Milton and His Age

THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY isl;hetter fitted than he to make us lllPPteciate, not merely her mastery of the technique of story-telling, but her primacy in American :fiction in all _ that concerns form and good form. She is second only to Henry James and the New England poets as a conveyor of the cultural heritage of Europe. Mr. Brown appropriately doses his study with a reference to the lively sense she has of cc the presence of the past." It would be rank ingratitude to scold her for wanting, what is so rare among even great novelists, a sense -of the future. · Mr. Brown's monograph is provided with an admirable bibliography - both of Edith Wharton's works and of works dealing with her. To the latter must now be added his own study as the most authoritative and the most definitive. MILTON AND HIS AGE A. S. P. WoooHousE Few debates are more thoroughly idle than those which circl~ endlessly around the question of the poet's relation to his age or the narrower issue of the place of his conscious thinking in his poetry. Such matters can be decided only for a particular poet, and by evidence, not by argument. An answer in general terms cannot be valid; for ·it rests on a colossal assumption-that the poetic process is simple, not complex, and that the relation of one poet to his age is identical with that of another; and this assumption is equally false whether it is used to bolster up a claim that no poet ·can be understood out of his temporal relations, or that poetry is sui generis and has nothing to do with the poet's environment , conviction, and opinion. In criticism, as elsewhere, extremes meet; and he who rebukes the student of Milton's theology for fancying that he is studying Milton's poetry, is at bottom guilty of the same error, the error of over-simplification and premature pronouncement._. Only when the study of Milton's theology is completed and has been followed by a fresh and unprejudiced reading of his poetry can anyone tell what the relation between them really is. Meanwhile, the student of Milton's thought has one advantage over his critic-a strong incentive to 130 REVIEWS go on collecting facts which he or someone else may be· able to use; for by facts, and not by argument, the issue will at last be decided. . * * * Though only three of the works listed below1 bear directly on Milton, they indicate fairly clearly the stage reached in the investigation of his thought and that of his age; and in this aspect I propose to discuss them. No student of -Milton can withhold his tribute of grateful praise from the superb edition of his writings produced by the Columhia University Press under the general editorship of Professor F. A. Patterson.- Of the need for a new edition there can be no question, for neither the Bohn edition of the Prose nor the Mitford of the Prose and Poetry makes any pretence to critical exactitude. The :first is definitely disagreeable in format, and both are long out of print. By the pious labour of his American editors and the munificence of a great university press, Milton now appears with all the accuracy and all the sober grandeur that he ·deserves: indeed no English poet can_rival him save only Spenser, the object of such another memorial in the great Variorum edition now in progress. Four volumes of the Columbia Milton are devoted tothe De Doctrina Christiana, edited by Professor J. H. Hanford, the most distinguished of living Milton scholars, and Profess~r W. H. 1 Milt~n's De Doclrina Christiana, edited by James Holly Hanford and Waldo Hilary Dunn (The Works of John Milton, Columbia University Press, vols. XIVXVII ). "Milton's De Doctrina Christiana," by Arthur Sewell (Essays and Studies by lvlembcrs of the English Association, vol. XIX, collected by D. Nichol Smith, Clarendon Press, pp. 40-66). The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Ag~ in Relation to Poetry and Religion, by Basil Willey, Chatto and Windus (Gundy). Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, by Perry Miller...