Milton in Brief
Milton. By Rose Macaulay. (Duckworth. 2s.) JUST as Paradise Lost is an extremely obscure and difficult poem, so is Milton a fascinatingly complicated character. Only one thing is clear about him, his derogatory view of
women, not excepting our universal mother, upon whom Adam smiled "with superior love." Outwardly there should be no difficulty ; the facts of his life are clear, and, though tragic, a little dull. There is plenty of autobiography in his
pamphlets, while much of his poetry—the whole of Lycidas, for example, and, in a sense, the whole of Samson Agonistes are egotistical, and his contemporaries arc not dumb about him. But what is interesting is under the surface, namely the conflict in him between the Puritan and the Renaissance scholar, complicated as it was as regards the question of sensuous delights by his dallyings with Fludd and the Mor- talists, and even the Cabbalists. Again there is the conflict between the man of action and the man of letters, while what is moving is the sight of the bitterly disappointed
lover, the disillusioned revolutionary, and finally the blinded Titan. What is admirable, besides the poetry, is the resilient quality of his will, and his refusal to be crushed by the cir- cumstances of his life ; in short, his amazing courage.
To deal with all these things in the compass of cno of these "short lives" should be possible, but it would require both great artistry and a definite point of view. Miss Macaulay one feels, has allowed her acknowledged artistry to be sub- merged under a very considerable erudition, with no critical point of view, except one of being baffled, emerging from the
mass. Her final paragraph on Paradise Lost, which she fatally refuses to discuss, is typical of her position :
"There can be no poem in any language in which bathos and beauty so jostle one another, and pedestrianism so alternates with wingy flights. It is by turn magnificent, engaging, tragic, tedious, fantastic and entertaining ; and has, throughout, the queer enchant- ment. of the exotic, monstrous mind which shaped it."
Precisely ; but a biography should do more than state, it should illuminate, even at the risk of a false, or falsely coloured light, being thrown on the subject : this is a responsibility the biographer must accept. Just where it might have been accepted, namely in a discussion of Paradise Regained,
Miss Macaulay most frankly runs away.
In fact, what she has done has been to assemble the materials for a short biography with great skill and judgement, and there can be no doubt that she knows her Milton thoroughly well. But the whole thing would have gained by being more pon- dered: crystallization, so to speak, has not taken place.
That this is so is betrayed also bY the prose, sometimes admirable, full, and clear, but often as though Miss Macaulay had allowed it to get tangled into knots by having plunged too much into Milton's, just as his prose was tortured out, of English by his immersion in Latin. It is not only that such indigestible words as " misoelere 7' and " inheretrixes " make the pages gritty, but such sentences as "Of pleasing appearauec she probably was" occur ; and one .1w/idea-if.-
-ought to have admitted "The Republican pamphleteer had every excuse for Tyburn or imprisonment for life.. . ." There are two somewhat surprising omissions in the Biblio. graphy : Professor Grierson's Cross-Currents in Sezynteenth .Ceiitury Literature, and any of the .Miltonic works of M. Denis Saurat. Both these authoritiek help towards elucida- tion, though perhaps-.M. Saurat over-emphasizes the mystic aspect. But it iithis mystic aspect which might be of most interest today : it is something which we find in -Blake, Rossetti, Patmore and D. H. Lawrence. However, every. thing cannot be tackled in a short book, and perhaps Miss Macaulay felt that she had already undertaken an impossible task. It cannot be said that she has emerged tritunphant, but still her book can honestly be recommended to such readers to whom these short books are useful, that is to most of us ; nor can it be said to lack entertainment. - BONAMY _Popufm.
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