The influence and repressed passion of A. E. Housman
J. Enoch Powell
Wth the springy step of a young Fellow I was crossing the lawns of Great Court, Trinity, on the sunny morning of May Day 1936, when I noticed the college flag flying at halfmast over the gate and dropped into the porter's lodge to enquire why. With a false emphasis that would have qualified him to read the BBC news, the porter replied 'Professor Housman's died, sir.' It was less than five years since my Director of Studies had tentatively sug- gested that 'we might see how you react to Housman.' I never missed a Housman lecture from that time onwards. He be- came the most powerful single intellectual influence in my life. Imitation of his style and mannerisms was outgrown early; but the rigour of his mental imperatives en- dured, and to this day I can frequently hear his voice at my elbow, prompting, admo- nishing, encouraging. Housman lectured on the Latin poets. Passage by passage, he read his translation and commented drily and impassively upon the text, the readings of the manuscripts and the work and conclusions of earlier scholars. To watch his mind functioning was a university education in itself, a training in taste, in logic and in moral courage. Formally, the content of his teaching was textual criticism, a discussion directed to ascertaining the poet's thought and words, obscured or obliterated by copyists' corruptions, by ignorant altera- tions or by rash conjectures. What made it unforgettable was the white heat of sup- pressed passion which suffused it.
Though Housman rarely allowed himself to stray into aesthetic observations, he knew true poetry from false as surely as he knew good Latin syntax from bad. The emotional power of the verses which he dissected to uncover the original reading was felt by him so strongly that at times he could barely control his voice when lectur- ing. A scholar with no sense of poetry could no more see what the poet intended, or why, than a blind man could interpret painting. 'A modern writer', I remember him once remarking about a corrupt line in Lucretius, 'might have written such a thing and fancied that it was good: Lucretius could never do so.'
The central doctrine of Housman's cri- tical teaching was in all difficulties to look to the context and determine what the context required. As he put it in his famous address to the Classical Association on The application of thought to textual (the Morning Post printed "sexual") criticism': 'If the context required it, I would not hesitate to replace the polysyllable Con- stantinopolitanus with the monosyllable 0: No student probably ever forgot it who heard Housman on Horace, Epistles i.7.29, where his hero Richard Bentley had emended volpecula, a little vixen, into nitedula, a fieldmouse, in the story of the beast trapped in a meal chest by its own greed. It demonstrated the moral duty of reliance against all odds upon one's own reason to see the sense required where generations of readers had been content to put up with nonsense.
The scholar as textual critic is con- tinuously called upon to exercise the vir- tues of honesty and courage — honesty with himself, to admit the difficulties he perceives, and courage, in removing them, to endure the solitude of treading where no former footsteps are to be found. Hous- man was famous and feared for his scathing demolition of other scholars past and present. The complaint is not quite without foundation that a whole generation of aspiring Latinists was wiped out in Britain by the terror which Housman inspired. Yet nearly always Housman's gibbetings bore a moral message: the dangling corpses were specimens of intellectual sloth, of thought- less prejudice, of arrogant pomposity, of blatant bad logic, of dishonesty in exposi- tion. Examples lingered in his hearers' memories like that of Bacheler, whose comments on the work of better scholars than himself 'resembled nothing so much as an ill-mannered child interrupting the conversation of adults'.
When Housman was called in 1892 from a clerkship in the Patent Office to the Chair of Latin at London University, it was literally a toss-up that he did not instead accede to the Chair of Greek which was vacant at the same time. This present pupil of Housman has always thought of that accident wistfully. In comparison with the much longer and more complex transmis- sion of Greek literature and its inherently deeper and wider interest, the field offered by Latin to a textual critic of such genius as Housman's was limited and infertile. One wonders with regret what he might not have done with the Greek tragedians or the Greek New Testament. But there was something self-punishing about Housman's emotionally repressed personality, and one suspects that he was deliberately taking refuge when he preferred, though lecturing upon the Augustans, to work on the poets of Silver Latin and to dedicate his best years to the arid books of Manilius' didac- tic poem on astronomy. It was a great mind that chose to live in a narrow room. I remember him, gratefully but with just the suspicion of a shudder, whenever I pass along Sydney Street under the clifflike tower of Whewell's Court, of which he used to 'run up the steps two at a time, hoping to drop dead at the top'.
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