by Peter Parker
Housman believed that poetry had other functions beyond the principal one of giving pleasure to young men. In a letter of condolence to his sister Kate, one of whose sons had been killed in the First World War, he wrote: ‘I do not know that I can do better than send you some verses that I wrote many years ago; because the essential business of poetry, as it has been said, is to harmonise the sadness of the universe, and it is somehow more sustaining and more healing than prose.’ The person who gave this definition was Sir Leslie Stephen in his A History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), and Housman had copied the observation into a notebook, along with the statement that immediately preceded it: ‘Nothing is less poetical than optimism.’ Optimism is certainly not something the reader encounters very often in A Shropshire Lad, which at times seems almost comically glum. In ‘Twice a week the winter thorough’ (XVII), for example, Housman depicts a lad in summer ‘trying to be glad’ as he strides out onto a cricket pitch:
Try I will; no harm in trying:
Wonder ’tis how little mirth
Keeps the bones of man from lying
On the bed of earth.
This is the sort of poem that has always made Housman a popular target for parodists, though it is unclear quite how seriously we are supposed to take it. It seems the sort of verse against which a protest is raised in the book’s penultimate poem, ‘Terence, this is stupid stuff’ (LXII). Indeed, in that poem’s reply to the criticism of a friend there is a near echo of the earlier one in the undermining aside: ‘Therefore, since the world has still / Much good, but much less good than ill…’ Well aware of the reputation for gloominess his poetry had gained, Housman once agreed to a request that Last Poems should appear in a Braille edition on the grounds that ‘The blind want cheering up.’ As this remark shows, Housman could be very funny in his dry ironic way. He firmly rebutted the suggestion that he had at any time suffered ‘a crisis of pessimism’, insisting that he was not a pessimist but a ‘pejorist’, which is to say someone who believes the world is getting worse rather than better – adding (not entirely truthfully) ‘and that is owing to my observation of the world not to personal experience’.
Housman knew that Last Poems contained some of his finest verse, but A Shropshire Lad retained a special place in his heart. While he grudgingly allowed composers to set poems individually or as part of a song cycle, he steadfastly refused permission for the volume’s poems to be reprinted in anthologies. ‘Pray who gave Mr. E[dward]. Thomas leave to print two of my inspired lays in his and your Pocket Book of Poems and Songs?’ he asked Richards in June 1907. ‘You must not treat my immortal works as quarries to be used at will by the various hacks whom you may employ to compile anthologies.’ He resisted all suggestions for a collected edition of his poems, repeatedly arguing that A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems were entirely discrete volumes. The only occasion during his lifetime that they were published together was for a ‘limited edition de luxe’ (‘the pompous edition’, as he called it) in 1929. Housman agreed to this only ‘reluctantly’, perhaps bending his hitherto inflexible rule because the two volumes remained separate books within a single slipcase. His argument that the two books were entirely different entities is, however, undermined by our later knowledge that several poems eventually published in the second volume were originally intended for the first, and that the decision to remove five poems from A Shropshire Lad and add three others was taken only ‘while the book was printing’.
The ‘Englishness’ of Housman’s poetry has been widely recognised. ‘If he reminds us of any other poet, it is (now and then) Heine,’ the famous critic William Archer noted in an early review of A Shropshire Lad; ‘yet he is English of the English.’ The American poet Louise Imogen Guiney suggested a ‘cried kinship’ with Englands Helicon, the anthology of Elizabethan pastoral poetry published in 1600 and containing works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, Drayton, Peele and others. There was, however, a difference, as Archer noted. He detected the influence of the Classics, but went on to suggest that ‘The Shropshire of Mr Housman is no Arcadia, no Sicily, still less a courtly pleasaunce peopled with beribboned nymphs and swains. It is as real, and as tragic, as Mr [Thomas] Hardy’s Wessex.’
That reality was emphasised by the use of real place-names, unlike those of Hardy, which were largely invented; but the places Housman mentioned were emblematic, sometimes bearing little relation to geographical reality. As Orwell noted, the book is ‘full of the charm of buried villages, the nostalgia of place-names, Clunton and Clunbury, Knighton, Ludlow, “on Wenlock Edge”, “in summer time on Bredon”, thatched roofs and the jingle of smithies, the wild jonquils in the pastures of the “blue remembered hills”.’ It is much more than that, though. These place-names, however resonant for English readers, would be mostly unfamiliar to foreign ones. One of the earliest American reviewers pinpointed other aspects of Englishness embodied in the poems, noting of Housman’s generic Lad, ‘Like a true Englishman, he takes his pleasure sadly.’ Quoting the first two stanzas of poem XVII, in which the Lad attempts to keep unhappiness in check by the very English expedient of playing football and cricket, the anonymous reviewer went on to add that ‘In one of the most tragical lyrics [VIII], the crowning thought of desolation is delightfully English.’ This is by way of a joke, since in the poem a man who will not be returning to the family home after murdering his brother reflects that the dinner his mother has prepared for him will have gone cold. It nevertheless points to that strain in English life and letters that is the very reverse of traditional American optimism.
There are always dangers – including those of stereotyping and over-simplification – in attempting to define national traits, but one person who repeatedly did so was the political theorist Sir Ernest Barker (1874–1960), who contrasted what he saw as English values with the kind of nationalism that led to political extremism in mainland Europe. Like Housman, Barker was a classicist from a rural background (in his case in Cheshire, where his father had been an agricultural labourer), and his work and writings were informed by his study of ancient authors. One of the topics addressed in Barker’s National Character and the Factors in Its Formation (1927) is melancholy. ‘A theme or note which is from first to last characteristic of our literature, and a secret of its influence, is one which we may name elegiac,’ he writes. ‘It is a sadness which is not weakness, and a lamentation which is not unmanly; a melancholy which is mixed with endurance, and a brooding on the passage of time which never becomes despair.’ This is precisely the elegiac quality that one finds in Housman’s poems, but that quality is also part of an English literary tradition that stretches back across many centuries. Barker quotes the literary scholar W.P. Ker, a colleague of Housman’s at University College, London, and one of the three people whose advice he called upon when selecting the contents of Last Poems: ‘The Anglo-Saxon genius for poetry is best known in the elegies – The Wanderer, The Seafarer, and others – to which there is nothing corresponding in Germany or Iceland. The English invented for themselves a form of elegy. They seem to have been more readily touched by motives of regret and lamentation than other people.’
In The Wanderer, one of the earliest surviving English poems, dating from around the eighth or ninth century, a solitary figure finds himself exiled from his home, cast adrift on an icy sea ‘with winter in [his] heart’. Battling through atrocious English weather (frost, snow, wind and hail are all mentioned), he recalls his former life in the warm mead-halls of his beloved lord, whom he has buried after defeat in battle. Thus melancholy and nostalgia are present from the very beginnings of English literature. The notion that the English tendency towards nostalgia is bound up with the loss of empire or loss of power and prestige in the world certainly has some traction, but it overlooks a literary tradition that predates the zenith of imperialism by a millennium. Whatever the root cause, there remains in England a tendency to harp upon past glories rather than looking forward to a promising future, to look back upon a ‘lan
d of lost content’ rather than suppose that, as that quintessentially American popular standard puts it, ‘The Best Is Yet to Come’.
The English are also renowned for their sexual and emotional repression, and were particularly so during the period in which A Shropshire Lad became popular. If in England the traditional landscape is green, lush and productive thanks to all that rain, the emotional terrain is generally thought of as somewhat arid, and Housman himself appeared to embody this perception. His reputation was that of a dry classical scholar, not someone at all likely to have produced anything as deeply felt as A Shropshire Lad. The apparent gulf between the lyric poet people met on the pages of A Shropshire Lad and Last Poems and the man they might, with persistence, meet at his rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, or indeed be unlucky enough to find themselves placed next to at High Table, seemed both inexplicable and unbridgeable. In fact, at heart Housman was a romantic – though a romantic of a peculiarly doom-laden and tight-lipped English variety: because one is lapidary, it does not mean one has a heart of stone. The cynicism people detected in Housman’s work was merely the obverse of the romantic medal, for what are cynics if not disappointed romantics? Furthermore, the repression that seemed to characterise Housman’s life and conduct was precisely what produced the poetry and directed the form it took: deep emotion constrained by and contained within very short poems written in strictly observed verse forms.
All these elements contributed to the sense that A Shropshire Lad represented something recognisably and cherishably English. The book was published during a period in which what constituted England and Englishness had become a major preoccupation. On the surface, Britain had remained a stable, if very unequal, society during the latter part of Queen Victoria’s reign, and its confidence and sense of itself was very much bound up in its empire. Technically, this may have been a British Empire, and many of its servants Scottish, Welsh and Irish, but it was ruled from England and the values it disseminated around the globe were regarded as characteristically ‘English’. This was reflected in some of the seminal texts on empire published in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While Charles Dilke called his 1868 book Greater Britain, in describing the travels that inspired it, which took him to America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and India, he wrote: ‘I followed England round the world: everywhere I was in English-speaking, or in English-governed lands. If I remarked that the climate, soil, manners of life, that mixture with other peoples had modified the blood, I saw, too, that in essentials the race was always one.’ That race too was ‘English’ rather than ‘British’.
Dilke is now chiefly remembered as one of the main players in a sensational Victorian divorce case, but the book he wrote as a young man proved very popular, running rapidly through four impressions and remaining a key imperial text well into the twentieth century. J.R. Seeley’s book on imperialism was unequivocally titled The Expansion of England and proved even more popular and enduring: published in 1883, it sold around 80,000 copies in its first two years and was still in print at the time of the Suez Crisis in 1956. J.W. Froude’s Oceana (1886) was subtitled ‘England and her Colonies’, and in the book he referred to those colonies as ‘other Englands’. Like Dilke, Froude had travelled before writing his book and was happy to report that ‘Amid the uncertainties which are gathering around us at home […] it is something to have seen with our own eyes that there are other Englands beside the old one, where the race is thriving with all its ancient characteristics.’ These ancient characteristics took one back to a time not only before the Acts of Union which united England with Ireland (1801) and Scotland (1707), but even before the Principality of Wales had been subsumed into the Kingdom of England in 1536. Dilke, for example, had written of the global spread of ‘Alfred’s laws and Chaucer’s tongue’ to form an imaginary realm he dubbed ‘Saxondom’.
In the nineteenth century ‘British’ values may well have seemed less easy to define than ‘English’ ones, since they needed to take account of characteristics that were specifically Scottish, Welsh or Irish. Unlike England, those nations were Celtic and had their own languages and customs, though these had to some extent been eroded by centuries of English rule. The separating out of a pure and unalloyed England from the amalgam that was Britain was essentially a nineteenth-century idea – so much so that in 1867 Matthew Arnold could claim that ‘in England the Englishman proper is in union of spirit with no one except other Englishmen proper like himself. His Welsh and Irish fellow-citizens are hardly more amalgamated with him now than they were when Wales and Ireland were first conquered.’
In the eighteenth century ‘England’ and ‘Britain’ had been more or less interchangeable, as can be seen in two patriotic songs of the period, ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ and ‘Rule, Britannia!’ The words of the former were written by Henry Fielding in 1731 and became a hugely popular ballad when set to music by Richard Leveridge four years later. Fielding laments the current state of the nation and looks back to an age when proper solid English food ensured the country’s physical and moral health:
When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food,
It ennobled our brains and enriched our blood.
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good
Oh! the Roast Beef of old England,
And old English Roast Beef!
‘Rule, Britannia!’, dating from 1740 with words by James Thomson set to a rousing tune by Thomas Arne, similarly became a popular patriotic song and proved even more enduring. Thomson is best known for The Seasons (1730), a cycle of poems about the English countryside, but he was in fact Scottish by birth, having come to London as a young man to make his literary career and remained there for the rest of his short life. Born in 1700, he was of the first generation to grow up in a Scotland united with England, and ‘Rule, Britannia!’ reflects his interest in forging a new ‘British’ identity. The song opens with Britain rising from the sea ‘at Heaven’s command’, and while the reference was clearly to Britain’s naval supremacy, of vital importance to an island nation, in more general terms the song celebrated a country free from tyranny, its natural beauty kept secure by its stalwart inhabitants:
Blest isle! With matchless beauty crown’d,
And many hearts to guard the fair.
These lines owe something to both the aria ‘Fairest Isle’ in Purcell and Dryden’s opera King Arthur and the famous speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II, which hymns ‘this scepter’d isle […] This precious stone set in the silver sea’ and builds to the climactic paean: ‘This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.’
Fielding’s vision of a lost society in which ‘Our fathers of old were robust, stout, and strong, / And kept open house, with good cheer all day long, / Which made their plump tenants rejoice in this song’ came to be known as ‘Merry England’. This was an almost prelapsarian world, essentially rural and based around the more cheerful rituals of the church calendar, dancing round maypoles, swilling ale and enjoying a kind of painless feudalism. The term stretches back a long way, but was popularised by William Hazlitt in an essay of that title published in 1819. The denizens of Hazlitt’s Merry England were a people who enjoyed cricket, field sports and practical jokes, the open air in summer and the cosy fireside, with a perpetually blazing log, in winter. Their merriness was spontaneous and anarchic, generally reserved for ‘high-days and holidays’, but also wholesome: ‘They are not gay like the French, who are one eternal smile of self-complacency, tortured into affectation, or spun into languid indifference, nor are they voluptuous and immersed in sensual indolence, like the Italians.’
Hazlitt’s affectionate caricature mentions Robin Hood and ‘Merry Sherwood’, but not the Arthurian legends that were taken up as a model of ‘Englishness’ later in the century. Arthurian knights represented a noble rather than a merry England: chivalrous, virtuous, courageous, their exploits recounted by Sir Thomas Malory in Le Morte d’Arthur, published in 1485. The golden age of chiva
lry was the Middle Ages, but it saw a revival in the reign of Elizabeth I, forming the basis of Edmund Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene (1590), an Arthurian allegory in praise of Elizabeth and the knightly virtues of her courtiers. The Elizabethan period was close enough to the medieval period to make its embrace of chivalry seem a plausible ‘Indian summer’, and any revival thereafter seemed unlikely. In the early years of the Industrial Revolution Edmund Burke was able to announce that ‘the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of England is extinguished for ever.’ In fact, not only was the glory of England reanimated in the nineteenth century, but a new age of chivalry was ushered in.
This revival of chivalry was a conscious anachronism in which art, literature and fancy dress all played their part. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poems of Alfred Tennyson and the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites all drew upon a romanticised version of the chivalric tradition. England was after all a country that had an armour-clad knight, St George, as its patron saint and featured a ‘verray, parfit, gentil knyght’ as a pilgrim-narrator in one of its founding literary texts, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Such figures embodied all the virtues of what became known as a Christian English gentleman, and the public schools which flourished in the nineteenth century aimed to produce generation after generation of this paragon. Cyril Norwood, headmaster successively of Bristol Grammar School, Marlborough College and Harrow, would claim that ‘The ideal of chivalry which inspired the knighthood of medieval days, the ideal of service to the community which inspired the greatest men who founded schools for their day and for posterity, have been combined in the tradition of English education which holds the field today.’ This was the kind of education that produced the country’s leaders and the English country gentlemen who would preside over rural society. If country estates were not quite Camelot, they represented a social order in which the lord of the manor exercised a benevolent paternalism, looking after the material and spiritual needs of those who lived and worked on his estate. This resulted in a society that was rigidly stratified but considered just. As Mrs C.F. Alexander succinctly put it in her popular 1848 hymn ‘All things bright and beautiful’:
