can find out the answer for us. We
shall go on next to ask whether
Desdemona bought her clothes
from Bergdorf Goodman. Time
and space become unreal; all
times, all places melt together in
one contemporaneous, coterminous
jelly of a present for Mr. Chase. A
fine game perhaps, but once started
there is no stopping.
If
it is silly,
Mr. Chase argues, to ask whether
Iago was a progressive, then it is
also silly to ask whether Othello
was a progressive. Precisely; for a
moment Mr. Chase seems to get
the point, but then proceeds to
hope, with a very curious logic,
that these two very silly questions
will somehow add up to a single
sensible one.
The point, however, is not to al–
low Mr. Chase to parody himself
out of existence (however willing
he may be to oblige), but to ask
what causes him to make this amaz–
ing confusion between literature
and life, the past and present, the
relevant and irrelevant. I suspect
that he is in the grip of an
idee
fixe,
a very large idea indeed, that
obliterates for his mind the boun–
daries of literary criticism altoge–
ther: he is outside literature, out–
side politics, painfully engaged in
groping for a philosophy of life.
But, as is now the fashion, he seems
to approach the philosophic prob–
lem through the literary imagina–
tion. But is a philosophy to be ar–
rived at from life or from litera–
ture? from the facts about ourselves
and
our world
1
or from the desires
333
of the imagination to participate
completely in what Mr. Chase calls
"the great images of man and' his
career on earth?" Shall we become
Catholics just in order to have the
fullest possible appreciation of
Dante?
Turning from Mr. Chase's per–
plexities, we observe in the back–
ground the flexible and extended
critique of the liberal mind (and
liberal imagination) executed by
Lionel Trilling over the past dec–
ade or so. Mr. Trilling's critique
is one from which we have all
learned a good deal; but as I re–
read
him
I find myself puzzled as
to the precise limits at which his
criticism might halt. At certain
points where Mr. Trilling says "lib–
eralism," could he not just as well
say "naturalism" or "pragmatism?"
The liberal mind, as we have
known it in recent politics, has
been the Stalinist or Stalinized
mind. (The difference here, per–
haps important for manners, is not
so great for politics, since under
pressure the Stalinized slides over
into the Stalinist mind.) Mr. Trill–
ing does not speak of the "Stalinist
mind" or "the Stalinized mind"
because he
is
dealing with the fun–
damental human attitudes behind
the political will, and it seems
natural that he should prefer a
more general term like "liberaL"
But are not these fundamental at–
titudes associated (whether validly
or not) in the minds of liberals with
certain naturalistic and pragmatic
beliefs, rather than with the spe-
