A Mild Rebel
The Unexpected Years. By Laurence Housman. (Jonathan
. Cape. 10s. 6d.)
THE best part of this book is the description, which occupies the first hundred psiges,. of a -childhood spent in a respectable house at Bromsgrove in Worcestershire in the 'sixties and 'seventies. Mr. Housman was one of the seven children of It not over-prosperous country solicitor. The furniture, the meal-times, the daily routine with its Sunday variations, the grown-up persons seen through the eyes of a Victorian child-I-- all these are excellently conveyed. I once made a pilgrimage to that very house myself, and peered through the garden trees at its Gothic windows, its covering of ivy, its deep-reil brick. But I am afraid that it was not as the birthplace of Mr. Laurence Housman, but the house -in which his eldesft brother spent his early days, that I deemed it worthy of a visit. And the picture of a family here presented will be to many chiefly interesting for what it reveals of the childhood of the author of A Shropshire Lad. Not much specific information is given about A. E. Housman in those early days ; but the setting is there. We are promised on the wrapper " some of it.--k--liOnianan's earliest poems," but the promise, "on investi-
gation, turns out to be a half-truth, and in fact the best lines of poetry quoted in the book are two lines written by.:g sister, at the age Of nine:. _ _ - - -
• -; " Her brows were -knit-in-everlastinepain, Hers were, the lips that, npver smiled again."
Mr. Housman is justified; I Think; in applying here the word " magnificent." - - . -
• - - It was certainlya r remarkable family. that and brought up under the shadow of Bromsgrove spire and the 'kindly but somewhat austere influence of the step-mother whom they called " the Mater " : and the book lokes interest, just as it gains in incident, When the author leaves that family eircie to lead a life of " Art '-' in London. All his- later life can be explained (as people now say) " in terms of " his Childhood, and there is something not unattractive in the kindly feeling with which he looks hack upon circumstances and influences against which his life has been, in a large degree, a protest-:-- circumstances and inthienCes which, as he now sees, shaped
him as a rebel. .
A mild rebel Mr. Housman has been all bi$ days. He has been a rebel against the Censorship, and a rebel in the cause of Woman Suffrage ; he is apparently a rebel, in a mild way,. against organised religion, and . hefis7now a pacifist. It IS evident from his book that he has a warm heart and ready symp-athieS,- and these are qualities which are in themselves not unattractive. _BO .sympathies. which are not merely ready, but ever-ready, and which are directed in action by a not very clear head, fail, somehow, to command our full respect. In life, Mr. Housman appears to have been not always able to distinguish between the noble and the silly, just as in art he seems at times to have confused the first-rate with the second-rate. Not that he seeks to exaggerate the merits of his own graceful literary performances : he is content, apparently, with his own modest measure of achievement, and refers quite complacently to An Englishwoman's Love-letters as " the worst book I ever wrote."
Those who are satisfied with less than the best in the field of artistic creation, however, at least avoid one kind of dis- content : in this life they have their reward, and of such, no
doubt, is the kingdom of heaven. But a habit of confusing the true with the not quite true is not so easy to justify, and it is not only Mr.,Housman's artistic perceptions that at times lack sharpness and definition. Strange it is that a man who deeply admired his brother, and was as fond of him as this book proves him to have been, should quote twice from the same letter of A. E. Housman and 'quote it differently each time. Strange that he should say that his brother made an after-dinner speech unasked, and that he should quote the celebrated sentences about Wordsworth and Porson in a garbled version which shows him insensible to their proper point and form : on that occasion, at least, piety might have led him to exchange his brother's standard of accuracy for his own.
Take them, however, for what they are, the record of the life of a man of letters who emerged from a provincial house- hold into the artistic and literary London of the 'nineties, and these memoirs will not be found devoid of amusement, and the reminiscences of persons whom it has interested the author to meet and of the various movements into which he has thrown his energies, will have a certain interest for students of social history.
The frontispiece, somewhat whimsically chosen, depicts " Laurence Housman as Lord Beaconsfield " ; it would be interesting to know whether it resembles the_ former more closely than it does the latter. JOHN SPARROW.
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