In Praise of Lionel Trilling

...To his ironic dismay, he observed the eager, glib, ardently generalizing students in his modern-literature classes exulting in Eliot's and Conrad's and Mann's abyss of anxiety and alienation as though it had been ready-made for their unresisting surrender...

...Lionel Trilling was a writer and a man whose death incalculably diminishes a world endangered by the scarcity of heroism and truth...

...In his beautiful study of Keats, how passionately Trilling is moved by the young poet's "heroic vision of the tragic life and the tragic salvation," which led Keats to declare with such poignant courage that poetry "is not so fine a thing as philosophy—For the same reason that an eagle is not so fine a thing as a truth...

...The comedy in their uncritical embrace of literary despair was not lost on their professor as he urged the universities to recognize that a young man also needs to learn something entirely unrelated to "those academic disciplines founded upon the modern self-consciousness and the modern self-pity...

...Amid the deafening clamor of the '60s he urged us to remember Forster's sober cry: "Only connect the prose and the passion...

...This time it has been a somber experience, with a sense of finality hovering round the pages...

...How difficult this responsible task of conneotion can be Trilling demonstrated in one of his most powerful and personal essays, "On the Teaching of Modern Literature,' in which he took on yet another unargued assumption of our culture, "that the real subject of all study is the modern world...

...And when someone admits a truth entirely opposed to his self-interest but vitally important to the moral life, he is heroic...

...With deceptively quiet elegance that somehow heightened the urgency of his probing, Trilling insisted on examining the unacknowledged and unarticulated intentions behind intellectual principles and on disclosing the prophetic implications of self-congratulatory ideals...

...Intellectual heroism is a rare and wonderful attribute, and Lionel Trilling responded to it with his whole being in some writers he strongly admired...

...When Trilling wrote these words in 1965, the lust of the untrammelled self was being proselytized as the one true vision by those cultural pacemakers who earnestly believe they have initiated what in fact they only represent...

...Trilling, in his lonely disquiet, perceived a "perverse and morbid idealism" in this sanctification of "the opposing self" emancipated from its organic continuity with society, culture and the past...

...What disturbed Trilling throughout his life was the inhumane extremism that modern man is heir to...

...In Beyond Culture he examined "the adversary intention of modern literature,' which seeks "to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture and environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment...

...Clearly the quality of Matthew Arnold's thought that he found so deeply compatible with his own mode of analytic judgment was Arnold's passionate dislike of "system," his unequivocal affirmation of the power of human reason "to see the object as it really is...

...For his emphatic defense of the irrepressible curiosity that is the mainspring of literature, "the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty," Trilling, who was only too aware of the political implications of his argument, was damned as a conservative by precisely those liberals he so fiercely sought to engage...

...But he had clearly begun to hear the distant rumble of consequence that would soon lead him to a surprising and seemingly catastrophic view: "that art does not always tell the truth or the best kind of truth, and does not always point out the right way...

...When Trilling wrote his ground-breaking study of Forster, he had not yet acquired the eminence as a teacher and critic that in 1950, with the publication of The Liberal Imagination, became uniquely his in the world of American letters...

...And in the '60s he turned his uneasy attention to an even more dangerous symptom of our intellectual distemper than the deformations of liberalism...

...And so, I swear, he must surround each act With scruples that will hold intact Not merely his own, but human, dignity...

...Perhaps for that reason, what strikes me now with unexpected force about the completed journey of his restless intellect is the resilient consistency of his primal concerns, how much of a piece his books now reveal themselves to be, from Matthew Arnold to the exacting and boldly discursive complexities of his last major effort, Sincerity and Authenticity, published in 1972...

...Forster, "can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us the sensation of having learned something...

...Trilling argued that the critical function of literature is seriously undermined by any tendency, not only the liberal, to simplify and organize, to impose an ideological straitjacket on our view of life by denying "the lively sense of contingency and possibility," and righteously excluding "those exceptions to the rule which may be the beginning of the end of the rule...

...On the contrary, he possessed an uncanny instinct for sensing disruptive changes in the intellectual and political weather of the past 40 years before they became visible or potent...

...Against the antisocial, apocalyptic dominion of the dissociated self, he argued on behalf of the untheatrical and conditioned nature of life, for dreams of reason and experience rather than dreams of gratified freedom...

...Arnold's famous injunction had the gravest importance for Trilling...

...He had an unsettling, perseverant way of repeatedly scrutinizing those large-minded and often windy terms that are the unexamined donnees of enlightened 20th-century thought—liberal, radical, self, society, culture, ideology, progress, freedom—and asking uncomfortable and ruthlessly skeptical questions about our most cherished pieties...

...They entirely missed the point that he was speaking as a liberal to the intellectuals of his own world, in a familial colloquium and not a strident antagonistic debate between the Right and the Left...

...For a man whose life's devotion was literature, this cannot have been easy to say...

...He was not asking liberals to abandon their commitment to social progress, which he shared, but to realize the dangers—literary, intellectual and political —inherent in simplification...

...For it is this vital knowledge that enables literature to become a criticism of life...

...Forster's "relaxed will," Trilling believed, was far more receptive to the muddled truth of good-and-evil than the dogmatism spawned by "the politics of altruism...

...He taught us, as John Peale Bishop wrote in "A Subject of Sea Change": Time is man's tragic responsibility And on his back he bears Both the prolific and destroying years...

...he understood that seeing the object as it really is must precede all our certainties about the difference between motive and deed, illusion and reality...

...Such models of order tend to enact the commands of the imperious will, which throughout some 200 years of modern history has sought to press the mind, that "poor gray thing," into the errant service of a high-minded and repressive morality...

...He found it in Forster, Jane Austen and Keats, an unlikely trio who in their several ways enforced his fundamental belief that self and culture, individual and polity, the one and the many that is society, are not merely interdependent but morally inseparable, and this hard fact is the very marrow of reality...

...But his singular capacity for writing criticism that was not narrowly literary or academic was already abundantly present in his first book, an intellectual biography of Matthew Arnold begun as his doctoral dissertation and published in 1939...

...In our easy commitment to the importunate grandeur of liberal ideals, he argued in the preface to The Liberal Imagination—this was his abiding theme—we have allowed ourselves to become hazardously deficient in moral realism: "We have the books that point out the bad conditions, that praise us for taking progressive attitudes...

...We have no books that raise questions in our minds not only about conditions but about ourselves, that lead us to refine our motives and ask what might lie behind our good impulses...

...It seemed appropriate, after Lionel Trilling's death in New York last November, at the age of 70, once again to reread his wise and stubbornly inquiring works of criticism and fiction...

...By consistency I don't mean to imply that he stuck to a rigidly predetermined course and was unresponsive to the convulsive shifts in cultural temper so characteristic of our mortally unstable time...

...As he so lucidly explained, his purpose was "to recall liberalism to its first essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty...

...He wrote this in 1961, long before the students stopped reading about the abyss and plunged into it...