I (continued 2)

In the America where Hugo came to manhood, there was, in a sense, only a single class and a single culture; one found it behind every façade, one felt it through every uniform—and not merely among those members of society whom it had already become fashionable to ridicule: the small business man, the hired reformer, the windbag politician—but in the cramped mind of the clever lawyer, for whom intellectual dignity and freedom had been forbidden by the interests which he served; in the grandeur of the medical specialist’s waiting-room and the impoverishment of science which it masked; in the educated clergyman turned evangelist and vying with the mountebanks of Methodism; alike in the silk hat of the labor leader and in the homely and hollow plain-spokenness of the self-made industrial master; and even in the universities, with their presidents held in subjection by millionaire trustees, with their middle-class timidity about raising, in class or conversation, the real political, moral or æsthetic problems of the time; even in the best of the theatre, where incompetence and indifference almost invariably betrayed the beauty of the noblest text; even in literature, where an ignorant criticism was ready to declare every apprentice a master; in that whole machine of interrelated interests, which kept literature, theatre, learning, church, medicine, politics and law, all fixed in their mediocre functions, all constrained by the fear of their neighbors, all intent on their bank accounts—all that appalling susceptibility to regimentation by “business” and that incapacity for discipline of self, all that voracity for physical comfort, all that pervading commonness of mind, which, even in those sections of society from which Hugo’s father had come and which had at least produced a few men like him, now debased their distinction to luxury and made cowards of their leaders. It was, perhaps, after all, hardly necessary to find special explanations for Hugo’s fear of committing himself, of giving hostages to any group—which moved beside him like Pascal’s abyss. It was, perhaps, after all, not unnatural that there should come a moment, in every company, when Hugo would want to snatch his hat, to say good-by and get away.