THE POLITICAL IMAGINATION
tion, its imagination and immediacy dispel mythological expectations and
moderate the will to power. Trilling moves, like Arnold, between two
worlds, and his faculty of criticism and disinterestedness assumes the pro–
portions of culture, a political activity. In Gide, too, the protestant intel–
ligence is a means of living immediately. "Everything in life," writes
Gide, "must be intentional, and the will constantly taut like a muscle."
But Gide's intentions are often released in the gratuitous action, the non–
critical behavior of the immoralist. The intentions of Arnold and Trilling
' are expressed in neither the gratuitous act nor the concealed struggle for
power, but in a strenuousness of choice from moment to moment that
removes apocalyptic visions and programs into the distance of irrel–
evancy. The political man survives so long as the critical imagination
remains as tenacious and discriminating as it is in Laskell.
Trilling lately complained that the liberal ideology has failed to
produce any of the real emotions of literature, that liberals have written
mere works of piety. His remark must now be qualified. His own novel
has carried the liberal mind deep within the imagination.
Wylie Sypher
THE LIFE OF THE NOVEL
THE LIVING NOVEL. A Journey of Rediscovery. By V. S. Pritchett.
Reyna!
&
Hitchcock. $2.75.
V. S. Pritchett undertook these thirty-two studies of novelists
at a time when the pressures of war forced him to break off work on
a novel of his own. The interruption by cataclysm suggested a recon–
sideration of the past, and he put the interval to creative use by reading
good novels of all periods afresh, as if they had just come into being.
He wanted to discover from these earlier novels just what a good novel
of the present ought to be. Such an undertaking at such a time is hardly
conceivable for the more public American novelists, whose non-fictional
writing is devoted to public affairs and who,
if
they talk about art at
all, do it in general and self-justifying terms. Can we believe that the
later work of our Bromfields, Lewises, Steinbecks, and Caldwells would
be quite so crude and flavorless if they had been able to bring them–
selves to read other authors' work with anything of Pritchett's objec–
tivity? Even in the critical reviews there is conspicuously little writing
on the novel by practising novelists compared to the writing on poetry
by poets and on criticism by critics. This is a contemporary, not a na-
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