By MICHAEL KNOX BERAN [City Journal] – [Lionel] Tilling’s hostility to the social imagination is nowhere more evident than in the fourth essay in The Liberal Imagination, a meditation on Henry James’s 1886 novel The Princess Casamassima in which Trilling fingers a line of nineteenth-century novels “defined as a group by the character and circumstance of their heroes . . . Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Balzac’s Père Goriot and Lost Illusions, Dickens’s Great Expectations, Flaubert’s Sentimental Education.” The hero of these novels is a character Trilling calls the “Young Man from the Provinces,” a romantic adventurer who sets out to master the big city, Paris or London or New York.
Trilling said that the young man from the provinces was a creature of his age, one that stretched “from the late years of the eighteenth century through the early years of the twentieth.” This was a period, he later wrote in Sincerity and Authenticity, when the West was undergoing the “extreme revision of traditional modes of communal organization which gave rise to the entity that now figures in men’s minds under the name society.” Trilling cited the historian Peter Laslett’s scholarship, which evoked “the minute scale of life, the small size of human groups, before the coming of industry,” as evidence of how greatly premodern communities differed from “the groups that are characteristic of modern mass society, which did not begin to come into being until the middle and the late eighteenth centuries when factories were established.”
The towns in which Trilling’s young men from the provinces grow up are examples of community: they are small, and their residents know one another well. The metropolises that the young men set out to conquer are examples of society: one knows very little of most of the people one meets there, and one is bound to be indifferent to most of them. In Lost Illusions, Balzac describes the shock that Lucien de Rubempré experiences when he first encounters this indifference. In provincial Angoulême, even those who despised him “took him for a human being.” In Paris, “he did not even exist for Madame d’Espard,” a great hostess whom he seeks to impress.
“Historians of European culture are in substantial agreement,” Trilling said, that with the emergence of society, “something like a mutation in human nature took place.” The young provincial who, like Rastignac in Le Père Goriot, confronts the complexities of society for the first time must develop new ways of thinking and seeing.
Continued at City Journal | More Chronicle & Notices.
