Education Quote by Carl Clinton Van Doren

Van Doren is diagnosing a classic literary bait-and-switch: the drab, morally compromised texture of everyday life gets traded for the safe glamour of distance. “Familiar life” doesn’t just mean the domestic or the local; it’s the stuff that can’t help revealing its own compromises, the way routine “tend[s] to sordidness” once you look too closely. By contrast, “remote life” arrives pre-filtered. The past, the faraway, the exotic: all of it is “generally idealized” because it’s insulated from the reader’s immediate scrutiny and, crucially, from the reader’s guilt.

The sentence has the clipped authority of a critic watching culture manage its anxieties. It’s not neutral description. It’s a charge: when realism feels too exposing, audiences and authors retreat into historical or distant settings where ugliness can be aestheticized and heroism can be staged with less risk. That “had been succeeded” carries a sense of replacement, almost a market correction. People didn’t stop craving stories; they changed the kind of stories that let them feel good while still feeling smart.

Then comes the real tell: “historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.” Van Doren is skeptical of edification as alibi. The “detail” functions like intellectual set dressing, allowing pleasure to pass as instruction. The subtext is about respectability: entertainment wants a credential, and history supplies it. In Van Doren’s era, with mass readership expanding and historical fiction booming, this double-purpose storytelling becomes a cultural compromise: escape packaged as education, seriousness smuggled in through costume and dates.