I first encountered Ronald Knox through his “Letter from Ulysses to Penelope (written inside the Trojan horse),” a brilliant Ovidian epistle in elegiacs.[1] Knox wrote that in his early 30s, but his ability as a Latinist was apparent even at school, and certainly when he won the Chancellor’s prize at Oxford for a long poem in galliambics. I greatly admire Knox’s talent: I wish I knew Latin (or Greek, or even English) as well as he did. Now we can read another product of Knox’s youthful classicism, lectures on the Aeneid for Oxford undergraduates in the winter of 1912, when he was chaplain and tutor at Trinity College. Three copies survive, preserved both by Knox and by his pupil Laurence Eyres, who followed Knox (literally and figuratively) from low to high church, from Anglo-Catholic to Roman Catholic to priest.
Father (later Monsignor) Ronald Knox was an extraordinary linguist, a versatile writer (including six detective novels), and by all accounts a memorable speaker, both in church and outside. He was also a much-loved human being, cherished in life and in memory by friends and relations, students and colleagues. And because he is an appealing and interesting figure, anything he wrote is worth attention. But while Knox was an outstanding Latinist, he had not the least desire to be a scholar of classical antiquity. Matthew McGowan in his excellent essay in this volume identifies some of Knox’s limitations, for instance that both Heinze’s Vergils epische Technik and Norden’s commentary on Aeneid 6 had appeared before Knox gave these lectures, but he knew them not. He knew some German, but was generally proud of his ignorance of continental scholarship, claimed never to have heard of Wilamowitz (who had lectured in Oxford while Knox was a student), wrote (in the same year as these lectures) a parody of the kind of philological scholarship his brother Dillwyn practised,[2] and in Lecture 1 speaks disdainfully of the pedants who insist on writing “Vergil” rather than “Virgil.” Knox was a proud amateur.
That stance affected these lectures, not for the better. Both McGowan and Francesco Montarese in this volume point to original and still valuable elements of Knox’s work, and indeed, he had a fine eye for details: the observations on Virgil’s descriptions of landscape in Lecture 5, on Herodotean ethnographic details in Lecture 6, on the use of particular words in Lecture 8 are those of a very attentive reader. But even at his best, as on Virgil’s use of particular words (magnus, unus, turris, and si quis are the most notable), Knox is incomplete or disingenuous. He sneers in Lecture 2 at what he implies was the accepted translation of pietas, as “affection.” “Affection” is not a good translation—nor is it high in the list of meanings given by Lewis and Short, the best dictionary available to Knox and his students. As Knox says, Virgil uses magnus for grandeur rather than size, although (as Montarese admits) that is not its exclusive meaning even in Virgil—but neither Knox nor Montarese bothers to mention that Virgil’s usage is perfectly normal Latin: “grand” gets just as much space as “large” in Lewis and Short. Knox rightly notes Virgil’s pathetic use of si quis—but the first sentence of Pro Archia illustrates how common that is in elevated Latin. Knox is proud of what he sees, but his vision is very narrow. He is a good reader, but no scholar.
None of this should surprise, for more than one reason. Knox cared about Virgil; he cared little about the language and culture of Rome, and not at all about the discoveries of modern scholarship. His most precise comment about Virgil’s style is to point out that in adjective/noun phrases, the noun generally comes last. Had he read Norden’s appendices—which (credite experto) are quite intelligible even to someone with little German because there are so many illustrations—he might have taught his students something worthwhile about Virgil’s poetic technique. Instead, he explicitly points out that this pattern of word-order “ought to be capable of imitation in our own verse-copies” (172).
That is the second reason that Knox’s lectures are not particularly scholarly: they are lectures delivered by a 24-year-old to 19-year-olds, devoted, as he says, to the appreciation of the Aeneid, “not wholly without a view to the General Paper in Honour Moderations” (48). That paper gave students a chance to write about broad themes in ancient literature and culture; it demanded generalities and wide views, not the precise knowledge of texts that was necessary for the rest of Mods.
Guiding teenagers towards meretricious displays of bogus sophistication—for that is what Knox was doing—is entertaining, and Knox’s remarks are those of a very intelligent young man who knew Virgil well. But for understanding the Aeneid, they come up short. The words that interest Knox do not include, for instance, inanis or umbra, words I was taught to see as central to Virgilian poetics. He pays no attention to episodes that now seem important, the doors of Daedalus, the golden bough, the shield. He finds Virgil’s similes “a very tiresome and unconvincing form of poetic artifice” (134). For Knox, by and large, it is the relationship of the poem to the contemporary world of Augustan Rome that matters most, not the poem itself. But perhaps that it is because he is talking to teenagers; whether he would have written differently for publication is unknown, nor does that question seem to interest the contributors to this volume.
Knox’s lectures illuminate not Virgil, but Knox’s state of mind in 1912 and the cultural assumptions and level of both Knox and his audience. The most remarkable (to use no stronger a word) of these lectures are the first two, devoted to Virgil’s political outlook on the one hand and his religious attitudes on the other. Politically, Knox treats Virgil as straightforwardly Augustan, a herald of “this splendid world-power” (51); and unlike many modern readers, he sees an “atrmosphere of optimism” (57) in the Aeneid. That leads him to treat the Dido episode as, essentially, a reflection of Caesar’s encounter with Cleopatra: “[I]f he had remained in Carthage in deference to the feelings of the dusky Queen, he would have appeared in Roman eyes . . . as having played the coward: just as Caesar would have done if . . . he had failed to go and see and conquer at Zela, and left the world to manage its affairs as best it liked . . .” (55). The contributors to this volume understandably do not quote this passage, nor do they cite Knox’s later comment that Dido was best known before Virgil “for the famous Semitic trick by which she secured land for the building of her city” (105).
That Knox shared the prejudices of his time and place is not surprising, and his bland bigotries are far less vicious than, for instance, those of Pound and Eliot a couple of decades later; they are of a piece with his description of Lavinia, “that fluffy little pink-and-white creature” (65) as the heroine of the Aeneid, or indeed his expectation that his pupils would easily understand his explanation of the difference between Apollonius and Virgil as comparable to that between a sweet wine like Chablis and port: “The sweetness, the richness of the port is there, almost to excess . . . . But roll it for a moment round your tongue, and you will see at once that the body is not there” (137-38). Knox had been an assiduous participant in the numerous dining clubs of Oxford when he was an undergraduate, he enjoyed the company of what his brother Wilfred described as “carriage folk,”[3] and he clearly shared his audience’s assumptions about race, religion, gender, and when to drink which wines.
My inclusion of “religion” in the last sentence is unfair: religion is where Knox differed most from his students and contemporaries. When he gave these lectures, Knox had recently been ordained as an Anglo-Catholic priest; in the same year as these lectures (1912) he joined, and then was disgusted by and left, a group of dons attempting to find a foundational core of doctrine acceptable to all Christians. But for Knox, as his niece puts it, “All compromise in religion was treachery. . . . The committee were like a crazy, leaky vessel, throwing out Authority with trembling hands.”[4] Knox’s version of pietas sounds suspiciously like his view of the True Church: “The man who knows what sins or impurities need expiation, and what piacula are appropriate in each different case is, radically, the man who is pius. In this sense, when we speak of pius Aeneas, we mean practically, ‘Aeneas, that trained liturgiologist’” (63). That Knox goes on to describe the divisions of the underworld as Limbo, Purgatory, Hell, and Heaven does not seem to disturb the contributors to this volume. It does disturb me, as do the constant biblical parallels by which Knox explains Virgilian ideas.
Ronald Knox was the youngest of the four remarkable sons of the evangelical Bishop of Manchester. He possessed profound wit, linguistic ability, and religiosity—but in terms of wit, his oldest brother Edmund, the long-time editor of Punch, was well ahead of him; in terms of language, the second brother Dillwyn was a brilliant Hellenist, a great scholar who not only completed Headlam’s unfinished edition of Herodas but also played a significant role as a code-breaker at Bletchley in World War II; and the third brother Wilfred was a high Anglican priest whose good works, theological scholarship, and just plain holiness far outshone Ronald’s. Ronald was a brilliant all-rounder, but he was not so independent or original a thinker as his brothers. According to his niece, what he sought throughout his life was some authority to guide him; the transition from Anglo-Catholic to Roman Catholic in 1919 meant that he had, at the age of 31, found it. Perhaps in self-mockery, Knox transferred his belief in religious rules to his detective stories: he wrote the “Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction” for the Detection Club; his chapter in the collective Floating Admiral is called “Thirty-Nine Articles of Doubt.”[5] He called his account of his religious transformation A Spiritual Aeneid, and the Aeneid clearly played a major role in his spiritual life. But Knox’s transubstantiation of Virgil produces a very strange Aeneid. For most modern readers, truth, duty, and liturgy are hardly the central values of the poem. Knox says of Virgil that his “soul is naturally Catholic” (77). His Virgil is not mine.
Knox’s lectures are less interesting for study of the Aeneid than for students of Knox, of Anglo-Catholicism, or of English upper-class attitudes before World War One; the absence of any discussion of Knox’s context or any comparison of his view of the classics with that of the war poets (e.g. Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum) is a great weakness of the volume, as, indeed, is the painful inadequacy of the editor’s notes to Knox’s lectures. One must also ask whether Knox himself would have wanted the lectures published. He published a great many sermons and talks on Christian topics; the lectures on Virgil he preserved, but he did not print them. In that reticence, if not in his interpretations of the Aeneid, he showed excellent judgment.
Notes
[1] In R. G. Austin, ed., P. Vergili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Secundus (Oxford, 1964) 295.
[2] R. A. Knox, “Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes” The Blue Book vol. 1, no. 2 (July, 1912) 111-32. On Dillwyn as a target, see Penelope Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers (London, 1977) 105.
[3] Fitzgerald (above, n.2) 88.
[4] Fitzgerald (above, n.2) 107.
[5] “Ten Commandments” originally appeared in the foreword to R. A. Knox and H. Harrington, eds., The Best English Detective Stories of 1928 (London, 1929); “Thirty-Nine Articles” in D. L. Sayers et al., The Floating Admiral (London, 1931). Knox may have been the only member of the Detection Club to follow his own commandments, which may explain why his mysteries are superbly plotted but have flat characters and stilted dialogue.