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sigence; now he is most admired for his flexibility and variousness.
William Phillips' description of the modern artist as " a sus–
pended man" who "keeps the balance of opposing forces" fits not
only the artist but the present-day ego-ideal of many critics. The
artist "seems to be suspended," says Mr. Phillips, "between tradition
and revolt, nationalism and internationalism, the aesthetic and the
civic, and between belonging and alienation. Hence any movement
to line him up on one side or another over-simplifies
his
role and
limits his creative function."
In a much-quoted passage, Lionel Trilling applies the same idea
specifically to American writers. He is disputing Parrington, who
thought of American culture as a flow of two currents, one of liberals
and one of reactionaries (and Mr. Trilling's comments would apply
as well to writers like the early Brooks, who thought of our culture as
a flow of two currents, one of highbrows and one of lowbrows). Cul–
ture, writes Mr. Trilling,
is not a flow, nor even a confluence; the form of its existence is struggle,
or at least debate-it is nothing if not dialectic. And in any culture
there are likely to be certain artists who contain a large part of the
dialectic within themselves, their meaning and power lying in their
contradictions; they contain within themselves, it may be said, the very
essence of the culture, and the sign of this is that they do not submit to
serve the ends of anyone ideological group or tendency. It is a signifi–
cant circumstance of American culture, and one which is susceptible of
explanation, that an unusually large proportion of its notable writers
of the nineteenth century were such repositories of the dialectic of their
times-they contained both the yes and the no of their culture, and by
that token they were prophetic of the future.
This is a simple but profound formulation. How indeed shall we
understand Cooper, Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Faulkner and
the rest unless we see how inexhaustibly they embody the contradic–
tions of their culture? That we now understand them in this way is
the surest sign of our general advance over the older simplifications
and partialities of historical criticism.
But does it follow from the fact that our great novelists and
poets have succeeded by embodying the contradictions of our culture
that the rest of us should try to do the same? Mr. Trilling does not
say so, and yet
if
he did, he would be right-if he should add that
