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 as a department of philosophy and as most particularly related to that specific philosophical discipline which, by reason of its special concern with the nature and place and prospect of man, in its traditional designation, as "anthropology." Yet, despite the consistency with which the critical act for him has made an occasion for an essentially anthropological inquiry—despite the unfailing intensity of his long meditation on the exigencies attendant upon the life of selfhood in...