ABSTRACT
The James Bellinghams of criticism have outnumbered the Miss Kingsburys for the past century, and the Mr. Sewalls have been heard from hardly at all. The year 1925 is not arbitrary, for that was when Ortega y Gasset's influential essays, 'The Dehumanization of Art' and 'Notes on the Novel' appeared. No one since Ortega has written so authoritatively or so well about the death of the novel as Lionel Trilling, whose essays have circulated widely on both sides of the Atlantic. Trilling's fondness for abstraction together with his trick of lending abstractions an illusory concreteness is responsible for his use of the term 'reality'. Trilling's assertions force us to one of those terrible and complicated junction-points where criticism, literary, social, political history, and taste must meet and mingle. A meeting between manners and idea occurs when Laskell attends a church supper and bazaar at which Emily Caldwell is selling the wooden bowls she has decorated for the occasion.
