Judgments on James Frazer

Abstract

first reference in Roman antiquity that E. H. Gombrich finds the psychology of perception and its relation styles. His extraordinarily rich discussion of this whole subject, Art and Illusion, treats the history of art as a continuing tension between the stability of a style and the struggle against it, the struggle of an artist to win freshness of vision.1 He gives many examples of the artist's ambivalence towards tradition,2 cites the many exercises in copying the mas ters, and the common fear of becoming a slave tradition.3 Like other great art historians his powers are taxed account for innovation, but this is not the principal task of his book. Rather the other way, he deploys the psychology of perception explain why innovation is so difficult. current style imposes a closure on the possibilities of perception. style is a contemporary organization of experience: A style, like a culture or climate of opinion, sets up a horizon of expectation, a mental set which registers deviations and modifications with ex aggerated sensitivity.4 Constable succeeded in establishing a new way of trans posing our awareness of brightness into painting, but beside Corot's work the brightness of Constable's painting is eclipsed: It recedes behind the ridge which separates, for us, the contemporary vision from that of the past.5 This essay explicitly seeks use Gombrich's ideas about style as a frame work within which discuss the changes in the reputation of James Frazer as one generation has succeeded another. One hundred years ago Frazer took finals in classics and then prepared compete for the fellowship in Trinity College, Cambridge. He won it, aged twenty-four, with a dissertation entitled The Growth of Plato's Ideal Theory.6 In that hundred years his reputation grew so that he completely dominated a large area of European thought. He dominated classics?no small feat?and he dominated archeology. Above all, he dominated the whole horizon of thoughts about man and his nature, his origins, his capa bilities and destiny, within which the widest literary efforts were engaged. No one reputation in the subject rivals his until we reach L?vi-Strauss. In his in augural lecture the Coll?ge de France, L?vi-Strauss remarks that fifty years had elapsed between the founding of his Chair of Social Anthropology in 1958 and Frazer's inaugural lecture7 in Liverpool on taking the first university post in the world ever be thus entitled. Fifty years earlier still, L?vi-Strauss also remarked, were born Franz Boas and Emile Durkheim, the founders of modern anthropology, the one American, the other French. This pretty trilogy of dates 151

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