Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Verrall, Arthur Woollgar
VERRALL, ARTHUR WOOLLGAR (1851–1912), classical scholar, was born at Brighton 5 February 1851, the eldest of a family of three brothers and two sisters. His father, Henry Verrall, was a well-known solicitor, for many years clerk to the Brighton magistrates; his mother was Anne Webb Woollgar. In October 1864 Arthur Verrall gained a scholarship at Wellington College, where he became a favourite pupil of Edward White Benson, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury. In 1869 he was elected scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge. He had a distinguished undergraduate career: was Pitt university scholar (1872), was bracketed second classic and chancellor's medallist (1873), and became fellow of his college (1874). For the next three years he lived in London, reading for the bar at Lincoln's Inn; he was called in 1877. He had gained the Whewell scholarship for international law in 1875. In October 1877 he returned to Cambridge, where for thirty-four years he lectured at Trinity College until, in 1911, he was chosen to be the first King Edward VII professor of English literature.
Verrall's reputation as a teacher grew year by year. He had remarkable powers of exposition; he held large audiences spell-bound with the novelty and ingenuity of the problems which he propounded, and he would captivate them, as in his Clark lectures, with his gift of reading aloud. As his pupil, Mr. F. M. Cornford, put it, ‘To him teaching was the means of expression in which he felt the passion and the joy of an artist; a lecture by him was definitely a performance prepared down to small details with an orator's sense of effect.’
The long series of Verrall's published works begins with his edition of the Medea (1881). His originality, meticulous care, and audacity in pushing principles to logical conclusions, are as conspicuous here as in any of his later works. His Studies, Literary and Historical, in the Odes of Horace (1884) was a series of brilliant hypotheses; to take an instance, a new turn was given to the Ode to Lamia (iii, 17) by treating it as a jest, the slave Lamia being playfully assumed to belong to the noble house of that name. Other Latin studies followed—of Martial, of Statius, and, above all, of Propertius. These, however, were but interludes: the Greek drama was his main theme. The first of his editions of Aeschylus was the Seven Against Thebes (1887); the Agamemnon (1889) he dedicated to (Sir) Richard Claverhouse Jebb; the Choephori (1893) to Samuel Henry Butcher; long afterwards appeared the Eumenides (1908). Verrall's treatment of the text was conservative. Others might emend: his ampler resources were lavished upon the task of interpretation. These editions established Verrall's fame and at the same time provoked fierce opposition. For subtlety and cogent argument the Agamemnon has no equal. It divided critics into two opposing camps, which thirty years have not reconciled. In his Euripides the Rationalist (1895), his Essays on Four Plays of Euripides (1905), and his edition of the Bacchae (1910), Verrall achieved more unequivocal success. Here he began with the invaluable aid of Aristophanes in the Frogs. His main contention is that Athens enjoyed a play by Euripides the rationalist almost in proportion to his skill in wrapping up heresy in orthodox make-believe. The hierarchy of heaven, from Athena and Apollo to Heracles and Dionysus, cut sorry figures, the keenest shafts being aimed at the Delphian god. The Bacchae, indeed, presents a peculiar problem; even here Verrall made out a good case for the poet's rationalism. The net result may be summed up thus: the gods and miracles of Greek anthropomorphic religion were assumed, for artistic purposes, to be real and true; on the other hand, the incidents and language of the plays pointed to the opposite conclusion; the inevitable consequence was to foster disbelief; the peculiar traditions of the tragic stage required this pretence, maintained throughout by a natural love of irony, ambiguity, and play of meaning.
Verrall's appointment to the new chair of English literature gave universal satisfaction. His Sidgwick lecture (1909) on The Prose of Scott and his Clark lectures (1909) on the Victorian poets had delighted crowded audiences. But the sands were running out. For fourteen years he had suffered increasingly from arthritis. He had to be carried to deliver his lectures on Dryden in the Michaelmas term of 1911. A course on Macaulay, a subject for which he was singularly well qualified, was to have come next; but, although prepared, it was never given. In his long illness his sufferings were borne with unflinching courage and without complaint; he would still talk to intimate friends with alertness and something like the old vivacity. He died at Cambridge on Waterloo day (18 June) or, as he himself called it, ‘Wellington College day’, 1912.
Verrall married in 1882 Margaret de G. Merrifield, daughter of Frederic Merrifield, barrister-at-law, by whom he had one daughter.
[Collected Literary Essays, by A. W. Verrall, ed. M. A. Bayfield and J. D. Duff, with Memoir, 1913; personal knowledge.]