THE DUCHESS' RED SHOES
65
avowed social allegiances, lends itself to a doctrine of social change
and not to a doctrine of social conservatism, if, again, the question
must be raised; Proust's extensive and crucial use of the Dreyfus
case is identical with democratic liberalism and would have been
impossible without it; Lawrence's sexual heroes are lower class: they
are game-keepers, and the like, and possess an emotional vitality
lacking in the middle class and the aristocracy who are impotent or
somehow crippled sexually by their social station and by the tyranny
of industrial capitalism; Joyce's sympathy for and concentration
upon the common man (who is a Jew and a target of anti-Semitism),
upon daily life, and upon the speech of the people, is the center of
his work, and he is certainly neither indifferent nor hostile to the
tradition of democratic liberalism; and finally Gide's justification
and celebration of individualism, like his concern with social in–
justice, is one essential part of his work and genuinely "confirms"
the tradition of democratic liberalism.
It is true that very often only
one
essential element in these
authors supports the democratic liberal; other elements move in
other directions; and all elements move in the direction of something
which transcends all social and political ideals and is relevant to
all
of them, since the books in question are works of the imagination.
And if we distinguish between the creative works of these authors,
and their critical prose (in which, in an erratic and fey way, they
sometimes praise a landed aristocracy as one might praise Shangri–
la and Utopia), we cannot assert that their creative work is une–
quivocally indifferent to or hostile to democratic liberalism unless a
merciless condemnation of French society in terms of the Dreyfus
case can be interpreted as hostility and indifference to liberalism.
But though Mr. Trilling cites the greatness of these great authors,
whenever he deals directly with literary values he is much more
drawn to Forster, James, Howells and Keats, than to Joyce and
Eliot; and he has the most serious misgivings about the extremism,
the bias and the methods of all modernist authors.
But my emphasis upon Mr. Trilling's literary opinions also
verges on exaggeration and falsehood. Mr. Trilling is neither a so–
cialliberal nor a social reactionary, neither a literary modernist nor
a literary philistine. His literary allegiances depend upon the rela–
tionship of any author's work to Mr. Trilling's essential concern and
