THE LIBERAL MIND
661
or to understand-a much more defensible point. Mr. Trilling, however,
is unwilling to relinquish Mr. Chase's point for him, holding out
for Othello as the Noble Fellow-Traveler. Surely Mr. Trilling is thinking
of Paul Robeson at this point and not of Shakespeare's Othello. And this
violation of historical reality seems to me all the more curious in being a
violation of the emphases that Mr. Trilling would ordinarily maintain:
Shakespeare's play was written when human passion still had such in–
tensity that jealousy to the point of killing would be naturally and easily
accepted on the stage; the enlightened fellow-traveler would most prob–
ably invite the adulterous wife and her paramour to a conference with
cocktails, all overflowing with reason, and ending by suggesting a very
rational
menage
a
trois.
And so I could go on, detail by detail, but I am checked at this
point by the stern image of the reader rising up with impatience and
demanding:
«What the devil are you fellows arguing about anyway?
Tru e) none of you has defined liberalism) but you all seem to recognize
clearly what it is: a rational) secular) and critical habit of mind directed
toward examining human institutions and attitudes. I'Tl that sense you
are a liberal) so is Mr. Trilling) and Mr. Chase asserts that he did not
mean to deny the value of this kind of lib eralism. Furthermore) you are
all agreed that lib eralism must direct its critical energies toward itself
in the unremitting task of self-criticism. Then) with all this agreement)
what is there left for you people to talk about anyway?))
I can see the point to this impatience, but I also think there is
something left to talk about, something very important, though it still
lies in the background of Mr. Trilling's discussion. To get at it I shall
have once again to ask, I am afraid, some "forcing" questions. But these
questions are not directed at Mr. Trilling personally, but just as well
at myself and any other person who wants to think seriously about our
culture and civilization at this period. I begin with Mr. Trilling's last
paragraph, where he indicates how widespread in our society are the
manifestations of that impure liberal mind that he has attacked:
"The ideas of our powerful teachers' colleges, the assumptions of
our social scientists, the theories of education that are now animating
our colleges and universities, the notions of the new schools of psycho–
analysis, the formul ations of the professors of literature, particularly of
American literature."
Because Mr. Trilling's critique of the liberal mind touches so broad a
segment of our culture, I think it has been of very great use to us; but
the very breadth of this segment, which he sketches here, should suggest
that the evil that corrupts liberal minds has its root, not in liberalism
