The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination
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By 1651 Milton was totally blind from the affliction that had been creeping on him since his youth. And his affliction helped save him from punishment by the royalist Parliament. Now his pious enemies were willing to “leave him under the rod of correction, wherewith God hath evidenced His particular judgment by striking him blind.”
The Restoration proved a blessing for English literature. It gave Milton, only forty-two and in full talent, the opportunity to fulfill the epic ambition that he had been nursing since his grand tour. If the great issues of the constitution and of toleration had not been settled, if the caldron of vituperation had not stopped boiling while Milton was mature and productive, he might have spent himself in more pamphleteering polemics. But the Restoration removed Milton from the arena into which he had descended with such enthusiasm.
Long before the Restoration, Milton had suspected that his blindness might have been the divine punishment for his libertine and heterodox beliefs. Some of the “ancientest and wisest” poets and philosophers also had been blind. Yet he could not find the sin that would justify this punishment. “I call upon Thee, my God, who knowest my inmost mind and all my thoughts, to witness that.… I am conscious of nothing, or of no deed, either recent or remote, whose wickedness could justly occasion or invite upon me this supreme misfortune.”
“Not blindness,” Milton said, “but the inability to endure blindness is a source of misery.” As he concludes his reflective sonnet “When I consider how my light is spent”:
… God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.
His state is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.
Not even “this supreme misfortune” would deprive him of his freedom to create as he chose. For blindness too would nourish inwardness and inspiration. Having suffered without clear reason, he had a personal incentive to “assert Eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.” He organized his life into a productive routine. Rising at four o’clock most of the year, and five o’clock in winter, he had a man read the Hebrew Bible to him for about a half hour. Then he contemplated. At seven his amanuensis returned for dictation. If the reader was late, Milton would complain, “I wanted to be milked.” All morning would be spent in dictating or being read to. After dinner at noon he walked, sometimes for three or four hours, depending on the weather. He always had a garden. If he could not go out he exercised in a swing, which he kept in motion by a rope attached to a pulley. For recreation he played on his organ or the bass viol. Evenings he liked to listen to “some choice poets” for refreshment, and “to store his fancy against morning.” If there were visitors he would talk with them in his study between six and eight, then went downstairs to supper. Before retiring, usually at about nine o’clock, he smoked his pipe and drank a glass of water.
To compose a long epic like Paradise Lost when he could not write it down himself required, besides everything else, a prodigious memory. Milton’s powers of memory, he often noted, put him in the tradition of Homer and the other blind poets and seers of antiquity. He compared himself with mythological figures like Tiresias, to whom Zeus gave long life and the powers of prophecy after Hera had struck him blind for seeing Athena bathing.
When his reader-amanuensis was not there Milton still managed somehow. Children of friends or aged friends themselves were eager to hear Milton’s wisdom in response to their reading. He might be irritated at the reader’s inability to pronounce Italian to his taste, but he seemed grateful, and sometimes even jovial. Dictating, he sat relaxed in his easy chair with one leg flung over the arm. From his pregnant memory he would dictate “many, perhaps forty lines as it were in one breath, and then reduce them to half the number.” In winter he frequently composed lying in bed.
Now Milton was free to focus his talents inward to compose his life’s epic ambition. The vernacular, “the language of housewives,” which Dante had felt it necessary to defend for his epic, now was quite natural for a patriotic Englishman. Dante had painfully disciplined himself with terza rima. But in English literature, by Milton’s day, Shakespeare and other dramatists had shown the liberating powers of blank verse. Milton would enjoy this freedom too. Since “blank verse” (lines of iambic pentameter that are unrhymed and hence called “blank”) is close to the natural rhythms of English speech, it is easily adapted to all moods and all levels of discourse.
Dante, we have seen, had explained that his Comedy was so called because it inevitably had a happy ending—in the movement upward from Hell, through Purgatory, to the empyrean Paradise. And Dante chronicled an unambiguous universe of sharp distinctions, of levels of virtue and vice, where the dramatic spectacle was not the choices but the consequences of vice or virtue. Milton’s Paradise Lost was surely not a comedy. He described tragedy “as it was anciently composed … the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other poems,” and found his great examples in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Though Paradise Lost was not designed for the stage, it still could be called tragedy, revealing “Tears such as angels weep.” The drama and suspense came from momentous choices by God, by Satan, by Eve, by Christ Himself—and, of course, by Adam. In his opening lines Milton explained that the loss of Paradise was the consequence of the wrong choice made by the first man, which he made the theme of his epic:
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse.…
Western Europe, transformed in three and a half centuries by the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, had moved from a culture of consequences to a culture of choices. “Many there be that complain of divine Providence for suffering Adam to transgress. Foolish tongues! when God gave him reason, he gave him freedom to choose, for reason is but choosing; he had been else a mere artificial Adam.…” Milton would ring changes on this reminder of both God’s gift and the price man had to pay.
After returning from his Grand Tour, Milton had sought forms for his epic and first seems to have thought of drama. He began composing Paradise Lost about 1655 and finished it about 1665. The first edition was published in 1667 in ten books. These were grim years for Londoners. The frightful plague, which had arrived early in 1665, by September had carried away more than twenty-six thousand victims. To avoid the plague, Milton moved out of town, but came back early in 1666. The Great Fire of London, which began to burn on the morning of September 2, after three days and nights had destroyed two-thirds of the city, including eighty churches, eleven thousand houses, and famous public buildings like St. Paul’s Cathedral. Six months later parts of the city were still smoldering. The book trade of course suffered heavily.
Milton took the manuscript of Paradise Lost to the Simmons family, whose buildings had luckily escaped the fire and who had published for him before. They offered him an advance of five pounds with another five pounds to be paid when a first edition of fifteen hundred was sold, and for possible second and third printings of thirteen hundred copies, Milton was to receive an additional five pounds each. No edition was to be more than fifteen hundred copies. All future rights were assigned to the Simmonses. At most, with a spectacular sale of six thousand copies, Milton would net twenty pounds. At three shillings a copy, within two years the first printing was sold out. The book was registered and licensed, but some title pages bore only his initials instead of his name.
We have a hint of sales resistance in the fourteen pages added in a few months by the publisher. Along with errata and prose summaries of each of the ten books came Milton’s defiant attack on rime as “no necessary adjunct or true ornament of poem or good verse (in longer works es
pecially), but the invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched matter and lame metre.” Blank verse did not aim to excel in the jingling sound of like endings, a fault avoided by the learned ancients both in their poetry and oratory. “This neglect, then, of rime so little is to be taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar readers, that it rather is to be esteemed an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recovered to heroic poem from the troublesome modern bondage of riming.” Even Milton’s prosody became a manifesto for liberty!
With no excessive modesty, Milton explained the superiority of his epic over both Homer and Virgil:
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused,
Or Neptune’s ire or Juno’s, that so long
Perplexed the Greek and Cytherea’s son
(Bk IX, lines 14ff.)
The brief and cryptic Creation story in the Bible Milton elaborated into a long heroic poem focused on the decisions by the leading characters. How will Satan, Beelzebub and the rebellious angels avenge their defeat by God? Should they make war or find revenge through this new creature in a newly created world? When God sees that Satan will corrupt man, what will God do? But since man fell not by predestination but by Satan’s seduction and man’s own free will, how can man be saved? Will God accept a Savior’s ransom? When we see the drama in Eden we wonder whether Adam and Eve will eat the forbidden fruit. Will the angel Raphael persuade Adam to obey? After the Son of God drives out the Satanic hosts, can man resist the seducer? Will the Maker give Adam a companion? And can she resist Satan, newly incarnated in the Serpent? Will Adam still obey, or will he share her sin to share her life? Will Adam and Eve have to leave Paradise? How will the Son of God save them? Expelled from the Garden, can they find “a paradise within”? Satan himself, whom many see as the hero of the work, on being thrust out of Heaven, makes his classic declaration of man’s Freedom to Choose:
Hail, horrors, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest hell
Receive thy new possessor, one who brings
A mind not to be chang’d by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.
(Bk. I, lines 250ff.)
Dante makes us spectators of the final rewards and punishments. But Milton’s epic of heroic choices shows us man tested, blessed, and cursed by the gift of knowledge. God too reminds man that he lives a life of choice; and that his Fall is at his own will. For God would have no satisfaction in a blind obedience.
Freely they stood who stood, and fell who fell …
What pleasure I, from such obedience
Paid when Will and Reason (Reason also is Choice),
Useless and vain, of freedom both despoiled …
They trespass, authors to themselves in all,
Both what they judge and what they choose; for so
I formed them free, and free they must remain
Till they enthrall themselves …
Self-tempted, self-depraved …
(Bk. III, lines 102ff.)
And, though he lose Paradise he must face the tests of this world:
The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
(Bk. XII, lines 646ff.)
The world into which Milton led his readers was surely not for him a “place of rest.” In June 1665 young Thomas Ellwood, his student helper, a faithful Quaker who had been imprisoned for his faith, had helped Milton and his family find refuge from the London plague. When Ellwood came to see him in August at Chalfont St. Giles about twenty-three miles outside London, Milton handed him a bulky manuscript to take home for his critical opinion. Returning the manuscript, Ellwood discussed the poem “modestly but freely,” apparently without extravagant praise. “Thou hast said much here of paradise lost, but what has thou to say of paradise found?” Milton responded with Paradise Regained (1671), telling in blank verse the story of Christ in the wilderness. Though tempted by Satan, Christ, unlike Adam and Eve, never succumbed, and so paradise would be regained by Christ’s strength, giving mankind a second chance.
Milton’s long tragic poem Samson Agonistes (Samson the Champion; 1671), published with Paradise Regained, may have been written much earlier, even before Milton went blind. Now it had a plain autobiographical significance. A tragedy in the classic Greek form, it was never intended for staging. Milton still boasted that he had observed in it the Aristotelian unities, for the whole drama begins and ends “according to ancient rule and best example, within the space of twenty-four hours.” Milton retells the story from the Book of Judges, focusing on the last pitiable days of the blinded Samson, who refuses to pardon the “manifest serpent” Delila. Summoned to amuse the unsuspecting Philistines by his feats of strength, he pulls down the pillars of their idolatrous temple, destroying them all together with himself. Milton helps us follow Samson’s inward progress from blind despair to strength as God’s champion:
All these indignities, for such they are
From thine, these evils I deserve and more,
Acknowledge them from God inflicted on me
Justly, yet despair not of his final pardon
Whose ear is ever open, and his eye
Gracious to readmit the suppliant;
In confidence whereof I once again
Defy thee to the trial of mortal fight,
By combat to decide whose god is God,
Thine or whom I with Israel’s sons adore.
(lines 1168ff.)
As Samson had been “Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves,” so Milton found himself in London after the Restoration. After that, could Milton have joined his Chorus, “calm of mind, all passion spent”?
Milton himself never sought the easy solace of a dogma someone else had defined. He never became a professing member of any sect, never regularly attended any particular church, nor observed any sectarian rites at home. He lived out his belief that, since every man had divine guidance, each must choose his faith for himself. Dr. Johnson would not forgive him for it.
Few poets have had a more checkered afterlife. Joseph Addison, in his prosaic Spectator first hailed Milton’s Paradise Lost “looked upon, by the best Judges, as the greatest Production, or at least the noblest Work of Genius, in our Language.” The Romantic rebels, Blake and Shelley, delighted to see themselves in his Satan. T. S. Eliot attacked Milton as one whose sensuousness, dulled by blindness, had been “withered by book-learning,” and who wrote English “like a dead language.” But few ever did more to make that language live.
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Sagas of Ancient Empire
THE saga of empire was added to the human comedy in 1776 with the first volume of Edward Gibbon’s classic Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was a time for thinking about empires. After a Seven Years’ War Britain had secured Canada from France and Florida from Spain. Conquests in India had created a British Asian empire of unprecedented reach and power. Meanwhile, Britain’s imperial wars had given North American colonists the opportunity and the desire to govern themselves. And in this seminal year Thomas Jefferson’s American Declaration of Independence showed “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” by explaining how and why future empires would decline. Gibbon (1737–1794) had had a safe gentlemanly taste of the wars for empire by serving at home defense under his father as captain in the Hampshire militia. As a member of the House of Commons, he witnessed the debates and supported Lord North’s policies that would lose the American colonies.
In that Age of William Pitt, John Wilkes, and Edmund Burke, and the great debates over empire, we can be grateful that Gibbon was not a more political person. We might t
hen have inherited a file of dreary state papers instead of the most read and most readable work of a modern historian. Luckily, too, Gibbon was entranced by the people who made history. If he had been more vulnerable to the glittering abstractions of his age he might have become an English Montesquieu, writing for scholars of political thought. If he had sought historical laws or cycles or found some single cause, he might have been bedside reading no more than Vico or Marx.
But Gibbon became the ultimate humanist historian, whose story is dominated by vivid but inscrutable persons. He begins with “The Age of the Antonines,” in the first century and draws his narrative to a close with the coronation of Petrarch as poet laureate of Rome, the tribune Rienzi’s short-lived efforts to restore the freedom and government of Rome, the return of the popes to Rome from the Babylonian captivity in Avignon and their efforts to establish dominion over the nobles, and the conquest of Constantinople by “the great destroyer” Mohammed II in 1453.
Finally Gibbon humanized his own work as he recalled the night of June 27, 1787, between eleven and twelve when he wrote the last lines of the last page in the summerhouse of his garden in Lausanne. “I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion.”
A Ulysses on a voyage of his own devising, he somehow resisted the siren simplicities of his age, as he also avoided the deadly channels of respectable scholar-antiquarians. His focus on the human is heroic as he went the way of an amateur. Very early he conceived his love of his subject, and his comfortable station afforded him the leisure and the library. With no need for gainful employment he enjoyed a vagrant independence. Without wife or children, he remained a loner. Nor did he spend his energies consulting other scholars or traveling in search of manuscripts. Instead he relied heavily on his own books and his powers of reflection.