Trilling, Lionel 1905–1975: Critical Essay by Denis Donoghue

It was common for critics to maintain, during the years in which Trilling wrote his major books, that the relation between the individual artist and society was a relation between virtue and vice, or at least a relation between the highest aesthetic purity and the worst conditions which an indifferent society would impose upon a pure intention. Society was deemed to be a bourgeois conspiracy of the worst to thwart the best: the artist was regarded as a holy man in the degree of his victimage. Artist and critic were supposed to huddle together for comfort in the storm, since their motives were equally noble. The storm was a monster compounded of money and aggression.

Trilling was never persuaded by these common assumptions, and he turned their rhetoric upside down. I do not imply that he put his talent at the disposal of a mass society or that he tried to take the harm out of the standard social purposes; but he did not encourage the artist to take spiritual comfort from the grossness of material conditions or to regard himself as a victim of social alienation. Trilling did not interpret the relation between artist and society in terms so favorable to the artist that society could only be construed as barbarism and the artist as a tragic hero. He continued to urge upon the artist a concern for social consequence even when the particular society in question merited every rebuke it received. He did not turn away from society or from the values of responsibility, companionship, and mutuality which the concept of society almost desperately entailed. He never encouraged the artist to think that he might dispense with society, despise its purposes, and find within himself a sufficient moral authority…. Trilling set out to attach to the sentiment of society an aura of conscientiousness and value. He described the idea of society as if it had, by comparison with the individual people who compose it at any moment, not of course historical priority but logical priority; not priority of time but privilege of idea and feeling. He persuaded his readers to find even in the imperfections of society a perfection lost, abused, but not destroyed. The mind engaged in the understanding of society is encouraged to see, even in the monstrous lineaments offered to its attention, a sequence of human possibilities. At a time when other critics were repudiating the idea of society as a source of value because particular societies were demonstrably corrupt, Trilling kept the lines of communication open. (pp. 161-63)

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