22
LIONEL TRILLING
mission was granted by the University, with what reluctance I
do not know, or with what sad sense that another bastion of the
past had fallen, and in an English which was perhaps doctoral
but certainly lucid, Arnold undertook to define what he called
the modern element.
Arnold used the word modern in a wholly honorific sense.
So much so, indeed, that he seems to dismiss all temporal idea
from the word and makes it signify certain timeless intellectual
and civil virtues. A society, he said, is a modern society when it
maintains a condition of repose, confidence, free activity of the
mind, and the tolerance of divergent views. A society is modern
when it affords sufficient material well-being for the conven–
iences of life and the development of taste. And, finally, a society
is modern when its members are intellectually mature, by which
Arnold means that they are willing to judge by reason, to observe
facts in a critical spirit, and to search for the law of things. By
this definition Periclean Athens
is
for Arnold a modern age,
Elizabethan England is not; Thucydides
is
a modern historian,
Sir Walter Raleigh is not.
I shall not go into further details of Arnold's definition or
description of the modern.
2
I have said enough, I think, to sug–
gest what Arnold was up to, what he wanted to see realized as
the desideratum of his own society, what ideal he wanted the
works of intellect and imagination of
his
own time to advance.
And at what a distance his ideal of the modern puts him from
our present sense of modernity, from our modern literature!
To anyone conditioned by our modem literature Arnold's ideal
2. I leave out of my summary account the two supreme virtues that Arnold
ascribes to the most successful examples of a "modern" literature. One
is the power of effecting an "intellectual deliverance," by which Arnold
means leading men to comprehend the "vast multitude of facts" which
make up "a copious and complex present, and behind it a copious and
complex past." The other is "adequacy," the ability to represent the
complex high human development of a modern age "in its completest
and most harmonious" aspect, doing so with "the charm of that noble
serenity which always accompanies true insight."
