Critics From The United Kingdom

"It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of the truth."

"False and doubtful positions, relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those who build on them in the dark from truth. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from education, party, reverence, fashion, interest, et cetera."

"He that knows anything, knows this, in the first place, that he need not seek long for instances of his ignorance.""

"I doubt not, but from self-evident Propositions, by necessary Consequences, as incontestable as those in Mathematics, the measures of right and wrong might be made out."

"He that uses his words loosely and unsteadily will either not be minded or not understood."

"Since sounds have no natural connection with our ideas ... the doubtfulness and uncertainty of their signification ... has its cause more in the ideas they stand for than in any incapacity there is in one sound more than another to signify any idea."

"The boundaries of the species, whereby men sort them, are made by men."

"Preference of vice to virtue, a manifest wrong judgment."

"No man's knowledge here can go beyond his experience."

"There cannot any one moral Rule be propos'd, whereof a Man may not justly demand a Reason."

"I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts."

"New opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common."

"This life affords no solid satisfaction, but in the consciousness of having done well, and the hopes of another life."

"[I am] lover of his king and country, a lover of peace and the protestant interest...[Consent] is absolutely necessary to the very being and subsistance of our government and without which our peace and religion cannot possibly be any way secured...the miscarriages of the former reigns gave a rise and a right to King William's comeing and ushered him into the throne...Let us owne King William to be our King by right...[William came] to recover our oppressed and sinkeing laws, libertys, and Religion...They who would not betray England and expose it to popish rage and revenge, who have any regard to their country, their religion, their consciences, and their estates, must maintain the bulwarke have set up against it, and which alone preserves us against a more violent inundation of all sorts of misery than that we were soe lately delivered from."

"For wherever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer Justice, it is still violence and injury, however colour'd with the Name, Pretences, or Forms of Law, the end whereof being to protect and redress the innocent, by an unbiassed application of it, to all who are under it; wherever that is not bona fide done, War is made upon the Sufferers, who having no appeal on Earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such Cases, an appeal to Heaven."

"Popery so threatens and so nearly surrounds us...every sober man would think it seasonable at this time that all dissenting Protestants should be brought to a good understanding and compliance one with another...I think all Protestants ought now by all ways to be stirred up against them [Catholics] as People that have declared themselves ready by blood, violence, and destruction to ruine our Religion and Government...[they] are nothing but either Enemys in our bowells or spies among us, whilst their General commanders whom they blindly obey declare warr, and an unalterable designe to destroy us."

"If Papists can be supposed to be as good subjects as others, they may be equally tolerated... If all subjects should be equally countenanced, & imployd by the Prince. the Papist[s] have an equall title."

"As to the papists, 'tis certain that several of their dangerous opinions, which are absolutely destructive of all governments but the pope's, ought not to be tolerated in propagating those opinions; and whosoever shall spread or publish any of them the magistrate is bound to suppress so far as may be sufficient to restrain it...Papists are not to enjoy the benefit of toleration, because, where they have power, they think themselves bound to deny it to others...It being impossible, either by indulgence or severity, to make papists, whilst papists, friends to your government, being enemies to it both in their principles and interest, and therefore considering them as irreconcilable enemies, of whose fidelity you can never be secured whilst they owe a blind obedience to any infallible pope, who hath the keys of their consciences tied to his girdle, and can, upon occasion, dispense with all their oaths, promises, and the obligations they have to their prince, especially being (in their sense) a heretic, and arm them to the disturbance of the government, [I] think they ought not to enjoy the benefit of toleration."

"Sophistry is only fit to make men more conceited in their ignorance."

"This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind, and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections ; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment."

"Stop Traveller! Near this place lieth John Locke. If you ask what kind of a man he was, he answers that he lived content with his own small fortune. Bred a scholar he made his learning subservient only to the cause of truth. This thou will learn from his writings, which will show thee everything else concerning him, with greater truth, than the suspect praises of an epitaph. His virtues, indeed, if he had any, were too little for him to propose as matter of praise to himself, or as an example to thee. Let his vices be buried together. As to an example of manners, if you seek that, you have it in the Gospels; of vices, to wish you have one nowhere; if mortality, certainly, (and may it profit thee), thou hast one here and everywhere."

"To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues."

"The good King of France desires only that you would take his word and let him be quiet till he has got the West Indies into his hands and his grandson well established in Spain, and then you may be sure you shall be as safe as he will let you be in your religion, property and trade, to all which who can be such an infidel as not to believe him a great friend?"

"But there is only one thing which gathers people into seditious commotion, and that is oppression."

"Wit and good nature meeting in a fair young lady as they do in you make the best resemblance of an angel that we know; and he that is blessed with the conversation and friendship of a person so extraordinary enjoys all that remains of paradise in this world."

"The three great things that govern mankind are reason, passion and superstition. The first governs a few, the two last share the bulk of mankind and possess them in their turns. But superstition most powerfully produces the greatest mischief."

"A. E. Housman I can always read, in spite of his detestable philosophy."

"When passing through Berlin in the summer of 1926 I had the privilege of spending an interesting afternoon with the late Professor Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff at his house in Charlottenburg. I remember that we were discussing the various ways of pronouncing Homer, when he suddenly remarked, "Although we Germans know Housman to be a rabid Germanophobe, we, nevertheless, unanimously pronounce him to be the greatest living authority on both Latin and Greek in the English-speaking world. His latest work is above praise." Professor Wilamowitz-Moellendorff was not aware until afterwards that he was addressing these words to an old pupil, and also an old friend, of Professor Housman."

"In his last year at Oxford Housman shared lodgings with two friends, A. W. Pollard and Moses Jackson. Jackson was a brilliant scientist, certain of a First, tall, well-built, handsome and self-confident. Housman, short, shy and undistinguished in appearance, worshiped him. Too clear-headed and honest to deceive himself about the nature of this absorption, he was also too well trained in conventional morality to accept it with resignation. The evidence of his poetry suggests that he was overwhelmed with shame. His Christian faith had gone at the age of thirteen, when he became a deist; by twenty-one he was an atheist. At heart he defied the world; but outwardly, circumstances and a naturally conformist temper of mind preserved an appearance of rigid propriety. He hid his emotions and for the rest of his life felt the bitterness of the frustration."

"In later years Housman liked to attribute the "morbid secretion" of poetry to illness, but it seems to have been a state of guilt that brought his poems into existence. His father's death revived long-suppressed conflicts between parental duty and the annihilating force of his "nameless and abominable" love. A catalyst in this process...may well have been the Oscar Wilde trial, which must have demonstrated to Housman's painfully conformist mind just how ruthlessly "the laws of God, the laws of man" were interpreted and enforced in Victorian England."

"It was not that Housman did not understand the profound emotional content of poetry, and Horace's exquisite ode; he understood and felt it all too keenly. But his own emotional economy was subject to strict, self-imposed constraints. A poet of a later generation, W. H. Auden, also homosexual, attempted to psychoanalyze Housman's retreat from unbearable or unacceptable emotion—his love of rough trade—into a dry scholarship that was a form of self-hate, into which he could at least channel the emotions of cold anger and contempt. Housman, in what you could see as an act of self-punishment, chose to devote many years to an edition not of Horace or Propertius, the poets he really loved, but of Manilius, a minor Roman versifier whose long didactic poem on astrology must rank as one of the most obscure in the entire annals of poetry."

"My father gave me A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman on my 19th birthday (Housman's birthday too, as it happens). I had never visited Shropshire then, but nor had Housman when he wrote the poems so why should it stop me enjoying them? I think it was A Shropshire Lad that first taught me the hypnotic power of words."

"The fate which Housman's poems deserve, of course, is to be set to music by English composers and sung by English singers, and it has already overtaken them. He will live as long as the B.B.C. does."

"There are two themes in Housman, man's mortality, which intensifies for him the beauty of nature, and man's rebellion against his lot. On his treatment of these themes his reputation for classicism subsists. But his presentation of both is hopelessly romantic and sentimental, the sentiment of his poems in fact is that of Omar Khayyam, which perhaps accounts for their popularity; he takes over the pagan concept of death and oblivion as the natural end of life and even as a not inappropriate end of youth, and lards it with a purely Christian self-pity, and a romantic indulgence in the pathetic fallacy."

"His underlip hinted at ferocity, and nothing hinted that he was the author of A Shropshire Lad. I heard him read a paper on "Prosody and Method" to the Oxford Philological Society. It was a masterly performance and annihilated some modern errors about Latin metric."

"A. E. Housman was the greatest Latinist of his age. He excelled at editing difficult Latin texts, which called for the highest degree of knowledge and judgement... Housman was, as A. C. Clark said, "daemonic", and whatever he touched revealed his extraordinary mastery. He was a perfectionist and expected other scholars to maintain the same very high standards as himself."

"I took Housman for a walk and asked him how he had come to write his early verses and whether there was any episode in his life which suggested their gruesome character, but he assured me it was not so. He had lived as a boy in Worcestershire, not in Shropshire, though within sight of the Shropshire hills, and there was nothing gruesome to record. He shows no trace now of anything romantic, being a typical Cambridge Don, prim in his manner, silent and rather shy, conventional in dress and manner, learned, accurate, and well-informed. He is professor there of Latin, talking fairly well, but not brilliantly or with any originality, depressed in tone, and difficult to rouse to any strong expression of opinion... I have a great admiration for his ‘Shropshire Lad,’ on account of its ballad qualities and the wonderful certainty in his choice of exactly the right word. We had much pleasant talk all day, and sat up again till twelve at night telling ghost stories. He takes an interest in these. Housman's personal appearance is one of depression and indifferent health. He does not smoke, drinks little, and would, I think, be quite silent if he were allowed to be."

"Romantic poetry as Housman received it was in need of correction. He corrected it. The romantic conflict of man against society, of man against immutable laws is still there, but presented by a man who had the classic craftsman's respect both for himself and his craft. The form is concise and accurate; but for all their lightness, his poems never lose the sense of earth, for all their grace, they are tough enough to sustain a considerable irony. The limits within which Housman was able to feel at all were strict, but within them he felt intensely, and both strictness and intensity are in his verse."

"The way in which Housman's poetry has been published is marked throughout by his passion for distinction, his craving to be famous, his equally strong and perverse dislike of being known."

"Housman is one of my heroes and always has been. He was a detestable and miserable man. Arrogant, unspeakably lonely, cruel, and so on, but an absolutely marvellous minor poet, I think, and a great scholar."

"The emotional nature of his work fulfilled his own ideal. "I think that to transfuse emotion," he wrote in The Name and Nature of Poetry, "to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer—is the peculiar function of poetry." He judged it by the size of the lump it brought to his throat. It is in the light of his own statement that the verses of A Shropshire Lad should be considered. They are less the expression of profound experience than of common emotion intensely felt. The sad and bitter in life stirred him to write. The passing of time and time's revenges, injustice, fickleness of love, beauty's transience, and, over all, the shadow of death—with these he is preoccupied and from them his emotion springs... He cultivated the luxury of sadness, careful never to let it escape him, and he achieved neither more nor less than his ideal."

"In every American there is an air of incorrigible innocence, which seems to conceal a diabolical cunning."

"I find Cambridge an asylum, in every sense of the word."

"Good-night; ensured release, Imperishable peace, Have these for yours, While sea abides, and land, And earth's foundations stand, And heaven endures."

"We now to peace and darkness And earth and thee restore Thy creature that thou madest And wilt cast forth no more."

"Here dead we lie because we did not choose To live and shame the land from which we sprung. Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose; But young men think it is, and we were young."

"Who made the world I cannot tell; 'Tis made, and here am I in hell. My hand, though now my knuckles bleed, I never soiled with such a deed."

"The rainy Pleiads wester, Orion plunges prone, The stroke of midnight ceases, And I lie down alone."

"Hope lies to mortals And most believe her, But man's deceiver Was never mine."

"They say my verse is sad: no wonder. Its narrow measure spans Rue for eternity, and sorrow Not mine, but man's. This is for all ill-treated fellows Unborn and unbegot, For them to read when they're in trouble And I am not."