Not that
he was ever a barnburner at home. Sisson possessed the true Tory spirit
of independence, metaphorically and as defined by Dr. Johnson: “One who adheres to the ancient
constitution of the state, and the apostolic hierarchy of the Church of
England.” He was born in Bristol, where he attended the university, and was the
son of a clockmaker and optician. He entered the Civil Service in 1936, served
in the army during World War II and
retired from the Ministry of Labour in 1972. He was never an academic, hipster or activist. As he writes of the nineteenth-century Dorset poet William Barnes: "He was not what you could call maudit." Sisson published a novel, much poetry
and non-fiction, and became one of the supreme translators of the age (Virgil, Catullus,
Horace, The Song of Roland, Dante, Racine, La
Fontaine, Heine, among others). What follows is a Sisson Sampler drawn from the
volumes I’ve read this week. This passage is from “Call no man happy until he
is dead,” in English Perspectives: Essays
on Liberty and Government (Carcanet, 1992):
“You
cannot be Plato in Bechuanaland or George Herbert in Connecticut. You cannot be
in the Italy of the twentieth century a man of the first century A.D. So in
fact you are largely directed from the outside, however little you like to
think so, and it is not so much a recommendation I am giving you as a short
view of the nature of things [Sisson also translated Lucretius].”
From the
volume Sisson wrote about his favorite bête noire, The Case of Walter Bagehot (Faber and Faber, 1972):
“It is indeed characteristic of Bagehot in his literary
essays that he sets up, not man as the measure of all things but the mere man
of affairs as the measure of his betters. In a sense he could not help this,
for he was himself that mere man of affairs, only endowed with a certain
facility of pen which is not to be taken for granted in such people, though the
weakness is more common than it was in Bagehot’s day.”
From “Natural History” in Art and Action (Methuen, 1965):
“It is an absurdity to try to be original. You might as
well try to be beautiful or intelligent.”
“One imagines that Shakespeare could turn anything to
account because his receiving apparatus was as nearly perfect as could be, but
most writers can manage only a few scratchings on the limited subject-matters
of which, amidst the general obscurity of their lives, they manage to apprehend
something more or less concretely.”
From “Conclusion” in English
Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1971):
“If Dante and Catullus, Horace or Raleigh, or some
equivalent figures, are not of actual importance to you, in terms of pleasure
and enlightenment to be got from their works here and now, then literature—the designation
of the permanent elements in man—is not what you are interested in as you turn
to the weeklies and the Sunday supplements. There is always the great,
excitable flow of politics and fashion, but the point of literature is
something different.”
And “Up the Arts!” from Collected Poems:
“Shall we make legends of our silly selves?
The lies invented by the semi-great,
By Yeats for example, cut no ice:
After a few years the truth shows through
And where is folly of invention then?
The folly heightened, the invention fallen,
The bright surface crack, and underneath
The muddy water slinks away to the sea
Or lurks still to be lost below the weeds.
All nature will resume her homely sway;
What grew will grow, what was invented, die.”
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