Greek Philosophy and the Victorians

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Studies in the history of scholarship first encourage self-congratulation and then instil self-doubt. Contemplating the egregious misinterpretations of our predecessors, we preen ourselves and complacently boast of progress. Then, observing how the scholarship of the past has been distorted by the explicit beliefs and underlying preconceptions of past scholars, we properly wonder whether the scholarship of the present is not similarly vitiated by present beliefs and present preconceptions. All that is true of philosophy no less than of other branches of scholarship: Jowett's idealist Plato and Pater's aesthetical Plato strike us as travesties but what, then, of our own analytical Plato? Such doleful reflexions are occasioned by two recent books, one by Richard Jenkyns' the other by Frank M. Turner,2 on the Greeks and the Victorians. Turner remarks that 'the Victorian study of the Greek heritage occurred in an arena of thoroughly engaged scholarship and writing. Disinterested or dispassionate criticism was simply not the order of the day. Historians and commentators openly and avowedly used discussions of Greek art, religion, literature, philosophy, and history as vehicles to address contemporary issues far removed from the classics. ... This rootedness of Greek studies in modern questions was the obvious source of polemical distortion of knowledge about Greece'.3 That general judgement receives countless specific illustrations in the pages of both authors. But if Jenkyns and Turner convey a depressing moral, their books are, for all that, stimulating, exciting, and wholly engrossing works. Jenkyns is brilliant, erudite, elegant; his subject is the influence of Greece on Victorian England, and he is primarily concerned with the arts; philosophy occupies only one of his thirteen chapters. Turner's book is a solid and thorough piece of scholarship; his subject is the influence of Greece on Victorian intellectual life; and philosophy provides the matter for three of his chapters and for more than a third of his weighty volume. There is some overlap between the two books; but they are, on the whole, complementary to one another.4