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Wednesday, April 02, 2008
And what? And what? of the House-man?
Not this House-man
This Housman.
Although actually there’s a certain resemblance there, I think.
I’ve been reading some of Housman’s criticism lately, and enjoying it very much. Specifically I’ve just read his ‘Introductory Lecture, delivered before the Faculties of Arts and Laws and of Science at University College London, October 1892’, in which Housman argues that the one thing needful to transform a medium poet to a good poet, or to elevate a poet of genius to a poet of enduring worth is a thoroughgoing education in the classics. Shakespeare, for instance, coulda (in Housman’s view) beena contenda if only he’d studied Greek and Roman literature assiduously enough. As it is, Shakespeare is close but no cigar.
But then Housman presents a counter-example: not every mind can be saved by the classics. Not even, in some cases, a great mind. His example is Richard Bentley. Housman calls him ‘the greatest scholar that England or that Europe ever bred; a man so great in his own province he serves as a touchstone of merit.’ But he also says this:
Bentley was born in the year 1662, and he brought with him into the world, like most men born near that date, a prosaic mind; nor did all his immense study of the classics avail to confer on him a true appreciation of poetry. While he dealt with classical poets he was comparatively safe, for in dealing with these a prosaic mind is not so grave a disqualification as a dithyrambic mind; and Bentley had lived with the ancients till he understood them as no one will ever understand them who brings to their study a taste formed on the poetry of Elizabeth’s time or ours. But that jealous deity which loves, Herodotus tells us, to strike down towering things, put into his heart to invade a literature with which he was ill acquainted, and to edit Paradise Lost.
Bentley believed, apparently sincerely, that Milton’s blindness had presented the opportunity for an unscrupulous scribe to alter Milton’s dictation. ‘Accordingly, whenever Milton’s poetry failed to come up to Bentley’s prosaic standards of what poetry ought to be, he detected the hand … of this first editor.’
Milton relates how ‘four speedy Cherubim’ were sent out with trumpets to summon an assembly. ‘Four speedy Cherubim’ says Bentley: ‘Not much need of swiftness to be a good trumpeter. For speedy I suspect the poet gave “Four sturdy Cherubim.” Stout, robust, able to blow a good blast.’ Milton relates how Uriel at sunset came to Paradise to warn the guards of the approach of Satan: ‘Thither came Uriel, gliding through the even.’ Bentley insists on altering even to heaven, because, as he acutely observes, evening is a division of time, not of space, and consequently you cannot come gliding through it: you might as well say, he exclaims, ‘came gliding through six o’clock,’ Milton relates how Ithuriel found Satan disguised as a toad whispering at the ear of Eve: ‘Him, thus intent, Ithuriel with his spear Touched lightly.’ But Bentley cannot be happy without Ithuriel’s motive for doing so, and accordingly inserts a verse of his own composition: ‘Him, thus intent, Ithuriel with his spear, Knowing no real toad durst there intrude,Touched lightly.’ Here was a man of true and even colossal genius, yet you see in matters poetical the profoundest knowledge of the classics profited him nothing, because he had been born without the organs by which poetical excellence is perceived.’
This makes me wish that Bentley had just let rip on Paradise Lost and remixed the whole thing from start to finish. No? ‘Knowing no real toad durst there intrude’ is so spectacularly bad a pentameter it’s really rather endearing. I have to assume that it is to be pronounced: ‘Knowing no reäl toad durst there intrude’, which somehow makes it simultaneously better and much, much worse.
So, in sum, Housman’s position is: (a) Everybody born between about 1650 and about 1670 possessed a prosaic mind.
(b) People with prosaic minds should leave poetry well alone.
(c) Poetic excellence is apperceived by a particular organ. This last position might seem somewhat phrenological, but remember: the House-man does not specify where, exactly, this organ is located. It might be amongst our viscera.
On the other hand: surely the man who could write so extraordinary, if inadvertent, a two-line poem as
Came gliding speedily through six-o’clock
Knowing no reäl toad durst there intrude.
could never be accused of lacking an organ of poetry. I rest my case.
Comments
I enjoyed this, thanks. Housman was a pretty bad poet himself, mind. But he did come from the Arnold era in which just having an opinion was in and of itself reason for writing criticism.
Wow. Right as I’m preparing for my Latin Textual Criticism exam, I run across a Valve entry on non other than Housman. Weird.
Here
another classicist says that Housman’s poetry didn’t reflect his scholarship, and vice versa.
“There is a narrowness in Housman that does not just reflect a just appreciation of his own limits, but which contains as well a deliberate refusal to acknowledge anything great beyond his own expertise. The critic Edmund Wilson pointed out long ago how absurd Housman is when he applies Lucretius’ words about Epicurus — lucida tela dieï (brilliant shafts of sunlight) — to Bentley’s edition of Manilius. All the careful exactness of Housman goes along with a pettiness of spirit that at least at times is out of control and expresses a contempt for whatever he does not understand."