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I. Culture and Anarchy: “The Manufacture of Philistines”

Pinpointing the ethnological assumptions of Arnold’s criticism is difficult, especially in Culture and Anarchy. Along with Young, ethno-logical critics have typically taken Arnold’s comments on the “Hellenic” and “Hebraic” affiliations of the English as fully encapsulating his racialization of the nation’s history. The impression that Culture and Anarchy defines Englishness as inherently Hellenic derives from the following passage, from the chapter that names these two groups in its title:

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 is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism.⁵

It would seem a fairly straightforward conclusion that Arnold defines the English as Indo-European, and therefore linked biologically to the Greek civilization he admires for its “spontaneity of consciousness,” in contrast to the “strictness of conscience” that defines the opposed racial tendency of Hebraism (C, 128). While noting that Arnold is sometimes inconsistent in the attributes he ascribes to the national biology, ethnological school readings have understandably tended to view Arnold’s idea of Englishness as strictly Hellenic.⁶

But Arnold’s conflation of English and Greek, while prominent in the text, is hard to square with comments that arise elsewhere in Culture and Anarchy. Specifically, in “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace,” Arnold points repeatedly to what he calls “the want of flexibility of our race” as a source of its Hebraic tendencies (C, 123). How can readers of Arnold make sense of such a comment, which seems directly to run against the Hellenic “gift” of the English for “imaginatively acknowledging the multiform aspects of the problem of life” (C, 136)? Pecora’s suggestion that Hebraism is both an external influence, a religious import that stunts the natural English tendency toward Hellenic creative consciousness, and also the outcropping of a latent English racial element, is suggestive but finally insufficient in that he provides no contemporary discursive or ideological frame to define this mysterious Hebraic gene.⁷

Part of the confusion that arises in the attempt to parse Arnold’s ethnological definitions derives from the fact that, in terms of its [End Page 152] compositional history, Culture and Anarchy consists of a patchwork of separately written essays, and therefore cannot quite be read as the unified expression of a single set of ideas. Given this partial dispersal of intent across the book’s six chapters, it is not so surprising that Arnold would shuttle between seemingly disparate ethnological claims.⁸ I would suggest, however, that there is an unregistered coherence to the text’s racial maneuverings, a coherence that derives from its persistent evocation of the contemporary ethnological discourse of Teutonism. Only by attending to the operations of this discourse can the reader properly assess the racial underpinnings of Arnold’s key concepts, culture and “machinery,” and only through such a modified assessment can the reader then locate Arnold amid the broader Victorian concerns to which his work responds (C, 105). Because his reliance on this discourse spans both Culture and Anarchy and The Study of Celtic Literature, explicating the Teutonic dimension of the former text will prepare the way for subsequent analysis of the latter, where Arnold’s ethnological gaze expands beyond Britain to take in the entire United Kingdom.

Peter Mandler, along with others such as L. P. Curtis, Jr. and George Stocking, has argued that the dominant English racial ideology at midcentury was Teutonism, a doctrine that traced the nation’s heritage to barbarian communities in northern Europe. Citing among other sources John Mitchell Kemble’s The Saxons in England (1849), Mandler lists several central characteristics of Teutonic discourse, foremost among these being “individual liberty.”⁹ The “spirit of independence” discovered by Kemble in the “misty forests” of ancient Germany grew into what Mandler terms an “autostereotype” of English racial thought, producing a full-blown “Teutonic Zeitgeist” by the time of Arnold’s writing.¹⁰ Mandler notes that Arnold himself coined the pejorative phrase “Teutomania” to describe the racial-nationalist fanaticism of his father, Thomas, and states that during the 1860s public credence in this autostereotype was at its height.¹¹ It should not surprise us, therefore, to find this discourse surfacing in Culture and Anarchy, the constituent essays of which Arnold penned around 1867.¹²

In addition to individual liberty, Mandler enumerates other elements of the Teutonic myth such as “orderliness” and “domesticity” to illustrate the extent to which it served to valorize contemporary middle-class norms. Beyond these attributes, however, Mandler lists another characteristic, one which has even more direct bearing on Culture and Anarchy: “industry.” In Mandler’s description, the English came to believe that their stock “combined industry and independence, which [End Page 153] combination was responsible not only for the unique accumulation of material goods in Britain but also for their achievements in innovation and enterprise.”¹³ Thus Teutonism came to take on an economic dimension in addition to its primary political one, with the result that capitalism itself came to be viewed as the outgrowth of a preeminently English racial capacity.

Through this discourse then, the motive forces of British modernization, from rationalization to democratization and capitalist production, became outward and visible signs of an inner and hidden racial essence. Within the prevailing zeitgeist, the English were the paradigmatic rational, liberal, enterprising members of the human family. Given that, as Ellen Meiksins Wood documents in Empire of Capital, England was the first nation to implement the capitalist mode of production—that is, the organization of life according to market dependency and the competitive production of surplus value—it is fitting that Teutonism would define the protagonist of classical political economy, the homo economicus, as an Englishman.¹⁴ The tenets of Teutonism conform neatly to the definition of this prototypical human as a self-interested pleasure-seeker accepting limitations on his strivings only in order to minimize the pain of competitive acquisition. The autostereotype of the Teuton, with his hatred of restraint and inclination toward productive labor, can thus be understood as a post-facto racialization of British political-economic doctrine—or, more to the point, as a post-facto racialization of the motive forces of British civilization. This racialization ratified modernizing social tendencies, encoding them as intrinsic qualities of an essential Englishness.

Each of Culture and Anarchy’s bêtes noires falls within the purview of Teutonic discourse. Arnold traces the flaws in the national character, from “doing as one likes” to vulgar materialism and religious dogmatism, to Germany’s misty forests, from whose inhabitants the British aristocracy are directly descended:

The Barbarians, to whom we all owe so much, and who reinvigorated and renewed our worn-out Europe, have, as is well known, eminent merits; and in this country, where we are for the most part sprung from the Barbarians, we have never had the prejudice against them which prevails among the races of the Latin origin. The Barbarians brought with them that staunch individualism . . . and that passion for doing as one likes, for the assertion of personal liberty, which appears . . . the central idea of English life. . . . The stronghold and natural seat of this passion was in the nobles of whom our aristocratic class are the inheritors; and this class, accordingly, have signally manifested it, and [End Page 154] have done much by their example to recommend it to the body of the nation, who already, indeed, had it in their blood.

(C, 105)

Thus the first component of what Arnold dubs “machinery,” the master metaphor for all those “stiff-necked,” Philistine institutions that resist the pursuit of culture, becomes directly encoded as Teutonic (C, 105). The “Barbarian” class, the aristocracy, secures England’s political link to its Germanic ancestors, and by imbuing the early nation with the libertarian proclivity for “doing as one likes,” they ensure the continued influence of this Teutonic attribute on its other classes, the “Philistine” (C, 105) middle classes and the lower-class “Populace” who “already, indeed, had it in their blood” by genealogical descent (C, 107).

The second component of British “machinery,” “wealth,” maps equally well onto the Teutonic autostereotype, with its emphasis on industry and enterprise. “The commonest of common-places tells us how men are always apt to regard wealth as a precious end in itself; and certainly they have never been so apt thus to regard it as they are in England at the present time,” Arnold laments in the chapter titled “Sweetness and Light,” and the duration of Culture and Anarchy is anxiously preoccupied with challenging the consensus that “our greatness and welfare are proved by our being so very rich” (C, 65). Arnold conjoins this second, economic aspect of “machinery” to the first, political one in many passages in this and other chapters, but perhaps the neatest encapsulation of their symbiosis occurs not in Culture and Anarchy but in the earlier essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1864). Tiptoeing toward an indictment of that keystone of national self-regard, the British Constitution, Arnold crosses over into economics:

Where shall we find language innocent enough, how shall we make the spotless purity of our intentions evident enough, to enable us to say to the political Englishmen that the British Constitution itself, which, seen from the practical side, looks such a magnificent organ of progress and virtue, seen from the speculative side . . . sometimes looks . . . a colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines?¹⁵

Arnold links economics with politics in a direct causal chain: the idolatry of wealth which is perhaps Britain’s foremost cultural shortcoming is an outgrowth of the constitution, which Arnold views as enshrining a Barbarian urge toward bullheaded individualism. If the constitution is the product of Teutonic individualism, and if, in turn, it functions as a “colossal machine for the manufacture of Philistines,” there is then [End Page 155] some element of “doing as one likes” that contributes directly to this vulgar materialist trend. Arnold’s simile here makes the case quite blatantly: it is as if the constitution is a massive factory churning out Philistines as its finished products.

Arnold’s political-economic assumptions hereby come to light, as does their foundation in Teutonic discourse. The British state represents the embodiment of primitive Barbarian liberty, and thus reinforces the middle classes in this behavioral tendency that is also their own racial property. This libertarian politics gives the equally racially-ingrained productive and acquisitive impulses of the Teutonic homo economicus free rein. Philistinism, the “stiff-necked” resistance to cultural progress, is the compound product of this nefarious coalescence of domains. The Philistine’s “natural taste for bathos” (C, 118), his vulgar materialist deflation of the nation’s lofty aspirations, is a degenerative racial force that the laissez-faire Victorian state aids and abets, when it should instead be occupied with mitigating its harmful effects, the better to install “right reason” in the population (C, 91). Arnold thus calls for a more interventionist state management of British society to stem the tide of “anarchy,” a disintegrative social principle whose Teutonic basis we are now in a position to identify (C, 83).

Once Teutonic individualism and materialism are identified as evolutionary obstacles, the path for putting culture into practice to foster a “national glow of life and thought” becomes clear (C, 79). However, as Anderson notes in her reading of Arnold, race theory at midcentury could be a stultifying force in that it carried the baggage of a certain racial determinism and therefore placed firm boundaries on the possibilities of human development.¹⁶ Thus, Arnold’s evocation of Teutonic discourse places him in a rhetorical and ideological bind. How could Arnold promote his “social idea” to a people so strongly anchored to a Teutonic foundation (C, 79)? If his readers bear these problematic tendencies in their very blood, any effort to transform them into more imaginative, right-reasoning subjects would seem to be doomed a priori. By accepting the Victorian anthropological premise that civilization manifests biology in his diagnosis of Teutonic “machinery” as the British national malady, Arnold confines his search for a cure to this same biological register. If race is the prime mover of history, then his efforts to alter its course must also obtain a racial sanction.

Arnold’s eventual solution for extricating Englishness from “machinery” arrives in the taxonomy of Hebraism and Hellenism, and it is the precise function of this belated ethnological reorientation to [End Page 156] give the slip to the stultifying dictates of Teutonism. Given that the individual chapters of Culture and Anarchy were originally separate essays, the cohesion of its six sections must, occasionally, break down. This proves particularly to be the case in “Hebraism and Hellenism,” where Arnold significantly revises his anatomy of Englishness. Arnold supplies transitional language between chapters to make this sleight of hand nearly imperceptible, concluding the foregoing essay, “Barbarians, Philistines, Populace,” which grounds “machinery” firmly in Teutonic biology, by proposing to revise its ethnological picture: “But now let us try to go a little deeper, and to find, beneath our actual habits and practice, the very ground and cause out of which they spring” (C, 125). Taking up this “deeper” question at the outset of the subsequent essay, Arnold seems again to verge on confining Englishness to the Teutonic arena of material development, stating, “This fundamental ground is our preference for doing over thinking. Now this preference is a main element in our nature[.]” (C, 126). The proclivity for “doing” continues to “ground” English “nature” at the expense of “thinking”—of culture—in seeming conformity to the Teutonic autostereotype. However, Arnold displays a newfound caginess: if the Philistine preference for doing over thinking is a main element of Englishness, it is merely one component, merely one trait among others, however prominent.

The duration of “Hebraism and Hellenism” follows through on this ethnological equivocation in the effort to achieve ideological equilibrium. The sleight of hand to which I have referred operates as follows. First, Arnold redefines the racial filiations of “machinery” as Hebraic instead of Teutonic, a blunt but unavoidable first step toward circumventing the bind of Teutonic determinism. Second, he explains the presence of this Hebraic tendency in England as the byproduct of Puritanism, the religious heir to Judaism, thereby enabling him to reclassify it as an unnatural importation. Third, having rezoned “machinery” as biologically Hebrew through the first two maneuvers, Arnold redefines Englishness as inherently Hellenic by recourse to a generalized Indo-European ethnicity. The following passage, describing the dialectical alternation of these agencies in British history, displays these rhetorical strategies in rapid succession:

Puritanism, which has been so great a power in the English nation . . . was originally a reaction . . . of Hebraism against Hellenism; and it powerfully manifested itself, as was natural, in a people with much of what we call a Hebraising turn, with a signal affinity for the bent [End Page 157] which was the master-bent of Hebrew life. Eminently Indo-European by its humour, by the power it shows, through this gift, of imaginatively acknowledging the multiform aspects of the problem of life . . . our race has yet . . . in matters of practical life and moral conduct, a strong share of the assuredness, the tenacity, of the Hebrews. This turn manifested itself in Puritanism, and has had a great part in shaping our history . . . [Thus] the main impulse of a great part, and that the strongest part, of our nation, has been towards strictness of conscience. [We] have made the secondary [force] the principal at the wrong moment, and the principal [we] have at the wrong moment treated as secondary. This contravention of the natural order has produced . . . a certain confusion and false movement. . . . Everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a clue to some sound order and authority. This we can get only by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life.

(C, 136–37)

This is a remarkable example of the tortuousness of Arnold’s ethnology. Initially Puritanism, though a Hebrew import to Britain, meets there a native element already given to a “Hebraizing turn.” Because it manifests in “practical life” and resists Hellenic “spontaneity of consciousness,” this native Hebraic element is undoubtedly Teutonic in derivation. As the passage proceeds, however, Arnold gradually minimizes this Teutonic determinism: what begins as a “signal affinity” for the Hebrew “master-bent” becomes simply a “share” of this bent, a “secondary” “impulse” that is finally classed as a “contravention of the natural order,” an order which must then favor the antithetical agency of Hellenism. At the outset Arnold describes a Teutonic Englishness, but by the end he breaks from this equation to define Hellenism as the “signal affinity” of the national biology. The passage thus enacts what it prescribes, “going back upon the actual instincts and forces” seemingly ruling British life—Teutonic ones—“seeing them as they really are”—that is, as Hebraic—displacing them with “other instincts and forces” of Hellenic “bent,” and thereby “enlarging our whole view and rule of life,” this last being a quintessentially Hellenic project. Because these “other instincts” accord better with the “natural order” than Teutonic/Hebraic ones, the national attainment of culture, of “sweetness and light” will now merely involve the restoration of a bygone racial homeostasis (C, 66). In this single, profoundly strained passage, the reader witnesses each of the successive maneuvers by which Arnold writes his way free of the bind of Teutonic discourse. [End Page 158]

II. Culture and the Ontological Critique of Capitalism

To begin defining the larger significance of this racial picture, we must step back and consider the real historical coordinates of Arnold’s cultural program, the referents to which his ethnological terms correspond. The transformation for which Arnold advocates in his revision of Teutonism concerns the historical structures of which this discourse was the ethnological crystallization. The “machinery” he savages is, in effect, a metaphor for the motive forces of British development, central among which is the economic. Indeed, I would suggest that a major part of what Arnold calls “machinery” is what we would call capitalist reification, and that the Philistine norms he reviles index the narrowing of human existence in the mid-nineteenth century to primarily economic or, in Marxist terminology, instrumental imperatives.¹⁷ “Machinery” is a figural attempt to describe the complexity of British capitalist modernization and the ontological disturbances attending this radically transformative process.

Karl Marx himself mounts his early critique of political economy on precisely this ontological plane, where humanity’s rich species potential becomes subjected to the “estrangement” of capitalist labor. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx models what we might call the ontological critique of the capitalist mode of production—a critique that, in my view, Culture and Anarchy also advances. Political economy, “the science of wealth,” to Marx is really the “science of denial, of want, of thrift, of saving,” of “asceticism,” finally, “its true ideal” being “the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave.” “Self-denial, the denial of life and of all human needs,” is its “cardinal doctrine,” whereby “the less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life—the greater is the store of your estranged being.”¹⁸ Marx bases his evisceration of both political economy and the processes it glorifies on the grounds of their “denial of life and of all human needs.” The dual result of humanity’s subordination to this regime, governed by what I would call a repressive-productive dynamic, whereby the denial of certain activities and impulses enables the intensified pursuit of others better fitted to capitalist production, is the increase of capital and the impoverishment of human species being. Just as political economy codifies philosophically this central principle of capitalism, so Teutonism encodes it ethnologically, so that Arnold, by opposing its historical trajectory, communicates an encrypted critique of an emergent capitalist instrumentality. [End Page 159]

Ironically, the transformation of Teuton into Hebrew, though the product of ethnological convenience, enables Arnold to identify the forces driving British capitalism yet more accurately. The figure of the Hebrew conjoins the domains of economics and religion in a manner that presages the work of one of Marx’s most influential successors, Max Weber. Just as Weber reads early capitalism as founded on the Calvinist Protestant ethic, the “ascetic” morality of which fosters precisely the repressive-productive dynamic I have described, so Arnold links the third component of “machinery” in Culture and Anarchy, religious dogmatism, with Britain’s economic achievements:

The whole middle class have a conception of things—a conception which makes us call them Philistines . . . [in which] the main concerns of life [are] limited to these two: the concern for making money, and the concern for saving our souls! And how entirely does the narrow and mechanical conception of our secular business proceed from a narrow and mechanical conception of our religious business! What havoc do the united conceptions make of our lives! It is because the second-named of these two master-concerns presents to us the one thing needful in so fixed, narrow, and mechanical a way, that so ignoble a fellow master-concern to it as the first-named becomes possible; and, having been once admitted, takes the same rigid and absolute character as the other.

(C, 147)

English wealth is the offspring of Puritan morality, the “narrow” observance of which trains the British middle classes for the repressive dynamics of capitalist production. What Weber calls the “summum bonum” or greatest good of his ethic, the accumulation of wealth, is the same unum necessarium or “one thing needful” that Arnold defines as the linchpin of “machinery.”¹⁹ “For no people,” Arnold argues, “has the command to resist the devil, to overcome the wicked one . . . had such a pressing force and reality. And we have had our reward . . . in the great worldly prosperity which our obedience to this command has brought us” (C, 68). Hebraic “strictness of conscience” instills a repressive moral imperative propitious to capitalist development, and through the “mechanical” observance of this dual religious and economic code the British have been “baptized into a death” (C, 132), into an ontological state governed by Marx’s “denial of life and of all human needs.”

I lack the space to adduce the many further passages where Arnold configures “machinery” in terms that closely resemble those of Marx and Weber. But when Arnold complains that the Philistines’ “idea of human perfection is narrow and inadequate” (C, 70), and when he [End Page 160] urges that culture “consists in becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances” (C, 62), I would argue that he is advancing the same ontological critique as they advance, which views the “asceticism” of British capitalism as desiccating humanity’s rich species potential. His recurring metaphor for the reified state of British capitalist modernity, “machinery,” perfectly renders in figural form what one of Marx’s recent interlocutors calls “social domination,” that is, the overwhelming of the human subject by the agglomerated, exploitative apparatuses of capital.²⁰ When, in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Arnold bemoans the contemporary British moment as an “epoch of concentration” or narrowness, he is describing the ontological trajectory of capitalist modernization, and by promoting a regenerative, Hellenic “epoch of expansion,” he attempts to counteract that trajectory’s insidious effects.²¹

III. Capitalism and Celticism

As we turn to Arnold’s other major text of the late 1860s, The Study of Celtic Literature, we shall see that it enacts an ethnological strategy for repairing the “machinery” of capitalism that is both similar to that of Culture and Anarchy and different from it. Once we have witnessed how Culture and Anarchy’s ethnological maneuverings cluster around the problem of “machinery,” and once we have recognized the fully ontological import of this civilizational condition for Arnold, we will have already made substantial progress toward pinpointing the concerns to be addressed in the Study. However, the additional concern taken up by the earlier text, that of the Celt’s aesthetic talents, significantly complicates the anti-capitalist ideological portrait culled from Culture and Anarchy through its entanglement with Anglo-Irish colonialism.

To understand the ideological service rendered Arnold by the Celt, we must first understand the Celt’s place in contemporary British ethnology. Numerous critics and historians have excavated the multitude of characteristics attributed by the British to their Irish subordinates during the mid-nineteenth century. Just as Teutonism valorized British civilization, so the corresponding discourse of Celticism helped justify the Anglo-Irish colonial enterprise by defining atavistic qualities like irrationality, violence, and economic incompetence as inherently Irish.²² As Thomas Boylan and Timothy Foley document in Political Economy and Colonial Ireland, this last aspect of Irish difference, economic incompetence, became perhaps the most potent criterion for [End Page 161] legitimating British rule. In their account, by the time Arnold conceived the Study, Irishness had come to signify an economic recalcitrance so stubborn as to trouble the lofty pretensions of political economy itself, ultimately precipitating a relativization of its laws as specifically British in derivation and applicability rather than universal.²³

Terry Eagleton and Mary Poovey have also documented the process by which Irishness became synonymous with economic ineptitude during the mid-Victorian period. Eagleton reads the Great Famine of the 1840s as a watershed event in this ethnological process, while Poovey, in her account of British social reformer James Phillips Kay, describes him as interpreting the economic degeneration of the British working classes during the 1830s as the product of Irish immigrant influence.²⁴ I borrow a passage of Kay’s from Poovey to illustrate the extent to which Irishness came to be coded as antithetical to capital:

The Irish have taught the laboring classes of this country a pernicious lesson. . . . Debased alike by ignorance and pauperism, they have discovered, with the savage, what is the minimum of the means of life, upon which existence may be prolonged. The paucity of the amount of means and comforts necessary for the mere support of life, is not known by a more civilized population, and this secret has been taught the laborers of this country by the Irish. As competition and the restrictions and burdens of trade diminished the profits of capital, and consequently reduced the price of labour, the contagious example of ignorance and a barbarous disregard of forethought and economy, exhibited by the Irish, spread[.]²⁵

In Kay’s account, Irish immigrants are not merely themselves “[d]ebased” and “barbarous” but spread their congenital “pauperism” to the British working classes. The criterion of economic development Kay applies here is the same one by which George Stocking defines the homo economicus in Victorian Anthropology: “forethought.” The “respectable middle-class man” of the mid-Victorian period, according to Stocking, observed “a prudent self-denying industry” that distinguished him from those races or classes “who had not achieved respectability” and therefore opted for “present self-indulgence.”²⁶ In the terms of John Stuart Mill by which Peter Mandler defines Teutonic “industry,” Kay’s Irish are incapable of undertaking “present exertion for a distant object,” instead succumbing to their basest instinctual impulses.²⁷ At a moment when political economy promotes the exponential increase of the nation’s wealth, the presence of the Irish, a “debilitated race” that Kay calls “dissipators of capital,” cannot be suffered.²⁸ [End Page 162]

From Kay’s study of 1832 through the Great Famine of the 1840s and British political economy in the 1860s, we see a widespread tendency to identify Irishness as an anti-economic agency threatening to counteract Britain’s development. If capitalist modernity is preeminently a Teutonic state of affairs, the Celtic component of the Anglo-Irish colonial binary is intrinsically anti-capitalist. It is within this context that Arnold’s view of the Celtic element in the English racial “composite” becomes legible.²⁹ The Study relies directly on the conception of Irishness as anti-capitalist, as in the following, oft-cited passage which outlines the defining trait of the Celtic “temperament”:

[S]entimental, if the Celtic nature is to be characterized by a single term, is the best term to take. An organization quick to feel impressions, and feeling them very strongly; a lively personality therefore, keenly sensitive to joy and to sorrow; this is the main point. . . . Sentimental—always ready to react against the despotism of fact . . . [this term] lets us into the secret of its dangers and of its habitual want of success. Balance, measure, and patience, these are the eternal conditions . . . of high success; and balance, measure and patience are just what the Celt has never had.

(S, 84–86)

The penchant for “sentiment,” a powerful sensitivity to external stimuli, defines the Celt as a primarily emotive rather than rational being. As a “feminine” race—a characterization Arnold takes directly from his predecessor in matters Celtic, Ernest Renan—the Celt lacks the practical male capacity for “high success” in the world of “fact” (S, 90).³⁰ The Celt’s “habitual want” of economic achievement derives from a congenital inability to subordinate the body’s drives to capitalism’s repressive-productive dynamic, which demands “balance, measure and patience”—in a word, “forethought.”

What begins as a material disadvantage for the Celt, however, transmogrifies into an advantage in the aesthetic realm. While lacking the “industry, the well-doing, the patient steady elaboration of things” that is the “strong side” of Teutonic peoples and spurs them toward their “immense development” (S, 82), the Celt possesses the “sweet” resources needed to prevent “the steady humdrum habit of the creeping Saxon” (S, 92)—the “lack of all beauty and distinction” that is his “weak side” (S, 82)—from further fertilizing “Philistinism, that plant of essentially Germanic growth” (S, 92). The purpose of Arnold’s “commingling” of these “very unlike elements . . . the steady-going Saxon temperament and the sentimental Celtic temperament,” is thus not simply to naturalize as a biological fait accompli Ireland’s Union [End Page 163] with Britain, but to provide for the reform of Philistinism (S, 93).³¹ Arnold sees the “sweetness” that will enable this reform at work in the best English poetry, providing it with “its turn for style, its turn for melancholy, and its turn for natural magic, for catching and rendering the charm of nature in a wonderfully near and vivid way” (S, 113). The Celt’s immersion in the state of nature provides for an amazingly “vivid” ability to render its “charm,” a visceral intensity of utterance that manifests formally the “sentimental” capacity of this “poetical race” (S, 115). The Celt’s low place on the evolutionary ladder, while rendering her unfit for political and economic equality, generates an aesthetic capacity with the “magic[al]” ability to repair the “machinery” of Teutonism.

Arnold thus places Celtic “sentiment” at the heart of his “ideal genius” (S, 89). However, he stops short of advocating an undiluted Celticism and insists that the Celt’s “natural magic” must be “mastered” to achieve its potential (S, 90). It is here, with the notion of a mastering of the Celt’s aesthetic gifts, that we can address a particularly problematic tendency of recent Arnold criticism, namely the tendency to equate the Celt of the Study with the Hellene of Culture and Anarchy. Thus far I have described the two in somewhat similar terms, as both Celt and Hellene provide a “sweet,” expansive counterinfluence to the “narrow” ontology of Teutonic “machinery.” Arnold, however, makes several analytically pivotal distinctions between the two that we must note if we are to map the architectonics of his ethnology across the late-1860s oeuvre.³²

What Arnold seeks is a way simultaneously to take advantage of the potential of the Celt to infuse aesthetic “sweetness” and to avoid falling prey to her perceived practical deficiencies. The Celtic component of the “ideal genius,” the perceptual hypersensitivity known as “sentiment,” is a “beautiful and admirable force,” but it must be bridled in order to correct the Celt’s insufficiently “successful activity” (S, 90). It is just this capacity for mastery, a supplementary “law of measure, of harmony, presiding over the whole” (S, 86) of “composite” Englishness, Teutonic and Celtic, which Arnold locates in Hellenism:

The Greek has the same perceptive, emotional temperament as the Celt; but he adds to this temperament the sense of measure; hence his admirable success in the plastic arts, in which the Celtic genius, with its chafing against the despotism of fact, its perceptual straining after mere emotion, has accomplished nothing.

(S, 86) [End Page 164]

The Hellenic genius supplies what the Celtic lacks, “the sense of measure” needed to channel “mere” emotive and perceptual powers toward artistic achievement. The Hellene possesses an aesthetic talent to match the Celt’s, a capacity that is surely at the root of the critical tendency to equate the two figures, but he possesses the organizational capacity the Celt lacks, a masculine mastery of his feminine sensibilities.

What emerges, then, is a tripartite schema involving three distinct ethnological entities, the Teuton, the Celt, and the Hellene, each possessing a different proportion of aesthetic and material-developmental abilities. Another passage on Celtic “sentiment” crystallizes this schema by distinguishing the three according to their representational propensities:

The Celt’s quick feeling . . . gave his poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and passion; his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it . . . the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature. . . . Magic is just the word for it,—the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature,—that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism—that the Germans had; but the intimate life of nature, her weird power and fairy charm.

(S, 132–33)

Arnold defines the differences between the talents of Celt, Hellene, and Saxon against the common backdrop of “nature,” and describes their relation to this aesthetic referent as consisting respectively of “magic,” “beauty,” and “a faithful realism.”³³ The Celt offers a “weird power and fairy charm” in her rendering of nature that is directly opposed to the tame realism of the “humdrum” Saxon, and between these two extremes resides Hellenic art, retaining some of nature’s raw affective power but muting it with an element of control and specular distance. The Hellene inhabits an ideal middle ground between Teutonic and Celtic aesthetics.

The midcentury anthropological discourse on which Arnold’s schema draws distinguished between so-called primitive and civilized races in several interdependent registers. Thus far I have emphasized the economic register and have shown how this discourse constructed the Teutonic/Celtic opposition according to the putative racial bent for or against the “industry” that is the engine of capitalist development. This economic opposition, however, rested on a parallel opposition in the epistemological register, such that Teutonic “success” was thought to arise from a proclivity toward rational thought, while the Celt’s lack of success was thought to arise from “magical” or “homeopathic” mental habits.³⁴ Probing the consequences of anthropological [End Page 165] distinctions for the aesthetic theorization of the mid-Victorian period, this epistemological anatomy becomes pivotal. The rational/magical dichotomy devised to naturalize colonial difference and legitimate British rule also delimited the aesthetic practices to which the empire’s Manichean constituents, civilized and primitive, could be expected to tend. Given that capitalist modernization distanced the civilized British from original nature, it is logical for Arnold to define Teutonic aesthetics as muffling its uncanny power almost beyond recognition. Moreover, because Teutonic modernization rests on a representational regime that is rational in substance, a regime that Arnold simply dubs “science,” it is to be expected that he define this aesthetic as a realist one (S, 82). Conversely, because the primitive Celt resides outside capitalist modernity in original nature, it is logical that her aesthetic renders its “weird power and fairy charm” in a comparatively direct manner. Because Celtic epistemology is “sentimental,” consisting of a preternaturally sensitive relation to its objects, Arnold can only define the Celt’s aesthetic as a magical one.

Arnold’s maneuvering between the economic and aesthetic registers via the epistemological one that conjoins them reveals the full picture of his ethnologically encrypted ideology. Arnold reviles Philistinism as a degenerated developmental state in which the British have been reduced to machine-like automata, deficient in both light and sweetness. His politics demands that he define the talent for “light” as Teutonic, because only an equation between this rational epistemology, capitalist development, and Anglo-Saxonness can naturalize the British as imperial masters of the modern world. But reason and capitalism, however far they might be pushed, cannot overcome the deficit entailed in Teutonic “machinery,” because both require the repression of energies that must be expressed to achieve the utopian ontology of culture. Thus, to transform Teutonic reason simple into the Hellenic right reason that defines cultural “perfection,” a counteragent to Philistine ontological alienation, “sweetness,” must be sought in a racial elsewhere, in the makeup of a figure residing outside modernity, the Celt. So as not to interfere with the material domain, this counteragency is confined to the aesthetic domain, a marginal position from which the Celt can exert her “sweet” influence without disturbing Anglo-Irish power relations.

The Study is a deeply conflicted text, but it is a legible one. Arnold finds the Celt’s evolutionarily vestigial being a wellspring of energies capable of repairing the ontological damage wrought by capitalism, but he cannot bring himself to embrace the political correlative of [End Page 166] this bold aesthetic gesture. Ultimately, his definition of the Celt as materially hapless spills over into his aesthetic analysis as well, with the result that his ideal aesthetic cannot remain strictly Celtic. It thus becomes Hellenic, directly prefiguring the prescriptions of Culture and Anarchy. The term by which Arnold defines the Hellene’s paradigmatic Indo-European epistemology in the Study, “imaginative reason” (S, 125), neatly encapsulates his desire to fuse magic and rationality, instinctual fulfillment and material development, “sweetness and light.” Imaginative reason: this compact phrase combines the Celt’s visionary “imaginative” talents with the Saxon’s rational, “realist” perceptual modality in an ideal civilizational formula. By emulating this hybrid figure, the English can better farm their own “mixed” biological resources and “use the German faithfulness to Nature to give us science . . . [and] use the Celtic quickness of perception to give us delicacy, and to free us from hardness and Philistinism” (S, 147). The Hellene, marrying Teutonic “measure “and Celtic “sentiment,” becomes the racial paragon of Arnold’s cultural ideal, resolving the ideological tension between his political disenfranchisement of the Irish Celt and his celebration of her aesthetic talents. Just as Culture and Anarchy will utilize ethnological encoding to provide for the repair of Teutonic “machinery,” so the Study performs a slightly different encoding, one complicated by the political demands of Anglo-Irish colonialism, toward this same end.

IV. Reviving Arnold’s Anti-Capitalism

Arnold’s Celticism provides a striking case study in the normative contradictions of his mid-Victorian moment. At the purely instrumental level, the ethnological view of the Celt as unfit for self-government functioned to legitimate British colonial rule, while in the economic domain, the definition of the Celt as incapable of “industry” and “fore-thought” enabled Arnold to naturalize capitalist modernity as a biologically English state of affairs. Beyond these instrumental functions, however, Arnold’s Celticism must be understood as motivated by an urge for the return of repressed energies, for an alternative ontological modality of which the British unconsciously felt themselves deprived through the rigid, mortifying demands of the numerous interlocking social codes of Victorian respectability, among which, as I have argued, the repressive-productive dynamic of capitalism is foundational. In the words of the Study, the utopian Britain that lies beyond the reified, desiccated ontology of capitalist “machinery” “can only be reached by studying things that are outside of ourselves” (S, 151–52). [End Page 167]

It is the crowning symptom of these contradictions that Arnold finally abandons the radical aestheticism of the Study to embrace a compromise figure, the Hellene of Culture and Anarchy. Only in the Hellene can Arnold successfully harmonize the dissonance between the political, economic, and aesthetic registers of his thought. The practical political consequence of this ideological compromise, which stunts the expansive impulse of Celticism with a reaffirmed Teutonic “measure,” would seem to be that only the British partner in the Anglo-Irish relationship can fulfill the historical Aufhebung the Hellene models. However, in order to keep in view the complex overdeterminations he focalizes, we must remember that the Hellene is a palimpsest of Arnold’s engagement with both Teutonism and Celticism, and that whatever his antipathy to Irish nationalism, by configuring his racial paragon as a Teutonic-Celtic hybrid, Arnold defines his utopian Britain as a “composite” entity whose conservative political form would be undermined by its progressive social content. Though Arnold’s modernity would still draw its power from a Teutonic engine, the reconfigured “machinery” of this engine would place the British on a very different ontological course than the one plotted by the prevailing zeitgeist.

For practical corroboration of the progressive potential latent within Arnold’s Celticism, however, we must look beyond Britain to the colonized nation whose independence he so staunchly opposed.³⁵ As a result of the thorough integration of its economic lifeworld with that of the imperial metropole in the wake of the Great Famine, Ireland, in defiance of Arnold’s hegemonic intentions, stood directly to benefit from that aspect of Arnold’s ethnological theories that sought to resist the reified ontology of capitalist modernity. To define the Celt as inherently resistant to “industry” was simultaneously to provide the emergent Irish nationalism whose decolonizing trajectory Arnold hoped to stem with a buttressed raison d’être and a refined self-conception, such that a galvanizing cultural component came to be grafted onto the more strictly material resistance campaigns of organizations such as the Fenians and the Irish National Land League. Thus, in the period of the Celtic Revival from the mid-1880s onward, the student of Irish history discovers an increasing deployment of anti-capitalist ethnological ideals directly indebted to Arnold’s Study. In this context, the same Celticism through which Arnold sought (in part) to sanction British rule becomes a powerful lever against that rule, serving as a vehicle for the articulation of a dually anti-capitalist and anti-imperial nationalism. [End Page 168]

Irish nationalism at the fin-de-siècle is thus not merely negatively indebted to Arnold as an imperialist ideologue whose ethnological formulations, in Fanonian fashion, it would need to cast off in order to articulate a liberatory postcolonial vision.³⁶ Rather, in the case of the economic stereotype of the Irish Celt as resistant to capitalism, Irish nationalism’s alternative cultural vision is in fact positively indebted to these formulations. As a result of their thorough incorporation by British capitalism, the Irish found themselves situated in a temporally advanced position within the dialectics of colonial modernity. They were thus able, by virtue of what one critic has dubbed their “metrocolonial” condition, to conceive a liberatory nationalism addressed toward social problems otherwise distant from British colonial experience.³⁷ Because the ontological problem confronting Irish nationalists was therefore the very same “machinery” that so bedeviled Matthew Arnold, the decolonizing labors of members of the Irish Literary Revival such as William Butler Yeats, John Millington Synge, and Douglas Hyde, such Irish Ireland advocates as D. P. Moran and Arthur Griffith, and even radical Socialists such as James Connolly—who has recently been interpreted as propounding an ideal of “Celtic Communism” as an alternative to British capitalism—can be read as enablingly rather than debilitatingly inspired by the theories of one of the leading ideologues of Anglo-Irish colonialism.³⁸ In their hands, the abortive birth of the aestheticized, “sweet”-ened modernity toward which Arnold worked reaches its radical, counter-hegemonic fulfillment, a fulfillment which, if not for his pioneering though limited vision, would perhaps not have been possible.