PARTISAN REVIEW
197
simply proceeding from a fact of life that no intelligent, not to say
civilized, relationship can ignore.
So teachers must teach. They can explain, they ought to explain,
that they may use disciplinary matrices to which there are possibly
alternatives, as they must, in the humanities at any rate, explain that
survival depends on the effectiveness of the dialogue between teach–
ers and taught who are alike ready to question
anything
and to re–
frain from authoritarian assertiveness. The fresh, necessarily naive
skepticism of the young interacts with the cautious skepticism of
men who know about change, have themselves changed; men who
have made mistakes about history and everything else and want to
make their mistakes creative.
And this takes us back to our revolution and to the reminis–
cences and speculations about revolution which were overhauled by
the real thing. What surely is good about the changes of the last few
years is that, if we are spared the worst follies that might destroy the
universities altogether (and these could come from careless or desper–
ate men on either extreme wing of the argument) -
if
we are thus
spared we shall be able to claim that although teac.hing is harder
work now we are doing it better than we did. We have changed,
and must change again; we have iearned something about our job,
our responsibilities and the dangers which have always threatened us
but which used to be more easily ignored. We have learned that after
all
our innocent and disinterested activities have a political dimen–
sion, and we have found out our allies, the students. Among them
and among our colleagues too there are some who also threaten, who
believe we should not be allowed to do our thing. But we must go
on doing it.
When the young were in one another's arms, Yeats's old man
turned reluctantly to monuments of unageing intellect. The young
never wither, are perpetually renewed by nature; our art is, as far
as we can, to preserve intellectual monuments unaged. We can't do
this by junking the monuments; sometimes we can do it by showing
how the new is transmittable on the same terms as the old (how many
of the "best" exhibits at the big Metropolitan show last winter seemed
permanent not because of their novelty but because they were sub–
sumable under any old category such as "painterly"!). Mostly we
