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Lionel Trillings' new book of literary essays, The Liberal Imagination (Viking, $3.50), seeks to loosen up the thinking of liberal intellectuals and recall them to a sense of the variousness and possibility inherent in the idea of liberalism.

Mr. trilling is outstanding, in the higher ranks of criticism, for his freedom from pedantry and his alertness to the intimate connection between the world of literature and life itself. Working with the insights of a flexible, undoctrinaire modernism, he has shown himself to be a resolute and perceptive researcher into the problems of the moral life.

The present group of essays have as their point of departure the paradox that liberalism, though it is our dominant cultural tradition, has for long betrayed a growing cultural aridity. The liberal ideology, says Mr. Trilling, has been "at best a matter of indifference" to the writers whom serious criticism has designated as the greatest figures of our time. It has produced "a literature of piety" -- commercially successful but having "neither imagination nor mind." Too rigorous a critic to allow the shallow separation of content and form, Trilling concludes that the deficiencies of this literature reflect a flaccidity and corruption in the liberal imagination. His book, then, is more than a critic's collection of his recent papers: it is, in effect, a searching critique of contemporary liberalism by an unwavering liberal.

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In the interests of its vision of a better life, liberalism tends, says Trilling, "to select the emotions and qualities susceptible of organization." It thereby drifts toward "a denial of the emotions and the imagination"; toward an unbridled and oversimplifying rationalism, hostile to every sort of complexity. Opposing "reality" and "mind," liberalism has seen crude experience as somehow "virtuous" and intellect as suspect. Liberal critics have piously sentimentalized clumsiness (in Dreiser's case) and "honest stupidity," and have turned censorious when confronted with the subtle and disturbing talent of a Henry James. Liberalism, in effect, has turned its back on its true self -- its original essence was adventure -- and has become in practice a credo that plays safe.

This critique furnishes its own answer, explicitly elaborated in some of the essays. To the fatuous optimism of the doctrinaire progressive, Trilling opposes the deep truth of James's moral imagination, with its awareness of disaster, and the tough psychology of Freud, which invites a more complex estimate of human motives than liberalism has made. Trilling, in sum, asks of liberalism that it pay its neglected dues to the irrational, and realize that the moral life has dangers against which progressive formulas are not a shield.

I found these essays so rewarding, and I so greatly admire the whole bent of Trilling's work, that it is disagreeable to have to register a brace of complaints. Trilling repeatedly makes statements which betray that he is thinking of a small segment of the U.S. intelligentsia but which are certainly not phrased accordingly; for instance, the incredible assertion that nationalism "has become doubtful and debilitated." This noticeable group-centeredness of Trilling's is surely akin to liberalism's narrowness of outlook. There is, too, a certain lack of color in Trilling's prose which, considering his otherwise fine command of ways and means, suggests that he still, perhapse unconsciously, shares the liberals overvaluation of utility at the expense of grace.

It would be misleading to end on a querulous note. The Liberal Imagination is the very worth-while product of a first-rate critical intelligence, exceptionally in tune with the urgencies of our time.