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PARTISAN REVIEW
itself, but in some deeper conditions in our culture. Mr. Trilling has
conceived his critique of the middle classes as performing the same
service for us that Matthew Arnold performed for Victorian England.
But, it seems to me, the different conditions in Western bulture since
Arnold make n"ecessary now different objects of attack.
Culture and
Anarchy
appeared in 1869, when the middle class in England was at
the helm of society, and at the very height of its stability and prosperity;
this vigorous and conquering class had its values, but the values were
too rigid and unenlightened, and Arnold's critique was, in fact, a series
of exhortations to this class to reform itself. A relevant critical position
since this class seemed to be master of all the conditions of life, so that
even self-reform seemed possible. But the middle classes hardly exist
(certainly not in the same sense) in Europe today, and American society
is so fluid that the middle classes have almost no definite character, and
certainly no definite code of values. The moral disease of Western cul–
ture (its material conditions do not belong to this discussion) seems to
me to be the widespread and universal collapse of values in almost every
department of life. I do not disagree with Mr. Trilling that this disease
has invaded the liberal mind in the areas he indicates, but to deal with
the disease by confining oneself to a criticism of liberalism is to attack
the symptom rather than the focus of infection.
In short, Mr. Trilling has made his case, his critique of the liberal
mind is a job done, and a valuable one; but we must also ask ourselves
in what ways a valuable service like this is limited, what lies beyond it,
and whether in fact we are dealing with a really complete position.
If
I may speak with friendly bluntness to Mr. Chase, I should say that his
error is to have tried to make of Mr. Trilling's critique what it cannot be:
a
Weltanschauung,
a complete philosophy, a total view of life.
Pushing further, I see in the background something else, which I
locate in two of Mr. Trilling's assertions: (1) "that liberalism has not
been able to produce a literature which can strongly engage our emo–
tions"; and (2) "the contemporary literature which by common consent
is of the greatest stature follows in the line of Blake, Burke and Words–
worth." I wish Mr. Trilling had elaborated on this latter statement, for
I am not at all sure what line in contemporary literature is defined by
these three figures, and, so far as I can struggle to make out for myself
just what this line would mean, it seems to me there are some very great
works in contemporary literature to which it would have a velY tangen–
tial reference. But the collocation of the three names here is very sig–
nificant, and I should like to make explicit what Mr. Trilling leaves im–
plicit in their selection: Blake is a mystic, Burke an aristocrat and (in
