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 cri...

[Much] of what was fresh in American writing after the war came down in the fertile precipitate of ideas and attitudes released into [writers' and intellectuals'] thought by the chemistry of socialism on the wane. (p. 4) It was in the post-war climate of stalemate and reassessment that Lionel Trilling came to prominence as a spokesman for ambivalence, moral realism (that is, the acceptance of "good-and-evil"), ideas in modulation, and the tragic view of life. He emerged in the fo...

Lionel Trilling is one of the few critics of any standing to have actually written at some length on the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Aside from the incidental use which he makes of psychoanalytic ideas in the regular course of his criticism, he has several times directed his attention specifically to evaluations of what this relationship has been in the past and may be in the future. In particular, there are three essays which may well serve as milestones in his consideration of the ...

Judged against our contemporary standard—which is far less absolute than its "true believers" generally realize—Mr. Trilling's criticism must, it is true, be acknowledged as more than a little "impure." For his interests have most assuredly led him to see literary situations as cultural and moral situations, so much so indeed that he sometimes makes us feel that he—no doubt not in any very highly conscious or programmatic way—regards criticism a...

Lionel Trilling is probably as famous now as he was twenty years ago, but unless I am much mistaken, his reputation is nowhere near as high as it was in the fifties, the years of The Liberal Imagination and The Opposing Self…. Back then, if this country had a leading literary critic, or, more precisely, a leading literary spokesman, it was Trilling. He was at the center of a number of concentric circles important to the literary intellectual life of the country…. He was one of the best-known &...

[We see in Mr. Trilling's The Liberal Imagination] that he cultivates a mind never entirely his own, a mind always deliberately to some extent what he understands to be the mind of society, and also a mind always deliberately to some extent the mind of the old European society taken as corrective and as prophecy. He is always aware, to use one of his phrases, of the cost of civilization. He knows the price of glory and the price of equity; that the price of one may be the expense of the other; that t...

The career and reputation of Lionel Trilling as a literary critic pose something of an anomaly. Not, we should hasten to add, that Mr. Trilling does not deserve all the encomiums that have been lavished on him or the considerable influence he enjoys as a spiritual guide and mentor. But Mr. Trilling is by no means the kind of critic who has dominated the American literary scene since the end of the Second World War. His concern with literature has always been broadly moral and historical—like that of ...

[A distinct view of life is discernable in Trilling's works, revealed in the proposition that he] developed and illustrated throughout that galaxy of essays he published during the last 35 years. It is this. Intuition and perception alike show not merely that life overflows ideologies and coercive systems—so much is obvious: there would be no systems and ideologies if life were not impossibly hard to regiment. The contention is rather that the only things worth cherishing in life are necessari...

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&...

[For more than 30 years], Lionel Trilling has seen literature as a "criticism of life." The phrase comes from Matthew Arnold, and Trilling rightly interprets it to mean that literature is moral rather than moralistic in character, that it always makes its comment on the individual caught up in society or culture. Every person's freedom is affected by the habits and presuppositions of his time, which often sustain him unconsciously; and our culture could not exist for long without the an...

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 '...