Milton’s Royalism

REVIEWS 467 a Victorian; she was well-bred; she was not insensitive to Milton's poetry; and she genuinely desired to understand. But within her limitations she is not wholly unsuccessful. At least Milton occasionally comes to life in her pages, with his singing robes about him-and ev.en some of his faults. At the end of his Preface to Paradise Lost Mr Lewis briefly considers the motives of those who in our day have attacked Milton's memory and have derived advantage from Mr Eliot's leadership in the onslaught. With Mr Eliot's own motives (which, however laudable, seem to us irrelevant to the art and function of a critic) he is not unsympathetic. But he utters a solemn warning: The round table is pressed between the upper millstone (Galahad) and the nether (Mordred). If Mr Eliot disdains the eagles and trumpets of epic_poetry because the fashion of this world passes away, I honour him. But if he goes on to draw the conclusion that all poetry should have the penitential qualities of his own best work, I believe he is mistaken . . . • If the round tnble is abolished; for every one who rises to the level of Galahad, a hundred will.drop plom b down to that of Mordred. Mr Eliot may persuade the re11ding youth of England to have done with robes of purple and pavements of marble. But he will not therefore find them walking in sackcloth on floors of mud-he will .find them in smart, ugly suits walking on rubberoid .... .GA.lahad must not make common cause with Mordred; for it is always1Mordred who gains and he who loses· by such nlliance. . There would seem ·to be more applications of Mr Lewis's 1mage than he has chosen to make specific. Jl MILTON'S ROYALISM* MERRITT Y. HuGHES· Thi~ book is ·a very interesting and skilful contribution to Miltonic depreciation·. 1t develops the thesis that in Paradise Lost the royal imagery which the young Milton had inherited from the Elizabethans-vitiated because "the royalist symbol" had been shattered in "the vise of history" and had become "disembodied and abstract" in "the writings of the Puritans and sectaries"gave us a God .who ~s Cresar and a Heaven which is "a glittering barbaric co.urt of warriors, of feudal princes and barons." In Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes Mr Ross traces a reaction *Milton's Royafism: A Study of tlu Conj/i(/ of Symbol and ldet;z in the Poems, by MALCOLM MAcKENZIE Ross. Cornell Studies in English, val. XXXIV. Ithac~, N.Y., Cornell University Press [London, Oxford University Press], 1943, xiii, 150 pp., $2.50. 468 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY against the "royalism" of Paradise Lost and a largely successful attempt to avoid "the confusion of values attendant upon the necessary choice of royalist-power symbolism." He makes no attempt, however, to revalue either of the poems. Samson is dismissed in six short pages; · and Paradise Regained, though it is exonerated of ·basic confusion of values in its treatment of royal images, is condemned for its "rejection of the progressive secular element in humanist thought" which had so passionately inspired Milton's "optimistic republicanism" in his " revolutionary days." Judged from Mr Ross's point of view, Paradise Lost is manifestly an artistic failure, and the best aesthetic effect that can be allowed to the poem is "unrivalled sweep of fury and power." Perhaps the most interesting part of M r Ross's study is his introductory survey of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature as seen from the point of view of the sociological critic, and his scrutiny of the influence of the arch-Elizabethan, Spenser, upon the Milton of the academic years and of the early poems. He gives us a most excellent defence of the theory that Milton's sheltered education unfitted him to be more than a temporary and unfaithful champion of the "progressive" and "democratic" elements in humanism and doomed him never to understand "the socio-economic·implications of the 'good old cause.'" Yet it is a bit alarming and a bit amusing to find a sociological critic contrasting Milton severely with Shakespeare and comparing him even more severely with...