THE LIBERAL MIND
657
fact, been settled by modern scholarship: she did not.) I do not take
Mr. Chase to mean-I accept a momentary membership in the Literal
Party which has been formed for the occasion by Mr. Barrett and the
gentlemen from Smith-that Iago voted for Henry Wallace; I take
him to mean that what he calls "the great images of man and his career
on earth" have a continuing though fluctuating relevance, sometimes
quite specific, sometimes only paradigmatic, to our present moral and
thus to our present political situations. So far from agreeing with Mr.
Barrett that this shows in Mr. Chase a lack of historical vision, I think
that it is exactly what true historical vision suggests. It seems to me that
the story of Oedipus means many things, among the most striking of
which is the traditional view that it is the tragedy of the Inadequate
Naturalist, the tragedy of the Man of the Enlightenment ; and I should
be glad at any time to discuss Othello as the Noble Fellow-Traveler
Destroyed By Love of His Own Virtue.
Mr. Barrett questions the phrase, which I myself have used,
the
moral imagination.
He wants to know precisely what morality this moral
imagination imagines. And he wants to know why anyone who uses the
phrase isn't content to say "psychological insight." My own intention for
the phrase was that it should stand against what I detect as an assump–
tion of liberal culture, that the life of man can be nicely settled by a
correct social organization, or short of that, by the election of high moral
attitudes. It was intended to mean, if I may quote myself, that the very
election of morality constitutes a kind of moral danger, as does the cor–
rect social organization. Since I use the phrase chiefly in reference to liter–
ature, the proposed alternative, "psychological insight," would not serve
me, partIy because "insight" is less relevant to literature than "imagina–
tion" is, chiefly because in literature psychology is a quite secondary thing,
sometimes no more than a sort of illusion, like "natural" dialogue, which
satisfies our immediate temporal notion of the way things happen. In
literature as well as in life the psychological is subsumed in the moral,
and to try to make the smaller concept do the work of the larger is only
to mask actuality.
One last point and I have done. Mr. Barrett in conclusion expresses
gratitude to the critics of the liberal mind for having "demolished"
certain "targets" which he exemplifies by
PM
and certain contributors .
to the liberal weeklies. He then goes on to speak of intellectual economy
and asks, "How much energy is profitably expended in attacking the
degradation of a doctrine? Is it really wise to take
The New Republic
as the residual legatee of the Enlightenment?"
If
Mr. Barrett sees the quarrel with the liberal mind as having only
