The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society

What today passes for unchallenged forms of theoretical discourse are chastened by the intellectual courage, independent-mindedness, and literary skills of Mr. Trilling. One reviewer calls his thought "anachronistic," which is a bit like saying that Rousseau is anachronistic. It's a kind of generational chauvinism with we are sadly afflicted.

It is an undeniable asset to have this classic work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century critics readily available again. Let me mention right off that the vast majority of the essays here have nothing to do with the fashionable Freudianism or bygone politics of the 1950's. Trilling's concerns as a literary critic and commentator on society go much deeper. He wishes to perform for his time a similar service to that John Stuart Mill rendered contemporaries in the nineteeth-century: the reminder that in disputable questions one has the obligation to see if one's intellectual opponents may possess some necessary portion of the truth. Mill, Trilling reminds us, found in the thought and poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a man, by the way, Mill profoundly disagreed with from metaphysics on down, a vivifying opposition and a liberating opponent, surprisingly able to cure the disabling aridity in Mill's earlier emotionless soul. Trilling feared that the majority "liberals" of the 1950's were especially open to the perennial temptation of bien-pensants of all sides, times, and places - a devolution into mere conformity and rigid ideology, an abandonment of the necessity as thinkers and citizens to be ever vigilant. Trilling's equivalent of Coleridge in this volume is the Master, Henry James, an author he thought certain to offend progressives mindlessly resentful of social hierarchy and supposed aestheticism. Trilling maintained that the James of "The Princess Casamassima" had much insight about art and politics that such "advanced" types ignored at their peril. (In a later volume, the self-identified "liberal" Trilling assigned a similar teaching function to Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park," a novel heavily on the side of tradition whose greatness he declared "was commensurate with its power to offend" the complacent "liberals" of its own day, his day, and most importantly - of any other day.

Trilling was one of the most important literary critics of his time. He was a person of very broad learning whose heart was primarily in literary matters but who also dealt with the political questions of his time. His writing is informed and intelligent but I have always sensed it to lack a deeper passion, a power to move in the strongest way.