Sense and Sensibility

lence that prevailed among the prole-

Take, for example, Trilling’s treatment of The Princess Casamassima by Henry James. In James’s portrayal of the allure and danger of the anarchist viotarian reformers of 19th-century London, Trilling finds “an incomparable representation of the spiritual circumstances of our civilization.” Drawn into radical politics after rejecting the bourgeois social life of her husband, the novel’s title character is, for Trilling, “a perfect drunkard of reality” – someone who makes the typically modern mistake of treating reality as “a thing, a position, a finality, a bedrock” that can