THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION
the enlightenment of Kermit, who buys his humanity from the workers
he treats well; the nihilism of Duck, the inadequate man-in-the-street;
the hollow independence of the Folgers; the devouring guilt of the con–
verted Maxim. Only Emily maintains herself against disenchantment;
she, and Susan, for Trilling shares James's resignation to the innocence
of the child, irresponsible and uninvolved in the power and suffering
of the world. Laskell's final skepticism, marking his political maturity,
is his surrender of middle-class hope for the future.He will not throw his
expectations before him as a manufactured and fictitious life. He will
live here and now, in a present that is temporal in an almost Bergsonian
way. Neither Arthur, the man of the near future, nor Maxim, the bloody
•
apocalyptic man of the far future, is eligible to live with Laskell's new
sense of immediacy and responsibility.
In surrendering the future, Laskell also renounces the carefully
masked will of every intellectual to impose his program upon the world.
In his last encounter with Maxim the struggle for power is defined in
its naked alternatives. Maxim offers him a choice between competing
systems-the secular law of rights for the masses, or the Augustinian
law of duty for the leaders. In this collision of forces Laskell, the "Re–
naissance" man who is responsible and intelligent, appears doomed. But
he does not admit the necessity of this inhuman dialectic: "I do not
acquiesce." He will not, like Maxim, vanish as a person. And he is hated
by the Crooms and Maxim, whose absolute systems codify their will
to
power; neither can tolerate Laskell's skepticism, or any "appearance of
an idea in modulation."
Maxim virtually admits that his apocalyptic will cannot survive
any modulation of an idea. He can enslave Laskell
if
Laskell defends
himself with ferocity; for then Laskell is a fanatic, a victim of the dia–
lectic. But he cannot enslave the tenacious flexible critical intelligence,
the skeptical sensibility.
Thus Trilling pays his greatest debt not to the Renaissance as
Burckhardt conceived it, but to Matthew Arnold, who was approximately
in his own position, a liberal attempting a moral critique of liberalism.
The bane of the middle class, Arnold said, is its hard unintelligence, its
lack of responsible individualism. Against evasions, codes, partial views,
and the hatreds of Jacobinism, Arnold appealed to the saving remnant
who could modulate their intelligence into a political instrument. There
was, for Arnold, no one law of human development: "The human spirit
is wider than the most priceless of the forces which bear it onward."
The flexibility of the critical mind, its toleration, its distrust of abstrac-
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