CULTURE
431
promise to become, in their way, as stultifying and productive of hypoc–
risy as their antecedents. Moreover, this culture is not "the other," as it
was for Arnold's bourgeoisie; it is, or it threatens to become, the status
quo. To put it in sociological terms, which Mr. Trilling does not, the
bourgeoisie with infinite cunning has adopted the weapons of its internal
enemies.
This historical shift has occurred fairly recently, but the polar range
is suggested by the two classes of referrents to whom Mr. Trilling alludes
or quotes. On the one hand there are the English Romantics and Vic–
torians, Wordsworth, Keats, Arnold, Newman and the massive thinkers,
largely Continental, of the nineteenth century, Hegel, Marx, Freud,
Nietzsche, Frazer; at the other extreme there are the contemporary con–
noisseurs of chaos, psychiatrists, sociologists and at least one art historian,
Harold Rosenberg. Within this overall shift what has happened or is
happening goes something like this (all simplifications and distortions
by removal from context on my head): Diderot, Blake, Dostoevsky,
Nietzsche, Conrad, Mann, Lawrence, Joyce, Yeats et. aI., once the out–
laws, have finally proved overwhelming and have created what is in
effect a new orthodoxy which has become a second environment. The
presiding genius of this new cultural phenomenon is something called
the modern spirit. (Mr. Trilling has an elegantly archaic habit of per–
sonifying abstractions, almost in an eighteenth-century fashion, surely in
an Hegelian or Arnoldian sense; indeed he talks about ideas as if they
were old, and often exasperating, friends.) This modem spirit has the
following characteristics: it is aggressive, powerful and thunderously con–
cerned with good and evil; it is in a restless, perpetual quest for the
self ("Is it true for me?"), is obsessed with the inner life and with
making this inner turmoil public.
It
wishes absolute freedom from society
and what used quaintly to be called Reality, and has attempted to ac–
complish "the legitimization of the subversive." It holds "pleasure" (very
specially, widely and vaguely defined in "The Fate of Pleasure") in
disrepute, as it does fame and peace and bliss. It doesn't want Gloriani's
garden, but Blake's or Rimbaud's hell.
It
sees the mind as a battlefield,
for it prizes activity and seeks ceaselessly for
"more life."
It
wants
Heaven and Hell, beatitude and damnation; existence for it is a "spirit–
ual competition" : "Our modern piety is preoccupied by this ideal of the
autonomous self, or at least of the self as it seeks autonomy in its tortured
dream of metaphysical freedom."
The modem spirit has no real ethical dilemmas since it cannot
conceive of a conflict between two principles and considers that what
is good for it is good for the rest of mankind; in fact it is positively
