Lionel Trilling and the End of Romanticism‪.‬

IN HIS WELL-KNOWN PREFACE TO THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION (1950) LIONEL Trilling notes that John Stuart Mill, "at odds with Coleridge all down the intellectual and political line, nevertheless urged all liberals to become acquainted with this powerful conservative mind." (1) That Trilling will follow Mill's lead is confirmed when he argues that "a criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general rightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time" (LI x). One way in which Trilling puts the contemporary "sense of general rightness" under pressure is in his work on Romanticism, both in his influential essays on Wordsworth and Keats and in the references to Romanticism that pervade his work. As Morris Dickstein argues, "When the Romantic poets--or later romantic writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald--were being dismissed as immature, antirational, or technically faulty, Trilling offered different readings that re-created them as writers growing up, learning from politics and experience, and developing a tragic sense of the complexities of life." (2) Trilling's views on Romanticism are closely allied with his interest in tragedy, as Dickstein argues; they are also allied with his understanding of Freud, whom Trilling regards as "one of the culminations of the Romanticist literature of the nineteenth century" (LI 35). But his relation to Romanticism changes in The Opposing, Self (1955). As late as "Wordsworth and the Rabbis" (1950), which is included in that volume, Trilling values Romanticism as an anticipation of Modern literature, as Wordsworth anticipates Freud and other Modern writers. In parts of that essay, however, and more fully in the celebrated essay on Keats in the same volume, Trilling expresses a melancholy sense of decline that causes him to value Romanticism for its radical differences from later writing. Hereafter Romanticism will often represent what he calls in his 1956 essay on Santayana "a nearly forgotten possibility of the mind; it is not approved by the hidden, pre-potent Censor of modern modes of thought." (3) Trilling thinks of himself as writing at the end of the period that began with the French Revolution and the Lyrical Ballads; at his most disenchanted, he writes as if he were the era's last survivor. An early indication of Trilling's interest in Romanticism occurs in "T. S. Eliot's Politics," a 1940 essay that, as Leon Wieseltier notes, was "considered and rejected" for The Liberal 1magination and published posthumously (MO 557). Although Eliot's morality is based on a metaphysics that Trilling cannot share, he argues that Eliot's "way of considering morality has certain political advantages over Trotsky's way or the Marxist way in general" (MO 27). He finds similar advantages in an unlikely source: the Wordsworth who "deserted the Revolution" (29). According to Trilling, Wordsworth was able to speak of the mystery of the moral life in ways that we cannot: "Eventually he made morality absolute and admittedly he engaged it with all sorts of unsound and even dangerous notions. But, as he conceived the quality, it was a protection against the belief that man could be made into a means and it was an affirmation that every man was an end" (MO 30). In subsequent essays, Trilling will be much more critical of anti-Romantic writers, including Eliot, who repeat a past that they cannot remember. In this case, he is more concerned to commend both Wordsworth and Eliot for recognizing "the error which lies hidden in materialist and rationalist psychology. Against it a certain part of the nineteenth century was always protesting" (MO 29). In a 1945 essay on Whitman this continuity between the nineteenth century and Modern literature enables Trilling to group Wordsworth with Baudelaire and Joyce as "insurgent poets" of" modern times": "Their purpose has always been ultim