A few years ago the distinguished American critic Lionel Trilling published a series of lectures entitled Sincerity and Authenticity. At the beginning he called attention to two responses which we are aware of when reading an ancient work of literature: ‘How like us those people were! How little human nature has changed!’ and at the same time ‘How different in their way of life, their thoughts, and their moral assumptions!’ So far so good. But after that Trilling went on to concentrate exclusively on the second response, proposing the idea that ‘at a certain point in its history the moral life of Europe added to itself a new element, the state or quality of self which we call sincerity’ (2). It then emerges that the crucial point in history was the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century and that the country where this momentous change took place was England.

Now when confronted with such a large and surprising statement we naturally assume that the writer is using his key terms in a deliberately strange or provocative way, and so we read on with our critical antennae on the alert. Trilling tells us that ‘sincerity’ as he understands it is restricted to certain phases of culture.