Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism

Author(s): Donald D. Stone

Source: Poetics Today , Summer, 1998, Vol. 19, No. 2, Hellenism and Hebraism
Reconsidered: The Poetics of Cultural Influence and Exchange II (Summer, 1998), pp.
179-198
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1773438

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Poetics Today

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics
of Hebraism and Hellenism

Donald D. Stone
English, CUNY

The power of intellect and science, the power of beauty, the power of social life
and manners, -these are what Greece so felt, and fixed, and may stand for. They
are great elements in our humanisation. The power of conduct is another great
element; and this was so felt and fixed by Israel that we can never with justice
refuse to permit Israel, in spite of all his shortcomings, to stand for it.
Arnold, "Equality," 1878

Abstract Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy describes Hebraism and Hellenism
as the "two points of influence [between which] moves our world." Arnold was not
speaking as an expert in Judeo-Christian or Greek studies; he used the terms prag-
matically, flexibly, to denote both a dual historical heritage and two complementary
states of being (strictness of conscience and spontaneity of consciousness, respectively) that
had practical bearing in a newly industrial and democratic world. An educator by
profession, and one deeply influenced by what he perceived as France's superiority
in educational and social matters, Arnold initially argued on behalf of the Hellenic,
or critical, spirit: the ability to see things freely and objectively, without religious
or political bias. But he never divorced the Hellenic stress on knowing from the
Hebraic emphasis on conduct. As a disciple of Socrates, he invoked that master's
belief in the "interdependence of virtue and knowledge."

Lecturing to an American audience in 1883, Matthew Arnold was pleased

by the impact of his words, and he was reminded of Benjamin Disraeli's

Poetics Today 19:2 (Summer 1998) Copyright ? 1998 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
180 Poetics Today 19:2

flattering comment, made two years earlier, that he "was the only living
Englishman who had become a classic in his own lifetime," in part through
his facility in "launching phrases" (1895, 2:219, 269). From less friendly
quarters, Arnold's predilection for such quotable phrases and terms as
"sweetness and light," "Philistinism," and "saving remnant" (the latter
phrase proved especially popular in America) has been derided as a Victo-
rian equivalent of the modern taste for sound bites-"scrupulously empty
phrases," in J. Hillis Miller's view, that serve only to keep "the void open
after the disappearance of God" (1965 [1963]: 265). To admirers such as
John Holloway or Steven Marcus, however, these phrases are admirable
stylistic devices, inculcating "value frames" in the reader (Holloway 1965
[1953]: 217). These "handy and detachable bits of phraseology are memo-
rable," Marcus claims, "not merely by virtue of their ingenuity but also
because they refer to and are part of spirited and significant argumentative
discussions that have a resonance beyond their original historical context
and still retain some connections with matters of issue today" (1994: 165).
For Arnold these rhetorical terms were pragmatic tools assembled to goad
the English public into facing up to major social problems.
Of all these terms, few have proved more influential-or more diffi-
cult to define--than the ones Arnold employed in Culture and Anarchy to
describe the "two points of influence [between which] moves our world":
"Hebraism and Hellenism" (1960-77, 5: 163-64). Arnold was not speaking
as an expert in Judeo-Christian or Greek studies; he used the terms prag-
matically, flexibly, loosely, to denote both a dual historical heritage and
two complementary states of being that had practical bearing in a newly
industrial and democratic world. Differing with those who promoted one
of these values at the expense of the other, Arnold argued that "the final
aim of both Hebraism and Hellenism is . . . no doubt the same: man's
perfection or salvation" (ibid., 5:164). But, he noted, whereas Hebraism,
with its concern for inward rectitude, requires an obedience on the part
of the individual that might lead to an unquestioning acceptance of the
status quo, Hellenism prompts a counterimpulse: the desire to have an ob-
jective grasp of reality that might very well lead to a questioning of the
status quo. As a supporter of educational and other social reforms, Arnold
felt the practical need to achieve an adjustment between the two, an ad-
justment that would strengthen England's ability to meet the challenges
of a rapidly changing world. To his mother, Arnold claimed that the dis-
tinction he had made between Hebraism and Hellenism-between "strict-
ness of conscience" and "spontaneity of consciousness" (ibid., 5:165)- was
one "on which more and more will turn, and on dealing wisely with it
everything depends" (1895, 2:37). And to his good friend Louisa, Lady

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Maron Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Stone * Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism 181

de Rothschild, Arnold expressed delight when the eminent Jewish scholar

Emanuel Deutsch commended what Arnold modestly called his "crude
speculations" on Hebraism and Hellenism. "I have had no such tribute to
my powers of relaxing and dissolving yet paid. If we can but dissolve what
is bad without dissolving what is good!" (1895, 1:458-59).
"Dissolvents of the old European system of dominant ideas and facts we
must all be, all of us who have any power of working," Arnold had asserted
in 1863; "what we have to study is that we may not be acrid dissolvents
of it" (1960-77, 3:109-10). The comment appears in the most progressive-
minded of the Essays in Criticism, the essay devoted to an author whose style
and message Arnold was particularly drawn to and from whom he had
taken the Hebraism-Hellenism construction: Heinrich Heine. "All people
are either Jews or Hellenes," Heine had asserted three decades earlier
(in Ludwig Borne), "people with drives that are ascetic, image-hating, and
ravenous for spiritualization, or people of a nature that rejoices in life, is
proud of display, and is realistic" (cited in Carroll 1982: 242). For Heine,
Western history could be viewed as a perpetual oscillation between Hel-
lenic and "Nazarene" impulses, between the desire for artistic, intellectual,
and sensual freedom and the repression of such desires. Although he paid
tribute to the claims of both sense and spirit, Heine also cautioned against
the political consequences of religions that condemn the flesh: their in-
evitable "support of despotism" (Heine 1973b [1833]: 132). Heine's assault
was not on religion per se. (He protested that instead of "having no reli-
gion, . . . I have them all" [Sammons 1979: 306].) Rather, he attacked
the unholy alliance between "religious repressiveness" and the existing
state of "political repression" (ibid.: 148). It is largely on this account
that Arnold--a school inspector by vocation, frustrated by the opposition
of the Puritan-biased middle-class establishment to the spread of educa-
tion-joined forces with the brilliant opponent of "Philistinism" (another
of Heine's terms) and borrowed his Hebraism-Hellenism distinction. He
decried Heine's "injustice" in praising Hellenism at the expense of Hebra-
ism (1960-77, 5:164), but he praised Heine for containing both qualities
within himself (1960-77, 3:127). For all his moral defects, Heine was, for
Arnold, "a brilliant soldier in the Liberation War of humanity" (ibid., 3:
132), a cause that Arnold accepted as his own. And both the German and
the English poet-essayists looked to France as the country where, in the
nineteenth century, Hellenism seemed to be thriving in the forms of a su-
perior educational and social system and a superior intellectual climate.
Arnold's lifelong aim as educator and social critic was to support a core
of ethical values and, at the same time, to promote a "free play of the mind
upon all subjects." For this purpose one needed Hebraism, with its regard

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
182 Poetics Today 19:2

for conduct and duty, but one also needed a Hellenic or "critical" outlook.
The function of criticism, he notes (in perhaps the most widely quoted of
his phrases), is to obey "an instinct prompting it to try to know the best
that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics,
and everything of the kind" (ibid., 3:268)-an instinct that Arnold de-
fines as being conspicuously Hellenic. But opposition to such thinking-
a thinking that would call for inevitable changes in English institutions
and tempers--came from the newly powerful middle class, "drugged with
business, ... its sense blunted for any stimulus besides, except religion; ...
a religion, narrow, unintelligent, repulsive" (ibid., 5:19). Thus, Arnold felt
obliged to "dissolve" the authority of a popular but repressive form of reli-
gion (latter-day Puritanism), while also arguing the pragmatic value of
religion in upholding standards of conduct. To understand Arnold's seem-
ingly ambivalent handling of the Hebraism-Hellenism distinction, one
must know something about his personal background, and one should
have a sense of England's historical situation, as he saw it, in the middle
third of the nineteenth century. It is also instructive to briefly examine the
views of some of Arnold's contemporaries who made use of the Hebraism-
Hellenism distinction for their own purposes.
While Heine is credited with turning the opposition between Hellene
and Hebrew into a historical paradigm, he was anticipated, to some de-
gree, by two German authors who dallied with the charms of the pagan
world, Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
As an English disciple (who also draws on Arnold), Walter Pater, writes in
the chapter of The Renaissance devoted to Winckelmann, "The aim of our
culture" is the attainment of "not only as intense but as complete a life
as possible." Thus, Pater, following Arnold, celebrates the idea of Bildung,
the German concept of self-development devised by Goethe and Johann
Gottfried von Herder by way of Platonic sources. In the contrasting figure
of Girolamo Savonarola (self-denying, Hebraic), Pater points to another, if
less attractive, Renaissance "type of success" (1986 [1873]: 121). Like Heine
and Arnold, Pater describes the Renaissance in terms of a contest between
revitalized Hebraic and Hellenic forces. Unlike his predecessors, however,
Pater saw the efforts of a Pico della Mirandola "to reconcile Christianity
with the religion of ancient Greece" (ibid.: 20) as a doomed undertaking.
Heine, by contrast, had endorsed the pagan (or "sensual") effort "at reha-
bilitating matter and vindicating the rights of the senses without denying
the rights of the spirit or even its supremacy" (1973a [18351: 324). Implicit
in Heine's or Arnold's defense of Hellenism is the view that a position that
supports self-development would also allow for the satisfying of spiritual
needs. "Essential in Hellenism," Arnold declares in Culture and Anarchy, "is

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Stone * Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism 183

the impulse to the development of the whole man, to connecting and har-
monizing all parts of him, leaving none to take their chance" (1960-77, 5:
184). Such a development was, for Arnold, in society's best interest; and
here we see a divergence between Arnold and Pater. For whereas Helle-
nism for Arnold is an educational means of advancing England, Hellenism
for Pater is purely an individual matter.'
John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty (1859), also distinguishes between
religious (i.e., "Calvinistic") and pagan counterdemands. "'Pagan self-
assertion,"' he contends (quoting John Sterling), "is one of the elements
of human worth, as well as 'Christian self-denial.' There is a Greek
ideal of self-development, which the Platonic and Christian ideal of self-
government blends with, but does not supersede. It may be better to be a
John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either;
nor would a Pericles, if we had one in these days, be without anything
good which belonged to John Knox" (1969 [1859]: 409-10). But there was
no guarantee that a Hellenic-minded individual would have respect for,
or be tolerated by, someone of a Hebraic cast of mind. George Eliot, in
Romola (1863), drew a cautionary portrait of a young hedonist, living in
the Florence of Savonarola, who disavows all claims upon him. "I am
no Hebrew," Tito Melema announces upon his entry into the novel (1980
[1863]: 56), and before long he has betrayed everyone close to him.2 Eliot
wrote four admiring essays on Heine in the mid-185os, but she duly noted
Heine's own sardonic admission that in his time of suffering the Greek
gods were of no avail. When Heine collapsed in the Louvre, he imagined
hearing the Venus de Milo say to him, "Dost thou not see, then, that I
have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?" (Eliot 1963: 241-42).
In her most ambitious novel, Middlemarch (1872), Eliot sought to rec-
oncile the Hebraic and Hellenic impulses; or, rather, in the persons of
the overly self-denying Dorothea Brooke and the benignly hedonistic Will
Ladislaw, she shows how each gains from contact with the other. Dorothea
becomes aware of the value of beauty and of her own sensual needs, while

1. On this point see Donoghue 1995: 158. The differing use of Hellenism by Arnold and Pater
is also explored by David DeLaura (1969) and Linda Dowling (1994).
2. Arnold's devotee Henry James also draws on Arnold's distinction between Hebraic- and
Hellenic-minded individuals. The ill-fated sculptor-hero of his first major novel, Roderick
Hudson (1875), loftily asserts, "I'm a Hellenist; I'm not a Hebraist!" (James 1960 [1875]: 88);
but Roderick's lack of self-control proves ruinous to his life and art. (James may also be
thinking of the opposition between pagan and Christian impulses depicted in Hawthorne's
Marble Faun.) The protagonist of "The Author of 'Beltraffio"' describes the difference be-
tween his wife and himself as that between "Christian and pagan. . . She thinks me, at any
rate, no better than an ancient Greek. It's the difference between making the most of life
and making the least" (James 1963 [1884]: 334).

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
184 Poetics Today 19:2

Will learns to apply his scattered energies and talents to a useful vocation.
In Arnold's life and writings, one finds a similar movement at work. A play-
ful, aesthetically minded schoolboy (Merry Matt) changed into a brilliant
elegiac poet, then into an earnest inspector of schools, and finally (without
giving up the inspectorship) into the most discerning social and literary
critic of his generation. In Arnold's development one finds the legacies of
Greece and Israel continually enriching his endeavors and encouraging
him, in turn, to pass on to his readers the values of that double heritage.
In the more than three decades he spent inspecting Dissenter-run
schools, Arnold came face to face with the meager curricula and fates af-
forded the majority of English schoolchildren.3 Preparing A Bible-Reading
for Schools (1872), Arnold explained to a friend, "Into the education of the
people there comes, with us at any rate, absolutely nothing grand" (1895,
2:99). For Arnold, to be sure, the Bible was to be appreciated as literature,
not dogma. ("More and more," he wrote in "The Study of Poetry," in 1880,
"mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for
us, to console us, to sustain us" [1960-77, 9:161].) Of the power of a literary
text such as the Book of Isaiah, Arnold marveled, "What an extending of
[its readers'] horizons, what a lifting them out of the present, what a sug-
gestion of hope and courage!" (1960-77, 7:71-72). But the English lacked
more than an appreciation of good literature. They also lacked, Arnold
felt, the ability to see where they as a nation were heading, and they were
unwilling to profit from the wisdom of other nations. They lacked, in short,
an objective awareness of their Hebraic background (its negative and posi-
tive qualities), and they desperately needed a Hellenic perspective.
A typical, mistaken criticism made by Arnold's more religious-minded
contemporaries was that (as a reviewer of Arnold's St. Paul and Protestantism
complained) in his "culture, perhaps in his nature, the Hellenic element is
too exclusive; the Hebraic has scarcely any place" (cited in Dawson and
Pfordresher 1979: 262). Arnold admitted to his mother that he gave more
"prominence" to Hellenism than his father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, would
have conceded (1895, 1:455). But, he added, modern times and modern
needs demand this new balance. It is useful to look back to Greece, he
argued in his inaugural lecture as professor of poetry at Oxford (1857, pub-
lished in 1868 as "On the Modern Element in Literature"), if England is

3. As Park Honan writes, during his school inspections Arnold "found that religious schism
and the pride of middle-class Dissenters and their animosity to the state all meant the
poor would suffer" (Honan 1981: 253). Fred G. Walcott studies Arnold's educational back-
ground in The Origins of Culture and Anarchy (1970); Peter Smith and Geoffrey Summerfield
have assembled a selection of Arnold's writings on education, including his inspection re-
ports (1969).

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Stone * Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism 185

to achieve "intellectual deliverance" and move forward as a nation. "Such

a deliverance is emphatically, whether we will or no," he says, "the de-
mand of the age in which we ourselves live." Without denying the need
for "moral deliverance," delivery from pride and selfishness ("in the enjoy-
ment of both [moral and intellectual] united consists man's true freedom"
[1960-77, 1:19]), Arnold urges the Oxford students to examine the most
enduringly "modern" of literatures, that of ancient Greece. Writers like
his father's beloved Thucydides are modern, Arnold claims, because they
possess the critical spirit, the ability to "view all the facts" (25) without ex-
aggeration or distortion. The critical or Hellenic spirit, Arnold maintains
throughout his work, is the ability to see objects as they really are (140);
where the English are at fault, he argues, is in their inability to rise above a
narrow point of view. Invoking Pericles' famous eulogy of Athens (as cited
by Thucydides), Arnold links the flourishing of Greek culture with its "free-
dom," in Pericles' words, "for individual diversities of opinion and charac-
ter," for its toleration of "the tastes and habits of our neighbour" (25).
Mid-Victorian England, by contrast, seemed a nation singularly indif-
ferent to alternative viewpoints, whether expressed by ancient authors or
by foreign thinkers. The "collective life of humanity," Arnold says, is pre-
cious, and relevant to us all: "everywhere there is connexion, everywhere
there is illustration: no single event, no single literature, is adequately
comprehended except in its relation to other events, to other literatures"
(20-21). To learn, he contends, is to make comparisons, to achieve what a
modern philosopher, Hans-Georg Gadamer, calls a "fusion of horizons"
between oneself and the world outside the self. The effect of such learning
is change: self-transformation, as our individual knowledge expands, and
social transformation, as we learn as a collective body to act on our new
ideas. The goal of education, in Arnold's view, is, accordingly, "to know
how others stand, that we may know how we ourselves stand; and to know
how we ourselves stand, that we may correct our mistakes and achieve our
deliverance" (21).
Like John Dewey, Arnold saw in education the means of nurturing and
safeguarding a democratic culture. "So hard, nay, so impossible for most
men is it," he interjects near the end of the "Modern Element" lecture,
"to develop themselves in their entireness; to rejoice in the variety, the
movement of human life with the children of the world; to be serious over
the depth, the significance of human life with the wise!" (36). The impe-
tus for Arnold's critical efforts not only came from his work as inspector
of English schools; it was also fueled by his examination of Continental
schools. Arnold's job reinforced his sense that in a time of change, "open-
ness and flexibility of mind [the Athenian qualities praised by Pericles] are

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
186 Poetics Today 19:2

.. the first of virtues" (1960-77, 2:29), and it also reinforced his sense that
there could be no intellectual deliverance in an England where the mass
of the population was ignored. In France, Arnold duly noted, nearly six
times as many students as in England attended secondary schools (1960-
77, 8:359). As a result, the French had a better sense of "social solidity"
(361) and of the possibilities of life: "Life is so good and agreeable a thing
there, and for so many" (362). The apostles of culture, Arnold repeatedly
says, are believers in solidarity and political equality. That a nation needs
high standards Arnold takes for granted. What it doesn't need are fanat-
ics or dogmatists or theorists blocking our ability to see things in their rich
variety. In his inspection tours of European schools, Arnold discerned a
more intellectually liberating climate- one in which the spirit of Bildung
was at work. In "A French Eton" (his account of a school run by Jean Bat-
tiste Henri Lacordaire), Arnold cites Wilhelm von Humboldt's view "that
it was a joy to him to feel himself modified by the operation of a foreign
influence" (1960-77, 2:312). The essence of Bildung ("perhaps the greatest
idea of the eighteenth century," Gadamer calls it [1991:9], noting also its
genesis in the Greek educational ideal), of the cultivation of the self, is that
we enrich ourselves by going out of the self, discovering other cultures,
learning to "become at home" in the other, as Gadamer (and, before him,
Hegel) puts it (Gadamer 1991: 14). Widening our perspectives, we become
so familiar with the enormous range of human achievement that we learn
(in Nietzsche's phrase, taken in turn from Pindar) to become what we are.
But while France and Germany were providing an education for their
citizens that prepared them for the future, instructing them in scientific
as well as literary subjects, England was lagging behind-in large mea-
sure, Arnold felt, because of its resistance to state-supported enterprises.
(Arnold's fellow liberal, Mill, opposed the idea of state-run schools in On
Liberty.) And England's individualistic habits-its refrain of "Leave us to
ourselves!" (1960-77, 2:21)-was abetted by a Protestant cast of mind that
served to thwart (as Arnold lamented in a note to William Gladstone ac-
companying a copy of Culture and Anarchy) a sense of "larger existence and
more sense of public responsibility" (1960-77, 6:417). The English middle
class, Arnold complains in Friendship's Garland, are enemies of Bildung, ene-
mies of enlightenment; they are modern-day versions of the biblical Phi-
listines.
This does not mean, however, that Arnold undervalued the Hebraic
impulse. Ideally, "culture" (the work of Hellenism) and "character" (the
work of Hebraism) are interdependent. "Culture without character is, no
doubt, something frivolous, vain, and weak," he concedes in "Democracy"
(the great essay that originally served to introduce his survey The Popular

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Stone * Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism 187

Education of France [1861]); "but character without culture is, on the other
hand, something raw, blind, and dangerous. The most interesting, the most
truly glorious peoples, are those in which the alliance of the two has been
effected most successfully, and its result spread most widely. This is why
the spectacle of ancient Athens has such profound interest for a rational
man; that it is the spectacle of the culture of a people" (1960-77, 2:24-25).
With help from the state (not an authoritarian state but one that represents
our collective "best selves"), Arnold felt the English, "more than any mod-
ern people, have the power of renewing, in our national life, the example
of Greece" (ibid.: 314).4
The road to Greece, however, required a detour through modern
France. Like Heine, Arnold felt that Paris was the successor to Athens.
It was to Paris that Heine had emigrated because he deemed the French
more accessible "to ideas than any other people" (1960-77, 3:112). Thomas
Carlyle, in The French Revolution, had warned of the danger to any people
calling itself the "Athens of Europe" (Carlyle 1989 [1837], 1: lo); but Arnold
welcomed the legacy of the revolution and praised one of its prophets,
Voltaire, for his ability to look "at things straight," with "marvelous logic
and lucidity" (1960-77, 8:363). Midcentury France boasted a culture of
criticism: in her journals appeared the work of Heine, Charles-Augustin
Sainte-Beuve, Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, Charles Baudelaire. It was here
that Arnold encountered Heine's Hebraism-Hellenism distinction, and it
was from Ernest Renan's Essaies de morale et de critique (1859) that he found
the literary form in which to promulgate these values: the critical essay.
Renan was a critic concerned with the pressing social problems of the day.
(A former seminarian, Renan was also the author of perhaps the most
influential of revisionary histories of Christianity.) But whereas Renan
tended (as Arnold explained to his sister) "to inculcate morality, in a high
sense of the word, upon the French nation as what they most want, . . .
I tend to inculcate intelligence, also in a high sense of the word, upon the
English nation as what they most want" (1895, 1:129).5 Just as the modern
Athens needed a dose of Hebraism, so too did modern England require a
dose of Hellenism added to its customary diet of Hebraism.
In truth, Arnold's Essays in Criticism (a collection inspired by Renan's
Essaies) inculcates Hebraic as well as Hellenic values (see apRoberts 1983:
133). Arnold's Essays of 1865 (followed by a second series in 1888) con-

4. I have compared Arnold's views on Greece, education, culture, and religion with those
of Nietzsche (Stone 1988), noting how both men felt that Hellenic values were in need of
revival.

5. I discuss the influence of Renan (and other French critics) on Arnold in my Communica-
tions with the Future (1997), chapter 2.

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
188 Poetics Today 19:2

stitutes a dazzling display of literary prowess put to the service of sage

admonitions. "Only by a literary form of this kind being given to them,"
he confided to his mother, "can ideas such as mine ever gain any access in
a country such as ours" (1895, 1:282). His method in the Essays was to pro-
vide a gallery of non-English points of view (the largest group coming from
France), each offering a valuable idea. "I hate all over-preponderance of
single elements," he explained, "and all my efforts are directed to enlarge
and complete us by bringing in as much as possible of Greek, Latin, Celtic
[as well as German, Dutch, Persian, and Russian] authors" (ibid.: 287).
The true aim of criticism, thus, as Arnold avows in the most celebrated of
the Essays, "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time," is "spiritual":
"to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarising,
to lead him towards perfection [an unending goal, for Arnold], by making
his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty
and fitness of things" (1960-77, 3:271).
Among the voices heard in the 1865 Essays are conservatives like Joseph
Joubert and Edmund Burke and Eugenie de Guerin; revolutionaries like
Spinoza and Goethe and Heine; the stoic Roman emperor Marcus Aure-
lius; and the humble St. Francis. Long before the term "dialogism" became
fashionable, Arnold was contending that we must take part in that never-
ending dialogue with ideas and their authors that makes up culture. In
Heine Arnold found an intellectual and literary model, one bridging "the
French spirit" with "German ideas and culture" (ibid.: 120) and thus con-
necting past and present with the future. Heine "had in him both the spirit
of Greece and the spirit of Judaea," Arnold writes admiringly (ibid.: 127-
28). In the end, however, Arnold faults Heine for his "want of moral bal-
ance" (ibid.: 132). Still, Heine's campaign in behalf of ideas, his war against
philistinism, was also Arnold's fight. Overall, Arnold seeks, in the Essays,
to balance the claims of Greece and Israel. In specific cases, his strategy is
frequently to moderate the extreme position of a particular voice by follow-
ing it with an opposing point of view.6 Hence, Heine is charged with insuffi-
cient Hebraism, while Eugenie de Guerin, who clings to an outworn faith,
is implicitly charged with insufficient Hellenism. In the essay on Marcus
Aurelius, Arnold makes his most trenchant case against paganism, even at
its best, and for Christian-inspired conduct. The Imitation of Christ provides

6. Joseph Carroll (1982: 245-46) has compared Heine's tendency to play the Hellenic pole
off against the Hebrew pole in a spirit of mockery ("The defects of each pole tend to be
played off against the other and produce the ironic tonal reverberation that Arnold rebukes
as 'incessant mocking' ") with Arnold's tendency to present each side in a creditable light:
"he restricts the use of irony to ridiculing the opponents of both his Gods, the Hebraic and
the Hellenic."

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Stone * Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism 189

more comfort, he avows, than the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. More-

over, the early Christians can be seen as the needful "dissolvents" of mori-
bund pagan values. "It was inevitable," he audaciously contends, "that
Christianity in the Roman world, like democracy in the modern world, like
every new spirit with a similar mission assigned to it [in the Heine essay,
Arnold had just praised the "dissolvent" power of Goethe's and Heine's
radicalism], should at its first appearance occasion an instinctive shrinking
and repugnance in the world which it was to dissolve" (ibid.: 144).
In one of the key essays, "Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment,"
Arnold balances the claims of Hellenism and Hebraism, the pagan "reli-
gion of pleasure" (Heine's phrase), and the Christian "religion of sorrow."
For the multitude, Arnold acknowledges, the latter offers more "joy." "But
the main element of the modern spirit's life is neither the senses and under-
standing [the Hellenic sphere]," he adds, "nor the heart and imagination
[the Hebraic]; it is the imaginative reason," a faculty that combines re-
gard for the things of this world with that sense of our responsibilities, and
regard for conduct, which religion nourishes. And no other writers were
so "well balanced" in this respect as the supreme Greek poets: Simonides,
Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles. "No other poets, who have so well satisfied
the thinking power, have so well satisfied the religious sense" (ibid.: 230-
31).
Arnold's praise for the Hellenic point of view reaches a climax in "The
Function of Criticism at the Present Time," which might well be retitled
"The Function of Hellenism at the Present Time." If only England would
allow itself the same "free play of the mind on all subjects" that Pericles
saw as the great Athenian achievement, many seemingly intractable social
and religious problems might be solved. Even the widespread misery of
human life occasioned by the Industrial Revolution might be lessened,
Arnold hints, if we exerted some mental energy on the subject. There is no
reason to be proud of a system that has produced so many victims like the
workhouse girl named Wragg. (Arnold juxtaposes the praises for England's
industrial progress made by her political leaders, as reported in the Lon-
don Times, with a 7imes account of a young woman who strangled her
illegitimate baby.) "By the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing!" (ibid.:
273). In "The Function of Criticism," Arnold chastises the British habit
of acting without thinking (bringing factories into existence, for example,
without foreseeing the consequences), of being satisfied by "inadequate
ideas" (274), of being in thrall to a political and religious system that dis-
courages widespread education and disparages alternative points of view.
In this vein, Arnold applauds Renan's recent application of "criticism" to
the Scriptures for its attempt to see the Bible as in itself it really is--taken

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
190 Poetics Today 19:2

from "the old, traditional, conventional point of view and [placed] under
a new one" (279). In all of this, Arnold is announcing his own program in
Culture and Anarchy and in his books on religion written in the 187os.
Although Culture and Anarchy is Arnold's best-known work, its creation
was both inevitable and incidental. The decade of the 186os was a busy
time for him. In 1865 he made an official inspection tour of state-supported
schools on the Continent. ("Sooner or later we shall all learn, even we
English people," he wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette in that year, "that there
is an appointed sphere for public function as well as for private" [1960-77,
4:11]). In 1866 he completed a series of Oxford lectures, published as On
the Study of Celtic Literature, daring in their insistence that the English have
much to learn from their non-Anglo-Saxon neighbors. In early 1866 he
published a rejoinder to Fitzjames Stephen's attack on "The Function of
Criticism" in the form of a Heine-inspired comic diatribe, "My Country-
men." Collected with the follow-up Friendship's Garland papers, Arnold's
essay is a fictionalized conversation between himself and a German visi-
tor to England, Arminius, who assaults the British lack of intelligence
("Geist"), its low standard of culture, its narrow-minded religion. (Heine
himself, visiting England in 1827, had felt "convinced that a swearing
Frenchman is a pleasanter sight for the Godhead than a praying English-
man" [Sammons 1979: 131].) In 1867, once again at Oxford, Arnold gave
a final lecture there on the topic "Culture and Its Enemies." In it all the
various Arnoldian concerns-England's resistance to change even as the
world was changing, its traditional dislike of state-supported enterprises,
its social inequalities, its clinging to an outmoded religion-came together
in what was to prove the opening chapter of Culture and Anarchy.
Contrary to the misguided notion in some academic quarters that the
book is a defense of elitist values (a promotion of "culture" as a way
of numbing the energies of a rising democracy), Arnold's book is one
of the great Victorian tributes to democracy and its inevitable triumph.
In the early essay "Democracy," he had written about the current efforts
of the working class to "affirm its own essence; to live, to enjoy, to possess
the world, as aristocracy" had done earlier and as the middle class was
now doing. But, he cautioned, with an eye on America, "the difficulty for
democracy is, how to find and keep high ideals" (1960-77, 2:7, 17, empha-
sis in original). Arnold was scarcely being elitist when he proclaimed that
democracy has a right to all that makes life worth preserving-from access
to knowledge and things of beauty to access to better health care. ("A good
thing meant for the many cannot well be so exquisite as the good things of
the few; but it can easily, if it comes from a donor of great resources and
wide power, be incomparably better than what the many could, unaided,

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Stone * Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism 191

provide for themselves" [ibid.: 21].) The enemies of culture, thus, are the
enemies of democracy. In ancient Greece, he notes, there was also once a
triumphant democracy, a culture of the people, for whom things of beauty
and the love of knowledge ("sweetness and light") were cultivated. From
the Greek pursuit of "perfection" came the belief in culture as a process, a
means of endless growth and development requiring "harmonious expan-
sion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature,
and [which] is not consistent with the over-development of any one power
at the expense of the rest" (1960-77, 5:94).
The political situation of the mid-186os may have provided some of the
immediate background of Culture and Anarchy -the agitation preceding the
Second Reform Bill of 1867, for example. But Arnold's disenchantment
with English stolidity was of long standing. In writing the book, Arnold
aired his grievance at the major obstacle lying in the way of true re-
form: the alliance between political liberals and middle-class Protestants
that thwarted efforts at improved education for the masses in the name of
laissez-faire ("Doing as One Likes")7 and opposed efforts at solidarity or
any breakup of the English class system. In the chapters preceding the one
devoted to Hebraism and Hellenism (Arnold did not add the descriptive
chapter titles until the second edition, in 1875), Arnold urges that England
"rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, the State,"
an ideal state embodying not our warring individuals but rather our "best
self" (1960-77, 5:134, emphasis in original). By Arnold's ideal Ilissus, there
were also no barbarians, philistines, or populace engaged in a Hobbesian
(and Industrial Revolutionary) war of each against all.
Another popular misconception of Culture and Anarchy is that Arnold, in
his comparison of the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism, is divorcing the
realm of action (Hebraic "conduct") from the realm of thought.8 But for
Arnold, the Liberals and Protestants were themselves acting unaided by
the powers of thought; hence, their version of "reform" was a mechani-

7. Arnold singled out Mill and Edward Miall (editor of the leading Dissenting journal,
the Nonconformist) as partners here, despite their memberships in the Hellenic and Hebraic
camps, respectively, because of their mutual mistrust for state-run enterprises.
8. In Human Nature and Conduct, John Dewey insists that there is no demarcation between
thinking and doing: "Potentially conduct is one hundred percent of our acts" (1922: 279).
Arnold would agree with Dewey on this point -especially his use of the word "potentially."
In A Common Faith, Dewey further charges that "Arnold's sense of an opposition between
Hellenism and Hebraism resulted in exclusion of beauty, truth, and friendship from the list
of the consequences toward which powers work within and without" (1934: 54). Arnold, on
the contrary, hoped to mend that breach. Elsewhere, Dewey shows himself to be Arnold's
disciple in his view, as educator, that a democracy must offer the fullest cultural possibili-
ties to its citizens. (See chapter 5, "Arnold and the Pragmatists: Culture as Democracy," in
Stone 1997.)

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
192 Poetics Today 19:2

cal solution: to extend the suffrage without providing needful educational

opportunities. "To act is easy, to think is hard": Arnold quoted Goethe's
words in "The Function of Criticism" and again in Culture and Anarchy
(1960-77, 3:276, 5:227). Speaking as a pragmatist, Arnold argues at the
very beginning that the aim of culture is both to know and to make rea-
son prevail (1960-77, 5:9). In his own mental development, the practice of
"criticism" (the Hellenic aim of seeing things as they really are) had been
subsumed into the enterprise of culture (seeing and acting accordingly).
In the chapter on Hebraism and Hellenism, Arnold thus seeks to define
the forces that have divided human loyalties over the centuries, dooming
humanity to be fragmented rather than whole selves. These forces were
once united in Periclean Greece and might well be reconciled in England
in the future. Like Heine, he differentiates between spiritual impulses
(Heine's target, here, was Catholicism, while Arnold's is Puritanism) and
secular and material impulses, warring tendencies that have flourished in
part because of their oppositional nature. Both forces seek human "per-
fection," but by different routes: "The uppermost idea with Hellenism is
to see things as they really are; the uppermost idea with Hebraism is con-
duct and obedience" (ibid.: 165). If Hebraism "set doing above knowing"
(165), it did so in the belief that all efforts of the unaided "individual will"
were sinful; hence, to do was to obey. To seek knowledge, as any Helle-
nist knows, is to question prevailing dogmas and customs. For Goethe and
Heine, the response to the claim of dogma and authority was an unflinch-
ing "But is it so? is it so to me?" (1960-77, 3:11o, emphasis in original). In
this respect, Socrates had been the supreme questioner. But Socrates was
also, Arnold would say in later writings, a devotee of the Dorian religion
of conduct. For the moment, Arnold praises the Socrates who spoke in be-
half of human development, who said that "the best man is he who most
tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who most feels that
he is perfecting himself" (1960-77, 5:167-68, emphasis in original). Such
Hellenic optimism about human nature was put aside -"it was unsound at
that particular moment of man's development," Arnold remarks; "it was
premature" -in favor of Hebraic calls for self-denial (ibid.: 169).
For Arnold, both "contributions to human development," "a man's intel-
lectual and moral impulses" (ibid.: 171, emphasis in original), must be
heeded; and he laments the oscillations of history that have allowed one
force to thrive at the expense of the other. He particularly laments the lost
occasion during the Renaissance when England had a chance to renew
its Hellenic energies ("that irresistible return of humanity to nature and
to seeing things as they are" [173]) but chose instead to enter, as Arnold
had written in the Heine essay, "the prison of Puritanism, and had the key

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Stone * Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism 193

turned on its spirit there for two hundred years" (1960-77, 3:121). England,
to its intellectual cost, repudiated Hellenism at the time when it was most
needful, and it continues to do so: "For more than two hundred years the
main stream of man's advance has moved towards knowing himself and
the world, seeing things as they are, spontaneity of consciousness; . . . [the
English instead] have made the secondary [stream] the principal at the
wrong moment" (1960-77, 5:175).
Arnold was by no means denying the value of Hebraism. For the rest
of his life he would insist that the Hebraic stress on righteous conduct
constitutes three-quarters of our needful energies. But given the immense
problems faced by England, he insists that "now, and for us, it is a time to
Hellenise, and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraised too much, and
have over-valued doing." ("The habits and discipline received from He-
braism," he adds, are an "eternal possession" that we cannot assign "to
the second rank to-day, without being prepared to restore to them the
first rank to-morrow" [ibid.: 255].) Meanwhile, let us "Hellenise a little,"
he urges (ibid.: 199); and, accordingly, Arnold looks to areas of concern
where lucidity of vision is called for: to England's abominable treatment of
Ireland, for example; to the prevalence of "grotesque and hideous forms
of popular religion" (204); to the slums of East London, whose "ever-
accumulating masses of pauperism" are ignored by a religion that piously
speaks of the poor always being with us (216-17). It is from such excesses of
the Hebraic cast of mind that one must turn away, realizing all the while
"that the human spirit is wider than the most priceless of the forces which
bear it onward, and that to the whole development of man Hebraism itself
is, like Hellenism, but a contribution" (171).
In the decade following Culture and Anarchy Arnold turned his attention
to a series of religious books. This has occasioned some scholars to view
the 187os as a time of "regression" for Arnold, a time in which he aban-
doned Hellenism for Hebraism. It is claimed that this change of attitude
was brought on in part by the deaths of three of his children and by the
outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (see Carroll 1982:109). Yet Arnold
began to ponder the weaknesses of Hellenism as early as 1868, in a review
of Ernst Curtius's History of Greece. Greece's freedom of intellectual inquiry,
when cut adrift from its ancient religion (he argues), proved fatal in the
end. "The power to respect, the power to obey, are at least as needful for
man as unlimited freedom and the practical school of public life" (1960-
77, 5:283). And Arnold now praises Socrates, who, though "assuredly ...
no mere conservative [he had, after all, "introduced a stream of thought
so fresh, bold, and transforming that it frightened 'respectable' people and
was the cause of his death"], . . . was never weary of recalling the Hellenic

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
194 Poetics Today 19:2

mind to the old-fashioned maxims of righteousness, temperance, and self-

knowledge engraved on the temple at Delphi" (ibid.: 287).
Arnold was deeply shaken by France's collapse in 1870; he sensed that
Greek history was repeating itself in France, and for similar reasons.
Hence, in Literature and Dogma (1873) Arnold describes how "nations and
men" are "shipwrecked on conduct" (1960-77, 6:386, emphasis in original).
"All of us feel, at some time or other in our lives, a hankering after the
French ideal" (391), Arnold wrote feelingly of his and Heine's beloved
country; but he recalls how "brilliant Greece," France's predecessor, "per-
ished for lack of attention enough to conduct; for want of conduct, steadi-
ness, character" (388, emphasis in original). In God and the Bible (1875)
he deplores the attitude of Sainte-Beuve ("the finest critical spirit of our
times") for saying that it is time to bid farewell "aux vieilles Bibles" (1960-
77, 7:392); and he chastises Renan for paying insufficient attention to the
moral (as opposed to the scientific) facts of life. "No one feels more than we
do," he declares, "the harm which the exaggeration of Hebraism has done
in England; but this is Hellenism with a vengeance! ... Moral conscience,
self-control, seriousness, steadfastness, are not the whole of human life cer-
tainly, but they are by far the greatest part of it; without them- and this is
the very burden of the Hebrew prophets and a fact of experience as old as
the world-nations cannot stand" (45).
But if religion dominated Arnold's attention in the 187os, this does not
mean that he had ever doubted its claims. What he did question was the
misuse of religion and its distortion in the hands of unthinking dogmatists.
He felt that, rather than the reign of the "old Bibles" being over, a new era
was commencing in which Protestantism would be obliged to relinquish
its allegiance to untenable doctrines. "All forms of religion are but approxi-
mations to the truth," he contends (ibid.: o18, emphasis in original); and
one of the duties of Hellenism or criticism (the two words are often used
interchangeably in the religious books) is to see exactly how much of Chris-
tianity is verifiable. A "Hellenic" methodology is applied, accordingly, to
the Hebraic texts, and the results are some of Arnold's most radical (if
generally ignored) works.
In the first of the religious books, St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Arnold
sought (as he informed his mother) to "sap [the Protestant Dissenters]
intellectually," to "deliver the middle class out of the hand of their Dis-
senting ministers" (1895, 2:20; see 1:264). His intent here is to show how
St. Paul has been misinterpreted, how Puritanical notions about "elec-
tion" and "justification" are based on misreadings, how Paul's appeal that
we resurrect ourselves to righteousness "now" does not refer to resurrec-
tion beyond the grave. In Literature and Dogma he argues that the Bible is

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Stone * Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism 195

not to be interpreted as dogma but rather as literature -a work of litera-

ture focusing on the value of conduct. And in God and the Bible Arnold
contends that however much people may need the Bible, they must not
be deluded into thinking that miracles happen. Jesus, the successor to
Socrates in his "sweet reasonableness," was misunderstood by his original
followers, but Jesus' message remains relevant. The Hebraic legacy has
outlasted the Greek, Arnold says, because while Greece (despite Socrates'
warning) neglected its moral component, Israel never did so: "Israel is the
great, standing, unsilenceable, unshaken witness to the necessity of mind-
ing one's ways, of conduct" (1960-77, 7:215).
But for modern man, Arnold maintains, both elements are needed.
Culture demands that we develop "in our totality, on our perceptive and
intelligential side as well as on our moral side." It is only in "their lower
forms," Arnold suggestively avows, that Hebraism and Hellenism seem to
be "at variance" (1960-77, 6:124-25). Problems arise when the terms be-
come occasions for ideology rather than pragmatic tools. The Greece of
Pericles, after all, was flexible enough to combine both instincts, "the old
morality and the new freedom" of thought (1960-77, 9:31). But Greece fell
when its flexibility turned out to be "not flexible enough, because it could
not enough bend itself to the moral ideas which are so large a part of
life" (ibid.:34).9 The last comment appears in one of Arnold's most charm-
ing and least-known works, his "Speech at Eton" (1879), which contains in
miniature the thesis of Culture and Anarchy and the religious books. "Here,"
Arnold tells the Eton students, "is the true moral: that man has to make
progress along diverse lines, in obedience to a diversity of aspirations and
powers, the sum of which is truly his nature; and that he fails and falls short
until he learns to advance upon them all, and to advance harmoniously"
(34-35)- "But this does but bring us to the old and true Socratic thesis"-so
Arnold had concluded his Last Essays on Church and Religion (1877)--"of the
interdependence of virtue and knowledge." However we may advance "in
science, art, and literary culture," religion "will be still there as what these
rest against and imply; as the indispensable background, the three-fourths
of life." Yet "while the remaining fourth is ill-cared for, the three-fourths
themselves must also suffer with it" (1960-77, 8:162, emphasis in original).
And so we come back to the question of whether Arnold's phrase "He-
9. Just as Arnold saw in Periclean Athens a period when Greece's moral (Dorian) and
intellectual (Ionian) impulses were balanced, so Pater, in Marius the Epicurean (1885), finds
a moment in early Christian history before the church fathers split off the "ideal of as-
ceticism" from the "ideal of culture" ("harmonious development of all the parts of human
nature"). "For a little while, at least, there was no forced opposition between the soul and
the body, the world and the spirit, and the grace of graciousness itself was pre-eminently
with the people of Christ" (1985 [1885]: 241).

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
196 Poetics Today 19:2

braism and Hellenism" is to be dismissed as something merely rhetorical,

or as something that retains, in Marcus's words, "some connections with
matters of issue today." Although he might speak, on occasion, of He-
braism and Hellenism as if they were scientifically verifiable propositions,
Arnold knew that he was speaking of poetic postulates, postulates more
likely to be true because they were poetic. But he was also using these
terms pragmatically-as a means of pushing for educational and related
reforms. By "Hellenism," Arnold generally meant the critical faculty that
lets us examine things objectively, unhindered by preconceptions or dog-
mas. While the French were for Arnold the contemporary practitioners of
this method, the Greeks had provided the original impetus for the ques-
tioning spirit. But "Hebraism" too had its pragmatic function, as Arnold's
twentieth-century follower Dewey would note in A Common Faith. For all
their liberal hopes, Dewey and Arnold realized that something was needed
to deter what Cardinal Newman had called "fierce wilful human nature
on its onward course" (Newman 1968 [1864]: 188). Newman had felt that
only "some form of religion" could serve to subdue destructive human in-
stincts. Arnold and Dewey, however, feared that religion, if detached from
the faculties of criticism, might make matters worse. And yet the modern
substitute, faith in science-Renan's and Dewey's solution-was not ac-
ceptable either. A progress lacking in values (as Arnold warned in "The
Function of Criticism at the Present Time") was no more tolerable than
an outmoded religion that made progress impossible.
Of all Arnold's literary musings on this subject, none is more pertinent
to modern needs, perhaps, than the essay-lecture that Arnold addressed
to American audiences over a century ago. In "Literature and Science"
(1882), he maintained that "the needs of our modern life" require that we
allow for the teachings of science and literature, including the presumedly
outdated literatures of ancient Greece and Israel. From literature, he ar-
gued, we learn how to relate what we know to a world beyond the self: "to
the sense which we have in us for conduct, to the sense which we have in
us for beauty" (1960-77, 10:63). The two competing literary legacies, he
intimates, are now soul mates, both of them endangered species. Yet the
"majority of men" and women "will always require humane letters," he
concludes, for the sake of self-preservation (ibid.: 73), for the accumulated
knowledge that tells us that we can become more "humane" individuals. A
hundred years after Arnold's death, as we speed our way down the infor-
mation superhighway, tossing aside all forms of literary culture (not just
Sainte-Beuve's "old Bibles"), we might ponder Arnold's description of the
fate awaiting a people that splits off intelligence from conduct, a worship
of facts from a belief in values. For Arnold the legacy of Hebraism, the

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Stone * Matthew Arnold and the Pragmatics of Hebraism and Hellenism 197

legacy of Hellenism, and the legacy of both combined, which ideally con-
stitutes the humanities, dared not be disregarded.

References

apRoberts, Ruth
1983 Arnold and God (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Arnold, Matthew
1895 Letters, edited by George W. E. Russell, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan).
1960-77 Complete Prose Works, edited by R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press).
Carlyle, Thomas
1989 [1837] The French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Carroll, Joseph
1982 The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold (Berkeley: University of California Press).
Dawson, Carl, and John Pfordresher
1979 Matthew Arnold's Prose Writings: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul).
DeLaura, David
1969 Hebrew and Hellene in Victorian England: Newman, Arnold, and Pater (Austin: University
of Texas Press).
Dewey, John
1922 Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Holt).
1934 A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Donoghue, Denis
1995 Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (New York: Knopf).
Dowling, Linda
1994 Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Eliot, George
1956 [1872] Middlemarch, edited by Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).
1963 Essays, edited by Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press).
1980 [1863] Romola, edited by Andrew Sanders (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin
Books).
Gadamer, Hans-Georg
1991 Truth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New
York: Crossroad).
Heine, Heinrich
1973a [1835] Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, in Selected Works,
translated and edited by Helen M. Mustard (New York: Vintage Books).
1973b [1833] The Romantic School, in Selected Works, translated and edited by Helen M.
Mustard (New York: Vintage Books).
Holloway, John
1965 [1953] The Victorian Sage (New York: Norton).
Honan, Park
1981 Matthew Arnold: A Life (New York: McGraw-Hill).
James, Henry
1960 [1875] Roderick Hudson (New York: Harper Torchbooks).
1963 [1884] "The Author of 'Beltraffio,'" in Complete Tales, edited by Leon Edel, vol. 5
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott).
Marcus, Steven
1994 "Culture and Anarchy Today," in Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, edited by
Samuel Lipman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
198 Poetics Today 19:2

Mill, John Stuart

1969 [1859] On Liberty, in Autobiography and Other Writings, edited by Jack Stillinger (Bos-
ton: Houghton Mifflin).
Miller, J. Hillis
1965 [1963] The Disappearance of God (New York: Schocken Books).
Newman, Cardinal John Henry
1968 [1864] Apologia Pro Vita Sua, edited by David J. DeLaura (New York: Norton).
Pater, Walter
1985 [1885] Marius the Epicurean, edited by Michael Levey (Harmondsworth, England:
Penguin Books).
1986 [1873] The Renaissance, edited by Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Renan, Ernest
1947-61 Oeuvres Completes, edited by Henriette Psichari. Vol. 2, Essais de moral et de critique
(Paris: Calmann-Levy).
Sammons, Jeffrey L.
1979 Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Smith, Peter, and Geoffrey Summerfield, eds.
1969 Matthew Arnold and the Education of the New Order (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press).
Stone, Donald D.
1988 "Arnold, Nietzsche, and the 'Revaluation of Values,'" Nineteenth-Century Literature
43: 289-318.
1997 Communications with the Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press).
Walcott, Fred G.
1970 The Origins of Culture and Anarchy: Matthew Arnold and Popular Education in England
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press).

This content downloaded from

49.37.35.223 on Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:56:01 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms