Looking for, and so far unable to find, my copy of Hill’s A Treatise of Civil Power. I’d been reading Without Title on the train, thinking it was his most recent and wondering why it wasn’t as good as I remembered (it has its moments). Most of the lines I wanted to quote from it are also quoted in this review. It’s good - really good:

The poor are bunglers: my people, whom I

nonetheless honour, who bought no landmark

other than their graves. I wish I could keep

Baconian counsel, wish I could keep resentment

out of my voice.

I’m trying to home in, at the moment, on the question of, as Evan puts it, “how to turn the idiosyncratic into the deeply felt of the commons”. That’s Hill’s problem in a nutshell, a problem which I once tried to pinpoint through a never quite adequate or articulated notion of “cultural politics”. I now think that was simply the wrong lens to try: “culture”, in spite of Raymond Williams’s valiant attempt to give a generic sense to the term, is something we have ministers for: not the commons at all but the variously enclosed. Here’s Hill in The Triumph of Love:

Active virtue: that which shall contain

its own passion in the public weal -

do you follow? - or can you at least

take the drift of the thing? The struggle

for a noble vernacular: this

did not end with Petrarch. But where is it?

Where has it got us? Does it stop, in our case,

with Dryden, or, perhaps,

Milton’s political sonnets? - the cherished stock

hacked into ransom and ruin; the voices

of distinction, far back, indistinct.

Still, I’m convinced that shaping,

voicing, are types of civic action…

“Noble vernacular” deserves underlining: it speaks of an ambition that Hill shares with William Morris, to model (here through poetic “shaping” and “voicing”) a vernacular that presupposes the intelligence of the common hearer or reader. Hill is so often so recondite in his references and allusions that this aim seems wholly incongruous with the means employed; but part of what he’s getting at is that if my intelligence and yours are indeed to be presupposed, and mutually honoured, then we should not expect to find each other immediately and transparently intelligible: we will find that after the initial pleasantries have passed, we will have some questions to ask, and some explaining to do.

Speaking of William Morris, here’s Hill in a recent interview triangulating Morris, Milton and one Bishop Butler:

I greatly admire [Milton’s] political sonnets. I believe that, were he alive now, he would be the people’s champion against plutocratic anarchy.

Until very recently I thought that I had invented the term plutocratic anarchy, but it appears to have originated with William Morris. A few days ago I happened upon the text of a lecture delivered at University College, Oxford in 1883 (“John Ruskin in the Chair”). Morris’s term, to be precise, is “anarchical Plutocracy”.

Anarchical Plutocracy destroys memory and dissipates attention; it is the enemy of everything that is summoned before us in Bishop Butler’s great pronouncement of 1729; “Everything is what it is, and not another thing”. Bad poetry, bad art, also dissipate the sense of things at once exactly and numinously understood. Great poetry is an act of unfailing attention; its frequently cited “music” must so be understood.