Criticism > Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism > Victorian Hellenism - The Meanings Of Hellenism

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THE MEANINGS OF HELLENISM

Matthew Arnold (essay date 1883)

"Hebraism and Hellenism," in Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism; and Friendship 's Garland: Being the Conversations, Letters, and Opinions of the Late Arminius, Baron von Thunder-Ten-Tronckh, Macmillan and Co., 1883, pp. 109-27.

[In one of the most persistently influential works of the Victorian age, Arnold characterizes his culture according to two complementary principles: Hebraism and Hellenism. Equating Hellenism with the humanist consciousness of the Renaissance, Arnold both stresses its centrality to modern civilization and warns against what he sees to be an inherent "moral weakness."]

This fundamental ground is our preference of doing to thinking. Now this preference is a main element in our nature, and as we study it we find ourselves opening up a number of large questions on every side.

Let me go back for a moment to...

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1. Introduction
2. Representative Works
3. Overviews
4. The Meanings Of Hellenism
5. The Literary Influence
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. Victorian Literature