Areopagitica Revisited

AREOPAGITICA REVISITEb ARNOLD WILLIAMS IT would be a monstrous irony if, in the midst of a war fought partly for the preservation and extension of freedom of speech, we should overlook the tercentenary of one of the. most important, and certainly the most eloquent, defences of a free press in English. For it is exactly three hundred years ago this November that John Milton addressed to the "Lords and Commons ·of England" a short pamphlet entitled Areopagitica: ~ Speech for the Liberty oj Unlicensed Printing. A few moments in revisiting this monument of 1644 may not .be misspent in the year of conflict, 1944. Like many of Milton's major works, Areopagitica has had the power to separate its readers into two camps, the violent enemies and the heated defenders. One could almost write a history of the political ideals of the English-speaking peoples using no other material than the pronouncements of critics about Milton's prose works, Areopagitica among others. There have been times when it was neglected, or but rarely mentioned and then with condescension. Alternately, reverence of its very synti;lx has been enjoined on ·the young with all the prestige of organized pedagogy. It has attracted .the patronage of politicians literate enough to read it, the idolatry of all manner of liberals and radicals and the cool scepticism of the sort of intel- .·lectual cons~rvatives who a few years ago, while scorning the hysterical mass propaganda of Nazism, still recognized "that chap Hitler" as having something. The high tide in the idolatry of Areopagitica was reached in the nineteenth century. In the age of its writing, Milton's plea· for unlicensed printing seems to have attracted little notice ·and had no measurable influence.1 The Restoration engulfed Areopagitica as it did most of the pamphlet iiterature of the Revolution. With the Revoluti~n of 1688, Milton's fame began growing, but Areopagitica '·s.eems to have lagged . behind Paradise Lost and even some of the anti-royalist pamphlets. With the gradual triumph of\Vhig principles, however, /lreopay,itica attracted its share of the glory which, by mid-nineteenth century, invested everything from the pen of "the blind Old Man." Areopagitica ultimately took its place, along with Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, and Junius' letters, among the scriptures of the English peoples. Though men might not always live up to its strenuous demands, just as they were not always equal to keeping all the ten commandments, it was hardly ·to be expected that anyone would question the proposition that -the liberty to know, to utter and to argue freely ·was the chief of all liberties. As well defend adultery or praise theft. lSee William Haller, Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution (New York, 1934), 1, 75, 134-9. 67 68 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO. QUARTERLY A few samples of the Victorian adoration suffice. In the famous essay on Milton, Macaulay speaks twice of Areopagitica, each time annexing to it the epithet "sublime." John Stuart Mill's "Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion" is in its main outlines merely a repetition, and often vulgarization, of the chief points of Areopagitica. Lecky, the historian of rationalism, thought Paradise Lost "scarcely a more glorious monument of the genius of- Milton" than Areopagitica.2· Perhaps the best measure of the reverence with which the tract was regarded is the fact that for decades it was one of the «classics" assigned for study in schools and academies. Someone has testified that schoolboy parsing of Milton's involved sentences gave him a lifelong aversion to the Hunlicens'd" press. In this enshrining of Areopagitica as a classic, the Victorians doubtless assumed that the principles for which Milton pleaded had been irrevocably won and that a free press was, like parliamentary government, an achieved milestone of progress. That assurance we fail to share, just as we doubt a good many of the Victorian certainties. Our leaders list freedom of the press as one, oJ the purposes to which, our war effort is dedicated, and it seems pretty certain that neither they nor we consider a free press as some- .thing we have won and wish to share with the less...