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JOHN HENRY RALEIGH
been one of the most distinguished commentators on the American cul–
tural scene and some of his essays, such as the one on Freud, are justly
considered both brilliant and seminal. His particular blend of literary
sensibility, learning, historical orientation and a civilized, urbane and
ironical prose style is all too rare, and getting rarer. What he has tried
to do in his career as a whole, as I understand it, is to perform in
twentieth-century America the two roles that Matthew Arnold per–
formed in nineteenth-century England: the conservor of what was valu–
able from the past and the proponent of the free play of the critical
intelligence on the present. This is an honorable calling; so I think Mr.
Trilling deserves a full hearing. And what he has to say is always of
interest.
To summarize baldly and abstract simply the basic ideas of a col–
lection of essays is no doubt unfair since in them there are bound to be
inconsistencies, some of them unconscious (and therefore not culpable)
and some of them purposeful (and therefore quite understandable).
Mr. Trilling is nothing if not strategic, and with some subtlety and an
ever-present "sense of the occasion," he makes the separate arguments
fit the separate occasions for the various cultural and literary accomp–
lishments or crimes or peccadillos that he is separately concerned with in
the essay. To this end, he has a cultural charity about the veerings of
others in these complex and fluid matters. Thus in an essay on the once
notorious Snow-Leavis controversy, when he is taking Lord (at that time
merely "Sir Charles") Snow to task for the antagonism to literature
expressed in
The Two Cultures,
he remarks, "and I have no doubt that,
in another mood and on some other occasion, Sir Charles would be
happy to assert the beneficent powers of literature." Thus in
Beyond
Culture
there is, purposeful and recognized, an ambivalent attitude
toward both literature and culture, literature being conceived of both in
a Shelleyan or Arnoldian sense as
the
basic "criticism of life" (this is
largely Mr. Trilling's historical point of view) and in an instrumental
or anthropological perspective whereby it is a kind of vested interest of
the "cultural establishment," self-perpetuating, overweening, to some
overwhelming, often overvalued and occasionally positively dangerous,
in Plato's sense (this is one side of Mr. Trilling's view of modern litera–
ture and the vast cultural apparatus, including the universities, that has
grown up about it). Similarly, culture in the past is conceived of as an
Arnoldian plateau, to which one climbed from the depths of Philistia ;
and Pavlovian in the present, a prepotent force which is like the environ–
ment itself and which, ineluctably, presents us wi th inexorably "styles
of life" which have replaced the old class stratifications but which
