A Note on Milton's Critics

A NOTE ON MILTON'S CRITICS Concerning Milton's place in English letters, any competent critic between 1700 and 1900 would have conceded that, with the exception of Shakespeare, Milton was the greatest of English poets. Dryden exclaimed after reading Paradise Lost, "This man cuts us all out, — and the Ancients too," and deciding upon Paradise Lost as the theme for his opera State of Innocence, he wrote of the epic as "being undoubtedly one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either this age or nation has produced."1 Alexander Pope, who declared that the most valuable quality in poetry, and yet the most difficult to achieve, is the 'vivida vis animi' went on to assert that "in Milton, it glows like a Furnace kept up to an uncommon Fierceness by the Force of Art: In Shakespeare, it strikes before we are aware, like an accidental Fire from Heaven."2 Joseph Addison, surely the most respected critic of the eighteenth century, said, "Milton . . . by the choice of the noblest Words and Phrases which our Tongue wou'd afford him, has carried our language to a greater height than any of the English Poets have ever done before or after him, and made the Sublimity of his Style equal to that of his Sentiments."3 Dr. Samuel Johnson, who had no love for the proud regicide poet, declared, nevertheless , that "the characteristic quality of his poem (Paradise Lost) is sublimity. He sometimes descends to the elegant, but his element is the great. He can occasionally invest himself with grace; but his natural port is gigantick loftiness. He can please when pleasure is required; but it is his peculiar power to astonish."4 To the soul which was like a star that dwelt apart, William Wordsworth beconed raise us up, return to us again; And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power Thou hast a voice whose sound was like the sea ; Pure as the naked heavens, majestic free. 1 John Dryden, Dramatic Works, ed. M. Summers (London, 1932), Vol. Ill, p. 417. 2 Alexander Pope, The Iliad of Homer (London, 1720), p. 5. 3 JosephAddison,OnParadiseLost, ed.EdwardArber(London, 1868), p.37. 4 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford, 1805), Vol. I, p. 177. 142 A Note on Milton's Critics143 'Time,' Byron sang in Don Juan, makes the word 'Milton' mean 'Sublime '5. For Tennyson, Milton was the "God-gifted organ voice of England "6 and Mathew Arnold, certainly the greatest critic to come out of the Victorian Age, declared that Milton was the "ideal of high and rare excellence".7 Cardinal Newman, who felt that good Catholics should feel a repugnance for Milton's ideology, admitted that the "proud rebellious creature of God" was "gifted with incomparable gifts."8 "Milton's art is incomparable," Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to Dixon, "not only in English literature, but I should think, almost in any; equal, if not more than equal, to the finest of Greek or Roman."9 But the reputation of a famous poet undergoes various mutations. Such has been the fate of Dante, and such is the fate of Milton. The sublimity of Milton's achievement was for two hundred years hardly ever questioned, but now the twentieth century — the second and third decades, to be exact — has witnessed a startling change. For J. Middleton Murry who feels "there is death in Milton," the poet has "little intimate meaning for us ... He does not, either in his great effects or his little ones, touch our depths."10 Sir Herbert Read feels that it was Milton who "did more to destroy the true tradition of Metaphysical poetry than any other agent."11 He tells us that "his thought was a system apart from his feeling ... he did not think poetically but merely expounded thought in verse."12 Dr. Frank Leavis speaks of the versification of Paradise Lost as "dull and empty" even thought "there are intervals of relief" and feels that Milton "forfeits all possibility of subtle or delicate life in his verse."13 After making further observations on Samson Agonistes , he asks a most exasperating question, "How many cultivated adults...