58
PARTISAN REVIEW
world, the material of its analysis being always manners as an indi–
cation of man's souL" This eloquent formulation
is
marred by the
double use of "always" and by the extremely ambiguous reference,
given the context, to manners. For Mr. Trilling began his essay by
saying that what he meant by manners was virtually indefinable.
He continued by making a series of assertions which were intended
to substitute a kind of circumscription for a definition: he did not
mean "the rules of personal intercourse in our culture; and yet such
rules were by no means irrelevant" nor did he mean "manners in
the sense of
mores,
customs," although that meaning was also rele–
vant. "What I understand by manners, then, is a culture's hum and
buzz of implication ... that part of culture which
is
made up of
half-uttered or unuttered or unutterable expressions of value ... the
things that for good or bad draw the people of a culture together."
This is Mr. Trilling's broad definition of manners. Throughout his
essay, however, he sometimes uses a limited and very different defin–
ition of manners, namely, the manners of particular social classes
and groups in a given social hierarchy.
It
is by moving back and
forth between his broad (and tentative) definition and his limited
(and unexpressed ) definition that Mr. Trilling is able to hold forth
Don Quixote
as a true novel (here the broad definition works )
while
The Scarlet Letter
(here it is the limited definition) suffers
"from a lack of social texture" and
is,
like almost all American
novels, not concerned with society at all.
1
How can one say, in terms
of Mr. Trilling's broad definition, that
The Scarlet Letter, Moby
DicP
and
Huckleberry Finn
lack social texture? The equivalent
would be to say that
Walden
is not about society because it deals with
a solitary individual.
In
the same way, again, it is only by using his
limited definition and ignoring his broad one that Mr. Trilling can
quote and agree with James Fenimore Cooper and Henry James on
"the thick social texture of English life and the English novel" in
the nineteenth century as opposed to the thinness of American life
I
It
is important to note, in passing, that unlike Yvor Winters, Mr. Trilling
believes that James knew very well that to write novels, one had "to use the
ladder of social observation." Hawthorne did say, as Mr. Trilling points out,
that his books were "romances," and not "novels." But Hawthorne meant by
a romance precisely such a book as
Don Quixote.
2 As Irving Howe has observed,
M oby Dick
is, among other things, a cele–
bration of the manners of a free, open, democratic society in which candor,
friendship and equality are always desirable and necessary.
