Introduction chapter one: life and creative career ofjohn austin

2.2. PHILOSOPHICAL AND MYSTICAL CHARACHTERISRTCS OF PARADISE LOST
The novel Poetry in the 17^th century came from the Court, the Church, the gentry or the theatre. The grand exception is the late work of John Milton (1608-74), after the great crisis of the Civil War. He wrote for a spiritual elite. Paradise Lost, he prayed, would ‘Fit audience find, though few’, echoing Christ’s saying that many are called but few are chosen (Matthew 20:16). He invoked for his epic the Spirit ‘that dost prefer/Before all temples the upright heart and pure.’ A Puritan, he chose to rewrite the Bible as it might have been written with the benefit of a humanist English education. If this does not conform to our ideas of Puritans, not all Puritans were like Shakespeare’s Malvolio or Jonson’s Tribulation Wholesome. Milton was not a conformist. His father’s career illustrates the link between Protestantism and capitalism: turned out of the house for reading the Bible in his room, he became a scrivener (legal writer) and moneylender in London. He stuck to his books, giving his eldest son the education of a scholar and a gentleman: St Paul’s School (stiff); Cambridge University (disappointing); five years of private study; a grand tour of Italian literary patrons. Education moulded the life and work of England’s most influential poet.
It was an upbringing in the high Protestantism of Spenser. St Paul’s gave its pupil a humanist faith in the powers of the mind and in the lofty role of poetry. He read widely in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and modern languages, and was remarkable for learning in an age when a reader could know virtually all that was known. His first poem was a version of Psalm 114, ‘When Israel went out of Egypt’. This becomes ‘When the blest seed of Terah’s faithful son ...’. A ‘fit’ audience would know of God’s promises to Abraham and his descendants. The few who knew that Abraham was the son of Terah would see that ‘faithful’baroque A term in art history for the ornate style which succeeded the classicism of the High Renaissance distinguishes the son’s faithfulness from the father’s idol-worship, and would be saved from folly. Milton’s ‘faithful’ father had left an idolatrous home. As one of the ‘blest seed’, Milton would claim that God ‘spoke first to his Englishmen’, the new chosen people.
Humanist ideals shape the early poems: poetic aspiration in ‘At a Vacation Exercise’ and ‘What needs my Shakespeare for his honored bones’; impatience in ‘How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth. Stol’n on his wing my three and twentieth year.’ Other early works are in pastoral modes or lighter moods: the rejoicing baroque ode On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, and the playful debate of L’Allegro and Il Penseroso. Young Milton is already master of medium and form, and his joy in the exercise of his art is infectious. L’Allegro, the cheerful man, likes comedy:
‘Then to the well-trod stage anon.
If Jonson’s learnéd sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, fancy’s child
Warble his native woodnotes wild.’
The thoughtful Penseroso prefers tragedy; he goes to church alone:
But let my due feet never fail,
To walk the studious cloister’s pale, enclosure
And love the high embowéd roof,
With antic pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight, decorated
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow
To the full-voiced choir below,
In service high, with anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all heaven before mine eyes.¹ [p. 149]
A joyous response to nature and to art enlivens the early work. The ‘dim religious light’ is Anglican, and the ‘ecstasies’ almost Italian. After Milton left the Church of England in the mid-1630s he would do with words what the Church did with stained glass and music. But for years he was part of the high Caroline culture, an artistic consensus between Church and Court, writing courtly masques. The figuration of the Nativity Ode is distinctly baroque.
Peace, he writes, crowned with olive green, came softly sliding
Down through the turning sphere
His ready harbinger, [God’s]
With turtle wing the amorous clouds dividing,
And waving wide her myrtle wand,
She strikes a universal peace through sea and land.¹
The olive crown of Peace is both classical and biblical, for the turtledove brought an olive branch to the Ark. The appearance of Peace is now likened to the chariot of Venus, drawn by doves; ‘amorous’ is an epithet transferred from the goddess of love to the clouds clinging to her. The Love she symbolizes is divine, not pagan. Such a use of classical symbolism was common form in Europe.
Milton’s early Protestant ideals were at odds with his sophisticated Italianate style. At court, Charles I patronized the baroque sculptor Bernini. This style, far from Puritan plainness, displays its art with the confidence of the Catholic Reformation.
Milton wrote six sonnets in Italian, and English verse in an Italian way. The title Paradise Lost answers that of Tasso’s epic, Jerusalem Conquistador (1592), ‘Jerusalem Won’. Milton embraced Renaissance and Reformation, Greek beauty
and Hebrew truth. This embrace was strained in the 1630s as England’s cultural consensus came apart. In 1639 Milton abandoned a second year in Italy, returning from the palace of Tasso’s patron in Naples to write prose in London. Although John Donne called Calvinist religion ‘plain, simple, sullen, young’, the first Puritan writer who was truly plain and simple was John Bunyan (1628-88). Strains begin to appear in Comus (1634), a masque for a noble family. It owes something to Jonson’s Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618), but Milton’s virtuous Lady rejects the Pleasure eloquently urged by Comus, the ‘bouncing belly’ of Jonson’s masque. Virtue is Chastity (that is, obedience to divine Reason). The earnest argument of Comus shows its author’s ambition. Lycidas (1637) is an ambitious pastoral elegy for a Cambridge contemporary, a priest and poet who drowned in the Irish Sea. Lycidas is the longest poem in a collection otherwise in Latin and Greek. Nature mourns the young shepherd-poet, and the parts of the classical pastoral elegy are displayed. Renaissance pastoral convention allows Milton to discuss poetic fame, and to criticize the pastoral care of bishops. He shows his poetic skill, and his horror at the early loss of a poetic talent. Apollo tells him that Jove (that is, God) will judge his fame in heaven, a Reformation answer in a Renaissance form. The crisis comes after the list of flowers brought ‘to strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
For so to interpose a little ease
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.’
The ‘false surmise’ is the poem’s pagan pretence. Since the body was not recovered, there was no hearse to strew: ‘thee the shores, and sounding seas
Wash far away, where’er thy bones are hurled ...’.
Then:
Weep no more, woeful shepherds weep no more,
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead,
Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor,¹ [p. 150]
So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore,
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky:
So Lycidas sunk low but mounted high,
Through the dear might of him that walked the waves.
He is now with heaven’s ‘sweet societies/
That sing, and singing in their glory move,/¹
And wipe the tears forever from his eyes.’ Revealed faith consoles, unlike nature’s myth. Yet the poetry of nature returns:
Henceforth thou art the genius of the shore, guardian spirit
In thy large recompense, and shah be good
To all that wander in that perilous flood.
Thus sang the uncouth swain ... ²
This unknown shepherd (Milton) sings a far from uncouth song.
And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:
Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.³
The beauty of the close does not end the discord of ‘where Lycid lies’, a deliberate false note. Such passionate question-and answer is to mark all of Milton’s mature work. Personal concerns also obtrude in the prose to which, in an abrupt change of plan, Milton now devoted himself. In London in 1641-2 he published five anti-Episcopal tracts; and in 1642, shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, he married Mary Powell, a girl half his age who soon went back to her Royalist family. Milton wrote four tracts in favour of divorce, then attacks on the king, and then the government’s Defences of its regicide. At Cromwell’s death, Milton called again for a republic and liberty of conscience, publishing The Ready arid Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth as Charles II returned. Paradise Lost.
Paradise Lost begins with the fall of the angels, Satan’s plan to capture God’s newly created species, and a Heavenly foresight of the future. In Book IV we meet Adam and Eve in the Garden. Raphael tells Adam of Satan’s rebellion, the war in Heaven, the fall of the angels, the creation of the universe, and of Man and of his requested mate, and warns him of the tempter. In IX Satan deceives Eve, and Adam resolves to die with her; the Son conveys God’s doom and promises redemption. In X, Satan boasts of his success, but he and his angels are transformed to serpents. In XI and XII Raphael shows the miseries of mankind until the Redemption, where after Adam will have ‘a paradise within thee, happier far’. The ‘heroic poem’ exemplified right conduct.
There are several heroisms: Adam and Eve, like the Son, show ‘the better fortitude. Of patience and heroic martyrdom’, - not the individual heroism of Achilles or the imperial duty of Aeneas, nor yet the chivalry of the Italian romantic epics. The magnificence of Satan’s appearance and first speeches turns into envy and revenge. At the centre of the poem is an unglamorous human story, although ‘our first parents’ are ideal at first, as is their romantic love:
So hand in hand they passed, the loveliest pair
That ever since in love’s embraces met,
Adam the goodliest man of men since born
His sons, the fairest of her daughters Eve.¹[p. 153]
In IV Eve says that Paradise without Adam would not be sweet. In IX the Fall elaborates the account in Genesis. Eve, choosing to garden alone, is deceived by the serpent’s clever arguments. She urges Adam to eat. ‘Not deceived’, he joins her
out of love:
How can I live without thee, how forgo
Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn?²
Eve leads Adam to sin but also to repentance; blaming herself for the Fall, she proposes suicide. Milton types the sexes traditionally (‘He for God only, she for God in him’) but also allegorically - Adam is intellect, Eve sense. He likes cosmology, she prefers gardening. Although the sexes are not equal, the presentation of sexual love and of marriage is positive and new. Central to Paradise Lost is the first good marriage in English literature. When Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden:

Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon.

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide:
Thus hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.¹

Milton’s endings display his mastery of verse, syntax and sense. The sole humans, having lost God and angel guests, are ‘solitary’ yet hand in hand; wandering yet guided; needing rest yet free to choose. The balance is, as Milton said poetry should be, ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’.
Milton’s Christian humanism depends on human reason, and for him ‘Reason also is choice’. Right reason freely chooses to recognize the truths of God. Eve freely chooses not to accept Adam’s reasoned warning; Adam freely chooses to die with her; the Son freely chooses to die for Man.
Milton held that ‘just are the ways of God,
And justifiable to men’, yet made
God justify himself and blame mankind.
‘Whose fault?’ asks the Father,
‘Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me
All he could have; I made him just and right,
Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’.²
The point is clear, but so is the crossness. Here, ‘God the Father’, as Alexander Pope said, ‘turns a school divine’ (an academic theologian). To represent God the Father as conducting his own defense was a mistake. Mysteries, as Donne wrote, are like the sun, ‘dazzling, but plain to all eyes’. Milton explains the dazzle. The invented scene of the Son’s promotion to ‘Vice-Gerent’, which prompts Satan’s revolt, is a blunder. To portray ‘what the eye hath not seen and the ear hath not heard’ is almost impossible: in Milton the life of Heaven is too like that of Homer’s Olympus: ‘Tables are set, and on a sudden piled/With angels’ food, and rubied nectar flows... They eat, they drink, and in communion sweet/Quaff immortality.’ Dante does it better. The faults are the obverse of Milton’s strength of purpose. Paradise Lost does in compact form what the Mystery cycles had done. Its Bible story is rational, as the Renaissance wished, and pictorial, in the style of Italian ceiling painters. The energy and grandeur of Paradise Lost strike even those readers who do not know the Bible. It is like hearing Handel’s Messiah in the Sistine Chapel; or, more precisely, how a blind man might hear a Messiah by Henry Purcell (1659-95), had he composed one. Paradise Regain’d is not about the Redemption but about the temptation in the desert.¹
The Son’s rejection of Satan’s offer of the (pagan) learning of Athens stands out in a dry landscape. Samson Agonistes is a tragedy to be read, not acted. (‘A dialogue without action can never please like a union of the narrative and dramatic powers’ - Johnson.) Its form is Greek, with protagonist and chorus; its subject the fate of Israel’s champion, ‘eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves’.
Samson speaks:
‘Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed
As of a person separate to God
Designedfor great exploits; if I must die
Betrayed, captived, and both my eyes put out?’
O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse
Without all hope of day!
O first-created beam, and thou great word,
Let there be light, and light was over all;
Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?
The sun to me is dark
And silent as the moon,
When she deserts the night
Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.¹
Milton’s self-vindication turns scripture and tragedy into autobiography.
For example, Dalilah betraying Samson to the Philistines recalls the first Mrs Milton. Finally the persecuted hero pulls down the temple, slaying all his foes at once: ‘the world o’er whelming to revenge his sight’ (Marvell). The last chorus, both Greek and Christian, begins: ‘All is best, though we oft doubt/What the unsearchable dispose/Of highest wisdom brings about’.
It ends:
His servants he with new acquist
Of true experience from this great event
With peace and consolation bath dismissed,
And calm of mind, all passion spent.
Milton left an example to English poets of dedication to his art, but also of passionate self-assertion.