Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination

Author(s): JOSEPH FRANK

Source: Salmagundi, No. 41, Lionel Trilling (Spring 1978), pp. 33-54
Published by: Skidmore College
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40547114
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 Lionel Trilling and the
Conservative Imagination*
BY JOSEPH FRANK

The career and reputation of Lionel Trilling as a literary critic pose

something of an anomaly. Not, we should hasten to add, that Mr.
Trilling does not deserve all the encomiums that have been lavished on
him or the considerable influence he enjoys as a spiritual guide and
mentor. But Mr. Trilling is by no means the kind of critic who has
dominated the American literary scene since the end of the Second
World War. His concern with literature has always been broadly moral
and historical - like that of his master Matthew Arnold - rather than
more strictly aesthetic or formal- like the group of New Critics who
sprang into prominence exactly at the time Mr. Trilling's own star was
on the rise. The anomaly posed by his career is that of explaining his
reputation, when the whole drift of American literary opinion seemed to
be moving in the direction opposite of the one he chose to take.
Part of the answer may be found in an observation of Mr. Trilling
himself about such men as John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and R. P.
Blackmur. It is an illusion, he writes in The Liberal Imagination, to
believe that these critics are as free from ideology as they pretend; in
reality their so-called aesthetic judgments are profoundly steeped in
concealed cultural preferences and moral assumptions. This remark is
perfectly just. In defending the autonomy and integrity of the work of
art, the New Critics were repulsing the claims of the liberals and radicals
to appropriate it for social or political ends; their influence was part of
the wave of disillusionment with politics that marked the generation of
the fifties. And, though Lionel Trilling approached art with overt moral
and historical assumptions, the substance of what he had to say was by
no means dissimilar to what the New Critics were advocating in their
own way. For the pervasive disillusionment with politics was given its
most sensitive, subtle, and judiciously circumspect expression in the
criticism of Lionel Trilling- and this is the real answer to the anomaly of
his success.
* This item appeared originally in 1956. (See the appendix, following.)

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 34 JOSEPH FRANK
Mr. Trilling's strategy was far more elaborate than that of the New
Critics and was deployed with far more finesse. Instead of pretending to
immure himself in a confining aestheticism, he showed himself open to
all the currents of the political and social life; but in his famous attack on
"the liberal imagination" he criticized liberalism for attempting to
measure the complexities of reality exclusively by a sociopolitical
yardstick. Only literature, he argued, could truly cope with the
intricacies of the moral life; and he recommended that politics
appropriate for itself some of the suppleness of literature.
"Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind," he declared in
The Liberal Imagination, "we will learn that imagination and mind are
politics, and of a kind we will not like." It was never made clear just how
politics was supposed to metamorphose into "imagination and mind";
but phrases of this kind, turned with Mr. Trilling's consummate skill,
show how perfectly he was able both to crystallize the temper of the
moment and to appear to escape its limitations at the same time. For
while he rejects the crudities of politics in one breath, in the very next he
holds out the hope of a new politics that will incorporate all the
discriminations of literature.
It is hardly necessary to say that no such latter politics has ever
existed - or ever will exist. As R. P. Blackmur remarked in an acute
review of The Liberal Imagination: "The politics of existing states is
always too simple for literature; it is good only to aggravate literature." 1
No political ideology of any kind can compete with literature in the
delicacy of its reaction to human experience. Even Mr. Trilling would
agree that his favorite Edmund Burke, whom he so often quotes with
approval, hardly rivals Wordsworth in the range of his responses to the
French Revolution. In other words, Mr. Trilling's criticism of the liberal
imagination revealed nothing that was not equally true of any politics
that set itself up as a total view of human reality; and he actually
criticizes politics from the point of view of art- a point of view happily
free from the limiting conditions of all political action. Yet by confining
his criticism to the liberal imagination, and not extending it to politics in
general, Mr. Trilling implied that his views had immediate practical and
political relevance. He thus, as it were, filled the intellectual vacuum left
by the New Critics. For Mr. Trilling's readers among the erstwhile
liberal and radical intelligentsia could continue to feel that they were
actively engaged in the political life, while in fact they were tacitly
rejecting it from the standpoint of art that the New Critics defended with
less tact and more belligerency.
1 R. P. Blackmur, The Lion and the Honeycomb (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957), p.
41.

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Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination 35
II

The delicate poise of The Liberal Imagination was thus based on an

unresolved tension in Mr. Trilling's thinking between art and politics.
This tension has since been resolved in his succeeding volume, The
Opposing Self. For this latter volume of essays is a development of those
aspects of Mr. Trilling's thought- aspects that were already present
even in his books on Matthew Arnold and E. M. Forster- which come
closest to constituting a rejection of the political imagination as a whole.
The best way to approach The Opposing Self is to turn to one of the
key essays in The Liberal Imagination, the essay entitled "Art and
Fortune." Here Mr. Trilling speaks of the modern will dying of its own
excess; and he suggests that literature, particularly the novel, might be of
great service in renovating and restoring the will to health. How can this
be done? "The novel has had a long dream of virtue," Mr. Trilling
answers, "in which the will, while never abating its strength and activity,
comes to refuse to exercise itself upon the unworthy objects with which
the social world tempts it, and either conceives its own right objects or
becomes content with its own sense of its own potential force." The way
for the modern will to renovate itself, according to Mr. Trilling, is to
abnegate its action on the unworthy objects of the social world and
attain a state of pure contemplative being; and the chosen agent for this
renovation is literature.
Mr. Trilling's antipathy to the will, as we can see, is thus of long
standing; and there are moments when, for all his candor, alertness, and
receptivity to the historical moment, we seem to feel the "inner check" of
Babbitt and More - not to mention the Nirvana of Schopenhauer -
lurking ominously in the background. But in any case Mr. Trilling's
essays in The Opposing Self arc all devoted to exploring this theme of
the abnegation of the will which he had broached in The Liberal
Imagination. Indeed, he now argues that this abnegation of the will, this
substitution of contemplation for an active grappling with social reality,
is an important key to modern culture.
The modern self, he writes in the preface to The Opposing Self has an
intense and adverse imagination of the culture in which it exists. But this
opposition of the modern self to culture takes a very special form. "What
virtually every writer of the modern period conceives," he states, is "the
experience of art projected into the activity and totality of life as the
ideal form of the moral life." Dissatisfied with its habitual life in culture,
the modern "opposing self seeks to transcend culture's moral burdens
in the free play of imagination and desire; and this, Mr. Trilling adds,
"makes, I believe, a new idea in the world."

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 36 JOSEPH FRANK
One may doubt whether all this is as new as Mr. Trilling would like to
think. The Hellenistic self of the Alexandrian era and the Christian self
of the first centuries after Christ were also, one suspects, "opposing
selves" by Mr. Trilling's standard. But he insists, nonetheless, that the
modern self has given birth to a new cultural mutation; and to prove the
point he invokes the formidable authority of Hegel. Hegel, he writes,
"understood in a remarkable way what he believed to be a new
phenomenon of culture."

This is the bringing into play in the moral life of a new category of
judgment, the category of quality. Not merely the deed itself, he
said, is now submitted to judgment, but also the personal quality of
the doer of the deed. . . . For Hegel, art is the activity of man in
which spirit expresses itself not only as utility, not only according to
law, but as grace, as transcendence, as manner and style. He
brought together the moral and aesthetic judgment. He did this not
in the old way of making morality the criterion of the aesthetic: on
the contrary, he made the aesthetic the criterion of the moral.

It is unfortunate that Mr. Trilling decided to venture into such deep

philosophical waters because, strictly speaking, the ideas he so
generously attributes to Hegel are entirely of his own devising. 2 Hegel, it

2 Mr. Trilling cites no evidence for his contention about Hegel except a reference to a
passage in the fourth part of the Philosophy of History. This passage turns out to deal
with the German barbarians who invaded the Roman Empire and to whom Hegel
attributes a quality that he calls GemUth. This latter is a common German word
meaning, roughly, the emotional temper of a man or a group. Hegel, however, gives it a
special definition. "Character is a particular form of the will," he writes, "and of the
interests that manifest themselves through the will. Gemüthlichkeit, however, has no
particular aims, such as riches, honors and the like; in fact, it does not concern itself
with any worldly conditions of wealth, prestige, etc. , but with the entire condition of the
soul - a general sense of enjoyment."
Mr. Trilling is quite captivated with this idea of Gemüth - no doubt because it
seemed to furnish a term for expressing the condition of the will that he had tried to
define in "Art and Fortune." But this should not have led him to pretend that Hegel's
remarks about the German barbarians refer to the relation of the modern self to culture
since the French Revolution.
Hegel clearly is not talking about the "modern self in Mr. Trilling's sense - unless
we assume that nothing significant happened to culture between the Völkerwanderung
and the French Revolution. Moreover, even if we overlook this anachronism, Hegel's
text does not bear out Mr. Trilling's interpretation. "GemUth? Hegel also writes, in a
passage that Mr. Trilling fails to cite, "in the abstract is stupidity, and so we see in the
original condition of the Germans a barbaric stupidity, confusion and indeterminacy."
Far from making Gemüth the basis of a new category of cultural judgment, Hegel
regards it as an empty form of infantile self-enjoyment and self-preoccupation. In his
view, it only became valuable after having assimilated the objective content of Greco-
Roman culture preserved by the Catholic Church. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke,
Jubiläumsausgabe, ed. by H. Glockner (Stuttgart, 1927-1930), Vol. II, pp. 447-449.

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Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination 37
may flatly be asserted, never made the aesthetic the criterion of the
moral; and if Mr. Trilling thinks he did, then he should read Hegel's
criticism of Friedrich Schlegel and Romantic irony in the lectures on
aesthetics.3 From the reference to style and grace as providing a
standard from which law and utility may be judged, it is possible to infer
that Mr. Trilling is here confusing Hegel with a recollection of Schiller's
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind', but these questions of
attribution and accuracy are of course picayune. What is important is to
see that Mr. Trilling himself now wishes to make "the aesthetic the
criterion of the moral," just as previously, in The Liberal Imagination,
he made the aesthetic the criterion of the political. This is the point,
however, at which it is necessary to tread very cautiously - at least as
cautiously as Kant, for instance, who (in The Critique of Judgment) also
viewed art as a projection into nature of the ideal form of the moral life,
but who hastened to add that this ideal was realized only in the state of
aesthetic apprehension, or, more completely, in that of aesthetic
creation.
For it is one thing to make the experience of art- the experience of
pleasure and beauty, of harmony and reconciliation - the ideal form of
moral life. It is quite another to attribute the virtues of this aesthetic
ideal to concrete social behavior which, quite independently of any
relationship with art, merely exhibits an abeyance or absence of the will.
In other words, it is of the utmost importance not to confuse the
boundaries of the ideal and the real, the aesthetic and the social; not to
endow social passivity and quietism as such with the halo of aesthetic
transcendence. Mr. Trilling regrettably does not always keep this
boundary well defined, and he tends occasionally to identify all forms of
being in which the will is absent or quiescent with the ideal values of the
aesthetic attitude. As we shall see, this leads him, by a devious path, to
end up in justifying a good many of the degrading objects of the social
world which the will had once been required to shun and to despise.

Ill

The best essay in The Opposing Self as might be expected, is the one
in which Mr. Trilling portrays the true transcendence of the artist at its
highest peak of aspiration and achievement. This is done in his
admirable study of Keats's letters, which ranks with the essay on The
Princess Casamassima among the finest performances of
contemporary criticism. The central purpose of Mr. Trilling's article is
to show how Keats's self, while accepting the immitigable reality of evil,
3 Ibid., Vol. XII, pp. 100-105.

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 38 JOSEPH FRANK
was yet capable of affirming a faith in life through aesthetic
transcendence. The point is very forcefully made in Mr. Trilling's gloss
on the famous conclusion to The Ode on a Grecian Urn.
When Keats wrote that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" he was not
evading issues but confronting them. What he meant, according to Mr.
Trilling, "is that a great poet (e.g., Shakespeare) looks at human life, sees
the terrible truth of its evil, but sees it so intensely that it becomes an
element of the beauty which is created by his act of
perception. . . . Keats's statement is an accurate description of the
response to evil or ugliness which tragedy makes: the matter of tragedy is
ugly or painful truth seen as beauty." By transcending the reality of evil
in this fashion, Keats affirmed "the creativity of the self that opposes
circumstance, the self that is imagination and desire, that, like Adam,
assigns names and values to things, and can realize what it envisions."
(This last, presumably, means to "realize" artistically.)
What Mr. Trilling so rightly admires in Keats is the courage and
resilience of the self, the gallantry of the spirit accepting the challenge of
circumstance and the world's evil and asserting its heroic resolution
nonetheless. This spirit, according to Mr. Trilling, is no longer of our
time. "We have lost the mystique of the self." This mystique does not
consist in the struggle of the will against fate, but rather in the
transcendence of the will by a self that feels capable of rising superior to
any onslaught. "Shakespeare suggested the only salvation that Keats
found it possible to conceive, the tragic salvation, the soul accepting the
fate that defines it." Certainly when man is faced with the problem of
ultimate evil, the Keatsian heroism of acceptance may be seen as the
finest flower of the cultivation of the self. But not every evil is ultimate,
not every acceptance is heroic; and while there is no need to stress this
point for Mr. Trilling, with his acute sense of moral nuance, the fact
remains that he does not always keep it in mind in developing his
arguments.
As an example we may take the wide-ranging essay on "Wordsworth
and the Rabbis." This title is a prettyyew desprit that Mr. Trilling works
out with graceful ingenuity; and there is no reason to take it more
seriously than he does himself. Wordsworth has as much (or as little) to
do with the rabbis as with the lamas, the fakirs, the gurus, or the bonzes.
What Mr. Trilling wishes to bring out by his comparison is the
"sentiment of being" in Wordsworth's poetry, a sentiment very close to
the natural piety shared by disciples of all the great spiritual religions.
This sentiment of being is perfectly expressed in the lines from Tintem
Abbey (though Mr. Trilling does not use this passage himself), where
Wordsworth speaks of

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Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination 39
that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, -
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of Harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

Mr. Trilling believes that Wordsworth's loss of contemporary

reputation, his relegation to the status of a school classic, is caused by
the preference of our time for the apocalyptic and the charismatic, our
inability to experience the sense of being illustrated by these lines as
anything but alien and repugnant. "The predilection for the powerful,
the fierce, the assertive, the personally militant is very strong in our
culture," he writes. Wordsworth's sentiment of being is thus foreign to
our sensibility.
To prove this point Mr. Trilling refers to T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail
Party - specifically, to the scene in which Eliot depicts the way of life of
the "common routine" as contrasted with that of the saint or the martyr.
Many critics have objected that Eliot's picture of the common routine is
far from appealing - that it is, in fact, perhaps even more terrifying than
the way of martyrdom. There is no reason, of course, for a Christian like
Eliot to glorify ordinary earthly existence. But in the context of his
evident desire to make the resolution of the common routine a plausible
one, his failure to brighten up its colors a bit more is unquestionably an
aesthetic defect. Mr. Trilling attributes this weakness in the play to our
modern insensitivity to the values of the nonassertive, which he now
associates both with Wordsworth's "sentiment of being" and with "the
common routine" to which Eliot had failed to do justice. He argues that
even the way of martyrdom is made factitious by Eliot's inability to
portray the simple joys of the common routine. And Mr. Trilling
castigates this "system of feeling which sets very little store by- which,
indeed, denies the possibility of- the 'beatitude' which Wordsworth
thought was the birthright of every human soul."
Here Mr. Trilling's covert passage between two very different levels of
experience becomes apparent. Whatever one may say about the feelings
depicted in the lines from Tintern Abbey, it is obvious that they have
little to do with the routine trivialities of modern middle-class life.
Wordsworth himself, as Mr. Trilling is surely aware, felt his sentiment of
being in opposition to the life of the common routine, or at least to the

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 40 JOSEPH FRANK

routine of the urban middle class of his time (and we can be sure he
would have felt the same about our time). He turns to images of nature
that revive his sentiment of being " 'mid the din of towns and cities" and
"In darkness and amid the many shapes/ Of joyless daylight; when the
fretful stir/ Unprofitable and the fever of the world/ Have hung upon
the beatings of my heart."
In other words, by lumping Wordsworth's "beatitude" with Eliot's
"the common routine," Mr. Trilling is being false to the spirit of
Wordsworth; but even more, he is trying to make us believe that a
passive acceptance of social convention is on the same level of spiritual
dignity as the quasi-mystic experience of Wordsworth. The only element
the two have in common is that of passivity, the suspension of the will.
And while the sentiment of being of Wordsworth or Keats may truly be
called a projection of the experience of art as the ideal form of the moral
life, it is difficult to see how the same may be said of a simple
acquiescence in the common urban routine.
The same type of illegitimate identification between two quite
different kinds of being - to use Mr. Trilling's own criterion - comes out
even more sharply at the conclusion of the Wordsworth essay. At this
point Mr. Trilling is maintaining that "again and again in our literature,
at its most apocalyptic and intense, we find the impulse to create figures
who are intended to suggest that life is justified in its elemental
biological simplicity." And he then goes on to give a list of such
creations - D. H. Lawrence's primitives, Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt and
Mrs. Griffiths, Hemingway's waiters, Faulkner's Negroes and idiot
boys. According to Mr. Trilling, all these figures show the tendency of
our literature to "depict the will seeking its own negation - or, rather,
seeking its own affirmation by its rejection of the aims which the world
sets before it and by turning its energies upon itself in self-realization."
But what, one cannot help asking, has the biological justification of
life to do with the will seeking its own negation? And what have these
examples to do with anything that can remotely be called self-
realization? The transcendence of the will by the artist (or by the ascetic
and the saint) is self-realization; but this idea carries with it the
implication of conscious purpose, self-dedication, discipline, struggle -
it implies, in short, having a will to surrender. From Mr. Trilling's
examples it is clear that he makes no distinction between such self-
realization and a blind and dumb submission to destiny - a condition of
being that never reaches a level on which the will may properly be
spoken of. Here, too, Mr. Trilling is assigning the ideal values of the
aesthetic attitude to a condition of being with which it has in common
only an absence of will.

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Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination 41
This tendency of Mr. Trilling's thought, working with another set of
categories, may also be observed in his provocative essay on "William
Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste." The announced
intention of this piece is the laudable one of removing Howells from the
history of American culture and giving him a place in literature. All too
many writers belong in the first category, and Mr. Trilling thinks that
Howells deserves a better fate. No modern critic excels Mr. Trilling in
giving fresh and perceptive readings of novels; and one would have
expected him to do for Howells what he did for The Princess
Casamassima and the novels of E. M. Forster. But, instead of
concerning himself at length with Howells's creations, Mr. Trilling
adopts the same oblique tactic as in his Wordsworth essay. He argues
that our modern apocalyptic and charismatic culture, addicted to
power-worship and the deification of evil, is incapable of justly
evaluating the sunlit merits of Howells.4 And Mr. Trilling goes on to
talk not about Howells but about the roots of modern taste, using some
remarks made by Henry James as indices to what disqualifies us from
appreciating Howells.
Modern taste is dominated by an antipathy to what Mr. Trilling calls
"the conditioned" and favors what he calls "pure spirit" (whose agent
and instrument is the will). The conditions to which we moderns
respond, he says, "are the ones which we ourselves make, or over which
we have control, which is to say conditions as they are virtually spirit, as
they deny the idea of the conditioned. Somewhere in our mental
constitution is the demand for life as pure spirit." Now Mr. Trilling
contends, roughly, that our longing for pure spirit has made us blind to
such aspects of the conditioned as the family and our class status, and
has caused us to deprecate such necessary matters as those which
Howells listed among possible subjects for a novelist - "the family
budget, nagging wives, daughters who want to marry fools, and the
difficulties of deciding whom to invite to dinner."
Our dislike of the conditioned also accounts for our passion for form
and artifice in literature, since the triumph of form is primarily that of
spirit imposing its own conditions. And then, after having identified the
4 In this connection, it may be apposite to cite a critic writing in the halcyon days of 1 9 1 2,
and by no means unfriendly to Howells.
"Instead of demonstrating that life was interesting," John Macy says, "that the
commonplace is uncommonly interesting if you get under it and understand it, A
Modern Instance demonstrates with fine precision that life is not interesting to the
people that live it and that the commonplace is just as commonplace as the romantic
had always supposed it to be." John Macy, The Spirit of American Literature (New
York: Modern Library, n.d.), p. 284.
It would seem that times have not changed as much as Mr. Trilling would have us
believe!

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 42 JOSEPH FRANK
conditioned in Howells with the most commonplace concerns of civil
life ("for Howells the center of reality was the family life of the middle
class"), Mr. Trilling clinches his argument in the following startling
fashion: "The knowledge of the antagonism between spirit and the
conditioned - it is Donne's, it is Pascal's, it is Tolstoy's - may in
literature be a cause of great delight because it is so rare and difficult;
beside it the knowledge of pure spirit is comparatively easy."
In the light of what Mr. Trilling has told us about Howells's sense of
"the conditioned," this invocation of Donne, Pascal, and Tolstoy is
unexpected to say the least. What has Howells to do with Donne's
conflict between a skeptical sensuality and a passionate religiosity? With
Pascal's conflict between the impasses of reason and the eternal silence
of the infinite spaces? With Tolstoy's titanic search for the meaning of
history, and his anguished struggle to reconcile the abundance of life
with the gnawing awareness of physical death?
It is Mr. Trilling himself who has called our attention to the
importance of qualities of being; and his own attempt to wipe out the
differences between the social trivia of Howells and the tragic sense of
the conditioned in Donne, Pascal, and Tolstoy is thus all the more
disturbing and disconcerting. Once again Mr. Trilling's antagonism to
the will has led him to assign the same spiritual significance to totally
diverse levels on which "the conditioned" may enter into a relationship
with "pure spirit."And the result is that the will, instead of transcending
the social world and its particular aims, now finds itself enjoined to treat
the most casual conventions of the family life of the middle class as the
sacrosanct conditions of life itself.

IV

The remaining essays in The Opposing Self are dominated either by

the idea of transcendence and negation of the will in a quasi-religious
sense (Dickens, Flaubert), or by the dialectic of pure spirit and the
conditioned turning up in an explicit or implicit form (James, Tolstoy,
Orwell, Jane Austen). Mr. Trilling shows remarkable skill in working
these diverse subjects around to conform to his ideas. And while one
may feel that he too often and too readily finds what he is looking for,
with the aid of the convenient ambiguities of such words as "culture"
and "self," all these studies are nonetheless valuable and suggestive
contributions. Taken as a whole, however, the total impression they
create serves to reinforce Mr. Trilling's preference for stability and stasis
over the restless agitations of pure spirit. In his brilliant interpretation of
Mansfield Park, which one does not have to agree with to admire, Mr.

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Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination 43
Trilling speaks of the antivital element in the novel, the self-mockery of
spirit, the choice of sanctions of principle over the exigencies of
consciousness. And it is this facet of the novel, lovingly caricatured in
the somnolent and almost inanimate figure of Lady Bertram, that he
says "speaks to our secret inexpressible hopes." It speaks, at any rate, to
the hopes of Mr. Trilling; and in a language considerably different from
the one we had heard in The Liberal Imagination.
In his earlier book Mr. Trilling had attacked the tyranny of the will in
wishing to impose its aims on other modes of apprehending reality.
Naturally, in the course of doing so, Mr. Trilling stressed art's tragic
sense of the conditioned nature of life and of the ultimate insolubility of
most human dilemmas. But this was still done in the name of freedom -
in the name of the artist's freedom to transcend the concerns of the will
and in the name of what Mr. Trilling called "the lively sense of
contingency and possibility, and of those exceptions to the rule which
may be the beginning of the end of the rule." On the literary level this
concern for freedom appeared also in Mr. Trilling's defense of plot,
fable, and form in the novel against the realistic prejudices of liberal
critics. Authorial minds playing with reality, Mr. Trilling wrote, were
for him "the great and strangely effective symbols of liberty operating in
a world of necessity."
Mr. Trilling, however, is no longer concerned to defend this authorial
freedom from the hampering clogs of realism; he now feels that his
urgent task is to defend not freedom but the virtues of acknowledging
necessity. For he seems to have acquired an uneasy sense that the spirit
of man is ready to fly off at any moment to some distant goal "pinnacled
dim in the intense inane"; and for man's own protection Mr. Trilling
keeps recalling him to his earth-bound condition. Writing of Howells's
preference for the "smiling aspects of life," Mr. Trilling concedes that
these latter may not be very exciting; but at least, he adds, they will serve
"to bind us to the earth, to prevent our being seduced by the godhead of
disintegration."
No doubt this anxiety about disintegration is linked to Mr. Trilling's
puzzling inability to conceive of the will (pure spirit) except in terms of
an apocalypse. Even in The Liberal Imagination he had already defined
the modern idea of "progress" as being in reality the extinction of
history; and in his intellectual world no alternative now seems left but
total acceptance or total disintegration. It is one of the paradoxes of his
position that his aversion to the apocalyptic and charismatic, instead of
causing him to reprobate extremism in any form, should simply have
driven him to adopt the alternative extreme himself.

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 44 JOSEPH FRANK
From a critic of the liberal imagination, then, Mr. Trilling has evolved
into one of the least belligerent and most persuasive spokesmen of the
conservative imagination. For, on the plane of the imagination, the
distinction between liberal and conservative- as Karl Mannheim has
explained in his Ideology and Utopia - pivots precisely on this feeling
for the conditioned. "The deepest driving force of the liberal ideas of the
Enlightenment," Mannheim writes, "lay in the fact that it appealed to
the free will and kept alive the feeling of being indeterminate and
unconditioned. . . . And if one wishes to formulate the central
achievement of conservatism in a single sentence, it could be said that in
conscious contrast to the liberal outlook, it gave positive emphasis to the
notion of the determinateness of our outlook and behavior."5 However
he may have misread Hegel, Mr. Trilling's flair did not betray him when
he thought to find sustenance in Hegel's work. For Hegel is the
philosopher who, to quote Mannheim again, "set up against the liberal
idea a conservative counterpart"; in Hegel, "reality, the 'here and now,'
is no longer experienced as an 'evil' reality but as the embodiment of the
highest value and meanings."6
Some light on this evolution, which hardly seems to have been
noticed, may perhaps be cast by a quick look at Mr. Trilling's brochure
on Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture. Freud has generally been
considered a radical and disintegrating influence, but it is striking to see
how Mr. Trilling singles out for special praise one of the few Freudian
ideas which have been called "reactionary." Man, Freud contended, is
biologically determined; he is not simply a creature of cultural
conditioning; and Mr. Trilling praises this notion because, if we refuse
to accept it, then "there is no revision of the nature of man that we
cannot hope to bring about." Far from being reactionary, Mr. Trilling
considers Freud's position "liberating" because "it suggests that there is
a residue of human quality beyond the reach of cultural control, and
that this residue of human quality, elemental as it may be, serves to bring
culture itself under criticism and keeps it from being absolute."
One can sympathize with Mr. Trilling's revulsion against the idea of
man as infinitely malleable and helplessly exposed to the "conditioning"
imposed by the brave new world of 1984; but this is no reason to locate
the ideas of freedom and liberation in stasis, immutability, and barely
conscious biological existence. For the problem still remains of
understanding how immutable biological determination can be a root of
freedom, and how purely biological attributes can "criticize" culture and
5 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harvest, Harcourt, Brace, n.d.), p.
229.

6 Ibid, p. 232.

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Lionel Trilling and the Conservative Imagination 45
exhibit "human quality" without the intervention of some more
positively human spiritual force. The curious concatenation of stasis
and freedom in Mr. Trilling's thought thus very probably has a Freudian
source; and one suspects that Freud's sympathy for socialism, his battle
against sexual obscurantism, and his general aura of radicalism, may
well have enabled Mr. Trilling to adopt an essentially conservative
position under Freud's aegis without feeling it as self-betrayal.
The weakness of the liberal imagination, as Mr. Trilling shows in his
book of that title, is that it views the realm of the ultimate, the eternal,
and the immitigable in the perspective of the will. But we may now retort
that the weakness of the conservative imagination lies in imposing its
sense of the ultimate conditioned nature of life on areas where the will
may fruitfully intervene. One of the great merits of The Liberal
Imagination was that it criticized the illegitimate ravages of the will
without openly impugning its efficacy or necessity in its proper realm;
but in adopting the positive standpoint of the conservative imagination,
Mr. Trilling has taken over its weakness as well as its strength. And it is
to bring out this weakness that we have emphasized so strongly those
passages in which Mr. Trilling seems to have yielded too easily to this
congenital conservative temptation. For it would be a great pity indeed
if Mr. Trilling were to use his scrupulous sensitivity, his lucid and
ingratiating style, and his considerable moral authority to encourage
this all-too-prevalent failing of the conservative imagination. And one
cannot help but feel that, if he continues to do so, he will unwittingly
promote what he himself characterizes, in the Howells essay, as "a
debilitation of the American psychic tone, the diminution of moral
tension."
Howells had already noticed, at the end of the nineteenth century,
"the displacement of doctrine and moral strenuousness by a concern
with 'social adjustment' and the amelioration of boredom"; and Mr.
Trilling refers to David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd as proof that this
process has by no means slackened in our own time. The society of The
Lonely Crowd, however, is hardly threatened by the godhead of
disintegration - at any rate, not so far as that godhead takes the form of
pure, free, and independent spirit striving to impose its own conditions
on life. The real danger to such a society surely does not arise from an
excess of pure spirit; it is far more likely to stem from a submissive
acceptance of the conditioned in the form of social pressure and
convention.
When Mr. Trilling defended art and the tragic sense of the
conditioned in The Liberal Imagination, he performed a distinct service
to American culture. These values always need defenders against the

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 46 JOSEPH FRANK

overwhelming predominance in American life of a shortsighted

optimism and utilitarianism. But in defending the conditioned on the
level of middle-class values, and in endowing the torpid acceptance of
these values with the dignity of aesthetic transcendence, Mr. Trilling is
merely augmenting the already frightening momentum making for
conformism and the debilitation of moral tension. The presence of spirit
and will has always carried with it the danger of disintegration; but the
absence of these qualities inevitably carries with it far more immediate
danger of moral and cultural stultification.
Indeed, if we are to judge from a little essay on Edith Wharton called
"The Morality of Inertia," which appears in Mr. Trilling's most recent
volume, A Gathering of Fugitives, it may well be that he is becoming
uneasily aware of this danger in his position. It would be wrong to say
that such a morality of inertia was explicitly advocated all through The
Opposing Self- ox at least, if such an assertion were not literally
mistaken, it would yet be unforgivably heavyhanded. Still, Lady
Bertram comes uncomfortably close to symbolizing such a morality;
and Mr. Trilling, as we have tried to show, did not pay sufficient
attention to the moral and qualitative difference between inertia and
tragic acceptance. It is thus only fair to cite what he now has to say.
"The morality of inertia," he writes, "of the dull, unthinking round of
duties, may, and often does, yield the immorality of inertia; the example
that will most readily occur is that of the good simple people, so true to
their family responsibilities, who gave no thought to the concentration
camps in whose shadow they lived. No: the morality of inertia is not to
be praised, but it must be recognized." To which one can only say
"Amen!" - with the reminder that more than biological determination
has always been needed for the immorality of inertia to be conquered
and surpassed.

Appendix (January 1978)

What eventually became my essay on Lionel Trilling first began as a
review of The Opposing Self; the article reprinted in The Widening Gyre
is an expanded and rewritten version of the original, published in
Sew anee Review in 1956. Despite this lapse of time, however, I still have
a very vivid recollection of the state of mind in which it was written, and
of some of the circumstances that influenced my point of view.
These were, it should be remembered, the Eisenhower years, when
"egghead" was a generally accepted term of abuse for intellectuals, and

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 Appendix (January 1978) 47
when McCarthyism was still very much of a force. (I do not, however,
wish to join in the present tendency to inflate the House Un-American
Activities Committee into the equivalent of the KGB, and to compare
what occurred to its victims in the United States with being shipped off
to the Gulag Archipelago.) The general intellectual atmosphere of the
country in those days was also rather complacent; the Partisan Review
symposium on "Our Country and Our Culture" (1952), in which I
participated, suggested, in its questions, that Europe was finished as a
cultural force and that the United States was on the point of taking the
lead culturally as it had done politically. My own sense that the rejoicing
was perhaps premature may be seen in a quotation from my response. "I
think of the first job for every American intellectual," I wrote in 1 952, "is
to protest against the intellectual witch-hunting and the drive for
conformist thought-control that is making our country the laughing-
stock - as well as the bugaboo - of the rest of the civilized world."
During the early 1950's, as a matter of fact, I had spent several years
living in France, which then seemed to me to be producing works of art
and ideas (particularly the latter) of great interest and vitality. I had been
particularly struck by the attempt of such writers as Sartre and Camus
(not to mention many others) to work out a synthesis of Marxism and
Existentialism, to unite the social with the artistic and the metaphysical,
and in this way to enlarge the previous narrow boundaries of official
Marxist-Leninist dogma. Such efforts had of course been familiar to me
since my student days in the 1930's, which had seen in the United States
the important attempt made by Partisan Review to unite a social
radicalism rooted in Marxist ideas with literary experimentalism and an
openness to the cultural avant-garde independent of political
prescriptions. Many of the early essays of Lionel Trilling, later collected
in The Liberal Imagination, had first appeared in the pages of Partisan
Review, and they had seemed to me - as well as to a good many others,
to be sure, but I am here speaking personally - as the finest critical
expression of this particular need and desire. Trilling, in those days,
wrote out of a broadly Socialist or left-liberal point of view, which he
more or less took for granted as the dominating conviction of his readers
as well. And he combined these assumptions with a cultural
responsiveness that rejected all attempts to limit or curb artistic
expression in order to serve narrow and immediate social-political
goals. It was because Lionel Trilling's early essays defined this position
with such scrupulous precision that they touched the nerve of the
Zeitgeist so unerringly, and received so well-deserved and widespread an
acclaim.
Meanwhile, as I have said, I had become aware that the same

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 48 JOSEPH FRANK

endeavor was being carried forward, in an even more philosophically

rigorous, energetic and ambitious fashion, in such works of the
immediate post- World War II period as Sartre's What Is Literature?
and Camus's L'Hommet evolte (I prefer the French title to the accepted
English translation). In these works, whatever my disagreement with
them on specific matters of detail, I could feel the tension of the same
struggle that had animated The Liberal Imagination - the struggle
between social idealism and artistic or metaphysical awareness, the
ambition to work out a new synthesis of the two or, at the very least, not
to sacrifice one in the presumed interests of the other. It was thus in a
frame of mind sensitized to this particular issue that I received The
Opposing Self for review, and began to grapple with the problem of
defining my reaction to it. Secure in my admiration for Trilling's earlier
work, I had expected that the article would be written quickly; but in this
I was woefully mistaken. Indeed, the review took me much longer than I
had anticipated and turned into a genuine article rather than a cursory
notice. The inordinate length of time I spent on it reveals the problems
that began to arise as I read Trilling's new book, and the great uneasiness
I felt about certain of its accents and emphases.
Roughly, this uneasiness was caused by my sense that the delicate
balance of the earlier work, whose subtlety I had so much admired, had
begun to shift in a way that I found disturbing. No doubt my perception
of this shift, or perhaps my unwillingness to accept it unchallenged, was
caused by those distressing aspects of American life at that particular
moment which I have already alluded to; and I remember being very
well aware that this situation was in the background of my mind as I was
writing. It is true that Trilling never referred directly to the present in
The Opposing Self, and I am sure that he found much of it as
reprehensible as I did myself; but it seemed to me, all the same, that the
new shading of his thought that I detected could only serve to reinforce a
general attitude of compliance with a good deal of which he himself
certainly disapproved. For his strong stress on the acceptance of "the
given" - what he called his "moral realism" - now had a much
different resonance than in his writings of the 1930's and 1940's. At that
time, Trilling's conception of "the given" had meant - or so I had taken
it to mean - either the metaphysical limits of life itself, or all those
human appetites and desires that have always proven refractory to the
demands of the social-political will. A recognition of "the given" in this
sense both widened the horizon within which human life was
apprehended, and also defended the individual against the all-engulfing
claims of politics with its frequently inhuman demands. In the mid-50's,
however, "the given" struck me as having a tendency to take on the

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 Appendix (January 1978) 49
significance of an acceptance of circumstances whatever they might
happen to be; and this I found it very difficult to swallow.
My review-article is substantially the same as the one reprinted in The
Widening Gyre, though I did add some new material. I rewrote and
expanded the introduction to point up the relation between Trilling and
the New Critics; and I drew on Trilling's later work to reinforce my point
of view where this was possible. The lecture on Freud and the Crisis of
Our Culture came very pat to my purposes; and I used it to illustrate the
curious combination of the idea of "liberation" with that of "stasis" and
inertia that seemed to me so characteristic of the new phase of Trilling's
thought. Also, I seized on the book review of Edith Wharton's Ethan
Frome to illustrate Trilling's own awareness of some of the dangers of
his new position. This review had appeared in 1955, hence before my
article had been published; but it had not come to my attention
previously, and it seemed a perfect statement of the point I had been
trying to make in more general terms. Nor did it seem to me that
Trilling's self-awareness provided any adequate response to the
possibility that he had evoked.
On reading my article again carefully, after all these years, I find
nothing in it that I would wish to change or retract; and my recent
reading (as well as re-reading) of a good deal of Lionel Trilling's work
only confirmed and supplemented some of my earlier observations. I
have come to feel even more strongly that the root of what bothered me
can be traced to the influence of the later Freud - especially to the work
that Trilling refers to again and again, Civilization and Its Discontents
- and that this influence led to a deep internal contradiction in
Trilling's point of view. This is already clear, I believe, in the essay on
Freud and the Crisis of Our Culture (reprinted, with a different title, in
Beyond Culture); and I should like to take this occasion to develop my
remarks on that essay a little more fully. For I have been greatly struck
by the evident discrepancy between the concrete examples that Trilling
gives to illustrate his positive ideal of the independent, autonomous self
and the conceptual terms in which he casts his defense.
Freud himself, of course, was a pre-eminent example of such a
personality for Trilling; and he attributes Freud's ability to resist the
dominant culture of his time to a number of factors. There was, in the
first place, Freud's ethnic-religious environment (he was a Jew in
Catholic, anti-Semitic Vienna); there was the cultural ideal given by his
education (the classical Greco-Roman world, the admiration for
freedom-loving English literature, the influence of the Goethe period of
German culture with its ideal of Humanität); and there was the tradition
of exact science, with its stress on objectivity and lack of bias. It is after

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 50 JOSEPH FRANK

detailing all these factors that Trilling adds: "And then beyond all these
cultural interpositions there was the sense of himself as a biological
fact." The use of the word "interposition" here implies a secondary order
of relevance for the previous assertions that I find entirely unconvincing.
What on earth did "biology" give to Freud except a set of drives and
instincts that he shared with the human species as a whole? If he became
the man that Trilling admired, it was because he had the strength to
forge an alternative cultural ideal to the one he refused to accept; it was
his response to his biology, not the fact of being biological, that was
decisive.
The same disjunction between example and explanation can be
observed in a later passage as well, where Trilling is talking of "the
interaction of biology and culture," and objecting - quite rightly - to
the idea that the health of the ego and superego is totally a function of
the prevailing social environment. Bad environments - persecution, for
example - often create "egos and superegos of amazing health and
strength," Trilling notes, contrary to the view that an open and
democratic society is an absolute precondition of psychic health. Why
should this be so? "The answer may be," he replies, "that they [the
persecuted] conceived of their egos and superegos as not being culturally
conditioned and dependent but as being virtually biological facts, and
immutable." As examples, Trilling goes on to cite Giordano Bruno,
Socrates "or any other martyr of the intellect" who faced death for his
ideas. It is difficult to comprehend how someone as intelligent and
perceptive as Lionel Trilling should not have understood that "martyrs
of the intellect" died for an ideal of "truth" that could hardly have been
derived solely from their biological existence. Indeed, I find it slightly
repellent even to speak of "immutable biological facts" in such a
context, as if all the treasures of the human capacity for heroism, self-
sacrifice, and supreme dedication to a moral ideal - as if all the values
that Trilling himself is actually urging us to admire - could be reduced
to the sum total of a few instinctual drives. Time and again, in this way,
Trilling's reliance on Freudian concepts runs counter to the true nature
of his own insights; and even while accepting the implications of his
main argument (as in this case), I find myself forced to quarrel with the
terms of his formulation.
Such reliance on Freudian "biology" as an ultimate "God-term" (to
use a convenient phrase of Kenneth Burke's) also helps to explain
another rather exasperating feature of Trilling's later work - his
puzzling refusal to acknowledge those aspects of modern literature
which are not merely perverse and self-destructive. In his important
essay "On the Teaching of Modern Literature," Trilling defined, with his

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 Appendix (January 1978) 51
usual percipience, the changed cultural situation which makes the
teaching of modern (or at least of contemporary) literature so morally
ambiguous a task. Literature in the past had been a storehouse of ideal
exemplars and of the moral-social wisdom of Western mankind; it had
held the mirror up to social nature, whether for admiration or ridicule,
but in either case with a clear sense of performing a certain function
within the human community. Modern literature, however, seems to be
dedicated, in a very fundamental way - and with significantly few
exceptions - to the destruction of the community of which it is a part;
and nobody before Lionel Trilling, so far as my knowledge goes, had
seen quite so clearly the new situation for teaching that this entails. At
the same time, though, we cannot help noticing to what extent he tends
to ignore or depreciate those aspects of the works he mentions - the
great works of the modern canon - which reveal their own
destructiveness as a problem and a dilemma, not at all as a source of
satisfaction or gratification.
After all, the underground man does tell us that his life is intolerable,
and that he longs for an ideal at which he would not be compelled to
stick out his tongue, that is, an ideal that would satisfy his feelings and
moral instincts, not one based on deterministic laws of nature which
deny his humanity by eliminating the freedom of his will. Gide's
immoralist, at the end of that novel, is hardly a triumphant figure; nor is
he shown filled with anything except emptiness and despair, and sinking
into degradation. "Je me suis délivré, c'est possible" he writes; "mais
qu'importe? je souffre de cette liberté sans emploi." Trilling's comments
on The Magic Mountain quote the words of Clavdia Chauchat "se
perdre et même ... se laisser dépérir" as the entire significance of the
book. But how about Hans Castorp's vision in the snow, the "dream-
poem of humanity" that he dreams, which imagines the reconstruction
of the harmony of civilization, of "friendly, enlightened, beautiful
human intercourse - always in silent recognition of the blood-
sacrifice"? Is this not Lionel Trilling's very own ideal, which he
unaccountably fails to single out in Thomas Mann's great book? All
this, in the essay, may be simply for the purposes of stressing his point;
no doubt such matters were not neglected in the more thorough scrutiny
of texts in the classroom. But their omission in the essay is nonetheless
significant - it evinces the general disinclination on Trilling's part to
take such elements in modernity seriously, to give them any credence, to
view them sympathetically as a search for new solutions and new ideals
rather than simply as nihilistic and completely negative. And such
disinclination certainly has something to do with the opposition
between culture and "biology" that he returns to continually. For he

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 52 JOSEPH FRANK

could not really believe, or interest himself in, new cultural possibilities
because his argument continued to take "biology" as the ultimate
guardian of the integrity of the self that Lionel Trilling cherished so
single-mindedly.
There is much more that could be said about Trilling along these lines,
but this is as far as I wish to go at the present time. If I were to examine
his work at any length again, I would probably start from the end of my
original article and explore his attempt to construct a defense of classical
humanism in terms of Freudian insights and by an appeal to Freudian
ideas; this is rather a unique effort of its kind in the modern world, and
one worthy of close scrutiny. From the beginning to the very end of his
career, Trilling always referred to Freud as the guarantor of his highest
values - those that he saw as being identical with the great Western
tradition of "classic tragic realism." In his last book, Sincerity and
Authenticity, he stresses very strongly the analogy between Freud's
response to life and "what we might call the tragic element of Judaism
and Christianity"; and he also remarks that psychoanalysis is "wholly in
the service of the Apollonian principle, seeking to strengthen the 'honest
soul' in the selfhood which is characterized by purposiveness and a clear-
eyed recognition of limits." That the aim of psychoanalysis is to shore up
the ego in its combat with all the forces that assail it can hardly be
denied. But that, in doing so, psychoanalysis reaffirms the values of the
great Western tradition of literary tragedy is quite another matter. What
sort of "purposiveness" does Freud recommend, and does it truly have
the quality of classic tragic grandeur with which Trilling endows it?
Once again, as in his earlier essay, Trilling invokes the personality of
Freud himself as the best illustration of the "tragic" dimension of
Freudian ideas. As is well known, Freud gave instructions to his own
doctor never to prescribe any painkilling drugs to alleviate his suffering;
but the doctor did so on one occasion despite Freud's express
injunction. Furious when he discovered the deception, Freud shot out
the question: by what right (Recht) had the doctor taken such a liberty?
Trilling justifiably sees Freud, in this way, affirming his own "precious
sentiment of being as that was defined by his chosen relation to fate,"
and thus affronting life (or death) in the same attitude as that of a tragic
hero. But one cannot help wondering, all the same, whether Trilling's
admiration for Freud the man has not caused him to misread the
implications of what Freud the psychoanalyst actually taught. The idea
that any individual human being had a "right" of the kind that Freud
asserts can scarcely be derived from psychoanalytic thought; and if it is
true, as Trilling sadly informs us, that Freud's "bitter rebuke" to his
doctor "had its origin in assumptions that are now archaic," much of

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 Appendix (January 1978) 53
what has made it so comes from psychoanalytic thought itself. This is a
problem that, I think, Trilling never truly faced, and which accounts for
many of the difficulties and ambiguities of his defense of humanistic
values.
If I were to write about him again, I should also pay much more
attention than I did twenty years ago to his merits as a literary critic.
This was so much taken for granted then that I saw no reason to dwell on
it unduly; but now that his work has come to an end, it is perhaps his
accomplishment as a critic that guarantees its best chance for survival.
As a literary critic Lionel Trilling had few rivals among his
contemporaries; and I should like to conclude these remarks by
celebrating his achievements in this domain. When he did not use
literature simply as illustration to argue a more general thesis, when he
devoted his full powers to a writer who evoked his sympathy, Lionel
Trilling was unquestionably a supreme master of his craft. His studies of
Keats and The Princess Casamassima are recognized as unrivalled
classics; his later essays on Jane Austen's Emma and on Isaac Babel,
collected in Beyond Culture, are fully on the same level. It has always
seemed to me rather a pity that so much of his later writing was
occasional and (usually) obliquely polemical - cultural diagnosis
rather that criticism as such - and that he did not devote himself to
another major project comparable to his rich and rewarding first book
on Matthew Arnold. How one would have liked a book from him on
Jane Austen, despite the flood-tide of Austeniana by which we have
been innundated in recent years! The essay on Emma, with its perceptive
insights into the social-political implications of purely personal
behavior, and its detection of a note of nationalism sounding in the
background of Austen's idyllic world, only whets one's appetite all the
more for such an alas ! now unrealizable prospect.
Just at the moment of his unfortunate death, there were some slight
signs that he may have been subjecting his ideas to revision and
alteration. One notices that terms like "mind" and "the rational
intellect" now come forward to a new prominence, and "biology,"
though by no means abandoned, rather recedes into the background. In
the preface to Beyond Culture, he remarks that art might well be subject
"to the scrutiny of the rational intellect," and that this latter faculty,
"with its informing purpose of standing beyond any culture, even an
adversary one, may be of use." The growing irrationalism of the
"culture" of the 1960's may well have begun to make Trilling suspicious
of his old appeal to such an anti-rational concept as "biology" to
buttress his values. What had once been salutary and efficacious in the
face of the overweening rationalism of the liberal culture of the past had

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 54 JOSEPH FRANK

unquestionably lost its edge in the present. Perhaps it is a straw in the

wind that Trilling's last completed work, the Jefferson Lecture at the
Library of Congress (1972), was entitled: Mind in the Modern World.
Here, in a very effective polemic against some of the cultural
excrescences of the contemporary American scene, Trilling excoriates
the loss of faith in "the rational intellect" as a guide, a faith which, he
points out, has been an integral part of Western culture since Plato and
the Greeks. "Mind" gave Trilling a new and, it seems to me, much more
suitable vantage-point than "biology" from which to assert his values,
even though these values necessarily involved the recognition by "mind"
of its own limits. Whether any significant new development was in the
offing, however, we shall never really know, though Robert Boyers is
right in noting a new firmness of tone and precision of statement in
Sincerity and Authenticity.
I have often wondered, over the years, whether Lionel Trilling had
ever read my essay about him, and what he thought about it if he had.
Quite recently, through a mutual friend, I learned that he had in fact
read my comments on his work; but I could learn very little of what, if
any, were his responses. Some years after the essay appeared I met him
casually at a large party, and, much later, I had the good fortune to see
him frequently over a longer period of time when he gave a series of
Gauss Lectures at Princeton. Lionel Trilling was known for his
impeccable courtesy, and no one could have been more cordial, gracious
and urbane; but he never said a word about my article, nor did I, of
course, ever raise the question. The following year, though, he sent me
a complimentary copy of the Jefferson Lecture; and I assume that he
did so simply as a gesture of politeness to his official host at Princeton.
But in the light of the tenor of my criticisms, and the shift of terminology
expressed in the lecture itself, it has sometimes crossed my mind that the
dispatch of the article might also have been meant as a discreet though
inevitably elusive reply to the question I had never dared to ask.

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