34
LIONEL TRILLING
people at large?" It makes us smile, but it was asked in all seri–
ousness, and it is serious in its substance, ,and it had to be answer–
ed seriously, in part by the reflection that this idea, like so many
ideas encountered in the books of the course had to be thought
of as having reference only to the private life; that it touched
the public life only in some indirect or tangential way; that it
really ought to be encountered in solitude, even in secrecy, since
to talk about it in public and in our .academic setting was to seem
to propose for it a public practicality and thus to distort its mean–
ing. To this another student replied; he said that, despite the
public ritual of the classroom, each student inevitably experienced
the books in privacy and found their meaning in reference to his
own life. True enough, but the teacher sees the several privacies
coming together to make a group, and they propose- no doubt
the more because they come together every Monday, Wednesday,
and Friday at a particular hour- the idea of a community, that
is to say, "the practical sphere."
This being so, the teacher cannot escape the awareness of
certain circumstances which the critic, who writes for an ideal,
uncircumstanced reader, has no need to take into account. The
teacher considers, for example, the social situation of
his
students
-they are not of patrician origin, they do not come from homes
in which stubbornness, pride, and conscious habit prevail, nor
are they born into a culture marked by these traits, a culture in
which other interesting and valuable things compete with and
resist ideas; they come, mostly, from "good homes" in which
authority and valuation are weak or at least not very salient and
bold, so that ideas have for them, at their present stage of de–
velopment, a peculiar power and preciousness. And in this con–
nection the teacher will have in mind the peculiar prestige that
our culture, in its upper reaches, gives to art, and to the ideas
that art proposes-the agreement, ever growing in assertiveness,
that
art
yields more truth than any other intellectual activity.
In this culture what a shock it is to encounter Santayana's acerb
skepticism about art, or Keats's remark, which the critics and
