The Brothers Housman

An Atlantic Portrait

BY AGNES REPPLIER

THERE is an oppressive similarity in men, and a wide divergence in brothers. Whether we accept this as a fact, or deny it as a theory, makes very little difference. In either case we can ignore it (accounting for things is an uttermost waste of time), and proceed on our way untroubled. The divergence is more interesting than the similarity (men are not peas in a pod), and sidetracking, which is a waste of material in peas, is reasonable and right in men, though it leads to lamentable conclusions. Cain and Abel must have been disturbingly unlike as children. Romulus and Remus had the same reasonable ambitions, but they came to grief over the fraternal rocks. Brother against brother is more genuinely historical than are brothers side by side. Yet there is no kinship in the world so rich in possibilities, no loyalty in the world so ennobling to the hearts of men. For one thing, it is very old. For another, it is very proud. Pride heads the seven deadly sins; but the trouble with most of us is that we stand exempt because we have so little to be proud of.

There are two Housman brothers known to fame. A third, Herbert, who was killed in the Boer War, appears to have died with the silence of a soldier. Every family needs one member of this type, and most English families possess one. Their graves mark the uttermost limit of British control, and their tradition supports it. Two famous brothers are good measure for any household, being two more than are usually vouchsafed. The surviving Housman, standing undazzled on a pleasant pinnacle, relieves something that is akin to boredom by turning resolutely to the memory of his brother, A. E. Housman, who died with recognition pressing close upon him, and with an undue proportion of influence. There is a regrettable story which Clarence Darrow told the author of A Shropshire Lad. He said that he had used that blameless volume in persuading a soft-minded jury to preserve Loeb and Leopold in an ungrateful world.

When I carried A Shropshire Lad from friend to friend, striving to awaken enthusiasm for its remarkable contents, I failed signally. Recognition came quickly, but it never came through me, except in the case of Dr. Horace Howard Furness, who understood and accepted the poems readily enough, but who insisted that, while their setting was English, their inspiration was German. An English rustic, he pointed out, does not come back from the grave to inquire about his ploughing and his sweetheart. To his practical mind, dying is final. It is the German who strays in and out of the jaws of death as though they were a gate which swings both ways. Yet Housman’s kinship with the sons of English soil is the most penetrating thing in the poems. He does not have to assert this kinship. His chance allusions have all the sureness of earth and air.

How intimate it sounds! How completely one with the hangman, and the hanged, Housman has grown to be. And this incredible simplicity, this close alliance with men who seem ordinarily a bit remote, is brought about by the use of the two letters that spell the word ‘us.’

The initialed Housman stands or falls with A Shropshire Lad, and the indications are that he will stand long. The Housman who has a Christian (and a very great saint’s) name has been so brilliantly versatile that there is hardly a field of letters which he has left untried and unadorned. The overwhelming success of Victoria (on and off the stage) has lifted him as high as ambition can reasonably expect to climb. It leaves us speechless with admiration for the author’s understanding of a life which he has never been compelled to share. Dullness is not confined to courts. It is as universal as death. It gives lectures, it preaches sermons, it dines out, it sings comic operas. But it has never been so unerringly drawn as in Mr. Housman’s two volumes on the Queen. The treadmill is riotously gay as compared to one of Victoria’s dinners. Yet there is nothing accentuated in their soberness. Why should not the royal hostess show Landseer’s drawings to Lady Normandy and remark, ‘So like life. You can almost see him wagging his tail. I do think Mr. Landseer is a great artist.’ And what could Lady Normandy reply but ‘He is indeed, Ma’am!’ Yet the thought of these harmless sentences — or somct lung like them — repeated every night makes the boldest spirits quail. Greville does quail. He is reduced to feeling grateful to the Duke of Sussex for being a little drunk. He does not like intoxicated old gentlemen, and the Duke is far from amusing. But, if a cat had caught a mouse, or had had a fit, it might have restored the inanimate to life.

Now to have made dullness entertaining is surely the triumph of a great artist. Mr. Andrew Lang once said to me that he did not see why people in novels talked brilliantly and sometimes improperly, whereas people whom he met at dinners told him about their sons at college and their daughters at boarding school. But college sons and boarding-school daughters are good material, and might be gayly handled; whereas the conversation at Mr. Housman’s court dinners is possessed of a perfect and complete nothingness. It is this nothingness which, in the author’s hands, makes them supreme. Of what avail to Mr. Greville was his wit when he was dining with the Queen? He tucked it out of sight and hearing, and became one with his neighbors. Hence this choice bit of a ‘conversation piece.’

THE QUEEN: Good evening, Mr. Greville. Have you been riding today?

GREVILLE: NO, Ma’am, I have not.

THE QUEEN: It was a fine day.

GREVILLE: Yes, Ma’am, a very fine day.

THE QUEEN: It was rather cold, though.

GREVILLE: It was rather cold, Ma’am.

THE QUEEN: Your sister, Lady Francis Egerton, rides, I think, doesn’t she?

GREVILLE: She does ride sometimes, Ma’am. (There is a short pause; GREVILLE himself takes up the running.) Has your Majesty been riding today?

THE QUEEN : Oh, yes, a very long ride.

GREVILLE: Has your Majesty got a nice horse?

THE QUEEN: Oh, a very nice horse.

(THE QUEEN smiles, inclines her head, and passes on, leaving MR. GREVILLE with his deep bow unfinished.)

One very distinct impression gleaned from these dramas and sketches is that Victoria was a disagreeable woman. She did not want to be disagreeable. She tried to be otherwise. But nature, represented by ancestors, was too much for her; and it is on the whole easier for a queen than for a subject to be untrammeled. Her control must come from within, whereas most of us are firmly controlled from without.

Elizabeth was also a disagreeable woman. She allowed herself that privilege on a more liberal scale than did Victoria, who was a constitutional sovereign with a conscience and a Prince Consort. Elizabeth’s conscience went the way she bade it. She was not a Tudor for nothing. Victoria’s conscience (coddled in her girlhood) nagged at her unceasingly, or spoke in seemly fashion from the lips of her husband. It was only in her long widowhood that she gradually forgot it, and acquired the habit of believing that what she did was right because she did it. And by that time reigning had become second nature, and the authority of the crown was as superb and as limited as the constellation of Orion.

How remote is this majesty, this certainty, this monumental dullness, which is like the dullness of grazing flocks, from the harsh ups and downs of the Shropshire Lad, to whom nothing seems reasonable but adversity, and nothing is certain but death. Yet the little book links itself adroitly with the Queen in its opening poem, ‘1887,’ and never loses sight of her. She stands behind the law, and the law represents to the rustic mind a superb but meaningless authority.

‘If things went right,’ — that is, if things went our way, — how admirable we should all of us be! How good of Mr. Housman to remind us of this rejuvenating circumstance. Even as it is, with the cards stacked against us, those of us who are not going to be hanged have a good deal to our credit.

Between the life of the Shropshire Lad and the life of Victoria’s court, who would not turn to the Lad? He has jail ahead of him, and the gallows around the corner; but he takes the world in his stride, and enjoys or endures whatever may befall. He botanizes a little (‘who can sever an Englishman from his botany’?), but the meaning of friendship is clear to him, and so are the long stretches of time which he does not cumber with detail.

History taken with gaps like these is an impressive spectacle. The Lad, who is presumably ignorant of the War of the Roses and the First Reform Bill, feels the dramatic sequence of events. He feels the breath of life blowing through the world, and sees man as a thing of splendor striding over the wrecks. The consciousness of defeat fails to dim this vision. Defeat is our allotted portion, but splendor survives, untarnished and unafraid.

Nothing about a writer concerns us deeply but his books. His books are of necessity affected by his attitude toward his fellow creatures. They are a mixed lot, these fellow creatures, docile to deal with individually, but difficult in the lump. Laurence Housman has accepted them on easy terms, which grow easier and easier as experience modifies resentment. He is a bit cramped by his views on war, which are liable to obstruct the clear outlines of life; but that is a modern phase of thought which must be met with understanding and patience. It works out well on paper, which is to its credit, and years will test its worth. A. E. Housman refused to like or even tolerate his fellow creatures. In this he was blameless but mistaken. The untolerated ones did not care, because they did not know, how despicable they were. The sun shone on them, when it shone at all, and they walked their appointed paths. There is something a little ludicrous about tolerance because it implies that intolerance is compatible with sanity. God tolerates us, but we do not know for how long or on what terms. Nature tolerates us, but her tolerance is not kind. We affect to tolerate one another, which is a shallow excuse for cherishing an unnegotiable sense of superiority.

The Housman of A Shropshire Lad offered no such affectation, and implied no such excuse. He appears to have had a fretful mind. He took his dislikes very seriously, and was as conscientious about detailing them to his brother as his brother has been conscientious about detailing them to the world. His refusal to accept the order of Merit, his refusal to accept academic honors, were manifestations of personal pride. That he did not like other men who received them seems to the ordinary mind no reason at all. Had they been offered to enemies of the State, no decent Englishman would have considered their acceptance; but we can hardly expect a government or a university to be aware of our personal prejudices, or to be considerately influenced by them. Dr. Johnson’s refusal to ‘ bandy words ‘ with his sovereign represents a composed sanity as refreshing as the wind that blows.

Well, we must take our men of genius as they come, and thank Heaven for them. This is not a dull world, but a tragic one. Spain is at best a scantily populated country, and she has been drained of her vigorous young manhood which should have carried her forward to another generation. The regret of Pallas Athene — who was a warrior maid — over civil strife rings in our ears. Moreover, a land which has been dowered by her sons with a large share of beauty is the heritage of the world, and we ask ourselves sadly how much that belonged to us has been lost. For my part, I never saw a bit of old Spanish wall that any lover of loveliness could bear to see destroyed.

When some caviling critic said to Mr. Chesterton in 1918, ‘What has come out of the war, anyway?’ he answered, like the man he was, ‘We have come out of the war, and we have come out of it alive.’ It is all that can be asked of a nation which argues best ‘in platoons’; and it is a vision noticeably absent from the mind of the Shropshire Lad. He sees nothing in battle but death, which is a personal point of view, and very like him. Soldiers are not all killed, and do not of necessity die young. Kipling was aware of this refreshing truth; but Housman, having the poetic temperament, refuses to take it into account.

‘None that go return again ‘ is the burden of his song. And there is small comfort in the going. When we read,

we feel like the exhorted policeman in The Pirates of Penzance.

Men are not spurred into action by sentiments like these. The British officer in the World War who confessed that when he was in a tight place he kept hold of his courage by recalling tags of Latin rhetoric got more out of them than if he had remembered the whole of the Shropshire Lad. They were men of steel, those Latins, and they had Rome behind them, Rome trailing a cloud of glory through the centuries. It is hard to overestimate the value of a background in men’s lives. If it chances to be the best that earth affords, it floods their souls with light. The poorest citizen of Rome, the meanest citizen of Paris, feels this splendor, and rejoices.

Laurence Housman takes the world of London lightly. It has been in a caressing mood, and he has submitted to, rather than courted, its caresses. Perhaps he recalls from time to time the short-lived enthusiasms of his own life; but we all expect to be remembered a little longer than we remember others. Perhaps he really knows how flawlessly he has done the work he assigned himself. Victoria’s reign was a gold mine from which he extracted the pure metal. If the Shropshire Lad survives the Queen, it will be because of its medium, and because of its straight appeal to the human heart, which will be happy or unhappy for inadequate reasons until the final sun has set. Satire is bound to lose its point, and the mocking laugh he stilled; but nature which promises little and gives less will deceive men to the end. The Shropshire Lad believes in her most devoutly when he treads the London streets. They are as kind to him any day as

which he has left in the lanes, but he cannot believe it.

‘Eve,’ said Adam when the gates of Paradise were closed behind them, ‘the Garden was loath to see us go. The flowers lifted up their heads to be plucked, and the trees bent down their branches to brush us as we passed.’

But Eve the temptress paid no heed to his word. Sentiment had no place in her terror-stricken heart, and comfort there was none.