Arnold and Renan on the Popular Uses of History

Abstract

In selecting the role of importer and interpreter of French intelligence rather than that of exporter and expounder of British liberalism, Matthew Arnold (once Merry Matt) must certainly have derived some perverse pleasure from swimming against the Victorian current. Thus no less temperamentally than ideologically he was bound to find an ally in the French historian and critic, Ernest Renan, whose views of the English ideals of utility and comfort were as dim and satirical as his own. pot of English manufacture, wrote Renan, better adapted to its purpose than all the Greek vases of Vulci or of Nola. But, he would add caustically, are works of art, while the English pot will never be anything more than a household utensil. 1 Both writers were acid in their scorn of what they considered egoistic bourgeois values; both sought to expand the boundaries of man's relationship with man; both described their search with the same vocabulary-the pursuit of perfection through criticism, disinterestedness, self-sacrifice. And both may be aptly characterized as missionaries of these higher values under the broader name of culture. Yet even this outline can only hint at their remarkable sympathy, a sympathy that has, in fact, become something of a truism among casual writers on Arnold and general commentators on the history of ideas in the XIXth century. The question Arnold scholars in their turn have attempted to answer is whether or not this sympathy owed very much to the direct influence of Renan upon Arnold. For the past fifty years or more scattered efforts to examine this issue have largely affirmed the casual view that it did.2 A study of these efforts,