Lionel Trilling
ON THE MODERN ELEMENT IN
MODERN LITERATURE'"
The title I have given to this discourse makes refer–
ence to a lecture which Matthew Arnold delivered a little over
a century ago. I cannot expect a quick and general recognition
of the allusion, for this particular one of Arnold's lectures is not
widely known. "On the Modern Element in Literature" has a
signal importance in its author's career-it was Arnold's first
lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and it inaugurated not
only
his
p~ofessorship
but his career in criticism. The lecture
as
it was delivered in 1857 was a great success, but Arnold was not
pleased with it; he never wanted it to be part of the canon of
his
work, he never put it into any of the volumes of critical
essays he brought out in his lifetime.
1
Yet he did not entirely
disown it; after the passage of a decade he published it in
Mac–
millan's Magazine,
explaining that he did so because it made a
certain point about the nature of Hellenism which at that time
needed to be made. He apologized for the inadequacy of the
piece in a prefatory note, speaking of its deficiencies in content,
but more emphatically of its wrongness of tone. He said that it
was composed
in
a style which he had since learned to dislike,
*
An expanded version of a lecture delivered at Vanderbilt University in
the spring of 1960 and later in the year at Boston College.
1.
The lecture, although republished from time to time, was for many
years difficult to come by, but this year
it
has been made accessible in
Essays, Letters, and Reviews
by
Matthew Arnold,
edited by Fraser Nei–
man (Harvard University Press) and in On
the Classical Tradition,
edited by R. H. Super, the first volume of the projected
Complete Prose
Works 01 Matthew Arnold
(The University of Michigan Press).
