Milton's Rival Hermeneutics: “Reason is But Choosing”

4. Toward Latinitas: Revising the Defensio

57 Toward Latinitas Revising the Defensio Hugh Jenkins My title alludes, obviously, to Mary Ann Radzinowicz’s magisterial Toward Samson Agonistes: The Growth of Milton’s Mind. Radzinowicz’s central premise is that Milton’s mind and art developed dialectically, that the same concerns that inform his Commonplace Book and early, tentative public utterances as a poet are thought out, rethought, and move toward synthesis in his subsequent prose tracts and poetic masterpieces. Radzinowicz defines Milton’s dialectical approach as a move toward “liberation,” “not from change into fixity but through change into growth,” a constant tension leading toward a synthesis in reason and art. And for Milton, both reason and art served “the public good”; he viewed himself as an artist and an educator, and “whenever Milton thought about education, there was present to him the idea that the mind can be tempered and harmonized only through debate and dialectic.”1 But according to Radzinowicz, a deeper dialectic informs Milton’s work, particularly the great poetic works he completed after the Restoration. That dialectic is tragic and based 4D 58 Hugh Jenkins on the ruination of Milton’s personal and political dreams. The result was that “Milton experienced a profound discrepancy between the world he lived in (reality) and the world he wished to live in (dream)” (3). The obvious analogy here is to Samson, the hero of Milton’s last great work. Radzinowicz views Samson as the tragic synthesis of Milton’s oeuvre as it enacts what Christopher Hill calls “the experience of defeat,” the recognition of “the collapse of the system of ideas which had previously sustained action and attempting to discover new explanations, new perspectives.”2 It is a tribute to Milton’s courage and integrity that the “new explanations and perspectives” of his last poetic works should speak so boldly and so in tune (though perhaps modulated to a minor key) with the ideals of his youth and his desires of the 1640s. He remained, as Radzinowicz argues and as has been so forcefully seconded of late by Nigel Smith and Sharon Achinstein (among others), a revolutionary to the end.3 Yet when exactly this sense of defeat became concrete for Milton is debatable. Hill, in another work, cites the “slow sapping of Milton’s faith in the Revolution he had made his own” during the 1650s; Barbara Lewalski agrees that Milton remained at best pragmatically ambivalent about the course of the republic during this time.4 Such disagreement suggests the possibility of another, earlier synthetic moment for Milton: the moment when dream and reality, hope and fear came forcefully in conflict and demanded some kind of resolution. That moment, I would argue, is initiated in his Defenses of the English people of 1651 and 1654 and moves toward (if not quite achieving) resolution in Milton’s revision of his first Defensio in 1658.5 In all of these works we see a double dialectic: an external one, with Milton confronting his own and the republic’s external enemies, but also an internal one, as that confrontation forces Milton continually to rethink his own views on the English people and the republican experiment they have undertaken. The real problem for Toward Latinitas 59 Milton is that resolving the first of these dialectic struggles tends to work against a resolution of the second, leaving both works in a state of ideological tension. Milton’s 1658 revisions of the Defensio encapsulate both of these movements but work toward a promised synthesis. The dialectical problem Milton’s revision seeks to answer is whether he is in fact defending a unified people or, in the absence of a unifying monarch, just a loose collection of competing factions and interests—in essence, not really a “people” at all. Milton would devote much effort in 1658 to polishing the latinitas, the “Latinity” or artistic quality of the Defensio, but that effort in turn closely relates to this problem, the essential nature of the English people. D Recently Jonathan Bate has taken historicist and “revisionist ” approaches to Milton to task for “writing so richly about the polemical prose and saying so little about the literary art.”6 Radzinowicz too notes, “polemical prose often declares less of what a man thinks than of what he prudently or impatiently finds it expedient to argue” (xiv). Certainly both editions of The Readie and Easie Way, for example, written almost on...