Milton and the Place of
English
Milton is the awkward member of the pantheon of the three
great English writers [the others being Chaucer and Shakespeare]. He gained his
status for a number of reasons but principally for achieving what he set out to
do to – to write of ‘things unattempted
yet in prose or rime’.
To understand the importance of Milton we have to understand
how he established English as a language capable of matching other languages’
ability to handle the most complex of human perceptions and experiences through
the medium of the epic – the highest form of poetry. Historically, English was not a major
European language. Amongst the learned, Latin, of course, was supreme but it was
no longer used creatively. The mediaeval and early renaissance periods had seen
a flowering of vernacular literatures across Europe – an expression of a
diversity of regional or national cultures: in England, Chaucer bore the prize,
establishing the dialect of the East Midlands spoken in London as the principal
dialect of English laying the foundations of what would become modern Standard
English. Although there was cultural cross-fertilisation in Europe, it tended
to be, so far as English was concerned, a case of borrowing rather than lending.
Hence Chaucer used various French sources in his writing, but it was Italy that
was regarded as the cultural centre of Europe.
Chaucer owed much more to the writings of the Italian Boccaccio whose Decameron provided the source of three
tales – the Clerk’s, the Franklin’s and the Shipman’s – as well as the general
structure of the series of tales told by a variety of tellers. Chaucer then,
like Milton after him, was culturally cosmopolitan, reading his contemporaries
in Europe as well as having a classical education and a deep understanding of
the writings of ancient philosophers and poets.
Italian, too, had produced three major epics. Two were based
on knightly exploits: Ariosto’s Orlando
Furioso [1516] is a rather ironic romance in episodes following the
wanderings and trials of its hero, Orlando;
Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata
[1581] is a more solemn account of the crusades to the Holy Land. The most
influential epic, however, was Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy [1314], an account of the author’s dream-journey
through heaven, hell and purgatory. It is interesting to note that Milton’s
original project – The Arthuriad –
was to have matched the knightly quest convention of Ariosto; but that he
abandoned it for the supreme task of ‘justifying the ways of God to men’ –
closer in intention to that of Dante. A language that could manage that had
surely come of age. So, for the English, Milton became a matter of national
pride – the author who gave the language international status.
1 Did Milton write
in English?
But it was a status that was not unproblematic. Whereas it
is comparatively easy to see how, linguistically, there is a continuum in the
English of Chaucer and Shakespeare and the language we now speak, that is less
obviously so in the case of Milton. The principal criticism can be parodied by
the statement that ‘Milton does not write English’.
T.S. Eliot [Milton I 1936]
.… the serious
charges to be made against him [are] the peculiar deterioration to which he
subjected the language.
Milton writes English like a dead
language. The criticism has been made with regard to his involved syntax. But a
tortuous style, when its peculiarity is aimed at precision, is not necessarily
a dead one; only when the complication is dictated by a demand of verbal music,
instead of any demand of sense.
To extract everything possible
from Paradise Lost, it would seem
necessary to read it in two different ways, first solely fir the sound, and
second for the sense. The full beauty of his long periods [i.e. sentences] can hardly be enjoyed while we are wrestling with
the meaning as well….
T.S. Eliot [Milton II, 1947]
In this article, Eliot has revised his position. Whereas
in 1936 he had seen Milton’s language as a dangerous path – a deviation from
the nature of English, by 1947 he sees Milton as a necessary conservative,
preventing too rapid change in language and in its poetic uses.
Modern poetry will have much to learn from Milton’s extended verse
structure; it might also avoid the danger of a servitude to colloquial speech and to current jargon. It might also
learn that the music of verse is strongest in poetry which has a definite
meaning expressed in the properest words. Poets might be led to admit that
acknowledged of the literature of their own language, with a knowledge of the
literature and the grammatical construction of other languages, is a very
valuable part of the poet’s equipment. And they might … devote some study
of Milton as … the greatest master in
our language of freedom within form… In studying Paradise Lost we come to perceive that the verse is continuously
animated by the departure from, and return to, the regular measure [i.e. rhythm].
F.R. Leavis
[‘Milton’s Verse’, in Revaluation,
1936]
The great Cambridge critic, F.R. Leavis, shared Eliot’s earlier
view of the unnaturalness of Milton’s English.
Even in the first two books of Paradise Lost, where the myth [of the
fall of Satan] has vigorous life and one can admire the magnificent invention
that Milton’s verse is, we feel, after a few hundred lines, our sense of
dissatisfaction growing into something stronger. … We find ourselves protesting
against the routine gesture, the heavy fall, of the verse, flinching from the
foreseen thud that comes so inevitably, and, at last, irresistibly: from reading
Paradise Lost is a matter of
resisting, of standing up against, the verse-movement, of subduing it to
something tolerably like sensitiveness, and in the end out resistance is worn
down; we surrender at last to the inescapable monotony of the ritual.
Donald Davie Syntax and Music in
Paradise Lost
Davie argues that one
of the strongest [‘muscular’ is the word he uses] effects Milton deploys is a kinetic one – one that creates a sense of movement. He uses I.44-49 ‘Him the
Almighty … Onmipotent to Arms’ and II.939-50 ‘Quenched in a bog … or creeps, or
flies’ as evidence. He is arguing that the poetry enacts the state it is
describing. He also, implicitly, assumes that we are reading the poem aloud to
hear the music.
Of the first extract he comments: We occupy in ourselves the gestalt
[roughly ‘total experience greater than the sum of its parts’] of the
falling.
Of the second he comments: Milton crowds stressed syllables
together so as to make the vocal exertion in reading imagine the physical
exertion described. It is the reader, too, who flounders, stumbles, pushes
doggedly on. Just as skilful, though less conspicuous, is the way un which
line-break, punctuation and metre
combine to make ‘Half flying’ act out, in our speaking of the words, the
abbreviated and ungainly flap which they describe.
Although ‘dramatic’ is an
inadequate word, it is still the right word for these felicities, because what
they do is to force us to participate in the situation and the actions
described; we no longer merely observe these, in imagination we suffer them,
ourselves embroiled.
Davie offers criticism of the way in which Milton breaks
the narrative flow of the plot by looking to the future. He cites examples of
Satan’s confrontation with Death [II 720-722] and when he launches into Chaos
[II 1021-1028]. He also criticises Milton’s practice of introducing digression
into ‘arcane knowledge’ – such as the account of Galileo’s telescope: Davie
comments:
… because the overt structure of Paradise Lost is narrative, and because
of the speculative learning encrusted upon its every angle, this consistent
disruption of the present time inevitably distracts the reader’s attention from
the poem as narrative to the poem as encyclopaedia.
If one of the major critical
interests of Milton is his use of English, another is that of his allegiance.
William Blake [1757-1827]
famously wrote:
The reason Milton wrote in
fetters [= chains i.e. Milton was
inhibited] when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils
& Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without
knowing it.
Interestingly, Blake’s
evidence lies in the vitality of language. He sees Milton creatively engaged when dealing with Satan and evil in a way
he claims is lacking when he deals with God.
This comment would have surprised – scandalised – Milton
who, though heterodox in his views on Christianity, was a believer. He accepted
the omnipotence and omniscience of God and the belief in free will as the
foundation of the interaction between God and humankind – though he did not
accept the doctrines of the Trinity or of predestination.
William Empson [1906-1984]
Empson was a
mathematics undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1920s who, while pursuing his
avowed subject, wrote a book on the nature of English poetry – Seven Types
of Ambiguity – shortly before being sent
down from university after a condom was found in his rooms. He subsequently
published Milton’s God – the most
stimulating study of Paradise Lost. His
argument was that, in dealing with Satan, Milton had to give him an
intellectual consistency and integrity. This is not necessarily the same as
saying that Milton was on Satan’s side. In other words, as is true in all
literature, a distinction should be maintained between author and character.
One example Empson uses is the description of God as ‘Almighty’ using Satan’s
third grand speech in Book I.242-270.
Satan calls God ‘Almighty’ … but
Milton expects the reader to impute a tone of irony, because Satan is retorting
upon God a familiar accusation against himself [i.e. a word used by God to quell Satan]; he may also mean to
express doubt whether God created Hell, but in any case he sneers at the
metaphysical meaning of ‘Almighty’ while accepting the common one*:
th’
Almighty hath not built
Here
for his envy, will not drive us hence: [260]
I am not denying, what Milton
regularly asserts, that Satan fell out of pride and envy; but as Satan believes
God to be a usurper he genuinely does believe him to be envious. As soon as we
waive out metaphysical presumptions [i.e.
when we work outside the terms
given by orthodox Christian belief] we easily recognise that the motivation
will be complex as in human affairs. In another case, resisting Charles I for
example, the emotional forces actuating Satan could have made him work for the
public good with increasingly public-spirited sentiments. As has often been
pointed out, he is in the wrong solely because of an intellectual error [i.e. he mistook the true nature of God.
In other words He was really
‘Almighty’ and not simply ironically so]; and we are ill-equipped to dell
certain that we ourselves, in his place, would have decided rightly from the
right motives.
*[note: Earlier in the argument, Empson had seen Beelzebub’s use of
the word ‘Almighty’ to mean simply ‘stronger than us’ because God had defeated
them and therefore, militarily rather
than metaphysically He was
‘almighty’.]
3 Kingship and
Rebellion
A third area that has engaged critics and historians is
Milton’s politics and his adherence to the Republican party against the
Royalist. That he held the position of Latin Secretary to Cromwell made him, in
modern terms, a high-ranking civil servant, but one whose politics were largely
in line with those of the Commonwealth Government. His imprisonment after the
Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the threat of a traitor’s death indicate
his standing.
Christopher Hill
The pre-eminent
historian of the Commonwealth period of English history is Christopher Hill. In
his ‘Paradise Lost’ and the English Revolution he sought to tease out the seeming political contradictions within the
poem, principally the significance of Satan’s rebellion against God and how it
might reflect the politics to which Milton
had devoted his life – and which in 1660 threatened to take his life.
Satan, Hill argues,
cannot be simply identified with Charles I. Hill argues that the qualities of
pride and ambition are principally human
weaknesses. Satan, therefore, reflects humankind misled. He identifies Satan
with those plotting to restore Charles II; but he also sees characteristics of
the self-seeking republicans whom he observed at close quarters – the
major-generals.
Hill argues that
Milton did not oppose revolt against authority in itself, but that the defeat
of The Good Old Cause of republicanism made him reflect on what form resistance
should take.
So far as God is
concerned, there could be no equivalence in Satan’s revolt against Him and the
Republicans’ revolt against Charles I or the plottings of the Royalists seeking
the return of Charles II. Hill warns us against trying to make a simple
correlation between the events of the Commonwealth and the events in Paradise
Lost. Keep this in mind as you read
Hill’s argument.
Milton and
the English Revolution,
(1977) pp. 365-75
The political allusions in Paradise Lost, veiled though they had to
be, are not indecipherable. The poem was no doubt planned as a whole before the
Restoration of May 1660. Nevertheless there must have been a break in 1660, when
Milton was in danger of his life and had to go into hiding; and a further
interruption when he was in prison. It would have been dangerous for friends to
visit his hiding-place for the sole purpose of taking down from his dictation,
and impossible when he was imprisoned. The invocation to Book VII suggests a
fresh start, under more difficult circumstances; the conjecture that Books I to
VI were written (at least in first draft) before the Restoration, Books VII to
XII after it, appears to be borne out by the evidence of style, which links the
last six books with Paradise Regained
and Samson Agonistes more closely
than with the first six books. But 'I sing ... unchanged' (VII. 24) may also be
intended to recall to the fitter audience for whom Paradise Lost was written the John Milton whom they knew as the
defender of divorce, regicide and the republic.
There is a shift of emphasis in the
last six books of the epic. Until April 1660 the revolutionaries still held
power, however insecurely. The Royalists had been defeated, although they were
desperately scheming revenge. In Books I and II Satan is wrong but grandly
wrong. His attempt 'against the omnipotent to rise in arms' (VI. 136) seemed as
absurd as a Royalist attempt to reverse the verdict of history! But after May
1660 Satan was not trying vainly to recover power in England: he had won
it. His degradation in the second half of the epic is the greater because of
Milton's disgusted realisation of the power and influence of evil. It is
paralleled by the stepping forward of the Creator-Son and the withdrawal of the
impersonal Father. We should not then see Satan just as the apotheosis of
rebellion. One subject of Paradise Lost
is indeed rebellion, but Milton had himself been a rebel; he wanted now to know
where he and his fellows had been mistaken, what kind of rebellion was
justified and what not.
Satan, no less
than Christ, is a king. His approach to Eve is a parody of the rituals of
courtly love at Henrietta Maria [wife of Charles I]’s court. Satan was 'by
merit raised' to kingship in hell, as the Son had been in heaven. The analogy
with the Son is stressed throughout. Sin, Death and Satan are the infernal
Trinity: I see no reason why Milton should not parody this concept, in which he
himself did not believe. In the early books Satan's 'grandeur' and 'ruined
splendour' predominate. But Satan is also an Asiatic tyrant, associated with
Turkish despotism (X. 457) - as Charles I had been in Eikonoklastes. Since 1649 another group of men had been called
Turkish bashaws - Cromwell's Major-Generals. It is not unlikely that there is
something of them in the fallen angels. The latter are not mere
personifications of evil. They were angels of light who have rejected the
light. As Northrop Frye says, 'into Satan Milton has put all the horror and
distress with which he contemplated the egocentric revolutionaries of his
time', whose romantic rhetoric had got them – and those who trusted them –
nowhere.
If, among other
things, the character of Satan alludes to some of the ways in which the Good
Old Cause [i.e. The Republic] had
gone wrong, it is to be expected that he will contain a good deal of Milton,
who recognised that he too was not without responsibility for its failure.
Milton's intellect now told him that he must accept God's will, if only because
the Father is omnipotent: but his Submission to the events of 1655-60 [a period
in which Milton grew disillusioned with Cromwell’s move towards kingly
pretensions] was highly reluctant. Satan, the battleground for Milton's quarrel
with himself, saw God as arbitrary power and nothing else. Against this he
revolted: the Christian, Milton knew, must accept it. Yet how could a free and
rational individual accept what God had done to his servants in England? On
this reading, Milton expressed through Satan (of whom he disapproved) the
dissatisfaction which he felt with the Father (whom intellectually he
accepted).
Milton does not
identify with Satan and the rebel angels, who embody and criticise the defects
of the military leaders of the Revolution, as well as – more obviously – of the Royalists. The essence of Satan is his selfish ambition. Jealousy of the exaltation of
the Son caused his rebellion. As Defoe observed, Milton gave no real
explanation of Satan's fall; it is taken as given from the start of the poem.
The exaltation of the Son is one of Milton's inventions, and it appears to be a
late insertion in the epic: it is not in the Bible, the commentaries or – still more significant – in the De
Doctrina [Milton’s declaration of his religious beliefs]. Milton seems to
have invented it in order to have an unexplained divine decree leading to the
fall of the angels analogous to that which led to the Fall of Man, so as to
reinforce the parallel between earth and heaven. Angels, like men, elect their
own salvation. This is Arminian doctrine. Milton endowed Satan with conscience
(IV. 23) and appears to envisage the possibility of his repenting (IV. 71-104).
This too must be intended to stress the analogies between him and mankind.
Satan has freedom without self-discipline, dynamic energy and driving
individualism with no recognition of limits. 'Satan has more to say about
liberty than any other character in Paradise
Lost. Milton had heard the name of liberty bandied about a good deal by
either side during the civil war.' Satan's kind of liberty, like the Ranters'
kind, became licence - and so ceased to be truly free. Satan also has much to
say about equality (Paradise Lost, I.
248-9).
This approach enables us to admit a great deal of Milton in Satan
without reviving the view of Blake, Shelley, Belinsky – all romantic radicals,
we note – that Satan is the hero of Paradise Lost, or that he is the first
Whig. Satan is heroic: as heroic as Milton still thinks the English Revolution
had been. But the Revolution had utterly failed. It had failed because the men
were not great enough for the Cause. Satan had always been a rebel for the
wrong reasons - self interest, jealousy, ambition. Like Muggleton's Satan,
Milton's personified selfish Reason. As early as 1641 Milton had been arguing
that the selfishness and greed which were mixed up with the motives of the
original reformers did not destroy the value of the Protestant Reformation. Now
perhaps he saw deeper. We must, however, not take Milton's condemnation of
Satan as condemnation of rebellion, any more than we should take his acceptance
of a hierarchy of being from man up to God as acceptance of a traditional
social hierarchy of 'degree'. Milton's is a hierarchy of virtue, of merit. In Paradise Lost Adam increases in virtue
as Satan decreases; in Paradise Regained
Christ grows in merit. Only God's virtue is by definition absolute: that is why
he must be obeyed.
Nevertheless the magnificent Satan of the early books of the epic does convey
some of the defiance which Milton himself must have felt tempted to hurl in the face of omnipotence as the republic crashed
about his ears. The rebellious energy ebbs in the later books, after the
restoration of Charles II has brought Milton to recognise the full magnitude of
the rethinking that is required. Perhaps Milton felt that he and his peers had
been too tolerant of the Satanic fellow travellers of the Revolution. God,
after all, is not only King of the English Commonwealth, he is also the historical
process: what he wills is fate. So Satan is a rebel against history itself, not
someone Milton can identify with. In the De
Doctrina Milton began his list of the sins involved in the Fall of Man with
credulity in Satan and lack of confidence in God; it ends with deceit,
aspiration to divinity, pride and arrogance. Presumptuous aspiration, use of
the wrong means, pride and arrogance: they are the vices against which Milton
and other radicals had warned Oliver Cromwell and his generals. Deceit: like Dalila
quoting,
that grounded maxim
So
rife and celebrated in the mouths
Of
wisest men, that to the public good
Private
respects must yield;
(Samson
Agonistes, 11. 865-8)
or
like Cromwell pleading 'public reason just, / Honour and empire', to justify an
aggressive foreign policy. (Milton underlined the point for contemporaries by
referring to Satan's use of 'necessity, / The tyrant's plea' in the following
lines. The phrase recalled accusations that Cromwell made necessities in order
to plead them e.g. by Joseph Beaumont
in Psyche (1648), and by George Cony,
an old Parliamentarian stalwart, when refusing to pay taxes to Cromwell: Cony
himself was echoing Hampden's lawyer in the Ship Money Case [one of the causes
of the rebellion against Charles I – the imposition of arbitrary taxation], and
Hampden was Cromwell's cousin. In Book V Satan plans to recover power 'by
violence, no, for that shall be withstood, / But by deceit and lies' (V.
242-4).
The
Satanic Parliament gave Milton the chance to stress what was most lacking in
1658-60 - unity among the defenders of the Good Old Cause:
O
shame to men! Devil with devil damned
Firm
concord holds, men only disagree
Of
creatures rational, though under hope
Of
heavenly grace: and God proclaiming peace
Yet
live in hatred, enmity and strife
Among
themselves, and levy cruel wars,
Wasting
the earth, each other to destroy:
As
if (which might induce us to accord)
Man
had not hellish foes enough besides
That
day and night for his destruction wait.
(II.496-505)
[Even at the
heart of democracy – Parliament – Hill detects a disillusionment with the way
it operated during the Commonwealth, though not with the institution itself.
Hill, later in
his book, makes the case for the unrecognised success of the Commonwealth
period. The Restoration may have returned the monarchy, but it was a very
different institution to the pre-Commonwealth one. Charles I had tried to
assert an absolutist position – ruling by decree and without Parliament.
Charles II, having learned from his father’s fate was happier as a bourgeois
monarch, a position that was consolidated after the expulsion of his own son
James II in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 which brought Mary and William to
the throne as joint monarchs.]
Note: Hill deals with the historical context. Remember, however,
that Paradise Lost is not a political
manifesto. It is a piece of literature speaking about universal concerns.
Claire Tomalin
'a man possessed by natural and human beauty, by dreams, myths and legends, a man full of ideas that are sometimes in conflict with one another; who was prepared to give up his vocation as a poet for years in order to serve a political cause; and who overcame blindness to write his greatest work, full of exquisitely imagined scenes'
Milton makes you think, provokes you into arguments about power, good and evil, about responsibility, innocence and the right to knowledge. He shows God forbidding this right, but we remember that Milton had himself defended it furiously in his essay on the freedom of the press, "Areopagitica". The clash between Milton the Renaissance humanist and Milton the faithful servant of God makes things interesting.
One of Milton's characteristic effects is to collide Christian and pagan imagery and legend. Eve is compared to a wood-nymph in Diana's service. Raphael arrives in the garden of Eden like the god Mercury, shaking his plumes and giving out "Heavenly fragrance".
Dr Johnson felt there was 'gigantick loftiness' about his poetry
Joseph Hazlitt felt that Milton's imagination could melt down "as in a furnace, the most contradictory materials"
Randeep Ramesh
Milton's Satan was loosely modelled on Oliver Cromwell, a compromised figure who had led a de facto benevolent dictatorship where discussion and argument substituted for true freedoms in a political democracy. Milton had been left bitter after Cromwell failed to empower people and deliver the country from the tyranny of the king. Today Britain has to decide not whether it wants to get rid of a divine monarchy but whether it wishes to overthrow a divine market.
Like Satan, whose fallen angels ultimately lose to God, the Restoration triumphed over Cromwell's puritan party. In many ways Paradise Lost is a literary rendition of today's political argument for the status quo: There Is No Alternative. Now the question is not whether the country would choose enslavement to the throne but whether it remains bonded to an almost biblical belief in the benefits of deregulated markets. This market theology not only caused the Great Crash of 2008, it has also spread both greater inequalities and a higher degree of economic insecurity in our lives for decades.
The fall of humankind through the temptation of Eve is paralleled by an economically ravaged people being seduced and falling again for free-market policies that will leave them leading poorer and more precarious lives.
J. B. Broadbent: a comfortably pessimistic survey of world history
Jonathan Richardson (1734): "'Tis Adam, Adam the first, the representative of human race. He is the hero in this poem.... The business of it is to conduct man through a variety of conditions of happiness and distress, all terminating in the utmost good: from a state of precarious innocence through temptation, sin, repentance, and finally a secure recumbency upon . .. the Supreme Good by the mediation of his Son."
Merritt Y. Hughes Milton's Adam surrendered to Divine Justice, Mercy, and Love. Seen in the light of history as equivalent to attainment of an ideal resembling Platonic or Aristotelian temperance, to which all violence and excess are opposite, or as equivalent to modern man's intellectually disciplined submission to the phvsical and social principles of life, the attainment of the mood of the last dialogues and the prayers of Adam and Eve in Book X seemed to Tillyard to be no less a crisis-a turning point in the medical sense of the word-than their Fall in Book IX
Heroic virtue is a divine attribute which can be shared by men and even by angels only as long as they are true images of God himself. By this severe logic, Adam ceases to be heroic when he loses the divine image after the Fall. What was intended is an ever-refining idea of heroism.
It is a part of Milton's own "long choosing" of his "Subject for Heroic Song," to settle at last upon the "fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom / Unsung" rather than the dissection of "fabl'd Knights / In Battels feign'd"-"hitherto the onely Argument / Heroic deem'd" (IX.26-32). His literary experience complements Adam's discovery that "renown on Earth" is poor material for history. The upshot might seem to be Saurat's view of Milton as his own ironically unconscious hero.
Tillyard suggested that Eve wanted Adam to coax, her, say how much he loved her then put his foot down, Eve being coquettish
Fredson Bowers sees Adam as the embodiment of reason whilst Eve is the embodiment of passion
Joan S Bennett
- Liberty as the goal of contemporary revolutionaries
- For Milton, no law was to be obeyed because it was a law eg breaking sabbath to heal the sick
- Dilemma or knowing what is holy spirit and what is own desire
Quotes:
