[For more than 30 years], Lionel Trilling has seen literature as a "criticism of life." The phrase comes from Matthew Arnold, and Trilling rightly interprets it to mean that literature is moral rather than moralistic in character, that it always makes its comment on the individual caught up in society or culture. Every person's freedom is affected by the habits and presuppositions of his time, which often sustain him unconsciously; and our culture could not exist for long without the antagonism of what Trilling calls, drawing among others on Hegel, an "opposing self."

Yet Trilling, of course, has no grand philosophy or overview of the conflict between the two powers he isolates: the self and culture. It is here as in morals generally: the good and the evil grow up together, inseparably. A critic's soul is made, like any other man's, by recognizing that life in society—civilized, cultured...