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John Stuart Mill on the Utility of Classical Greece

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2010

Robert O. Preyer
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Extract

What was the state of classical Greek studies in early Victorian Britain? The anonymous author of a series of Platonic translations-with-commentaries has this to say in the February 1834 issue of the Monthly Repository:

Considering the almost boundless reputation of the writings of Plato, not only among scholars, but (upon their authority) among nearly all who have any tincture of letters, it is a remarkable fact that, of the great writers of antiquity, there is scarcely one who, in this country at least, is not merely so little understood, but so little read. Our two great ‘seats of learning’ of which no real lover of learning can ever speak but in terms of indignant disgust, bestow attention upon the various branches of classical acquirement in exactly the reverse order to that which would be observed by persons who valued the ancient authors for what is valuable in them: … with the exception of the two dialogues edited by Dr. Routh, we are aware of nothing to facilitate the study of the most gifted of Greek writers which has ever emanated from either of the two impostor-universities of England; and of die young men who have obtained university honours during the past ten years, we are much misinformed if there be six who had even looked into his writings. There are, probably, in this kingdom, not so many as a hundred persons who ever have read Plato, and not so many as twenty who ever do.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 10 , Spring 1982 , pp. 41 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

Notes

1. Robson, J. M., ed., Essays on Philosophy and Classics, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), XI, 40–41.Google Scholar (Collected Works will be hereafter cited as CW.)

2. Robson, J. M. and Stillinger, J., eds.. Autobiography and Literary Essays, in CW (1981), 1, 9, 24.Google Scholar

3. See especially Clarke, M. L., Classical Education in Britain, 1500–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959)Google Scholar, and Ogilvie, R. M., Latin and Greek (Hampden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1964).Google Scholar

4. Clarke, p. 53.

5. Mill's Inaugural Address is available in many editions. I have used Knight, W., ed. Rectorial Addresses Delivered at the University of St. Andrews, 1863–1893 (London: A. & C. Black, 1894).Google Scholar

6. Autobiography, in CW, 1, 33.

7. Hare, Julius C. (1795–1855)Google Scholar attended Charterhouse with Grote and Thirlwall, entered Cambridge 1812, A.b. and Fellow (with Thirlwall) 1818; took up residence as Assistant Tutor in 1822, resigned 1832 to take up family living at Herstmonceux. His brother Augustus was an intimate of Tom Arnold at Oxford in the 1820s. Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers appeared in 1827; The Victory of Faith in 1840, The Mission of the Comforter in 1846. The Hare family was related by marriage to the Stanleys, Maurices, Arnolds, and Sterlings. See McFarland, G. F., “Julius Charles Hare: Coleridge, De Quincey and German Literature,” Bulletin of John Rylands Library, 47 (1964), 245–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Preyer, Robert, “Julius Hare and Coleridgian Criticism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 21 (1957), 449–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Preyer, Robert, “Victorian Wisdom Literature: Fragments and Maxims,” Victorian Studies, 6 (1963), 245–62.Google Scholar Connop Thirlwall translated Tieck, Schleiermacher, Niebuhr, and others in the 1820s, returned to Trinity (1827–34), became Bishop of St. David's (1840), and wrote History of Greece (1844). See Perowne, J. J. S., Remains, Literary and Theological, 2 vols. (London: Daldy, Isbister, 1877)Google Scholar; Letters, 2 vols. (London, 1881); Thirlwall, J. C. Jr, Connop Thirlwall, Historian and Theologian(New York: Macmillan, 1936)Google Scholar; Preyer, Robert, “The Histories of Grote and Thirlwall,” in Bentham, Coleridge, and the Science of History (Bochum, W. Germany: Heinrich Pöppinghaus, 1958).Google Scholar

8. “Preface,” Philological Museum, 1 (1832).Google Scholar

9. Autobiography, in CW, 1, 25.

10. CW, XI, 42.

11. CW, XI, 62.

12. CW, XI, 41. He read Schleiermach-her's “On the Worth of Socrates as a Philosopher” in Thirlwall's translation, which can be found in Philological Museum, 2 (1833), 538–55.Google Scholar

13. Turner, F. M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 400–01.Google Scholar This is a powerful work which will prove invaluable to Victorian scholars. See also Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar, for another impressive work on the general topic.

14. Forbes, Duncan, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Dockhorn, Klaus, Der Deutsche Historismus in England (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1950)Google Scholar offer the fullest accounts. See also Preyer, Robert, “Bunsen and the Anglo-American Literary Community in Rome,” in Geldbach, Erich, ed., Der Gelehrte Diplomat (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1980).Google Scholar

15. Neibuhr, B. G., The History of Rome, trans. Hare, J. C. and Thirlwall, C. (Cambridge, J. Taylor, 1828), 1, 250.Google Scholar

16. Prothero, R. E., The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley(New York: Scribners, 1894), p. 130.Google Scholar

17. James, D. G., The Romantic Comedy (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 211.Google Scholar

18. Ibid., p. 210.

19. Thirlwall, Connop, Letters to a Friend (London: Daldy, Isbister, 1881), p. viii.Google Scholar

20. Turner, p. 211.

21. Quoted in McFarland, p. 187.

22. Preyer, Robert, “The Romantic Tide Reaches Trinity,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 360 (1981), 45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 46.

24. F. E. Mineka, ed., The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1812–1848, in CW, XIII, 629.

25. Schneewind, J. B., ed., Mill's Essays on Literature and Society(New York: Collier Books, 1965), p. 293.Google Scholar

26. Niebuhr, History of Rome, p. ix.

27. Schneewind, p. 323.

28. See Bain, A., James Mill (London, 1882; rpt New York: A. M. Kelley, 1967), p. 191Google Scholar: “It is important to mark the date of publication of the article, Government, as contributing an epoch in the political history of the time.” Macaulay's strong attack did not appear in the Edinburgh Review until 1829 and by that time “its work had been done,” Bain remarked. James Mill's powerful articles for the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica were reprinted in 1828 and before that time were printed as tracts and given free distribution. James Mill, delighted with his Cambridge undergraduate disciples, mingled them with his London journalist disciples. Black of the Morning Chronicle, Albany Fonblanque of die Examiner. Countering them, F. D. Maurice, followed in 1829 by Sterling, edited the Athenaeum and used it as a conduit for “Germano Coleridgian” notions. They published several pieces by their old Cambridge tutor J. S. Hare. The Metropolitan was another such “party” organ, as was Knight's Quarterly, written almost entirely by Cambridge undergraduates.

29. Tuell, A. K., John Sterling (New York: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 89–90.Google Scholar

30. Bain, p. 456. Mill's “Commonplace Book” (4 vols.) provided Bain with a good indication of James Mill's early reading.

31. Turner, p. 208.

32. Pyn, H. N., Memoirs of Old Friends Being Extracts from the Journals and Letters of Caroline Fox, from 1835 to 1871 (London: Smith, Elder, 1882), p. 157.Google Scholar

33. Mill, James, Essays on Government, ed. E. Barber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), p. 72.Google Scholar

34. Autobiography, in CW, 1, 133.

35. CW, 1, 132.

36. Schneewind, p. 293.

37. Ibid., p. 324.

38. See. Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History generally and An Autobiography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), pp. 110, 112Google Scholar: “You are thinking historically when you say about anything, ‘I see what the person who made this (wrote this, used this, designed this, etc.) was thinking … historical knowledge is the re-enactment in the historian's mind of the thought whose history he has been studying.” See my “Coleridge's Historical Thought,” in Coburn, K., ed., Coleridge: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1967)Google Scholar for resemblance to Coleridge's notion of “ideas” in history. Mill was a great admirer of Coleridge's On the Constitution of the Church and State According to the Idea of Each, which he probably read in the Pickering edition of 1839. We know that he was also reading Niebuhr during a long stay in Rome that year and much other Roman history. Bain, John Stuart Mill, p. 45: “It was long a design of his to write the philosophy of the rise of the Roman power, but he failed to satisfy himself that he possessed an adequate clue. So late as 1844 or 1845 he was brooding over a review-article on this subject.” Coleridge's “idea” and Mill's “philosophy” of the development of power are not unrelated.

39. CW, XI, 241.

40. Schneewind, p. 290.

41. Rectorial Addresses, p. 37.

42. Quoted in Dockhorn, p. 196.

43. Knight, p. 32.

44. Ibid., pp. 34–35.

45. Burston, W. H., James Mill on Philosophy and Education (London: Athlone Press, 1973), p. 79.Google Scholar

46. Mill, James, The History of British India, 2nd ed., 6 vols. (London: Baldwin, Craddock & Jay, 1820), 1, xii.Google Scholar

47. Thirlwall, Letters to a Friend, p. 266.

48. Bain, Alexander, John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), pp. 50–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

49. Sir George Cornewall Lewis (1806–63) translated Boeckh's Public Economy of Athens as early as 1828, was editor of Edinburgh Review (1852–55), was author of Enquiry into the Credibility of Ancient Roman History (1855) and other historical works, was successively Chancellor of the Exchequer (1855–58), Home Secretary (1859–61), and Secretary of War (1861–63). He was a great friend of George Grote, the banker-historian M.p.

50. Bain, Alexander, ed., The Minor Works of George Grote (London: John Murray, 1873), p. 102.Google Scholar Prof. James Zetzel of the Princeton Classics Department called my attention to the significance of The Letters on Switzerland in conversation in Adirondack Woods.

51. Schneewind, pp. 281, 307, 315.

52. Bain, The Minor Works of George Grote, p. 68.

53. Aarsleff, Hans, The Study of Language in England 1780–1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967)Google Scholar provides a detailed confirmation of the thesis that Trinity College provided the impetus for the creation of the Philological Society of London (in 1842, Connop Thirlwall presiding) and its subsequent great project, the OED (see esp. pp. 211–63). This is the direction John Mill's interests were to take, which amounted to a reversal of the language theories held by Bentham and Mill's father. James Mill reviewed Horne Tooke's linguistic treatise The Diversions of Purley in 1806 and thought it “the best introduction … to all the logical studies.” Bentham's work on language dates from 1814 when he and Mill were together at Forde Abbey. See Ogden, C. K., ed., Bentham's Theory of Fictions (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1932).Google Scholar Aarsleff demonstrates how this Benthamite enthusiasm for Tooke's naive rationalism delayed all progress, in linguistics in England.

54. A System of Logic, IV–VI, in CW, VIII, 68.

55. Ibid., p. 692. Horne Tooke's completely nominalist theory of the relation of language to thought – The Diversions of Purley (1786) – was well known at Gotringen when Coleridge studied there with C. G. Heyne in 1799. Heync shared the same view as Winckelman and Herder: language is the reflex of the inner life of the nation, and it evolves with the mind of the Volk. The Logic divides up “sociology,” a term used in the Ms version – into Political Economy and Political Ethnology or the Science of National Character, defined as “the theory of the causes which occasion the type of character belonging to a people or to an age” (CW, VIII, 905). Book VI, the conclusion of this great work, shows Mill's struggle to bring together philology and psychology in order to find the elements in society which are uniform and those which are “progressive.” Language study is a key to the infant science of Ethnology or National Character. Alert Victorian minds were quick to pick up the connections between philology and the natural sciences. G. H. Lewes made one such connection shortly after die appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species: “The development of numerous specific forms, widely distinguished from each odier, out of one common stock, is not a white more improbable than the development of numerous distinct languages out of a common parent language, which modern philologists have proved to be indubitably the case. Indeed there is a very remarkable analogy between philology and zoology in this respect: just as the comparative anatomist traces the existence of similar organs, and similar connections of the organs, throughout the various animals classed under one type, so does the comparative philologist detect the family likeness in the various languages scattered from China to the Basque Provinces, and from Cape Comorin across the Caucasus to Lapland – a likeness that assures him that the Teutonic, Celtic, Wendic, Italic, Hellenic, Iranic, and Indic languages are of common origin, and separated from die Arabian, Aramean, and Hebrew languages, which have another origin. Let us bring together a Frenchman, a Spaniard, an Italian, a Portugese, a Wallachian, and a Rhaetian, and we shall hear six very different languages … yet we know most positively that all these languages are offshoots from the Latin which was once a living language, but which is now, so to speak, a fossil.” (Lewes, G. H., Studies in Animal Life [New York: Harper, 1860], pp. 102–03.)Google Scholar