Lionel Trilling's Criticism of Life
Benston, Kim
Kim Benston Lionel Trilling's Criticism of Life • • "The poet avoids making those doctrinal utterances about the nature of life, about life's goodness or badness or perfectibility, which, if he...
...All good critics become embarrassed with a "moral" language in assessing creative works, because they are conscious that such a language is not only inadequate to present the full literary experience but is also, because of its associations with ethical action and prescription, apt to be misleading...
...He writes with the seeming abstractness of a theorist...
...Oh, it was so thoroughly not good," Laskell thinks...
...It is not only his concern with metaphysics which makes him so alien to Trilling (who, with Leavis, was perhaps the leading nominalist of modern criticism...
...Moral realism" is the key to his interest...
...I think this is important...
...He says of the poet: "He is a man speaking to men...
...With F.R...
...In contrast to both Coleridge and Johnson, Trilling (whether nominalist or not) begins and ends in a scrupulous attention to the actual...
...I cannot hold myself free of these things...
...it is a phrase which, in the sense it gives of the simultaneity of vision and fact, goes far beyond James' limited notion of "inspiration...
...Hisfear remained that expressed in The Liberal Imagination: will the individual realize himself in organic fullness despite an excessive leaning towards one side of the dialectic between Law and Spirit...
...Given the existence of this quality, it is obvious that we cannot wholly account for Trilling by calling his a quasi-Wordsworthian, any more than we can account for Wordsworth by calling him a quasiMiltonian...
...IL To understand both the continuity and subtlety of Trilling's work we must set straight the confusing and often misrepresented nature of his "moral" tone...
...For Henry James, that morality "is in reality simply a part of the richness of inspiration—it has nothing to do with the artistic process and it has everything to do with the artistic effect...
...The resemblance is certainly greater: the detached aristocracy of the spirit forced to live in a belittling world...
...Trilling, whatever his critics may say, was not a promoter of cultural ideologies...
...I am trying to depart from the line of comment established by those for whom Trilling is mainly a controversial figure, whether as a "puritan," an "elitist," an "apologist" for culture, or as anything else...
...not of Freedom...
...Not far into the novel, however, these characters, particularly Laskell and Maxim, are shaken from their complacent acceptance of dialectical materialism and utopian hopes...
...But," he asserts as their agon concludes, "you are wrong on one point—I do not acquiesce...
...Like Keats' "beauty," Emily's bowl synthesizes an accepted reality (here, older art forms) and personal vision...
...When we meet Maxim, he has just "broken" and has come to beg a favor of the recuperating Laskell...
...After all, it would be unscholarly and unkind in the extreme to estimate Arnold merely by the most quotable extracts from "The Literary Influence of Academies" and "The Study of Poetry...
...Thus, in his famous essay, "Freud: Within and Beyond Culture," Trilling stresses Freud's "tragic regret over the necessary involvement with culture...
...for who, truly, killed Susan...
...Up to the time of The Opposing Self, Arnold, with his emphasis on the need for imagination and intellectual "alienation" in the best formulation of culture, was perhaps Trilling's primary explicit authority...
...His rejection of "showy nihilism," whether personified in his view by Dreiser in the 1940s or R.D...
...If Trilling shares with Wordsworth a reliance on personal observation, he shares both with Wordsworth and with many modern writers who are not literary critics an "existential" stress on bringing into activity not merely the mind or the emotions but the whole person...
...Laing in the 1970s, was, in our ever-darkening age, perhaps the most unusual and exemplary facet of his vision...
...Rather, he desired to heal this nagging Cartesian dualism through the relocation of imagination and emotion within the traditional mental process...
...Tracing in modern literature an increasing disaffection toward the life afforded it by received cultural ideas, Trilling, in the essays collected in The Opposing Self and Beyond Culture, warned against the urge to shed all explanations and conditions...
...Trilling charts their respective self-reconstructions with psychological and symbolic precision...
...How different this language is from Trilling's, yet how similar the vision of the creative fact...
...14 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1976 term of this dialectic, its binding imperative, was Trilling's moral urgency which, far from producing a sum of moral judgments, resulted in a complex "criticism of life...
...Neither of these responses is a mere evasion...
...the intellectual and poetic traditions which he devoted his life to understanding and revaluing are ones which were integral to his own being...
...Matthew Arnold, with his concern for the best that has been thought and said, for the institutionalizing of standards, for a literature which (though in ways significantly different from those native to Trilling's sensibility) promotes life, energizes and renews...
...he is a man "singing a song in which all human beings join with him," and is therefore, in a quite mysterous way, a representative man...
...Yet when one has read him, one does not have the sense of having been presented with mere theory...
...One is the way of such a critic as Yvor Winters, and it consists in assimilating imaginative terms to moral ones...
...Fitzgerald and Hemingway, yes...
...Freud's and Trilling's thought intersect at two crucial junctures of Trilling's vision, that is, his insistence on the wholeness of human life and his unremitting adherence to "moral realism...
...And when you conform to it successfully, you overcome it and it serves your purpose...
...Some of Trilling's interpreters have mistaken this virtue for inconsistency or have been led by it to allege that Trilling reversed positions during the course of his career...
...By comparison with him, the earlier great critics have a quality of the amateur of genius...
...And for that matter, I cannot avoid my gratitude to them...
...in both cases, an inflection falls subtly yet unmistakably on the noun...
...On this account, the poet is perhaps the only fully representative man...
...Emily, who did not tell her husband about Susan's heart condition because she feared his contempt for physical weakness...
...If we seek a forerunner for this scrupulous habit of Trilling's it cannot, I think, be Arnold, who might seem at first sight the obvious choice...
...18 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976...
...They are "moral myths" which, while accepting delimitation as necessary to human definition, express the hope that the sense and experience of identity are not wholly at the mercy of the conditioning forces around us...
...Nancy, who, like The Princess in...
...Superficially, The Middle of the Journey is a critique of post-World War II liberal thinking...
...yet contours arrest, they involve restraint, rigidity, even suffocation...
...Yet, as Trilling observed, "Freud's view of culture is marked by an adverse awareness, by an indignant perception" which the individual brings to his relation with the civilization that spawned him...
...Dismayed, she halts and repeats_ the line in Laskell's fashion and, with the aid of his offstage cue, completes her oration with aplomb...
...And, further back, John Stuart Mill, with his elevated common sense...
...Impelled, that is, not to mere self-release, or self-expression, or momentary desire to communicate to others his sense of his own vitality...
...I want to challenge these views...
...As Maxim tells Laskell: "You spoke up for something between...
...They reveal that inadequacy of imagination and susceptibility to surprise which Trilling in his early criticism ascribed to liberalism...
...The hostile pronounce on him before reading carefully, the admiring read every word and then repeat ad nauseam whichever of them can be converted into cliche...
...The consistency of this vision accounts, in great part, for the intellectual continuity of Trilling's critical work...
...This strikes me as an unfortunate distinction and, to judge from his critical writings, it struck Trilling thesame way...
...If life, so conceived, seems not just complex but even paradoxical, then, Trilling would smile to say, it effectually realizes the ideal of "moral realism...
...In Coleridge, there is a restless, even eager alternation between detailed insight and metaphysical system, now teasing a particular judgment out to act as an illustration of some abstract scheme, now faltering in the design of his scheme to record some brilliant isolated perception...
...they are acknowledged influences, of an immediate kind...
...He passionately wished he knew what he was talking about—that is, knew it to explain, not just to feel...
...We may state the essential question raised by Trilling's work in this way: can modern man find a freedom which is not a chaos, and can he establish an identity within society which is not a prison...
...still less do I envisage a sort of dedicated and mercenary parasite or middleman...
...It is not only Arnold's practical procedures that are inferior (he is, after all, content with surprisingly loose critical formulations), it is his spiritual and even mental courage...
...Or malformed it...
...If the Party preached the inevitability of revolution's historical fulfillment, Maxim's new faith proclaims the eternal human enslavement to God's order...
...For Trilling, great works of art achieve moral realism by an intricacy, even a studied ambiguity, of moral valuation and, from The Liberal Imagination to Sincerity and Authenticity, he was devoted to showing how the anatomizing of any work will bring out the nature, at every part of its body, of the imaginative-moral life which has formed it...
...Duck, who was unaware of her fragility...
...For, as Tony Tanner has observed most eloquently, to exist, a person, like a vision or a culture, needs outline—there can be no identity without contour...
...He believed that the critic's role is to scrutinize and refine the best ideas current in society and that the critic's aim, like the poet's and the practical man's, is to so discriminate among ideas, passions, and interests as "to see the object as it really is...
...As Trilling saw a shift occurring in the crisis of modern man from a lack of imagination to a deficient sense of cultural roots, Freud—especially the Freud of Civilization and Its Discontents—took Arnold's place...
...Laskell, however, senses that his friend's action, whatever its particular logic, was quite purposeful...
...16 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 which, finally, define the homogeneity of the critical canon...
...He is so concerned with source and effect that he often forgets the work itself...
...If, then, Trilling does so little to resume or extend the criticism of Johnson or Coleridge, to what extent were his roots in Arnold...
...In a sense, he was perhaps more systematic than any other great critic before his generation...
...Trilling's appellation for this unified personality was the highly problematic one of "mind...
...It is, then, crucial to state of Trilling that he, in a similar but more self-conscious manner than Wordsworth, valued both the rationalist humanism of the Enlightenment and the impulse towards self-definition of Romanticism...
...There are two standard ways of evading the dilemma thus raised...
...Trilling's perpetual concern was that the "absolute"—whether embodied in facile "liberal" patterns or in the irresponsibility of pure will—not arrest the vital dialectic between self and culture and hence overwhelm the tragic rhythm of human complexity...
...By "mind" Trilling did not mean merely "rational intellect" as opposed to emotion or impulse...
...The most profound and cogent expression of this insight is found not in Trilling's criticism but, instead, in his one long work of fiction, The Middle of the Journey...
...And Maxim dismisses his adversary's view as a dead creed: "The supreme act of the humanistic critical intelligence—it perceives the cogency of the argument and acquiesces in the fact of its own extinction...
...Its hero, John Laskell, is an urban planner with vague sympathies for the Communist Party...
...Because he genuinely loves Susan and wishes to save her from a "childishly" histrionic performance, Laskell has her amend her inflection to an even level of "I will not cease from Mental Fight...
...So it may be a little harder than it seems to estimate who his predecessors are...
...She practices her recitation for Laskell who listens approvingly until she reaches the final stanza and declares "I will not cease from Mental Fight," stamping "her foot in a passion of refusal...
...Laskell accepts this description: he is a representative of humanism and its criticism of life which at once rejects for man the roles of angel and brute...
...His closest friends, Arthur Croom, an academic economist, and Arthur's wife, Nancy, are more loyal "fellow travelers...
...Susan, who, unbeknownst to her father, has a weak heart, falls dead...
...indeed, his position was remarkably, and courageously, consistent...
...There is too much talk of what he "stood for," too little attention to what he said...
...Trilling thus understood life to be a journey, a never-ending quest for self-fulfillment in which all human faculties participate under the aegis of "mind...
...One mark of his "professionalism" was that he was perennially directing his attention to the adequacy of his own critical concepts, if not as "tools" of his judgments, then as exploratory instruments of his sensibility...
...and in Wordsworth, as in Trilling, the sense of that working is also a sense of the actual world which is its basis and its subject, even, in some sense, its medium...
...Original sin neatly replaces utopia as the unalterable essence of Maxim's doctrinal ground for existence...
...I. Anyone who notes the inimitable tone in which Trilling wrote the words "The Liberal Imagination" will be likely to reflect that Trilling himself was a liberal and imaginative critic...
...In a much-maligned discussion of William Dean Howells, Trilling said: "When we yield to our contemporary impulse to enlarge all experience, to involve it as soon as possible in...
...the open "political" interest: all these, and more...
...He sees that standard notions of moral cause-and-effect are complicated by human passion, that responsibility and fate are equally bound into every statement and act...
...But clearly, as the passage from his Howells essay shows, Trilling did not harden with age into a tyrannical defender of existing orders...
...The famous essay on Parrington and "reality in America" in The Liberal Imagination, for example, shows how scrupulously he analyzed the workings of a critical imagination until the logic of his analysis drove him to an open ethical protest...
...Laskell's redefinition of life is achieved less easily and is more complex...
...ionel Trilling, "The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters" The late Lionel Trilling's writing has been a major intellectual and moral force in our culture for well over three decades...
...yet contours arrest, they involve restraint, rigidity, even suffocation...
...unlike Trilling, he offers no detailed practical analysis which will mediate those terms to us...
...Laskell has reached a position of "adverse awareness" of all systems, an acceptance of "life" as he had earlier gropingly defined it...
...But the real clash between Laskell and the Crooms is precipitated by Maxim, though he is not present until the novel's climax and conclusion...
...We are as much conscious of him, of what he is, a presence and witness, as of his actual formulations...
...This deliberate reduction of the text allows Maxim to declare his complete ideological turnabout, for, as Laskell tells him, "You said that this world was the field of Law...
...He is "an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love...
...Between him and Johnson, on the one side, there is a temperamental as well as a procedural gulf as large as that between him and Coleridge, on the other...
...Hence his welcome of Freud's emphasis on the biological factor in human fate as a "liberating idea...
...Wordsworth, it seems to me, is the closer filiation...
...It seems clearly to me, however, that his vision, like Freud's, intended a blow to human pride in the ultimate service of a truly human ideal...
...Duck can be forgiven...
...Laskell, too, finds Emily intellectually crude, even silly, but she is also kind, forthright, and sensual—and he eventually has an affair with her...
...The trouble is, he sees the relation too simply, and he sees it, as it were, as being unmediated...
...All these are perhaps obvious forerunners...
...In addition to the "explanatory myth" of mind, Trilling gained from Freud a "moral myth" (again the phrase is Trilling's own) of mind's fate in culture...
...As contemporary life itself progressed through complexity and paradox, Trilling came to sense in radical thought a development away from liberalism's too-simplistic systematic reasoning towards the opposite excess: a reckless anarchy of formlessness caused by the growing desire to be beyond all definition and patterning, to step utterly "beyond culture...
...In the definition quoted above, Trilling stresses the complexity of the moral life...
...For you—no responsibility for the individual, but no forgiveness...
...It is a recognition of these facts that gives Trilling's criticism, in contrast to today's avant-garde gesture of despair before the text, its unique ambitiousness of being a "criticism of life...
...Call it human being in maturity, at once responsible and conditioned...
...And, in the end, this essential habit of the teacher-critic enabled Trilling not merely to test his own concepts but to extend and refine those of his great predecessors...
...And the third In the 1940s Trilling quarreled with liberalism's "impulse of organization," its preference for clearly-etched, absolute, final solutions to complex moral problems...
...Culture, as the Crooms believe, with its "social causes, education or lack of education, economic pressure" and imposed "character-pattern" which "all go to explain Trilling understood life to be a journey, a never-ending quest for self-fulfillment in which all human faculties participate under the aegis of "mind...
...In the 1940s, Trilling perceived the danger to human fulfillment, to mind, as residing principally in culture's power to pattern the self in an imprisoning design not of the self's choosing...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1976 15 ganization," its preference for clearly-etched, absolute, final solutions to complex moral problems...
...Yet, again, the temper is different...
...and the reason surely lies in his role as teaching member of a great university...
...But he is enabled to be so because he is a man of "more than usual organic sensibility" (my emphasis...
...Yet he no more wished individuals to submit to society's structures than he asked them to ignore the power of those structures...
...Beyond their initial bewilderment and sadness, the protagonists find themselves shaken in their usual notions of culpability...
...Trilling's later work, then, is a reminder to those who believe in a totally adversary attitude—a rejection of all that passes under the label "culture"—of the necessity, or inevitability, of civilization's demands...
...While very ill, he had become fixated upon a rose that lay beside his bed...
...If life and love, like culture and self, join only through tragic recognition of limitation—especially the final limitation of mortality—their union is at least achieved by continual activity, by that dialectic between Law and Spirit which lies at the heart of moral realism...
...The conflict between culture—the principle of condition, limitation, or Law —and self—the motive of freedom, pure energy, or Spirit—was the central issue of Trilling's entire oeuvre...
...Having forsaken the role that had defined him for so many years, Maxim feels he has "no existence...
...Wordsworth, too, unlike Coleridge, based his insights not on metaphysical speculation but on a remembered experience of the imagination at work...
...Arnold is certainly aware of both sources and effects, and he tries always to hold in relation the apprehensions of the world from which the work results and the apprehensions of the world to which it leads...
...James and Forster, yes...
...I choose this novel of 1947 as an illustration of Trilling's essential vision deliberately, for it boldly manifests the qualities of spiritual intensity and perspicuity To exist, a person, like a vision or a culture, needs outline—there can be no identity without contour...
...her vision of Maxim upset, she can only account for his change by calling him "insane...
...Trilling recognized that an essential paradox lies at the heart of this dialectic...
...This imaginative-moral conflict occurs after the shocking death of the Caldwells' young daughter, Susan, which Trilling contrives as an image of moral realism's tragic mysteriousness...
...It helps to keep in the forefront of our attention two paradoxes: that a work of art is the result of a unique and mysterious process, yet it matters and ministers to human life...
...The greater portion of The Middle of the Journey details Laskell's stay with the Crooms, which is marked by everyone's failure to communicate significant feelings and ideas...
...yet a response can be more or less adequate to the work, and a formulation more or less adequate to the response...
...It is not a particularly handsome work, anachronistic in its abstract cubism, awkward in its overall design...
...Laskell and the Crooms' relation to the Party is evinced by their mutual association with Gifford Maxim, a dedicated Marxist who has been engaging in "secret" activities for the Party...
...Yet both, I think, have unfortunate results, because they distract our attention from certain dimensions of the work, sometimes structural, sometimes historical, sometimes even personal and visionary...
...For Laskell, it becomes "a monument of his summer," his interlude between illness and health in which he discovers a tenuous harmony of life and love...
...His legacy has already suffered as a result of the completeness, as well as the firmness, of his own critical enterprise...
...Freud's "tragic regret" is, in fact, another expression of Trilling's "moral realism...
...Freud's "research into the self" (Trilling's phrase) was a synthesis of the Enlightenment's scientific exploration of reality ("research") and Romanticism's descent into the private psyche ("self...
...The contrast between Maxim's and Laskell's concepts is thus depicted as that between rigid classification and moral circumspection, and the narrative moves steadily towards their explicit confrontation...
...This bowl, like Keats' Grecian urn and its inscription which Trilling so admired, is a challenge to the ugly, controlling forces that seek man's submission...
...the sense of the possibilities which literature carries for profound renewal...
...The other is perhaps the more usual way, and it consists in so assimilating morality to the real or fancied process of the imagination that moral terms disappear entirely, to be replaced by concepts like "tension" and "irony," or by some metaphysical conception of the work of art as an autonomous entity...
...it is willing to speak only of what that experience truly is...
...He conceived of man's faculties as mutually sustaining and "mind" was his term for this human ideal...
...Freud's attitude towards culture was ambivalent...
...Thus he felt that, as contributor and advisor to culture, the critic, like the artist, ideally produces an ongoing "criticism of life...
...You denied in effect the possibility of the ultimate social aims of revolution...
...When Laskell leaves the Grooms he takes with him a wooden bowl which Emily had made for the bazaar...
...James' The Princess Casamassima (one of Trilling's favorite works), craves a knowledge of things "real" and "solid," is especially dumbfounded...
...It is no wonder Trilling called the dialectic from which man must wrench self-definition "man's tragic fate...
...Susan's public presentation goes smoothly until this final stanza when, momentarily forgeting Laskell's "improvement," she stamps her foot and staunchly declares, "I will not cease...
...During a period of ideological simplicity within the liberal establishment, Trilling thought criticism had to "recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty...
...Laskell's intuition is a consequence of his and Maxim's interdependence, and the novel is structured upon the inextricability of their fates...
...elsewhere in the Forster book, he states that "improbability is the guide to life...
...for although it synopsized so much recent art it must also have some particularity of the individual who had made it...
...For, if Wordsworth, as an exemplar of fruitful reconciliation between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, was Trilling's steady companion, Freud was his chief advisor during his battle against our contemporary flight from reason and culture...
...We can do no, better, I think, than emulate Trilling's courage, and affirm with him: "I will not cease from Mental Fight...
...And so you [i.e., the Crooms] and I stand opposed...
...When Laskell tells them of Maxim's "defection" from the Party they are incredulous...
...It is the product not so much of professionalism as of a kind of searching, scrupulous, self-checking reverence...
...On one hand, he believed (following Arnold) that modern man's fate is in great measure determined by the wholly secular exigency of culture, or "reason experienced as a kind of grace by each citizen, the conscious effort of each man to come to the realization of his complete humanity" (Matthew Arnold...
...Beginning with a critical biography of Matthew Arnold (1939), and encompassing a novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947), a study of E.M...
...He reached out blindly and said, 'It's like making sonnets...
...The self is shaped by culture and, moreover, is forever involved with culture's continuing reformations and redefinitions...
...the sense of certain works as touchstones for judgments...
...It is a renunciation not of involvement but of "those doctrinal utterances about the nature of life" which make involvement simply meddlesome...
...they do not erect their ideological billboards in an imaginative void...
...delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them...
...Great critics are not quarrelsome pundits...
...I do not wish to further any image of him as the dour professional...
...rather, one gains access in theoretical terms to a creative and very particular process of imaginative life...
...The Crooms, for example, have an unquestioning adoration for a local craftsman, Duck Caldwell, because he represents for them the hard, concrete, proletarian reality in which they want to believe...
...they live as critics of those creative works which engage their most profound and complete attention...
...Conforming to it, indeed!' There was a full contempt in Nancy's emphasis...
...it is harder to state than Maxim's because its essence is anti-systematic...
...Yet I have the feeling that, if there is a radical affinity between him and any earlier writer, it is with none of these so much as with Wordsworth—the Wordsworth not only of the poems but of the Prefaces and the letters—and that what he most brought to consummation by working out, exemplifying, and refining in works of practical criticism was Wordsworth's central insights into the organic nature of the creative and moral sensibilities...
...pervasively, though perhaps less obviously...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1976 17 and account for any given individual's actions" ? Or, as Maxim gleefully asserts, all humanity?: "Let me show you the advantage of my system...
...She has chosen these lines "because of the gestures" which serve as mnemonics for the poem's images—the bringing of bows, the building of Jerusalem, etc...
...It is a product of dark, tragic conflict between the self and the limitations life thrusts upon it, and it is a transcendent affirmation of the self s working with and against those limitations...
...Freud's biologically achieved "freedom" from culture may be only another absolute, a restrictive notion which merely pours the individual into a different, yet similarly predetermined mold...
...and (more implicitly) that the "morality" of a work of art must be predicated of the whole work, of its source, of its process, of its achievement, and of its effect...
...Those critics unable or unwilling to accept this limitation to the human will naturally see Trilling as an enemy of spirit itself...
...in this he is quite unlike the moralistic critic, who tends always to do so...
...Laskell sees in Duck resentment, hostility, and vulgarity, but the Crooms will speak of him only with praise...
...What Trilling, following Wordsworth, saw, and what his contemporaries, like Eliot, Richards, Empson, Ransom, did not see, or at least did not see so clearly, is that the "morality" of a literary work is organic to its imaginative growth, from seed to full blossom, yet organic in such a way that, if one is to estimate that imagi native working and achievement, one cannot dispense entirely with a moral terminology...
...Yet Duck, who has unexpectedly come to hear his daughter, strikes the girl in a drunken pique at her "disgrace...
...A critic's response to a work can never be coterminous with, or exhausted by, his formulations of it...
...Keats, with his complex moral interests and his sense of the tragic dimensions to man's life...
...Quite simply, his passion for the flower is "a love affair with non-existence...
...Indeed, every page of his writing resonates with the habitual music of his seriousness—and, I want to argue, every page conveys the urgency and dignity of a "full poetic vision...
...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...
...Freud discovered within the self a strife among human possibilities, and his consequent definition of man integrates the particular faculties which the Enlightenment and Romanticism had claimed for themselves...
...I didn't make myself and I don't dare cut my connection with all the things in the world that made me...
...Yet a richer explanation of this continuity is available from a deeper understanding of "moral realism...
...Hence, the affinity is with Wordsworth, whose Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (Second Edition) is distinguished by just such a self-qualifying attentiveness...
...you spoke from a religious point of view...
...Hence his famous quarrel, evinced mainly in The Liberal Imagination, against liberalism's "impulse of orStill consistent, he later quarreled with the opposite excess: a reckless anarchy of formlessness caused by the growing desire to be beyond all definition and patterning, to step utterly "beyond culture...
...and one might point to the difference by saying that one would never expect to find Trilling praising a work for its power to console...
...As Trilling continued to explore the dangers of a new intellectual "Establishment" based on the unchecked fluidity of pure will, he came under attack as a supposed enemy of "spirit," as a spokesman for a "conservative imagination" which allegedly seeks to trap and confine the individual within dreadful limits...
...We lose [then] the actuality of the conditioned, the literality of matter, the peculiar authenticity and authority of the merely denotative...
...On the other hand, he felt (after Hegel) that modern man seeks to detach or "alienate" himself from culture as a necessary element of self-realization...
...It is in that word "organic" that we find the nexus of elements which, since Wordsworth's day, have been split so far apart that people take them as opposites, and which Trilling strove to restore to unity—as, indeed, it was Hawthorne's, James', Freud's, and other of Trilling's touchstone writers' life-work to do...
...They may believe, as did Lawrence, that "the essential function of art is moral...
...But he is also unlike the opponents of the moralist, the critic with transcendentalist leanings of one sort or another, who tends to examine archetypes and "universals," or the critic who can see nothing beyond "devices" and "technique...
...When Laskell comes closest to exact formulation of a new philosophy— "life sets limits and it insists on acting within them"—he is ensnared in an embarrassing and irritating quarrel with Nancy...
...In other words, the desire for life as a series of unmediated spontaneities, when culturally pervasive, becomes itself a new kind of convention as restrictive as liberalism's cold formalities and simplifications...
...He still wrote as a servant of the self...
...Neither Eliot nor Arnold, neither Coleridge nor Samuel Johnson, whatever other advantages they enjoyed over him, had that advantage...
...And, whether he was analyzing specific texts or centuries of literary development, Trilling was a master discriminator...
...Here we have a fuller working out of the ambiguities and possibilities engendered by "moral realism" than any single critical work can offer...
...and Trilling devoted his scrupulous and qualifying attention to all of them...
...It is a vision of the creative process as imaginative-moral, of a process of understanding and feeling which produces the literary work and which that work, in its turn, acts out...
...Forster (1943), and several collections of essays—The Liberal Imagination (1950), The Opposing Self (1955), A Gathering of Fugitives (1956), Beyond Culture (1966), Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), and Mind in the Modern World (1972)—Trilling's career rivals Edmund Wilson's and Irving Howe's as an American testament to the creative and affective powers of critical genius...
...He may well have stamped his foot, for here he declares his kinship with Blake and his love for Susan...
...I can personally forgive him because I believe that God can forgive him...
...You see, I think his will is a bad one, but not much worse, not different in kind, from other wills...
...If, however, Trilling is not to be judged simply according to the system of values which his statements of intention seem to adumbrate, he was perhaps a more systematic practical critic than one usually remembers him as being...
...and he speaks often as though a poet wrote to produce in the reader, by a process of relatively simple transference, the feelings, of wonder, consolation, or fellowship, which he had felt himself...
...Yet it is obvious that if we are to take Trilling seriously we must pay equal attention to his announced view of the critical The Alternative: An American Spectator _lune/ July 1976 13 function—"to see the object as it really is"—and to his constant (and self-qualifying) activity as a critic, to his explanation of his aims and to his confrontation with writers who, for one reason or another, most interested him...
...Trilling once described culture as "life's continuous evaluation of itself...
...He admired Arnold's belief that the critic must be "the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne" and his writing as a whole shows a remarkable flexibility of interest and attitude...
...he could stand to contemplate less than his biographer and student...
...The self is always struggling against its milieu and, though complete separation is impossible, the very notion of selfhood is a result of the mind's "adverse awareness" of that controlling environment...
...Its extreme rationalist position ignored, as Trilling (again, echoing Wordsworth) put it, "the simple fact that the life of reason, at least in its most extensive part, begins in the emotions...
...His work, like Wilson's and Howe's, was primarily concerned with the self in its relation to society...
...Trilling defines his terminology first and most succinctly in his study of Forster: moral realism is "not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes, and dangers of living the moral life...
...Laskell's response to this choice of "systems," the Crooms' placing the entire emphasis upon culture, Maxim's upon the self, is a rejection of absolutism which achieves a reconciliation of all perceptions: "An absolute freedom from responsibility—that much of a child none of us can be...
...Laskell, having recovered from a near-fatal attack of yellow fever, spends a summer vacation with the Crooms and finds their inability to speak of death and the "claims of the past" a jolt to his own faith in the absolute sanctity of the future...
...Johnson is always using his critical judgments to establish his own stature and authority, not, perhaps, as is often supposed, by a habit of swaggering self-assertion but at any rate by a retrospective attitude of "Quod scripsi, scripsi...
...Static in its beauty," the flower creates in Laskell a "strange desire," one totally satisfied, "a kind of fullness of being, without any of the nagging interruptions of personality...
...Susan is to read at a community bazaar the four stanzas Blake prefixed to Milton...
...yet his "passions and thoughts and feelings are the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men" and they are connected with "our moral sentiments and animal sensations...
...yet to establish it one has to pass over both the immense difference in terminology and the fact that, in an important sense, Wordsworth was not a "critic" at all...
...On the other hand, Duck's wife, Emily, earns the Crooms' enmity by her eccentricity and "reactionary" attraction to such passe ideas as Spengler's pessimism...
...Kim Benston Lionel Trilling's Criticism of Life • • "The poet avoids making those doctrinal utterances about the nature of life, about life's goodness or badness or perfectibility, which, if he rests in them, will prevent his going on to his full poetic vision...
...In saying this I am not wantonly trying to invent "traditions" for Trilling to have reworked...
...the concern that the creative mind should beadequate for its historical position...
...Laskell, too, has lost his bearings...
...The genuine magnanimity to which the cadences of his prose attest is won from the attempt to balance an openness to certain foreign kinds of experience against a passion for moral justice and a terror at life's probabilities...
...Again, Wordsworth is a much nearer relation...
...Maxim has suddenly "broken" from the Party and its strict explanation of reality...
...Both end by talking about his "attitudes" or "politics" rather than by trying to estimate his judgments and vision...
...In this early study, then, we have the clue to Trilling's abiding moral and intellectual concern—that dialectic of culture and self which combines a strong feeling for the shaping and abstracting powers of man's mind with a profound sense of how nightmarish the resultant structures might become...
...Trilling, of course, was consistently aware of this difficulty, and his use of the phrase "moral realism" was a way of dealing with it...
...Freud's name is not arbitrarily invoked here in connection with Trilling's later work...
...Liberalism, a programmatic reduction of the Enlightenment's trust in reason tinged with Marxist ideology, inclined towards purely mechanical explanations of human action...
...And it is this experiential quality which gives Trilling so strong a resemblance to Wordsworth...
...yet somehowit contained so much that had been tried and fought for in confusion and pain...
...You sound positively feudal.' " This is an exquisitely mimetic passage of almost Shavian brilliance...
...Yet that inflection is misleading if it leaves the impression that it was the mere fact of imagination that Trilling was interested in, or that he was engaged in a campaign of politicizing the creative faculties...
...For me—ultimate, absolute responsibility for the individual, but mercy...
...For what Laskell wishes to define is the inexpressible triumph of mind over the material that gives mind shape, of the self over the very forms it creates as evidence of its existence and power...
...If the terms of Words-worth's concepts do not speak directly to us, we shall never understand him at all...
...yet they are also aware that this perception is too often confused with the platitudinous act of declaring moralistic attitudes...
...they are attempts to deal with a problem which is nearly insoluble, at least in theoretical terms...
...His public criticism is an expression, and an inevitably systematized one, of his teaching...
...Nor could Trilling have inherited the concern from Johnson or Coleridge...
...and his achievement presupposes an intellectual community actually at work, even as it helps to create one...
...Once recovered from his illness, with the fresh skin of a "new-born babe," Laskell, like Maxim, finds himself in the middle of a journey where will is neither entirely full nor absent, where the self knows at most its name and the fascination-terror of an imagined nonbeing...
...It seems to me that Trilling's work offers us a richness of perception unified by a deep understanding of literary and cultural issues...
...An absolute responsibility—that much of a divine or metaphysical essence none of us is...
...It is not often that he talks about a work's effect...
...Laskell, who tried to reform Susan's natural response to the poem because he feared his friends' smirking judgment of her outmoded method of reciting...
...You set the pattern, a difficult pattern, and the effect comes from conforming to it...
...His concern with the adequacy of his own and his precursors' concepts is of a piece with—indeed, quite patently arises from—his openness before the literature which he loved and to which he was anxious to dojustice...
...it is also his temperament, which gives him so different, indeed so disconcerting, a purposiveness...
...Leavis, Trilling believed that "all criticism aims implicitly at creating a community"—hence his controversial but insistent use of the pronoun "we" in critical discourse...
...His is amorality that does not concern itself, as do Maxim's urbane categorizations, with the taking up of attitudes to experience...
...Freud thus provides Trilling what the latter would call an "explanatory myth" of man, one which delineates him as complex but whole—the very essence of Trilling's "mind...
...He is desperate, therefore, to establish his namepublicly, and he asks Laskell to arrange for him a writing job with a small liberal journal...
...Maxim embraces a new abstract pattern, which he enunciates in his first article, an explication of Melville's Billy Budd as an allegory of Necessity's, or Law's, struggle with Freedom, or Spirit...
...I will blame them when they injure and reduce me, as they do every moment of the day...
...Trilling's reliance on Freud has perhaps obscured from us his signal knowledge of the transcendence which springs from a tragic vision of life...
...A man forever in the middle, he accepts the claims of an unmasked, responsible will which is neither wholly satisfied in contemplation of death nor utterly empty in rejection of love...
...the oneness of spirit—an impulse with which, I ought to say, I have considerable sympathy—we are in danger of making experience merely typical, formal, and representative...
...Wordsworth, of course, was relatively unselfconscious in speaking of them: "...habits of meditation have, I trust, so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my description of such objects as strongly excite those feelings will be found to carry along with them a purpose...
Vol. 9 • June 1976 • No. 9
