HEBRAISM AND HELLENISM IN "OUR MUTUAL FRIEND"

To make Riah the only Jew in the novel, he claims, is once again to scapegoat the Jew as a Jew. Because Riah is not seen in the context of his “Jewish reference group” he is “non-narratable. To make her point, Morris examines “some of the main currents of feeling and social forces of the 1860s” (182), and in so doing analyzes Max Müller's “Science of Language” lectures given at the Royal Institute from 1861 to 1863 to argue forcefully that Dickens's ending of the novel follows Miiller “in suggesting a revitalization of imaginative energies through an alliance of cultivation (in the form of the patrician disaffection of Wrayburn and his linguistic playfulness) with the ‘dialect-speaking classes’” (187). [...]the marriage of Lizzie and Eugene brings “patrician disaffection” together with the “dialectspeaking class” to resolve the problem of finding cultural self-renewal in a society that has “devalued its own expressive currency” through the degeneration of language resulting from Podsnappery. Arnold argues that Christianity, “Hebraism aiming at self-conquest and rescue from the thrall of vile affections, not by obedience to the letter of the law, but by conformity to the image of a self-sacrificing example” (113), saved the pagan Hellenic world from the “self-dissatisfaction and ennui” it had fallen into (114), and thus became the dominant cultural current in Western Europe until the Renaissance, at which time there was “an uprising and reinstatement of man's intellectual impulses and of Hellenism” (116). [...]Arnold sees a return to Hellenism as the answer to England's cultural crisis.