19 JUNE 1936, Page 21

The Scholarship of A. E. Housman BOOKS OF THE DAY

By C. M. BOWRA THE death' of A. E. Housman has started a lively debate on the merits, or faults, of his poetry. But scholarship was his chief concern, and for it he has received nothing but praise. He deserves better. Praise so perfunctory shows a lack of interest, and Housman was a stranger phenomenon as a sebolar than as a poet. By the time of his death he had won a_ peculiar eminence in the world of learning. In early years he had been the bad boy of scholarship, who made fun of his elders and embarrassed scholars by what were thought deplorable exhibitions of bad taste. But he grew old, and age brought, as it will in England, respect. The rowdy of yesterday became the sage. His paradoxes were accepted as dogmas ; his casual sayings were circulated with hushed reverence, and he became a figure of legend. Even the Germans knew of him.

Housman concerned himself with only a small department of claSsical scholarship. In a long life he edited three Latin poets, Manilius, Juvenal, and Lucan, and in editing them he confined his energies to establishing what he thought to be the correct text. His articles in learned journals were also concerned with textual criticism. He was, in every sense, a pure scholar. Whatever his tastes in reading may have been, in writing he showed himself singularly unsympathetic to many branches of classical learning. For literary criticism he displayed an open contempt. The descent of manuscripts left him cold, and he said that " Ueberlieferungsgeschichte is a longer and nobler name than fudge." He did not even claim tondmire the poets whom he edited, but called Manilius " a fifth-rate author." But though he was narrow, he was extremely strong. In his chosen field he was a master. It is impossible to read anything that he wrote without admiring not only his untiring industry and remarkable organisation of knowledge but his piercing intelligence and matchless resource in devising solutions for difficulties. With new discoveries his interpretation was almost final in its acuteness and its mastery of all relevant evidence, so that, when he was confronted with hitherto unknown lines in the Oxford manu- script of Juvenal, he illustrated and explained them with an array of detail which requires neither supplement nor correc- tion. He had a vast knowledge of classical literature, and he knew Latin as few can ever have known it. So, even if his solutions were sometimes wrong, he had always excellent reasons for them.

Housman, however, impressed others less by his actual performance, which could be properly appreciated only by a few experts, than by his personality. On every word that he wrote he left a unique imprint. This was partly a feat of style. His bold, clear, and resonant sentences stay in the memory as do those of no other scholar. But it is much more a triumph of personality. He had an extraordinary confidence in himself and a passionate belief in the import- ance of his subject. He felt that he was right, and that others were often wrong. Nor was he content to leave them alone. He persecuted them for their_errors and hunted their heresies with a deadly fanaticism. If the dead dis- pleased him, he said so, as of an earlier editor of Manilius : " If a man will comprehend the richness and variety of the universe, and inspire his mind with a due measure of wonder and of awe, he must contemplate the human intellect not only on its heights of genius but in its abysses of ineptitude ; and it might be fruitlessly debated to the end of time whether Richard Bentley or Elias Stoeber was the more marvellous work of the Creator : Elias Stoeber, whose reprint of Bentley's

text, with a commentary intended to confute it, saw the light in 1767 at Strasburg, a city still famous for its geese." But Housman's real concern was with the living. lie KUNV them as the victims of detestable errors due to intellectual and moral defects. He attacked them with an anger which passed into a poisonous wit. In this mooed he wrote : " I imagine that when Mr. Buccheler, when he first perused Mr. Sudhaus' edition of the Aetna, must have felt something like Sin when she gave birth to Death," or " He believes that tile 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." Those who read this in 1903 felt that a wild, angry demon had conic into the quiet house of scholarship.

Housman was sure of himself, and he was not joking when he said : " Posterity should titter a good deal at the solemn coxcombries of the age which I have had to live through." He was equally sure that most of his fellow scholars were not only fools but knaves. Hard as he was on stupidity, he was even harder on what he believed to be dishonesty, laziness, sycophancy, and conceit. Against these failings, real or imagined, he thundered in Olympian anger. He had a peculiar gift for making the mistakes of editors look like vile sins. When someone attributed an unmetrieal line to Propertius, Housman wrote : " This is the mood in which Tereus ravished Philomela : concupiscence concentrated on its object and indifferent to all beside." An editor of Lucilius, who complained of rashness in the work of sonic others, became an example of the hypocritical inconsistency of our ethical notions : " Just as murder is murder no longer if perpetrated by white men on black men or by patriots on kings ; just as immorality exists in the relations between the sexes and nowhere else throughout the whole field of human conduct ; so a conjecture is audacious when it is based on the letters preserved in a MS., and ceases to be audacious, ceases even to be called a conjecture, when, like these conjectural supplements of Mr. Marx's, it is based on nothing at all." The folly of editors made him reflect with bitter irony on the corruption of truth which it entailed : " In Association football you must not use your hands, and similarly in textual criticisms you nest not use your brains. Since we cannot make fools behave like wise men, we will . insist that wise men should behave like fools ; by t his means only can we redress the injustice of nature and anticipate the equality of the grave." In the small world of scholarship faults of intellect or character took on for Housman a cosmic significance, and he cured them with the virulence of a Hebrew prophet.

There is wit in these curses, but there is no fun. Housman meant what he said. He stood for an ideal of impeccable scholarship, and anything with which he disagreed was a sin against it. His anger blasted many worthy scholars. In his own sphere he neither tolerated rivals nor admitted compromise. The truth obsemed him, and he was convinced that he was more usually in possession of it than anyone ere. He can hardly be said to have firthered the general study of Latin in England. His ft tandards were too high, his tastes too narrow, for others to shire them. But he satisfied him4elf. His work- was the expression of his belief : " The tree of knowledge will remain f)r ever, as it was in the beginning, a tree to be desi!ed to m ike one warns,"