MODERN LITERATURE
23
of order, convenience, decorum, and rationality might well seem
to reduce itself to the small advantages and excessive limitations
of the middle-class life of a few prosperous nations of the nine–
teenth century. Arnold's historic sense presented to his mind the
long, bitter, bloody past of Europe, and he seized passionately
upon the hope of true civilization at last achieved. But the his–
toric sense of our literature has in mind a long excess of civiliza–
tion to which it ascribes the bitterness and blood of both the
past and of the present and of which it conceives the peaceful
aspects to be mainly contemptible-its order achieved at the cost
of extravagant personal repression, either that of coercion or that
of acquiescence; its repose otiose; its tolerance either flaccid or
capricious; its material comfort corrupt and corrupting; its taste
a manifestation either of timidity or of pride; its rationality at–
tained only at the price of energy and passion.
For the understanding of this radical change of opinion
nothing is more illuminating than to be aware of the doubleness
of mind of the author of
The Golden Bough.
I have said that
Frazer in his conscious mind and in his first intention exemplifies
all that Arnold means by the modern. He often speaks quite
harshly of the irrationality and the orgiastic excesses of the primi–
tive religions he describes, and even Christianity comes under his
criticism both because it stands in the way of rational thought
and because it can draw men away from intelligent participation
in the life of society. But Frazer had more than one intention,
and he had an unconscious as well as a conscious mind.
If
he
deplores the primitive imagination, he does not fail to show it as
also
wonderful and beautiful.
It
is the rare reader of
The Golden
Bough
who finds the ancient beliefs and rituals wholly alien to
him.
It is to be expected that Frazer's adduction of the many
pagan analogues to the Christian mythos will be thought by
Christian readers to have an adverse effect on faith, it was un–
doubtedly Frazer's purpose that it should, yet many readers will
feel that Frazer makes all faith and ritual indigenous to human–
ity,
virtually biological; they feel, as DeQuincey put it, that not
