‘All Knowledge is Precious’
In act 1, scene 3 of Alan Bennet’s The History Boys (2004), Mr Hector says to his students:
HECTOR. Nothing that happens here has anything to do with getting on, but remember, open quotation marks, ‘All knowledge is precious whether or not it serves the slightest human use,’ close quotation marks. Who said? Lockwood? Crowther? Timms? Akthar?
Pause.
‘Loveliest of trees the cherry now.’
AKTHAR. A.E. Housman, sir.
HECTOR. ‘A. E. Housman, sir.’
It was unfair of Mr Hector to expect his students to know the answer. A. E. Housman never wrote any such thing, and it’s just as well, because even if he’d said it in defence of humanist learning, it would have been a fairly outrageous thing to say. Sure enough it was not said by, but against Housman, in an essay by the literary critic F. L. Lucas:
His Cambridge lectures I found impressive, but repellent. The lecturer himself, immaculate in his starched linen and icy in his impassive aloofness as the Pole Star, seemed the awesome embodiment of a steely, mathematical precision; but his faith that all knowledge was precious, whether or no it served the slightest human use, revolted me then, as it revolts me still. I imagine I might have felt the same rebellious repugnance in listening to the great Calvin preaching, with inflexible, yet absurd logic, on Predestination at Geneva. I sensed something morbid and unhealthy in this formidable ascetic pressing into his own skin the harsh folds of his intellectual hair-shirt. It seemed too like the brilliant perversity of Pascal. All things in the end may in the end be vanity; but meanwhile some things seem much vainer than others. If anything matters, it is surely not knowledge in itself, but mental states and processes that we can value. For a healthy mind, life remains, I feel, too precious and even brief, to be spent on futilities, even if they are facts; on trivialities, even if they are true.1
This paragraph, like Lucas’ essay as a whole, was a mighty and failed attempt by a spiritually right-handed man to understand a spiritually left-handed man. At least Lucas recognized that he was set apart from men like Housman, Calvin and Pascal. But he could not really grasp their motives, and thought that any severity of intellect or religion must be rotten morbidity. Lucas was like Celia in Middlemarch, addicted to puppies and jewels and amazed at her fervent older sister, who seemed to take almost sensual pleasure in no puppies and no jewels.
Of course Housman did not think that all knowledge was precious. But his calculus of what was precious and what was not was invisible to someone who could only think himself in terms of ‘values’ and ‘mental states’. (Today the intellectual descendants of Lucas might talk about ‘impact’ and ‘big ideas’.) There are very many trivialities in the world, but Manilius and Lucretius are not trivialities. And someone who cannot see the inherent value in editing ancient literature should simply stay away from the whole field. Despite his protests, he is the very last person who should be trusted to deal with it as literature (never mind the boring textual details). We do not live in the fourteenth century. You simply cannot make any specialist contribution to literature without textual precision.
The proper corrective to Lucas is this passage from Max Weber’s “Science as a Vocation”:
…And if someone does not possess the capacity to put blinkers on (so to speak) and to persuade himself that the fate of his soul depends on whether this, precisely this conjecture in this passage in this manuscript is correct—then he should stay far from science. He will never have what we can call the “experience” of science. Without this strange intoxication which looks ridiculous to every outsider, without this passion, without this feeling “millennia had to pass before you came into being, and more millennia are waiting silently” regarding whether this conjecture succeeds—he does not have the vocation to science, and must do something else.
Lucas was one of the Draußenstehenden that Weber describes. Unable to sense the holy and self-justifying nature of technical humanistic research, he contented himself with gawking at its initiates. Lucas could characterize Housman as a literary character: abrasive, punctilious, aloof, mysterious, brilliant. But when it came to the actual content of Housman’s work, he could only smile at it tolerantly: or, in a worse mood, contemptuously.
So much for Lucas: the question is how his sneer at Housman ended up, misattributed, in The History Boys. The paragraph in question was first cited in 1978 by T. E. B. Howarth in a book about interwar Cambridge.2 Five years later Norman Page included the passage in his biography of Housman, citing Howarth but not Lucas’ original.3 Which of these three books did Mr Hector get it from?
In order to get to the bottom of it, I wrote a letter to the playwright:
***
18 July 2020
Dear Mr Bennett,
In an early scene of The History Boys you have Mr Hector attribute to A. E. Housman the line ‘all knowledge is precious, whether or not it serves the slightest human use’. The thought is true, but it is not actually Housman’s. It was in fact said not only about Housman, but in mockery of him. F. L. Lucas wrote:
He [Housman] seemed the awesome embodiment of a steely, mathematical precision; but his faith that all knowledge was precious, whether or not it served the slightest human use, revolted me then, as it revolts me still.
This paragraph was later quoted by T. E. B. Howarth in his Cambridge between Two Wars.
I’m wondering: how did you come across this pseudo-Housmanian line when you were writing your play?
Yours sincerely
Jonathan Nathan
***
I got this postcard in reply:
***
I’d read the TEB Howarth book so that’s how I made the mistake. Housman wouldn’t have forgiven me—he hated errors.
All good wishes
Alan Bennett
***
I now realize that I hadn’t had as much cause to write as I thought. Lucas wrote ‘whether or no it served the slightest human use’, but when Howarth cited this sentence he corrupted it to ‘whether or not it served the slightest human use’. The History Boys reproduces the corrupted version, proving that Bennett used either Howarth’s citation of Lucas or Page’s (equally corrupted) citation of Howarth. Nevertheless it would have been impossible without asking to tell whether Bennett had read Howarth or Page, so I’m glad I wrote after all.
Frank Laurence Lucas, ‘“Fool’s-Errand to the Grave”: The Personality and Poetry of Housman’, in The Greatest Problem and Other Essays (London: Cassell, 1960), pp. 179–233 [185–186].
Thomas Edward Brodie Howarth, Cambridge between Two Wars (London: Collins, 1978), p. 89.
Norman Page, A. E. Housman: A Critical Biography (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 110.
That’s a funny misattribution, since a famous line of Housman’s is about learning that has no intrinsic value at all: “A scholar who means to build himself a monument must spend much of his life in acquiring knowledge which for its own sake is not worth having and in reading books which do not in themselves deserve to be read” (from his preface to Nine Essays by Arthur Platt). Nobody who wrote that could believe “all knowledge was precious.”
Frustratingly, the “monument” quotation tends in turn to get misinterpreted as an expression of Housman’s pride in his edition of Manilius. But it’s rather a wistful remark. His obsession with erecting a scholarly monument “warped and narrowed” his studies: “at illa iacent multa et praeclara relicta.” Meanwhile his dear friend Arthur Platt, unburdened with ambition, roamed wherever pleasure and inclination led him in the world of letters. Housman clearly wonders with a sigh whether that’s the wiser way to live.
So whether by misattribution or misinterpretation, we rarely do right by Housman these days.