The words we encounter most frequently in the essays of Lionel Trilling are: flexibility, variety, difficulty, possibility, modulation. They are the marks of Mr. Trilling's mind, which is capable at once of more range and more exactness than almost any other critic in America today; they are also, one may say, the burden of his song…. In his disciplined inspection of literature, old and new, we find Mr. Trilling irresistibly drawn toward any writing in which tensions serve to expand the world…. Mr. Trilling, whose style is rarely over-spirited, gravitates more willingly toward an earlier writer like Montaigne, who genially upset an entire system of thought by his rambling insistence upon the "dissemblable," and who was pleased by the man from Delphos because he could even tell one egg from another.

But it is not, primarily, the scholastic proponents of eggness, of the one, the simple and the...