^{Note 1} Both the Preface to the 1853 Poems and “On the Modern Element in Literature” appear in On the Classical Tradition, Vol. I of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960–77), pp. 1–15; 18–37; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. The cited materials are on pp. 4 and 28.

^{Note 2} 3 May 1979, pp. 33–36. The quoted material appears on p. 33.

^{Note 3} Antigone, trans. Elizabeth Wykcoff, The Complete Greek Tragedies: Sophocles I, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1954), 11. 31–32; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

^{Note 4} The authoritative Victorian editor of Sophocles, R. C. Jebb, brackets lines 904–20 (included in all the manuscripts) as spurious, scribal, “orientalizing” interpolations from a tale by Herodotus. Most modem translators, with the important exception of Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald in their 1939 version, omit brackets, defending the lines as Sophoclean if only because Aristotle quotes two of them in the Rhetoric 3.16(147a). For a summary of the controversy, see Phillip Whalley Harsh, A Handbook of Classical Drama (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1944), pp. 108–09.

^{Note 5} Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (Phänomen-ologie des Geistes), trans. J. B. Baillie, rev. 2nd ed. (1910; rpt. London: Allen and Unwin, 1949), pp. 456506; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

^{Note 6} Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen & uUber die Geschichte der Philosophie), trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances Simon (New York: Humanities, 1955), i, 441.

^{Note 7} Kaufmann, “Antigone and Sittlichkeit,” in Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), p. 127.

^{Note 8} Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik), trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), ii, 1218; I, 464; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

^{Note 9} René Wellek discusses tragedy and the Hegelian dialectic in The Romantic Age, Vol. II of History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1955), p. 331.

^{Note 10} Lionel Abel, one of the more recent critics who have considered this limitation, suggests it as the reason Hegel proposed a second theory of tragedy for Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. See Moderns on Tragedy, ed. and introd. Lionel Abel (New York: Fawcett, 1967), p. 26.

^{Note 11} Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), p. 262, n.; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as Essays. Eliot's review of the Antigone text also appears in this volume. Her familiarity with Arnold's Preface is evidenced by her review of the 1853 Poems for the Westminster Review, 64 (July 1855), 297–98; moreover, George Henry Lewes, her mentor in classical matters, reviewed the volume for the Leader, 26 Nov. 1853, pp. 1146–47.

^{Note 12} Whether or not Eliot's “collision” intentionally alludes to the Hegelian Kollision, the word is habitual with her when she refers to tragedy. In her Notes on “The Spanish Gypsy” she characterizes tragedy as representing “some grand collision in the human lot” and, more specifically, the “irreparable collision between the individual and the general” (George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, ed. J. W. Cross [New York: Harper and Bros., 1885], iii, 30–34). That such a definition was meant to apply to a heroine like Dorothea Brooke is clear from the penultimate paragraph of Middlemarch. Both in the manuscript and in the parts publication of 1872 (though not in the final revision for book publication, which I quote below in the text), Eliot refers to the inescapable “collisions” of Dorothea's life, given the imperfect, prosaic conditions of the society against which her “great feelings” must struggle. Jerome Beaty, in “The Text of the Novel: A Study of the Proof,” Middlemarch; Critical Approaches to the Novel, ed. Barbara Hardy (London: Athlone, 1967), pp. 59–60, compares the three versions of the text.

^{Note 13} Relying on that one allusion—a reference, in a letter, to a single, not particularly important line in Hegel's Aesthetics —Darrell Mansell, Jr., in “A Note on Hegel and George Eliot,” Victorian Newsletter, 27 (1965), 12–15, argues unconvincingly that Eliot's concept of tragedy in the major novels derives in substantial measure from that work. And U. C. Knoepflmacher, in George Eliot's Early Novels (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968), p. 29, n., describes a manuscript in the Beinecke Library at Yale, “possibly in George Eliot's hand,” that contains a full commentary on George Henry Lewes' treatment of Hegel in the Biographical History of Philosophy (1854–57). While Eliot could express bemusement over English intellectuals who spoke authoritatively on Hegel after having read him only in John Sibree's translation of 1849 and not in the German (The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1954–55], ii, 511), the impact of Hegel's work on Eliot, filtered as such influence undoubtedly was through Lewes, seems impossible to assess with exactitude. The most recent study of nineteenth-century Anglo-German literary relations, Rosemary Ashton's The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), does not, in its section on Eliot (pp. 147–77), consider a Hegelian influence, although Hegel figures prominently in the discussion of Lewes (pp. 105–46).

^{Note 14} According to R. C. Jebb, Sophocles: The Plays and Fragments, iii (Cambridge, 1888), xxi; as described in Essays, p. 264, n. For the equally important influence of the Hegelian Otto Friedrich Gruppe's Ariadne: Die Tragische Kunst der Griechen (1834) on Eliot's view of tragedy, see Knoepflmacher, pp. 171–75.

^{Note 15} Moldstad, “The Mill on the Floss and Antigone” PMLA, 85 (1970), 527–31.

^{Note 16} Middlemarch, ed. Gordon S. Haight (Boston: Riverside-Houghton, 1956), pp. 139–41; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

^{Note 17} See William Sullivan, “Piero di Cosimo and the Higher Primitivism in Romola,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 26 (1971), 390–405. Hugh Witemeyer, however, both in “George Eliot, Naumann, and the Nazarenes,” Victorian Studies, 18 (1974), 145–58, and in George Eliot and the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 86–87, argues that Naumann's allegorizing tendency represents merely another “incomplete insight” in a novel full of optical failures.

^{Note 18} Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot (London: Athlone, 1959), p. 175.

^{Note 19} Felicia Bonaparte, in The Triptych and the Cross: The Central Myths of George Eliot's Poetic Imagination (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1979), fully describes the accommodation of Bacchus and Christ in Romola and elsewhere in Eliot's work. The discussion of Tito's name appears on pp. 83–84.

^{Note 20} Joseph Wiesenfarth, in George Eliot's Mythmaking (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1977), p. 186, makes the point that in the world of Middlemarch the aggressive heroism of the Antigone is no longer possible, only the heroism of Oedipus at Colonus, which is compassionate fellow feeling.

^{Note 21} Daniel Deronda (Boston, 1907–08; rpt. New York: AMS, 1970), ii, 137. Joseph Wiesenfarth, who has edited the Commonplace Notebook as George Eliot: A Writers Notebook, 1854–1879 (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, forthcoming), generously called this quotation (which appears on p. 3) to my attention.

^{Note 22} For a recent discussion of Barry's The New Antigone (New York: Macmillan, 1887), see Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33 (1979), 434–53.

^{Note 23} Woolf, Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt, 1938), pp. 124 and 259, n. The entry for 29 Oct. 1934 in Woolf's A Writer's Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt, 1953), p. 222, records that the novelist was reading the Antigone while working on Three Guineas and The Pargiters (the early version of The Years).

^{Note 24} Woolf, The Years (New York: Harcourt, 1937), p. 51; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. In the Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 80 (Winter 1977), an entire issue devoted to reappraising this generally neglected and underrated late novel, Jane Marcus' “The Years as Greek Drama, Domestic Novel, and Gotterdammerung,” pp. 276–301, is especially pertinent to the present emphasis. She suggests that, following the lead of the classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, Woolf uses Antigone to affirm the return of chthonic matriarchal values as over against the death of historically secondary patriarchal ones, thereby celebrating the death and rebirth of the Spirit of the Year. For a study that traces the Antigone motif through the novel and arrives at conclusions quite different from my own, see Mitchell Leaska, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: From Beginning to End (New York: John Jay Press of the City Univ. of New York, 1977), pp. 190–235 passim.

^{Note 25} Significant allusions to the Antigone occur at the outset of Woolf's career in The Voyage Out (1915) and in the medial “On Not Knowing Greek” of The Common Reader (1st ser., 1925) as well as in the late Three Guineas and The Years. Such strategically placed repetition of image has led Jean Guiguet to assert that Antigone is the most autobiographical of the many literary figures who appear in the works, that she “appeals to Thoby Stephen's devoted sister like a double whose fate haunts her,” and that an Antigone-like “hopeless passion” for a dead brother is a key to Woolf's personality, especially her attraction to death (Virginia Woolf and Her Works, trans. Jean Stewart [London: Hogarth, 1965], pp. 149, 464). In a study of the textual development of The Voyage Out, Louise DeSalvo goes even further. She argues that the association of the death of its heroine, Rachel Vinacre, with the burial of Antigone, a motif not spelled out until the latest version of the text, alludes to Woolf's desire to rejoin not only her brother but also her dead father and mother (Virginia Woolf's First Voyage: A Novel in the Making [Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980], pp. 153, 155, 159).

^{Note 26} While analyzing Hegel's brilliant discussion of Rameau's Nephew in the Phenomenology of Mind, Lionel Trilling, in Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 42–44, argues that J. B. Baillie felt free to render Hegel's Bildung as “Culture” in the 1910 translation of the Phenomenology precisely because Arnold's notion of Culture encompassed that Germanic meaning. Hegel appears as an intellectual predecessor of Arnold's throughout Trilling's Matthew Arnold (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), although Trilling thinks that, while Arnold was generally considered a Victorian disciple, he probably had not read much of Hegel's work (p. 90, n.). For a summary (in which Hegel figures hardly at all) of Arnold's familiarity with German idealist thought, see Park Honan, “Fox How and the Continent: Matthew Arnold's Path to the European Sentimental School and ‘La Passion réfléchissante,‘ ” Victorian Poetry, 16 (1978), 58–69.

^{Note 27} Drabble, The Ice Age (New York: Knopf, 1977); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

^{Note 28} Drabble, For Queen and Country: Britain in the Victorian Age (New York: Seabury, 1979); hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

^{Note 29} Kitto, Greek Tragedy: A Literary Study (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954),, p. 134.

^{Note 30} Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “The Ambiguity of Female Identity: A Reading of the Novels of Margaret Drabble,” Partisan Review, 46 (1979), 234–48; the quoted phrase appears on p. 235.

^{Note 31} John Eells, Jr., demonstrates this involvement throughout The Touchstones of Matthew Arnold (New York: Bookman Associates, 1955). “The Study of Poetry” appears in English Literature and Irish Politics, Vol. ix of The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

^{Note 32} For Fish's concept, see his “Interpreting the Variorum,” Critical Inquiry, 2 (1976), 465–85.

^{Note 33} I have described Arnold's optics, especially the antinomies implicit in seeing the object as in itself it really is and seeing life “steadily” and “whole,” in “Tennyson's Optics: The Eagle's Gaze,” PMLA, 92 (1977), 426–27, and in “Victorian Frames: The Windows and Mirrors of Browning, Arnold, and Tennyson,” Victorian Poetry, 16 (1978), 70–87.

^{Note 34} Norman Holland's “How Can Dr. Johnson's Remarks on Cordelia's Death Add to My Own Response?” in Psychoanalysis and the Question of the Text: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1976–77, ed. Geoffrey Hartman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 18–44, may serve as a late statement of reader-response theory especially pertinent to my concern, since the essay tries to meet objections accumulating against that theory, against Holland's earlier work, and against 5 Readers Reading (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975) in particular—objections to the effect that the transactive model accounts well enough for the singular, obviously idiosyncratic reading (i.e., Arnold's “personal estimate”) but less well for the generally accepted, “regular” interpretation of a work.

^{Note 35} Bonnerot, Matthew Arnold, poète: Essai de biographie psychologique (Paris: Didier, 1947), p. 368.

^{Note 36} Arnold, Poetical Works, ed. C. B. Tinker and H. F. Lowry (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1950), pp. 195–98.

^{Note 37} Warren D. Anderson, Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 32.