OlD SOUL MAD AGAINE
whom people under twenty-five take seriously as a new, original in–
fluence, unsullied by the approval of Cultural Authority. I have often
wondered who is read by the young nowadays as my contemporaries
used to read Lawrence and Huxley and Eliot and Joyce. For a time
it seemed to be Thomas Wolfe, which was depressing. But, if I may judge
by a few recent conversations, it is Henry Miller now. Moral: all is
not lost; or
plus fa change, plus c'est la meme chose.
Frank Jones
THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION
THE MIDDLE OF THE JOURNEY.
By
Lionel Trilling. Viking.
$3 .0~
Gide once noted that
if
skepticism is sometimes the beginning
of wisdom it is often the end of art. Mr. Trilling's wisdom as well as his
art is the consequence of his skepticism-his disenchantment with the
liberal ideologies of the thirties and his exploration of the dark and un–
certain business of the ego that eventually expresses itself in opinions, po–
sitions held, in all our devotions to abstract systems. Laskell in this novel,
like Strether in the Jamesian fiction, is one of the persons upon whom
none of our present malaise is lost as he returns to life from the great
white peace of his sickness, and, during his summer in Connecticut, eman–
cipates himself turn by purgatorial turn from the unexamined attitudes of
those about him: the liberal optimism of his host Arthur Croom, the hard
social idealism of Nancy Croom, the possessive benevolence of Kermit
Simpson, the fierce revolutionary program of Maxim and his equany fierce
defection to religion. The pain and confusion of the world-Laskell's
abortive attraction to Emily Caldwell, the death of her daughter, the
eruption of Maxim into the .quaint liberal order established among the
Crooms, the evidences of a coming struggle for power-are the intellec–
tual history of the thirties interpreted through Laskell's sensibility of
skepticism. Conflicts of opinion are profound fissures within the modern
condition, a dim and slow disintegration of the outward and inward
world. To desert a cause is to upset the moral equilibrium.
Trilling had already argued that the question of power has been
forced upon us, and that the romantic revolutionism of the bourgeoisie,
their excited humanitarianism, their surrender to programs, abstractions,
utopian visions-all, in fact, that the Crooms represent-is either a pro–
jection of the will or an evasion. The dramatic contradiction between
the liberal intention to make a conscious, intelligent choice and the
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