660
PARTISAN REVIEW
to find that I have expressed completely: (1) my attitude toward re–
ligion, (2) a theory of the relation of literature to life, (3) a definition
of that complex historical entity, liberalism, (4) a theory as to the sources
and initial data from which a philosophy is to be formed, (5) a thesis,
in the history of ideas, about the precise nature of the nineteenth cen–
tury, the Enlightenment, and the exact scope of the Enlightenment in
our literary heritage. R eally, gentlemen, you flatter my powers of con–
ciseness too much!
Well, as we all know, polemic is inevitably the domain of distortion,
and I should not like to add my own mite in the present case by bicker–
ing point by point with Messrs. Chase and Trilling; but there are one or
two points I must rescue from confusion in order, as quickly as possible,
to get myself out of the center of controversy, where I do not belong,
and direct discussion toward what seem to me the important problems and
issues.
It
is important to know what was and what was not the issue. The is–
sue was not, as both gentlemen try to make out, my views on religion
(which were not expressed), or even the large question of religion as such,
but simply whether Mr. Chase, in talking of Dostoevski's Father Zossima
as he did, was not implying some kind of Christian belief, to which in
fact he is not actually committed. Far from divorcing literature from
life, I should say that some kinds of literary appreciation are possible
for us only if we take certain positions in life. Both gentlemen are very
surprised to discover in me a theory of the relation of literature to life
that makes me a "formalist"; I am surprised myself, for I h ad thought
that if I came under any of Mr.
Chas~'s
rubrics it would be under that
recent coinage of his: an "ordealist." Mr. Trilling exclaims at my ques–
tion "Is a philosophy to be arrived at from life or from literature?"–
although he is surely acquainted with the widespread and deleterious
habits of "literary" philosophizing, and must have observed that this
question is not a complete sentence in my text and is further explicated
by the sentence that follows:
"Is a philosophy to be arrived at from life or from literature? from
the facts about ourselves and our world, or from the desires 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?"
Mr. Chase has discovered I am a "formalist" because I criticized him for
treating lago as a real person-a rather curious riposte. But at least my
"forcing" questions have forced Mr. Chase to modify his position on
lago's liberalism: he now states, not that l ago's evil was his liberalism,
but that this evil is a human fact that liberalism has been unable to face
