Milton

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Title:     Milton
Author: John Cowper Powys [More Titles by Powys]

It is outrageous, the way we modern world-children play with words. How we are betrayed by words! How we betray with words! We steal from one another and from the spirit of the hour; and with our phrases and formulas and talismans we obliterate all distinction. One sees the modern god as one who perpetually apologises and explains; and the modern devil as one who perpetually apologises and explains. Everything has its word-symbol, its word-mask, its word-garment, its word-disgrace. Nothing comes out clear into the open, unspeakable and inexplicable, and strikes us dumb!

That is what the great artists do--who laugh at our word-play. That is what Milton does, who, in the science and art of handling words, has never been equalled. Milton, indeed, remains, by a curious fate, the only one of the very great poets who has never been "interpreted" or "appreciated" or "re-created" by any critical modern. And they have left him alone; have been frightened of him; have not dared to slime their "words" over him, for the very reason that he is the supreme artist in words! He is so great an artist that his creations detach themselves from all dimness--from all such dimness as modern "appreciation" loves--and stand out clear and cold and "unsympathetic"; to be bowed down before and worshipped, or left unapproached.

Milton is a man's poet. It would be a strange thing if women loved him. Modern criticism is a half-tipsy Hermaphrodite, in love only with what is on the point of turning into something else. Milton is always himself. His works of art are always themselves. He and they are made of the same marble, of the same metal. They are never likely to change into anything else! Milton is, like all the greatest artists, a man of action. He, so learned in words, in their history, in their weight, in their origin, in their evocations; he, the scholar of scholars, is a man, not of words, but of deeds. That is why the style of Milton is a thing that you can touch with your outstretched fingers. It has been hammered into shape by a hand that could grasp a sword; it has been moulded into form by a brain that could dominate a council-chamber. No wonder we word-maniacs fear to approach him. He repels us; he holds us back; he hides his work-shop from us; and his art smites us into silent hatred.

For Milton himself, though he is the artist of artists, art is not the first thing. It is only the first thing with us because we are life's slaves, and not its masters. Art is what we protect ourselves with--from life. For us it is a religion and a drug. To Milton it was a weapon and a plaything.

Milton was more interested in the struggle of ideas, in the struggle of races, in the struggle of immortal principles, in the struggle of gods, in the great creative struggle of life and death, than he was interested in the exquisite cadences of words or their laborious arrangement. A modern artist's heart's desire is to escape from the world to some "happy valley" and there, sitting cross-legged, like a Chinese Idol, between the myrtle-bushes and the Lotus, to make beautiful things in detachment forever, one by one, with no pause or pain. Milton's desire was to take the whole round world between his hands, with all the races and nations who dwell upon it, and mould that, and nothing less, into the likeness of what he believed. And in what did he believe, this Lord of Time and Space, this accomplice of Jehovah? He believed in Himself. He had the unquestioning, unphilosophical belief in himself which great men of action have; which the Caesars, Alexanders and Napoleons have, and which Shakespeare seems to have lacked.

Milton, though people have been misled into thinking of him as very different from that, was, in reality, the incarnation of the Nietzschean ideal. He was hard, he was cold, he was contemptuous, he was "magnanimous," he "remembered his whip" when he went with women, he loved war for its own sake, and he dwelt alone on the top of the mountains. To Milton the world presented itself as a place where the dominant power, and the dominant interest, was the wrestling of will with will. Why need we always fuss ourselves about logical names? Milton, in reality--in his temperament and his mood--was just as convinced of Will being the ultimate secret as Schopenhauer or Nietzsche or Bergson or the modern Pragmatist. Nothing seemed to him noble, or dramatic, or "true," that did not imply the struggle to the death of opposing wills.

Milton, in reality, is less of a Christian than any European writer, since the Gospel appeared. In his heart, like Nietzsche, he regarded the binding into one volume of those "Two Testaments" an insult to "the great style." He does, indeed, in a manner find a place for Christ, but it is the place of one demigod among many other demi-gods; the conqueror's place possibly, but still the place of one in a hierarchy, not of one alone. It is absurd to quarrel with Milton's deification of the Judaic Jehovah. Every man has his own God. The God he has a right to. And the Jewish Jehovah, after all, is no mean figure. He, like Milton, was a God of War. He, like Milton, found Will--human and divine Will--the central cosmic fact. He, like Milton, regarded Good and Evil, not as universal principles, but as arbitrary commands, issued by eternal personal antagonists! It is one of the absurd mistakes into which our conceptual and categorical minds so easily fall--this tendency to eliminate Milton's Theology as mere Puritanical convention, dull and uninteresting. Milton's Theology was the most personal creation that any great poet has ever dared to launch upon--more personal even than the Theology of Milton's favourite Greek poet, Euripides.

Milton's feeling for the more personal, more concrete aspects of "God" goes entirely well with the rest of his philosophy. At heart he was a savage Dualist, who lapsed occasionally into Pluralism. He was, above all, an Individualist of the most extreme kind--an Individualist so hard, so positive, so inflexible, that for him nothing in the world really mattered except the clash of definite, clear-cut Wills, contending against one another.

Milton is the least mystical, the least pantheistic, the least monistic, of all writers. That magical sense of the brooding Over-Soul which thrills us so in Goethe's poetry never touches his pages. The Wordsworthian intimations of "something far more deeply interfused" never crossed his sensibility; and, as far as he is concerned, Plato might never have existed.

One feels, as one reads Milton, that his ultimate view of the universe is a great chaotic battlefield, amid the confused elements of which rise up the portentous figures of "Thrones, Dominations, Principalities, and Powers," and in the struggle between these, the most arbitrary, the most tyrannical, the most despotic, conquers the rest, and, planting his creative Gonfalon further in the Abyss than any, becomes "God"; the God whose personal and unrestrained Caprice creates the Sun, the Moon and the Stars, out of Chaos; and Man out of the dust of the Earth. Thus it is brought about that what this God wills is "Good," and what his strongest and most formidable antagonist wills is "Evil." Between Good and Evil there is no eternal difference, except in the eternal difference between the conquering Personality of Jehovah and the conquered Personality of Lucifer. So, far from it being true that Milton is the dull transcriber of mere traditional Protestantism, a very little investigation reveals the astounding fact that the current popular Evangelical view of the origin of things and the drama of things is based, not upon the Bible at all, but upon Milton's poem. In this respect he is a true Classic Poet--a Maker of Mythology--a Delphic Demiurge.

One of the most difficult questions in the world to answer would be the question how far Milton "believed" simply and directly, in the God he thus half-created. Probably he did "believe" more than his daring, arbitrary "creations" would lead us to suppose. His nature demanded positive and concrete facts. Scepticism and mysticism were both abhorrent to him; and it is more likely than not that, in the depths of his strange cold, unapproachable heart, a terrible and passionate prayer went up, day and night, to the God of Isaac and Jacob that the Lord should not forget his Servant.

The grandeur and granite-like weight of Milton's learning was fed by the high traditions of Greece and Rome; but, in his heart of hearts, far deeper than anything that moved him in Aeschylus or Virgil, was the devotion he had for the religion of Israel, and the Fear of Him who "sitteth between the Cherubims." It is often forgotten, amid the welter of modern ethical ideals and modern mystical theosophies, how grand and unique a thing is this Religion of Israel--a religion whose God is at once Personal and Invisible. After all, what do we know? A Prince of Righteousness, a King of Sion, a Shepherd of his People--such a "Living God" as David cries out upon, with those dramatic cries that remain until today the most human and tragic of all our race's wrestling with the Unknown--is this not a Faith quite as "possible" and far more moving, than all the "Over-Souls" and "Immanent All's Fathers" and "Streams of Tendency" which have been substituted for it by unimaginative modern "breadth of mind"? It is time that it was made clear that the alternative at present for all noble souls is between the reign of "crass Casuality" and the reign of Him "who maketh the clouds His chariot and walketh upon the wings of the wind." Those who, "with Democritus, set the world upon Chance" have a right to worship their Jesus of Nazareth, and, in him, the Eternal Protest against the Cruelty of Life. But if Life is to be deified, if Life is to be "accepted," if Life is to be worshipped; if Courage, not Love, be the secret of the cosmic system, then let us call aloud upon it, under personal and palpable symbols, in the old imaginative, poetic way, rather than fool ourselves with thin mysticities, vague intuitions, and the "sounding brass" of "ethical ideals"!

The earlier poems of Milton are among the most lovely in the English language. Lycidas is, for those who understand what poetry means, the most lovely of all. There is nothing, anywhere, quite like this poem. The lingering, elaborate harmonies, interrupted in pause after pause, by lines of reverberating finality; and yet, sweetly, slowly leading on to a climax of such airy, lucid calm--it is one's "hope beyond hope" of what a poem should be.

The absence of vulgar sentiment, the classic reserve, the gentle melancholy, the delicate gaiety, the subtle interweaving of divine, rhythmic cadences, the ineffable lightness of touch, as of cunning fingers upon reluctant clay; is there anything in poetry to equal these things? One does not even regret the sudden devastating apparition of that "two-handed engine at the door." For one remembers how wickedly, how mercilessly, the beauty of life is even now being spoiled by these accursed "hirelings"--and now, as then, "nothing said."

The Nativity Hymn owes half the charm of its easy, natural grace to the fact that the victory of Mary's infant son over the rest is treated as if it were the victory of one pagan god over another--the final triumph being to him who is the most "gentle" and "beautiful" of all the gods. In the famous argument between the Lady and her Tempter, in Comus, we have an exquisite example of the sweet, grave refinement of virginal taste which shuns grossness as "a false note." The doctrine of Comus--if so airy a thing can be supposed to have a doctrine--is not very different from the doctrine of Marius the Epicurean. One were foolish to follow the bestial enchanter; not so much because it is "wrong" to do so, as because, then, one would lose the finer edge of that heavenly music which turns the outward shape "to the soul's essence."

Milton's Sonnets occupy a place by themselves in English Literature, and they may well be pondered upon by those who think that the relinquishing of the "old forms" makes it easier to express one's personality. It makes it, as a matter of fact, much harder, just as the stripping from human beings of their characteristic "outer garments" makes them so dreadfully, so devastatingly, alike! Nothing could be more personal than a Miltonic Sonnet. The rigid principles of form, adhered to so scrupulously in the medium used, intensify, rather than detract from, his individualistic character. That Miltonic wit, so granite-like and mordant, how well it goes with the magical whispers that "syllable men's names"!

All Milton's personal prejudices may be found in the Sonnets, from his hatred of those frightful Scotch appellations that would "make Quintlian gasp" to his longing for Classic companionship and "Attic wine" and "immortal notes" and "Tuscan airs"! As one reads on, laughing gently at the folly of those who have so misunderstood him, one is conscious more and more of that high, cold, clear, lonely tenderness, which found so little satisfaction in the sentiment of the rabble and still less in the endearments of women! As in the case of "sad Electra's poet," his own favorite, it is easy to grow angry about his "Misogyny" and take Christian exception to his preference for mistresses over wives. It is true that Milton's view of marriage is more than "heathen." But one has to remember that in these matters of purely personal taste no public opinion has right to intervene. When the well-married Brownings of our age succeed in writing poetry in the "grand style," it will be time--and, perhaps, not even then--to let the dogs of democratic domesticity loose upon this austere lover of the classic way.

What a retort was "Paradise Lost" to the lewd revellers who would have profaned his aristocratic isolation with howlings and brutalities and philistine uproar! Milton despised "priests and kings" from the heights of a pride loftier than their own--and he did not love the vulgar mob much better. In Paradise Lost he can "feel himself" into the sublime tyranny of God, as well as into the sublime revolt of Lucifer. Neither the one or other stoops to solicit "popular voices." The thing to avoid, as one reads this great poem, are the paraphrases from the book of Genesis. Here some odd scrupulousness of scholarly conscience seems to prevent him launching out into his native originality. But, putting this aside, what majestic Pandemoniums of terrific Imagination he has the power to call up! The opening Books are as sublime as the book of Job, and more arresting than Aeschylus. The basic secrets of his blank verse can never be revealed, but one is struck dumb with wonder in the presence of this Eagle of Poetry as we attempt to follow him, flight beyond flight, hovering beyond hovering, as he gets nearer and nearer to the Sun.

It is by single paragraphs, all the same, and by single lines, that I would myself prefer to see him judged. Long poems have been written before and will be written again, but no one will ever write--no one but Dante has ever written--such single lines as one reads in Milton. Curiously enough, some of the most staggering of these superb passages are interludes and allusions, rather than integral episodes in the story, and not only interludes, but interludes in the "pagan manner." Second only to those Luciferan defiances, which seem able to inspire even us poor worms with the right attitude towards Fate, I am tempted to place certain references to Astarte, Ashtoreth and Adonis.

"Astarte, queen of Heaven, with crescent horns,
To whose bright Image nightly, by the moon,
Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs."

Or of Adonis:

"Whose annual wound, in Lebanon, allured
The Syrian damsels to lament his fate
In amorous ditties all a Summer's day--"

That single line, "Whose annual wound, in Lebanon, allured," seems to me better than any other that could be quoted, to evoke the awe and the thrill and the seduction of all true poetry.

Then those great mysterious allusions to the planetary orbits and the fixed stars and the primeval spaces of land and sea; what a power they have of spreading wide before us the huge horizons of the world's edge! Who can forget "the fleecy star that bears Andromeda far off Atlantic seas"? Or that phrase about the sailors "stemming mightly to the pole"? Or the sudden terror of that guarded Paradisic Gate--"with dreadful faces thronged and fiery arms"? The same extraordinary beauty of single passages may be found in "Paradise Regained," a poem which is much finer than many guess. The descriptions there of the world-cities, Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, have the same classic thrill of reserved awe and infinite reverence that some of Dante's lines possess--only, with Milton, the thing is longer drawn out and more grandiloquent. Satan's speech about his own implacable fatality, "his harbour, and his ultimate repose," and that allusion to Our Lord's gentleness, like "the cool intermission of a summer's cloud" are both in the manner we love.

It is only, however, when one comes to Samson Agonistes that the full power of Milton's genius is felt. Written in a style which the devotees of "free verse" in our time would do well to analyse, it is the most complete expression of his own individual character that he ever attained. Here the Captain of Jehovah, here the champion of Light against Darkness, of Pride against Humility, of Man against Woman, finds his opportunity and his hour. Out of his blindness, out of his loneliness, out of the welter of hedonists and amorists and feminists and fantasists who crowded upon him, the great, terrible egoist strikes his last blow! No one can read Samson Agonistes without being moved, and those who look deepest into our present age may well be moved the most! One almost feels as if some great overpowering tide of all the brutalities and crudities and false sentiments and cunning hypocrisies, and evil voluptuousness, of all the Philistias that have ever been, is actually rushing to overwhelm us! Gath and Askalon in gross triumph--must this thing be? Will the Lord of Hosts lift no finger to help his own? And then the end comes; and the Euripidean "messenger" brings the great news! He is dead, our Champion; but in his death he slew more than in his life. "Nothing is here" for unworthy sorrow; "nothing" that need make us "knock the breast;"--"No weakness, no contempt, dispraise or blame--nothing but well and fair, and what may quiet us in a death so noble."

And the end of Samson Agonistes is as the end of Milton's own life. Awaited in calm dignity, as a Roman soldier might wait for Caesar's word, Death has claimed its own. But let not the "daughters of the uncircumsized" triumph! Grandeur and nobility, beauty and heroism, live still; and while these live, what matter though our bravest and our fairest perish? It only remains to let the thunderbolt, when it does fall, find us prepared; find us in calm of mind, "all passion spent."

[The end]
John Cowper Powys's essay: Milton

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