This chapter looks at how Victorians constructed a genealogical relation to antiquity and the Bible, forming both as a cultural, intellectual and spiritual origin for modernity. It shows how philology was the discipline which linked theology and classics as disciplines, and how historiography and archaeology were mobilized to understand the present as the outcome of the past. In particular, it looks at how William Gladstone, Matthew Arnold, Brooke Foss Westcott, Charles Kingsley, and Henry Montagu Butle, used translation, Homeric studies, historical fiction and cultural history to forge a contentious and contested relation between the biblical and classical pasts and modernity.

This chapter considers the place of the desert in relation, following Nietzsche and Heidegger, to the character of human development in the modern era – “the wasteland grows; woe to him who hides wastelands within”. It looks at Heidegger’s concern with technology and language, or the way technological progress has reduced language to “idle talk”, against which the only adequate resistance, as Heidegger saw in Hölderlin, is a rebirth of the poetic. It then looks at how language interconnects with politics and science through the work of Hannah Arendt, and her distinctions between labour, work, and action in The Human Condition. Here recovering language from the colonization of science, technology and mass data begins by restoring the forms of political discourse qua speech, which in turns requires dispensing with what Uwe Poerksen calls “plastic words” that professionalize, institutionalize and modularize language. The chapter concludes these thoughts by returning to Heidegger’s question of poetry, and specifically to words by Matthew Arnold, where the desert that is in our words might become our saving power.

On the surface, the ethical vocabulary of stylistic virtue reflects the fact that moral and stylistic virtues overlap. A “manly” style may connote masculine strength, just as an “honest” author may promise fidelity in representation. However, the “aesthetic” critics of the mid- to late-nineteenth century did not disavow this seemingly moralistic lexicon. Instead, Chapter 2 shows how the doubleness of stylistic virtues made them appealing to critics who sought to provide an ethical justification for formalist methods. By tracing the theory of stylistic virtue in the four Victorian critics most influenced by Aristotle – John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde – it reveals a process of “ethico-aesthetic drift” whereby “ethical character” was increasingly understood as an aesthetic phenomenon that had autonomous value. As literary criticism came to be seen as a creative act on a par with the production of art, it too became an ethically valuable act, investing style and its appreciation with an unprecedented level of attention and esteem.