THE LIBERAL MIND
663
a certain sphere) an anti-rationalist, and Wordsworth exalts feeling
above reason. The fact-and I would agree with Mr. Trilling both that
it is a fact and that liberals have not thought about it sufficiently-is
that great
art
in the past, and in this century, has come out of attitudes
and ways of life that have been aristocratic, religious, or downright irra–
tional. Perhaps art needs this rich, dark, organic, primitive, irrational
soil to grow from, and perhaps in a thoroughly rational culture it would
have a minor and less vital place? I think it important to push this
question forward, because I find in T. S. Eliot's recent book on culture
one unspoken premise behind all Eliot's reasoning: he is writing about
culture from the point of view of an artist, a literary man, aspiring
toward a more organic, primitive, religious, and aristocratic society be–
cause this kind of society seems to carry greater possibilities for art. A
scientist, wholly devoted to rational inquiry, would be likely to start
from altogether different premises about culture. This problem-the pos–
sible choice we may have to make between two kinds of culture-goes
back, of course, to Nietzsche, who drew the alternatives with the greatest
possible sharpness. Nietzsche's alternatives may not be finally exclusive;
most of us go along on the assumption that they may not be, and there
are passages in Nietzsche to imply they are not; but in any case they
are alternatives that we have to keep in mind. One must also insist, how–
ever, that history permits us as yet no decision on the matter; if culture
in the past was organized around religion, aristocracy, and the irrational,
we cannot exhaust the possibilities of the future by simply extending
the past forward; and democratic society has not yet evolved into any
stable form that would permit us to know for certain its ultimate poten–
tialities for art; and then, of course, there are some very great modern
exceptions to "the line of Blake, Burke and Wordsworth."
Which brings us, in conclusion, to the whole question of the En–
lightenment-a matter that I brought into the discussion only in order
to remind Mr. Chase that modern liberalism, however low it may have
sunk, had an honorable ancestry and therefore should not be dismissed
from court too peremptorily. Obviously, I did not mean, nor did I imply,
that the Enlightenment, as a definite historical state of mind, could
be reinstated wholesale in the present. The past can never be appro–
priated so inertly. Mr. Trilling indicates what might be described as
the Counter-Enlightenment in the figures of Pascal, Blake, Burke and
Wordsworth. I agree that the movement of the Counter-Enlightenment
is a very deep and significant one in modern thought, though I should
come at its historical definition a little differently from Mr. Trilling: I
should not, for example, include Pascal though he deals with all its data,
