THE LIBERAL MIND
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defining liberalism in a wholly ideal sense, that is quite inacceptable.
Mr. Barrett wonders whether, when I say harsh things about liberalism
I don't really mean Stalinism. I do indeed mean to attack Stalinism,
but I also mean to attack liberalism as it tends to corrupt itself by
approaching Stalinism as a limit. I have no thought of attacking prag–
matism, for I consider myself a pragmatist in the precise and condi–
tioned sense in which William James defines the position on page 60 of
The Problems of Philosophy.
(Incidentally, pragmatism will not serve
as a test of liberalism, nor is it necessarily the yokefellow of naturalism.
It
can also be the philosophical basis of conservatism and of religious
belief. This can be seen from a careful reading of Newman or from
T . S. Eliot's virtually explicit statement in his essay on Pascal.) And I
have no intention of attacking naturalism, for I consider myself a com–
mitted naturalist insofar as I formulate views on such matters.
But I believe that liberalism has debased its whole intellectual
heritage.
It
is precisely because I am myself a liberal, and a pragmatist
and naturalist, that I am depressed by the obvious fact-I have so often
pointed to it that it and I have become tiresome-that liberalism has
not been able to produce a literature which can strongly engage our
emotions, nor a body of thought which can win our happy assent.
This failure of liberalism in art and its concomitant failure in
thought in general, in perceptive feeling in general, seems to me so
obvious and dominating a condition of our lives that when Mr. Barrett,
following the three gentlemen from Smith, unsheathes the flashing ques–
tion, "Just what do you mean by liberalism?" I can't help suspecting
a polemical maneuvre the motive and necessity of which quite puzzle
me. Semantic precision is surely one of the simple virtues, but we've
come to a sad pass of culture when, in the company for which we write,
Mr. Chase and I aren't allowed to point to the open, staring secret of
liberalism's inadequacies without placing our pious hands on our pure
hearts to show that they're in the right-i.e. the left (or what's left of it)
-place.
Again in the interest of semantic precision and liberal homiletics,
Mr. Barrett asks why, if I criticize the liberal imagination as inadequate,
I don't say "literal imagination" and be done with it.
I say "liberal imagination" exactly because I don't want to be
done with it. I don't aspire to the impregnable position of Calvin Cool–
idge's preacher, who was against sin-my interest in literalness comes
from my belief that the liberal imagination has literalness as one of
its
characteristics. And literalness of imagination becomes a matter of great
concern to me when it marks a group, my group, that claims to have
