To the modern reader, a little Logan Pearsall Smith goes a very long way indeed. Arch, feline and stylistically oh-so-self-conscious, his polished observations seem frequently empty and almost always precious. How, one wonders, could the incisive intellect of Hugh Trevor-Roper have fallen for all of this? Part of the answer must surely be: he was young. Reading these pages, with their pre-echoes of the lofty, Olympian style of the late Trevor-Roper, you sometimes have to remind yourself that these are the words of a writer in his late twenties.
More importantly, the Smith doctrine — or attitude — was perhaps ideally suited to someone who had lost his religious faith (if he ever had it), had decided that all metaphysical questions were pointless and was disillusioned with political programmes and ideologies, but whose character retained two active springs: an intense curiosity about human behaviour, and a powerful aesthetic sense. The obvious comparison here is with the mental world of Bloomsbury (with which Smith was directly connected, but Trevor-Roper was not). Here is a telling passage from a "self-appreciation" penned by Trevor-Roper in 1941:
For elementary justice and intellectual freedom (or perhaps I should say, against their opposites), and for my friends, I will fight with relish and abandon. But morals, — I mean the systems people make out of their repressions — I can't do with. Social and sexual conventions, religion, and all the apparatus of God and Sin, — these make an interesting psychological study; but when people attach importance to them, I don't argue, I flee.
On the surface, there is enough evidence here to enrol him as an honorary Bloomsburyite. But there are differences too. Trevor-Roper could feel no connection between these attitudes and leftist political causes. ("I am", he wrote in the same self-appreciation, "instinctively a British whig ... I admire ... the 18th century, with its elevated self-assurance, its complete and orderly world.") And his aestheticism was broader and much more traditional. Modernism had few charms for him: Proust and Joyce had merely "embalmed and buried" the corpse of a dead genre (the novel), and he dismissed the former's masterwork as "that great haystack of introverted snobbery". Instead, he spent the war years re-reading Homer, Pindar, Thucydides, Lucretius, Horace, Dante, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Sir Thomas Browne, Gibbon, Keats and Tennyson. His engagement with these authors was intense, and intensely pleasurable; one wonders how many intelligence officers — or Oxford academics — today would sit down to read, in the original, the fragments of the Greek poet Alcaeus for sheer enjoyment of the word-pictures they painted.
