BOOKS
473
bureaucratize itself into Stalinism. Trilling never conflated Stalinism
with radicalism. His commitment to "the idea in modulation" left
open the possibility of other kinds of radicalism for people with
temperaments different from his own to follow. Nevertheless, I some–
times find wanting in his work a sharper discrimination between a
possible radicalism and an absolute radicalism, which denies condi–
tions. Dea th tends
to
cast a premature shadow.
All of the changes in Trilling's intellectual career can be viewed, I
think, as the tracings of "an idea in modulation." Trilling had his
heroes and even his causes, but I think it a mistake simply
to
see Freud
or Arnold in the background of the mutations of his thinking about
political and cultural situations.
It
was an aspect of Trilling's genius
that he could turn on ideas and commitments that he had long
cherished , when he found them a threat to what he felt to be the health
of self and society. Mind, art, and the idea of culture itself are not
exempt from an often penetrating skeptical scrutiny. It has scarcely
been remarked how far Trilling traveled from an Arnoldian view of
culture in his later career, however much he continued
to
admire
Arnold's spirit and sensibility. No one knew better than Trilling that
Culture could no longer be counted on to supply a fresh stream of
thought to our stock habits of thought and feeling.
In the concluding essay in
Beyond Culture,
"The Two Environ–
ments: Reflections on the Study of English," Trilling asks "whether in
our culture the study of literature is any longer a suitable means for
developing and refining the intelligence." It should be noted that
Trilling asks the question (in a manner characteristic of a mind in
modulation), leaving open the possibility of dialogue and debate.
Chace engages the question by challenging the attempt
to
go beyond
culture and literature "as hazardous and dubious as was his earlier one
to find a politics appropriate to the antinomian, adversarial, and
deathly aspects of the culture he fears," but he does not say why, apart
from challenging Trilling's effort
to
find support in Keats 's apparent
preference for philosophy over poetry ("for the same reason that an
eagle is not so fine a thing as truth"). "Hazardous and dubious " aborts
our understanding of Trilling's brave attempt to think through our
cultural situation. By literature Trilling means something quite
different from Arnold's secular scripture, he means "the antinomian,
adversarial literature" that richest expression of the modern creative
mind, which diffuses itself, for instance, in our recent counterculture.
Literature as secular scripture never lost its value for Trilling, but he
was acutely sensitive to its weakness as an antidote to mass culture. In
