Vive Le Roi: Robert Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work

Abstract

“All things flow. Nothing remains.” Thus Heraclitus, whom in a letter of 22 August 1888 the young James George Frazer quotes to Henry Jackson, Praelector in Ancient Philosophy in the University of Cambridge, by way of reproving him for attempting to foist the modern mentality upon primitives. Time too has dealt unkindly with Sir James, who, as Robert Ackerman laments at the beginning of this well-prepared biography, is now regarded by social anthropologists as so much jetsam. Quoting Frazer’s letter in his turn (p. 88) Ackerman skips a word, so reducing the Greek to nonsense, but the point is well taken. Frazer knew his hypotheses were doomed but strangely did not mind. He hoped that his works might survive as repositories of fact, but we and generations of earlier readers — among them Yeats, Eliot and a host of twentieth-century writers — have learned to value them for reasons of our own.