Ronald A. Knox - Other Eyes Than Ours

Knox, Ronald Arbuthnott, 1888-1957

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OTHER EYES THAN OURS

MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE

sanctions: a frivolity

A BOOK OF ACROSTICS THE VIADUCT MURDER

BV

RONALD A. KNOX

Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side ?

Is there no baseness we would hide.

No inner vileness that we dread ?

In Memoriam

First Published in ig26

PSIKTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

DEDICATED

FOR NO OBVIOUS REASON TO THE

MASTER OF LOVAT

CONTENTS

Vll

OTHER EYES THAN OURS

CHAPTER I

THE HUNT FOR GAEDKE

The world we live in is not reaUy a single circle, as they draw it for you in the maps. It is a whole tangle of circles which only intersect at intervals; and the circumference of each is a brick waU which pens in the lives of the inmates. Look round you in your railway-carriage ; that young man in the comer is reading The Egg-Fancier; his vis-d-vis is cherishing an organ whose title is not so easy to catch^is he, perhaps, ashamed of it ? At last he lays it down beside him; what did I say ? It is The Chiropodist. The lady next door is less reticent; in fact, I think she tends to flourish her review in the faces of her fellow-passengersThe Herald of the Star; she will be an Anglo-Israelite or a Theosophist. Behold yourself, then, for that fractional part of a hfe which your railway journey constitutes, forming a tangent with three of these circles, an Egg-world, a Foot-world, and a Patentreligion-world ! Did I not hear the other day from the editor of The Paper Container, which has no

interest, I take it, except for those who are engaged in the manufacture of paper bags and cardboard boxes ? The world, I say, is a complex of such worlds, and of these worlds the most ancient and the most honourable is that of classical scholarship. It is also the most acrimonious; those few who breathe its rare atmosphere are for ever at war with one another over issues which the groundling might be in danger of thinking unimportantthe root of a Greek verb, a reading in some dusty old manuscript, the right way to turn on a Roman bath or to fold a Roman tunic.

Such a man was Harold Shurmur, of Salisbury College in the University of Oxford; the hero of this story, if it be the heros office to persist from the first page to the last, to strive, to endure, and to seem (for he lives only in a book world) to have attained. He had been born and bred in a country parsonage, where the classical tradition still lingered and was formative ; his father had been a scholar of his College, and might, but for inertia, have been an author. Volumes, not altogether undusted, of Heynes Virgil and Paleys Euripides lined the shelves in the tobacco-incensed study where little Harold did his first lessons; busts of Homer and Socrates peered at him from above as he sat, cushioned for height on a Greek Lexicon, over his copy-books. At an age when other children are still spellbound with fairy-stories, he was conversant with the eternal triangle of amo, amas, amai, and could give you the Greek for the crocodile moves his upper jaw before he had begun to shed his own first teeth. Perhaps his imagination was a httle starved; paternity meant to him a mysterious inti

macy with the gender rhjnnes, and the priestly office was seen through a mist of enclitic particles. But of the practical value of his education there could (at that age) be no doubt; he won a good scholarship at a school of his fathers own choosing, and the exacter Muses claimed him early for their votary and their thrall.

His classical career was one of easy success; and if he missed a first in Greats, it must be attributed to the defects of his qualities, for he occupied almost the entire time allowed for his moral philosophy paper in discussing a doubtful reading at the beginning of Aristotles Ethics. The accident may be said to have determined his career; he abandoned all dreams of the Civil Service, and accepted as his lifes mission, at the age of twenty-two, a fellowship and classical lectureship at Salisbury. The Latin poets had always been his hobby; and now, a prey to the virus that leads clever men to specialize, he resolved to achieve fame as the last and indispensable authority on the satires of Persius. The names of Persius and of Shurmur should henceforth be inseparable. Nor was the choice a rash one; he had little competition to face. Persius (if my reader should chance to lack information on the point) wrote Latin hexameters with all the lucidity of an acrostic editor trying to convey secret information to his countrys enemies; and when the painstaking critic has succeeded in establishing the sense of the text, it is not from the literary point of view very rewarding. The satirist remains, then, a closed book for most people, occasionally quarried for difficult Unseens; and the man