Lionel Trilling [antikvár]

BaCK in 1924, I. a. Richards could in all candor write that "critics have as yet hardly begim to ask themselves what they are doing or under what conditions they work/' Richards was quite right, of course, and it is a fact of the literary life that ever since the publication of his Principles of Literary Criticism, critics have done nothing so compulsively and so tediously as to ask just those questions. How strange, then, that the single critic who, in these fifty years or so, has done more than others to make of his calling an honorable and distinctive mode of literary expression should have concerned himself so little with the theory of his discipline or with the particular school affiliations of his thought. Lionel Trilling has been variously deseribed as a liberal, a conservative, a patriarch, an aesthete, a morálist, and so on.1 Though in his writings he consistently expressed a profound aversion to ideological thinking and was scrupulously fair and responsive to rival points of view, he came especially in his later years to be derided for various kinds of inflexibility and for downright obtuseness. Why so many literary people should have thought him vulnerable to their probings-malicious and otherwise-we cannot confidently say, but there is no doubt that a critic of his eminence was hurt in the eyes of many detractors by his seeming to operate so blithely, without benefit of theory or system. Though Trilling contradicted himself on occasion, and was of two minds on almost everything he touched, he knew what he was doing, or thought he knew. The pleasure we take in his enduring work is a pleasure 1. Philip Rieff, in Fellow Teachers (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), designates him "Jew 0f Culture."