The Victorians and Ancient Greece by Richard Jenkyns (review)

166ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW Blake's actual life — the influence of pleasure gardens situated near his home, for ;nstance. The prose style is good and the knowledge of scholarship impressive. BRIAN WILKIE, University of Illinois Robert Fleming. Willard Motley. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978. 168p. The case here is one of alleged mishandling of a writer by his critics. The defendant is Willard Motley, an American novelist of this century who has been unfairly maligned because he wrote naturalistic fiction after Naturalism itself was dead, because he consistently used white protagonists though he himself was black, and because he frequently presented a view of society that was at variance with that some of his readers wished to see. Motley's case is now up for appeal, his defense being undertaken by the unflagging, perceptive literary critic Robert Fleming, who presents Motley's case so skillfully that the reader is forced to reassess the evidence and accord Motley a more deserving place in the canon of the American novel. Fleming's relentless method is a kind of point-counterpoint where he acknowledges the objections of the opposition and then presents his own evidence which, by highlighting Motley's numerous literary accomplishments, takes much of the sting out of Motley's detractors. Piling detail upon detail, Fleming ends each chapter with a catalogue of Motley's strengths. The cumulative effect is an extremely strong case in Motley's favor. The verdict: because Motley wrote better naturalistic fiction than some of the "best" Naturalists, because he wrote honestly andsympathetically about life as he actually knew it (he knew little about the black experience, having grown up as part of the only black family in a white neighborhood), and because he was a social reformer and a creative writer, taking both his craft and his message seriously, he must be given the place he deserves in the history of American literature. LILLIE P. HOWARD, Wright State University Richard Jenkyns. The Victorians ant" Ancient Greece. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. xi, 386p. Anyone who knows much about the Victorians knows that the arts, literature, and philosophy of ancient Greece were dear to them. The Victorians and Ancient Greece impressively documents their love and admiration while arguing that, as often as not, the Victorians misunderstood and misapplied Hellenic forms and thought. Jenkyns easily makes good his claim in the Preface that "ancient Greece preoccupied many of the finest minds of the last century, and thus, directly and indirectly, it became a pervasive influence, reaching even to the edges of popular culture." Another comment from the Preface is also amply justified: "When I have not concealed my own views, I have stated them with dogmatic brevity." Fair warning: the reader must not expect a uniformly "objective" treatment of the multifarious "facts" of Victorian Hellenism, although the breadth of coverage invites the book's use as a kind of encyclopedia, for here are not only the expected — the Arnolds, Jowett and Swinburne, Ruskin and Pater, Lytton and Kingsley, Lord Leighton and Alma-Tadema — but also Gilbert and Sullivan, Gladstone, J.A. Symonds, Wilde, and many more, including such rather less well-known personages as the Revd. Edward Lefroy, Dean Farrar, and the author of Sinister Street. Jenkyns demonstrates that Victorians worshipped the ancient Greeks (and BOOK REVIEWS167 sometimes their gods: Ruskin is claimed as a literal believer in Apollo and the Muses), copied them, interpreted them (Christian lovers of the pagan Hellenic made Greeks into proto-Christians; Gladstone, for example thought Homeric religion contained memories of God's revelation to primitive man), and used them to explain and express their predelictions (e.g., to justify masculine "admiration" of the naked male). They insisted on the study of Greek, admired Homer above all (and Plato more than Aristotle), and saw their own age as a falling off from the glory that was Greece. In Jenkyns's view, Victorians were often wrong-headed, feeble, or inept. In his adverse comments, he is at times simply unfair, as in some of his many "shots" at Matthew Arnold. More often, however, Jenkyns's dogmatisms are at least arguable propositions, and readers will again and again feel called upon to argue with him: e.g...