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  The Liberal Imagination

  5700D4

  LIONEL

  TRILLING

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  THE

  LIBERAL

  IMAGINATION

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  Essays on Literature

  and Society

  THE WORKS OF LIONEL TRILLING

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  UNIFORM EDITION

  New York and London

  HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOV ICH

  Copyright r940,1941, 1942, r943, 1945,1946, 1947,

  1948, 1949, 1950 Lionel Trilling

  "The Princess Casamassima" copyright 1948 The Macmillan Company

  "The Function of the Little Magazine" copyright 1946 Dial Press

  "Huckleberry Finn" copyright r948 Holt, Rinehart & Winston

  Copyright renewed 1968, r969, 1970, 1971, 1973,

  1974, 1975 Lionel Trilling

  Copyright renewed 1976, 1977, 1978 Diana Trilling and James Trilling

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or trans.

  To Jacques Barzun

  mitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Primed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Trilling, Lionel, 1905-1975.

  The liberal imagination.

  (The works of Lionel Trilling)

  r. Literature and society-Addresses, essays, lectures.

  I. Title. IL Series: Trilling, Lionel, 1905-1975.

  The works of Lionel Trilling.

  PS3539.R56L5 1979

  814'.5'2

  78-65749

  ISBN O-J5-15II97-7

  B C D E

  Preface

  THE ESSAYS of this volume were written over the last

  ten years, the greater number within the last three or four

  years. I have substantially revised almost all of them, but

  I have not changed the original intent of any. The bibliographical

  note indicates the circumstances of their first publication. For permission to reprint them here I am grateful to The American Quarterly, Horizon, Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New

  Leader, The New York Times Book Review, and Partisan Review,

  and the Columbia University Press, The Dial Press, The Macmillan

  Company, New Directions, and Rinehart and Company.

  Although the essays are diverse in subject, they have, I believe,

  a certain unity. One way, perhaps the quickest way, of suggesting

  what this unity is might be to say that it derives from an abiding

  interest in the ideas of what we loosely call liberalism, especially the

  relation of these ideas to literature.

  In the United States at this time liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in

  general circulation. This does not mean, of course, that there is no

  impulse to conservatism or to reaction. Such impulses are certainly

  very strong, perhaps even stronger than most of us know. But the

  conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some

  isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in

  ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to

  resemble ideas.

  Preface

  Preface

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  This intellectual condition of conservatism and reaction will perso, then for liberalism to be aware of the weak or wrong expressions haps seem to some liberals a fortunate thing. When we say that a

  of itself would seem to be an advantage to the tendency as a whole.

  movement is "bankrupt of ideas" we are likely to suppose that it is

  Goethe says somewhere that there is no such thing as a liberal

  at the end of its powers. But this is not so, and it is dangerous for us

  idea, that there are only liberal sentiments. This is true. Yet it is also

  to suppose that it is so, as the experience of Europe in the last

  true that certain sentiments consort only with certain ideas and not

  quarter-century suggests, for in the modern situation it is just when

  with others. What is more, sentiments become ideas by a natural

  a movement despairs of having ideas that it turns to force, which it

  and imperceptible process. "Our continued influxes of feeling," said

  masks in ideology. What is more, it is not conducive to the real

  Wordsworth, "are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are

  strength of liberalism that it should occupy the intellectual field

  indeed the representatives of all our past feelings." And Charles

  alone. In the course of one of the essays of this book I refer to a re­

  Peguy said, "Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique"­

  mark of John Stuart Mill's in his famous article on Coleridge-Mill,

  everything begins in sentiment and assumption and finds its issue in

  at odds with Coleridge all down the intellectual and political line,

  political action and institutions. The converse is also true: just as

  nevertheless urged all liberals to become acquainted with this powersentiments become ideas, ideas eventually establish themselves as ful conservative mind. He said that the prayer of every true partisan

  sentiments.

  of liberalism should be, "'Lord, enlighten thou our enemies ... ';

  If this is so, if between sentiments and ideas there is a natural consharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions and consecunection so close as to amount to a kind of identity, then the connectiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger tion between literature and politics will be seen as a very immediate

  from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills

  one. And this will seem especially true if we do not intend the

  us with apprehension, not their strength." What Mill meant, of

  narrow but the wide sense of the word politics. It is the wide sense of

  course, was that the intellectual pressure which an opponent like

  the word that is nowadays forced upon us, for clearly it is no longer

  Coleridge could exert would force liberals to examine their position

  possible to think of politics except as the politics of culture, the

  for its weaknesses and complacencies.

  organization of human life toward some end or other, toward the

  We cannot very well set about to contrive opponents who will do

  modification of sentiments, which is to say the quality of human

  us the service of forcing us to become more intelligent, who will relife. The word liberal is a word primarily of political import, but its quire us to keep our ideas from becoming stale, habitual, and inert.

  political meaning defines itself by the quality of life it envisages, by

  This we will have to do for ourselves. It has for some time seemed

 
the sentiments it desires to affirm. This will begin to explain why

  to me that a criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism

  a writer of literary criticism involves himself with political conmight find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its siderations. These are not political essays, they are essays in literary

  sense of general rightness but rather in putting under some degree

  criticism. But they assume the inevitable intimate, if not always obof pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time. If vious, connection between literature and politics.

  liberalism is, as I believe it to be, a large tendency rather than a con­

  The making of the connection requires, as I have implied, no

  cise body of doctrine, then, as that large tendency makes itself exgreat ingenuity, nor any extravagant manipulation of the word plicit, certain of its particular expressions are bound to be relatively

  literature or, beyond taking it in the large sense specified, of the

  weaker than others, and some even useless and mistaken. If this is

  word politics. It is a connection which is quickly understood and as

  Preface

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  quickly made and acted upon by certain governments. And alin a despairing apathy which brought him to the verge of suicide.

  though it is often resisted by many very good literary critics, it has

  That is w.hy, although his political and metaphysical disagreement

  for some time been accepted with enthusiasm by the most interestwith Coleridge was extreme, he so highly valued Coleridge's politics ing of our creative writers; the literature of the modern period, of

  and metaphysics-he valued them because they were a poet's, and he

  the last century and a half, has been characteristically political. Of

  hoped that they might modify liberalism's tendency to envisage the

  the writers of the last hundred and fifty years who command our

  world in what he called a "prosaic" way and recall liberals to a sense

  continuing attention, the very large majority have in one way or

  of variousness and possibility. Nor did he think that there was only

  another turned their passions, their adverse, critical, and very intense

  a private emotional advantage to be gained from the sense of varipassions, upon the condition of the polity. The preoccupation with ousness and possibility-he believed it to be an intellectual and pothe research into the self that has marked this literature, and the litical necessity.

  revival of the concepts of religion that has marked a notable part of

  Contemporary liberalism does not depreciate emotion in the abit, do not controvert but rather support the statement about its essenstract, and in the abstract it sets great store by variousness and tial commitment to politics.

  possibility. Yet, as is true of any other human entity, the conscious

  When Mill urged liberals to read Coleridge, he had in mind not

  and the unconscious life of liberalism are not always in accord. So

  merely Coleridge's general power of intellect as it stood in critical

  far as liberalism is active and positive, so far, that is, as it moves

  opposition to the liberalism of the day; he had also in mind certain

  toward organization, it tends to select the emotions and qualities

  particular attitudes and views that sprang, as he believed, from

  that are most susceptible of organizatioq. As it carries out its active

  Coleridge's nature and power as a poet. Mill had learned through

  and positive ends it unconsciously limits its view of the world to

  direct and rather terrible experience what the tendency of liberalism

  what it can deal with, and it unconsciously tends to develop theories

  was in regard to the sentiments and the imagination. From the

  and principles, particularly in relation to the nature of the human

  famous "crisis" of his youth he had learned, although I believe he

  mind, that justify its limitation. Its characteristic paradox appears

  never put it in just this way, that liberalism stood in a paradoxical

  again, and in another form, for in the very interests of its great

  relation to the emotions. The paradox is that liberalism is concerned

  primal act of imagination by which it establishes its essence and

  with the emotions above all else, as proof of which the word happiexistence-in the interests, that is, of its vision of a general enlargeness stands at the very center of its thought, but in its effort to ment and freedom and rational direction of human life-it drifts

  establish the emotions, or certain among them, in some sort of freetoward a denial of the emotions and the imagination. And in the dom, liberalism somehow tends to deny them in their full possivery interest of affirming its confidence in the power of the mind, it bility. Dickens' Hard Times serves to remind us that the liberal

  inclines to constrict and make mechanical its conception of the naprinciples upon which Mill was brought up, although extreme, ture of mind. Mill, to refer to him a last time, understood from his

  were not isolated and unique, and the principles of Mill's rearing

  own experience that the imagination was properly the joint possesvery nearly destroyed him, as in fact they did destroy the Louisa sion of the emotions and the intellect, that it was fed by the emo­

  Gradgrind of Dickens' novel. And nothing is more touching than

  tions, and that without it the intellect withers and dies, that withthe passionate gratitude which Mill gave to poetry for having reout it the mind cannot work and cannot properly conceive itself. I stored him to the possibility of an emotional life after he had lived

  do not know whether or not Mill had particularly in mind a sen-

  Preface

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  Preface

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  tence from the passage from Thomas Burnet's Archaeologiae Phi­

  unique relevance, not merely because so much of modern literature

  losophicae which Coleridge quotes as the epigraph to The Ancient

  has explicitly directed itself upon politics, but more importantly be­

  Mariner, the sentence in which Burnet says that a judicious belief

  cause literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most

  in the existence of demons has the effect of keeping the mind from

  precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

  becoming "narrow, and lapsed entirely into mean thoughts," but

  he surely understood what Coleridge, who believed in demons as

  L. T.

  little as Mill did, intended by his citation of the passage. Coleridge

  wanted to enforce by that quaint sentence from Burnet what is the

  New York

  general import of The Ancient Man"ner apart from any more par­

  December, 1949

  ticular doctrine that exegesis may discover-that the world is a

  complex and unexpected and terrible place which is not always to

  be understood by the mind as we use it in our everyday tasks.

  It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify, and this tendency is natural in view of the effort which liberalism makes to organize the elements of life in a rational way. And when we approach liberalism in a critical spirit, we shall fail in critical completeness if we do not take into account the value and necessity of its organizational impulse. But at the same time we must understand

  th
at organization means delegation, and agencies, and bureaus, and

  technicians, and that the ideas that can survive delegation, that can

  be passed on to agencies and bureaus and technicians, incline to be

  ideas of a certain kind and of a certain simplicity: they give up something of their largeness and modulation and complexity in order to survive. 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-this sense does not suit well with the impulse to organization.

  So that when we come to look at liberalism in a critical spirit, we

  have to expect that there will be a discrepancy between what I have

  called the primal imagination of liberalism and its present particular

  manifestations.

  The job of criticism would seem to be, then, to recall liberalism

  to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which

  implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty. To the carrying

  out of the job of criticizing the liberal imagination, literature has a

  Bibliographical Note

  "Reality in America," part i, was first published in Partisan Review,

  January-February, 1940; part ii was first published in The Nation, April

  20, 1946.

  "Sherwood Anderson" was first published in The Kenyon Review,

  Summer, 1941; some of the added matter appeared in The New York

  Times Book Review, November 9, 1947.

  "Freud and Literature" was first published in The Kenyon Review,

  Spring, 1940, and in revised form in Horizon, September 1947.

  "The Princess Casamassima" was first published as the introduction

  to Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, New York, The Macmillan

  Company, 1948.

  "The Function of the Little Magazine" was first published as the introduction to The Partisan Reader: Ten Years of Partisan Review,

  1933-1944: An Anthology, edited by William Phillips and Philip Rahv,

  New York, The Dial Press, 1946.

  "Huckleberry Finn" was first published as the introduction to Mark

  Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, New York, Rinehart and