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It derives only in part from his proposing that we might at least aspire
to a condition in which Arnold's claims for the importance of litera–
ture could have a continuing force. He is most important in the re–
straints and skepticisms with which he advances any such proposi–
tions. So that even as he assigns enormous responsibilities to literary
studies, he does so while acknowledging the likelihood that modernist
literature has cracked the restraints of culture, has eluded any kind of
discipline. Professor Trilling's tentativeness reveals a deep anxiety
about his own activities as a critic which are the more difficult to
confront for not obtruding into convenient polarities. Literature itself
induces vagrancies, as he has shown , which culture in his definition of
it is not able
to
incorporate and correct. And yet the problems which
Professor Trilling encounters derive from a conviction about the pos–
sible reciprocal relationship between literature and life, literature and
history, which can and especially now need
to
be held
to
an even
stricter account. Thus, for me at least, the only demonstrable way in
which literature seems to be related to life, especially to those disrup–
tive impulses in contemporary life which Professor Quentin Ander–
son finds so disturbing, is that it shows how language and how literary
forms act
by
their
very
nature
as restraints upon such impulses. The
disenchantment with modern literature and with the functions and
possibilities of literary criticism since the vogue of the so-called New
Criticism is in large part the result of illusions about both, illusions
which , especially when sponsored by critics incapable of Professor
Trilling's subtle distinctions, have been injuriously inflationary to the
profession of English Studies.
It
is in the context of these large expectations that one must
understand Trilling's tough assessments of his own function as a
critic-teacher, and his uncertainties about the possible effectiveness of
either occupation. Long before the radical caucus he had the courage
to ask if these were still useful , or congenial, or "relevant"
occupations-though he does not lean on that catchword. But in the
case of Trilling, as in the later case of the radical faction, the question
of whether or not English Studies could matter always presupposes
that it should matter a very great deal. And it is importantly indicative
that this presupposition seldom lends itselfto translation into anything
like a pedagogical method.
F.R. Leavis here offers himself as a revealing and instructive
