In the essays collected as Culture and Anarchy
(1869), Arnold attacked the smug, backward "provinciality" of
English culture, which was dominated by well-mannered
aristocratic "Barbarians" and even more by morally earnest
middle-class "Philistines." In the fourth essay he
distinguished the Philistines' impulse of Hebraism (letting
the revealed truth of religion guide one's actions) from the
intellectual and aesthetic impulse of Hellenism (seeking truth
disinterestedly, using human rather than divine guides).
Arnold felt that English culture was excessively Hebraic and
needed rebalancing. He was agnostic himself, but he admired
religious contemporaries like John Henry Newman.
By the end of the century, however, Arnold’s language had
been subsumed into a black-and-white culture war between
repressive middle-class "philistines" and freedom-loving,
artistic "bohemians" (a term that had emerged in Paris in the
early 19th century to describe artists). “Greek,” Gifford
observes, now connoted bohemian freedom, sensual pleasure, and
aesthetic beauty, while “Jew” connoted social repression,
“straightlaced Victorian morality,” and hostility to art.
Mulligan embodies the decadence of this fin-de-siècle
scene, and he shows none of Arnold’s interest in
restoring cultural balance. His Hellenism consists of Swinburnean values: flashy
style over intellectual substance, hedonism over conventional
morality, and atheistic blasphemy over religious piety. In Scylla
and Charybdis he praises "The Greek mouth that
has never been twisted in prayer."
Ulysses also drops a hint or two that Mulligan may
entertain the ancient Greek openness to choice of genders in
sexual pursuits. In the same part of Scylla and Charybdis,
having seen Bloom looking between the nether cheeks of the statue of a Greek goddess, he not
only infers that the Jew is interested in a forbidden kind of
intercourse: “O, I fear me, he is Greeker than the
Greeks. His pale Galilean eyes were upon her mesial groove.”
He also infers that such interest implies sexual
ambidexterity: “The wandering jew... Did you see his eye? He
looked upon you to lust after you. I fear thee, ancient
mariner. O, Kinch, thou art in peril. Get thee a breechpad.” A
certain amount of projection seems to be going on. Mulligan
sounds distinctly queeny in recounting what Dowden said about
Shakespeare: “Lovely! Buck Mulligan suspired amorously. I
asked him what he thought of the charge of pederasty brought
against the bard. He lifted his hands and said: All we
can say is that life ran very high in those days.
Lovely!” To which someone in the following line (almost
certainly Stephen) thinks, “Catamite.”
Mulligan’s joking about Bloom being simultaneously Jewish and
Greek points comically and obliquely (a way in which this book
typically makes meaning) toward the Arnoldian idea that (contra
Mulligan’s own practice) these two cultural impulses might
coexist, combine, and even coincide. In Circe a cap
exclaims, “Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet. Death
is the highest form of life. Bah!” This coincidence
of contraries is manifested most obviously in the coming
together of the book’s two principal characters. The first
chapter identifies Stephen with Hellenism in ways ranging from
his "Paris fads" and his “ancient
Greek" names to his principled refusal to compromise his
intellect for the sake of his mother’s piety. Bloom
dresses and acts like a conventional middle-class wage-earner,
he becomes identified with the ancient, archetypal figure of
the wandering Jew, and his
relentlessly practical and moral sensibility contrasts starkly
with Stephen’s high intellectual and aesthetic disregard for
such things (even though he has, like Stephen, rejected
religion). To the extent that some uncanny Father-Son unity is realized
between these very different men, jewgreek is indeed greekjew.
Despite Arnold's importance in theorizing the union of
Hellenic intellectual freedom with Hebraic moral rectitude, Ulysses
subjects him to some mockery as a stuffy English gentleman of
the previous generation, using the same imagery with which it
trivializes "Lawn Tennyson,
gentleman poet." When Stephen imagines a scene at Magdalen College,
Oxford in Telemachus, he places Arnold there,
tending to the prim propriety of the place: "A deaf gardener,
aproned, masked with Matthew Arnold's face,
pushes his mower on the sombre lawn watching narrowly the
dancing motes of grasshalms." In Circe "The
Siamese twins, Philip Drunk and Philip Sober, two
Oxford dons with lawnmowers, appear in the window
embrasure. Both are masked with Matthew Arnold's face."
Of these passages Gifford observes that "Arnold's emphasis on
restraint, poise, and taste, and on what contemporaries called
the 'ethical element' in literature, was regarded as
Philistinism incarnate by turn-of-the-century aesthetes, even
though many of their terms were derived from Arnold and
Arnold's influence was (from an academic point of view) still
paramount in English criticism."
The importance of "hellenising" the island can be gauged from
its history in the decades following independence from
Britain. The policies of the Free State and early
Republic––conservative, sexually repressive, slavishly
deferential to the dictates of Catholic authorities––reveal as
nothing else could that the excessive "hebraism" of Irish
society was not solely a product of colonial subjugation.
Joyce's occasional mockery of Matthew Arnold masks the fact
that he found in him one literary inspiration for liberating
the souls of his countrymen.
