The Book of Lost Books

by Stuart Kelly

  In his twenties, Milton described himself as an epic poet more often than he attempted to compose an epic poem. To his university friend Charles Diodati he sent jesting verses about how he was not cut out for amatory lyrics, maintaining instead he was one who would “tell . . . of wars, and of heaven . . . of pious leaders and god-like heroes, who sings now of the solemn decrees of the gods above, now of the infernal kingdoms.” In lines written to his father after leaving the university, he justified his vocation, writing, “do not scorn the work of the poet, divine song.” His father seemed to accept the demand, allowing Milton to enjoy five uninterrupted years of leisurely study. But there was still no epic poem.

  The portrait of the man that emerges from the early verse persists. He is committed to Protestantism, to the divine right of people to choose, to somber, sober consideration rather than fashion or rash action. He is uncompromising, even if, as yet, he is also unfulfilled.

  Milton traveled to Europe in 1638, and sought out Count Manso, the Italian aristocrat who had supported Torquato Tasso. In a Latin poetic epistle, Milton flattered Manso, insisting that “if only Fate would grant me such a friend” he would “call back into verse our native kings.” He had, it seems, found an appropriate topic—“the great hearted heroes united in the unbreakable friendship of the Round Table.” The following year, Milton made his most unambiguous statement about his intentions. In an elegy for Charles Diodati, Milton vowed to write a poem describing Uther Pendragon, Merlin, and King Arthur. Moreover, the poem would “sound out a British theme in its native strains”: an epic about England, written in English.

  The Arthurian epic haunted the British literary imagination. Edmund Spenser had used some of the legends in his Faerie Queene; but his Arthur was in the dreamworld of Fairyland, not on British soil. Instead of Lancelot, Guinevere, and Mordred, he described Artegall, Amoret, and Archimago. Eighteen years after Milton’s death, Dryden was considering an epic poem about Arthur, and in the preface to his translations of Juvenal and Persius, he outlined the project to the Right Honorable Charles, earl of Dorset and Middlesex:

  Thus, my lord, I have, as briefly as I could, given your lordship and by you the world, a rude draught of what I have been long labouring in my imagination . . . a work which would have taken up my life in the performance of it. This, too, I had intended chiefly for the honour of my native country, to which a poet is particularly obliged. Of two subjects, both relating to it, I was doubtful—whether I should choose that of King Arthur conquering the Saxons (which, being farther distant in time, gives the greater scope to my invention), or that of Edward the Black Prince in subduing Spain . . . (wherein, after Virgil and Spenser, I would have taken occasion to represent my living friends and patrons of the noblest families) . . . my salary ill paid, and no prospects of a future subsistence, I was then discouraged in the beginning of my attempt.

  Dryden even described how he would introduce supernatural “machines,” such as guardian angels, evil spirits, and individual countries’ Geniuses, to dignify his narrative and provide a contemporary counterpart to the pagan deities of Homer and Virgil.

  While Dryden was peddling epics to his potential patron, one Richard Blackmore was not reading poetry, and, in his own words, had not even written a hundred verses. The Arthur idea must have struck him as potentially lucrative, and within three years his epic Prince Arthur was published. It was so successful, he brought out another, King Arthur, two years later. Dryden seethed at this hack who had popped between the election and his hopes, and fulminated in the preface to his Fables (1700). “I will only say,” he began, “that it was not for this noble knight”—Blackmore had bagged a Sir for his verses—“that I drew the plan of an epic poem on King Arthur . . . yet from that preface he plainly took his hint.” An amateur Arthur seemed worse than no epic at all.

  Alexander Pope, Dryden’s self-appointed successor, planned his own “British” epic, but chose instead the even more mythical Brutus, so as not to disturb the shade of his elected ancestor. Sir Walter Scott tested the waters with an anonymous poem said to be in the style of Sir Walter Scott, The Inferno of Altisidora, which dealt with Arthurian legends, but switched to novels soon thereafter. Finally, Tennyson produced his Idylls of the King, by which point the power of the epic, eroded by the novel, minimized by politics, and travestied by domesticity, seemed profoundly irrelevant.

  Milton never wrote his Arthuriad either. In 1639, he heard of the brewing discontent between the king and Parliament, and, fired with a sense of mission, returned to support the rights of the people. In the storms of the approaching Civil War he would sign a king’s death warrant, become a notorious pamphleteer in defense of liberty, reformation, and the press, and even lend his name to a dissenting cult of “Miltonists or Divorcers,” according to the Reverend Thomas’s encyclopedia of heretics. Of course, he would also eventually write an epic.

  Why did he forgo Arthur? In his History of Britain, written many years later, Milton gives a chink into his misgivings: “But who Arthur was, and whether ever any such reign’d in Britain, hath bin doubted heretofore, and may again with good reason . . . We may well perceave to have known no more of this Arthur 500 years past, nor of his doeings, than we now living.” Every element of Milton’s character demanded that the epic would have to be true, not fabled.

  Sixteen hundred and forty: the year Oliver Cromwell demands that Parliament must be recalled annually, the hated Archbishop Laud is arrested, and Milton is writing a list in his spare time. Not only has he dispensed with the idea of an Arthurian work, it seems that even epic is off the agenda. He notes ninety-nine possible topics for a tragedy, ranging from the seduction of Adam and Eve to one described as a “strange story of witchcraft, & murder discover’d, and reveng’d. Scotch story” (although this may sound familiar, it is worth noting that three items later, Milton is also considering a tragedy on Macbeth).

  Most of the topics are taken from the Bible. The first glimmers of Milton’s last work, the drama Samson Agonistes, are here; “Dagonalia: Judges 16” contains the material he will adapt. Many of the scenarios will eventually be written by others, though none of them knew about the manuscript: Jean Racine takes no. 46, “Athaliah”; Abraham Cowley is already discarding his version of King David, nos. 28 and 29; Dryden will pick up on Achitophel (no. 31) for his satirical mock epic; and even Oscar Wilde will provide a particular take on no. 54, Salome and John the Baptist. Countless schoolchildren will fulfill idea 55, which reads, simply, “Christ born.”

  As well as looking for biblical themes, Milton is looking for biblical forms. He believed that the Bible contained exemplars of literary genres: the Song of Songs is a pastoral drama (like his own Comus), the Book of Job is a short epic, and the Book of Revelation is a “high and stately tragedy.” The Bible was not, however, written in the style of Homer, and, for the time being, Milton wavers between epic and tragedy. In the handful of topics drawn from English history, the epic is still raised as a possibility: “An Heroicall Poem may be founded somewhere in Alfreds reigne. especially at his issuing out of Edelingsey on the Danes. Whose actions are wel like those of Ulysses.”

  There is, however, one possible story that Milton outlines in some detail. Four different drafts appear in the manuscript for a drama founded on the opening of the Book of Genesis, sketches for a tragedy called Adam Unparadiz’d. Milton’s daughter, Mrs. Susannah Clarke, told Voltaire in 1727 that her father had actually written nearly two acts of the work; but it was set aside and somehow lost.

  The Civil War delayed and deferred Milton’s creative ambitions. Throughout the Commonwealth period, he engaged in polemical controversies, wrote political tracts and diplomatic documents. He served the state, advanced the Puritan cause, but his calling erupts, occasionally, in his prose. In the Reason of Church Government urged against Prelacy (1642), he interrupts himself to inform the reader he is no mere pamphleteer.

  Time serves not now, and perhaps I might seem too profuse to give any certain acco
unt of what the mind at home, in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting: whether the epic form . . . or whether the rules of Aristotle [i.e. tragedy] are strictly to be kept . . . and lastly, what king or knight before the conquest might be chosen in whom to lay the pattern of a Christian hero.

  Politician or poet? Epic or drama? Saxons or Israelites? He is drawn to origins: even when defending the freedom of the press, that most modern of estates, his mind snags on the oldest story. “It was from the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world,” he wrote in the Areopagitica, desperate to denounce the “mere artificial Adam” of his pro-censorship opponents. If there is a way out of the chaos of the present, it is in first principles: wisdom older than Virgil, Homer, and Moses. If there is to be a heroic poem he knows it must be true, needs it to be holy, and is adamant it must be absolute.

  Sixteen sixty: he is blind. The Commonwealth has collapsed and the king sits again upon the throne. The Civil War was won, but by the enemy, now engaged in dismantling the project. Milton, the great justifier of regicide, who only just avoids the gallows, is without influence, income, hope, and sight. But he does, at least and last, have time, and his daughters, who can copy down his words. Whatever he had scribbled and drafted beforehand, Paradise Lost is begun in his isolation. No one knows exactly when he started, or with which line, or word. But the finished production includes his own long path to the poem:

  Since first this subject for heroic song

  Pleased me long choosing, and beginning late;

  Not sedulous by nature to indite

  Wars, hitherto the only argument

  Heroic deemed, chief mast’ry to dissect

  With long and tedious havoc fabled knights

  In battles feigned (the better fortitude

  Of patience and heroic martyrdom

  Unsung), or to describe races and games

  Or tilting furniture, emblazoned shields,

  Impresses quaint, caparisons and steeds

  Bases and tinsel trappings, gorgeous knights

  At joust or tournament; then marshaled feast

  Served up in halls with sewers and seneschals;

  The skill or artifice or office mean,

  Not that which justly gives heroic name

  To person or to poem.

  “I know thee not, old man,” Milton whispers to Spenser. The only remnant of his dreams of an Arthuriad is a denunciation of the whole juvenile idea. The planned dramas remain skewered in the blank verse like a splinter under the skin: Milton’s self-dramatized, self-deluded, soliloquizing Satan is the son of Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, and the father of the novel’s self-knowing villains.

  After so many fits and starts, in internal, eternal exile, the ways of God will be justified to man. The English will get their epic.

  Paradise Lost very nearly never appeared at all. It was published in 1667, the year after the Great Fire of London. Many printers’ and booksellers’ premises around St. Paul’s had suffered particularly badly—indeed, the manuscript and every printed copy of John Ogilby’s epic poem The Carolieswere now so much ash. Milton’s work survived the conflagration.

  Its afterlife makes even Paradise Lost a curiously lost work in itself. The literary world wanted it to, well, go away.

  John Dryden huffily acknowledged its greatness, but denied it the laurels on a technicality.

  As for Mr Milton, whom we all admire with so much justice, his subject is not that of an heroic poem, properly so called. His design is the losing of our happiness; his event is not prosperous, like that of all other epic works; his heavenly machines are many, and his human persons are but two.

  Moreover, in an almost petulant exercise in dumbing-down, Dryden turned it into a stage opera, entitled The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man. Dryden rewrote the blank verse as rhyming couplets, though he did ask Milton’s permission. “You may tag my verses” is all that remains of an exceptionally curious literary meeting.

  Richard Bentley (1662–1742) was a formidable scholar of Latin and Greek, most renowned for conclusively ending the debate about whether the Epistles of Phalaris were genuine (they weren’t). He decided to turn his copious erudition to Paradise Lost, and became convinced that the true work had been mangled by Milton’s soft-witted daughters’ attempts at taking dictation, and the slapdash carelessness of his editors. After all, a blind poet cannot check his proofs. Take, for example, the closing lines:

  They hand in hand, with wand’ring steps and slow, Through Eden made their solitary way.

  Ridiculous! How could two people be solitary? What Milton meant to say was:

  Then hand in hand, with social steps their way Through Eden took with heav’nly comfort cheer’d.

  Even if Bentley hadn’t managed to annoy Alexander Pope, by slighting his abilities as a translator of Homer, he was destined, just for this small editing job alone, for a place in the expanded edition of Pope’s Dunciad.

  William Lauder, who died in 1771, was at the opposite end of the social spectrum, but in a similar line of work to Mr. Bentley. A one-legged Scottish classics tutor, he also possessed a monomaniacal hatred of Paradise Lost. In An Essay into Milton’s Use and Abuse of the Moderns of 1750, he sensationally showed how Milton had plagiarized from Taubmann, Staphorstius, Masenius, and other little-known contemporary Latinists. In fact, Lauder had translated Paradise Lost into Latin and then inserted his lines into the works of the said authors. He also included an advertisement for his services as a tutor. Once the forgery was revealed, the publishers decided that “we shall for the future sell his book ONLY as a masterpiece of fraud, which the public may be supplied with at 1s6d stitched.”

  Even Samuel Johnson managed to lard his biography of Milton with caveats. “The original deficience cannot be supplied,” he argued, continuing with damning short sentences: “The want of human interest is always felt. Paradise Lost is one of the books the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure.”

  And perhaps even Milton felt some resentment to his poem. Despite the fact that he had written the English epic, when the countless other attempts—the risible Alfred and Eliza of Blackmore, the countless Wellingtoniads and Alexandriads—molder on shelves; perhaps he would have preferred power to poetry. If the Devil had taken up John Milton unto an high place, and offered, on the one hand, the laurel of posterity, and on the other, the chance for his Commonwealth to continue beyond Cromwell’s death, the extirpation of monarchy, the collapse of Catholicism, and England transformed into a global beacon for his ideals—what would the old Iconoclast have chosen?

  Sir Thomas Urquhart

  {1611–1660}

  SOLDIER, GENTLEMAN, TRAVELER, mathematician, genealogist, poet, translator, linguistic philosopher, and, possibly, madman: Sir Thomas Urquhart had many talents, but by far the greatest was for hyperbole.

  Thomas was the eldest son of the impecunious laird of Cromarty. He studied at King’s College, Aberdeen, and then embarked on a grand tour of Europe, where he was conspicuous for defending the honor of Scotland and acquiring books for his library, a collection he later called “a complete nosegay of flowers which in my travels I have gathered out of the gardens of above sixteen several kingdoms.” On his return, apart from unsuccessful attempts to alleviate the debts and placate the creditors of his father, he traveled to London, to the court of Charles I. Urquhart began to fashion himself as a Cavalier wit, writing 1,103 epigrams entitled Apollo and the Muses in thirteen weeks in 1640, and publishing a further 134 Epigrams: Divine and Moral. He was knighted in 1641, and returned to Scotland after the death of his father, barely having time to dash off his impenetrable treatise applying Napier’s logarithms to trigonometry. Among the more extravagant claims of the Trissotetras, or a most exquisite table for resolving triangles was
that a student could, using Urquhart’s method, learn a year’s worth of mathematical formulae in the space of seven weeks.

  With the outbreak of the Civil War and the execution of Charles I, Urquhart rallied troops for a Royalist counteroffensive. He had already earned the enmity of the Protestant Covenanters after a skirmish at Turriff, purportedly the first blood to be shed in the defense of the Solemn League and Covenant. He was cautioned by the General Assembly for his “dangerous opinions,” but nonetheless hastened to Charles II, and joined his army in attempting an invasion of Cromwell’s England in 1651.

  After the defeat of the Royalists at the Battle of Worcester, Urquhart was taken to the Tower of London as a traitor, but seems to have enjoyed some degree of liberty. While in prison he petitioned Cromwell’s government with various claims, including that he had a secret “advantageous to the nation,” which he would make known on his release. He translated Rabelais, and compiled three fantastical books—the Pantochronochanon, the Ekskubalauron, and the Logopandecteision— before being exiled around 1655. He died, in 1660, on hearing the news of the Restoration of Charles II, “in a fit of excessive laughter.”

  So what were these strange tomes? The Ekskubalauron, also known as The Jewel, contains material from the Pantochronochanon, Urquhart’s genealogy of himself from Adam, and the Logopandecteision, his proposal for a universal language, as well as including a panegyric on Scotland in the character of a polymathic soldier and scholar, the Admirable Crichton. In his translation of Rabelais, Urquhart indulges in copious expansions and erudite exaggerations: for example, when Rabelais gives nine examples of onomatopoeic animal noises, Urquhart extends this to seventy-one. His version is seventy thousand words longer than the original. Stylistically, his sentences stretch like two mirrors facing each other, warping to incorporate classical neologisms, demotic asides, and a plethora of quirks and curiosities. To call it “Shandy-esque,” “Carlyleish,” or “Joycean” is to obscure Urquhart’s originality, and underplay his peculiar grandiloquence. As Rev. John Willock wrote, “only a mind like his own could trace the maze of its windings and turnings, and fathom the depth of its eccentricity.”