Essayists From England

"Again as with a bullfight, you never appreciate this sport till you see a really great performer. Something departed for ever from the pleasure of specialist review reading when A. E. Housman gibbeted his last victim."

"Housman is a "country" poet. His poems are full of the charm of buried villages, the nostalgia of place-names, Clunton and Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow, "on Wenlock Edge", "in summer time on Bredon", thatched roofs and the jingle of smithies, the wild jonquils in the pastures, the "blue, remembered hills"."

"At the beginning of the period I am speaking of, the years during and immediately after the war, the writer who had the deepest hold upon the thinking young was almost certainly Housman. Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910–25, Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now not at all easy to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of the Shropshire Lad by heart... these are the poems that I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy."

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

"He published about 235 articles and edited Lucan, Juvenal, and five volumes of Manilius between 1903 and 1930. Widely acknowledged as the greatest scholar of his age, he could justly claim with Horace: Exegi monumentum aere perennius (I have built a monument more lasting than bronze)."

"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."

"Is this the spectacle of a great mind crippled? Certainly it is the spectacle of a mind of remarkable penetration and vigour, of uncommon sensibility and intensity, condemning itself to duties which prevent it from rising to its full height. Perhaps it is the case of a man of genius who has never been allowed to come to growth. Housman's anger is tragic like Swift's. He is perhaps more pitiable than Swift, because he has been compelled to suppress himself more completely. Even when Swift had been exiled to Ireland, he was able to take out his fury in crusading against the English. But A. E. Housman, giving up Greek in order to specialize in Latin because he "could not attain to excellence in both," giving up Propertius, who wrote about love, for Manilius, who did not even deal with human beings, turning away from the lives of the Romans to rivet his attention to the difficulties of their texts, can only flatten out small German professors with weapons which would have found fit employment in the hands of a great reformer or a great satirist. He is the hero of The Grammarian's Funeral—the man of learning who makes himself impressive through the magnitude, not the importance, of his achievement. After all, there was no need for another Bentley."

"The Shropshire of Housman's imagination is at once curiously realistic and romantic—a land of faerie yet of solid earth, somewhat like that depicted on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. A beautiful world is set as a magic stage for the course of human wilfulness, perversity, and tragic fate. A strong vein of what many would call pessimism runs through the whole: these "lads," these soldiers and other companions of the poet, are pitted against destiny on an earthly stage of ironical enchantment under the cope of mathematically ordered cosmic processes."

"As the creator of "A Shropshire Lad" he was well known and admired wherever English poetry is read; while among classical scholars the Professor of Latin at Cambridge had earned for himself a place among the greatest editors and critics in the long history of classical scholarship. Surprising as it may seem to those of his readers who know only his poetry, his attainments in scholarship were higher than they were in poetry."

"No one when he reads...the pieces which begin "There pass the careless people" and "If truth in hearts that perish" can doubt that they were inspired by actual experience of the passion of love. But Housman did not often express these feelings directly in his published poems. A clerk in the Patent Office, even a Professor in Cambridge, could not confess to affections of which a poet could speak only in ancient Greece. Like Gray, therefore, and for the same reason, Housman "never spoke out". For the most part, he held his peace – "Ask me no more, for fear I might reply"."

"His saeva indignatio was nearly always reserved for pretentious incompetence, intellectual fraud, meanness of spirit, and that compound of the three which makes men band together, with cries of mutual encouragement, round a fashionable totem. Against these things Housman waged war, without respect of persons or enmity towards them."

"Housman was a marvel of learning and brilliancy and penetration: and he had, or came to have, the prime virtue; which is to say that he clung to reality, abhorring from the bottom of his soul all efforts to fit it upon frames or smother it in cotton wool. Reality, in philology as elsewhere, is often inconvenient. So much the worse: "They say my verse is sad"."

"When I ask myself what it is that has made my readings of the Manilius the most memorable intellectual experience of my life, I look to another quality, which I find in no other comparable scholar to anything like the same degree. I mean Housman's unremitting, passionate zeal to see each one of the innumerable problems in his text not as others had presented it or as he might have preferred it to appear but exactly as it was."

"As a classical scholar Housman was, beyond serious dispute, among the greatest of all time. Not the greatest, certainly: of Bentley's superiority in their common field of textual criticism he was himself intolerantly convinced. And he would never have denied that Mommsen and Wilamowitz were cast in a larger mould. He published much; but the measure of his scholarship, as of his verse, was narrow. Apart from some early work on Greek tragedy, he devoted himself almost exclusively to the text and interpretation (I use the latter word in its restricted sense) of classical Latin poets. He says of his commentary on the astrologer poet Manilius, his magnum opus, that it is designed to treat of two matters only: what Manilius wrote and what he meant. And almost everything that Housman published on classical authors—the editions of Juvenal and Lucan, as well as the mass of articles in learned journals—might be similarly described."

"When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again, "The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain; 'Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue." And I am two-and-twenty And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true."

"When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say, "Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away.""

"Lovers lying two and two Ask not whom they sleep beside, And the bridegroom all night through Never turns him to the bride."

"Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; Breath's a ware that will not keep. Up, lad: when the journey's over There'll be time enough to sleep."

"Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more. And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow."

"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now Is hung with bloom along the bough."

"Nature, not content with denying to Mr — the faculty of thought, has endowed him with the faculty of writing."

"Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair."

"My heart always warms to people who do not come to see me, especially Americans, to whom it seems to be more of an effort."

"I rather doubt if man really has much to gain by substituting peace for strife, as you and Jesus Christ recommend. Sic notus Ulixes? do you think you can outwit the resourceful malevolence of Nature? God is not mocked, as St. Paul long ago warned the Galatians. When man gets rid of a great trouble he is easier for a while, but not for long: Nature instantly sets to work to weaken his power of sustaining trouble, and very soon seven pounds is as heavy as fourteen pounds used to be. Last Easter Monday a young woman threw herself in the Lea because her dress looked so shabby amongst the holiday crowd: in other times and countries women have been ravished by half-a-dozen dragoons and taken it less to heart. It looks to me as if the state of mankind always had been and always would be a state of just tolerable discomfort."

"Three minutes' thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time."

"The average man, if he meddles with criticism at all, is a conservative critic. His opinions are determined not by his reason -- 'the bulk of mankind' says Swift 'is as well qualified for flying as for thinking' -- but by his passions; and the faintest of all human passions is the love of truth. He believes that the text of ancient authors is generally sound, not because he has acquainted himself with the elements of the problem, but because he would feel uncomfortable if he did not believe it; just as he believes, on the same cogent evidence, that he is a fine fellow, and that he will rise again from the dead."

"The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall."

"Chorus: O suitably attired in leather boots Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom Whence by what way how purposed art thou come To this well-nightingaled vicinity? My object in inquiring is to know. But if you happen to be deaf and dumb And do not understand a word I say, Nod with your hand to signify as much. Alcmaeon: I journeyed hither a Boeotian road. Chorus: Sailing on horseback or with feet for oars? Alcmaeon: Plying by turns my partnership of legs. Chorus: Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus? Alcmaeon: Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes. Chorus: To learn your name would not displease me much. Alcmaeon: Not all that men desire do they attain."

"The most important truth which has ever been uttered, and the greatest discovery ever made in the moral world."

"Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him."

"The middle age of buggers is not to be contemplated without horror."

"The book [A Passage to India] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?"

"Mr E. M. Forster, particularly in the first half of Pharos and Pharillon, set a model of lucidity and individuality in which the elegance is so unobtrusive as to pass some readers unnoticed."

"Forster wrote the five books on which his reputation rests because he desperately needed to create characters and situations that would expose his own plight in ways that were subtle and dramatic without being obvious or explicit. His true nature was not only homosexual, it was also wounded, mysterious and filled with sympathy for others, including foreigners and women. Despite his best intentions, he allowed all of himself into the five novels published in his lifetime, and only part of himself into “Maurice"."

"He's a mediocre man — and knows it, or suspects it, which is worse; he will come to no good, and in the meantime he's treated rudely by waiters and is not really admired even by middle-class dowagers."

"Forster took a risk, opening the comic novel to let in the things it was not designed for; small patches of purple prose were the result. But Forster's innovation remains: he allowed the English comic novel the possibility of a spiritual and bodily life, not simply to exist as an exquisitely worked game of social ethics but as a messy human concoction. He expanded the comic novel's ethical space (while unbalancing its moral certainties) simply by letting more of life in. Austen asks for toleration from her readers. Forster demands something far stickier, more shameful: love."

"He Anthony Blunt] reminded me of E. M. Forster's famous statement that if he had to choose between betraying his country or betraying his friend, he hoped he would have the courage to betray his country. I said that in the appalling political circumstances under which we lived, to betray one's country might mean betraying innumerable other friends and it might also mean betraying one's wife and one's family. I said Forster's antithesis was a false one. One's country was not some abstract conception which it might be relatively easy to sacrifice for the sake of an individual; it was itself made up of a dense network of individual and social relationships in which loyalty to one particular person formed only a single strand."

"For the Wilcoxes are England; they contain more of the essence of England even than Sunday afternoons, or Lords, or Sir William Bull."

"Forster...perceived, and, as far as it can be done at all, described, that sense of hallucination which pervades India. "Nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else." As I once heard it remarked of the rope-trick, "it is essentially Indian, because no such trick ever existed". The English in India, for all their doing and striving, became part of that hallucination. The Raj itself (without intending the pun) was a mirage; a dream which British and Indians dreamed together and which individuals will still dream again when they meet, long, long after other dreams and other hallucinations have succeeded. Leave out Forster's pasteboard figures of fun, and his physical descriptions of scenes and cities evoke the dream as they only could if someone who also felt it had written them."

"She thinks the one place where you can transcend your own tribalism, and daily politics, is through the novel. Just so long, she says, as it avoids preachiness. She cites A Passage to India, one of her favourite books. "It's a political novel and the politics are dead and obsolete; and yet the book goes on and on. And because it's a political book it has a tremendous moral and didactic message, and yet it so transcends the teaching aspect of it that it seems to me the most remarkable model for what a novel should be, when you want to say something with a 'message'. Otherwise if it has a message, the hell with it.""

"No government, no big organization, will pay for the truth. To take a crude example: can you imagine the British Government commissioning E. M. Forster to write A Passage to India? He could only write it because he was not dependent on State aid."

"He has quite lost the touch of preciousness, of exaggerated care for nature and the relationships of human beings, that faintly irritate some readers of his earlier books. He used once to write at times too much as a graduate (even occasionally as an undergraduate) of King's College, Cambridge (perhaps the most civilized place in the world), who has had an amour with Italy and another with the god Pan. In A Passage to India (as, indeed, in Howards End), Pan is only implicit, the mysterious is more diffused, the imagination at once richer, less fantastic, and more restrained. It is a novel that from most novelists would be an amazing piece of work. Coming from Mr. Forster, it is not amazing, but it is, I think, the best and most interesting book he has written."

"Lawrence was a powerful early influence on me, Forster a more enduring one."

"His light blue eyes behind his spectacles were like those of a baby who remembers his previous incarnation and is more amused than dismayed to find himself reborn in new surroundings. He had a baby's vulnerability, which is also the invulnerability of a creature whom one dare not harm."