Philhellenism and antisemitism: Matthew Arnold and his German models

Comparative Literature, Winter 1994 by Gossman, Lionel

Leigh Hunt wrote to Hogg--in jest, it is true--that "if you go on so, there will be a hope that a voice will be heard along the water saying 'The great God Pan is alive again'(14)--upon which the villagers will leave off starving, and singing profane hymns, and fall to dancing again."(14) Hunt's reference to Pan is noteworthy. More than the Olympian Gods, "Pan," as Richard Jenkyns observes, "had become the god of the pantheists"(179). Even Ruskin; who warned against investing the Ancients' religious view of nature with modern sentiment, sometimes thought it could be revived. "With us," he wrote, "...the idea of the Divinity is apt to get separated from the life of nature; and imagining our God...far above the earth, and not in the flowers or waters, we approach those visible things with a theory that they are dead; governed by physical laws, and so forth." Ruskin longed to repeople with divine spirits the rivers and hills of an England already scarred by the industrial revolution. The scientific, utilitarian, exploitative relation to nature "fails." In Jenkyns's words: "Christian beliefs in transcendence and monotheism seem inadequate" (184-85). Philhellenism was thus, at least in part, a rejection of Enlightenment rationalism and deism, Judeo-Christian monotheism, religious and philosophical dualism, and the mixture of prosaic utilitarianism and literalist Christian fundamentalism that Victorian Englishmen saw as the prevailing ideology of hard-nosed middle-class businessmen and industrialists.

Though an implicit opposition of Hellenism and Hebraism was thus already in the air in his own Victorian world, most scholars who have studied the matter are in agreement that Arnold took the basic idea of the fourth chapter of Culture and Anarchy from Heine. Heine was well aware, of course, of Hegel's comments on Judaism and subscribed to them in large measure:

As the prophet of the East called them [the Jews] the "People of the Book." so the prophet of the West, in his Philosophy of History, characterizes them as the "People of the Spirit." Already in their earliest beginnings--as we observe in the Pentateuch--they manifest a predilection for the abstract, and their whole religion is nothing but an act of dialectics, by means of which matter and spirit are sundered, and the absolute is acknowledged only in the unique form of Spirit. What a terribly isolated role they were forced to play among the nations of antiquity which, devoting themselves to the most exuberant worship of nature, understood spirit rather as material phenomena, as image and symbol! What a striking antithesis they represented to multicolored Egypt, teaming with hieroglyphics; to Phoenicia, the great pleasure-temple of Astarte, or even to that beautiful sinner, lovely fragrant Babylonia--and, finally, to Greece, burgeoning home of art! ("Ludwig Borne: A Memorial" 265)

Heine's poem "Die Gotter Griechenlands" ("The Gods of Greece"), with which Arnold was almost certainly familiar, communicates the ambivalence of the German-Jewish poet's relation to both the Creeks and the Judeo-Christian tradition. The poet laments the passing of the ancient gods, now "verdrangt und verstorben" ("driven out and wasted away") and reflects that even the gods are subject to the iron law of historical existence. "Auch die Gotter regieren nicht ewig, Die jungen verdringen die alten" ("Even the gods do not rule forever; the young drive out the old"; my translation, as are the other excerpts from this poem). As Zeus drove out the Titans, he has in turn been dethroned, his thunderbolts extinguished. The Virgin has displaced once haughty Juno: "Hat doch eine andre das Zepter gewonnen," the poet tells the ancient goddess,