Milton Day-by-Day

REVIEWS MILTON DAY-BY-DAY' A. S_ P_ WOODHOUSE The Life Records of John Milton, to be completed in four volumes, is not a biography, but "a source book designed to provide a day-by-day guide to the known facts" relating to him and to his family and associates_ The first two volumes, now available, caIry the story down to the publication of the First Defence of the English People in February, 1651, and enable us to judge the scope and method and probable utility of the whole work. The entries are, roughly speaking, of five kinds: (1) statements in Milton's writings, either deliberately autobiographical (and quoted under the years to which in the compiler's judgment they refer) or revealing of Milton's activities and interests at the time when they were written, all of which are, of course, available in Milton's collected works, and many of which have already been brought together on a different plan in Professor Diekhoff's useful Milton on Himself ; (2) statements by Milton's early biographers, all (or almost all) of which are available in Miss Darbishire's collection; (3) public records of various sorts, the class into which most of the new material in the volumes faIls; (4) contemporary allusions to Milton, most of which have been already noticed by Dr. W. R. Parker and others; and (5) miscellaneous records of ascriptions to Milton, most of which are absurd, and of portraits which bear no slightest resemblance to him. The materials thus differ very widely in their relevance, significance, and utility, and in the degree to which they are already accessible. The last group, if included at all, might better have been relegated to an appendix, since they are facts of later opinion and not of the liIe record. For the rest we will confine our comments to the first category and the third. Of the first-rate importance of all Milton's utterances respecting himself there can be no doubt. But much depends on the skill of the interpreter: one must know what allowance to make for the circumstances of the utterance or for the conventions of the genre in which Milton is writing, one must recognize his tendency, not to invent, but to simpliIy and emphasize in retrospect tbe pattern of past events, and one must be able to balance statement with statement; and interpretation lies outside the scope of a source book. Again, it is not always easy to detennine where Milton is in reality alluding to, or·The Life Records of John Milton : I, 1608-1639 ' II . /639-1551. Edited by J. M1LTON FRENCH. Rutgers Studies in English, 7. New Brunswick, N.].: Rutgers University Press. 1949; 1950. pp. xii, 446; viii, 395. $5.00 each, 193 Vol. XXI, no, 2, Jan., 1952 194 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY glancing at, himself. The lines in Paradise R egained (1, 201 If.) , uttered by Jesus, When I was yet a child, no childish play To me was pleasing; all my mind was set Serious to learn and know . . . , are not included; yet their memory of Milton's own childhood seems a great deal less speculative than does the relevance of much of the material in other categories which the compiler admits. Interpretation apart, the value of the record depends, at many points, on precision in dating. In the works covered by the first volume (extending to July, 1639) there are vexed problems in chronology. All that one can do is to study and set forth all the evidence with care, examine critically the arguments advanced by the principal authorities, and reach one's own decision. This task the compiler does not altogether decline, but here he is at his weakest. His consultation of authorities appcars to be quite haphazard. Of those scholars whom he has happened to consult he gives only the conclusions, none of the facts on which they are based. But what the scholar said is not evidence. The compiler adopts E. M. W. Tillyard's date for "L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso," but with no reference to him or his important argument on the dating of the poems. He ignores W. R. Parker's...