SOURCE: Pecora, Vincent P. “Arnoldian Ethnology.” Victorian Studies 41, no. 3 (spring 1998): 355-79.

[In the following essay, Pecora considers various critical approaches to Culture and Anarchy, paying particular attention to Arnold's notion, or lack thereof, of race.]

In the light shed by current trends in “cultural studies,” Matthew Arnold's version of culture would seem to be precisely that which must be contested: a grand edifice housing only those Europeans responsible for what Culture and Anarchy (1869) calls “the best that has been thought and known in the world” (Arnold 5: 113), dead white males whose “desire after the things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are” (5: 91) provides an elite heritage of disinterested reflection to guide the rest of us. And to a large extent, this view of Arnold is correct, albeit terribly reductive. In demonizing Arnold, however, we may overlook the degree to which an element of his work that has always been something of an embarrassment for his interpreters—Arnold's confusing and inconsistent approach to the relation between race (or nation) and culture—continues to be an embarrassing problem for us today. Arnold was clearly egalitarian when it came to the dissemination of “sweetness and light” (5: 99), and he was hardly a purist when the issue was race, emphasizing instead the hybrid vigor of the English. He strongly disliked the dominant, bourgeois mentality of his time, limited as it was to “the concern for making money, and the concern for saving our souls” (5: 186), and showed a distinct affection for lost, oppressed, or simply non-English cultural traditions. He was also thoroughly interdisciplinary and transnational in his methods, eschewing any systematic codification of knowledge that might hinder the interpretive play of the mind. In all of this, Arnold is more our contemporary than many would now care to admit. Arnold's difficulties in exploring the relations between race, nation, and culture thus should have a peculiar claim on our sympathies, for they are not as far removed from our own complicated obsessions with such terms as they might seem. Like the Celtic sensibility Arnold found buried within the English soul, Arnold's ethnology represents a conceptual knot that has refused to go away in spite of all sincere attempts to ignore it.

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The opposition between Hellene and Hebrew in Matthew Arnold's writing is a remarkably persistent trope in post-Enlightenment thought. Arnold's rhetoric both echoes prominent strains in Romantic (especially German) literature and philosophy, and is in turn reproduced by a large segment of the Modernism to follow. Such rhetoric depends on the belief that ancient Greece represented a condition of natural harmony, grace, spontaneity, vitality, and freedom, a condition that needed to be recovered (if only on a higher plane) in a modernity plagued by excessive spiritual strivings and an ascetic narrowness of mind. It is a perspective essential to Winckelmann's art history, apotheosized so famously a century later by Pater. As Lionel Gossman describes it, this “philhellenism or neohumanism” (4) was widespread in German writing, from Wolf and the Humboldts to Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Hegel, and Heine (the widely credited source of Arnold's views on the topic), for many of whom the worship of Hellas paralleled an even more ubiquitous desire to rediscover the innocence and wholeness lost in the Mosaic legend of the fall of man. It lay behind Byron's (and many other educated Europeans') support for Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire, and was elaborated in another, more estranging key by Nietzsche toward the end of the century. Moreover, as Gossman observes, this affection for Greece was often both anti-Semitic (or at least opposed to Judaism as a religion, that is, anti-Judaic) and anti-Christian in character.

But the distinction between a higher, disinterested curiosity linked to the pagan Greeks and the Philistine (or Evangelical) pragmatism of England's merchant classes is also fundamental to English Romanticism in the poetry of Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron, and it is reproduced in the neo-romantic modernism of Pater, Wilde, Hardy, and Forster (see Gottfried and De Laura). Joyce playfully manipulated the Hellene-Hebrew dichotomy as the basis of his great mock-epic—“Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet,” we read in Ulysses ([1922] 15: 2097-98)—but only because, like many others around him, he accepted on some deep level the ethnological assumptions it embodied (see Ellmann 395). D. H. Lawrence turned the distinction into something palpable in the bodies of his characters and in their relation to an instinctual life repressed by modernity as a whole. In Lord Jim (1900), Conrad specifically labels Cornelius, who is among the most abject examples of pathological ressentiment in all of his work, “the Nazarene” (173). The word echoes Heine's use of the term to describe the “natural disposition” (“Ludwig Börne: Eine Denkshrift,” trans. and qtd. in Gossman 17) of ascetic Jews and Christians alike in their difference from life-affirming Hellenes—though Conrad strangely puts the epithet in the mouth of Jim's faithful and obedient Malay servant, Tamb' Itam, who gives no indication of having read Heine.

Gossman more or less absolves Matthew Arnold of any overt complicity in the (racially based) anti-Semitism or (religiously based) anti-Judaic tendencies of his time—rightly, I think, at least on the whole. In this, Matthew would prove to be quite different from his father Thomas, who had profoundly influenced him in so many other ways, and whose rather strong anti-Semitic opinions were voiced publicly. Moreover, for Gossman, even the distinction between Hellenism and Hebraism in Arnold is less a dialectic of opposites (as in Heine's thinking) than a flexible and pragmatic search for synthesis (which Heine's “want of moral balance,” in Arnold's words, prevented him from achieving [“Heinrich Heine” (1863) 3: 132]), a “spiritual balance” (Arnold 5: 173) that appears all the more plausible because of Arnold's characteristic lack of conceptual rigor. Arnold may indicate at times that Hellenism is itself the essence of true “culture” while Hebraism tends toward narrow enthusiasm and unthinking action, but for Gossman it is really the awkward accommodation of playful intelligence and righteous morality that Arnold is after, an “inclusive, pluralistic vision of ‘culture’” (Gossman 36) that parallels an English parliamentary tradition dedicated less to organic unity than to imperfect consensus amid difference.

Gossman's approach also persuasively detaches Arnold's thinking from the more fully elaborated notions of racial identity and racial consciousness available at this time—if only by default of Arnold's fuzzy concepts—and emphasizes instead what might be called the intellectual, emotional, or ideological “impulse” (Arnold 5: 178), “bent” (5: 179), “force” (5: 179), or “tendency” (5: 180) that would urge the behavior marked either as Hellenism or Hebraism. For example, Arnold's Hebraism would seem to depend less on any notion of innate racial composition—it makes no reference to the anatomy or mental capacity of Jews—than on a moral imagination, supposedly traceable back to Jewish law, and powerfully sustained in the modern period by Christian Evangelical fervor. Hebraism thus appears to be a learned perspective rather than a racial inheritance, a perspective that in its unhealthy or extreme forms turns moral rectitude and practical efficacy into ends in themselves. It is also a perspective that can be moderated by other learned perspectives, such as Hellenism. In this view, culture as Arnold imagines it does not demand the modification of any particular “natural disposition,” racial or individual, but only the surrender of the ideology of religious certainty, or “strictness of conscience” (5: 176)—which can of course take many forms—in order that an alternative tendency toward disinterested inquiry, or “spontaneity of consciousness” (5: 176), can flourish unconstrained by moral and political imperatives.

This way of reading Culture and Anarchy has been a fairly dominant one, even among those, like Lionel Trilling (in Matthew Arnold) and Raymond Williams (in Culture and Society), who criticize the shortcomings of Arnold's logic and political sentiments. Who could object to Arnold's ambiguous terminology, once it is understood as simply demanding a practical (parliamentary) balance between pluralism and righteousness, between free inquiry and ethical concern? (For a usefully skeptical view of what this practical balance represents, however, see Graff.) Indeed, George Stocking provides an anthropological historian's support for the view that Arnold's sense of the word “culture” is actually much closer to the usage of modern, relativist anthropology, which at least strives to detach itself from racism and ethnocentrism, than was that of Arnold's contemporary E. B. Tylor, who is often cited as the source of anthropology's culture concept. Tylor, a Nonconformist, positivist, and utilitarian who would have been a perfect example of Arnold's Philistine, elaborated an evolutionary, developmental notion of culture (or civilization) in the singular. Along a universal (though obviously not uniform) progression toward the material and moral condition of Tylor's own time and place, different peoples and races could be normatively ranked. Arnold, with his neo-Romantic alienation from modern Western society and its rationalist machinery, instead develops what for Stocking is a sense of culture as “an integrative, organic, holistic, inner manifestation” (Stocking 796), a view that was supposedly more likely than Tylor's to imply modern anthropology's relativism. Indeed, Stocking does not mention race at all in his discussion of Arnold.

Gossman's recent account of the German Romantic roots of Arnold's thinking, certainly among the most thorough yet provided, may emphasize more than have most Arnold's “pragmatic” (if “conservative”) view of the State and his affection for Hebraism. But Gossman is in good company when he finds little in Culture and Anarchy that suggests biological race as a cultural determinant and much that prefigures later efforts at pluralism, whether humanist or anthropological. Previous and equally comprehensive accounts of Arnold's sources for Culture and Anarchy, like that of David J. DeLaura, likewise do little to explore the race-culture link in Arnold's work itself.

Writing more than half a century earlier, Lionel Trilling could not have been more opposed to certain of Gossman's interpretations. For Trilling, Arnold's State is an “essentially mystic conception” (Trilling 255), a “liberal” myth that ignores the realities of power; and Arnold's Hellenism is clearly the implicitly favored impulse, a proper human end to which Hebraism should serve only as a (modestly pursued) means. Like Gossman, however, Trilling's reading of Culture and Anarchy suggests neither a specifically “racial” content (242) nor any anti-Semitism; Trilling even notes in a footnote how far Heine's Greek-Jew distinction was accepted by many Jewish intellectuals of Heine's era, such as Moses Hess (256n). Trilling's book, however, has room to discuss a work by Arnold that neither Gossman nor Stocking mentions at all—On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867)—and here the problem of race in Arnold is squarely faced. “Science,” writes Trilling, “the anthropology of his day, told him that the spirit of a nation—what we might call its national style—is determined by ‘blood’ or ‘race’ and that these are constants, asserting themselves against all other determinants such as class, existing social forms, and geographical and economic environment” (232-33). As Trilling's brief survey of the essay demonstrates, the evidence for Arnold's belief in inherited racial characteristics is very strong. Still, Trilling's rightly critical focus on the Victorian assumptions about race in Celtic Literature does not go very far in exploring its significance for the reading of Culture and Anarchy.

Just over a decade after Trilling's discussion, Frederic Faverty published Matthew Arnold, the Ethnologist, a study that takes the racial assumptions so evident in Celtic Literature as keys to Arnold's work, Culture and Anarchy included. While, for Faverty, “it must be admitted at the start that Arnold was no systematic racialist” (1), it is also clear that “like his contemporary, Taine, he sought always for the dominant trait (pensée maîtresse) in the race or nation under discussion” (186). Faverty accepts much of what animates Gossman's approach—that Arnold rejected the anatomical absurdities propagated in books like Emile Burnouf's La Science des Religions (1888), with its grotesque caricature of Semitic anatomy; that Arnold actually displays “a profound admiration” (174) for Hebraism and found it a necessary component of a balanced human perfection; and that, whether discussing Indo-Europeans or Semites, Arnold generally pointed out virtues and defects alike. But for Faverty, these virtues and defects were still racial dispositions, at least in their origins, and his conclusion is as harsh as criticism of Arnold gets: “To the unfounded assumptions of the racial hypothesis Arnold lent the weight of a distinguished name. His pronouncements upon the Celt, the Saxon, and Jew have not gone unheard; they have told upon the world's practice” (191-92). Faverty's penetrating work has been too often ignored in major Arnold studies, even though, as Ruth apRoberts noted a few years back, his “rich study … is by no means dated” (97; see also Graff 191, and Lloyd 145n11). Faverty's own currency aside, how should we address today the very real problem of Arnold's relationship to the ethnological assumptions of his day, a problem raised more obviously by a work like Celtic Literature than by any of Arnold's other writings? And to what extent should Arnold's sentiments in Culture and Anarchy be assimilated to those in Celtic Literature, published serially in The Cornhill Magazine in 1866, only one year before the earliest elements of Culture and Anarchy began appearing there? As recent work on culture and race has begun to demonstrate, these are questions with continuing relevance for current criticism (see Young 55-89 for a wide-ranging, if flawed, effort to address such issues).

The difficulty facing any attempt to reconcile the ethnological assumptions in Celtic Literature with those implied by Culture and Anarchy is not hard to see. Stocking is quite impressed, for example, when Arnold admits that he could easily have been an aristocratic Barbarian:

Place me in one of his great fortified posts, … with all pleasures at my command, with most whom I met deferring to me, everyone I met smiling on me, and with every appearance of permanence and security before and behind me,—then I too might have grown, I feel, into a very passable child of the established fact, of commendable spirit and politeness, and … a little inaccessible to ideas and light. …”

(Arnold 5: 144; as qtd. in Stocking 795-96)

Though Stocking oddly does not state it bluntly, what he really seems to admire here is simply Arnold's sense that a different environment, a different “way of life” or set of customs, would have produced a different person, a notion supposedly both more in tune with modern anthropology and quite different from Tylor's emphasis on a fixed evolutionary sequence. That Arnold is talking more about class within a nation than about races or nations, and that a recognition of environmental influence in this narrow context need not necessarily contradict more broadly based assumptions about racial inheritance—all this goes by unobserved in Stocking's essay. Yet Stocking's point is still a good one: Arnold's humanism implies in such passages that “human beings shared a capacity for various types of development” (Stocking 795), including development of either Hebraistic or Hellenistic tendencies, a capacity that much of the anthropology of his time seemed to be repressing.

By contrast, what Trilling addresses in Celtic Literature would seem directly to refute all that Stocking claims about Arnold. Arnold argues that

[m]odes of life, institutions, government, climate, and so forth—let me say it once for all,—will further or hinder the development of an aptitude, but they will not by themselves create the aptitude or explain it. On the other hand, a people's habit and complexion of nature go far to determine its modes of life, institutions, and government, and even to prescribe the limits within which the influences of climate shall tell upon it.

(3: 353)

It is a refutation especially pertinent to Stocking's argument in that, as Trilling points out, Arnold's target here seems to be Henry Thomas Buckle, whose emphasis on “the non-racial determinants of culture” (Trilling 235) implies something far closer to a shared “capacity for various types of development” than is suggested by Arnold's rather frankly biological “complexion of nature.” In rejecting Buckle, of course, Arnold is surely not implying the evolutionism that inspired Tylor, but he is clearly rejecting the essential elements of Stocking's “modern” anthropological perspective.

One possible impediment to comparing Culture and Anarchy with Celtic Literature in this way is that Arnold was never much bothered by inconsistency. Like Emerson across the Atlantic, Arnold's mind was perhaps too deliberately free of the hobgoblins of systematic thought to concern itself with the ethnological niceties described by Stocking. In the “Introduction” to Celtic Literature, Arnold admits the “provisional character” (3: 387) of his remarks quite openly, and goes so far in the published version of his lectures as to include footnotes by Lord Strangford that time and again point out the errors (or worse) propagated by Arnold's superficial knowledge of philology, Celtic and otherwise. Oddly, Arnold apparently felt no need either to correct his text for publication or to refute Strangford—the contradictions and mistakes remain unresolved.

If the text of Celtic Literature itself can be so riddled with contradictions, all the more reason to think that the gap between Culture and Anarchy and Arnold's study of the Celts mattered little to him. While Culture and Anarchy develops a liberal and inclusive view of culture as “a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature” (5: 94), Celtic Literature's pseudo-scientific ethnological categories are at times not that far from those of Joseph Arthur de Gobineau: “As there are for physiology physical marks, such as the square head of the German, the round head of the Gael, the oval head of the Cymri, which determine the type of a people, so for criticism there are spiritual marks which determine the type, and make us speak of the Greek genius, the Teutonic genius, the Celtic genius, and so on” (Arnold 3: 340). Culture and Anarchy focuses in large part on a sense of culture as “cultivation,” on what the German Romantics had called Bildung, both as a search for inward perfection and as an egalitarian drive “to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere, to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light” (Arnold 5: 113)—a principle that has seemed to a great many to be still unsurpassed as a humanist ideal. By contrast, Celtic Literature is dedicated to an account of culture as a set of identifiable physical, linguistic, and spiritual characteristics that seem to derive more from a medieval theory of the humors than from any positivist or evolutionary Victorian ethnology.

Arnold uses and italicizes the word “humour” both in Culture and Anarchy, where he describes the English nation as “eminently Indo-European by its humour” (5: 174), and in Celtic Literature, where the unique “humour” of the English appears to be Germanism awkwardly leavened by “hauntings of Celtism” (3: 360). The phlegmatic Germans (Arnold actually refers at one point to “the Saxon's phlegm” [3: 348]) are dull, steady, and “humdrum,” even “ignoble,” yet methodical in their “patient fidelity to Nature,—in a word, science” (3: 341). The sanguine Celts are sentimental and lively (3: 343), yet lacking in patience or self-control (that is, “feminine”—hence their chivalry); they are close to “natural magic,” prone to “extravagance and exaggeration” (3: 347), “ineffectual in politics” (3: 346), and “always ready to react against the despotism of fact” (3: 344). Even the body's organs display the difference: the German “has the larger volume of intestines,” while the Frenchman (whom Arnold also considered fundamentally Celtic, even beyond Brittany) “has the more developed organs of respiration” (3: 343). Arnold's larger purpose is to illustrate, against much philo-Teutonic and anti-Celtic opinion in England at this time, the degree to which the English have inherited elements of both racial dispositions. In Celtic Literature, Arnold's ethnology is in fact different from Tylor's evolutionism, though not, as Stocking observes of Culture and Anarchy, because it is more modern in its functionalism and relativism, but rather because it is profoundly anachronistic in its conception of national/racial “spirit.” Hegel's grand typologies of national Geist in the Philosophy of History (1822-31) seem no more untimely, and we should recall that in Friendship's Garland (1871) Arnold, referring in passing to Celtic Literature's typologies, comically explains his Hellenism through Arminius's notion of Geist as “intelligence” (Arnold had been reading Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]; see Arnold, 5: 40-42 and 76-77).

Further difficulties of interpretation stem from the degree to which Celtic Literature is clearly a work of borrowed scholarship. Throughout his career, Arnold lifted ideas and terminology from continental writers whose work was less well known in England. Ernest Renan wrote essays on Marcus Aurelius and Spinoza and the Celts, and so did Arnold. On this score, however, Celtic Literature may be in a class by itself. Arnold's debt to Renan's “La poésie des races celtiques,” published as part of his Essais de morale et de critique in 1859, is well known and has long been recognized, though Renan's essay is a far more sentimental and nostalgic survey of Celtic attributes than is Arnold's attempt at ethnological science. It was from Renan, himself a Breton Celt, that Arnold took what was perhaps the germ of his essay: the belief that, in Renan's words, “le chevalrie,—cet idéal de douceur et de beauté posé comme but suprême de la vie,—n'est une création ni classique, ni chrétienne, ni germanique, mais bien réellement celtique” (Essais 385). But as Faverty demonstrates, Arnold borrowed just as extensively from Henri Martin's Histoire de France (1855-60), passages of which, like that on the Celt's resistance to the “despotism of fact,” found numerous echoes in Celtic Literature. Add to this Arnold's debts to Amédée Thierry's Histoire des gaulois (1835) for the emphasis on philology and anthropology—Arnold could have taken his sense of the main groups within the Celtic race, Welsh-Cornish and Breton (the Cymric), Scottish and Irish (the Gaelic), from either Thierry or Renan (see Faverty 123, and Arnold 3: 498, ed. note to 292: 31-38)—and E. F. Edwards's Recherches sur les langues celtiques (1844) for the remarks on the physiological evidence of Celtic inheritance in England (Faverty 36), and Celtic Literature begins to break apart into something of a scholarly collage. Is the problem then that Arnold's interest in the Celts, stimulated mainly it seems by a visit to Brittany and a subsequent visit to Wales (where he attended an Eisteddfod, or Bardic Congress, at Llandudno) was based on a hastily assembled, if comprehensive, hodgepodge of ethnological writing—for which Arnold himself can hardly be held fully responsible?

Neither a high tolerance for inconsistency nor hasty scholarship, however, is finally very satisfying as an explanation for the twists and turns in Arnold's ethnology. To tackle the second point first, Arnold's scholarship was always much broader than it was deep—which should not seem odd in a critic devoted to the idea that intellectual machinery, including the tendency to the over-specialization of thought, was the curse of his time. Indeed, Arnold is very much our contemporary in this regard, for it is precisely Arnold who should be seen as the great progenitor of the post-1968 demand for inter-disciplinary and non-systematic humanistic inquiry, at least in the Anglo-American world. Much in contemporary “cultural studies” reproduces the cursory quality of Arnold's anthropological and philological thought along with his breadth of vision. The issue, then as today, is less how to excuse this combination of qualities than to understand what it enables or overlooks, both for good and ill.

By the same token, Arnold's inconsistent approach to the concept of culture should itself be seen less as a simple failing to be explained away than as a crucial hinge in his thinking. It is far more likely that Arnold did not recognize any real contradiction between the ethnographic opinions expressed in Culture and Anarchy and Celtic Literature than that he did and ignored them. Once again, I would suggest, Arnold is our contemporary, for it is precisely his equivocations that haunt, albeit in strongly disavowed forms, contemporary humanistic reflection on culture. Both cultivated disposition and biologically rooted aptitude, both a “study of perfection,” whose inwardness is itself real only if it implies “a general perfection, embracing all our fellow-men with whom we have to do” (5: 215), and a “complexion of nature” (3: 353) displayed by a racial-national stock even when blended with others in diverse physical and social environments: Arnold's sense of culture is in fact fluid and dynamic and tacks back and forth between these positions and through a number of intervening ones with some ease. This conceptual sliding or equivocation is mediated by the host of metaphors—“impulse,” “bent,” “force,” “tendency”—that does so much work in Culture and Anarchy. For with such terms, Arnold can talk about a wide variety of things in either of two, often unspecified, causal sequences: either learned, if deeply rooted, sensibilities that have been cultivated by literary, philosophical, and religious traditions; or literary, philosophical, and religious traditions that are themselves primarily the consequence of racial/national “genius” or “spirit,” a natural (that is, biologically given) complexion of consciousness that can be traced, in varying depths, wherever a “people” migrate and intermarry. While Culture and Anarchy would appear to be indebted primarily to the first causal sequence (hence its continuing viability in contemporary criticism) and Celtic Literature to the second (hence its relative invisibility today), it is important to recognize that both types of arguments are present in varying degrees in both essays. Once we take seriously Arnold's claim that the new “science of origins” is indeed the foundation of “all real knowledge of the actual world,” the fact that these two causal chains are inextricably linked in his thinking becomes difficult to ignore.

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Perhaps the most difficult problem of all in addressing Celtic Literature, however, is that the essay embodies manifestly good intentions—good, that is, from the perspective of much current opinion, quite in spite of its now discredited racial assumptions. (If any piece of scholarship illustrates how far the road to hell can be paved with good intentions, Celtic Literature is it.) Arnold not only seriously promoted the value of studying Celtic literature and myth at a time when its mostly ill-informed proponents had been subjected to withering (and often justified) attacks, he also called at the end of his essay for a “chair of Celtic” (3: 384) at Oxford or Cambridge. (Among his listeners at the last of Arnold's Celtic lectures was John Rhys, who would be the first to occupy such a chair when established in 1877 at Jesus College [Arnold, ed. note, 3: 493]). If we are to believe figures like W. B. Yeats and Andrew Lang, Arnold's essay (along with the writings of James Macpherson and Renan) had a formative influence on the Celtic Revival (see Kelleher, and Faverty 152-53) that would soon transform—we might say re-invent—the literary history of Ireland, even if Arnold, like Joyce, displayed little of the Revival's enthusiasm for Gaelic language and folklore. Moreover, in essays like “Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism” (1879), Arnold supported the Irish Catholic demand for a Catholic University (8: 321-47), though the ethnographic grounds for his support become more clear in “Joseph de Maistre on Russia” (1879), Arnold's review of the great conservative political theorist's correspondence: “Just as every plan of government is a baneful dream, unless it be in harmony with the character and circumstances of the nation, so it is with education” (9: 101). Whatever Arnold's shortcomings in accepting a race-culture nexus, his essay deployed such thinking toward ends that would be widely praised in the modern academy: the revival of a neglected and oppressed literary tradition, and the institutionalization of its study within the university.

Yet Arnold's brief excursions through Brittany and Wales, which reminded him of something in his Cornish mother, and presumably in himself (Renan also saw Bretagne through the eyes of his mother and his childhood), produced complicated results. His pointed interest in Celtic matters was at heart one more expression of his deeply Romantic attraction to things (like classical grace and medieval humors) that had come to seem irrelevant to the utilitarian sensibility, technological progress, and science of the modern world. This attraction could extend from solitary, sentimental melancholics, like the autobiographical hero of Etienne Pivert de Senancour's Obermann (1804)—“I'expression d'un homme qui sent et non d'un homme qui travaille” (i), we read in its first sentence—to entire peoples around whom the aura of lost nobility could be imagined to glow in direct proportion to their worldly disappointment: “For ages and ages the world has been constantly slipping, ever more and more, out of the Celt's grasp. ‘They went forth to war,’ Ossian says most truly, ‘but they always fell’” (Arnold 3: 346). This line from James Macpherson's largely invented Poems of Ossian (1760-65), which is perhaps the single most important document for the reawakened European interest in folk culture and oral tradition throughout the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including that of German Romantics like Herder (see Chapman, Gaelic Vision 29-52 and 83-84), also serves as Arnold's epigraph. What Arnold saw in the Celts, partly in himself, but certainly in the Irish, whom many of the English would have considered a distinctly alien race at this time, was an all but forgotten poetic sensibility, the value of which lay precisely in its manifest unsuitability for worldly success in Arnold's day. In elaborating this melancholic Celtic nobility, Arnold largely followed the lead of Macpherson, who, like Walter Scott in his popular Waverley novels, reflected more the mood of Scottish clansmen after the failed rebellion of 1745 than a heritage of Celtic poetry (see Smart 26-29). “For the sword which they were no longer able to yield,” writes Faverty in summary of Macpherson's image of the Celts, “they substituted the harp. They were a dying race, but like the swan, they would sing a beautiful lament before they expired” (149). Arnold's crucial difference from Macpherson, however, lies in the fact that in Celtic Literature we find a mechanism, racial inheritance, by which the virtues of that beaten breed might survive in the English, if only, like so many other anthropological “survivals,” in latent form.

Arnold's interest in the Celts is thus riddles with a nostalgia equal to, if more temperate, than Renan's; for Arnold, the lost cause of the Celts also becomes a salutary reminder of a “style” and “grace” and “delicate magic” (Arnold 3: 374) absent in the Teutonic (Saxon) character of the modern English Philistine. All of the attributes Arnold cites had become part of a commonly accepted Romantic discourse on the Celts from Macpherson on, though Arnold would turn that discourse to his own purposes: “The Celt's quick feeling for what is noble and distinguished gave his poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion; his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature” (3: 374). In Culture and Anarchy, the “extraordinary grace” demanded by feudalism's “struggling society” from England's “land-holding class,” whose charismatic dominance provided “cohesion” and an “ideal or standard for the rest of the community,” disappears from the “luxurious, settled and easy society” of the modern aristocratic Barbarians (5: 203). But that grace, that style and magical charm, are never really lost in Arnold. They are constantly recaptured on other grounds, in phrases like “sweetness and light,” in the spontaneous play of the mind that marks Hellenism, and in the racial heritage of Celtic poetry. Arnold's point is both retrospective and very much of his moment. He wants to illustrate the deep undercurrents of this often overlooked Celtic influence in English literary history: Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Wordsworth, and Keats are all called to testify to its workings. But he also wants to demonstrate to an uncomprehending and increasingly dominant Philistine middle class that there is a vestigial “humour” of romance and poetry and magic flowing in its veins, a Celtic humor that could substitute for what aristocratic England has lost, once it is recognized as innate. The repressed “hauntings of Celtism” (3: 360) in the Englishman's character, which prompt his characteristically “self-conscious” and “embarrassed” nature, or what George Sand called his “typical awkwardness” (3: 360-61), are appropriate reproductions of the haunting, magical qualities of Celtic poetry itself—as if the poetry had been designed all along to remind the English that something intimately their own needed to be recovered from the mists of their racial past.

Unsurprisingly, it is this uncanny nostalgia that gives Celtic Literature its convoluted politics, for however admirable (in part) the noble Celtic sensibility might be, it remains resolutely a thing of the past, forever cursed by a worldly impotence and “feminine” (3: 347) lack of discipline that, in effect, binds it to the Empire irrevocably. In this regard, as Lord Lytton observed of Irish qualities, Arnold's treatment of the Celt bestows virtues “that win affection but never esteem” (qtd. in Faverty 146)—just like the virtues bestowed on women by a supposedly Celt-invented code of chivalry. To be sure, Celtic Literature (like Culture and Anarchy) has a distinctly ameliorative social program, demonstrating “traces of kinship, and the most essential sort of kinship, spiritual kinship, between us and the Celt, of which we had never dreamed” (3: 335). At a time when, fifteen years after the Great Hunger in Ireland, relations between the English and Irish are at a particularly low ebb, distrust is the rule, and the rather stark choice between “coercion” and “separation” (Lloyd 142) seems to be all that is left, Arnold's essay tries to demonstrate that, “we English, alien and uncongenial to our Celtic partners as we may have hitherto shown ourselves, have notwithstanding, beyond perhaps any nation, a thousand latent springs of possible sympathy with them” (Arnold 3: 395). Arnold's grand goal is nothing less than a transformation of English character, “substituting, in place of that type of Englishman with whom alone the Celt has too long been familiar, a new type, more intelligent, more gracious, and more humane” (3: 395). And yet Arnold is in no way calling here for more Irish (much less Welsh!) autonomy; like most of the English, Arnold had no sympathy even for the maintenance of the Welsh and Gaelic language if these challenged the hegemony of English. He demands just as great a transformation of character from “the Celtic members of this empire,” who would thereby better realize “that they are inextricably bound up with us” (3: 395). In fact, Arnold's twin appeals to the English and Celts of the Empire for political moderation, however balanced they may at first seem, are in fact quite asymmetrical.

Arnold's appeal to the English presumes what to him would be historically obvious: the English are the hardier (politically and spiritually dominant) stock, both by virtue of their sound Teutonic basis (or primary humor) and by virtue of their heterosis, that is, of the various racial humors that have been bred into that basis. Like the physical hybrid, the cultural hybrid in Arnold would appear to be richer and stronger for its admixture—a fairly progressive thesis, after all, at a time of strong national and racial chauvinism: “[J]ust what constitutes special power and genius in a man seems often to be his blending with the basis of his national temperament, some additional gift or grace not proper to that temperament” (Arnold 3: 358; on the broader question of the hybrid in the nineteenth century, see Young 1-28). Philology, physiology, poetry—all point toward an “affinity of race” (3: 335) between the English and the Celts, but it is only the English who seem to have benefited historically from the numerous invasions and conquests that united one race with another in Britain, precisely because the English are themselves the happy racial consequence of this earlier crossbreeding (a point made in a more satirical vein by Daniel Defoe's poem of 1701, “The True-Born Englishman,” on the prejudice against William III's foreignness). The Celts were the original, passive (“feminine”), and absorbed stock, “insensibly getting mixed with their conquerors”—the Saxons, the Romans, the Normans—“their blood entering into the composition of a new people, in which the stock of the conquerors counts for most, but the stock of the conquered, too, counts for something” (3: 338). It would thus appear that those Celts who fled westward into Wales, Scotland, and Ireland to avoid destruction or servitude, and who thus retained some degree of racial purity, paid a high price on the world's stage, both because of the weakness of their racial stock and because of the lack of any tempering influence. Had Arnold, when writing Celtic Literature, enjoyed the benefit of hearing Renan's later lecture, Qu'est-ce qu'une Nation, delivered at the Sorbonne in 1882, he would have found sentiments that both confirmed and usefully undermined his ideas about the Celts and the English: “Ethnographic considerations have thus been for nothing in the constitution of modern nations. … The truth is that there is no pure race, and that to make politics depend upon ethnographical analysis is to sustain it upon a chimera. The most noble countries, the English, the French, the Italians, are those where the blood is most mixed” (Renan, Nation 37; my translation). Arnold agreed, but only up to a point, for Renan's chimera did in fact matter to him in 1866.

Unlike the later Renan, moreover, Arnold is far from treating all forms of racial simplicity or complexity in the same way, and the only real marker of racial health is Darwinian in character—the superior worldly and spiritual success of the race. Like the Celt, for example, the German nature is “all of a piece” (Arnold 3: 361), yet the Germans have enjoyed political and cultural prosperity, in spite of their racial “Gemeinheit” (vulgarity) (3: 341), dullness, and lack of poetry, because of the relative strength of their stock, a strength based in a “steadiness with honesty” (3: 341) and shared by the English (in the form of “energy with honesty”) through Saxon conquest. The French, by contrast, are a blend in which Frankish-German and Latin have been superimposed on “an undoubtedly Celtic basis” (3: 349). But the French suffer much more from their Celtic inheritance than do the English, precisely because the Celtic humor remained the basis of the French stock. Once again, the final arbiter of cultural complexion is nothing less than blood: “Gaul was Latinised in language, manners, and laws, and yet her people remained essentially Celtic. The Germanisation of Britain went far deeper than the Latinisation of France, and not only laws, manners, and language, but the main current of the blood, became Germanic” (3: 338). What Arnold actually means here is unclear. Did the Romans simply not procreate much with their Celtic hosts in Gaul? Were the Saxons far more thorough in producing offspring through the Celts of Britain? Should the Saxons be considered true colonizers, settling and intermarrying among the native population that did not flee, while the Romans were mere imperialists? “They were no colonists,” Marlow says of the Romans in Heart of Darkness (1902), “their administration was merely a squeeze, and nothing more, I suspect” (Conrad 10). It is an open question, made all the more puzzling by the fact that, following such logic, the English could be considered more Norman (that is, Latin-Celt) than anything else—a possibility Arnold, despite his rejection of all strident English philo-Teutonism and his elaboration of Norman influences, does not address. Arnold endorsed the sentiment that France was “famed in all great arts, in none supreme” (qtd. in Faverty 137), and it seems only through its Latin (rational) humor that France had been able to overcome its Celtic flaws—though elsewhere even this Latin inheritance appears to be marked by sensuality (see Arnold, “Numbers; on The Majority and the Remnant” [1884] 10: 155). The English, by contrast, appear to have inherited only Latin virtues from the Normans, who brought with them the imperial Roman gifts for oratory and orderly administration.

The dizzying combinations of racial traits that Arnold is able to distinguish perhaps point to a salient characteristic of all such arguments: Arnold's genealogies are primarily ways of rationalizing the social and political realities of his day, of explaining (and perhaps justifying) English authority even as he contests its cruder exercise, challenges its narrow-minded chauvinism, and admits—or rather, celebrates—its awkward hybrid vigor. Indeed, some current ethnological approaches to the question of the Celt deny that the term has any racial or ethnic coherence at all. Malcolm Chapman reminds us that it was only after William Jones's elaboration, in 1786, of the relation of Sanskrit to Greek and comparative philology's subsequent reconstruction of an “Indo-European” (or “Indo-Germanic”) genealogy of languages that language began to be taken as a key to the genealogy of “peoples, races, nations, and cultures” (Chapman, Celts 14-16). It was a key much exploited in an age of rising nationalism, but with little historical justification. The near-mystical Romantic link between language, race, and nation could thus be mapped in both evolutionary and geographical terms and, following Barthold Niebuhr, in terms of European history itself. For Chapman, “the Celt” is one of the most influential and persistent, but least credible, genealogical units of the age; like others before him, he finds little evidence that, for much of its supposed history, the Celt ever embodied the concatenation of physical, spiritual, and linguistic characteristics that is assumed by Romantic Celtic studies, and by Matthew Arnold. Chapman comes close to endorsing the idea that “there is no such thing as Celt” (Celts 251), that the term may really be no more than a name for attributes like charm and grace and poetic sentiment imposed by all industrialized metropolitan societies on their “folk” (another late-eighteenth-century invention) peripheries. (For a very early predecessor of Chapman's argument, see the 1867 review of Celtic Literature by Fagan.)

What is clear in Arnold is that a racial “basis,” a people's original “complexion of nature” or humor, will have a determining influence on its culture unless that basis has been saturated with and overcome by the blood of a conquering race. At best, a people will be able to temper the vices of its racial basis with the virtues of its racial cross-breeding. The phlegmatic Teutonism of the English can thus be enlivened by Celtic sentiment and magic; the Celtic extravagance, femininity, and eternal readiness “to react against the despotism of fact” inherited by the French can be held in check, but only barely, by Latin laws and bureaucracy. Even here, of course, the asymmetry persists, for England is blessed both with a more wholesome Teutonic “basis,” despite its vices, than the French, and a greater resource, in its vestigial Celtic humor, for tempering that basis than the Germans. England's greatest danger may be too much dull, plodding rectitude, but France must constantly beware an explosive rebellion against fact—a dangerous tendency that France, with its seemingly endless political upheavals in the nineteenth century, could be said to share with the Irish Celts it was often asked to support against England.

Arnold's notions of racially based cultural traits and cultural cross-breeding might appear to be of little relevance to the larger rise of “multicultural” pedagogy in recent years and to contemporary notions of cultural hybridity and cross-cultural aesthetic practice. After all, these modern meditations on what Arnold called the “science of origins” would seem to have been amply inoculated against all that plagues Arnold's ethnology by a repudiation of the biological-racial inheritance of cultural traits and by a more thorough-going relativism. Like John Stuart Mill, Andrew Lang, Yeats, and the later Renan, most of Arnold's readers today are likely to reject the theory of “inherent natural differences” (Mill, Principles 324) supporting Celtic Literature as an outmoded explanation for both individual character and cultural traditions (see also Lang, Yeats, and Renan, Nation 37). Yet, like many people in casual conversation, then and now, these earlier writers were hardly always free in practice from using national-racial assumptions to explain cultural or political tendencies, despite their stated beliefs. Mill's attitude was primarily developmental rather than racial: his view that “despotism is a legitimate mode of government when dealing with barbarians” (“On Liberty” 263) may be a convenient notion for imperial designs, but it need not be racially based. However, when Mill indicts the “despotism of Custom … over the whole East” (“On Liberty” 318) and notes that China, “stationary” for thousands of years despite earlier eras of progress, will only be “farther improved … by foreigners” (320), it is hard not to understand this result as a product of innate racial disposition, for it is only an unexplained and seemingly natural “diversity of character and culture” (320) that, with proper nurturing, will save European nations and individuals from a similar fate. It should thus not be surprising that highly sublimated versions of Arnoldian racial inheritance, along with what may be the practical impossibility of strict relativism, continue to haunt contemporary scholarly uses of the word culture, just as surely as the assumptions of a coherent and continuous Celtic personality have persisted in ways that critics like Chapman rightly find unwarranted.

When we refer to a culture as having a coherence based on a national or regional or group identity over time, as elaborated in a particular language, literary tradition, and set of customs—whether these are designated Irish or French or German or one of a number of newer ethnic American “communities”—does our usage in fact limit such a sense of culture to what Pierre Bourdieu calls a learned, and hence quite functionally motivated and hierarchically structured, habitus (see Bourdieu 167)? Do we not at times imply that it is also an expression, as Arnold put it, of a people's innate “genius” (Arnold 3: 325) or soul, a spiritual disposition composed of intellectual, emotional, and psychological tendencies passed on by blood? By the same token, when we value the cross-fertilization enabled by transnational flows of ideas and capital, and champion the discursively (rather than racially) hybrid character of cultures around the globe as a salutary form of resistance to oppressive notions of racial and cultural purity, can we always prevent our rhetoric from subtly implying something not so different from what Arnold openly stated: that there really are distinct or simpler or purer cultural “humours” to be so blended in the first place, that the heterogeneous mix of Self and Other promoted by cosmopolitan modernity, if it is to represent a salutary cultural vigor, must have begun with more uniform racial aptitudes and sensibilities? It may be impossible to speak about “culture” in any depth even today without dragging along at certain points the Romantic ghost of blood inheritance. Don't the affiliations of kinship crucial to nascent nineteenth-century nationalisms and central in turn to anti-colonial struggles for political emancipation reverberate throughout the contemporary fascination for ethnic or cultural “difference,” even when this difference is anchored in language, and bald terms like “blood” and “race” are never used?

At one point, Arnold cites linguistic evidence—faulty, as Strangford's note shows—to demonstrate that “the hearth comes to mean home. Then from home it comes to mean the group of homes, the tribe; from the tribe the entire nation; and in this sense of nation or people, the word appears in Gothic, Norse, Celtic, and Persian, as well as in Scythian” (3: 331). Arnold's bad philology notwithstanding, I would suggest that clear echoes of such Romantic (and surely much older) thinking, implying that the race or nation is in fact the family writ large, can be heard throughout the Modernism that triumphs in Arnold's wake, and that vestiges of it survive well into contemporary critical thought. Current usage of the word “ethnicity,” for example, as in “ethnic American literatures”—English literature no longer qualifying, of course, as ethnic, though an Englishman's ethnicity was in no sense to be taken for granted among the Victorians—at times does much of the equivocating work that Arnold's “impulse,” “bent,” “force,” and “tendency” do. Ethnicity can enable precisely the same conceptual slippage, the same back and forth shuttle of meanings between an arbitrarily transmitted custom and a racial inheritance that manifests itself as an expression of the soul, as a vague but intractable “sensibility” passed on by blood kinship.

As Robert J. C. Young has argued, “[t]he ethnological basis of Arnold's cultural politics, and the way in which racism, ethnology and culture slide so easily into each other, might also give us pause about current ways in which we champion ethnicity, and promote a culturally defined ethnic, as opposed to a biologically defined racial, identity” (88). Indeed, in a recent issue of PMLA devoted to ethnicity, Sander Gilman notes: “Ethnicity as it is used in the humanities is a North American sociological concept that is defined against the categories of race and class”; it often “comes very close to definitions of race in sociology and physical anthropology” (19). Yet after Gilman, none of the essays collected in the issue openly confronts the potential problems raised by using a term like ethnicity, with its vague connotation of inherited characteristics, in a causal relation to culture. In practice, I would argue, ethnicity often allows the disavowed ghost of blood-carried cultural humors to occupy the otherwise sanitized (or non-“essentialist”) precincts of contemporary cultural studies. If the rather impractical demand that we eschew the word “culture” altogether, because it supposedly designates nothing but ghosts (see Walter Benn Michaels), is to be answered, then the sort of Arnoldian rhetorical work that a word like ethnicity does in the analysis of culture needs to be carefully elaborated. I do not mean to claim that neither “race” nor “culture” matters, but rather that the relation between them is as arbitrary (if historically maintained or contrived) and non-natural as the relation between race and language—a fact all too easy to forget once race, language, and culture are recognized as associated instruments of social and political power.

.....

However much I agree with readers like Lionel Gossman that Arnold's use of the words Hebraism and Hellenism would seem to be free of any overt anti-Semitism, I remain convinced that the lingering resonance of Celtic Literature's view of race in Culture and Anarchy cannot be ignored, and that these must reflect back in turn on what Arnold meant by Hebraism and Hellenism in the first place. The Celts and the Saxons belonged, we should remember, to the same racial family tree, in spite of their differences: both were Indo-European, and it would seem that it is the Celtic aptitude for sentiment and beauty that makes the Saxon all the more truly “Hellenic.” The Hebrews and English belonged to completely different racial trees for Arnold, despite the similarity of their moral tendencies. To be sure, Arnold found Gobineau's and Burnouf's vulgar caricatures of the Semite worthy of ridicule. He certainly rejected, in Literature and Dogma (1873), Burnouf's thesis that Christ, like other northern Jews of Galilee, was really Aryan (that is, Indo-European, or Indo-Germanic). Arnold thus dismissed Bernouf's claim that Christianity was a metaphysical doctrine imported from Persia and India rather than the practical religion of the southern Jews of Jerusalem and Judea, those supposedly true Semites guided by legal literalism, incapacity for abstraction or science, and small brains (see Arnold 6: 239-40; also Faverty 172). But what cannot be disputed is the fact that Arnold followed the lead of Renan, in texts like his Histoire du peuple d'Israel (1889-93), in thinking of Indo-European and Semite as distinct racial groups with distinct humors, aptitudes, and complexions of nature. Arnold refused Burnouf's idea that Christianity was Aryan in origin, but he admitted “that Israel shows no talent for metaphysics,” even if religious greatness arises from the fact that “he does not found religion on metaphysics” (6: 241). Renan had insisted that the Indo-Europeans excelled at intellectual, political, and military achievement, while the Semites were responsible for the development of religious belief. Arnold's own conceptions are not far off.

In language that echoes Celtic Literature's “science of origins,” Arnold observes in Culture and Anarchy that

science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is of Indo-European growth, Hebraism of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism.

(5: 173)

And yet Arnold goes on to point out that there is an “essential unity of man” marked by the “affinities we can perceive, in this point or that, between members of one family of peoples and members of another” (5: 173). The racial affinity, or likeness, of the English Protestants and the Jews is one such affinity—Renan and Taine had also noticed a similar seriousness, strength, and simplicity of spirit (see Faverty 173)—and it is a likeness reflected in the religious continuity of Hebraism. But the thesis that Arnold's Hebraism represents a relatively smooth continuum of transmitted religious and moral tradition from Judaism to Christianity, as implied by Trilling, Stocking, Gossman, and many others, does not at all contradict the notion that for Arnold the English and Jews represent quite distinct innate racial aptitudes. The Aryan English and the Semitic Hebrews resemble one another to an extraordinary degree, and they share a religious tradition, but they are hardly the same racially. It is precisely because the English are racially rooted in their Indo-European humors that Arnold can reasonably expect them, as in “St. Paul and Protestantism” (1869-70) to redress the “over-Hebraising of Puritanism” (6: 7), a task that includes Arnold's attempt to translate the great convert St. Paul “for us modern and Western people” (6: 23) in a way that corrects “the defect in the critical habit of himself and his [Jewish] race” (6: 22).

What seems superficially to be merely a single transmitted tradition of religious and moral ideas in Arnold's essay turns out to be instead the evolutionary emergence of a “likeness in the strength and prominence of the moral fibre” (5: 174) in the English and Hebrew people. “Eminently Indo-European by its humour,” by its power of “imaginatively acknowledging the multiform aspects of the problem of life” (5: 174) and hence of resisting “over-certainty,” the English race also has in its practical and moral life “a strong share of the assuredness, the tenacity, and intensity of the Hebrews” (5: 174). English Puritanism may be called a form of “Hebraism” because Christianity in its origins “transformed and renewed” (Arnold 5: 187) the Hebraism of the Jews. But Puritanism as the continuation of a religious and moral tradition must at the same time be distinguished from the racially-given moral complexion of the English as an Indo-European people. Puritanism is in fact the consequence, then, both of a religious law externally transmitted (with modifications) from the Jews by converts like Paul, and of a quite separate and racially given moral aptitude in the English, albeit an aptitude equal to that of the Jews. As such, the impulse or tendency toward Puritan Christianity is driven first of all by “the conscience and moral sense of our race” (5: 174), and by “our race” Arnold means “the English nation.” This “moral sense” echoes, or resembles, the racial humor of the Jews only because of some much older racial connection, implied by “the essential unity of man,” in pre-history. Conceived in racial rather than religious terms, Jewish morality and English (Indo-European, Hellenic) morality are not consecutive points on the same line of evolutionary descent, as are Judaism and Christianity; they are actually like two distinct, if similar, evolutionary products linked by a common, but much older and unnameable, ancestor.

Arnold may have differed from his father on the literal truth of the Bible story, but he followed him on the need to make Christianity over into a more English, or Indo-European, phenomenon. As he wrote in a letter to his mother on Christmas Day, 1867:

Bunsen used to say that our great business was to get rid of all that was purely Semitic in Christianity, and to make it Indo-Germanic, and Schleiermacher that in the Christianity of us Western nations there was really much more of Plato and Socrates than of Joshua and David; and, on the whole, papa worked in the direction … of Bunsen and Schleiermacher, and was perhaps the only powerful Englishman of his day who did so. … Perhaps the change of times and modes of action being allowed for, my scope is not so different from his as you and I often think.

(Arnold, ed. note, 6: 456)

Baron Bunsen, as Faverty notes, was responsible for the theory “of the co-existence of two races among the Jews, one black, the other of a dark color” (Faverty 172), an earlier version of the theory that Arnold had rejected in Burnouf. Arnold may have insisted on the idea that Christianity as a religion indeed originated among the Jews rather than the Aryans, and from practical moral experience rather than metaphysical speculation. After all, it is precisely Christianity as deeply experienced ethical perfection rather than as mechanical legalism, literal history, or divine intervention that earned Arnold's admiration and acceptance. But just as, in Arnold's view, it is Heine's adopted Germanic-Hellenic culture that allows him to treat his Hebraic religious and racial inheritance with an ironic freedom absent in the Jews themselves (see 3: 127-28), so it is the Hellenic humor of the Indo-European races that Arnold calls upon to make Christianity into the instrument of ethical perfection.

And Arnold did not hesitate when needed, as in his treatment of the Liberal proposal to allow marriage to “one's deceased wife's sister” (5: 206), to remind his readers that the worst parts of Hebraism were, in fact, Semitic: “the delicate and apprehensive genius of the Indo-European race” cannot allow itself to be “hoodwinked” by a “divine law expressed for them by the voice of any Oriental and polygamous nation like the Hebrews” (5: 208). Hebraism cannot in practice be divorced from the opposed racial bases, Semitic and Indo-European, that give it its peculiar complexions and limitations; neither, finally, can Hellenism, composed as it is of Indo-European tendencies lacking in the Semitic peoples. Culture itself, then, far from being only that inward perfection of spirit spread among the peoples of the earth by means of cultivation or education is always in Arnold anchored, whether vulgarly or vaguely, in a theory of racial inheritance, a theory that both explains culture's origins and determines the natural aptitudes of those who are to be cultivated.

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