1. Edwar W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. xiii.
2. Ibid., p. 320.
3. Arnold’s high estimation of Greek literature (especially poetry) is perhaps most eloquently set forth in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry in Oxford in 1857, entitled “On the modern element in literature,” in: Matthew Arnold on the Classical Tradition=Id., Complete Prose Works 1, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 18–37. For a general study of Arnold’s thoughts about the classics, see Warren D. Anderson, Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965). Arnold’s concept of liberal education also embraces modern literature, but he, makes it clear that the ultimate aim of liberal education (“to enable a man to know, himself and the world”) is best obtained through a study of classical literature: “the value of the humanities, of Altertumswissenschaft, the science of antiquity, is, that it affords for this purpose an unsurpassed source of light and stimulus. Whoever seeks help for knowing himself from knowing the capabilities and performances of the human spirit, will nowhere find a more fruitful object of study than in the achievements of Greece in literature and the arts during the two centuries from the birth of Simonides to the death of Plato” (from Arnold, Schools and Universities on the Continent [1868] =Id., Complete Prose Works 4, ed. Super [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1964], p. 190). Similarly, in Literature and Science (1885, in: Id., Philistinism in England and America =Id., Complete Prose Works 10, ed. Super [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974], p. 71), Arnold makes the point that Greek literature best serves the human instinct for beauty and should therefore be increasingly important in education.—On Matthew Arnold and the concept of “culture” see Joseph Carroll, The Cultural Theory of Matthew Arnold (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1982); Fred G. Walcott, The Origins of Culture and Anarchy: Matthew Arnold and Popular Education in England (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1970), and Matthew Arnold in His Time and Ours: Centenary Essays, ed. Clinton Machanan and Forrest D. Burt (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1988), especially David J. DeLaura, “Matthew Arnold and Culture: the History and the Prehistory,” pp. 1–16.
4. E.g.: “But above all in our own country has culture a weighty part to perform, because here that mechanical character, which civilization tends to take everywhere, is shown in the most eminent degree ... The idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is at variance with the mechanical and material civilization in esteem with us” (Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), in: Id., Culture and Anarchy, with Friendship’s Garland and some literary essays = Id., Complete Prose Works, 5, ed. Super, [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965], p. 95). Elsewhere, p. 119, Arnold attributes a rising tendency to anarchy in Britain to a “superstifious faith” in machinery. The opposition between culture and machinery is a commonplace of British nineteenth-century thought which is first voiced in the eighteenth century—see Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (New York and London, 1958), p. 37—and which, according to Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850–1980 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), continues to haunt Britain to deleterious effect.
5. I use the term coined by Ronald Hyam in Britain’s Imperial Century 1815–1914. A Study of Empire and Expansion (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1976). The dates mark, of course, the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the beginning of World War I—see Hyam, ibid., Britain’s Imperial Century 1815–1914. A Study of Empire and Expansion (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1976) 377.