Philhellenism and antisemitism: Matthew Arnold and his German models

Comparative Literature, Winter 1994 by Gossman, Lionel

12 Wesen des Christentums, ch. 12, quoted in Poliakov 415.

13 See the striking article by Nicholas Rand.

14 All four passages quoted in Jenkyns 177-78. The Shelley passage is cited more fully here than in Jenkyns.

15 The essay on Heine (read as a lecture in 1863) in The Function of Criticism and the poem "Heine's Grave" (probably completed by 1863 but not published until 1867) are eloquent testimony to Arnold's long-standing admiration for Heine. The exact relationship of Arnold's contrast of Hellenism and Hebraism to Heine's writings is, however, a matter of some scholarly dispute. Lionel Trilling, R. H. Super (the editor of Arnold's Complete Prose Works), and most other English-speaking scholars (but not, apparently, David J. DeLaura in his now-classic study) hold that Arnold derived the Hellenism-Hebraism opposition from Heine's memorial essay on Borne. But it has been questioned whether Arnold had read that essay, and some of Trilling's assertions in particular have been effectively invalidated. More pertinently, it has been argued that Arnold altered the meaning that the opposition of Jews and Hellenes had for Heine, while retaining Heine's idea that history is marked by the struggle and alternance of forces represented by the two terms Hebraism and Hellenism. See Ilse-Maria Tesdorpf, especially 43-36, 138-69.

16 Quoted by Arnold himself in Culture and Anarchy 39 (hereafter CA). See also 72.

17 "Democracy is a force in which the concert of a great number of men makes up for the weakness of each man taken by himself; democracy accepts a relative rise in their condition, obtainable by this concert for a great number, as something desirable in itself, because though this is undoubtedly far below grandeur, it is yet a good deal above insignificance" (italics added), in "Democracy" 448.

18 See Dover Wilson's Introduction to CA, xxii-xxxiv.

19 CA 19. See also 21: "Culture...and what we call totality..."

20 See CA 48-49; also 17-18, 19, 22 on North America. America, "that chosen home of newspapers and politics," is "without general intelligence," according to Renan, and Arnold believes "it likely from the circumstances of the case, that this is so; and that, in the things of the mind, and in culture and totality, America, instead of surpassing us all, falls short" (19). To Arnold, only the first generation of Puritans--Milton, Baxter, Wesley--had had any greatness, chiefly because they still enjoyed the legacy of the catholic culture that they rejected ("were trained within the pale of the Establishment"). Since then, they had all been mediocrities (13).

21 See, for instance, CA 189-98.

22 Michelet, whom Arnold admired, tended to do the same thing in his histories, most blatantly in his powerfully schematic Introduction a l'histoire universelle of 1831.

23 One thinks of Burckhardt's expression: "Unzeitung."

24 Thus "culture" admits the necessity of "fortune making and industrialism," "culture does not set itself against games and sports" (CA 61 ).

25 Jenkyns underlines the deliberately non-dialectical nature of Arnold's thought on the subject of Hellenism and Hebraism. "It was characteristic of the age, or of its more enquiring members, to feel that between faith in Christianity and the love of Greece there must be a tension. Arnold was being consciously heterodox when he argued that Hellenism and Hebraism could be painlessly combined" (70). The contrast between the dialectical character of Heine's opposition of Greeks and Nazarenes and the undialectical character of Arnold's opposition of Hellenism and Hebraism is one of the chief themes of Ilse-Maria Tesdorpf's Die Auseinandersetzung Matthew Arnolds mit Heinrich Heine. Tesdorpf argues convincingly that while Arnold's Hellenism and Hebraism is not the same as Heine's Greeks and Nazarenes, his philosophy of history is borrowed from Heine. As a result there is a significant degree of inconsistency in Arnold's ideas (see especially 168).