A C.H. Sisson Reader

C.H. Sisson, Charlie Louth, Patrick McGuinness, Charlie Louth, Patrick McGuinness

• Publisher: Fyfield Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781847772855
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

C.H. Sisson was born in Bristol in 1914. To celebrate his centenary, this Reader includes a generous selection of his poems, translations and essays. The poems are drawn from all periods of Sisson's writing life, from the darkly satirical work of the 1950s and 1960s to the Virgilian Somerset poems to the reflective late poems in which Sisson, looking out on the landscape he cherished, sees himself standing at the last promontory of life'. The essays demonstrate the wit, precision and sheer scope of Sisson's writings on literature, culture and politics (he was a senior civil servant before retirement). The editors declare, No poet has written with anything like his intimate knowledge of the workings of government, and few have had a clearer sense of the role of literature in participating in civic life.' An heir to Marvell, Hardy and Edward Thomas, Sisson brings to this essential Englishness the disruptive energies of modernism. Never a comfortable or comforting writer, he is an incisive intelligence and speaks with clarity to the twenty-firstcentury reader's expectations and discontents. This book, first published in 1993, collects Spark's essays on the Brontës, her selection of their letters and of Emily's poetry. Evident throughout are Spark's critical intelligence, dry wit, and refusal to sentimentalise - qualities that gave her own novels their particular appeal. At the same time, The Essence of the Brontës is Muriel Spark's tribute to the sisters whose talents placed them on a stage from where they could hypnotize their own generation and, even more, posterity'.

ESSAYS

From the New English Weekly (1937–1949)

Charles Maurras and the Idea of a Patriot King

We have several political poets and too many publicists, yet scarcely any writer since Hulme has formulated a precise political idea. Inevitably, both poetry and political analyses are the worse for the lack of political doctrine. I believe that Charles Maurras is almost the only writer capable of re-directing our political enquiries. He is not, by Englishmen, to be swallowed whole, but to be used. What is needed is a transposition of his ideas to fit our own place and prejudices. That difficult transposition is not attempted in this essay, which is a simple experiment. I have taken a single idea of Maurras (an idea not peculiar to him no doubt) and placed it beside an idea of Bolingbroke; the two are allowed to react in such a way as to expose a common contemporary English error.

Maurras finds in the identification of a king’s interest with the public interest a chief guarantee of the efficacy of monarchy. While not without a good word for personal qualities which his taste disposes him to admire, he aims at showing the value of the monarchy independently of the value of the monarch.

Bolingbroke is concerned with a ‘rare phenomenon’, a patriot king, but there are fortunately passages in his essay which are susceptible of commoner application. He claims at the start that his method is sceptical, yet he is soon engaged in discussing ‘duties’ in a manner which is not sceptical. His intention, however, is coherent. ‘“Salus reip. suprema lex esto”, is a fundamental law: and sure I am, the safety of a commonwealth is ill provided for, if the liberty be given up.’ Liberty is justified because it contributes to the safety of the state. Similarly, we read:

I speak not here of people, if any such there are, who have been savage or stupid enough to submit to tyranny by original contract; nor of those nations on whom tyranny has stolen as it were imperceptibly, or had been imposed by violence, and settled by prescription. But I speak of people who have been wise and happy enough to establish, and to preserve, free constitutions of government, as the people of this island have done. To these, therefore, I say, that their kings are under the most sacred obligations.

The king must be moral because the people has a mind to be free. The constitution is such, Bolingbroke says elsewhere, that ‘no king who is not a patriot can govern with sufficient strength’. The need for morals arises from the nature of the constitution. The famous English talent for humbug is not all stupidity; it corresponds to the facts of our situation.

Maurras, despite his comparative unconcern for rights and wrongs, does not represent a contrary point of view. The government he wishes to realize is decentralized; the monarchy is therefore not unlimited. In national affairs, however, the king exercises a power which he may delegate but which he shares with no one. The English constitution provides for a division of power in national as well as in local affairs; the business of the king is merely to prevent the disintegration of the central authority. The difference between the theories of Bolingbroke and Maurras, therefore, arises out of the difference of function of the English and French monarchies; it is accidental. In essence, Bolingbroke and Maurras aim at the same thing – the utilization of the king to secure the unity and coherence of the nation.

The morals of Bolingbroke are forced into their place in an empirical system. They are in no sense the starting point of his political theory. In this, Bolingbroke is at one with Maurras, who, at every point more consistent, declares himself an atheist.

If we are content to identify, as for this purpose we may, the ‘justice’ and ‘injustice’ of the Pinks with the ‘absolute standards’ of the Oxford Group and the ‘development of consciousness’ of the Artists’ International Congress, it will be clear that this relegation of morals, or sentiments, to a position of dependence in politics, is in conflict with the assumptions of a wide section of political writers in this country. While Bolingbroke, attempting to justify the position of the king deductively, was taking notice of the habits of his countrymen to such an extent that his method was in fact empirical groping, most contemporary writers, while claiming to adhere more or less to scientific schools of political thought, deduce their politics from their ethical and sentimental prejudices. An English interpretation of the ideas of Maurras would make their fault evident, and might rid us of those humane philosophies which provoke violence by demanding excessive change.

Prejudice as an Aid to Government

permitting the innocent to be possessed with laziness and sleep in the most visible article of danger.

In the fourth and fifth books of De l’Esprit des Lois, Montesquieu defines three springs of government and describes the education which favours each. Honour is the spring of monarchical government, fear of despotism and virtue of democracy. The ‘principle’ of a government is what makes it work. The government does not, however, entirely stand on its own legs; an appropriate education is required for the production of suitable citizens and subjects.

No European state now belongs wholly to one or other of Montesquieu’s three types of government. England, for example, is a democracy pervaded by snobbery which is in part a decadent left-over from a monarchical caste system and by a little tyranny more lately introduced. Democracy is, of Montesquieu’s three, apparently the chief ingredient of England as it is of all modern European states. (All are at least governments in which the people appears to have some voice.) We should therefore examine more closely the virtue which makes democracy work.

This virtue is, Montesquieu insists, a ‘vertu politique’ and has nothing to do with morals. In a later book, he illustrates this by telling us that the avarice of the Chinese is a ‘vertu’, whereas the honesty of the Spaniard is bad for the prosperity of the state. These examples, however, prove nothing about the nature of ‘vertu politique’; they merely show that a moral virtue may cause the state to disintegrate, and a vice may hold it together. ‘Vertu politique’ is more closely defined in the fourth book, and there it is not successfully distinguished from moral virtue. As one might expect, if many are to govern they must be possessed of honest manners, uprightness and forbearance. Otherwise the government will disintegrate or be transformed either into a monarchy or a despotism by the vice of one man or of a group.

The ‘sentiment de l’éducation’ which, according to Montesquieu, is appropriate to democracy, is the honesty learned from the manners of one’s parents. Englishmen, with their long democratic tradition, should obviously be instinct with this honesty. As everyone knows, however, the young do not imitate their parents; rather, perhaps, the old prefer to be like their children rather than to be models for them; the family, except as a breeding-ground, is disappearing. There are few opportunities of exercising virtue in public life. The citizen drops his paper in the ballot-box with a cross against the name of one of two or three distasteful candidates. This action may help the state to cohere; the mere repetition of it produces a sense of easiness; it is not, however, ‘virtuous’, or in itself even ‘politically virtuous’ and it has little to do with democracy. There is virtue in the air, however, in England, of the sort that the League of Nations was built on. We may examine it more closely.

The first thing to notice is that the citizen does not do anything with it politically. He carries it about with him and he can produce it like a driving licence. It does, however, enable him to react in a certain way, or rather, it is a label which tells one how he will react. If it is useless to him, therefore, it may still be of use to someone else and it is in fact useful to the man who makes him react – the advertiser with something to sell, or the politician. The passive sense of what is right does therefore help to hold the state together. It is, however, a mechanical sentiment and by no means an active quality.

The political thoughts which drift in most minds in England are ‘Is it right?’ and ‘It’s not fair.’ That these should be the most popular thoughts is due partly to our tradition of democracy and partly to our liking for religion of a certain brand. It is clear, however, that the function in the state of passive virtue is precisely the same as that of the passive sense of national honour which is exploited by the leaders of Germany. Hitler has said that the German soul has two or three strings, and one can count on getting a certain response by plucking them. An English statesman might say the same of the English soul. The notes would be different, that is all.

The modern governor uses in an unprecedented fashion the sentiments of his subjects as an instrument of government. The typical modern state is in fact run by propaganda. Wherever the nominal government is, the power will lie with whoever controls opinion and a government which offends public opinion will go under. Most governments, of course, once established, take care that they shall more than anyone else control opinion.

The sentiments appealed to usually are of some nobility. In England they are moral and sporting canons; everywhere they are meant to dispose people to be disinterested. Hitler has written in Mein Kampf an interesting chapter on propaganda. He says: ‘All propaganda must appeal to the people and must be put at the intellectual level of the most limited of the minds it is directed to…. The capacity of the mass of men is very limited, their understanding small, but their forgetfulness great.’ The second sentence at once recalls Machiavelli – ‘It is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowards, covetous…’ Hitler is speaking of peaceful persuasion; the fact that he is an unpleasant Nazi should not blind us to that. His words might be used by any politician or man with muffins to sell. Machiavelli recommended the utmost violence. If he were our contemporary he would change nothing in his view of man; he would, however, no doubt see that a subject who can be clubbed into obedience by propaganda is not in need of rougher treatment. One may, by friendly words, give a despotically-governed people the illusion that it is free. The nobility of the sentiments the new despot governs by, makes it hard for people to understand his tyranny. Blows have this advantage, that even the stupidest do not think them signs of good intentions.

English Liberalism

Anthony Ludovici, English Liberalism (New Pioneer Pamphlet)

Mr Ludovici’s thesis in his new pamphlet, is that the Anglo-Saxons, a race of particularists, were civilized against their will by wise rulers from Henry I to Charles I and forced to admit the authority of the state to order certain matters for the common good. Then the Puritans got the upper hand, defeated the king and made property absolutely private, at the same time re-admitting to the country the Jews, an ‘uncivilized’ race (in the proper sense) little better than the Anglo-Saxons. Despite the Tories of the king’s party England declined from that day. Englishmen grew both sentimental and scraggy and the stock declined so far that some are now born liberals.

I am not competent to discuss Mr Ludovici’s account of the history of our decline, but on his methods I will offer a few observations. It is undeniable that races, or at any rate nations, have peculiar characters, but these characters are difficult to define. Wherever it is possible, therefore, to explain a change in a society without reference to them, one should, I think, in the interests of clarity do so. There is a further reason. Whoever talks of the national character comes near to encouraging it, and I do not think that the national character should be encouraged. It is the fund of vitality from which the conscious life of a nation springs, and if one exploits it one debauches the source of life. To develop a personal life it is perhaps best to fix one’s eyes on impersonal values, and it may be better to criticize past changes in constitutions in the light of the values one at present entertains than to consider them in relation to ‘national character’. ‘National character’ can only be a name for one’s ideals and if one judges by it one is still judging by present values, only more blindly because less explicitly. Mr Ludovici would have made a more convincing case if he had not dragged in the Saxon character, as everyone must feel on reading ‘The Study of Celtic Literature’ that Arnold would have made a more serious attack on his contemporaries had he not used the clownish abstractions of Celt and Saxon. The changes Mr Ludovici deplores are not peculiar to England, and his case has much in common with the case which for many years M. Maurras has been making out in France.

Mr Ludovici’s belief that our history is a struggle between the particularist natives and the rulers who cared for the common interests causes him to observe our present conditions erroneously. He desires for the worker a status which only the possession of property can give, but he none the less overlooks the fact that people are now forced to do more for the state than before and that the life of the ordinary worker is regulated by the state as never before. ‘Particularism’ is a vice few can now afford to practise.

I have written chiefly about what I consider to be the faults of Mr Ludovici’s pamphlet, but the reader would do well to expend sixpence to discover the virtues for himself. In the course of the pamphlet Mr Ludovici raises many of the questions which must be considered by anyone concerned about the future of England, and he raises them with the right intentions.

The Civil Service

Emmeline W. Cohen, The Growth of the British Civil Service (Allen & Unwin)

This history of the Civil Service in the last hundred and fifty years is a record of improvement, and improvement is always suspicious. I certainly would not deny that the civil service is hard-working and honest, but a story of progress is almost always a story with something left out. One could write an account of a number of social and political institutions and show that they had improved, much in the same way that one could give an account of the development of the steam engine. The discovery and development of the steam engine is a thing to wonder at; obviously good, if considered by itself, for the modern railway engine has more steam than Watt’s kettle, and it uses it more effectively. But the history of the technical development of the steam engine is not the history of the last hundred and fifty years, and an insulated account of the steam engine is a story which none but an imaginary abstract technician could call wholly a story of good. That engines are better than they were is undeniable; that we are better off for having better engines is a thing to be disputed about. In matters of government it is equally easy to abstract, and abstraction is even more surely a falsification. One might say that Parliament has improved because it represents more people than it did; one might assert that it has improved because each member represents a more or less equal number of voters, and places (which are not human) have no representation. Those...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Poems
• From The London Zoo (1961) and other early poems
• From Numbers (1965)
• From Metamorphoses (1968)
• From the new poems in In the Trojan Ditch (1974)
• From Anchises (1976)
• From Exactions (1980)
• From the new poems in Collected Poems (1984)
• From God Bless Karl Marx! (1987)
• From Antidotes (1991)
• From What and Who (1994)
• Poems from Collected Poems (1998)
• Translations
• Essays
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Poem Titles
• Index of First Lines
• About the Authors
• Copyright