Milton: national saviour
In times of crises, Harry Eyres believes we should remember this mighty poet The condescending statement introducing Blake's illustrations to his poem 'Milton' in the recent Blake show at Tate Britain hardly seemed to call for comment. 'Although he is little read today, in Blake's time John Milton was recognised as England's greatest epic poet.' But the smug dismissal, with its air of stating a universally acknowledged truth and its peculiarly newTate curatorial arrogance, stirred a spirit of dissent. 'Little read'? How would the Tate curators so confidently know? Might there not be many people, in ambits removed from the metropolitan world of Sir Nicholas Serota, who still possess and treasure copies of Paradise Lost, who still have certain of the weightiest sonnets in English ('When I consider how my light is spent') engraved in their memories? Writing in 1802, shocked at the 'mischief . . . engendered by undisturbed wealth' in his countrymen. Wordsworth invoked his great predecessor as emblem of an authentic, unselfish English virtue. As the country labours through various crises, perhaps it is time to recall the mighty poet who saw himself, and was seen by succeeding generations, as a secular national saviour.
Milton was subjected in the 1920s and 1930s to a lethal combination of critical revaluation (downwards) and character assassination by T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, and Robert Graves, from which he has yet to recover. The general view of Milton's poetry is of densely argumentative stuff full of classical allusions and written in a perverse sort of Latinate English. As for Milton the man, the image is probably that of a puritan prig whose joyless regime of study drove away his fun-loving (and Royalist) first wife Mary Powell, and who later in life inflicted on his daughters the penitential task of reading to him texts in dead languages which he taught them to pronounce without understanding a word.
It is amazing how completely this defamatory picture has replaced the image of Milton as poetic hero and defender of liberty which inspired Blake, Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. Not that Milton was ever uncontroversial. Addison was the first to question the astonishing poetic diction of Paradise Lost: 'The language sunk under him.' Dr Johnson, notoriously, was no fan: 'Milton's republicanism was . , . founded on an envious hatred of greatness,' The point was that Milton was more than just a poet. Unusually for an English writer, he was also a man passionately engaged in political controversy and for a while, as Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Commonwealth and Protectorate, active in politics.
(in religious, political and domestic spheres) was what endeared him so greatly to the Romantics. This caused Keats to call him 'an active Friend to Man all his life' and Shelley, for whom he was 'sacred Milton', 'a bold inquirer into morals and religion'.
Milton attacked episcopacy in The Reason of Church Government and argued for divorce on grounds of incompatibility in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Most nobly and eloquently in Areopagitica he spoke for the freedom of printing and against censorship. His arguments in what is probably the greatest English oration have not lost their force: 'as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book . . a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit.' Two of Milton's own books were burned in 1660; nearly 300 years later the book-pyres of the Nazis shadowed forth the horrors of Auschwitz. For much of the 20th century countries like Spain and Portugal suffered the stultifying effects of censorship, against which Milton thundered in his peroration: 'Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.'
Milton was known in his own time as a controversialist as much as a poet, but the poetry, and above all Paradise Lost, is obviously his most splendid achievement. But Paradise Lost has fallen victim to the academic industry. Somehow the epic story of the fall first of Satan, then of Adam and Eve, has been almost buried under a mountain of commentary treating it as a theological monument, rather a profoundly moving human poem about blindness, love, marriage, nature and wrong-headed revolt.
Blindness, as Eliot unsympathetically noted, is not to be underestimated as a theme in Paradise Lost. The loss of sight, mourned in unforgettably moving lines at the start of Book III, gives special poignancy to Milton's descriptions of the beauty of the newly created world and of Paradise; it also informs the extraordinary sci-fi-like passages depicting the lightless landscapes of Hell, Chaos and Night. Most moving of all, though, is the tender but intense appreciation of the naked loveliness of Eve. How could anyone speak of Milton's 'puritanical prudishness' (Tate Britain again) after reading the frankly erotic passages in Book IV and Adam's great defence of human sexual love in Book VIII and his cry of uxorious attachment in Book IX?
The most deadly criticism of Milton and Paradise Lost is that they are elitist. The charge has some justification: the disillusioned poet himself asked no more than 'fit audience . . . though few'. But Milton's late poems, written after the Restoration and the destruction of all his political hopes, turned out to have an extraordinary impact on generations of readers not necessarily of the elite, In the 1840s the Chartists were inspired by both Shelley and Milton. In that same decade a boy in a Northumberland pit-town made a momentous discovery. Joseph Skipsey taught himself to read aged seven while working down the mine. Aged 14 he was lent a copy of Paradise Lost. The loan, and subsequent access to classical poets and Shakespeare, he wrote later, 'changed the aspect of the world for me'. He determined to become a poet — and did so, publishing his first volume aged 27. Later in a varied life he became a friend of Rossetti and BurneJones and was for a while custodian of Shakespeare's birth-place. Even if Milton could not build the new Jerusalem, he nurtured imaginative life in one of Albion's darkest corners. Letting him languish in unread obscurity is surely a crime against ourselves.
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