Education: A Sad, Solemn Sweetness

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It was as a literary critic of broad erudition that Trilling achieved his greatest renown. (Notable essay collections: The Liberal Imagination, 1950; The Opposing Self, 1955.) In studies ranging from Jane Austen to Tolstoy to Orwell to Freud, he sketched a view of man struggling to assert himself against the forces of his society. In Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (1965), Trilling argued that "the primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment."

Historical Sense. Always apart, a little aloof, with neither an ideology nor an all-encompassing aesthetic theory, Trilling put his main emphasis on a "historical sense" in criticism. He once described his curiosity to know "what at a certain time people liked or demanded in the way of literature and for what cultural and historical reasons." Within that historical framework, he attached considerable importance to literature as a moral phenomenon. He delighted in recalling the day a student told him that George Orwell was "a virtuous man."

Such delights came less frequently as the nation's colleges moved through the storms of the '60s. Trilling spoke out bitterly against the "ideology of irrationalism" and the idea that knowledge can be attained through "intuition, inspiration, revelation." Denouncing the pressures to hire more blacks and women as professors, he complained that some groups "have not yet produced a large number of persons trained for the academic profession." In reply some younger colleagues at Columbia began to feel that Trilling's appreciation of artists was limited to restrained and ironic intellectuals like himself.

One young student, Carey Winfrey, now a TV producer, gushed to Trilling that he had "raised the essay to a level that it had not seen since Charles Lamb." Trilling thanked his young admirer, reflected for a moment, and then offered an answer that seemed a classic example of academic vanity. More likely it was another one of Trilling's wry jokes, and perhaps it was even true. Said he: "I'm not altogether certain that I haven't."

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