Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Spike or Victoria College Review October 1930

Harry Espiner

page 35

Harry Espiner

Harry espiner is dead, and the world feels suddenly very empty. The generations pass quickly in a university, and few who are at College now will remember him, though some of us were hoping he would be back next year to teach modern languages. No man would have been a better teacher of his chosen subject, and no man loved his subject more; but death does not wait on such plans. It would have meant a great deal to Victoria College to have had him as one of its staff.

Harry came to College in the year after the war, much battered from a British barrage, by way of an Odyssey of hospital wanderings. The first time I heard of him was in a eulogy from Professor Brown, at the end of the 1919 session. Harry had joined the Pass Latin course half-way through the year and had done remarkably well, which was more than most of us healthy, unimpeded loafers had done. This set the tone for his whole College career. Paralysed in one arm, with a permanently badly lamed leg, with voice reduced to a not unattractive monotone, and able to keep going only by perpetual daily dosing with some drug, he could take little part in ordinary College activities. But there was a sympathy and friendly seriousness in him which made his companionship a very precious thing. He would have made a magnificent Rhodes Scholar but for his injuries and his age; for he had solidity as well as brilliance of mind; he had a fine physique, and even as it was the grip of his hand was crushing. And there was in him that quality of leadership, that perfect and capable devotion to an ideal which wins the devotion of a man's fellows, and which is a reality in so very few among men. He once said that as a young school teacher he had seen the war coming, and had made up his mind to fit himself to play his part in it; and I have heard that at the front he was equally determined to leave no single thing undone that would help his men to do so equally. And his sympathetic open-mindedness, the attitude of interest he adopted towards everyone who made the slightest advances to him, was, I think, the secret of this. At College he would lean against a radiator in the hall in between lectures, or waiting for a friend to go down the hill with, with a patient, amused, half-serious smile as he observed the chaotic, noisy scene before him. "Why don't you marry the girl?" he would say, with a rich sort of enjoyment, to a friend whose business or pleasure kept him hanging around the letter-rack in unduly prolonged conversation.

He did well both at Latin and French, and he won the affection of his teachers to an extraordinary degree. In the end he took only a second-class, and round about that time 1 heard the only sentence from him that could ever be construed as a complaint, and it was hardly that. "Ah, I could knock spots off all these clever young birds," he said, "if I had a whole brain to work with. But I'm doped; I'm never going at more than half-power." I think it was explanation more than grumble, even then. However, he got a free passage in the annual scramble for such things, and his pension was large enough to keep alive a person of his simple page 36 tastes in France. He went first to the University of Poitiers, a little town which he loved; and here he did extremely well, taking his licentiate with marks ahead of every French student. He spent some time in Germany also, working up the language, and becoming exceedingly interested both in it and in the people. He was a born philologist, and had some difficulty in settling on a specialised subject for this very reason; every tongue had an appeal to him, and he touched none without an instinctive faculty for co-ordination and hypothesis asserting itself. Finally he settled down to a big piece of research, on the life and work of a notable French Renaissance scholar, Claude Fauchet, and in his Paris years, slowly accumulating a mass of relevant knowledge, I think he must have been fairly happy. If he was a born philologist, he was also a born researcher. He was more than that, he was a scholar, with a sober, but (it must have been) intense joy in the pains and compulsions of scholarship. The life of research has a fascination of its own, but it is a fascination that to be fruitful is arduous and exacting. Harry gave it all his time and all his strength; he had a passion for precision, for the accuracy of firsthand knowledge, and his search took him to Italy and to the British Museum, as well as through the appallingly uncatalogued labyrinths of the Bibliotheque Nationale. And how grateful he was for the slightest trouble taken on his account by anyone else, even if it had but a negative result! The very humbleness with which he asked and accepted help—and how hesitant he was to "impose" on a friend!—made one feel humble, aware of his capacity and one's own ignorance. He had the true scholar's thoroughness—he would worry at a problem for months. And yet I don't think it was the thoroughness of the pedant—he had too much humour for that, a vein of dry self-depreciation. He continually saw "little Harry" in some comically embarrassing situation.

He didn't have many interests outside his work; his mind was intensive rather than extensive; I don't think he was drawn much to art or architecture, for instance. But he was interested in men, individually or nationally; he observed those with whom he came in contact closely and with shrewdness, and it was pleasant to hear him discuss the French, and the French student, with an amiable, though not altogether approving appreciation of their peculiarities and failings. Probably he didn't take enough time off from his work; he did some English teaching at the Sorbonne, but that could not have given him enough variety; and he never did the ordinary round of the sights in Paris. He knew his Frenchmen, his professors and his concierge, but his life must have been rather lonely, and it was a joy to hear of his engagement, and later his marriage, to a fine and very winning Scots girl, Janet Scott, a scholar with his own tastes, and a woman who could give him that touch of humorous and affectionate bullying which he needed. He was generous to his friends of his time and his knowledge and his lodging, and his wife shared his generosity. The happiness of such people is a beautiful thing; and it is tragic above all to think how short that married life was. In May and June of this year he had a succession of seizures, the entail of his injuries, from which he seemed to be recovering; he went down to Poitiers to recuperate, and there, early in July, he had an attack, from which he did not recover consciousness.

page 37

These words, so difficult to write, so lacking in essential truth—for how can one capture a personality?—must end on a personal note, for I am proud to think that Harry Espiner gave me his friendship. Death can be unimaginably cruel, and it is hard to think that that quenchless spirit is darkened. But he remains in one's memory, as things fine and noble must remain. I think I see him now, stumbling down over the rocks of Mount Street after lectures, with that outrageously radical Christian, MacGibb, and myself; or standing at the top of the Dixon Street steps, gazing at the lights of the town, casting some salutary pessimism into the mind of extreme idealist youth; or in his own room in a block of Paris flats, at the top of a fiendishly steep flight of steps (the lift would bring you up but wouldn't take you down) mixing a large bowl of some chocolate and milk powder preparation for breakfast—that and a crust and butter was his French petit dejeuner; or shaving to an accompaniment of cheerful reminiscences (punctuated by chuckles) of his boyhood in Bunnythorpe—was it?—home thoughts from abroad with a vengeance! or giving the fullest and most precise directions for the purchase of a loaf of bread or a paper round the corner ("l'Intran" was the text on which he would occasionally base a brief and pungent dissertation on the French attitude to life); or guiding his hard-up guest to a restaurant near-by, amazing for the cheapness of its meals, the variety of its custom, and the volubility, universality and laughter of its conversation; or discoursing on the precise shade of honorific address which would extract the right information from a learned but secretive professor; or in London, poring over some abstruse mediaeval alphabet in the reading-room of the Museum, or humorously cursing the damp fog in the autumn streets. How often "humorously" is the qualifying word that occurs to one in describing his characteristics! For, indeed, his very curses seemed to have some mockery in them—the mockery of a humorous resignation. It was a brave and constant front he gave to the world. And how often, one thinks, as part of his world, one must have failed him.

His thesis for the D. es L. had been accepted, and his book was in print when he died. What its value was, how much he could have given those whom it might have been his lot to teach, but few of us will realise. He drew all one's affection as well as admiration. The flame of his spirit burnt very steadily and very purely; and he was the gentlest and humblest and bravest man I ever knew.

—J.C.B.