The prig never learns anything unconsciously or instinctively. He learns only what he feels is worth learning; anything else he not only scorns but fears, or regards as compromise, contamination, deterioration. Your prig lives in a kind of many-windowed, not to say entirely glassed-in, dwelling, bathed in a prim religious light; but the windows themselves he never opens, for fear that something may blow in from the street. He wants light without air, he prefers purity to humanity, in all too many cases the campus to the cosmos. He is the most complacent of men, where the snob will often be the most worried; and he is not, like the snob, observant, so he is not, like the snob, adaptable. He is rigid equally by temperament and by training—rigid in all big ways, where the snob is only in small. For the snob, at his Proust-like task of studying the great world, there may be only one place to go for neckties; for the prig there is only one way of going to heaven.
ATTRIBUTION:
Louis Kronenberger (1904–1980), U.S. critic, editor, novelist. The Polished Surface, Knopf (1969).
