The Opposing Self and The Liberal Imagination are, of course, all of a piece; to read both books is to see Mr Trilling emerging more clearly than ever before as the guardian of the intellectual class…. As a distinguished member of this class, Mr Trilling in The Liberal Imagination was dismayed to find that the best of modern European literature has been written by men who are indifferent or even hostile to the tradition of democratic liberalism: Yeats, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, and Gide 'do not seem to confirm us in the social and political ideals which we hold.' Largely as a result of this fact Mr Trilling has become a divided and reactionary man; he realizes that if one is to concern oneself with modern literature at all one must do so by way of these six writers, but his own heart is not in the...