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Book Review, 07 February 2008 To justify the ways of God to man
Milton: poet, pamphleteer and patriot T.S. Eliot, in his mischief, was not beyond the inventing of delicious critical phrases, phrases not exactly misleading but so memorable that they come to stand between the reader and the work discussed. One such that I recall - though this never achieved currency in a book, only in a review contributed to a magazine - was his likening of the processes of Tennyson's thinking to the regular tick-tock of a grandfather clock. Another, so notorious that he felt obliged to recant it in later life, was his attack on what he called the "Chinese wall" of Milton's verse. What he meant was that Milton had been a bad influence on subsequent poets in that he wrote as if English were a dead language. Eliot and Pound seem to have seen Milton, indeed, as almost the archetype of the enemy so far as their own early poetry was concerned. The resonant, the Latinate, the mandarin, these Miltonic qualities were to be decried because they placed poetry at several removes from a certain directness and flexibility only to be achieved by bringing it back within earshot of current speech rhythms. By linking blindness and bookishness, Eliot even managed to make Milton's affliction sound like a character defect. Eliot is not the only modern poet to have gone for Milton below the belt. Robert Graves, in his novel Wife to Mr Milton (1943), gave voice to a strong personal dislike of the man, and in critical pieces afterwards repeated with relish Dr Johnson's strictures on Lycidas. Nor, of course, is it only the moderns who have felt and said such things. There is the story of Keats abandoning his ambitious, sub-Miltonic experiment Hyperion with the comment "English must be kept up". None of these opinions gets an accredited airing in Anna Beer's Milton, which is a pity because some of them chime with what Beer thinks herself. Of course it would be eccentric to expect discussion of later critical views of Milton if this book were merely what it purports to be: a biography. But I think it is more than that. True, Beer makes a better fist of tracing her subject's career than any other recent biographer has done, but her Milton really excels in its lively readings of the poet's works. A case in point is her treatment of Milton's verse in Latin. What she suggests here is mildly scandalous - namely that Milton had recourse to Latin because he felt he could say things in that language which he could not say in English, and that what he had to say concerned the possibly homoerotic nature of his friendship with Charles Diodati. Beer goes a deal further than A.N. Wilson or any previous Milton biographer in pursuit of this. I find her arguments convincing, and it is at least interesting that they pick up on some of the gossip current about Milton in his lifetime. This is to isolate the most sensational element in a fine book. But then Milton presents problems to biographers. We know from his own writings his opinions regarding most matters concerning religion and literature and politics but little of what he thought or did regarding those closest to him, his wives and daughters. There is even doubt as to which of his wives is being remembered in the sonnet which begins "Methought I saw my late espoused saint", generally supposed to be about the second wife, though it was the first, Mary Powell, who died in childbirth as that poem posits. Most of the key events in Milton's life, and not just in his emotional life, are shrouded in mystery. Where, for instance, did he hide in the early days of the Restoration, when he was a wanted man or an apologist for regicide? And how did he escape any real punishment for his secretarial work for Cromwell? Even his authorship of some of the more polemical works attributed to him is disputed. Did he really write what Beer calls "the profoundly heterodox" De Doctrina Christiana, which questions the doctrine of the Trinity, and defends polygamy? This year of the fourth centenary of his birth will see the publication of a new study of the evidence for this from Oxford University Press. Meanwhile, we have Anna Beer's biography to kick off that year, and a truly splendid book it is, neither debunking nor idolatrous, but judicious and intelligent in what it has to say about the life and work of one who once described himself as a "true wayfaring Christian", and who in Paradise Lost sought by his own reckoning to "justify the ways of God to men". Both claims, of course, could be found somewhat lacking in humility, but then humility is not the stuff that epic poetry is made on. No doubt this is in part what William Blake was driving at when he observed that Milton was "of the devil's party without knowing it", a remark usually taken to refer to the fact that the most memorable lines in Paradise Lost are given to Satan, or concerned with things seen through Satan's eyes. The seriousness of Beer's book, and its status as something beyond the common run of literary biography, could not be better exemplified than by her remark that for all the truth of this, "Milton could also write paradise; he could make the reader understand, to feel, what Satan was drawn to destroy." It will be recalled that Satan's most famous question in Paradise Lost is "Which way shall I fly?", which Beer sees as echoing Milton's own unhappiness as a young man. Satan's answer to himself is the completely despairing: "Which way I fly is hell; my self am hell." Again, Beer's triumph in this book can be indicated by her final praise of her subject in showing where he differs from his Satan: "Milton's writings and his life answer the question in other ways, never disowning or ignoring the despair, but offering also celebrations of friendship and love, of religious toleration and intellectual openness and, above all, of political ‘liberty'." While placing Milton firmly in his own time, this is very much a Milton for our own.  |
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