Lord David Cecil and IB in the Cloisters, New College, Oxford, 1950
LORD DAVID CECIL WAS BORN the second son of the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, and spent his boyhood and much of his youth at the family house at Hatfield. His earliest memories, as a boy, were of a house full of talk – sharp, articulate, amusing. He spoke of the atmosphere of total freedom and spontaneity in which everything was discussed at his parents’ hospitable table, in particular, as was very often the case, when his uncles Robert and Hugh – the political sons of the great Victorian Prime Minister – and the future Bishop of Exeter, William, were present. Politics, history, religion, stories about the behaviour of British cabinets, episodes in Parliament (serious and comical), elaborate analyses of the personal relations of public personalities – all this was part of the daily pabulum of this famous and dominant clan.
When their cousin the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, came to stay, as he often did, the talk became particularly lively and vehement and indiscreet and intimate – but interspersed with discussions of moral and religious principles and issues – with the result that David Cecil’s naturally keen and eager mind and wit developed early, and he acquired opinions, the capacity for clear and articulate expression, and a tendency to relate abstract ideas to the vicissitudes of public, social and personal lives, and the interplay of individual characters and doctrines to their public environment and their place in history – all this as a naturally uninhibited process.
Books were everywhere, prose and poetry; he read them at odd moments, at various times, in no particular order, and so became familiar with Clarendon, Dickens, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Carlyle, Lamb, Byron, Shelley, Macaulay, Disraeli; he had absorbed volumes or chapters or fragments of these writings by the time he went to Eton. He had, as a schoolboy, from all evidence, unusual charm and ease of manner, intellectual gaiety and delight in human gifts and foibles. But he was a bookish boy, and this did not stand him in particularly good stead at Eton. He did not like his years there. His contemporary, Edward Sackville-West, later a well-known musical critic, said that Cecil truly blossomed only when he left Eton and came to Oxford, and entered Christ Church. The strongest cultural influence on him at Eton was probably Aldous Huxley, who was a temporary master there during the First World War, and opened his eyes to realms of poetry which were new to him; his love of English poetry, particularly Christian poetry, stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Lord David Cecil and IB in the Cloisters, New College, Oxford, 1950
At Oxford Cecil became deeply interested in English history, particularly the Stuarts and the rise of the Tory Party, with which his family’s fortunes were so deeply bound up – this was strongly encouraged by his learned and sensitive history tutor, Keith Feiling, who thought him one of the cleverest as well as one of the most attractive undergraduates he had ever known. And indeed Cecil’s reputation for natural charm, combined with a very sharp and nimble intelligence, both clear- and hard-headed, critical both of what he read and of what he wrote, and an unflagging interest in people (more than ideas) and imagination (more than intellect), characterised him at all times.
He was always conscious of his origins and his social position in the hierarchical structure of British society. He once said that it was difficult for English aristocrats to be original artists or writers because, unless their circumstances were very unusual, they tended to be brought up to be all things to all men, and this, he thought, was an obstacle to the withdrawal and concentration needed for original artistic creation – Tolstoy and Byron and perhaps Shelley were exceptions. Those brought up as he was, he thought, were tempted to take too much interest in the lives, both personal and social, by which they were surrounded to dedicate themselves to hard, life-absorbing tasks. He was, all his life, too deeply fascinated by too great a variety of individual experiences, as well as books, above all novels and poetry, stories and literary essays, to be able to do more than describe them and the worlds they expressed, give his own impressions, convey what they seemed to him to say and be; and this left no room for the self-disciplined, preoccupying creative labour after which, at times, he hankered.
After his First in History at Oxford he attempted All Souls, but was not taken, and was elected to a fellowship at Wadham College, where he remained from 1924 until 1930. He taught English literature (and sometimes history) there – it was then that he began to exercise his extraordinary capacity for understanding casts of mind and for eliciting from pupils and making them aware of the precise content of what they thought and felt and groped for, their roots and their goals, and, conversely, conveying his own vividly imaginative and concrete sense of what he himself thought and understood and knew about the writers and works which were being discussed. This gift for seeing in stunted-seeming seeds the particular kinds of blooms that might be encouraged to grow made him (especially after he became a tutor at New College, and then, from 1939 to 1970, Professor) a remarkable influence on his pupils, an unusually large number of whom became distinguished teachers of English literature themselves, at Oxford and other universities, and held him in affection and admiration for ever after. At least five among the most distinguished literary luminaries at Oxford alone acknowledged a deep intellectual and personal debt to him as a wonderfully sympathetic and inspiring teacher. Until fashions changed, his lectures were vastly attended.
His interest did not lie in scholarship, but he did not look down on the minutiae of learning, on the most scrupulous textual or philological investigations, let alone creative reconstruction of the past: he respected this deeply, and looked on as masters and personal friends some of the best-known literary scholars in Oxford at this time – C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Helen Gardner, F. P. Wilson, Helen Darbishire, L. P. Wilkinson, Nevill Coghill – who, in turn, liked him greatly and respected his judgement. But his heart was not in learning. He had a very definite doctrine of the proper aim of the study of literature, at least as he conceived of it, though he did not exclude other possibilities. He was not favourable to historical, biographical, sociological, sociolinguistic approaches to a writer, and the interpretation of his work in the light of them.
His approach was aesthetic. Like T. S. Eliot, he thought that works of art shone by their own radiance, and that knowledge of the artist’s life added little. Like Proust, he was against Sainte-Beuve’s methods. He did not care for Edmund Wilson or the semantics of I. A. Richards, or the cultural moralism of F. R. Leavis (who duly attacked him). This was not what he wished to do, even when he admitted that it was, in its own way, well done. He thought that the task of a critic, and of a teacher of literature, was to make clear to himself and convey to others the creative process of the writer, the process of the particular imaginative act of composition, whether it obeyed rules or departed from them, or derived from examples, or was directed against other modes of expression, or created its own. He thought that this task resembled that of a teacher of composition in a musical conservatoire who describes the process of evolution of successive drafts of a Beethoven sonata, or Wagner’s development of the organisation of orchestral forces and the relationship of this to his mythological invention. This entailed a degree of imaginative insight, as well as accurate knowledge where it was available, which alone could bring out the inwardness, and, in particular, convey the specific quality, of a piece of writing, its inner pulse, its poetic imagery and changing forms, which were part and parcel of its meaning, of the artist’s way of achieving artistic effects. It was this wish to see nothing between him and the object of attention, and a consequent distaste for theories of literature, systems of aesthetics – sociological, psychological, philosophical, methodological approaches – that gave Cecil’s teaching and his writing their particular character. It was this, too, that often enabled him to encourage a particular approach, and suggest further steps along the grain of a pupil’s mind or imagination. He made no attempt to indoctrinate or impose correct methods, as some of his less formidable colleagues seemed, in the 1930s and late 1940s, keen to do.
Cecil’s books, which reflect his deepest interests, both in literature and life, show that what he loved best was what was most English in English life and letters, and everything outside England which seemed closest to its, to him, most valuable qualities – a sense of lives as they are lived, the inwardness, the awareness of the poetry of quiet existence in the country, the often complex self-absorption of solitary lives, as well as their part in and interplay with the facets of various kinds of English social life, particularly when the observation is authentic, and concerned with the personal and private, and the effects of distortion or destruction by disasters or false values. His first important work, The Stricken Deer (1929), is a beautifully written, deeply sympathetic study of a melancholy, introspective, semi-solitary, lyrical Christian poet living out his life in the country. Cecil had a natural affinity with uneasy, cloistered, fantasy-filled, inwardly rich lives, and the deep, unquenchable lyrical impulse which they fed – Cowper, Gray, Lamb, the Brontës (as in his Early Victorian Novelists of 1934), Dorothy Osborne in an earlier century (Two Quiet Lives, 1948) – and this is conveyed by the best pages of Poets and Story-Tellers (1949), by his essay on Walter de la Mare, and especially by his excellent, original and deeply-felt lectures on Thomas Hardy, perhaps the best of all his books.
But he was not confined to this genre: he gave an interesting account of Scott’s early grasp of the collision of social classes, of conflicts of individuals in societies in flux, which owed nothing to Lukács. His lecture on Walter Pater in 1955 is something else again – an exquisite appreciation of the aesthetic approach to life, which meant a very great deal to him, and which he defended in an unfavourable climate, as emerged in his Inaugural Lecture. Against the current streams of the time, in 1949 and again in 1957, he declared that the central purpose of art was to give delight, not to instruct, nor to disturb, nor to explain, nor to praise or condemn a movement, an idea, a regime, nor to help build a better world in the service of a Church, a party, a nation, a class, but to irradiate the soul with a light which God had granted the artist the power to shed, and the reader or listener to absorb, understand, delight in, and thereby be drawn nearer its divine creator.
The true love of his life was, of course, Jane Austen. He wrote about her during his freelance life in London in 1935, and after he retired from Oxford in 1978: A Portrait of Jane Austen was his most finished study of her. Everything in her appealed to him: the dry light upon, and profound understanding of, the human heart; the unswerving pursuit of what she perceived to be the real nature of human beings and the world they lived in; the calm good sense and unalterably just appraisals; the steady gaze; the light but calculated weight; the perfection of marksmanship of every word; the pervasive irony, the deceptively quiet tone; the capacity to convey the nuances of every tremor of feeling and passion and painful thought in these well-mannered, genteel, provincial heads and hearts. He laughed at the strictures of social, especially Marxist, critics – what, no mention of the French or the Industrial Revolutions? Nothing about the condition of the poor? Or Napoleon? Or class warfare? Or the technological transformation which altered everything in the society about which she purported to write? Nothing but individual experience, personal relationships, children, adolescents, marriage, a thousand indescribable feelings, intimations? As if this were not enough, not the essence of life and of art.
She wrote of an England he knew and understood, and he responded to those who described it with genius. He felt this in a smaller degree about Mrs Gaskell and, in his own time, Jean Rhys. George Eliot was a genius, he knew, but for him too unaesthetic and too ideological. For this he was reproached by members of the Bloomsbury coterie, but he was defiantly unrepentant.
He was, of course, well acquainted with Bloomsbury; he had married the daughter of Desmond MacCarthy, who was brought up at the heart of it, and he went to Bloomsbury parties. He delighted in the wit and irreverence of its members. Lytton Strachey did have a strong and lasting influence upon him – he believed that Strachey was the creator of biography as a conscious art form alongside the novel, and as a biographer he confessed himself to be his disciple. The Young Melbourne and its successor, Lord M., probably his most widely read works, owe a great deal to Strachey; the sure touch with which the brilliant world of the Whig aristocracy is brought to life has surely some foundation in Cecil’s familiarity with his own social world before the war, and is perhaps a trifle anachronistic, as Tolstoy’s society in War and Peace is, for much the same reason. Both volumes are most enjoyable reading – Strachey would have been much more ironical, mischievous, cruel, would have played with the facts to the point of caricature, but the genre is similar: Cecil is at once more high-spirited, kinder and more conventional. He liked the Partridges, thought E. M. Forster very clever, amusing, skilful, but recoiled from their moral values – they conflicted obviously with his own religious and perhaps more worldly ones. He compared Forster unfavourably with Turgenev, who seemed to him equally gifted, indeed, more so, equally clever, amusing, perceptive and humane, but with a lyrical imagination denied, in his view, to Forster.
He looked on Bloomsbury with some irony, as a kind of sect, a self-contained, unreal little society which had its own orthodoxies and its own experts on everything, rather like the Roman Catholic or Marxist or Freudian establishments. But the person in Bloomsbury he most deeply admired, and, indeed, looked up to almost uncritically, was, of course, Virginia Woolf. He thought her novels works of undeniable genius, but what meant most to him was The Common Reader, her critical essays. These formed his ideal model – the revelation of the varieties of the actual processes of creation, the literary analogue to the teaching of musical composition – in which he so deeply believed, and which he tried to write, all his life. He shared his sense of Woolf’s dazzling genius with his lifelong friend, Elizabeth Bowen, whose novels spoke to him directly. He thought Elizabeth Bowen, as well as his intimate friend the novelist L. P. Hartley, to be endowed beyond others with a sensibility to the texture of life as it is lived, a gift which, for him, Chekhov possessed to a supreme degree. He loved Tolstoy – he preferred his sunlit world – ‘Tolstoy was surely the cleverest man who ever lived’, he said of him – to the crushing misanthropy of Flaubert or the unceasing discords and infernal regions of Dostoevsky. The most valuable quality for him in people was, I think, a capacity for self-understanding – for knowing what one could and could not be and do. Genius as she was, Virginia Woolf did not completely possess that – and Vita Sackville-West, for example, and indeed, the rest of Bloomsbury, then a dominant literary influence, not at all. He was too hard-headed and undeceivable not to look on this literary mandarinate with amused detachment, and mocked at the snobbishness, both social and artistic, of most of its members (acute even in his heroes, Strachey and Woolf) as being a genuine defect.
Towards the end of his life he did many other things. He wrote an excellent life of Max Beerbohm (Max), which Max, on his deathbed, had asked his widow to propose to him. He wrote about his own family and their house, first in the early 1950s, then again in his later years, in 1973. He wrote about his father-in-law, Desmond MacCarthy; and he edited anthologies, of Christian verse in 1940, and of his own choice (Library Looking-Glass) in 1935. He wrote Visionary & Dreamer, about the painters Samuel Palmer and Burne-Jones (1969), on whom he had lectured in the United States. He took no interest in ‘the modern movement’ – T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and their successors. The new schools – deconstruction and its successors, formalism, neo-Freudianism, neo-Marxism and the rest – seemed to him arid, academic exercises, or else dark mysteries conjured up by foreign mystagogues, which he was only too happy not to seek to penetrate.
All in all he was one of the most intelligent, irresistibly attractive, gifted, life-enhancing, shrewd and brilliant literary personalities of his time. He confined himself to what he liked, admired and enjoyed, and described it and his reasons for it with great talent. He saw through pretence and sham quickly and infallibly. Some declared that he wrote with undeniable charm, style and distinction, but with a lack of originality, that his opinions were often familiar enough though ‘ne’er so well expressed’.1 This is not just. His pen had a very sharp edge, and often cut deeper than cruder, if stronger, weapons. However this may be, he was certainly the most delightful human being that anyone could ever hope to meet.
1 [‘True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest’: Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, 2nd ed. (London, 1713), 15 (lines 297–8). In the first edition (London, 1713), 19, the phrase is ‘ne’er before Exprest’.]