By bridges that Thames runs under  

            In London, the town built ill,  

        ’Tis sure small matter for wonder

            If sorrow is with one still.

A Shropshire Lad, 50

Man goeth forth to his work, and to his labour: until the evening.

Psalms, 104:17

On hearing the news of his appointment as Professor of Latin at University College London, Housman had little time for self-congratulation. As the new junior Professor, it was his task to deliver a lecture to mark the opening of the academic year in October. It would be his first public oration, and he was determined that it should be remembered: its composition took him much time and trouble during the summer months.

Housman set himself to answer the question: ‘What is the good of learning?’ First he dealt with the aims of learning usually put forward by scientists, and then by those on the Arts side. Scientists, said Housman, define the aim of learning as utility; and then, to the accompaniment of shocked rut-tuts from some students, he made slighting references to the utilitarian views of Herbert Spencer, his philosophical bête noire since Oxford days. ‘Our business here is not to live, but to live happily’; so the aim of studying science must be something other than utility. As for those on the Arts side, he considered that they defined the aim of learning as being to ‘transform and beautify our inner nature by culture’; but he did not believe that studying, say classics, would especially transform or beautify the inner nature of a large proportion of the human race. Although the study of classics might refine a student’s literary discrimination, so great a classical scholar as Richard Bentley had made an ass of himself trying to emend Milton’s poetry. Housman’s personal view was that man can only be truly happy and fully alive when his craving for knowledge is gratified: so learning is good in itself. Adding that the pleasures of the intellect were ‘the least perishable of pleasures’, and that a man should study whatever attracted him, he concluded that the only rivalry between science and the arts should be the rivalry of fellow-soldiers whose honour it was ‘to search out the things which God has concealed’.

Later Housman was to describe this lecture as rhetorical and not wholly sincere. He certainly believed that excellence in learning was of importance in itself; but he had long felt that knowledge does not always lead to happiness. He seems to admit this in his lecture: ‘the pursuit of truth in some directions is even injurious to happiness, because it compels us to take leave of delusions which were pleasant while they lasted’: thus ‘the light shed on the origin and destiny of man by the pursuit of truth in some directions is not altogether a cheerful light’. But then he states that: ‘The house of delusions is cheap to build, but draughty to live in, and ready at any instant to fall; and it is surely truer prudence to move our furniture betimes into the open air….’1 This was not perhaps the sincere view of a man who had once written:2

Find ye the truth, if so divine it seems

But we will live our lives & die in dreams.

At any rate, his lecture had been well aimed to please an academic audience. Housman’s new colleagues were impressed by the authority with which he spoke; and the Council of University College, feeling satisfied that they had been right to take this clerk from the Patent Office and install him as a professor, paid him the rare compliment of printing and distributing his Introductory Lecture.

*

University College London had first opened its doors to students in October 1828. Thus in Housman’s day it was a relatively new establishment; and it was also a progressive one: women were admitted to its classes, considerable emphasis was placed on the teaching of science; and, from the first, students had been admitted without religious or political tests.

When Housman joined University College, the Classics Department was in poor condition. Alfred Goodwin, a much respected man, was appointed Professor of Latin in 1867; but then in 1879–80 he taught Greek as well. He found this too great a burden, the work of the department suffered, and from 1880–9 he gave up the Latin Chair, and was solely Professor of Greek. Sadly, in 1889 Goodwin was allowed once again to combine the two professorships: his health broke down under the strain, and it was his death which had left the way open for Housman’s appointment.

Now, at least, the Latin and Greek Chairs were separated again, with Housman as the Latin Professor, and with the Greek Professorship taken up by William Wyse, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, whom Housman knew from the Cambridge Philological Society. The two new Professors found that their classes were not large; but there were some ten hours of teaching a week. Moreover, they ‘seldom had pupils who possessed a native aptitude for classical studies or intended to pursue them far’;3 and the teaching terms were twelve weeks long, which Housman, remembering the eight-week terms at Oxford, found ‘not nice’.4 Some of the teaching was very basic, with exercises in grammar, Latin composition, and unseen translation, so that each student’s work needed individual attention. With the obligation to give eight or nine lectures on Latin literature each spring, Housman was more occupied with teaching than he might have wished.

The college was not residential, and there was at first little social life among the teaching staff. In the evenings and at weekends Housman returned to his lodgings in Highgate where he worked, wrote poems, and on one occasion in 1894 wrote a splendidly ironic letter about Highgate Wood which was published in the Standard on 14 March; it began:

Sir,

In August 1886 Highgate Wood became the property of the Mayor and Commonalty and Citizens of the City of London. It was then in a very sad state. So thickly was it overgrown with brushwood, that if you stood in the centre you could not see the linen of the inhabitants of Archway Road hanging to dry in their back gardens. Nor could you see the advertisement of Juggins’s stout and porter which surmounts the front of the public house at the south corner of the wood. Therefore the Mayor and Commonalty and Citizens cut down the intervening brushwood, and now when we stand in the centre we can divide our attention between Juggins’s porter and our neighbours’ washing. Scarlet flannel petticoats are much worn in Archway Road, and if anyone desires to feast his eyes on these very bright and picturesque objects, so seldom seen in the streets, let him repair to the centre of Highgate Wood.

Writing letters to the paper – however amusing – is a rather lonely pursuit. But later in 1894 there was a change at University College which considerably added to Housman’s enjoyment of his years in London. That patient and exact scholar, William Wyse, disillusioned by the generally low calibre of his students, and the elementary nature of the teaching they required, returned to his Fellowship at Cambridge. His successor, whom he told ‘not to expect too much’, was a married man of about Housman’s age, called Arthur Platt.

Platt had been educated at Harrow and Cambridge where, rather like Housman at Oxford, he had failed to get a First through not sticking closely enough to the syllabus. But at least he had gained a Second and, though he did not have Housman’s genius for conjectural emendation, he was a fine scholar, and an expert on the subject of Greek metre. Platt and Housman respected each other’s work, and also shared an enthusiasm for literature: ‘Greek was his trade’, wrote Housman of Platt, ‘but the home in which he dwelt was great literature.’ Platt’s tastes were wide-ranging: he seemed to have read everything, from the Divine Comedy to Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities,5 and he knew the novels of Jane Austen practically by heart.6 Housman’s tastes in literature were also broad, and his reading included not only Matthew Arnold, Mark Twain, and Thomas Hardy – but lesser-known writers of detective novels and ghost stories.

Arthur Platt was a convivial man, and it was largely he who created social life among the University College dons, by persuading them to gather after lunch in a room which had been given to him, but which he turned over for general use. It was during these informal meetings that Housman was drawn into friendship not only with Platt but with W. P. Ker, the Professor of English, a man endowed with a dry sense of humour, who naturally shared their love of literature.

A bachelor now in his late thirties, Ker came originally from Glasgow. He had won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, and had then been elected to a fellowship at All Souls. Even now, after five years as Professor at University College, he regarded Oxford as his real home, and returned there every week-end during term-time. He was very learned in European as well as in English literature and it was said of him that he knew all the languages of Europe as far as the Slav borders.

Platt often went to London Zoo. As a student wrote, this devotion sometimes had unfortunate consequences for Platt, who at one time was going about ‘with three distinct wounds inflicted by the mistaken enthusiasm of his dumb friends’. The same student told Professor Housman how he had visited the Zoo and gone to the giraffe house, where he saw a crowd of children watching a man remove his hat ‘while the giraffe, its neck stretched to the fullest capacity, was rubbing its head backwards and forwards, upon the bald crown. When the object of this somewhat embarrassing affection turned his head, Platt’s features were revealed.’7

For seventeen years, from the time that Housman was in his early thirties to the time that he was a middle-aged man of fifty-one, the three friends worked together at University College. Students would crowd to the Arts Dinners to hear their three speeches, each so different and each delightful, and to meetings of the Literary Society – a Society which Housman compared to a Minotaur:

Housman himself read a number of papers to the Society, his subjects including Burns, Tennyson, Swinburne, Campbell and Matthew Arnold. Burns he provocatively declared to be a great critic but not a great poet; and as Ker was present at the meeting, Housman introduced a number of teasing references to Scots and Scotsmen in general. Ker, however, refused to be drawn, announcing only: ‘Forgiveness is the last refuge of malignity. I will not forgive Professor Housman.’ Tennyson he attacked for unfounded optimism, saying that if God had read ‘In Memoriam’, which contains lines like:

he would have said to Tennyson, as he had once said to Job: ‘Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?’ Swinburne’s early work Housman admired greatly, and he was especially fond of the Prologue to ‘Tristram of Lyonesse’, which begins:

But Swinburne’s later work he detested, on one occasion describing it as nothing but ‘a clattering noise’. The sound of a poem was certainly as important to Housman as its sense, and for this reason he had a fondness for some minor poets: Christina Rossetti, for example, whose beautiful verses he declared to be ‘the sort of nonsense that is worth writing’.

Again, in one of his papers to the Literary Society, Housman was very kind to Thomas Campbell, a minor poet but a man with an expert control of sound, who wrote the famous ‘Hohenlinden’.

The other poet to whom Housman gave nothing but praise was his old idol, Matthew Arnold, whom he now described as ‘the great critic of our land and time’; and, comparing him with some well-known Victorian critics, he wrote:8

I go to Mr. Leslie Stephen, and I am always instructed, though I may not be charmed. I go to Mr. Walter Pater, and I am always charmed, though I may not be instructed. But Arnold was not merely instructive or charming nor both together: he was what it seems to me no one else is: he was illuminating.

Unfortunately, only memories and a few fragments of most of these papers survive. ‘In their kind they were excellent’, wrote A. S. F. Gow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who heard several of them. But Housman was determined to let nothing but his best work outlast him, his high standards leading him to comment on his Swinburne, one of the papers which he intended to have destroyed: ‘I do not think it bad; I think it not good enough for me.’ One oration, delivered to the University College Union Society, he actually tore up page by page as he was speaking, so that it could not be printed afterwards. His literary papers were allowed to survive a little longer, as he intended to read them more than once; but he ordered them all to be destroyed on his death, and his instructions were obeyed.9

After the papers had been read, there was a debate. Housman would argue fiercely enough with older members of the Society – if his pistol missed fire, wrote one of them later, he could knock you down with the butt end – but he took a more lenient and encouraging line with the younger ones. The discussion was often enlivened by good-natured leg-pulling between Housman, Ker and Platt; and it became something of a challenge for one of the students to make a bold attack on one of Housman’s papers, a favourite line being to compare Housman with God. While Housman looked ominously down his nose, ‘The assailant was warmly cheered – then there was an icy silence as Housman rose to reply, the assailant began to wish he hadn’t, and the audience waited in delighted expectation of seeing him butchered…’.10 There was only one assailant against whom Alfred declined to defend himself: his brother Laurence, who came to speak in favour of woman’s suffrage. It was obvious to all those who knew him that Alfred must disagree strongly with his brother’s views, and when Laurence had finished speaking, ‘there were loud cries for Alfred Housman’. He rose and said, with disarming good humour:

Birds in their little nests agree

    And ’tis a shameful sight

When Children of one family

    Fall out, and chide, and fight.

So, some of the students at University College met Professor Housman’s brother; but, of course, there were large areas in his life about which they knew nothing. The sustained importance of his feelings for Moses Jackson, the shock of Edward Housman’s death in November 1894, the period of ‘continuous excitement’ in 1895 during which Housman wrote so many fine poems, all these were locked away. When in March 1896 the man whom they knew as a reserved academic published a volume of romantic poems, A Shropshire Lad, they were unable to reconcile the academic and romantic facets of his life, and he became something of a mystery to them. One of his students, R. E. Mortimer Wheeler, wrote of Housman as11

the austere and aloof Professor of Latin. He had very little liaison with his students, who came and went at their own individual discretion … his tongue could on occasion be as biting to all of us as his published prefaces. In spite of this, we all liked him in a kind of way, and felt a certain awe of him as a man of mystery and of manifest ability. The Shropshire Lad never emerged: but when he interpreted a page of Latin text, his precise and incisive translations, free from all ambiguity and humbug, are remembered still.

Housman took his teaching seriously, and set high standards for the men and women whom he taught. For the intellectual capacity of women in general, he had a low regard, once writing, rather waspishly:12

Man regards woman with intellectual contempt and sexual passion, both equally merited. Woman welcomes the passion but resents the contempt. She wishes to be rid of the discredit attached to her little brain, while retaining the credit attached to her large bosom.

But he did not single them out for attack: he simply made no allowances for them. His caustic comments would sometimes reduce the women to tears, perhaps because they still expected special treatment; and some of them were deeply wounded when, like many teachers, he found it difficult to remember their names from week to week. But at least one of his women students later wrote: ‘We did not mind his making us cry, because we knew he was just.’13 And when he came across a woman whom he considered exceptional, he made every effort to help her, as the recollections of another student testify:14

My first impression would have been of a reserved and rather unapproachable man, & of a lecturer of high scholarly attainments who could nevertheless make every detail clear and understandable to an attentive student. I wanted to ‘get on’ so his lectures were a joy and satisfaction to me.

I never met him outside the classroom, but I often had a few words with him about my private reading before the MA exam, & he even volunteered to teach me the elements of making Latin verses – & did.

There was another student whom Housman met in less formal surroundings. For a period during the 1890s he often went for Sunday supper to the home of Dr George Fletcher, whose daughter attended his classes three or four days a week. There was a simple reason for Housman’s visits: he had few friends in Highgate, and Fletcher, though ten years his senior, was an Old Bromsgrovian, while his father had been the Housmans’ family doctor for many years. Sadly enough, the Fletchers, noticing how often Alfred called on them, and not knowing of his homosexual inclinations, decided that their pretty daughter was the object of his visits. Worried that she was in some danger from his attentions while she was unchaperoned during the day, they stopped her from attending University College at the end of her first year.15

Otherwise Housman met few of his students outside the classroom, except at meetings of the Literary Society; or in the lunch room, where ‘the great man used to surprise us by his immense appetite for beef and beer’;16 but he did enliven some of the college magazines which they read, by contributing a number of his humorous verses. These included a clever skit on the sometimes laborious way in which the action unfolds in classical Greek drama. Entitled ‘Fragment of a Greek Tragedy’, it ends:17

ERIPHYLA (within). O, I am smitten with a hatchet’s jaw;  

And that in deed and not in word alone.

CHORUS. I thought I heard a sound within the house

Unlike the voice of one that jumps with joy.

ERIPHYLA. He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,  

One more: he purposes to kill me dead.

CHORUS. I would not be reputed rash, but yet

I doubt if all be gay within the house.

ERIPHYLA. O! O! another stroke! that makes the third.  

He stabs me to the heart against my wish.

CHORUS. If that be so, thy state of health is poor;

But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

More typical of the pieces which he contributed is ‘The Parallelogram, or Infant Optimism’, a delightfully nonsensical set of verses, one of which runs:18

Wherever placed, it matters not

In how unsuitable a spot,

The parallelogram must stay:

It is too weak to crawl away.

Among his colleagues, Alfred Housman built up a considerable reputation as an after-dinner speaker. This dated from an occasion in March 1895. The Professor of Chemistry at UCL, William Ramsay, had discovered the inert gas argon. A dinner was held in honour of this, but the speaker who was to have made the principal toast could not be present. F. W. Oliver, the Professor of Botany, who had heard of Housman’s abilities in this field ‘from an Oxford source’, persuaded him to make the toast instead. Housman’s speech was the success of the evening. Not only did Ramsay show ‘the utmost kindliness and friendliness’ to his young colleague for the rest of the many years during which they both worked at UCL, but19

from that time he was the refuge of those at University College who had to organise formal dinners. One, to W. P. Ker, was enlivened by Housman’s imaginary Biography of his victim. Ker, Housman asserted, being determined to teach English, had begun by learning to speak and write it: ‘And I must say that he learnt it very well; in fact, if I could speak and write Latin as well as Ker speaks and writes English, I should hang myself in despair of ever finding a sufficiently appreciative audience.’

Housman enjoyed belonging to a community. He was a proud and ambitious man, and was now highly regarded not only by his immediate colleagues but by many important figures in the literary and classical field; but he did not wish his personal life to be in any way remarkable or remarked upon, and as a member of an academic community he was able to conceal as much of his private life and emotions as he wished beneath a respectable and unremarkable disguise. When the publisher Grant Richards met Housman for the first time in 1898, he found him ‘agreeably precise’ in speech, bearing and dress. In fact, in 1898, Housman had a particularly good reason for wishing to appear just like everyone else, for in that year Moses Jackson came home on leave for a short while, apparently without his wife and family. Alfred was still devoted to him, but had, through correspondence, established a more relaxed personal relationship. Alfred Pollard and his wife, who were now living in Wimbledon, invited Jackson and Housman to dinner, offering to put them up for the night afterwards. ‘When I retired to rest’, wrote Pollard later, ‘I found an apple-pie bed awaiting me and I think the Professor of Latin was a fellow-victim, though I’m not quite sure that he wasn’t an aggressor. Anyhow, we became very youthful and light-hearted.’ One can imagine the shock which would have spread through University College if it had become known that their Professor of Latin had been making apple-pie beds for his male friends, one of whom he loved. No wonder Housman had ‘an air of preferring to pass unnoticed through the streets’!

Two years after this, there was a real crisis at University College. The Honorary President of the College was now Lord Reay, an able administrator who had been Governor of Bengal and then Under-Secretary of State for India. But he had no hand in the day-to-day running of the College; and there was still no proper academic head. Not only was the administration in need of reorganisation, but the financial position of the College had become extremely serious. By the summer of 1897, the College owed its bankers £30,000; and the situation deteriorated still further during the next few years, when to the existing difficulties were added the illness of Horsburgh, the College Secretary. Housman was staying at Henley for regatta week when the crisis broke in July 1900. As a member of the Council of University College, he was summoned back to London by an urgent telegram from Miciah Hill, the Professor of Mathematics; and the Council meeting which followed was a dramatic one: ‘though all else may fade from memory’, Housman wrote, over thirty-five years later, ‘the meeting of July 1900, when Horsburgh was dismissed, is branded on my soul.’

For some time there had been a group of Professors who had felt that the Constitution of the College needed reforming. Housman had not been one of these ‘convinced reformers’; though, as one of the Deans himself between 1894 and 1896, he was aware of the weaknesses of the existing system of administration, and had tended to take the part of the reformers in a discussion.

The meeting was attended by most of the Council, including Arthur Platt, Professor Oliver, and Mr Ashburner. There was a tedious delay while minor problems were discussed, then they moved on to the main business. A report had been prepared advising that a Principal should be appointed. This was read,20 and, in the discussion which followed, Housman acted as the spokesman of the reforming group. He demanded from Lord Reay a new Constitution in which there would be a proper academic head of the College; and he asked for the dismissal of the present Secretary. Horsburgh was sent out of the room, and it was decided to sack him. Lord Reay then asked Housman to take the Minutes of the rest of the meeting, which he did, tactfully glossing over what had happened.

Afterwards, Housman had to stay behind to enter the Minutes into the official Minute Book, while Oliver kindly took a telegram to the Post Office to let his friends in Henley know that he would be back later than expected. But everything had gone very well: Lord Reay had been quick to see that Housman had the Council solidly behind him; and that his proposals made sense. The meeting was the start of an important set of reforms which put the Constitution of the College on a firm basis. Less than seven years later, College circumstances were so improved that Housman was able to write nonchalantly: ‘One does not discover the difference, except that the Senate is now called the Professorial Board.’21

After the crisis of 1900, Housman did not play a large part in College affairs. However, he did serve for a time on the finance sub-committee, where he drew up entertaining reports, one of which describes the ‘varying degrees of reluctance of Professors and Fellows to pay their dues’; and he was an energetic Treasurer of the Dining Club, of which his appreciation of good food and his growing knowledge of wine made him a valuable member.

For the most part though, Housman concentrated upon his teaching and his classical researches. In 1903, he published the first volume of what was to be his great classical work, a revised text of the Latin poet Manilius. This was prefaced by one of the biting commentaries on the failings of other scholars for which he was becoming well known; and the work as a whole was dedicated to ‘M.J.J.’, his friend Moses Jackson.

Most years, Housman managed to get away for a few days’ holiday to Woodchester; and he also kept in good touch with his family, writing long letters to his stepmother about the continental holidays which he had begun in 1897; and corresponding with his brothers and sisters. But for some years, family news was very gloomy: his youngest brother Herbert died fighting in the South African war in 1901; and in 1905, after a short illness, his brother Robert also died. Two years later, Lucy herself died; and no doubt these three deaths contributed to the silences which sometimes made Mrs Hunter think that her lodger should see more people.22  In some ways, Housman had made himself less accessible than ever when in 1905 he had moved with his landlady from Highgate to a country hamlet near Pinner. But by this time he had also built up a modest social life in London.

Like many sincere and serious people, he had no small talk, and therefore disliked the sort of mixed party at which serious conversations are considered anti-social. He would occasionally go to dinner at the houses of friends like the Platts, but even among friends he sometimes felt ill-at-ease. Accepting one dinner invitation, he wrote to Mrs Platt:

The reason why you so seldom see me is that when the weather is bad on Sundays I am afraid to come so far, and when the weather is good, the country, being both nearer and larger, drags me north. Platt, who knows everything, even Greek, will explain to you that every particle of matter in the universe attracts every other particle with a force directly as their masses and inversely as the square of the distance which separates them.

Moreover, at the last at-home I came to, you treated me very ill. I had hidden under the piano, or in it, I forget which; and you came and pulled me out.

In an effort to dissuade another hostess, whom he disliked, he wrote much more firmly:

People are asking me out a great deal too often, and you are one of the chief offenders. I am not a social butterfly like you: nature meant me for solitude and meditation (which frequently takes the form of going to sleep): talking to human beings, whether ‘lovely ladies’ or not, for any length of time leaves me in an state of prostration, and will finally undermine my health unless I take care.

Housman managed to kill the idea of having women admitted to the Professors’ Dining Club;23 and his favourite social activity outside the College was to enjoy a good dinner in the company of two or three of his male friends, followed by a visit to a music hall.

When he was a child Housman had enjoyed some serious music, but in London he avoided it entirely. Serious music demands a serious response and, with his underlying melancholy, what Housman required was something light-hearted which he could simply enjoy. In a good music hall, one could drink a pint of beer or a glass of wine, talk to one’s friends, and keep half an eye on the continuous entertainment which was provided – often of a very high standard. There were jugglers, magicians, animal acts, short dramatic scenes, and, most important of all, vocalists. The best of the lyrics were witty and urbane, like Charles Coburn’s ‘The day I broke the bank at Monte Carlo’; there were also songs about the Empire and patriotism – a theme close to Alfred’s heart in view of his brother Herbert’s career; and nostalgic songs, sung by men like Harry Lauder, which brought tears to the eyes of all those who, like Alfred, were far from their childhood home.

Apart from his publisher, Grant Richards, the chief of the friends with whom Housman visited the halls was William Rothenstein, who made three portrait drawings of Housman in 1906. The following year Housman invited Rothenstein, who at the age of thirty-five was about thirteen years his junior, to dine at the Café Royal. ‘The form which these orgies take’, he wrote to Rothenstein, ‘is that after dinner we go to a music hall, and when the music hall closes, as I have no club, we are thrown on the streets and the pothouses: so you know what to expect.’ Rothenstein accepted the invitation, and afterwards made Housman a present of one of the drawings which he had made of him. After this they lunched or dined together from time to time, and Housman took him to see his brother Laurence’s play The Chinese Lantern when it opened in June 1908 at the Haymarket Theatre.

Alfred found Mrs Rothenstein rather tiresome, and several times declined her invitations to dinner-parties and other entertainments. On one occasion she tried actually telephoning him at the College, and the next day he had to write apologetically: ‘I hope that my conversation through the telephone yesterday did not sound brusque. I am very little accustomed to using that instrument. I was very sorry not to be able to come to the theatre with you….’ On another occasion she tried to persuade him to spend part of the summer with her family at a French seaside resort; she cannot have been very flattered by his reply, which was charming, but which suggested that he would ‘store his mind’ more profitably by visiting some cathedral towns which he had not yet seen!

Despite all this, he kept up his friendship with Rothenstein, and was pleased to go to a private view of an exhibition of his drawings in May 1910. He wrote to Mrs Rothenstein that he liked

Housman lured Rothenstein and Ashburner to the music halls without much difficulty; but Gilbert Murray, the Professor of Greek at Glasgow University, took rather more persuading. Housman first asked in April 1900, ‘When are we going to the music-hall?’ Several unsuccessful attempts and four-and-a-half years later he wrote firmly: ‘You cannot deny that you are now in London, therefore your long-impending music-hall can no further be delayed.’ Even then, Murray seems to have escaped him. A fortnight later, instead of enjoying dinner and a music hall, Housman spent an evening at the Court Theatre, sitting through Murray’s translation of a play by Euripides. He had enjoyed reading the translation much more than he enjoyed watching it performed; and although he afterwards wrote to thank Murray for the ticket, he could only find wholehearted praise for the ‘statue of Cypris standing there quiet all the time’. At any rate, Housman and Murray appreciated each other’s scholarship. They corresponded on classical matters – on one occasion Housman was kind enough to send Murray some unpublished conjectures which he was able to use – and Housman was pleased when in 1908 his friend was appointed Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, congratulating him ‘on having survived a Scotch professorship long enough to obtain what I hope will be consolation even for that’. Housman also thought it worth while to tell Murray some of his general views about life, as in this letter:

If Alfred’s view of the state of mankind was not very cheerful, at least he kept something of an open mind on the subject; and although he had abandoned his own religious beliefs, he would readily quote scripture, and maintained a keen interest in things which touched upon religion. In the summer of 1900 he went for a walk in Buckinghamshire one week-end with Karl Pearson, the Professor of Eugenics at University College, ‘to find a farmer who lays a particular kind of eggs, which tend to prove that there is no God’. A few years later Housman was writing to his friend Walter Ashburner, a former colleague at University College London who was now living abroad, and reported to him with a certain wry amusement, that Lord Kelvin had announced in the Botanical Theatre ‘that the vegetable kingdom requires a God, though the mineral could do without him’.24 More seriously, he wrote to Rothenstein in 1907 about a short story by W. H. Hudson: ‘A piece [like this] … hateful characters and harrowing events, showing God and man at their worst, is good to some extent if it is true, because then it is a weighty indictment of the nature of things.’

While he was at University College, Housman seems to have taken less of an interest in politics than he had as a young man, but he generally welcomed a Conservative victory, saying that it would ‘vex the kind of people I don’t like’.25 Indeed, Alfred was just as sceptical as his father had been about the benefits of democratic government. An aristocrat at heart, he was even prepared to believe, with the Greeks, that a class of slaves was the ‘essential’ foundation of ‘a well-governed state’. The one real advantage of democracy, as he saw it, was that it was difficult to betray a government you had chosen, and so there was less likelihood of revolution. ‘“Democracy does save you from horrors like that”,’ he said at a College debate, ‘and at the word “horrors” a shudder seemed to pass over him.’26 He was certainly a great patriot, and his patriotism was strengthened by his brother’s part in the South African war. When one day a pro-Boer professor – who, unfortunately, knew nothing about Herbert Housman’s death – made some disrespectful remarks about the English private soldier, the result was a display of Housman’s invective which surprised even his colleagues.

Besides seeing friends in London, Housman made occasional journeys to Cambridge where he was on good terms with a number of leading scholars, including Henry Jackson and J. G. Frazer. Henry Jackson had introduced Housman to the Cambridge Philological Society, and published his classical papers in the Journal of Philology, back in the days when Housman was a clerk at the Patent Office; and now Housman continued to visit him regularly, on one occasion taking Platt with him. From 1906, Jackson was the Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge; and when in 1908 he was awarded the Order of Merit, Housman wrote to him in the most friendly way.

James Frazer, only five years older than Housman, was half way through The Golden Bough. Housman, with his deep interest in religious truth, was fascinated by Frazer’s work; and it was at a dinner-party in Frazer’s house that Housman first met Andrew Gow, the outstanding young classical scholar who was later to be his friend and biographer: though on this particular occasion Gow took away ‘little … except a disappointing answer to the question where he spent his vacations; he went, it seemed, not to Shropshire but to Paris’.

Housman had made a success of his years as Professor of Latin at University College London; but although he had continued to publish papers every year, he had never had as much time as he would have liked for his own classical researches because his teaching programme was so demanding. He had once written with some feeling that he had hoped a friend would get a certain Greek Chair ‘in order that you might cease to sit up till four in the morning preparing lectures and looking over essays’; and when in 1910 the Kennedy Professor of Latin at Cambridge died, Housman was delighted to be asked to stand as a candidate for the post, which would involve much less formal teaching. It was not at all certain that he would be elected, especially as the forcefulness of his attacks on other classical scholars had made him distrusted in some quarters; and, in view of this, Henry Jackson at once began a benevolent intrigue on Housman’s behalf.27

In the meantime, there was what must have been an irritating and somewhat unpleasant incident. The writer and adventurer, Frank Harris, then editing a weekly journal, decided that he would interview the author of A Shropshire Lad, perhaps hoping to get permission to publish some of his poems; and, as Housman wrote, he ‘came down on me at the College like a wolf on the fold’. Harris dragged him off to an impromptu lunch, at which a gang of Harris’s friends were present, including the writer Richard Middleton with his ‘huge felt hat’ and his ‘enormous black beard’.28 Housman felt and looked ill-at-ease among this unconventional group. Middleton, who had no doubt expected the author of A Shropshire Lad to be more obviously a poet in his dress and manner, later wrote rather unkindly:

He looked elderly and insignificant and suggested in some subtle way an undertaker’s mute, the kind of man who wears kid gloves too long in the fingers, and generally has a cold in the head… [his] eyes might be rather fine in repose, but the whole body and speech of the man were twittering with nervousness.

In their own way, Frank Harris and his friends did their best to set Housman at his ease; but they cannot have struck the right chord when they ‘sympathised with him over his luckless environment’: after all, he was proud of his professorship and his classical work in London. Nor did they flatter him as they hoped, when they ‘quoted his poetry without stint’: they simply made him feel – probably quite rightly – that they were not being wholly sincere. At the end of the meal, thoroughly exasperated by his companions, Housman stood up and bluntly accused them of having arranged the lunch solely in order to extract some poems from him. This was unnecessarily rude, even if true, and later Housman did not like to recall the incident; but he would be less than human if he had never lost his temper, and on this occasion he had been considerably provoked by patronising efforts to ‘find him worthy of his own work’, as Middleton put it.29

Then, in January 1911, Alfred Housman heard the good news for which he had been waiting. The electors at Cambridge, waiving the customary trial lectures, wrote to offer him the appointment of the Kennedy professorship. Housman accepted, and was given a home in Cambridge by Trinity College, who promptly elected him to a fellowship. As the letters of congratulation poured in, Housman wrote to Ashburner (Fifteen Letters to Walter Ashburner: 30 January 1911), modestly attributing his election as professor to the fact that he was personally unknown to the majority of the electors, and the other candidates – who included such men as J. E. Sandys, J. P. Postgate and J. E. Reid – were not. The Oxford Magazine simply stated:30

Mr. Housman is the greatest living critic of Latin poetry; and it is fitting that such a man should fill the Chair of Munro…. If we bred a great man, yet it took us a long time to find it out… Cambridge has invested in genius.

Mrs Rothenstein was among those who sent Alfred letters of congratulation; and he wrote back: ‘To have less work and more pay is always agreeable, and that will be the case with me.’ But the real gain for Housman was that at last, at the age of nearly fifty-two, he could look forward to having sufficient time to devote to the classical studies at which he excelled. He celebrated privately by dining at the Café Royal with Arthur Platt and Grant Richards. Later on, Housman attended several more formal dinners given in his honour at University College.

One of these, held just before Easter, was given by the students.31 They had gained much from Housman: contact with his mind, his love of truth, perhaps even ‘his grim courage in racing a world, the evil of which he felt more keenly than most’.32 As well as his present students, some of his former pupils at University College had turned up for the occasion, and they presented him with a silver loving cup on which was inscribed his own couplet:

… malt does more than Milton can

To justify God’s ways to man.

(ASL 62)

Housman stood up to thank them, and in a short speech he apologised for sometimes forgetting their names, but joked that if he had concentrated on their faces, he might have forgotten the Latin which he was meant to be teaching them.33 Then he talked about Cambridge, describing his predecessor, Mayor, as: ‘a man who drank like a fish … if drinking nothing but water may be so described! When I come to Cambridge with this loving cup, things are going to be changed!’ Finally, he claimed one title to fame at University College: ‘as Augustus found Rome brick and left it marble, so I found the Easter Vacation four weeks, and leave it five!’

The Professors’ Dining Club also held a farewell dinner for Housman. In his speech to his colleagues, Alfred mentioned a recent decision that professors at University College should retire at the age of sixty-five. This was not to apply to professors already appointed, but Housman said that he would have felt morally bound to retire at sixty-five, and that he had been kept awake at night wondering how he would survive from then until his seventieth birthday, when he would be eligible for an old age pension of ten shillings a week. However, his appointment at Cambridge had provided him with a refuge: ‘Death, raving madness, or detected crime’, he rejoiced, ‘are the only enemies I now have to fear.’34 It was either at this dinner or a later one that he again ‘referred to the extreme abstemiousness of his predecessor, Mayor, and (practically) said that he should have to eat and drink all the time he was at Cambridge to restore the balance’.35 Then he added: ‘Cambridge has seen many strange sights. It has seen Wordsworth drunk; it has seen Porson sober. Now I am a greater scholar than Wordsworth, and a greater poet than Porson, so I fall betwixt and between.’36

Notes

Unless otherwise specified below, my major sources for the information in this chapter are: AEH: Recollections; Gow; Letters; My Brother: AEH; and for details of its administrative and related affairs, H. Hale Ballot, University College London 1826–1926, University of London Press, 1929.

1 A. E. Housman: Selected Prose, pp. 1–22; Introductory Lecture 1892.

2 Pugh; Appendix A, p. xxii.

3 A. E. Housman: Selected Prose, p. 156; Arthur Platt (1927).

4 R. W. Chambers, Man’s Unconquerable Mind, London, Cape, 1939, p. 369.

5 A. E. Housman: Selected Prose; Arthur Platt (1927); pp. 154–60.

6 Details about Platt and Ker are to be found in Man’s Unconquerable Mind; see pp. 360, 361, 362, 387–9, 398.

7 A. E. Housman: Selected Prose, pp. 156–7; Arthur Platt.

8 Ibid., pp. 197–8; from a paper on Matthew Arnold.

9 Columbia: Laurence Housman to Cyril Clemens, 9 April 1956.

10 Man’s Unconquerable Mind, p. 377.

11 Maude Hawkins, A. E. Housman: Man behind a Mask, Chicago University Press, 1958, p. 135.

12 Trinity, Add MS 71–20.

13 Man’s Unconquerable Mind, p. 368.

14 Columbia: letter to Cyril Clemens from L. P. Brown, 31 January 1937.

15 Lilly: Carter correspondence, Hilda Fletcher to G. L. Watson, 19 May 1957.

16 ‘Recollections of Mr E. V. Lucas’, Mark Twain Quarterly, A. E. Housman memorial issue, winter 1936.

17 Roger Lancelyn Green (ed.), A Century of Humorous Verse 1850–1950, London, Dent, 1959, p. 161.

18 A. E. Housman, Three Poems, printed by Department of English, University College London, 1935.

19 Man’s Unconquerable Mind, p. 374.

20 University College London; from the official Minutes of the Council Meeting, 4 July 1900; see section 161.

21 From a letter of 2 May 1907 from A. E. Housman in Alan Bell (ed. ), Fifteen Letters to Walter Ashburner, Edinburgh, Tragara Press, 1976.

22 Housman 1897–1936, p. 99. It may be worth remarking that Housman’s landlady appears as ‘Mrs Trim’ in the letters; but the editor of that volume, Henry Maas, states in an article in vol. 2 of the Housman Society Journal that ‘Mrs Hunter’ is the correct name.

23 Man’s Unconquerable Mind, p. 374.

24 From a letter of 2 June 1903 in Fifteen Letters to Walter Ashburner.

25 Man’s Unconquerable Mind, p. 379.

26 Ibid., pp. 377–8.

27 Housman 1897–1936, p. 98.

28 Henry Savage’s Richard Middleton, p. 47, quoted in Watson, p. 189.

29 Richard Middleton, ‘Monologues’, p. 219, quoted in Watson, p. 190.

30 26 January 1911; quoted in Housman 1897–1936, p. 100.

31 JPP, letter from R. W. Chambers to Mrs K. E. Symons, 24 February 1937.

32 Man’s Unconquerable Mind, p. 380.

33 Ibid., p. 368.

34 JPP, information from letter of R. W. Chambers to Mrs K. E. Symons 24 February 1937.

35 Congress, RHP Box 2: Mrs K. E. Symons to Grant Richards, 13 February 1937.

36 JPP, R. W. Chambers to Mrs K. E. Symons, 24 February 1937.