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LIONEL TRILLING
which all parties showed to the social values that had been established
by the respect revolution.
2
The social emotions which were involved in the critical movement
do not in themselves immediately concern us, but I mention them in
order to suggest how charged with will, how deeply implicated in the
bitter moralities of choosing among social styles, was the intellectual
tendency that gave us the Hawthorne we know.
But
if
we do indeed owe our Hawthorne to the movement of
criticism, it may be that our new possession is a little compromised by
the somewhat fatigued reputation of criticism in recent years. In 1956,
in his University of Minnesota lecture, Mr. Eliot expressed what he
was not alone in feeling-a degree of disenchantment with the enor–
mous critical activity of our age.
S
He was ready to affirm that our
criticism was very brilliant, but he felt it necessary to say that "it may
even come to seem, in retrospect, too brilliant." By which he meant,
I think, too busy, too eager to identify ironies, and to point to ambigui–
ties, and to make repeated analyses and interpretations.
One objection that Mr. Eliot made to the hyperactivity of
criticism is that it interferes with our private and personal relation to
the literary work, that it prevents our freedom to respond to it in our
own way. I should go further than this and say that. the brilliant
busyness of criticism has not only changed our relation to literature,
to art in general, but has even changed our conception of the nature
of art, and in a way that, if we stop to think of it, we might not be
entirely happy about.
The situation that I would describe is by way of being a paradox.
Of this paradox the first term
is
our belief that the vulgar art-product,
the art-product characteristic of the "respect revolution," stands in a
relation to the public which is radically different from the relation to
the public maintained by the work that commands our best attention
2. In the social-psychological view, Dr. Leavis is presumably no less "aristocratic"
than Mr. Eliot. At any rate, I am-I picked up the phrase "respect revolu–
tion" from an essay in which it is said that my volume
The Opposing Self
"defends an aristocratic attitude toward the respect revolution in terms of an
implicit romantic notion of inner direction." (Arthur
J.
Brodbeck, "Values
in
The Lonely Crowd:
Ascent or Descent of Man?", in
Culture and Character,
edited by Seymour Martin Lipset and Leo Lowenthal, 1962, p. 59)
3. I should here take note of Mr. Eliot's statement that the critical movement
ought not to
be
thought of as deriving from him.
