THE LIBERAL MIND
659
eral mind he was negating the values of liberalism altogether. Came,
therefore, the protest from Smith College, by Messrs. Arvin, Davis, and
Aaron (PR, February 1949), who were alarmed particularly by Mr.
Chase's rather startling tendency to connect villainy with liberalism, and
to see all the villains in the history of literature as liberals.
(All the noise and misunderstanding may thus have arisen merely from
Mr. Chase's tone and emphasis, but I notice that in his reply above he
still wants to think of Claggart, the villain of
Billy Budd,
as "a fake
liberal." Now, there is no objection to this, but why should so much
importance be attached to the point? And why could not Claggart
equally well be a fake reactionary, conservative, communist, fascist, or
Catholic? Which is to say, that human evil can crop up in the camp
of any ideology.)
At that
point
I stepped into the controversy myself with the brief
comment that Messrs. Chase and Trilling so vigorously belabor above,
and at a length that suggests I had written an encyclopedic tome. My
function, as I saw
it,
was to serve as something of a catalytic agent
-to precipitate certain vapors
into
some more definite substance–
rather than to inject any positive views of my own. I was interested
in pushing the discussion (Mr. Trilling calls this asking "forcing" ques–
tions) beyond the matter of Melville into the more general issues that
I saw in the background. Other people besides myself had wondered
about the limits, the definite shape and outline, of Mr. Trilling's posi–
tion, and the questions I raised were intended to provide an opportunity
for sharpening those outlines. Mr. Trilling has met most of these ques–
tions very well, and though he seems impatient at having to repeat what
he has often said elsewhere, it seems to me that the effect of gathering
together points dispersed through his other writings is to produce a
compact statement that makes his general position much clearer-so
that I flatter myself that my "forcing" questions have accomplished
some public service. But however this may be, the issue I tried to stick
to throughout my questions to Mr. Trilling, and my criticisms of Mr.
Chase, was their critique of liberalism, and not my own positive views
(whatever they may be) on religion, philosophy, literary criticism, and
the history of ideas during the past few centuries.
Now, in reply, both gentlemen surprise me by attempting to man–
oeuvre my brief comment into the center of the whole discussion. For
this purpose, of course, they appear to find in my editorial an enormous
number of things that they must surely know are not there. I have just
counted through my piece very carefully, and find it contains exactly
1540 words, and in these 1540 words, Messrs. Chase and Trilling appear
