BOOKS
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brute force of life, but rather the wise passivity of relaxed will as a
resistance
to
its more brutal expressions.
The phases of Trilling's career (represented by
The Middle of the
Journey, Matthew Arnold, The Liberal Imagination, Beyond Culture,
and
Sincerity and Authenticity)
are carefully distinguished and dis–
cussed by Chace, who wants to show the consistency of this effort
to
defend self and society against the various guises of the imperial will.
In
The Middle of the Journey,
as we have seen, the encounter with
death is more powerful in its resistance to the political absolutisms
which beleaguer the liberal "hero" than any political argument he may
offer against them. In
Matthew Arnold,
Trilling found a commitment
to
mind and literature that provided him with another center of
resistance
to
the ideological will. But his own innate gift for modula–
tion enabled him
to
see the inherent weaknesses and historical limita–
tions of Arnold's thought. Writing in the aftermath of the Enlighten–
ment belief in progress, Arnold envisaged the possibility of a perfect
state (the expression of the best self), "standing," in Chace's words,
"above all classes and resolving all contradictions." Trilling demurred
from this view (calling it "banter") partly because it was unrealistic; it
ignored the conditioned (i.e., class character) of social existence. But
Trilling also saw in the middle classes a source of valuable resistance to
an increasingly powerful modernism, which he was
to
call in
Beyond
Culture
"the adversary culture." (At times he seems almost willing to
forgive, if not forget, its philistinism.)
If
in
The Liberal Imagination
Trilling is very much the Arnoldian or Millian critic, discriminating
for example between the higher triumphs of the imagination (e.g.,
James) and the crudities of a simpleminded realism (e.g., Dreiser), he is
capable of finding in the values of art and intellect threats
to
social life.
"The middle class ... has been losing its love of society," Trilling
writes with a note of complaint. There is much
to
love in community,
not at all clear what there is to love in actual society. Trilling himself, I
suspect, does not value society as much as he mistrusts the reactive
alternatives to it, or rather withdrawals from it: anarchism, even
authoritarianism. "Often our anarchism takes the form of disgust
with the very idea of society. On the upper levels of our taste this
disgust is expressed for us by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Celine, and
Kafka." The adversary can be found in the most privileged reaches of
art. In
Sincerity and Authenticity,
wrilten against the background of
the sixties, Trilling deepens his critique of modernism for its "antimo–
nian reversal of all accepted values, of all received realities." His
adversaries are Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, David Cooper,
