Milton and the Cult of Conformity

-------- 8 -------Milton and the Cult of Conformity This is the only essay I ever published which was written as a lecturefor a strictly non-literary audience. One ofmyfriends at the University ofConnecticut was active in the local chapter of theAmerican Association ofUniversity Professors and asked me to give a lecturefor them. I rather reluctantly agreed to try. The challenge was to find what might be interesting about Milton for someone who had not read himfor years — ifever. (I think my imagined audience was one economist whom Ididn't know very well.) At any rate, it turned out to be ratherfun to write it, and the AA UP members seemed to like it. I was delighted when The Yale Review agreed to publish it. In an essay entitled "A Meditation on Literary Blasphemy," Merritt Hughes, the eminent Milton scholar at the University of Wisconsin, commented on the uses and abuses of blasphemy against the literary idols of the past. It is surely as normal for each generation to revolt against the standards and literary gods of the preceding generation as it is for sons to revolt against their fathers. "Blasphemous impulses," Mr. Hughes remarked, "are part of the instinct for self-preservation, but they are healthy only when they are spontaneous, personal, and unfashionable. Unfortunately, they are seldom any of these things." All too soon the once-new heresy becomes the new conformity, and fashionable anti-conformity may be as crippling both to reader and writer as fashionable conformity. Mr. Hughes concluded his meditation with considerable irony: "Let us grant that . . . Milton is [not] entitled to the unqualified respect of a society that is as anti-revolutionary and as deeply committed to psychological analysis as ours." Early in the twentieth century Milton was attacked by a number Milton and the Cult of Conformity99 of critics of various schools. After two and a half centuries of near literary deity, one of the three greatest English poets was attacked as a personality, as a thinker, as a religionist, and as an artist. In the mid-thirties, looking back on those years, a prominent contemporary critic remarked, "Milton's dislodgement . . . was effected with remarkably little fuss." Today, in the mid-fifties, that remark seems a bit premature. From the number and tone of the books and essays on Milton which have appeared in the past ten years, one must assume that, in scholarly and critical circles at least, Milton's eminence is still acknowledged. With the general public and with most writers and poets, however, one would guess that Milton is less frequently a "creative" influence than is either John Donne or Andrew Marvell — to mention two other seventeenth-century poets. Milton's name is still associated with "Puritanism" — vaguely confused with Blue Sundays, Prohibition, sexual repression, and the stocks — and with an oppressive grandeur and conformity of style and art, altogether forming an image of a sort of academic sacred cow, which can hardly be discussed and certainly cannot be read. The earlier iconoclasm did a great deal of good. Milton had often been read and defended on either poor or incorrect grounds, and it was a good thing for those positions to be taken or obliterated: Milton never anticipated nor advocated the social mores of the days of Queen Victoria. And it is certainly true that Milton should not be widely admired in an age of conformity. His is not a clubby nor a chummy personality. He does make embarrassing demands on himself and on his audience. Many readers' dislike for Milton may be accurately based on an almost instinctive recognition that he threatens our comfort and our fashionable conformities in political and religious theory, in our assumptions about the nature of the arts and the artist, and in our personal lives. Yet it would be sad if those individuals today who are opposed to fashionable currents, who are trying to possess their own souls, should reject unread the most uncompromisingly radical individualist of all of our major poets. There is an old Spanish proverb, "Lord, deliver me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies myself." That saying might be put in Milton's mouth, for his mind and...