F. L. Lucas

Frank Laurence Lucas (1894–1967) was an English classical scholar, literary critic, poet, novelist, playwright, political polemicist, and Fellow of King's College, Cambridge.

He is now best remembered for his scathing attacks on the poetry of T. S. Eliot during the 1920s ^[1] and for his book Style (1955), a much-acclaimed guide to recognising and writing good prose. His Tragedy (1927, substantially revised in 1957) was till the late twentieth century a standard introduction to Aristotle's Poetics. His most important contribution to scholarship was his four-volume Complete Works of John Webster (1927), the first collected edition of the Jacobean dramatist since that of Hazlitt (1857), itself largely a copy of Dyce (1830).^[2] T. S. Eliot called Lucas “the perfect annotator”;^[3] and all subsequent Webster scholars have been indebted to him, notably the editors of the new Cambridge Webster (1995–2007).^[4]

Contents 1 Literary criticism and verse translation 2 Original writing 3 History and politics 4 Biographical 5 Works 6 Other writings 7 Political letters 8 External links 9 Adaptations 10 Notes

Literary criticism and verse translation

The poets to whom Lucas returned most often in his publications were Tennyson (1930, 1932, 1947, 1957) and Housman (1926, 1933, 1936, 1960); these are among his most sensitive studies. He adopted the contextual approach at a time when it was considered a heresy (it is now orthodoxy again), including biographical detail and discussing the “psychology” of writers. Ever conscious that literature could influence for good or ill, he admired authors who were defenders of sanity and good sense – men like Montaigne and Johnson – or compassionate realists, like Homer in the Iliad, Euripides, Hardy, Ibsen and Chekhov. “Life is ‘indivisible’,” he wrote. “A public tends to get the literature it deserves: a literature, to get the public it deserves. The values men pursue in each, affect the other. They turn in a vicious, or a virtuous, circle. Only a fine society could have bred Homer: and he left it finer for hearing him.” ^[5] Lucas condemned the trahisons des clercs of the twentieth century,^[6] and used his Cambridge lectures and writing to champion timeless civilised values and to campaign for a responsible use of intellectual freedom. “One may question whether real civilisation is so safely afloat,” he wrote in his last published letter, “that we can afford to use our pens for boring holes in the bottom of it.” ^[7]

What Lucas wrote about Housman’s Name and Nature of Poetry in 1933 sums up what he himself aspired to as a literary critic: “… the kind of critical writing that best justifies itself before the brevity of life; that itself adds new data to our experience as well as arguing about the old; that happily combines, in a word, philosophy with autobiography, psychology with a touch of poetry – of the ‘poetic’ imagination. It can make acceptable even common sense. There are sentences here which recall the clear-cut Doric strength of the Lives of the Poets ...” ^[8]

Lucas was a formidable controversialist, and his impatience with the obscurantism of much modern poetry made him in the interwar years one of the foremost opponents of the new schools. “As for ‘profundity’,” he wrote, “it is not uncommonly found also in dry wells; which may likewise contain little but obscurity and rubbish.” ^[9] He opposed also what he saw as the narrow dogmatism of the New Critics, those "tight-lipped Calvins of art",^[10] as he called them, of Criterion and Scrutiny.

Steeped in Greek and Latin literature, Lucas dedicated much of his time to making accessible to modern readers the most living portions of the classics through verse translations. His Greek Poetry (1951, Everyman Library 1966) and Greek Drama (1954) (many reprints) were praised for their grace and fidelity, and were hailed by reviewers as “Cambridge’s single-handed answer to the [collaborative] Oxford Book of Greek Verse in Translation”.^[11] With introductions and notes it was a monumental project – nothing on this scale had been attempted by a single translator before, or has since. His versions pre-suppose, however, an understanding of metre and the caesura, and a taste for a poetic style closer to Morris than to Pound.

Original writing

The scholar’s wit and verve that mark Lucas’s literary studies are present in his creative work. Of his novels the best received was Cécile (1930), a “tenderly brilliant story of France on the eve of the Revolution” (New Statesman, 24 May 1930). “For grace and style and insight into character,” wrote Kathleen Tomlinson,^[12] “Cécile is reminiscent of Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. Only reminiscent, for Mr Lucas has a more profound philosophy, or wisdom, and is not content with the challenge and interplay of the individual, but extends his psychological understanding to classes and nations.” Vita Sackville-West also praised the novel: "It seemed to me to be full of the deepest and truest feeling," she wrote,^[13] "never sentimental, but always convincing and extremely moving. The relationship between Andrée and Gaston is admirably true to nature. No-one could fail to be moved by this picture of a woman struggling against her own love for a husband who disappoints and betrays her at every turn." Lucas dedicated the novel to T. E. Lawrence, a friend and admirer.^[14]

As a poet Lucas was a polished ironist. Early collections were mostly personal lyrics or satires, but he came to specialise in dramatic monologues and narrative poems based on historical episodes “that seem lastingly alive”.^[15] His First World War poems, including ‘Morituri - August 1915, on the road from Morlancourt’ (1935) and the exquisite ‘ ”The Night is Chilly but not Dark” ‘ (1935), offer a retrospect of his experiences at the front. If they lack the stark immediacy of Owen or Rosenberg, they nevertheless add poignant post-war perspectives. Its appearance in various mid-twentieth century anthologies of English verse has made ‘Beleaguered Cities’ (1929) Lucas’s best-known poem.^[16] Others that have gained a wider currency through anthologies include ‘The Destined Hour’ (1953), a memorable re-telling in verse of the old ‘appointment in Samarra’ fable,^[17] and ‘Spain 1809’, the story of a village woman's courage during the French occupation in the Peninsular War.^[18] His most ambitious poem was Ariadne (1932), an epic re-working of the Labyrinth myth. Simon Tidworth in The Quest for Theseus ^[19] summarises: “Lucas invents another sweetheart for Theseus, Aegle, one of the sacrificial maidens who accompany him to Crete. The real stroke of originality is to make the Minotaur Minos himself in a bull-mask. On Naxos Ariadne learns of Theseus’s earlier love for Aegle, and decides to leave him while the image of her own love is still fresh. An ordinary love-affair is not what she wants; she has to seek the Ideal [Dionysus].”

Lucas's most successful play was the thriller Land's End (Westminster Theatre, Feb.-March 1938, 29 performances, with Cathleen Nesbitt, Cecil Trouncer and Alan Napier among the cast) – "as full of drama as an egg is full of meat", noted The Stage.^[20] The Bear Dances: A Play in Three Acts was the first dramatisation of the Soviets on London’s West-end stage (Garrick Theatre, Oct.-Nov. 1932, with Elena Miramova, Abraham Sofaer and Olga Lindo). This play, which was revived by various repertory theatres in the North of England in the later 1930s, was written at a time when Cambridge University (in his words) “grew full of very green young men going very Red”.

History and politics

Outside literature, Lucas is remembered for his solution to one of the more contentious problems of ancient topography. His “north-bank” thesis ^[21] on the location of the Battle of Pharsalus (48 B.C.), based on his 1921 solo field-trip to Thessaly and on a re-examination of the sources, is now widely accepted by historians.^[22] John D. Morgan in his definitive “Palae-pharsalus – the Battle and the Town” ^[23] writes: “My reconstruction is similar to Lucas’s, and in fact I borrow one of his alternatives for the line of the Pompeian retreat. Lucas’s theory has been subjected to many criticisms, but has remained essentially unshaken.”

In the 1930s Lucas was widely known for his outspoken attacks in the British Press on appeasement. “Since the War,” he wrote in 1933, “British policy has been shuffling, timid, ignoble.” ^[24] He urged in September of that year that Nazi Germany be prevented from re-arming. "Versailles was monstrous", he wrote in The Week-end Review,

"but one thing surely comes first: Germany must not be allowed to re-arm. How prevent it? By an international police-force? It would be ideal. Unfortunately it does not exist. The French have urged it. We in our muddle-headedness want neither it nor the alternative – war. Are we prepared to see France do its work instead and take action in Germany? – or are we going to sit sanctimoniously on the fence, disapproving, but secretly relieved? I devoutly hope the first. Germany must not re-arm; even if the French had to invade it once every five years, that would be better than the alternative." ^[25]

And in 1937: “We have not kept agreements we made; we have made agreements we should not; we have tried to cheat our way to security, and now the security proves a cheat. We have forgotten the wisdom which says that since we cannot foresee where any road will lead in the end, we should stick to the straight and honest one.” ^[26] He argued that a hatred of war “can be no reason for being false to ourselves, in the name of an aimless amiability that cries ‘peace’ where there is none.” ^[27] Despite the prevailing pacifism of the time, such sentiments struck a chord. “This is the voice of the England I love,” wrote a correspondent from Prague in 1938, “and for whose soul I was trembling when I heard about the welcome given Mr Chamberlain on his return from Munich.” ^[28] As well as the letters there were articles, satires, books, public speaking, fund-raising, petitions, meetings with émigrés and help for refugees. As a leading anti-fascist campaigner in the thirties, Lucas was placed by the Nazis on their Special Search List G.B. of Britons to be arrested and liquidated.

A brilliant linguist with infantry and Intelligence Corps experience from 1914–18, proven anti-fascist credentials and a scepticism about the Soviet Union, Lucas was one of the first academics recruited by the Foreign Office – on 3 September 1939 – to Bletchley Park. He was one of the original three members of Hut 3 and remained a central figure there, working on the Enigma decodes as a translator and intelligence-analyst.^[29] The high standards of accuracy and clarity that prevailed in Hut 3, his chief maintained, were "largely due to his being such a stickler" for them.^[30] Lucas was awarded the O.B.E in 1946 for his wartime work.

Biographical

F. L. ("Peter") Lucas grew up in Blackheath and was educated at Colfe's and at Rugby, where he was tutored by the Sophocles scholar Robert Whitelaw. A prize-winning Classics scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1913, Lucas was elected Apostle in January 1914 and came under the influence of G. E. Moore.^[31] He volunteered in October 1914, and from 1915-18 served with the Royal West Kent Regiment in France, returning to the front twice after spending seventeen months in hospitals recovering from gas and shell wounds. In the last months of war he was in the Intelligence Corps, examining German prisoners. Elected to a Fellowship at King's College in 1920, he began his career as a Classics lecturer, switching in 1922 to the newly-formed Cambridge University English faculty, of which he was a member from 1922–1939 and from 1945–1962. His move from Classics to English and his edition of John Webster were inspired in part by the seminal 1920 Marlowe Society production of The White Devil,^[32] but his loyalties lay from first to last with Comparative literature. His students at King's included George Rylands, John Hayward, F. E. Halliday, Alan Clutton-Brock, Julian Bell, Desmond Flower and Christopher Burstall. From 1921 to 1929 he was married to the novelist E. B. C. Jones,^[33] niece of Robbie Ross; she based the character Hugh Sexton in The Singing Captives (1922) on Lucas. Through her and the Apostles he was associated with the Bloomsbury Group,^[34] Virginia Woolf describing him to Ottoline Morrell as "pure Cambridge: clean as a breadknife, and as sharp".^[35] To Lucas, interviewed in 1958, Bloomsbury seemed "a jungle":

"The society of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey was far from being in the ordinary sense a happy family. They were intensely and rudely critical of each other. They were the sort of people who would read letters addressed to others. They tormented each other with endless love affairs. In real crises they could be generous, but in ordinary affairs of life they were anything but kind ... Dickinson and Forster were not really Bloomsbury. They were soft-hearted and kind. Bloomsbury was certainly not that." ^[36]

Lucas's travel writings, accounts of long walks through wild landscapes with literary associations (Greece, Iceland, Norway, Ireland, France), date from the years of his second marriage, 1932–1939, to the artist Prudence Wilkinson, who shared this interest and who also designed the costumes and sets for some of his plays, including the first production of his Icelandic tragedy The Lovers of Gudrun. The emphasis on psychology in his post-war books – Literature and Psychology, The Search for Good Sense, The Art of Living, the essay on 'Happiness' in The Greatest Problem – reflects an interest shared with his third wife, the Swedish psychologist Elna Kallenberg, whom he married in 1940.^[37][38]

Works

• Seneca and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 1922 [13] ; paperback, 2009)
• Euripides and his Influence (1923)
• Euripides: Medea, partly in the original and partly in translation; with introduction and notes (Oxford University Press, 1923)
• Euripides: Medea; verse translation, with introduction and notes (Oxford, 1924)
• Ferenc Békássy: 'Adriatica' and other poems; selection with preface (Hogarth Press, 1925)
• Authors Dead and Living; reviews and essays from the New Statesman (1926 [14] ; essay on Housman reprinted in the Critical Heritage series, ed. Philip Gardner, 1992)
• The River Flows; novel (Hogarth Press, 1926)
• The Complete Works of John Webster; edition in four volumes (1927; 1966)
• Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's Poetics (Hogarth Press, 1927)
• Time and Memory; poems and verse translations (Hogarth Press, 1929)
• Cécile; novel (Chatto & Windus, 1930; C & W Centaur Library, 1931)
• Marionettes; poems (Cambridge, 1930)
• Eight Victorian Poets; essays (Cambridge, 1930)
• The Art of Dying - an anthology of last words; selected with Francis Birrell; preface by Lucas (Hogarth Press, 1930)
• The Wild Tulip; novella (1932)
• Ariadne; epic poem, in four books (Cambridge, 1932)
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson - an anthology; with introduction (Cambridge, 1932) [15]
• Thomas Lovell Beddoes - an anthology; with introduction (Cambridge, 1932)
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti - an anthology; with introduction (Cambridge, 1933)
• George Crabbe - an anthology; with introduction (Cambridge, 1933)
• The Bear Dances: A Play in Three Acts (with introduction: 'The Gospel According to Saint Marx') (1933)
• The Criticism of Poetry; essay [The Warton Lecture on English Poetry, 1933; Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol.19.] (O.U.P. London, 1933)
• Studies French and English; essays (1934) [16] ; revised edition (1950; essay on Ronsard reprinted in The Cassell Miscellany, London, 1958)
• From Olympus to the Styx; Greek travelogue, written with Prudence Lucas (1934)
• Marie Mauron: Mount Peacock, or Progress in Provence; translation, with introduction (Cambridge, 1934)
• Poems, 1935; poems and verse translations, with preface (Cambridge, 1935)
• Four Plays: 'Land's End'; 'Surrender to Discretion'; 'The Lovers of Gudrun'; 'Death of a Ghost' (Cambridge, 1935)
• The Awakening of Balthazar; poem for the Abyssinian Red Cross Fund (1935)
• The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal; literary criticism, with an Iceland travelogue (Cambridge, 1936 [17] ; in paperback, 2006)
• The Golden Cockerel Greek Anthology; originals and verse translations, with introduction and notes (Golden Cockerel Press, 1937)
• The Woman Clothed with the Sun, and Other Stories; short stories (1937)
• The Delights of Dictatorship; history and politics (1938)
• Doctor Dido; novel (1938)
• A Greek Garland; a Selection from the Palatine Anthology; originals and verse translations, with introduction and notes [enlarged version of 1937 volume] (Oxford, 1939)
• Journal Under the Terror, 1938; diary (1939)
• The Vigil of Venus; the original and a verse translation, with introduction and notes; with engravings by John Buckland Wright (Golden Cockerel Press, 1939) ^[39]
• Messene Redeemed; a verse drama (Oxford, 1940)
• Ten Victorian Poets; essays (Cambridge, 1940; essay on Hardy reprinted in the Macmillan Casebook series, editors Gibson & Johnson, 1979)
• Critical Thoughts in Critical Days; essay (1942)
• Tennyson, Poetry and Prose; an anthology, with introduction and notes (Oxford, 1947)
• The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite; the original and a verse translation, with introduction and notes (Golden Cockerel Press, 1948)
• Aphrodite - two verse translations: the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and the Pervigilium Veneris; with the originals; brings together 1939 and 1948 volumes (Cambridge, 1948)
• Gilgamesh, King of Erech; poem in free verse, re-telling the Sumerian epic (Golden Cockerel Press, 1948) [18]
• Homer: The Odyssey; verse translation in selection, with introduction and notes; engravings by John Buckland Wright (Folio Society, 1948) ^[40]
• Musaeus: Hero and Leander; verse translation, with introduction; with engravings by John Buckland Wright (Golden Cockerel Press, 1949) ^[41]
• Homer: The Iliad; verse translation in selection, with introduction and notes; engravings by John Buckland Wright (Folio Society, 1950) ^[42]
• Literature and Psychology; literary criticism based on the case-notes of Wilhelm Stekel (1951)
• Greek Poetry for Everyman; verse translations, with introductions and notes (1951)
• From Many Times and Lands; poems of legend and history (1953)
• Greek Drama for Everyman; verse translations, with introductions and notes (1954)
• Style (1955; in paperback with footnote translations: Collier Books, 1962, Pan Books, 1964)
• Tragedy: Serious Drama in Relation to Aristotle's Poetics; revised version of 1927 volume (1957; in paperback with footnote translations: Collier Books, 1962)
• Tennyson; essay [British Council 'Writers and their Works' series] (1957) p.7
• Webster: The White Devil; revised edition (1958)
• Webster: The Duchess of Malfi; revised edition (1958)
• The Search for Good Sense: Four Eighteenth-Century Characters: Johnson, Chesterfield, Boswell, Goldsmith (1958)
• The Art of Living: Four Eighteenth-Century Minds: Hume, Horace Walpole, Burke, Benjamin Franklin (1959)
• The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays; an essay on world overpopulation, literary essays and autobiographical pieces (1960)
• The Drama of Ibsen and Strindberg; literary criticism (1962)
• August Strindberg: Inferno; translation by Mary Sandbach, introduction by Lucas (1962)
• The Drama of Chekhov, Synge, Yeats and Pirandello; literary criticism (1963)
• Greek Poetry; verse translations; revised and renamed version of 1951 volume, without the passages from Homer (Everyman Library, 1966)
• Greek Drama for the Common Reader; verse translations, revised and renamed version of 1954 volume (1967)
• Greek Tragedy and Comedy; verse translations, renamed version of 1954 volume (1968)
• The English Agent: A Tale of The Peninsular War; novel (1969)

Other writings

• ’The Boar’; short story (Athenaeum), 10 September 1920)
• ’The Fortune of Carthage’; short story on the Battle of the Metaurus (Athenaeum, 28 January 1921)
• ’The Brown Bag’; short story (Cambridge Review, 6 May 1921)
• ’The Battlefield of Pharsalos’; report on a field study (Annual of the British School at Athens, No. XXIV, 1919–21) [19]
• ’The Reverse of Aristotle’; a discussion of Peripeteia (Classical Review, August–September 1922) [20]
• ’The Waste Land’; a review (New Statesman, 3 November 1923; reprinted in the Macmillan Casebook series and the Critical Heritage series)
• ’The Duchess of Malfi’; essay (New Statesman, 1 March 1924)
• ’Playing the Devil’; theatre-review of The White Devil (New Statesman, 17 October 1925)
• ’English Literature’; essay on English at Cambridge (University Studies, Cambridge 1933; editor Harold Wright)
• ’Poetry Examined by Professor Housman’; review of Housman’s Name and Nature of Poetry (Cambridge Review, 8 June 1933)
• ’Mithridates - The Poetry of A.E. Housman’; essay (Cambridge Review, 15 May 1936; reprinted in the Critical Heritage series, ed. Philip Gardner, 1992)
• ’Julian Bell’; a memoir (Cambridge Review, 15 October 1937; reprinted in The Cambridge Mind, editors Homberger, Janeway & Shama, 1970)
• ’Proud Motherhood (Madrid A.D. 1937)’; poem (Poems for Spain, 1939; editors Spender & Lehmann; reprinted in The Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse)
• ’William Wordsworth’; essay (Fifteen Poets, an anthology, Oxford University Press, 1941) [21]
• History of Hut 3, Public Records Office documents, ref. HW3/119 and /120
• ’Poetry’; ‘Epic’; ‘Ode’; ‘Elegy’; ‘Lyric’; ‘Pastoral’; articles in Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 1950–66
• ’Long Lives the Emperor’; essay on The Hundred Days, The Historical Journal, Vol.8, No.1, Cambridge, 1965 [22]
• ’On the Fascination of Style’; essay (Holiday, March 1960; reprinted in The Odyssey Reader: Ideas and Style, 1968)

Political letters

• 'Germany, Europe and Peace' (Week-end Review, 16 September 1933)
• 'Germany and Europe' (Week-end Review, 21 October 1933)
• 'Abyssinia : Our Duty' (Daily Telegraph, 25 July 1935)
• 'Italy and Abyssinia' (Daily Telegraph, 31 July 1935)
• 'Italy’s Claims' (Daily Telegraph, 7 August 1935)
• 'An Italian Teacher’s Political Views' (Manchester Guardian, 9 August 1935)
• 'Impartiality at Cambridge' (Manchester Guardian, 14 August 1935)
• 'Home-truths from Italy' (New Statesman and Nation, 24 August 1935)
• 'Reply to an Italian’s defence' (Morning Post, 12 October 1935)
• 'Mussolini’s War' (Manchester Guardian, 14 October 1935)
• 'Mr. Bernard Shaw’s Letter' (The Times, 24 October 1935)
• 'The Italians in Tripoli' (Manchester Guardian, 11 January 1936)
• 'Congratulations to the University of Heidelberg' (Cambridge Review, 14 February 1936)
• 'The League’s Abyssinian Front' (Manchester Guardian, 12 March 1936)
• 'British Policy in World Crises' (Manchester Guardian, 22 September 1936)
• 'Democracy and Progress' (Time and Tide, 10 October 1936)
• 'Blackshirt Marches and Meetings' (Manchester Guardian, 23 October 1936)
• ' “Non-Intervention in Spain” ' (Manchester Guardian, 16 February 1937)
• 'Barbarities of Modern War' (Manchester Guardian, 14 May 1937)
• 'The National Government’s Foreign Policy' (Manchester Guardian, 6 September 1937)
• 'Pacifism and Panic-Mongering' (Manchester Guardian, 1 December 1937)
• 'Pacifism and Air-Raid Precautions' (Manchester Guardian, 7 December 1937)
• 'The Absolute Pacifist Position' (Manchester Guardian, 15 December 1937)
• 'Mr. Chamberlain’s “Realistic” Policy' (Manchester Guardian, 10 March 1938)
• 'To the Editor of The Times ' (Journal Under the Terror, 17 March 1938)
• 'An Open Letter to Lord Halifax' (Journal Under the Terror, 12 May 1938)
• 'Labour and the Popular Front' (New Statesman and Nation, 14 May 1938)
• 'Air Defence' (Daily Telegraph, 16 May 1938)
• 'Britain and Political Refugees' (Manchester Guardian, 20 May 1938)
• 'Refugee Jews and England' (Manchester Guardian, 26 August 1938)
• 'The European Crisis' (Manchester Guardian, 15 September 1938)
• 'The Munich Agreement–and after' (Manchester Guardian, 4 October 1938)
• 'The Refugees in Czechoslovakia' (Manchester Guardian, 3 November 1938)
• 'The Two Voices' (Manchester Guardian, 7 November 1938)
• 'After Barcelona' (Manchester Guardian, 7 February 1939)
• 'Germany and World Empire' (Manchester Guardian, 10 February 1939)
• 'Hitler as “The Friend of Peace” ' (Manchester Guardian, 24 February 1939)
• 'Friendship with Germany' (Manchester Guardian, 8 March 1939)
• 'German Opinion about England' (Manchester Guardian, 15 August 1939)

External links

• Frank Laurence Lucas, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [23]
• F. L. Lucas papers, Janus, Cambridge [24] [25] [26] [27]

Adaptations

• Gerald Finzi set to music Lucas's poem ‘June on Castle Hill’ (1935) in his collection To a Poet, op.13a no.5
• Margaret Wood's play A Kind of Justice (1966) is based on Lucas's poem ‘Spain 1809’ (1953)

Notes

Persondata
Name	Lucas, F.L.
Alternative names	Peter
Short description
Date of birth	28 December 1894
Place of birth	Hipperholme, Yorkshire, England
Date of death	1 June 1967
Place of death	Cambridge, England