Arnold tried to express its beginnings, and failed, because he tried to explain instead of representing them.

He wrote about them; he did not write them down.

Nor did he really belong to this novel, quick, variegated, involved world which was so pleased with its own excitement and entanglement.

He was the child of a world which was then passing away, out of which life was fading, which was tired like Obermann, and sought peace in reflective solitudes.

Sometimes he felt, as in _The New Age_, the pleasure of the coming life of the world, but he was too weary to share in it, and he claimed quiet.