Noel Annan - The Dons - Mentors, Eccentrics and Geniuses

Trinity was the nest of Cambridge’s philosophers: of the Idealist M’Taggart, then of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and later of Wittgenstein – and also of the notably less original C. D. Broad. In history both G. M. Trevelyan and Steven Runciman *were able as men with independent means to retire from Trinity when young to devote themselves to research and writing. But Trevelyan returned in 1926 as Regius professor of modern history and in 1940 accepted at Churchill’s insistence another Crown appointment, the mastership of Trinity.

The most famous scholar in classics was a Trinity don: Housman believed that the first duty of a classicist was to apply himself to textual criticism. He despised those who tried to explain why Greek and Latin poetry were so moving. Yet he was profoundly moved by poetry; and on one occasion he let the mask of rigid fidelity to textual criticism slip and at the end of a lecture on Horace he read his translation of what he considered the most poignant of all the odes, ‘ Diffugere nives ’. He refused to allow his name to go forward for a higher degree of Doctor of Letters on the grounds that he was not the equal in textual criticism of those Trinity scholars, Bentley and Porson. (As a result no other classical don dared put in for the degree.) His austerity, his determination to nil admirari became a tradition in Trinity. Andrew Gow, a classical scholar in the Housman tradition, was a friend to numbers of undergraduates, particularly if they were interested in painting. His colleague Gaillard Lapsley, the American-born medieval historian, asked Gow to look at a painting by Allan Ramsay he had bought and waited on tenterhooks for the connoisseur’s judgement. ‘Not a very good Allan Ramsay, is it?’ Pause. ‘But then Allan Ramsay wasn’t a very good painter, was he?’ When Housman deigned to review a fellow of Trinity’s history of Louis Napoleon and admitted that some of the epigrams hit the nail on the head, he could not resist adding, ‘the slang with which Mr Simpson now and then defiles his pen is probably slang he learnt in his cradle and believed in his innocence to be English: “a settlement of sorts for example …”’

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