Juvenal's Mayor: The Professor who Lived on 2D. a Day

By John Henderson

A lively study of the life and times of J. E. B. Mayor, one of the towering figures of Classics in Victorian Britain, and author of a still standard commentary on Juvenal's Satires.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Release date: Aug 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913701260

Book preview

1

Quit you like men of 1882: Mayor’s Philological Society

The year 1882 will be one of the notable dates in Cambridge history.¹

This book’s story about stories of high Victorian scholarship and personal politics begins in the brave new Varsity of 1882, when ‘the Commissioners had largely completed their revolutionary work. Prize … fellowships were abolished and replaced by fellowships free of restrictions about marriage and holy orders, but requiring demonstrated proficiency in learning and research.’² Let us first set the scene – and suggest how many scenes pertain to J. E. B. M.

This was the year when the new College of Selwyn began its Anglican counterrevolution,³ where all who enter must pass beneath the gilt Greek motto watching over the gate, the only Greek on public display in Cambridge:

STAND FAST IN THE FAITH: HAVE COURAGE

So it reads – quoting St Paul’s militant protreptic To the Corinthians.⁴ But the meaning it enacted was: ‘Resist with might and main any attempt to abolish the precondition⁵ of competence in translating Ancient Greek to qualify for a Cambridge degree.’ And the sting in the motto’s tail was that this Christian fortitude spells, in Greek: ‘Resist manfully – resist the admission of women to Cambridge’, for Paul’s ‘courage’ specifies ‘Men (only)’.⁶ The alliance between Christian Britishness, Ancient Greek, and a particular construction of manhood as the proper and ordained objective and method of university education had, as we shall see (below, and chapter 8), been threatened by recent developments in Cambridge, and Selwyn was just one marker of compromise, and of the determination to re-group and stem the tide.⁷

1882 was the year when revised College rules, the Statutes (still very largely in force today), inaugurated the modern University, with a powerful new design for pedagogy and for scholarly life, not merely in Cambridge, or Loxbridge, but throughout the country.⁸ In the wise reform of SJC, for instance, ‘research [wa]s added to religion, learning and education as the vocation of the College, and, therefore, of its Fellows’; and the old Council of Master plus eight Senior Fellows gave way to Master plus twelve elected Fellows, with tenure of Fellowship shortened to six years … And, for (what will prove to be more than an) example, now that the requirement of academic celibacy was lifted and ‘in the eye of College Law there is, henceforth, neither benedict nor bachelor’,⁹

[a]ccording to legend, Dr. Corrie assured the Fellows of Jesus of his confidence that none of them would take advantage of the new statute allowing them to marry. All the resident Fellows but one, however, married within a year, some of them within a fortnight of the passing of the new statutes.¹⁰

‘In 1882 the stampede was remarkable; for a good many dons were already engaged in anticipation.’¹¹ Cambridge University in the 80s would present anxiously ‘as the last stronghold of pure, homosocial, and potentially homosexual, masculinity’, as for example in Rider Haggard’s She (1887), where two Cantab, scholars – the ugly ‘gorilla’ Charon, and his boy Vincey, ‘like a statue of Apollo come to life. What a man he is. Yes, he answered, he is the handsomest man in the University, and one of the nicest, too …’ (page 1) – journey to the horror of feminist matriarchy, down among the women of Ayesha’s Amahaggar tribe.¹²

As he saw out 1882 –

the year when women were first admitted to a Cambridge Tripos;

when Parliament passed the Married Women’s Property Act;

when the gynephobe Monty James went up from Eton for his first spell in KC;

when the ex-Magdalene College student and now M.P. for Cork, Parnell, was coerced then released amid slaughter by the Invincibles;

when Oscar Browning was blackballed by exclusive circles at the M.C.C.;

when the Society for Psychical Research started up under its President Henry Sidgwick;

and when H. W. ‘Bum’ Moss’s New School (building) at Shrewsbury was opened¹³ –

– the fifty-seven years young Rev. Professor of the Latin Language and Literature John E. B. Mayor could gleefully look forward, in his mock-ghoulish way, to a hard road ahead for the newly kosher couples:

The society here is becoming very pleasant under the new regulations, many young married folk, among whom big thinking may be presumed, and ‘plain living’ is a necessity. Plenty of work and not too much pay keep body and brain in order.¹⁴

In 1882, classical studies had their contested, but residually pivotal, role in the whole fabric of imperial Victorian Society; and they had their own academic microcosm, too, within and without the Faculty (as I shall call it, despite the anachronism). In 1882, it was much bigger news for Classics than might be evident today when Mayor’s friends Westcott and Hort were finally bullied by Macmillan into bringing out their Greek New Testament ready for this academic year of 1881–2 – ‘a model for the critical edition of any ancient text’;¹⁵ and, as the Greek–English lexicon of Liddell and Scott grew to its ‘proper’ page-size (1882⁷), the first fascicle of the New English dictionary (whose proofs were fetched to the printers in the Spring of 1882: A-Ant, Oxford, January 1884) must have aroused in members of the Cambridge classical fraternity far more mixed feelings than any of them could let on (chapter 5).

1882 was also the year when the first intake of students sat the revolutionized Cambridge Classical Tripos examinations in Part I and in its new options for the voluntary Part II:

(A) Literature (compulsory within the examination until 1895)

(B) Philosophy

(C) Ancient History

(D) Archaeology

(E) Philology.¹⁶

This had been introduced by a powerful ad hoc University committee, the Double Honours Syndicate (1879), with the big guns of the Classics Faculty, Dr Kennedy, Richard Jebb, and that Trojan Henry Jackson¹⁷ prominently involved: three Regius Professors in a row (1867; 1889; 1906). Threatened by the scandal of a messy accusation of a candidate’s ‘foul play’ in the Classical Tripos Examination that could not be made to stick,¹⁸ the brave new era for the new Classics was consolidated by further initiatives, and celebrated with public displays of institutional self-confidence. For the year ended with the contract signed to establish the Museum of Classical Archaeology and house there the University’s collection of casts.¹⁹ And 1882 was rounded off by the first Cambridge Greek Play, organized by the ubiquitous J. Willis Clark, University historian, museum curator, and Registrary-to-be,²⁰ by the lecturer on Greek Art, the celeb.-hunter Charles Waldstein (appointed both Reader in Classical Archaeology and Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1883, when the British School of Archaeology at Athens was set up),²¹ and by another heavyweight Committee which included at least four of the leading lights of Mayor’s Cambridge: Jackson, Jebb, Kennedy, and J. E. Sandys. Cambridge men, of course, played all the parts – in that most manly (most suicidally manly) of Greek plays, the Ajax.²²

Now it was in Lent Term 1882 that the teen-aged Cambridge Philological Society put its activities on a new footing, and (as we shall see, chapter 5) made a proper (re-) start.²³ Records of meetings were to be collected into an annual, not severally lost in the University broadsheet, the Reporter, as had been the practice up to that point. Publication of the Proceedings (PCPS) would create as well as promote an identity for what then went by the name of ‘classical studies’. As we shall see in chapter 5, the practices in this new arena would have a major role in determining the borders between an emerging professionalized academic subject, ‘Classics’, and its neighbours, its satellites, its former provinces and patrons. The Rev. Prof. Mayor, in 1882 pressing on after Christmas from Pliny, Epistles I to Pliny, Epistles II for Lent Term lectures, with Tertullian, Apologeticus in store for Easter Term, was in on all this from the beginning, and before.

‘Mr. Munro read a paper on Aeschylus Agamemnon 1156–1159 Kennedy = 1186–1189 Paley. He argued against both Madvig’s and Mr. Verrall’s emendations of this passage ….’²⁴ To our backward look, the first volume of PCPS offers a mixed bag, with norms and expectations that we share side by side with aberrant and surprise features. Welcome new members were elected – two Macmillans, in March, for example (G. A. and M. C.) – and papers delivered: some read by the author and a transcript delivered to the editor; some summarized, with quotation from and/or précis of ensuing discussion; others sent to the Society and communicated by an Officer – H.I.H. Prince L. L. Bonaparte, for example, ‘On Latin and Roman terms of viticulture’, read by the Secretary, also at that March meeting. Meetings regularly hosted several contributions per session, sometimes hearing papers held over for lack of time through the liveliness of discussion of previous items, sometimes responding to earlier offerings; and the President was evidently expected, not just to show up, but to bring the lion’s share – as when, in November, ‘The President criticized in detail Mr. Paley’s observations on Euripides read at the last meeting.’ The nature and style of editing would take a number of years before it assumed full front-line academic journal modernity. It would be at least well into the twentieth century before its status as the (sc. the sole) organ of Cambridge’s classical fraternity was settled. The character and range of its purview took a while, too, to consolidate broadly into the ‘Classics’ we know, or have known.

The Society would become an 80s club where participants brought and shared their eranoi, never presuming to impose themselves on a whole meeting. The decade would give a hearing to some topics that must strike us as lost strays from the home of the Early English Texts, the London Philological Society (chapter 5): ‘Wallachian as illustrating English etymologies’; ‘Hávamál 2, 3’, ‘Observations on the Stanford dictionary’; ‘Grendel, in Beowulf’; ‘Origin of Quadrivium and Trivium’; ‘The Armenian Queen Anelyda in Chaucer’s Compleynte’; ‘Misunderstood passages of Hávamál’; ‘Icelandic Proverb Collection from the xvth Cent.’; ‘On the provincial English words screes, sliding stones, and aiz, harrows’, etc.

On the one hand, the dons who made the Society and its Proceedings had also helped to make, were making, and would make, the re-tuned collegiate University, with its joint responsibility for devising, teaching, and examining flexible and developing Triposes that nevertheless presented strong systems for processing students through their spell of university education, while recruiting and elevating the next generation of career academics. And on the other hand, these dons were hugely important in settling what ‘Classics’ was to be, in the years ahead. Not that their views coincided, or that they collectively acknowledged this as the project and prize – in time, many of them would be losers, in the sense that the future dispensation cost them their stake in it (chapter 5).

The energy many of them put into high-profile drives when they were relatively junior sustained enough of them through enough decades to mean that deference to their longevity as much as to their seniority substantially delayed, defused and disguised the processes of re-definition of (Cambridge) Classics. For instance, the leading lights of the 1882 Society had co-founded and would control their Proceedings well past the turn of the century. And make no mistake, they had already directed the show for a generation, just to get this far: they were people of ‘the sixties’.²⁵ It were high time the cast of characters be called.

The President for 1882 was (we saw) the Rev. H. A. J. MUNRO (TC); the trio of Vice-Presidents: W. Aldis Wright (Librarian of TC), and Professors E. B. Cowell (Sanskrit: Corpus Christi) and Walter Skeat (Anglo-Saxon: Christ’s). The eleven members of Council included seven ordained members, three of them Professors: along with the Reverends Maddock (Clare), Lewis (Corpus Christi), Burn (TC) and Moulton, there were the Regius of Greek, namely the Rev. Prof. Dr. B. H. Kennedy (SJC: Doctor of Divinity: ‘Canon Kennedy’ as he preferred to be known), the Rev. Prof. F. J. A. Hort (Emmanuel), and the Latin Professor, the Rev. J. E. B. Mayor (SJC). The others were Allen and Sandys (both SJC; Sandys Public Orator, 1876–1919, a record), John Peile, the Master of Christ’s,²⁶ and Jackson (TC). Treasurer was that ‘insane Jack-in-the-box’,²⁷ J. E. Nixon (KC); Secretary and Editor was J. P. Postgate (TC).²⁸ In Paradise (formerly St Giles Cemetery), you will find Mayor (his cross tangled in yew) still beside Skeat; Sandys beside Jackson; Jebb in reach of Wright.²⁹

Three pristine examples of Mayor’s offerings to the Society in the first run of Proceedings are reproduced as Figures 1–3. Like the contributions of others, they are unmistakably individual, with a distinctively personal voice, and they stand as fair specimens of Mayor’s thinking, his chosen academic topics, and his project for Classics.³⁰ No one else saw things his way, exactly, but all the same there is a good deal of overlap in manner and in persona with what generally passed as academic interchange, and the variety of conceptualizations among the members of what the performances should be about lessens most of what oddity there is. Some, for instance, apprehended the Society as a Notes & Queries-style forum for bring-and-buy communal consultation (chapter 6). An informal group for giving a run to today’s bright idea, or a chance to try out emendation of the week. Others brought their forthcoming essays, leaving PCPS with a pale summary – and this was indeed the basic understanding, particularly in these pristine years. As noticed already, the variety of protocols applied to the editing also eases the reading of Mayor’s notes into the mainstream of this classical philology, terrain you would effortlessly associate with the Chair of Latin.

These snapshots are indispensable for a view of Mayor at his peak. They contain still valid expertise in Latin usage that could improve modern commentaries, works of reference and dictionaries. I shall not, however, give and withhold points for pioneering or enduring validity and pertinence, but rather try to situate, and contextualize, them.³¹ They are written in a specialized language, for academic insiders, and need to be read closely.

Figure 1(1) objects to a Madvig emendation in Seneca’s Epistles, which Mayor regularly lectured on, and would in vain promise to devote his declining years to editing.³² This is lexicographical enquiry, reported and/or followed up across editions and through commentaries. This philologist loves his words: alloquor, ‘address’ or ‘console’, matters to him; he hates the idea that his favourite role-model critic should have desecrated, not just the wisdom of Seneca’s gospel, but this key concept of humane culture. Indignation obliges him to spank the great Bentley along the way – before he rescues Madvig from his printer, and stops us in our tracks with the memory suddenly sprung on us: ‘he is nearly blind’. ‘Address’ to a learned society (the constant preoccupation of the present book) – is that, at core, no more no less than ‘condolence’? With a sudden twist, the reflection retracts the thoughtful diminuendo – and reflates, in a flash, into an ex cathedra ‘warning’ to Latinists, to beware the best series of texts in print; any of them may be riddled at any point with uncritical reliance on heroes of Latinity such as Madvig. We shall consider later just how central to Mayor’s conception of Classics, of preaching, and of sociality reading aloud always was (chapter 7), and above all reading in Latin: alloquor.

Figure 1. PCPS 1(1882) 14–17.

Figure 1 (2), a spin-off from Mayor’s evolving note on Juvenal 1.70,³³ turns into a (favourite³⁴) call for a follower to come forth and finish off the project started and sketched out here: sorting out Madvig; or, rather, sorting out the criticisms of Madvig by such as Mayor, systematically – now there’s ‘a good service to letters’. None better.

Figure 1 (3) says: this is no narrow Silver Latin poetry specialist firing off communiqués to make his own work easier, i.e. to promulgate his own province of research, in all its importunate difficulty. Mayor switches into the world of proverbs, no call for extenuation, for this be Latin, too, Latin as it is part of the continuing