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
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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
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
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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-
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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