HILARY FRASERsubjected the past to new kinds of scrutiny through their engagement with
the cultural ideal of Hellenism. For a start, Arnold's poetry articulates in a
particularly poignant register the kind of historical disinheritance that
Foucault discusses. In this respect, his best-known poem "Dover Beach"
(1867) may be said to offer a more compelling example of Arnold's
historicist poetics than his Hellenic drama Merope (1857): the long poem
that prompted Swinburne to ask: "the clothes are well enough but where
has the body gone?" 8 "Dover Beach" is set firmly in what Arnold in 1849
called the deeply "unpoetical... age" 9 of mid-nineteenth-century Britain -
a "darkling plain... I Where ignorant armies clash by night" (MA
35-37). Yet at the same time "Dover Beach" refers to "Sophocles long
ago" (15), the classical philosopher who heard the same "eternal note of
sadness" (14) in the sounds of the sea. In addition, the temporal backdrop
to the poem conforms to an evolutionary time-scale and an historical
perspective more vertiginous than the cliffs of Dover themselves. The very
mise en scene is suggestive of the accumulations and encrustations of
geological time, in contrast to the spiritual bankruptcy of the all-too-
human poetic subject. As such, it eloquently exemplifies Foucault's theory
of humanity's historical dispossession in the face of the newly acknowl-
edged historicity of the natural sciences. In "Dover Beach," we witness a
reformulated world where, as Foucault says, "nature no longer speaks to
[humanity] of the creation or the end of the world, of his dependency or
his approaching judgement; it no longer speaks of anything but a natural
time." 10
Arnold's historicist poetry is driven by a profound sense of loss, and also
by a keen awareness of historical processes. His Hellenism forms part of a
broader cultural project to reassert human historicity in the face of the
dispossession that Foucault identifies. But this project is marked by
ideological contradiction. Chapter 4 of Culture and Anarchy (1869) offers
what is perhaps the most famous statement of Victorian humanistic
Hellenism: a philosophical position founded upon a belief in the transhisto-
rical uniformity of human nature. 11 And yet modern historicist ideas that
radically undercut such a formulation run throughout Arnold's best poetry.
Although Arnold often appears as the proponent of a unitary concept of
Greek civilization characterized by a rational and calm "sweetness and
light," 12 in some of his early poetry - such as "Empedocles on Etna" (which
first appeared in 1852) - he depicts an ancient Greek culture as conflicted
as his own. Indeed, in the famous "Preface" to his Poems (1853), where he
expresses his unease with "Empedocles" and explains why he has refused to
reprint it in the volume, Arnold portrays late-fifth-century Greece as a time
when "the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced." 13 This is an
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