Milton Today

REVIEWS ON MILTO!\''S POETRY ' I MILTON TODAY• A. S. P. WoODHOUSE Only less than Shakespeare's, and more than either Chaucer's or'Spenser's, Milton's reputation has been a gauge of the state of critical opinion in England. Not the least remarkable fact which the history of twentieth-century criticism will have to record is the .attack on the idol, proceeding, as Mr Williams ·says, " from various sources, not otherwise noticeably friendly to each other." Fortunately for the spectacle we are likely to present to succeeding generations it will also have to record a vigorous movement of protest, of which Mr Pearsall Smith, Mr Charles Williams and Mr C. S. Lewis furnish the chief evidence to date. Mr Pearsall Smith, for all his authority and his unfailing charm, js the least significant of the three because, though he is directly toncerned with the revolt against Milton, he so signally fails to analyse its deeper causes and to examine the state of the Miltonic defences. To do the first, one mu.st go back to the revolution in English and European thought and feeling which we call -the Ro- · mantic movement, and which, while generally in appearance at least friendl,y to Milton's greatness, commenced the long and disastrous tendency to make him admired for qualities not really admirable and, w·hat is worse, not really his. To do the other, one must be critical (as is Mr Williams) of the official custodians of Milton's reputation, the "academic Chairs" (old style)-one must certainly not be, like Mr Pearsall Smith, mistakable at a very short distance for one of them. The modern attack on Milton, as Mr Williams remarks at the beginning of his essay, usually centres on one or more of the following points: that he was a bad man, and specifically a proud, of the "Milton and his Atfodern Critics, by Logan Pearsall Smith. London, Oxford University Press,· 1940, 73 pp. English Ponns of John Milton. With an Introduction by Charles Williams . . . . London, Oxford University Press, (1942), xxii, 545 pp. A Preface to Parodiu Lost, by C. S. Lewis. London, Oxford University Press, 1942, vii, 149 pp. . The Action of Comus, by E. M. W. Tillyard, in Essays and Studin by Mnnbers of the English Auociation, vol. XXVIII, 1942, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 194~, pp. 22-37. The Story of Marie Powell: W1jelo Mr. Milton, by Robert Graves. London, Cassell, 1943. 462 REVIEWS 463 devil's party in a word; that his verse is "hard, sonorous and insensitive"-in very deed the "organ-voice," so long praised; that his subject-matter is "remote and uninteresting"-a ''monument to dead ideas" had ·been .Raleigh's phrase in his brilliant and misleading book; that, egotistical and inhuman, he was devoid of insight and incapable of drama. But these are the very points that the "academic Chairs" had conceded before the attack began. And, says Mr Williams·, they are not true. ' Granted, he continues in effect, that Milton was proud, where is the evidence that he approved of pride, his own or another's? Why may he not, like other men, and other poets, have sinned and repented? If (we may add) he is supposed to speak in Satan's "to be weak is miserable, Doing or suffering," why not also in Adam's "Henceforth I learn that to obey is best"? In the treatment of Satan Mr Williams discovers not only supreme dramatic art, but an element of grim comedy. Certainly it is grim, an~ I do not think that the comic spirit is one of the virtues that can be safely challenged for Milton or that the Alm~ghty's laughter is any the less jarring for being recognized as an echo of the poet's own; but the parallel between Milton's Satan and Meredith's Sir Willoughby, which is Mr Lewis's elaboration o'f Mr Williams's point, is for other reasons suggestive: each is the egoistic rebel against, in the last analysis,}act. In writing of Milton's humanity Mr Williams is on surer ground. After observing how the last lines of Paradise LosJ, sealing the reunion of Adam and Eve in...