Kindred spirits …

… The Improbable Friendship That Shaped a Generation of Literary Scholarship - The Chronicle of Higher Education. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… their anxiety about teaching together soon disappeared. Their differences complemented rather than distanced them. Trilling’s temper inclined toward the oblique, self-conscious narratives of modernism, while Barzun ranged more widely, surveying the fixtures that both created and weakened society. Aloof, unruffled, grounded in the empirical, Barzun’s "masters in criticism" were Gautier, Hazlitt, Poe, Goethe, and Nietzsche, writers, he thought, Trilling was "untouched by." For Barzun, the essence of culture was "interpenetration"; for Trilling, culture was something that defined you, even in your attempts to deny its influence. Students didn’t have a chance. If one didn’t catch you out in a mistake, the other one would.