Abstract

Trilling's "larger naturalism," acknowledging as it does the value of mystery and the power of fact, aligns him with Arnold and Freud and Forster in an effort to synthesize the legacies of the Enlightenment and of the Romantic movement: conscious of the authority of the imagination, he "never deceives himself into believing that the power of the imagination is sovereign, that it can make the power of circumstance of no account" ; committed to reason and to an ideal of rational order, he is yet continuously aware of the limits of reason, of the rational intellect's potential tyranny over the emotions, of those forces within men and without which frustrate the mind's will to organize and control experience.1 And this "larger naturalism," with its emphasis upon "a social tradition," implicates Trilling in a particular view of the novel - a view which may be said to inform all of his thinking but which achieves its fullest and clearest expression in such well-known essays as "Manners, Morals and the Novel" and "Art and Fortune." "The novel," he remarks in the first of these polemics, "...is a perpetual quest for reality, the field of its research being always the social world, the material of its analysis being always manners as the indication of the direction of man's soul” . · 1. Nathan A. Scott, Jr., makes substantially the same point in his superb and very nearly definitive account of Trilling's "Anxious Humanism" . Readers familiar with Professor Scott's study will recognize at once the deep and general indebtedness which I am pleased to acknowledge here. Tom Samet is an instructor in literature at Douglass College, Rutgers University. He is currently preparing essays on Henry James and on Conrad and Hemingway. "The Modulated Vision" is part of a study, in progress, of Lionel Trilling and the Anxieties of the Modern