Atheists From England

"No one can escape the power of language, let alone those of English birth brought up from childhood, as Mrs. Hilbery had been, to disport themselves now in the Saxon plainness, now in the Latin splendor of the tongue, and stored with memories, as she was, of old poets exuberating in an infinity of vocables. Even Katharine was slightly affected against her better judgment by her mother's enthusiasm. Not that her judgment could altogether acquiesce in the necessity for a study of Shakespeare's sonnets as a preliminary to the fifth chapter of her grandfather's biography. Beginning with a perfectly frivolous jest, Mrs. Hilbery had evolved a theory that Anne Hathaway had a way, among other things, of writing Shakespeare's sonnets; the idea, struck out to enliven a party of professors, who forwarded a number of privately printed manuals within the next few days for her instruction, had submerged her in a flood of Elizabethan literature; she had come half to believe in her joke, which was, she said, at least as good as other people's facts, and all her fancy for the time being centered upon Stratford-on-Avon."

"One cannot grow fine flowers in a thin soil."

"Dearest, I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that. But I know that I shall never get over this: and I am wasting your life. It is this madness. Nothing anyone says can persuade me. You can work, and you will be much better without me. You see I can't write this even, which shows I am right. All I want to say is that until this disease came on we were perfectly happy. It was all due to you. No one could have been so good as you have been, from the very first day till now. Everyone knows that. V."

"For some reason, we know not what, his childhood was sharply severed. It lodged in him whole and entire. He could not disperse it."

"The Reverend C. L. Dodgson had no life. He passed through the world so lightly that he left no print. He melted so passively into Oxford that he is invisible."

"Here I come to one of the memoir writer's difficulties — one of the reasons why, though I read so many, so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that it is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: ‘This is what happened’; but they do not say what the person was like to whom it happened. Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world."

"Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying and will I write on her for The Times – a curious thought, rather: as if it mattered who wrote, or not. But this flooded me with the idea of Janet yesterday. I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person."

"I bought the blue paper book [Ulysses], & read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, & then again with long lapses of immense boredom."

"An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw?"

"On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look twice at, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed."

"At this Helen laughed outright. "Nonsense," she said. "You're not a Christian. You've never thought what you are.—And there are lots of other questions," she continued, "though perhaps we can't ask them yet." Although they had talked so freely they were all uncomfortably conscious that they really knew nothing about each other. "The important questions," Hewet pondered, "the really interesting ones. I doubt that one ever does ask them." Rachel, who was slow to accept the fact that only a very few things can be said even by people who know each other well, insisted on knowing what he meant. "Whether we've ever been in love?" she enquired. "Is that the kind of question you mean?""

"… I am not, and never have been, a Soviet agent."

"For Rothschild... the Avenue Marigny house was a home from home, but... I felt, a prison. Installed there, he was the the de facto if not the de jure head of the family. ...[H]is disposition was a curious, uneasy mixture of arrogance and diffidence. Somewhere between Club and the Ark of the Covenant, between the Old and the New Testament, between the Kremlin and the House of Lords, he had lost his way, and been floundering about ever since. Embedded deep down in him there was something touching and vulnerable and perceptive; at times lovable even. But so overlaid with the bogus certainties of science, and the equally bogus respect, accorded and expected, on account of his wealth and famous name, that it was only rarely apparent. Once when I was going to London he asked me to take over a case of brandy addressed in large letters to him at his English address. In the guard's van where it was put, among the porters who carried it, wherever it was seen or handled, it aroused an attitude of adoration, real or facetious, as though it had been some holy relic—the bones of a saint or a fragment of the True Cross. Even I partook of its glory, momentarily deputising for this Socialist millionaire, this Rabbinical sceptic, this epicurean ascetic, this Wise Man who had followed the wrong star and found his way to the wrong manger—one complete with chef, central heating and a lift. I think of him in the Avenue Marigny dictating innumerable memoranda, as though in the hope that, if only he dictated enough of them, one would say something; on a basis of the philosophical notion that three monkeys tapping away at typewriters must infallibly, if they keep at it long enough, ultimately tap out the Bible. Rothschild, anyway, did not lack for monkeys. After the war I caught glimpses of him at Cambridge, in think-tanks, once in the Weizmann Institute in Tel Aviv, still dictating memoranda."

"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."

"May I lay stress on the nobility and humanity of Housman's character? I have known many poets great and small...but I have known no poet and no scholar—and, indeed, no man—who impressed me as so great and human a being as Housman did... He was great and yet he was not chill; he was noble and yet he could unbend. I, who have travelled with him for weeks together, saw, and felt, now and again, an impatience with fools, and yet there went always with it some understanding of, and sympathy with, folly. He was always tolerant, greatly tolerant. He could understand the weaknesses of others. A great man, yes."

"One morning in May, 1914, when the trees in Cambridge were covered with blossom, he reached in his lecture Ode 7 in Horace's Fourth book, "Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis." This ode he dissected with the usual display of brilliance, wit, and sarcasm. Then for the first time in two years he looked up at us, and in quite a different voice said: "I should like to spend the last few minutes considering this ode simply as poetry." Our previous experience of Professor Housman would have made us sure that he would regard such a proceeding as beneath contempt. He read the ode aloud with deep emotion, first in Latin and then in an English translation of his own. "That," he said hurriedly, almost like a man betraying a secret, "I regard as the most beautiful poem in ancient literature," and walked quickly out of the room. A scholar of Trinity (since killed in the War), who walked with me to our next lecture, expressed in undergraduate style our feeling that we had seen something not really meant for us. "I felt quite uncomfortable," he said. "I was afraid the old fellow was going to cry.""

"The exhilaration was produced by watching what seemed to be a mental machine of great power and precision applied to material at first sight unexpected... The severity of Housman's presentation was the severity not of passionlessness but of suppressed passion, passion for true poetry and passion for truthfulness. For Housman textual criticism was the exercise of moral self-discipline... The phrases remembered over the years flashed from the inner furnace of passion for truth and logical thought, and of indignation against every interest or influence which could corrupt it... Under the radiation of this display of a great critical mind in action, one's own powers, such as they might be, developed – above all, the spirit of bold but temperate self-reliance without which no criticism is possible."

"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."

"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."