by Peter Parker
The £100 entrance scholarship Housman won to St John’s College, Oxford, in 1877 crowned a final year at school garlanded with prizes, including the Senior Wattell Prize, the Head Master’s Greek Verse Prize and the Prize for Latin Verse. Housman’s taste for writing Greek and Latin poetry was partly inspired by Sabrinae Corolla in Hortulis Regiae Scholae Salopiensis contexuerunt tres Viri floribus legendis (1850), which he had been given when he was seventeen. The book is a collection of mostly English verses translated into Latin and Greek by three scholars at Shrewsbury School, and so provides another early association between Housman and Shropshire. The Oxford scholarship was very welcome because the Housman family’s finances were becoming increasingly precarious. At Fockbury House Edward was living well beyond his means, and it soon became clear that he would have to return to Perry Hall, which he had meanwhile fraudulently bought and remortgaged. The children could not but be aware of what Kate called the ‘increasing restriction of means that fell upon our household’, but at eighteen Housman probably knew and understood more than they did what this meant.
When I was young and proud
1877–1881
Given his triumphant school career, Housman seemed destined for further success at Oxford, but in fact his troubles were only just starting. For the first two years all seemed to be going well. He lived within his means, made a close friend of a fellow Classics scholar called A.W. Pollard, and contributed humorous prose and verse to a short-lived university magazine called Ye Rounde Table – though he chose ‘Tristram’, the sad knight, as his nom de plume. According to Pollard, who lived on the same stair, Housman was ‘generally recognized in the College as exceptionally able’, an opinion confirmed when he gained a first in Mods, the exams taken at the end of his second year. At the beginning of Housman’s third year, in the autumn of 1879, Pollard moved to rooms in another quad and so the two friends saw rather less of each other. Instead, Housman took up with a science scholar in the same year called Moses Jackson.
Born in Ramsgate in 1858, Moses John Jackson was a brilliant student in a field quite different from Housman’s. At the age of seventeen he had matriculated at University College, London, where he was awarded the Neil Arnott Medal in Experimental Physics. After two years at UCL he was offered a scholarship at St John’s, arriving in Oxford in 1877. Jackson was also a natural athlete, and was very good looking, but he did not share Housman’s interest in the arts. A fellow undergraduate described him as ‘a perfect Philistine […] quite unliterary and outspoken in his want of any such interest’. Pollard more kindly described him as ‘lively, but not at all witty’. Housman disagreed with these observations, though admittedly he itemised the qualities he saw in Jackson in a reference he later wrote with the intention of getting him a Fellowship at University College, London: ‘I believe that if he had been caught young and kept away from chemicals and electric batteries and such things, he might have been made into a classical scholar. Even now, in spite of his education, his knowledge of Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon has often filled me with admiring envy. He also, when his blood is up, employs the English language with a vigour and eloquence which is much beyond the generality either of classical scholars or of men of science.’
The tone here, which veers between light mockery and painful sincerity, is characteristic of the letters Housman would write to Jackson over the years. One of the few things the two young men had in common was the companionable habit of taking long walks in the Oxfordshire countryside: ‘15-mile walks to a good pub to consume old ribs of beef 10" thick, pickled walnuts and a quart of bitter, with a good tub of cream, & rich cheese to finish’, as Jackson happily recalled many years later. Pollard felt that Jackson’s chief attraction for Housman was his ‘simplicity and singleheartedness’, qualities that were later ascribed to young men in A Shropshire Lad.
At the beginning of their fourth year, in the autumn of 1880, Housman, Pollard and Jackson took rooms together in an old house in St Giles’, more or less opposite their college and run by a Miss Patchett. This arrangement may have seemed highly congenial, but according to Pollard it proved fatal to Housman’s university career. ‘After we had returned from dining in Hall, and had our coffee,’ he recalled, ‘I mostly retired to work by myself in the lower sitting room, leaving the other two on the first floor.’ Whatever these two ill-matched friends did with their evenings, it had nothing to do with their studies. This did not much matter in Jackson’s case because he was a natural scholar, ‘an absolutely safe first in science in the schools [who] had no need to read much in the evening’. Housman may have seemed similarly gifted, but he had one dangerous flaw: a bumptious disdain for his elders that is characteristic of clever young men. Robert Ewing, the college tutor who had inducted Housman and his fellow freshman, was condemned for mispronouncing a Greek word during a sermon in chapel, after which Housman ‘vowed that he would not try to learn anything from such an ignoramus’. Even the great Benjamin Jowett, the university’s Regius Professor of Greek, failed to impress Housman, who attended ‘a single lecture’ from which he ‘came away disgusted by the Professor’s disregard for the niceties of scholarship’. Part of the trouble was that Housman had already decided that the chief aim of scholarship was to establish correct texts for classical authors. His friend and fellow classicist A.S.F. Gow suggested that philosophy or any ‘abstract thought of this kind was distasteful to him, and ancient history he valued less for its own sake than for the light it threw on ancient literature’. Rather than devoting himself to the study of philosophy, Housman had begun work on a commentary on the Roman poet Sextus Propertius. This work would occupy him for many years: when proposing an edition of Propertius to the publisher Macmillan in 1885, he stated that ‘There are few authors for whose emendation and explanation so much remains to be done.’
It has often been remarked that Housman’s attention to the minutiae of textual emendation – particularly in his five-volume edition of Manilius’s Astronomica – was the result of a lifetime’s emotional self-denial. ‘Deliberately he chose the dry-as-dust,’ his great admirer and fellow poet W.H. Auden suggested, as if this kind of exacting scholarship was a substitute for the messy business of life. The American critic Edmund Wilson similarly regretted that Housman devoted his time to academic work in which the voice that is heard in A Shropshire Lad was more or less silenced – ‘that voice which, once sped on its way, so quickly pierced to the hearts and the minds of the whole English-speaking world and which went on vibrating for decades, disburdening hearts with its music that made loss and death and disgrace seem so beautiful, while poor Housman, burdened sorely forever, sat grinding and snarling at his texts’. That the poet and scholar were not in fact two entirely different people is suggested by Gow’s observation that ‘Propertius had been Housman’s first love.’ The Latin poet may well have provided the textual scholar with a rich field for ‘emendation and explanation’, but one can hardly pursue this kind of work without being aware of what the ancient author under examination was attempting to convey. Enoch Powell, who regularly attended Housman’s lectures on Latin poets in the early 1930s, noted that it was very clear that ‘the marriage of logic with poetic taste in interpreting and correcting a text was not only not unnatural and contradictory but indispensable. The severity of Housman’s presentation was the severity not of passionlessness but of suppressed passion, passion for true poetry and passion for truthfulness.’ Unlike Manilius, generally regarded as a third-rate writer whom Housman himself dismissed as ‘facile and frivolous […] the brightest facet of whose genius was an eminent aptitude for doing sums in verse’, Propertius was a fine elegiac poet of the sort Housman himself would become – and Gow noted that ‘Housman’s chief love was poetry’. Propertius’s poems describe his hopeless infatuation with a woman he calls Cynthia, and it is possible that Housman was becoming aware of the relevance of this archetype to his own burgeoning relationship with Moses Jackson.
Quite how far Housman recognised the nat
ure of his feelings at this stage is unclear. He would in any case have realised that Jackson was entirely heterosexual, so that any hope of reciprocation was remote. Homosexuality was hardly unknown in Oxford, where – until reforms introduced by Jowett in the 1880s, well after Housman had left – Fellows were obliged to remain unmarried and no women were admitted as undergraduates. The exclusion of women meant that Oxford was, as one nineteenth-century alumnus nostalgically recalled, ‘a society, a brotherhood, of men living a common life, and having many things in common’; there was, wrote another, a ‘close, corporate feeling’, characterised by the ‘intimate comradeship of men and boys’. Unlike Housman, many young men arrived at the university after several years spent at boarding schools, where in an adolescent all-male atmosphere homosexuality flourished, sometimes in the form of platonic though passionate ‘romantic friendships’ but elsewhere – mid-Victorian Harrow as described by John Addington Symonds in his memoirs, for example – in the form of fully sexual relationships. The dominance of the Classics in the public-school curriculum undoubtedly fostered an awareness of Greek ideals that did not entirely chime with those of a Christian place of education. As the vice-president of the founding body of Cheltenham College put it at the school’s opening ceremony in July 1841: ‘Every pious parent must feel that there is great peril in putting into the hands of youth the abominable mythology of the ancients, tending as it does to warp their understandings, and destroy their better feelings. It is painful to think that a classical education could not be acquired without the use of such works.’ At Oxford, Jowett had also introduced reforms to the Greats curriculum, making Plato’s dialogues central to the study of Greek: not merely the Republic, which might be looked upon as useful philosophical and moral guidance for those whose destiny was to govern the country or the Empire, but also the more problematic Symposium and Phaedrus, which dealt with love. In his translations of Plato’s dialogues (1871–92), Jowett did his best to obfuscate the philosopher’s theme of the love between men and boys, treating it metaphorically and drawing parallels with Christian marriage. Others found it inspirational, and Victorian ‘Hellenism’ often had unmistakable homosexual undertones. Whether or not men went to bed together was beside the point; as many school stories of the period unblushingly demonstrated, a platonic love could be just as overwhelming as one that included a sexual element – as Housman was to find out to his very great cost.
It was at Oxford that, according to his own account, Housman finally lost his faith, becoming ‘an atheist at 21’. As with much in Housman’s life and work, this statement need not be taken too literally, and there would be little to gain from searching among the biographical minutiae of March 1880 for some anti-Damascene moment. In fact, two years after this apparently decisive statement, he told Kate that he ‘went on believing in God till I was twenty-two’. The letters mentioning religion that survive from his time at Oxford, written to his father and his godmother, are cheerfully irreverent about bishops and preachers, but Housman seems to have attended chapel regularly, as undergraduates were expected to do. None of the sermons he describes would do much to bolster the faith of someone who had ‘abandoned Christianity at 13’, but Housman’s comments upon them were written merely to amuse his correspondents rather than to suggest he was experiencing serious religious doubts. Twenty-one was the traditional age at which people came into their majority, and it is quite likely that Housman was suggesting that losing one’s faith was the natural result of becoming a grown-up, that religion was one of the childish things he put away when he became a man. That said, he had certainly got to know Moses Jackson very well by March 1880 and may have already fallen in love with him. When the Shropshire Lad is ‘one-and-twenty’, a wise man advises him: ‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas / But not your heart away’ (XIII). Again, one-and-twenty is a symbolic age, one at which, the poem suggests, such advice is of ‘no use’. It is only a year later that the Lad can acknowledge, with a resignation born of experience, that the wise man was right: ‘And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true’. By the time Housman himself was ‘two-and-twenty’, he was sharing digs with Jackson and may well have been only too aware that giving his heart away was ‘paid with sighs a plenty’ and the cause of ‘endless rue’. Homosexual feelings were regarded as wholly incompatible with Christian belief in the nineteenth century, and it seems likely that this was what finally put paid to Housman’s faith. Jackson’s unwitting contribution to this loss is suggested by the letter Housman wrote to Kate about this period of change in his beliefs, because he added: ‘and towards the end of that time I did a good deal of praying for certain persons and for myself’.
It was assumed that Housman would have no trouble in repeating his success in Mods when he came to sit Greats in the summer of 1881. While Pollard and Jackson both gained firsts, Housman failed his final examinations entirely. It is possible that the news he received a few days before taking the exams that his father was seriously ill as the result of a stroke affected his performance; but a more likely explanation is that Housman had been distracted from his studies and simply hadn’t done enough work. Pollard recalls that when Housman went back to Oxford for his viva, ‘the bewilderment of the examiners at finding themselves compelled, as they considered, to refuse even a pass to a man who had obtained a first in Mods, had caused enquiries to be made, which were now passed on to me, as to how it had come about that on some of the papers Housman had hardly attempted to offer any answers’. One of these examiners, H.J. Bidder, had found Housman a recalcitrant and unrewarding student who, when asked to consider the arguments laid out in Plato’s Republic, would simply outline, at some length, the merits or otherwise of the textual scholars who had edited the work. In one exam, he noted, Housman had remained true to form and ‘refused to consider Plato’s meaning except so far as it was relevant to the settlement of the text’. Housman’s answers to those parts of the exam dealing with philosophy, a subject in which he had declined to take any interest and for which he had done no work, were apparently ‘so ludicrously bad as to show that he had not made any effort, and to give the examiners the impression that he was treating that part of the business with contempt’. Bidder’s later judgement of Housman was that he was someone ‘on whom he had done his best to make an impression – and failed’. The more humiliating failure, however, was Housman’s own.
Back at Perry Hall, Housman was greeted with more bad news. Not only was his father’s life still in danger, but the prospect of resolving the family’s financial problems had been dashed. Displeased by her son’s financial legerdemain, Housman’s wealthy paternal grandmother had cut both Edward and his children out of her will. Edward had been relying upon this inheritance to get him out of his difficulties: his solicitor’s work barely paid for the upkeep of his family, and if he died or his illness prevented him from returning to work Lucy and the children would be ruined. The small allowance Housman had been receiving from a relative impressed by his results in Mods had been withdrawn, and his scholarship (which had another year to run) was suspended until he obtained his BA. The only thing he could do immediately was to return to Oxford for a term in the autumn in order to obtain his Pass degree. Having done that, he began to study at home for the Civil Service examination, which would be held the following summer. His old headmaster at King Edward’s School offered him some part-time teaching, which he gratefully took up in order to earn a little money.
Although living in straitened circumstances, Edward recovered from his stroke and continued to sail through life, cheerfully but ineptly pursuing a number of harebrained schemes – growing and preserving exotic fruits, prospecting for gold in Wales – with the intention of making his fortune. Because he had enormous charm, few people seem to have resented his fecklessness, which put a considerable strain upon everyone but himself. Unable any longer to afford clerical staff for his solicitor’s business, he expected his children to take on the work, Clemence in particular becoming an office drudge, while Lucy was obliged t
o make numerous economies in running the household. As Laurence nicely put it: ‘During those years of strain much was secretly done of which my father knew nothing – perhaps preferred not to know, for he had always the gift of taking things more easily than others could; and we would often see him going his own way, showing but little sign of inward disturbance, when the domestic situation was very disturbing indeed.’
Housman certainly did not share his father’s infuriating insouciance and appeared sunk into solitary gloom. ‘He returned home a stricken and petrified brother, who, from that time, was withdrawn from all of us behind a barrier of reserve which he set up as though to shield himself from either pity or blame,’ Kate recalled. ‘He met no word of reproach at home, but his own self-reproach was deep and lasting.’ Even without the open censure of his siblings, Housman must have realised that his failure was a grave disappointment to them. Kate put it brutally, referring to ‘his blamable failure’, adding: ‘for blamable it was that, knowing the severe difficulties besetting his home, making success for him the one bright spot to which his family could turn with confidence, he allowed his intellectual arrogance to lure him into slackness or negligence instead of making assiduous preparations for his Schools’.
An acknowledgement that Kate was right in suggesting that her brother’s outstanding potential had been wrecked by his youthful arrogance is apparent in a poem Housman wrote after he had published A Shropshire Lad:
When summer’s end is nighing
And skies at evening cloud,
I muse on change and fortune
And all the feats I vowed
When I was young and proud.
Another poem, written in April 1922, may also commemorate this academic disaster:
On miry meads in winter
The football sprang and fell,