Jane Ellen Harrison: The Early Work Ackerman, Robert Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies; Summer 1972; 13, 2; ProQuest pg. 209 Jane Ellen Harrison: The Early Work Robert Ackerman I THE CAMBRIDGE RITUALISTS were Jane Ellen Harrison, Gilbert Murray, Francis Macdonald Cornford and Arthur Bernard Cook, who, from about 1900 to 1915, worked together on the origins of Greek religion and the origins of Greek drama. l For me the group is best approached by focusing on the career of Jane Harrison, with the work of Murray, Cornford and Cook seen in its relationship to her. Since each member of the group was a considerable scholar in his own right, this decision calls for comment. 1 It should be noted that in terms of friendship and collaboration-the criteria by which one may fairly judge Miss Harrison and her friends truly to have constituted a group­ Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), though a lifelong Cantabrigian, was not a member of this or any other Cambridge group. The reasons lay in basic dissimilarities of temperament and intellectual outlook (it is of course no contradiction to say that the group was strongly influenced by Frazer's work). Examples of the temperamental and personal differences abound. Two may suffice. Despite the undeniable beauty of his prose style Frazer was practically unable to function in the give-and-take of ordinary conversation and never engaged in controversy except in writing (see Bronislaw Malinowski, "Sir James George Frazer: A Biographical Appreciation," in A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays [Chapel Hill 1944] 181-82); by contrast, the members of the group, and in the highest degree Miss Harrison, were all sociable persons. Frazer's inaccessibility was heightened when, at the age of forty-five (and much to the surprise of academic Cambridge), he mar­ ried; his wife, by all accounts an exceedingly formidable woman, set herself up as the door­ keeper of her famous spouse, deciding who might and who might not gain access to the great man. See the amusing postscript Miss Harrison adds to her letter of February 1901 to Lady Mary Murray, in which she describes a conversation with Mrs Frazer: "P.S.-Mrs. Frazer (your double!) has been sitting on my bed for two hours, telling me 'who not to know', i.e. who has not paid Mr. Frazer 'proper attention'! This is the price I pay for a few shy radiant moments under the Golden Bough-Good conservative tho I am I am ready for any reform in the Game Laws for the Preserving of Eminent Husbands." Jessie Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait in Letters (London 1959) 37; hereafter STEWART. As a result, relations between Frazer and the group were correct but no more. Aside from that remarkable class in Hebrew taught by Professor Kennett that had as its members Frazer, Miss Harrison, Cook and Cornford (Stewart 171). there is little evidence of intimacy or collaboration between Frazer and the others. In the voluminous Frazer correspondence in Trinity College Library there are perhaps a dozen communications to the members of the group, nearly all of them perfunctory. On the other side, there was respect tinged with 209 210 JANE ELLEN HARRISON: THE EARLY WORK To understand in what way the Cambridge Ritualists were a group, one must know something of Jane Harrison's life and temperament. She was one of that talented first generation of women admitted to English university education, entering the recently established Newn­ ham College, Cambridge, in 1875. She and others like her (one thinks of her contemporary fellow Yorkshirewoman Beatrice Potter Webb) showed that women, given the training, could pursue and attain the highest goals of intellectual life. She was born 9 September 1850 (four years before Frazer) into an upper-middle-class Nonconformist family and, like all women of her time and class, educated at home by a series of governesses. Fortunately, after some struggle on her part, her exceptional gifts caused her to be sent away to school at Ladies' College, Cheltenham, in 1867 and then on to Newnham. Nevertheless, she suffered (or claimed she did) throughout her life from having begun the study of Greek relatively late, and despite her obvious Sprachgefuhl, she never was as competent in her philological scholarship as she would have wished.2 This matter of her adequacy in scholarship had important conse­ quences throughout her life. Miss Harrison was, in every period of her adult life, always connected in a deeply emotional way with some male scholar of (supposedly) superior philological attainments who acted as a technical adviser and, just as importantly, as an essential emotional support. First it was the art historian D. S. MacColl, and then Francis Cornford, with both of whom she seems to have been in love.3 irreverence, as witnessed in an unpublished letter from Miss Harrison to Murray dated January 1910 in which she asks him to compose a few Greek sentences that she might use in inscribing one of her books to Frazer. "The real.\6yoc of this letter is to ask you to make an inscription for old Adonis. I must send him a copy as his greatest joy is to think he influences the trend of modern thought and I have no Liddell and Scott-pity my desolation ... Please write something-he will never know your neat little footprint." In the margin Mrs Stewart glosses "old Adonis" as Frazer. This and other unpublished letters of Miss Harrison appear with the kind permission of Miss M. E. Lane. 2 In her pamphlet on Russian aspects she lists the languages she has learned, "in a scrappy and discreditable way." These included, among living tongues, three Romance, three Scandinavian, German, three Oriental and five dead languages-plus Russian, of course, which she learned so well in her sixties that she taught it after the War. Aspects, Aorists and the Classical Tripos (Cambridge 1919) 6. a MacColl (1859-1948) is something of an exception in that he was not a philologist but an art historian (later Keeper of the Tate Gallery); at the beginning of her career, however, Miss Harrison was more closely involved with art history than with classical scholarship, so that, mutatis mutandis, his role was exactly the same as that of the scholars to be discussed below. ROBERT ACKERMAN 211 There were as well older men with whom she was likewise close, although probably not in love: as an undergraduate it was her teacher A. W. Verrall (to whom Prolegomena was dedicated),4 in her first years back at Newnham R. A. Neil;5 and then there were A. B. Cook and, pre-eminently, Gilbert Murray, both younger men, to both of whom she was deeply attached. And of course each of these men, in his own way, returned her affection. It is thus possible to see the Cambridge group, biographically speaking, as a particular happy time in Jane Harrison's life, when her emotional and intellectual energies were most closely bound up with those of its three other members. In one sense, then, the reason for the group's coming-to-be was that Jane Harrison had a need for making passionate intellectual friendships. If this hypothesis is generally correct, it may explain how and why each member of the group was close to Jane Harrison but not how or why they were a group. Here we must de-emphasize sentiment and point to the fact that she was the center because she seems, at least in the early years, to have had a broader conception of their common subject matter than any of the others. For this reason she was able to afford each of the others an important intellectual stimulus, just as she had done with men like Verrall and MacColl, who were in no sense members. The exception here is Cornford, who met Miss Harri­ son at the outset of his career; one is sure that their intense personal relationship was instrumental in determining the direction and tone of Corn ford's scholarly work.6 Although each man had independently been attracted to the ethnographic approach to the classics, she was able to broaden all of them by introducing them to material to which they were largely strangers. Specifically, she was able to offer a wide and deep knowledge of Greek art and archaeology, and later of con­ temporary work on religion, psychology, sociology and philosophy, that was invaluable to Cook, originally a folklorist; to Murray, originally a literary and textual scholar; and to ·Cornford, originally a student of philosophy. And, reciprocally, their work extended her 4 For Verrall, see the memoir by M. A. Bayfield in A. W. Verrall, Collected Literary Essays Classical and Modern (Cambridge 1913) ix-cii. 6 Miss Hope Mirrlees, Miss Harrison's closest friend at the end of her life. told me in August 1969 that Miss Harrison was thinking seriously of marrying Neil when he died suddenly. • Murray in his obituary of Cornford emphaSizes the crucial influence Miss Harrison had on Cornford's early work. "Francis Macdonald Cornford, 1874-1943," ProcBritAc 29 (1943) 421-3Z. 212 JANE ELLEN HARRISON: THE EARLY WORK own areas of interest and competence, so that their collaboration must have been deeply satisfying and exciting in an intellectual sense. As Gilbert Murray wrote in retrospect to her biographer Jessie Stew­ art, HWe were as you say a remarkable group; we somehow had the same general aim and outlook, or something, and the work of each contributed to the work of the others. We were out to see what things really meant, looking for a new light our elders had not seen."7 All this might help to explain certain social facts otherwise perhaps difficult to account for: e.g., how it was that around 1905 Francis M. Cornford, then a newly elected fellow of Trinity College, and Gilbert Murray, former professor of Greek at Glasgow, nearly ten years his senior, and without a college affiliation at Cambridge, should have become close friends and co-workers. This is not impossible on its face, but given the rather rigidly stratified social and academic world of British universities at the time, it is unusual, to say the least. The answer is that they, along with Cook, first came together in their affection for Jane Harrison. It is difficult to be absolutely sure now because the only letters that have survived in any appreciable num­ bers are those of Miss Harrison to Murray, but it is likely that each man in the group, especially in the early years, was closer to Miss Harrison than to any of the others.s The evidence for this interpretation of Miss Harrison's life is abun­ dant but difficult to summarize. The main document is the biography of Jessie Stewart, first :Miss Harrison's student and then her close friend from 1900 onwards. This work, subtitled HA Portrait from Letters," is based on the more than eight hundred letters from Miss Harrison 7 Stewart 83. The combination of intellectual and moral stimulation and generous friend­ ship that Jane Harrison provided is attested in the prefaces to Murray's Rise of the Greek Epic (1907) and Four [later Five] Stages of Greek Religion (1912), where he states that his first two chapters are merely recapitulations of Themis; and Comford in his prefaces to Thucy­ dides Mythistoricus (1907), From Religion to Philosophy (1912), and The Origin of Attic Comedy (1914) everywhere acknowledges her extraordinary assistance and magnanimity. Others of her friends, writing in the Newnham College Letter after she died or else in the Jane Harrison Memorial Lectures, give glowing witness to Miss Harrison's personal qualities. And Miss Harrison from her side gives eloquent testimony to Murray and Comford for their assis­ tance and friendship in the introductions to Prolegomena (1903); Themis (1912), to which both contributed chapters; and Ancient Art and Ritual (1913). Comford's dedication of Thucydides Mythistoricus to Miss Harrison reads: ovap avr' OVnp(ZTWV 'lToAAwv T£ Ka~ KaAWV. 8 One can sense the deepening friendship between Murray and Comford in my "Some Letters of the Cambridge Ritualists," GRBS 12 (1971) 113-36. However, the earliest letters between them that I found dated from 1907, after they had known each other for some years. ROBERT ACKERMAN 213 to Gilbert Murray that date from 1900 to the end of her life. The letters naturally permit unequivocal judgements only about Miss Harrison's relationship to Murray, but Mrs Stewart supplies a great deal more from her own memory and the memories (and some letters) of others; she makes it clear (without being indiscreet) that Miss Harrison's life really consisted in a series of these passionate scholarly collaborations. Miss Harrison herself alludes to this in her own memoir, characteristically called Reminiscences of a Student's Life: By what miracle I escaped marriage, I do not know, for all my life long I fell in love. But, on the whole, I am glad. I do not doubt that I lost much, but I am quite sure that I gained more. Marriage, for a woman at least, hampers the two things that made life to me glorious -friendship and learning.9 Mrs Stewart as well provides specific evidence concerning the pro­ found depression that settled over Miss Harrison's life when Francis Cornford married in 1909. Cornford's young wife, Frances Darwin, sensed that Miss Harrison-HAunt Jane" as they called her (until she asked them not to )-was in love with him even though she was old enough to be his mother.Io II Reading anything by or about Miss Harrison, one is struck equally by her intellectual power and her passionate nature. From without, • (London 1925) 88: the entire memoir has been reprinted in Arion 4 (1965) 312-46. See also Miss Harrison's deeply moving letter to Frands Darwin, Cornford's fiancee, in Acker­ man, op.cit. (supra n. 8) 121, in which she speaks of the pain attendant on Cornford's natural withdrawal from her as his relationship to Miss Darwin deepened. 10 In an unpublished note made in connection with the preparation of the biography (preserved in Newnham College Library), Mrs Stewart writes that Miss Harrison was like­ wise apparently in love with MacColl, with whom she traveled to Greece in 1888. She was told by those who knew Miss Harrison in the nineties that she went into a deep depression when MacColl married in 1897, despite the fact that she had refused him earlier. In an un­ published letter to Lady Mary Murray, written 15 March 1902, on the occasion of Murray's lecturing at Newnham on Hippolytus, Miss Harrison says: "I often reflect on the sorrows of being married to a genius because genius is like God who belongs to everyone up to the limits of their power to comprehend. I long ago refused to marry a man I cared for because he was a genius [MacColl, presumably] and some instinct told me I dared not and tho I am an oldish woman and fairly lonely I have never repented." For a description of her reaction to Cornford's marriage, and his typically male astonishment when told by his wife what Miss Harrison's real feelings were, see Stewart 112. (Unpublished Stewart materials used by kind permission of Mrs Stewart's daughter, Mrs Jean Pace, of Cambridge.) 214 JANE ELLEN HARRISON: THE EARLY WORK she lends herself to easy paradoxes: a tough-minded sentimen­ talist,u a woman who could speak of "falling in love" with Greek or Russian and who became excited about grammar, an intellectual who always kept an engaging childlike quality. But these are merely paradoxes; they resolve into a unified being, one of those rare and fortunate persons who seem to recognize no barriers between special­ ist knowledge and everyday life and who bring to both an extra­ ordinary energy and integrity. One of the keys to understanding Miss Harrison's life and achieve­ ment is perfectly obvious, but bears naming nevertheless-she was a woman. That is, if we may deal in generalizations, as a female she had not been brought up to stifle the expression of emotion, as had the majority of her male colleagues. After all, women in mid-Victorian England were supposed to be repositories of emotion, if little else. Likewise she was not as constrained as were her fellows by existing models of proper scholarly behavior. This is not to deny her male friends and colleagues their individuality nor to assume that they were all conformists. I merely allude to the obvious fact, true then as now, that in England men were not permitted the same range of emotional expression as women. Nor am I arguing that once her sex is noted everything about Miss Harrison becomes clear. But nothing can be understood without starting from that point. Because she was a woman I am sure (without being able to prove it) that to some extent at least her world found her behavior charming (and excusable), where the same behavior in a man would have been thought childish or bizarre. For instance, she seems never to have lost the habit or ability, which psychologists tell us is common in children but tends to die out with maturity, of thinking in pictures-eidetic imagery. (She was intensely visual, as her ten years of lecturing and writing on art demonstrate.) Thus, once she became friendly with Murray she gave him two nicknames-Cheiron, from the kindly, sage centaur, and Ther, from 8~p-and in her letters never addressed him otherwise. In a letter to him from Algiers during Christmas 1902, she writes: "How absurd it is for this Polar Bear to be sent southward and a thin Kangaroo to be leaping about in the snow."12 Translation: her theriomorph is the bear (she kept an old teddybear as a promi- 11 An unpublished letter to Murray of 1904 happily quotes A. W. Verrall's description of her as one who "simply reeks of ·sentiment'." 12 Stewart 34. ROBERT ACKERMAN 215 nent item of furniture in her rooms at Newnham, and was passion­ ately fond of anything ursine), and his is the kangaroo because he was Australian. Now this may be dismissed as embarrassing playfulness between friends, never intended for other eyes. But it does testify to something deeper: her natural intuitive feeling for what may be . called (with all due reservations) "primitive" modes of thought. She even personified her books. She called Prolegomena "the fat and comely one," whereas the copy of Nauck's fragments of Euripides, a gift from Murray, became "the slim handsome one."13 And in describing the Orphic tablets translated by Murray and printed as an appendix to Themis, she writes: "What a beautiful learned appendix and how therish it is!"14 Or she opens her review of J. C. Lawson's Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion by exclaiming, "Who loves not Cheiron ?"15 But this playful and sentimental tendency toward the primitive and the 'natural' tempered a profoundly rationalistic and intellectual nature. Miss Harrison was perhaps a sport in the world of classical scholarship of her time (or any time), but she was not there by suf­ ferance. She was able to hold her own in a world of men who at the time employed the most rigorous scholarly criteria of all the various divisions of humane letters. And it was the whole woman-the whole person-whose work is here in question; the woman who could write (in 1913), acknowledging the role of sex in what seem to be purely 'intellectual' matters, "We watch the physical and emotional sides of knowledge in our own minds: anyone who makes even a small mental discovery can note the sudden up rush of emotion, often a hot blush, sometimes tears in the eyes. How can such a sensuous process be insulated from a thing so interpenetrating as sex?"16 After encountering such an insight from a lady in her sixties, one is not surprised to learn that she was one of the earliest partisans­ albeit an unwilling one, for her style of life had been formed in a more inhibited area-ofFreud in England. Her advocacy of his work is only IS Ibid. In an undated letter quoted by Stewart, loe.cit. (supra n.4), Miss Harrison writes, "Nauck's old mottled cheeks are shining with joy because he has got a really sound in­ scription in him." 16 Stewart 35. A favourite word in her letters is 'therish', which means anything especially admirable because natural and instinctive. 15 CR 24 (1911) 181. 1G "Scientiae Sacra Fames," in Alpha and Omega (London 1915) 107. The paper was origi­ nally delivered in 1913. 216 JANE ELLEN HARRISON: THE EARLY WORK the best example of her amazing willingness to remain open to new thoughts or, what is nearly as good, to recognize her prejudices as such and compensate for them. In a delightful and revealing essay called '''Crabbed Age and Youth'," she takes as her text a remark much repeated in recent years but apparently uttered for the first time by Rupert Brooke as an undergraduate: "No one over thirty is worth speaking to." Her reaction is characteristic and worth quoting: Now, when I had recovered from the blow to my personal vanity -for, of course it was nothing else-I said to myself: "This is really very interesting and extraordinarily valuable. Here we have, not a reasoned conclusion, but a real live emotion, a good solid prejudice, a genuine attitude of gifted Youth to Crabbed Age. Give me an honest prejudice, and I am always ready to attend to it." The reasons by which people back up their prejudices are mostly negligible-not reason at all at bottom, but just instinctive self-justifications; but prejudice, rising as it does in emotion, has its roots in life and realiry.17 The passage embodies the wit and the remarkable wholeness of mind and heart that characterize her best work. It is playful paradox, to be sure, but it goes deep. For all of Jane Harrison's mature scholarly thought was an attempt to get down behind and beneath rationaliza­ tion to deeper-lying, and therefore (to her) more authentic, emotion. And thus her idea of religion, inspired by Emile Durkheim, another of the Continental thinkers whose work she helped to assimilate and disseminate, is that it "is not the aspiration of the individual soul after a god, or after the unknown, or after the infinite; rather it is the expression, utterance, projection of the emotion, the desire of a group ... Religion, in its rise, is indistinguishable from social custom, embodying sodal emotion."18 I shall not examine these ideas more closely now; the point here is that the tone of this serious intellectual dismissal of theology and the emphasis on prerational sodal emotion is of a piece with the playful rhetoric of the more personal passage from "'Crabbed Age and Youth'" that likewise denigrates sodal rationalizations in favor of "emotion [that] has its roots in life and reality." In the latter essay she goes on to say that she has remained 17 Alpha and Omega 3. In the essay Miss Harrison does not name the "utterer of the doom," but Brooke is identified in Christopher Hassall's biography, Rupert Brooke (New York 1964) 108. 18 "Unanirnism and Conversion," Alpha and Omega (supra n.16) 50, 51. ROBERT ACKERMAN 217 young by continuing to share one of youth's leading traits, a burning insistence on following the truth wherever it leads. One believes it to be true of her as of few others. We have here a complex of behavior and belief in the life of one woman. We can say of her that she had a temperamental predilection toward the primitive and the emotional as more authentic than the developed and the reasoned, but invoking Ctemperament' is noto­ riouslya way of excusing one's inability to proceed further in analysis. Or we can point to her fundamental understanding of the emotional basis of all human behavior and her view of the interpenetration of what were conventionally distinguished as mental and physical, but these beliefs certainly do not explain her expressive style. In fact we have come full circle: her emotional nature causing ideas that en­ hance feeling over reason to appear reasonable to her, and the ideas themselves being presented in a personal, passionate, cunscholarly' manner. We may fairly employ here the language usually reserved for the criticism of literature: both the manner and matter of Jane Harrison's mature work form an integrated whole, both being the products of a unified vision of life. Thus, in an unpublished letter to Jessie Stewart, Miss Hope Mirrlees, her closest friend during her last, cRussian' period (see PLATE 7), wrote: CCI am sure that you must realize the really great problems that we should have to deal with if a full life of Jane were written, as the intellectual and sentimental strands are inextricably interwoven. "19 The passion with which she imbued her beliefs has another facet in her love for language. She tells us in her charming and all-too-brief memoir that if she had her life to live over again she would change but one thing: instead of devoting herself to primitive religion, she would become a student of language. Her purpose would not have been to become a mere polyglot; rather, in the best romantic spirit, she felt that truly learning a language is the best and only way to enter into the collective soul of its speakers. She says, in her little book on Russian aspects: ccTwice in my life it happened to me to fall in love with a language. Once, long ago, with Greek. Again, only yesterday, with Russian ... "20 Thus it was that her life, which had lost its raison d'etre with the collapse of all scholarly work and loss of friends atten- 18 Letter of 1 July 1954, in the Jessie Stewart papers in Newnham College Library, and used with Miss Mirrlees' kind permission. 20 Aspects. Aorists and the Cll.lSsical Tripos (op.cit., supra n.2) 3. 218 JANE ELLEN HARRISON: THE EARLY WORK dant upon the outbreak of war, regained its momentum in the study of Russian. And when in 1915, in an attempt to teach English to Russian emigres, she began the language in earnest, she stopped all work on classics.21 Her Epilegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1921), though its title intentionally evokes the Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion of 1903, is not primarily about Greek religion at all but is rather a deeply personal and mystical attempt to synthesize the ideas on philosophy, psychology and religion that had grown out of her work. III Having got somewhat ahead of the story, it is fitting to return to the beginning and tell it in a more orderly fashion. Miss Harrison, having been passed over at graduation for a classical lectureship at Newnham,22 settled in London, lecturing and studying at the British Museum. During these London years (the eighties) she became a fluent German scholar and took several trips abroad, visiting the great Continental museums, especially those of Germany. The valuable lessons she learned in Europe and in her work at the British Museum, especially in the interpretation of pottery and other artifacts, are everywhere to be seen in the abundant illustrations that may be said to constitute a trademark of all her works. They are also evident in the way in which she consistently based her arguments primarily on things, not words. She was always basically an archaeologist rather than a philologiSt. During these years she supported herself by writing and lecturing. And from Mrs Stewart's biography we know that it was also during these years (specifically the late eighties), that she passed through a profound crisis. The change this produced in her is readily revealed by a comparison of these early writings with the dramatically different later work. Listen to her in the preface of Introductory Studies in Greek Art, first published in 1885.23 She begins by asking why we should study Greek art. 11 Her last piece of classical scholarship was the review article on "Greek Religion and Mythology" for the 1915 Year's Work in Classical Studies. 21 In favor of the "safer" Margaret Merrifield, later Mrs A. W. Verrall. See Stewart 10. 2a Jane Harrison, Introductory Studies in Greek Art (London 1885). Page references to be given in parentheses in the text. The book remained popular enough to reach a fifth edition by 1902. ROBERT ACKERMAN The answer is, I believe, found in a certain peculiar quality of Greek art which adapts itself to the consciousness of successive ages, which has within it no seed of possible death,-a certain largeness and universality which outlived the individual race and persists for all time. The meaning of this quality, which we call Ideality, it is the sole object of this little book to develope. 219 The heart of the book is a critical examination of the sculpture of Phidias, about which she says, Greek literature is the best and only comment on Greek art; what is expressed but undefined in Phidias is clearly articulate in Plato. And she concludes (p. vi): I shall be satisfied if, by the help of the wisdom of Plato, I can show any of the citizens of the state why, eschewing the dry bones of symbolism and still more warily shunning the rank, unwholesome pastures of modern realism, they may nurture their souls on the fair sights and pure visions of Ideal art. This paragraph is as far as one can be from the Jane Harrison of after 1890. A reader of her later work would turn hundreds of pages in vain to see a mention of the word 'Ideality', with a capital I, for she is no longer interested in it. In fact, the mature work of Miss Harrison and her fellow Ritualists may be thought of as a countermovement to the idealizing tendency that so clammily chills nearly every dis­ cussion of Greek art through the nineteenth century. Indeed, in her later work she never even gets to Phidias and the fifth century; her whole focus shifts to the Archaic Age, and the statues that figure as illustrations are the early Korai of the seventh and sixth centuries. And as for Greek literature-and Plato, no less !-being the best and only commentary on Greek art, one can say only that just as her attention turns to Archaic art, so it turns to pre-classical literature. Plato will rarely be quoted; her most freque.nt references will be to antiquarian writers and collectors of, and commentators on, old myths and rituals. Literature will be ransacked to provide illustra­ tions of rituals fallen into desuetude more than read for its own sake. And as for the "rank, unwholesome pastures of modern realism," 220 JANE ELLEN HARRISON: THE EARLY WORK one can only wince at the podsnappery and recall that the eighties featured the famous trials in which Henry Vizetelly, Zola's translator and publisher in England, was prosecuted by the National Vigilance Association and twice convicted of selling obscene literature. The attitudes suggested here are in fact completely uncharacteristic of the later Miss Harrison, who is remarkably free of the prudery which one might expect in a lady of good Victorian upbringing.24 The passage quoted above from Introductory Studies in Greek Art presents the characteristic tone of the early Jane Harrison. But in that work can also be found the elements typical of the mature work of the next decades. For example, from the first chapter (p.2) come these words about the quest for origins: In bygone days of art-criticism originality was claimed for the Greeks as their especial, distinguishing gift. Original they were, but not in the narrow sense of borrowing nothing from their predeces­ sors. The historic instinct is wide awake among us now. We seek with a new-won earnestness to know the genesis, the origines of whatever we study ... If critics in the past approached archaeology from the artistic and purely contemplative standpoint, critics of today incline to its historical, scientific aspect. Hence our first duty in speaking of Greek art is to show by the light of recent discoveries its relation to the art of Egypt, Assyria, and Phoenicia which preceded it. This is the authentic nineteenth-century obsession with history that was a dynamic force in all of Miss Harrison's work. In another of her early works, Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Litera­ ture (18'82), Miss Harrison remarks in the preface (pp. xxi, xxii): It In this connection Miss Harrison tells a delightful story in her memoir (Reminiscences [supra n.9] 34). As an old woman she was appointed Justice of the Peace, and on one case it was reported that the prisoner had used particularly profane language. The magistrates were interested to know just what the prisoner said. but as it was unbecoming to utter the offending words, they were written down and passed around the bench. "The unknown to me has always had an irresistible lure. and all my life I have had a curiosity to know what really bad language consisted of. In the stables at home I had heard an occasional