A. E. HOUSMAN

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 21992, 16 January 1937, Page 15

A. E. HOUSMAN

A Portrait and More Verse

A. E. Housman. A Sketch, Together with a List of his Writings and Indexes to his Classical Papers. By A. S. F. Gow. Cambridge IJniversity Press. 137 pp. (7/6 net.). More Poems. By A. E. Housman. Jonathan Cape. 71 pp. (5/- net.)

Housman directed in his will that none of his contributions to periodicals should be collected. They extended over more than half a century and, Mr Gow says, he was "no longer prepared to endorse a good many of the opinions expressed." But the search of scholars who want to know what they were is simplified by the list and indexes which Mr Gow has made, feeling'no lack of 'pietas'" in doing so and "some assurance that Housman would not have disapproved." To this part of his work are prefixed an outline oi Housman's life and an account of his scholarship, with which Mr Gow has. interwoven "an impression ot Housman as I knew him during the last 25 years of his life."

professor of' Greek." Housman disliked being rated with or near Bentley, who, he said, would "cut up into four of me." Mention of the comparison once drew from him this response:

His face darkened, his whole frame grew taut, and in an angered voice he replied: "I will not tolerate comparison with Bentley. Bentley is alone and supreme. They may compare me with Porson, if they will—the com. parison is not preposterous—he surpassed me in some qualities as I claim to surpass him. in others."

The extraordinarily high standard he set himself, together with his view that the scholar has "no more concern with the merits of the literature with which he deals than Linnaeus or Newton with the beauties of the, countryside or of the starry heavens," probably explains his choice of the subjects on which he brought his work to completion. He edited Juvenal, at Postgate's request, for the Corpus; but Manilius and Lucan, Mr,Gow thinks, were chosen, while his favourite Propertius must be put aside, because "he saw in these two more opportunity than in Propertius of displaying his special gifts, and more hope of approaching finality in the solution of the problems presented." But it remains a mournful thing that such strictness and austerity in choice of labour should have deprived us of a Housman's Horace and a Housman's Propertius.

Oxford, London, Cambridge

The most surprising fact about Housman's academic career is that the Oxford examiners seemed to have closed it. When he applied for the Chair of Latin in London University, 11 years later, his application was distinguished by the sentence, "In 1881 I failed to obtain honours in the Final School of Litterae Humamores." He had, in fact, revolted against the philosophical and historical side of the prescription and "showed up no answers to many of the questions set." The interim he had spent in the Patent Office, where fortunately his duties left him time and energy for those classical studies and papers which placed him, as Arthur Palmer said, "in the very first rank of scholars and critics." The-application whicn confessed his remarkable academic dishonour was supported by 17 testimonials from eminent scholars, who included, besides Palmer, Robinson EDis, A. W. Pollard, Verrall, Tyrrell, Gildersleeve, Henry Jackson, Nettleship, and Wecklem; and he was elected. In 1911 he succeeded J» E. B. Mayor, who had succeeded Munro, in the Chair of Latin at Cambridge; and there is something more than sentimentally fitting in Housman's reaching in his maturity the place of the superb Latinist whom he had learned in youth to venerate—a Prometheus, he said, who fetched to England new fire from the altars of Lachmann and Madvig and Ritschl, and whom English scholars should salute as Rome saluted the grave of Romulus: "O pater, o genitor, o sanguen dis oriundum, tu produxisti nos intra luminis oras."

Diamond Cut Paste

To similar causes—to a passion almost inhuman for "the common end of all, to set back the frontier of darkness"; to an equal anger against the. "deficiency in craftsmanship or care or sense which betrays the common cause and retards -victory—must be - attributed his relentless critical severity. That he enjoyed the exercise of his invective gifts is true; but enjoyment -came in the path of what he saw as his duty and did not lead or deflect. His, as he said, was "the unfair advantage of being able to say disagreeable things . . . without any departure from the truth. This is one of Housman's milder insults:

If a man is acquainted with the Latin tongue and with the speech of poets, he is abruptly warned of corruption in a Latin poet's text by finding that he can make neither head nor tail of it. But Mr Vollmer and his friends receive no such admonitory shock; for all Latin poets, even whera the text is flawless, abound in passages of which they can make neither head nor tail.

The Heights of Scholarship

Of what Mr Gow says in estimation of Housman's scholarship it would be impertinent to attempt a summary paraphrase. A few notes must suffice. Housman was once asked why, when his early work had been divided between Latin, and Greek he had ceased to write about the second; he replied, "I found that I could not attain to excellence in both."

Beck's Euripidean Index claims to be "a full and correct index of all words and phrases in the complete tragedies and surviving fragments, together with the letters": opposite the claim, in his copy, Housman wrote, large and firm, the words, "Liar and slave"! But a scholar who is not in one way or another a teacher is unfulfilled. In all that has been written about Housman, there has been, till now, too little illumination of this side of him. Mr Gow's light falls on Housman. in the lecture room:

Excellence, as Housman used the word and exhibited the quality, involved so complete a mastery of the tools of scholarship that by the side of his the work of other scholars tends to look amateurish.

Yet when Pearson edited Sophocles he sent Housman'a copy, in "recognition of the debt" owed to Housman's Sophoclean articles of many years before, saying, "If I ever differ from you it is with reluctance and a consciousness that I am probably wrong"; and when WilambwitzMoellendorff reviewed the edition he found, of three new emendations which won his special praise, that two were Housman's. Housman himself reviewed the edition, says Qow, "in a magisterial paper which might well have caused the uninstructed to wonder which of the two men was

The audiences may never have been very numerous, but they usually included some senior members of the University who found time to spare from their own to go on learning and knew best where to learn: and the undergraduates who sat at his feet were commonly constant and devoted. They were not exclusively the ablest classical students in Cambridge, for some of these shrank from the intellectual* effort required of them and fancied themselves better employed in, listening to more" flowery discourses elsewhere, while smong the less accomplished there were usually a few who delighted their Directors of Studies by pursuing a course to which they had been sent experimentally. Such men would perhaps have been puzzled to explain what brought them to Housman's lecture-room so regularly, but the fact is that in the lecture-room or out, it was impossible to listen attentively to Housman for lorn* without becoming aware that one was in contact with a mind of extraordinary distinction; and it is not only, or even chiefly, to professional scholars that such a contact is fascinating and exhilarating..

"The Shropshire Lad" Again

Readers who admire "The Shrop-r shire Lad" and "Last Poems" will be glad to add to them his third small collection, which Mr Laurence Housman has drawn from his brother's manuscripts. He was mitted,"" but not "enjoined," to publish such a choice of poems as appeared to him "not inferior to the average" of the other books; and he will not be thought to have judged and chosen laxly. But his was, after all, a second choice; the poet had been before him, and though there is not one poem here that might not have taken its place with those the poet published, there is, also, not one which is quite so good as the best of them. Housman's credit is not raised by this book; it did not need confirming. It is enough to say that these poems adorn it with flowers of the old, clear-cut, sad loveliness:

Here, on the level sand. Between the sea } and land. What shall I build or write Against the fall of night? .

Nothing: too near at hand, Planing the figured sand, Effacing clean and fast Cities not built to last And charms devised in vain, Pours the confounding mam,