beyond the power of his will to escape
from, like the hideous furniture--the cocktail cabinet, the "contempor–
ary" chair, the telly, and the painting of ducks in flight ("those blasted
birds")
--of
the Elliot home. George had "hoped, thought he was that
mysterious, ridiculous being called an artist"; instead, he finds himself
written into a script of his own creation, which has him having to
marry the younger Elliot daughter, whom, incredibly, he has got in the
family way. "Incredibly," "improbably"-that is the way things happen
to George; either he is real to himself and outside events are therefore
incredible because they seem to have no connection with him, or vice
versa: the events are real and he, amidst them, is the improbability.
It cannot be a coincidence that all three of the current non-heroes
are fish out of water-educated men confined with illiterates or the
nearest thing to it-and that all three, as if to emphasize their false
position, are liars. To the Elliot family (Percy Elliot excepted), George
is always a gentleman, that is, a superior order of person entitled to
superior consideration. This is only another way of saying that George,
to them, is an artist; seen from below, the two appear to
be
the
same
thing. In the prison world of
Deathwatch,
such illusions do not exist,
and Lefranc's superior education makes
him,
if anything, suspicious to
his cellmates. But in
A Touch of the Poet,
as the title indicates, you
again find an artist-gentleman profiting with a bad conscience from the
respect of the uncultured. Major Cornelius Melody, late of the Duke
of Wellington's service in the Peninsular War, now a derelict tavern–
keeper in New England, is worshipped and coddled as an aristocrat by
his low-born, rheumatic drudge of a wife, who wears herself out in the
inn so that he can keep a thoroughbred mare in the bam, spout passages
of Lord Byron, and once a year put on his fine red uniform to cele–
brate at a drunken dinner the anniversary of the Battle of Talavera.
He and George are really museum-pieces kept in the house by the lower
orders and tenderly brushed and polished; this is vividly symbolized by
O'Neill in the red uniform of the British Army officer that is brought
down from the trunk ceremonially every July 27 for the ruined Irish
