Woodhouse on Milton

REVIEWS WOODHOUSE ON MILTONThe 'Editor's Preface' begins: This book grew out of many years of teaching and scholarship.' The operative word is 'grew.' Although this book is made up from published and unpublished matter, and revisions of both, written at various times, it is an organic whole, not a collection but Woodhouse on Milton,' a valuable document, the result of a happy collaboration between the consistency of opinion and creative method of the author, and the fine judgment of his editor. For some readers, especially impressionist explicators or literary antiquaries, Woodhouse's approach to Milton may seem rather inflexible. Nowhere is this more evident than in the first chapter, where Woodhouse sets down what he would can his fframe of reference.' This lessay in historical criticism' is not the study of sources ( though Woodhouse is rich in sources and analogues for Milton's theological and political views), but depends on 'the facts of Milton's experience and thought as seen against the background of his age.' Later (99) when beginning his comment on the prose, he makes an uncompromising statement of his position: The prevalent danger [in criticism], like all the devil's best intentions, is much more securely grounded in original sin - that is, pride, self-sufficiency, and laziness. It is the temptation to bring everything for judgment to the bar of our own age and our own temperament .... Milton has been the victim of this process from Shelley to T.S. Eliot. ". Historical study is not the disease but the cure. Properly pursued, it enables us to comprehend the terms in which the author did his thinking. It is not a substitute for judgment of va1ue. It is the necessary preliminary if the judgment of value is itself to be valuaole: you cannot assess what you do not understand. But historical study is more than a preparative and a corrective. It lets you into the mind of the past, thus, as Milton himself recognized, extending your Seld of consciousness - an experience in the highest degree formative. This passage is, by occasion, an appropriate introduction to the author's steady and accomplished exercise among the bramble-mazes of seventeenth-century speculation and polemic, but, especially in the last Erasmian sentence, it has a general application to Milton and to the critical method employed in this book. In the 'extra-aesthetic' realm, the critic begins with the facts of Milton's personality and experience, private and public, seen in historical perspective, and conspicuously with the Christian intellectual assumption which Milton shares with his predecessors and contemporaries, the assignment of all experience and existence to the orders of nature and grace (5). The aesthetic experience depends on reception of the traditional genres (whose service for Milton is perfect freedom) : in poetry the pastoral monody, the masque, the greater and lesser • A.S.P. Woodhouse, The Heavenly Muse: A Prefare to MUI