16
LIONEL TRILLING
bearing personal testimony. He must use whatever authority he
may possess to say whether or not a work is true; and if not, why
not; and
if
so, why so. He can do this only at considerable cost
to his privacy. How does one say that Lawrence is right in his
great rage against the modem emotions, against the modem sense
of life and ways of being, unless one speaks from the intimacies
of one's own feelings, and one's own sense of life, and one's own
wished-for way of being? How, except with the implication of
personal judgment, does one say to students that Gide is per–
fectly accurate in his representation of the awful boredom and
slow corruption of respectable life? Then probably one rushes in
to say that this doesn't of itself justify homosexuality and the de–
sertion of one's dying wife, certainly not. But then again, having
paid one's
devoirs
to morality, how does one rescue from moral–
ity Gide's essential point about the supreme rights of the indivi–
dual person, and without making it merely historical and totally
academic?
My first response to the necessity of dealing with matters of
this kind was resentment of the personal discomfort it caused me.
These are subjects we usually deal with either quite unconscious–
ly or in the privacy of our own conscious minds, and if we now
and then disclose our thoughts about them, it is to friends of
equal age and especial closeness. Or if we touch upon them pub–
licly, we do so in the relative abstractness and anonymity of
print. To stand up in one's own person and to speak of them in
one's own voice to an audience which each year grows younger
as one grows older-that is not easy, and probably it is not
decent.
And then, leaving aside the personal considerations, or tak–
ing them merely as an indication of something wrong with the
situation, can we not say that, when modem literature is brought
into the classroom, the subject being taught is betrayed by the
pedagogy of the subject? We have to ask ourselves whether in
our day too much does not come within the purview of the
academy. More ,and more, as the universities liberalize them-
