And
its literary content. Hardy opens with
big guns in his first paragraph: “Exposition, criticism, appreciation is work
for second-rate minds.” In the second he describes “one of the few serious
conversations” he had with A.E. Housman, also at Cambridge. In 1933, Housman
had delivered his Leslie Stephen Lecture, “The Name and Nature of Poetry.” In
it, Hardy says, Housman “denied very emphatically that he was a ‘critic’; but
he had denied it in what seemed to me a singularly perverse way, and had expressed
an admiration for literary criticism which startled and scandalized me.” Hardy wasn’t
shy and Housman was no shrinking violet. The mathematician writes:
“Did
he really mean what he had said to be taken very seriously? Would the life of
the best of critics really have seemed to him comparable with that of a scholar
and a poet? We argued the questions all through dinner, and I think that
finally he agreed with me. I must not seem to claim a dialectical triumph over
a man who can no longer contradict me, but ‘Perhaps not entirely’ was, in the
end, his reply to the first question, and ‘Probably no’ to the second.”
Housman
had died in 1936, and could not respond to Hardy’s judgment, but it seems the
mathematician’s objection was more personal than literary or philosophical. Hardy
(1877-1947) had other things on his mind. He may have sensed that his own
essential mathematical work was behind him. Historically, mathematicians, like
athletes, do their best work when young. In the paragraph following the one
quoted above, Hardy writes candidly and with regret, but seemingly without self-pity:
“If
then I find myself writing, not mathematics but `about’ mathematics, it is a
confession of weakness, for which I may rightly be scorned or pitied by younger
and more vigorous mathematicians. I write about mathematics because, like any
other mathematician who had passed sixty, I have no longer the freshness of
mind, the energy, or the patience to carry on effectively with my proper job.”
I
find Hardy’s stoical resignation stirring. Few spectacles are more embarrassing
than a codger masquerading as a young Turk. Hardy was by all accounts a
first-rate mathematician. He befriended and collaborated with the brilliant,
doomed Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. That Hardy wrote with clarity and
wit makes him a doubly precious rarity. His differences with Housman take
nothing away from that great poet. I have always admired his statement in “The
Name and Nature of Poetry” that, “Poetry indeed seems to me more physical than
intellectual,” followed by this description of his test for poetry:
“Experience
has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because,
if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor
ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the
spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a
precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only
describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’s last letters, where he says,
speaking of Fanny Brawne, ‘everything that reminds me of her goes through me
like a spear.’”
In
his review of A.E. Housman: Collected
Poems and Selected Prose (ed. Christopher Ricks, Penguin Press, 1988), Kingsley
Amis says Housman’s famous lecture “reads rather disappointingly today.” Elsewhere,
Amis had already described Housman as his favorite poet, and in the review he
writes: “No poet could have turned his back more comprehensively on the modern
world or (what has come to be part of the same thing) written in a way less cut
out for study in modern universities, where the standing of poets seems nowadays
to be determined. From such places he looks a disagreeable figure, elitist,
embittered, pessimistic and utterly unsuitable for appearing on television.”
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