Two Versions of Lucretius: Arnold and Housman

Commenting on A Shropshire Lad in The Fortnightly Review of 1 August 1898, William Archer – serenely unaware that its author had been appointed to the Chair of Latin at University College London six years previously (with a sheaf of testimonials from leading classical scholars) – observed:

Mr Housman writes, for the most part, under the guise of 'A Shropshire Lad' – the rustic namefather of his book. But this is evidently a mere mask. Mr Housman is no Shropshire Burns singing at his plough. He is a man of culture. He moves in his rustic garb with no clodhopper's gait, but with the ease of an athlete; and I think he has an Elzevir classic in the pocket of his smock frock. But it is not Theocritus, not the Georgics or the Eclogues;I rather take it to be Lucretius.¹

This may rank as perceptive in itself, and intriguing in the possibilities it opens: Lucretian pastoral? A lyric Lucretianism? In what follows I should like to explore both by setting Housman's lyric and pastoral assimilation of Lucretian elements against Arnold's assimilation of Lucretian elements into a georgic of the mind in Empedocles on Etna.²

A. W. Pollard recalled the undergraduate Housman recommending Empedocles on Etna to him as containing 'all the law and the prophets'.³ We can take it that this commendation must have borne strongly on the deliverance offered in Empedocles' hymn to Pausanias in I.ii; and, whatever tinge of the sardonically blasphemous it might have carried,it bears witness – as, much more grandly, does Lucretius' celebrationof Epicurus and of his own enterprise – to the continuing power of religious language to articulate the deliverance from religion. Housman revered Arnold as a critic,⁴ and was steeped in his poetry. He 'knew Arnold's poetry by heart', wrote G. W. Watson to A. S. F. Gow, 'and would challenge us to cite a line the continuation of which he could not give. We never caught him out'.⁵ But the engagement with Lucretius in his own poetry is sharply distinct from Arnold's. The latter takes up Lucretius in his development from a poet of the unhappy modern consciousness to the critic of that consciousness and its culture in the Preface to his 1853 Poems and in his Oxford inaugural lecture of 1857, 'On the Modern Element in Literature'. The inaugural takes – or, rather, caricatures – Lucretius as an example of modern feeling. Empedocles on Etna filters Lucretian teaching through an assortment of Stoic positions, ancient and modern, in line with Arnold's own dictum: 'Epicureanism is Stoical, and there is no theory of life but is.'⁶ Housman writes to Robert Bridges on 31 December 1927: 'I am occupied with your rival Lucretius, on whom I have to lecture next term; which I do in the spirit of the true pedant, ignoring philosophy as much as possible and poetry altogether.'⁷ The Lucretius pieces in his Collected Classical Papers bear this out, and his poetry does not engage at all with the arguments of the DRN. But that does not mean he cannot engage with its vision, and I shall claim that he does so more richly than Arnold. I shall also claim that a key element in that engagement is a response to something Arnold himself registers and responds to, the Lucretian vision of what he calls in the inaugural 'the elementary reality, the naked framework of the world'.

We can find potential connections between Lucretian vision and pastoral otium – or at least between it and the cognate tradition of the locus amoenus (a tradition that comes down from the Phaedrus and beyond)⁸ – without going further than the proem of DRN Book II:

cum tamen inter se prostrati in gramine molli propter aquae rivum sub ramis arboris altae non magnis opibus iucunde corpora curant, praesertim cum tempestas adridet et anni tempora conspergunt viridantis floribus herbas

(29–33)

(They spread themselves in groups on the soft grass beside a stream of water under the boughs of a high tree and at no great cost pleasantly refresh their bodies, above...