VARIETY
WHAT IS THE "LIBERAL"
MIND?
The twentieth century is the
failure of the nineteenth. Hence
follow many things through which
we are now living, including a ra–
ther strange religious revival, or
the effort at one, as well as a great
variety of attacks from various
quarters upon what used to be
called the liberal ideology. No
doubt, liberalism, being part of the
common failure, must come in for
its share of the recriminations now
hurled so earnestly at our parent
century. But, amid the general
muddle, there may be some point
in observing that liberalism origin–
ated with the Enlightenment, that
the Enlightenment was not the en–
thusiasm of a few people thinking
by fits and starts but the conscious
summation of the secular mind of
Europe since the Renaissance, and
that our present intellectual reas–
sessment (if we are to have any)
ought to start there. Since reaction
is being worn this decade, the time
may be here for our own reaction–
ary banner with the slogan: Back
to the Enlightenment!
All this is only to place a number
of questions I should like to bring
up apropos of the Correspondence
in our last number (PR, February
1949) between Messrs. Arvin, Dav–
is, and Aaron, on the one side,
331
and Mr. Richard Chase, on the
other. Though this exchange deals
immediately with certain matters
of literary interpretation, it obvi–
ously raises broader issues that in–
clude literature as only one pro–
vince of their application. These is–
sues have been in the wings now
for a long while; it is time they
were pushed on stage, perhaps even
given a little spotlight too; and we
are grateful to the watchful eyes at
Smith College for providing the
occasion.
Taking off from what looks like
an incidental point in Mr. Chase's
argument, we find, in fact, that it
demonstrates (as clearly as any
matter like this can be demon–
strated) that the issues take us far
beyond the proper sphere of liter–
ary criticism. Mr. Chase says that
he is unable to see that the ques–
tion "Was Iago a 'progressive'?" is
ludicrous. The confusion of real
life and imagination here is so gross
that we are reminded of the psy–
chiatrist attempting to psychoanal–
yze imaginary characters as
if
they
had a real and continuing exis–
tence outside the literary work.
Iago is a character in a play written
before "progressivism" existed, and
whatever is true of this imaginary
character can be said without any
essential reference to the real his–
torical phenomenon we know as
liberalism. Did Iago vote for Henry
Wallace in the last election? Pre–
sumably, Mr. Chase must know, or
