MODERN LITERATURE
21
lecture, very eloquent, in which he bade the world be of good
hope in the face of the threat to the human mind that was being
offered by the Nazi power. He was still alive in 1941. Yet he had
been born in 1854, three years before Matthew Arnold gave the
lecture "On the Modern Element in Literature." Here, surely,
was history, here was the past I wanted, beautifully connected
with our present. Frazer was wholly a man of the nineteenth
century, and the more so because the eighteenth century was so
congenial to him-the lecture of 1933 in which he predicted the
Nazi defeat had as its subject Condorcet's
Progress ot the Human
Mind;
when he took time from his anthropological studies to
deal with literature, he prepared editions of Addison's essays and
Cowper's letters. He had the old lost belief in the virtue and
power of rationality. He loved and counted on order, decorum,
and good sense. This great historian of the primitive imagination
was in the dominant intellectual tradition of the West that, since
the days of the pre-Socratics, has condemned the ways of thought
that we call primitive.
In short, Frazer-at least in his first or conscious intention
-was a perfect representative of what Matthew Arnold meant
by a modern age. And perhaps nothing could make clearer how
the conditions of life and literature have changed in a hundred
years than to note the difference between the way in which
Arnold defines the modern element in literature and the way in
which we must define it.
If
we speak of modernity, we should have it in mind that
the terms of the endowment of the Poetry Chair at Oxford re–
quired that the Professor lecture on the ancient literatures and
that he speak in Latin. This will suggest that Arnold's making
the idea of modernity the subject of his inaugural was not with–
out its subversiveness. Arnold met the requirement of dealing
with the classic writers-his lecture is about the modern element
in the ancient literatures. But he asked for permission to lecture
in English, not because he was unable to speak in Latin but
because he wished to
be
understood by more than scholars. Per-
