338
LIONel TRILLING
around the work a band of fighting men to carry it on to the field in
force, like the Ark of the Covenant, each member of the band
deriving strength from the sacred object, becoming ever more con–
firmed in his own sincerity and genuineness while bringing into
ultimate question the authenticity of the heathen public.
Hence our paradox. Never, in a secular culture, has the inner life
seemed of such moment as it does in our culture. And never has the
inner life been lived so publicly, so much in terms of significant as–
sociations and allegiances, of admirations and rejections that make
plain how things stand within.
As
a result, it becomes ever more difficult for a work of art to be
thought of as existing in itself or in our private and personal experience
of it-its existence becomes the elaborate respect systems that grow up
around it, that huge penumbra of the public effort to understand it
and to be in a right relation to it, and to make known to the world
the completeness of the understanding and the rightness of the relation
that has been achieved. The work exists less in itself than in the
purview of one or another of the public agencies we have set up for
the service of the inner life; of these one of the most notable is surely
literary criticism, which, as it has established itself in the universities,
constitutes a great new profession, ever growing in its personnel and
in its influence/'
The extent of our author's public existence will not seem irrelevant
to the Hawthorne Question (since there
is
such a thing), for Haw–
thorne's relation to the public of his own day was a matter of great
moment in his thought about himself. Hawthorne seems never to have
been sure whether to be ashamed or proud of his lack of success with
the mass of his countrymen. And of course this was not for him
merely a question of his career but of his moral life, feeling as he did
4. For an interesting accou.nt of the part played by public agencies-"museums,
university art departments, professional publications"- in the establishment of
new painting see Harold Rosenberg's column in
The New Yorker,
September 7,
1963, pp. 136-146. Mr. Rosenberg's estimate of the power--one might say the
fury--of criticism is worth noting: "The future does not come about of
itself; it is the result of choices and actions in the present. Criticism, in–
cluding
art
criticism, is a form of conflict about what shall be.
If
history
can make into art what is now not art, it can also unmake what is now art. It
is conceivable that Michelangelo, Vermeer, Goya, Cezanne will someday cease
to be art; it is only necessary that, as in the past, an extreme ideology shall
seize power and cast out existing masterpieces as creatures of darkness."
