BOOKS
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writer to Trillin;_;. The English novelist's whole work might be
described as a protest against pedantry and priggishness, the two
vices from which our intellectual life now suffers as the English
intellectuals suffered from them a generation ago-and with neither
priggishness nor pedantry will Trilling have any truck. It is hardly
worth speaking of his freedom from pedantry, from that dreary habit
of "taking more pride in the possession of one's intellect than joy
in
the use of it," which has spread beyond its proper and natural
sphere in the academies and infected so much of our mental air as
to tempt one to describe the time, not as the Age of Fishes, but as
the Age of Pedagogues. Mr.
Trillin~
has, simply, the natural sense of
relations, of what is worth emphasizing and what is not, which no
pedagogue eYer achieves; and as a result his learning, which is con·
siderable, is always at the service of his intention, never a substitute
for it.
A more difficult feat to·day, however, is to think and write without
priggi~hness,
without a knitting of the moral brows, without servitude
to a hypertrophied will or conscience, without that humorless sense of
misapplied responsibility. which has imparted to so much of our
writing its anxious aridity, its air of moral worry, its quite peculiar
secheresse
of tone. It was a similar thing in English mental life that
Howards End
and
A Room. with
a
View
were written, thirty years
back, to aerate and to dispel; and Mr. Trilling, who has not forgotten
Matthew Arnold's protest against the exaggerated "Hebraism" of
British culture, is in natural sympathy with Forster's comic insight,
his distrust of absolutes, his hatred of smugness, his rejection of the
sternly dualistic "knowledge of Good and Evil" for the humorous,
naturalistic knowledge of "good-and-evil." It is, as I say, a difficult
feat in an age tortured by anxiety and inevitably haunted by the sense
o.f guilt, difficult in the personal and in the literary life, to remember
and assert the claims of imagination, of irony, of taste, of the
"hilarity" that Emerson credited to the hero; but it is necessary to do
this, terribly necessary, if the deadfalls of mere neurosis are to be
successfully skirted. Fiction like Forster's is a prop of this sort in
bad days, and so, on its own level, is Trilling's criticism.
On the positive side, his essay is not only an admirable exposition
of Forster's work, but a delicate rendering of its quality and its value
for us.
If
one has a reservation, it is that, negatively, Trilling leaves
somewhat too much in the air the question of Forster's rather subtle
failure to suggest the highest distinction, his "refusal to be great," his
own version of the
gran rifiuto.
For Trilling quite properly claims
only a secondary stature for Forster. I wish he had pushed his account
of it a little farther; no more than any writer is Forster a prop on
whom we can lean and loafe at our ease, indifferent to the special
dangers of
his
sense of things. Fortunately it is possible to describe
