Milton, Poet and Protestant
IF from Hilaire Belloc, the great Catholic apologist, we hardly expect a laudatory portrait of an arch-heretic, we are agreeably surprised in Milton (Lippincott, $4.00) at his fairness.
Milton the man he cordially detests as an eruptive, combative, angry megalomaniac, but Milton the poet, the clarions of whose verse ‘ring out unchanged in fresh glory after three hundred years,’ rouses him to ecstasy. He is even willing to admit that from the faults of the man sprang some of the virtues of the poet: his pride may have been silly, but it led him to regard himself as the privileged revealer of awful things, and it was from his towering absorption in himself that he drew that ‘courage never to submit or yield’ which caused him to triumph in the midst of dereliction with the trumpet blasts of Paradise Lost.
Mr. Belloc is a delightful guide to poetry. He rejoices in the sublime and revels in the bathetic. It is to be regretted, though, that he should have afforded the grammar-grubbing critics, whom he satirizes by detecting a split infinitive in Lycidas, an opportunity for triumph by the inaccuracy of some of his quotations.
In his attempt to understand Milton the man he lays great stress upon the failure of his first marriage, an event which he feels left the poet rabid and bitter with a permanent sense of inevitable, unceasing conflict with the world. Naturally Mr. Belloc can see nothing good in the divorce pamphlets.
His continual intimation that Milton was cowardly ami that his ‘fine motives’ were all afterthoughts is irritating, and the exaggerated emphasis which he places upon the ‘secrecy’ of the De Doctrina Christiana (as though Milton were as frightened thereat as he seems to be) is exasperating.
But ‘irritating’ and ‘exasperating’ are but inverse terms for ‘stimulating.’ And stimulating the work certainly is. Suggestive thoughts — on all topics from prosody to morality — are thrown out on almost every page. His insistence, for example, that in the Areopagitica Milton evades the issue — that the problem in regard to censorship is not whether we are to have it, but the criteria of its limitation — is typical and profound.
Milton’s life will always be of interest to those who have felt the spell of his verse, but Rose Macaulay’s study of him, Milton (Harpers, $2.00), as the idealist throwing himself into a great religious and political struggle should appeal to a far wider circle of readers.
The young poet, preparing himself with ascetic rigor for some great task to which he believed God would call him, abandoned Parnassus for Grub Street, harnessing his genius for years to the production of coarse invective and dull scurrility. But when at the Restoration of Charles the Second his cause fell ‘with hideous ruin and combustion down’ and he found himself blind, aging, poor, and despised, he turned again to his poetry and in throbbing harmonies came like an evening dragon upon his insolent foes, and by the soaring manifestation of his genius justified the ways of God (and Milton) to mankind forever.
It can be maintained, and with reason, that his political activities were an essential part of his poetic development. Certainly he himself felt that he was doing God’s work, ‘blowing a dolorous and jarring blast’ upon the trumpet of truth, just as he later felt himself divinely ordained to explain the cosmos. But Miss Macaulay is inclined to the more general view that as a pamphleteer he merely wasted his time. Only the Areopagitica, burning with a passion for liberty, and the first divorce pamphlet, holding up ideals of marriage so lofty that they are yet unrealized, seem to her worthy of him.
With his poetry she deals briefly but well. Particularly pleasing is her discussion of the subjective nature of Paradise Lost.
Throughout she seeks rather to remind the cultured than to inform the ignorant. Her book, touched with gentle humor and delicate irony, is written for that fit audience to which her subject proudly limited himself.
That she finally sees Milton as an alien, a perpetual adolescent who died vanquished and embittered ‘in a world with which he had never come to terms,’ does not necessarily redound to his discredit. Are not all idealists, in a sense, perpetual adolescents? The gods love them, and, whenever they die, they die young. And as for not coming to terms with his world — although certain psychologists may hold this up as the chief end of man, fortunately for man the greatest have never sought it.
BERGEN EVANS