toplofty

“Your bread! When did it come to be yours? By Amon, you have grown too toplofty of late, behaving like Pharaoh instead of the gutter waif you are. Aye, a waif, and remember it! Where would you be this moment, had I not offered you food and lodging out of the goodness of my heart? Sleeping in the dust of the streets, aye, and fighting the dogs for their leavings. Instead, you live comfortably on my bread.”

This settled quality makes Trilling’s letters a bit toplofty and dull.

One young toplofty gallant set the tone: “Well, think of that! Telemakhos has a mind to murder us. He’s going to lead avengers out of Pylos, or Sparta, maybe; oh, he’s wild to do it. Or else he’ll try the fat land of Ephyra— he can get poison there, and bring it home, doctor the wine jar and dispatch us all.”

But Joseph Jefferson, a far more versatile comedian than John Gilbert, was swift to discern merit, and he was wholly free from toplofty condescension toward other forms of the histrionic art than that in which he was himself pre-eminent—perhaps, because in his youth he had often appeared as a burlesque actor, an experience which he gladly admitted to have been very valuable to him.

Aldous Huxley adopted a toplofty attitude toward his creatures, but he had the intellectual force to transform snobbery into satire.