20
LIONEL TRILLING
for me was a first concern, the animus of the author, the objects
of his will, the things he wants or wants to have happen.
I went so far in my cultural and non-literary method as to
decide that I would begin the course with a statement of certain
themes or issues that might especially engage our attention. I
even went so far in non-literariness as to think that my purposes
would best be served if I could contrive a "background" for the
works we would read-I wanted to propose a history for the
themes or issues that I hoped to discover. I did not intend that
this history should be either very extensive or very precise. I
wanted merely a
sense
of a history, some general intuition of a
past. And because there is as yet no adequate general work of
history of the culture of the last two hundred years, I asked
myself what books of the age just preceeding ours had most in–
fluenced our literature, or, since I was far less concerned with
showing influence than with discerning a tendency, what older
books might seem to fall into a line the direction of which
pointed to our own literature and thus might serve as a pro–
legomenon to the course.
It was virtually inevitable that the first work that should
have sprung to mind was Sir James Frazer's
The Golden Bough,
not, of course, the whole of it, but certain chapters, those that
deal with Osiris, Attis, and Adonis. Anyone who thinks about
modem literature in a systematic way takes for granted the great
part played in it by myth, and especially by those examples of
myth which tell about gods dying and being reborn-the imagi–
nation of death and rebirth, reiterated in the ancient world in in–
numerable variations that are yet always the same, captivated the
literary mind at the very moment when, as all accounts of the
modem age agree, the most massive and compelling of all the
stories of resurrection had lost much of its hold upon the world.
Perhaps no book has had so decisive an effect upon modem
literature as Frazer's. It was beautifully to my purpose that it
had first been published ten years before the twentieth century
began. Yet forty-three years later, in 1933, Frazer delivered a
