with the works of the poets from Cowley to Lyttleton in fifty-six volumes, two volumes of index, and twelve volumes of the Lives. This was a fourteenth-birthday present, bought from George’s of Bristol; it still has their price marked in it, of £6 15s. The first owner had been an eighteenth-century clergyman, Francis Mills, who was born in 1759. He may have bought the first volumes when he was twenty, and lived through to die in 1851 in his ninety-second year. I hope these little books gave him the lifetime’s happiness they have given me.
Johnson’s Poets covers the period from the 1620s to the 1760s. The minor poets of this period include Rochester, the libidinous Earl; Addison, one of the most delightful of English essayists; Gay, who wrote The Beggar’s Opera; the saintly Isaac Watts, one of the best English hymn writers, and Gray, who wrote the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. When I suffered from adolescent depression at Charterhouse, I found Gray’s Elegy, the mirror of my mood, a great comfort.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The Ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
In Johnson’s collection, there are four major literary voices, those of Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope; of those Swift is a great satirist rather than a great poet. Dryden is indeed a great poet, free-flowing with fire and energy, but I never found him a particularly interesting writer despite the intellectual quality of his criticism. The two great poets whom I have come back to again and again, who, after Shakespeare, have done most to shape my mind, are Milton and Pope. Milton came rather the earlier of the two; I can remember first hearing Lycidas read in a form room at Clifton.
Lycidas was written in memory of Edward King, a young Cambridge poet who shared Milton’s idealism and died in 1637. One can imagine a young Cambridge poet of the 1930s writing such an elegy about one of his contemporaries, who might have died fighting Franco. It is a poem of the left, which foreshadows a dark future; I was reading it in just such an historic context:
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed,
But swoln with wind, and the rank mist they draw,
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread;
Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw
Daily devours apace and nothing said;
But that two-handed engine at the door
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more.
These lines from Lycidas gave me the true thrill of great poetry then, and they still do now. When written, they were indeed prophetic of the civil war that was about to break upon England. The executions they prefigure, which may already have been foreshadowed in Milton’s mind, were those of the men, such as Laud and Strafford, whom he regarded as having failed to feed ‘the hungry sheep’; the young poets in the 1930s regarded Neville Chamberlain and the appeasers in much the same way. King Charles I himself, on 30 January 1649, was executed by the axe, that ‘two-handed engine at the door’.
I enjoyed the poetry of public affairs; I was already storing up phrases and the rhythm of sentences which I felt I could use. If I sought to learn the use of irony and antithesis from Johnson, a line like ‘Daily devours apace and nothing said’, with its dying fall, became part of the inner rhythm of my early attempts at English prose.
No doubt John Milton is a greater poet than Alexander Pope; he is indeed second only to Shakespeare in the canon of English poets. But in learning how to read, which I was doing with the definite intention of learning how to write, ‘elective affinities’, to use Goethe’s congenial phrase, go for as much as poetic merit. I learned most from the poets whose personalities I liked best. I admire Milton; I love Pope.
Although our ability to classify poets by political temperament has often been denied, it seems to me that it is sometimes quite obvious. Alexander Pope loved Horace, a natural conservative among Roman poets. Pope took the view ‘whate’er is best administered is best’ – not a radical view of politics, he admired the Augustan ideal and detested what he saw as the contagious vulgarity of Grub Street. Milton was a man of the left, a radical progressive, a supporter of Cromwell, a hardline servant of the revolutionary government. Had he been a young Frenchman in the early 1790s, he would have been a Jacobin; if a young Russian in 1917, he would have been a Bolshevik.
I knew perfectly well at the age of ten that my own political temperament belonged to the conservative type, that I had no political sympathy at all with Milton’s radical progressive point of view. I had read about Cromwell in my early history books and saw him as an enemy. The poet who was to have the strongest influence on me was bound to be one who shared the temperament of rational conservatism. I found such a poet in Alexander Pope. He has been the friendly guide to my literary life.
His critics have said that Pope is not a poet at all, but, in effect, a brilliant prose writer, using verse as his medium for expressing what they would regard as merely prosaic thoughts. He is indeed an unusual poet; he was a cripple, marked by the effects of a tubercular disease of the spine in childhood. He was some inches short of five foot in height. Such an experience has its impact on the development of personality. As with blindness, certain aspects of life are cut off, but other aspects are intensified. Language, and the control of language, became his resource, into which he focused an astonishing energy.
In no poet does one feel to the same degree that each line has been packed with an intensity of meaning, so that phrase after phrase comes to the reader primed to explode, not as a sparkler or grenade, but with a nuclear energy. I do not know if I appreciated this when I first read Pope; Shakespeare and Blake are great poets who are highly accessible to children; Pope is a poet of argument, and the arguments are often mature in character. Later I was to realize that Pope’s arguments compress whole books into a couplet or two. Take these opening lines in the second book of The Essay on Man:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side, With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride, He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast.
Each couplet is a tablet of stone. Although both are great poems, the preference between Lycidas and The Essay on Man is inevitably a temperamental one; it is the choice between the radical’s sense of destiny and a conservatism tempered with scepticism. I was already seeing the world through Pope’s eyes rather than Milton’s. For me Milton might be the greater poet, but Pope was far more sympathetic.
The virtues of the best prose include clarity, energy, rhythm, strength and concentration of meaning. No word should be wasted; words should have colour as well as logical coherence. These are the lessons of Pope; everyone who aspires to write good English prose, and particularly journalists, who have to write too much of it, too fast, should read Pope, not occasionally but regularly. In any case such a habit is a great, and reliable, pleasure. If one has the right temperament for it.
Chapter Five
But we’ll do more, Sempronius
In September 1941, my father drove me for my first term at Charterhouse in his green 1932 open Lagonda, using some saved petrol coupons; I remember our happy feeling of companionship. The setting of the school is beautiful, and even then I appreciated it; the old school buildings, the best Gothic of 1870, look out over the green, where later I was to watch Peter May as a thirteen-year-old batsman; he became one of the finest English batsmen there ever was. The green itself is at the summit of the steep hill which runs up from Godalming; the view stretches out to Haslemere. Around the school there were walks in its extensive grounds, and beyond that the Surrey countryside, though Surrey seemed brown and scrawny compared to the green meadows of Somerset.
In summer the setting was delightful, but in autumn, winter and spring, it was cold, almost as bone-chillingly cold