The bitterness against Johnson- and it was widespread is the more remarkable because, aside from Lycidas and the sonnets, Milton's poems received far more commendation from the Ursa Major of literature than one would expect; to the epic in particular he gave extensive and very high praise. All this approbation, however, was swept aside by the devotees of the poet on the ground that the Doctor dared not do less. "He praises Milton," flared Miss Seward, "under the eye of the public as Pistol eat his leek under that of Fluellen. After all, he endeavours to do away, collectively, all his reluctant praise of that glorious and beautiful poem, by observing, that no person closes its pages with the desire of recurring to them. . . . A self-evident, I could almost say an impudent falsehood." Clearly, Milton's admirers were not easily satisfied. Is it any wonder that Richard Edgeworth feared lest some persons would "deem it a species of literary sacrilege to criticize any part of" the octosyllabics, when Cowper was so displeased with some remarks made by the great Miltonian, Thomas Warton, that he wrote, "Warton in truth is not much better" than Johnson and "deserves. . . to lose his own" ear because he "has dared to say that he [Milton] had a bad one"? 3 1 However interesting in itself, such sensitiveness to any criticism of their "idol" would be of little importance if it had been limited to a few persons; what gives these controversies their significance is the large number who took part in them. "The question, whether Milton borrow'd from Masenius," wrote an Englishman in Louvain to the Gentleman's Magazine, "concerns, in my opinion, the whole nation"; and the whole nation seems to have taken the matter as its concern. All of which is inconceivable to-day. When 1 Letters (1811), iv. 133. Other criticisms of Johnson's Life will be found in the Gentleman's Magazine, xlix. 492–3 (1779, two letters), lix. 413-17; Monthly Review, lxi. 81-92 (1779), lxii. 479-83; Horace Walpole's letters to William Mason, Oct. 13, 1780, Feb. 5 and 19, 1781, April 14, 1782 (in the last of these he says that Thomas Stratford "cannot bear the name of Johnson, for his paltry acrimony against Milton"); Lord Monboddo's letter to Sir George Baker, Oct. 2, 1782 (William Knight's Lord Monboddo, etc., 1900, p. 214); Robert Potter's Art of Criticism (1789), 6–19; Philip Neve's Cursory Remarks on English Poets (1789), 113, 134; Thomas Twining's letter to his brother, May 3, 1784 (Country Clergyman of the Eighteenth Century, 1882, p. 120). Johnson's criticisms of Samson (Rambler, 1751, nos. 139, 140) were refuted by W. J. Mickle and Richard Cumberland (Europ. Mag., 1788, xiii. 401-6; Observer, 1788, no. 111). * Poetry explained for Young People (1802), p. ix. 3 * Letters to Hayley, May 1, 1792, and Lady Hesketh, March 6, 1786; and cf. below, p. 57, n. 5. Samuel Darby's pamphlet of forty-one pages, Letter to T. Warton on his Edition of Milton's Juvenile Poems (1785), though not hostile in tone, is another illustration of the amount of attention Milton attracted. 4 xvii. 567 (Good, p. 189). we remember our perfunctory celebrations of the centenaries of Shakespeare and Milton, we can hardly believe that there ever was a time when for four years the most popular magazine of the day printed article after article regarding an alleged literary plagiarism, and when even schoolboys declaimed upon the subject. It is harder still to realize that any large number of persons ever became deeply interested in revisions of the text of a poet sixty years dead. These astonishing tributes to the "immeasurably great" popularity of one who expected his audience to be "few" require explanation. How did it happen that poems which are to-day the admiration of a relatively small number excited, a century and a half ago, the enthusiasm of many? One reason immediately suggests itself, the religious character of the epic. The avowed purpose of Paradise Lost is to "justify the ways of God to men," and its persistent and noble prosecution of that purpose has made it the greatest religious poem in English. Nowadays this aspect of the work is either overlooked or remembered with little satisfaction. To most of us the ways of Milton's anthropomorphic God are neither justified nor made attractive; we find little in his two major poems that seems distinctively Christian, little of the patient love for erring men and the yearning to help them that breathe in the parables of the prodigal son and the good shepherd. But in the eighteenth century, when the more tender aspects of Christianity were emphasized much less than they are now, their absence was little felt; then theology was more important, and to most of the orthodox the Puritan justification was satisfactory. The dissenters in particular, who counted Milton peculiarly their own, as he was, frequently held his epic second in importance only to the Bible. Among the earliest of his admirers and imitators, as we shall see later, was a group of writers who seem to have caught their enthusiasm at the nonconformist academy they attended in boyhood; and not a few of his other "adorers," like John Toland, Richard Baron, Thomas Hollis, did not belong to the established church. But all, the orthodox Addison, the deistic Thomson, the Catholic Pope, all agreed as to the importance of the moral and religious, the consciously didactic, element in poetry. A main point in Dennis's criticism was "that Religion is the Basis and Foundation of the greater Poetry,' ," and so late as 1797 the Monthly Review spoke of poetry as simply "a happy vehicle for conveying instruction." 2 Addison was 1 Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), 94. * Enlarged ed., xxiv. 460. The preacher's life should correspond with his instruction; hence Pope's anxiety that his life be regarded as "the nobler song." "I much 1 even willing to mar the perfect conclusion of Paradise Lost by omitting the last two lines, in order that the poem might end with the words "and Providence their guide." The religious aspects of the epic unquestionably had much to do with the admiration it awakened in Dennis, Addison, Thomson, Young, Cowper, and even Wordsworth. It was this side of the work that called forth Johnson's highest praise and so deeply impressed Gildon that he censured Addison for discussing the poem as an epic. Paradise Lost, he maintained, "is not an heroic poem, but a divine one, and indeed a new species." It must be remembered that a large number of the writers of this period were clergymen, and also that men by no means distinguished for their piety were unanimous in thinking that all great literature teaches religion and morality. For it was at once the weakness and the strength of the eighteenth century that writers and critics of the period did not regard literary beauty as its own excuse for being. Even among the frivolous and the dissipated Paradise Lost would never have achieved the reputation it did, if it had not been a moral and religious power. Not, of course, that the genuine liking which many of the fashionable felt for the poem was due primarily to its lofty ethical value; yet without that they might never have read it at all, and would certainly not have held it in that profound respect which was the basis of its popularity. But, though important even with the frivolous, the religious element loomed large indeed with the more serious of the gentry and with the middle class. There were thousands of readers upon whom the supreme poetic gifts of Milton were practically wasted, devout persons who regarded his richly-colored epic as little more than a religious tract. The humble folk who for a century had been thrilled by Fox's Book of Martyrs and had consumed edition after edition of the despised Pilgrim's Progress, were also attracted to Paradise Lost. To make the poem intelligible to them various devices were employed. Annotation, the most obvious expedient, was of course repeatedly used; and some editions, like the Rev. Dr. Dodd's Familiar Explanation (1762), were addressed particularly to the young and the uneducated. Omission of classical allusions, involved similes, and other difficult passages was tried by John more resent," he wrote to Aaron Hill, Feb. 5, 1730/31, "any attempt against my moral character, which I know to be unjust, than any to lessen my poetical one, which . . may be very just." See also T. R. Lounsbury's Text of Shakespeare (N. Y., 1906), 468– 82. The constant advocacy of Paradise Lost in the Tatler and the Spectator may have been part of the campaign of uplift to which those periodicals were devoted. 1 Laws of Poetry (1721), 259. See above, p. 25. Wesley,' and also, with astonishing results, by "a Gentleman of Oxford." In the last-mentioned product of academic leisure there was an attempt to remove from the poem not only its learning and obscurity but its long sentences and its "roughness," an experiment which led to such nondescript verse as this: Of Adam's Fall, and the forbidden Tree, Whose Fruit brought Sin and Death into the World, To Him and to his Sons — sing, heavenly MUSE! But the assistance which the less educated readers found most to their taste was more direct and even more astonishing than these makeshifts. It was a prose version, and, what is more, an English translation of a French translation of the original. In 1729 Dupré de St. Maur published in Paris, and in 1743 reissued with corrections, a translation of Milton's epic into French prose, which two years later was put back into English, probably by the same "Gentleman of Oxford." The work was printed ten times, and obviously for religious reasons, since it is made up of this sort of thing: Thus SATAN kept talking to BEELZEBUB, with his Head lifted up above the Waves, and glancing his Eyes from Side to Side: As for his other Parts, he lay extended in a melancholy Condition, floating in Length and Breadth over a vast Space of the Abyss. Another attempt, made in 1773, to render the poem intelligible to "persons of a common Education" was James Buchanan's "First Six Books of Milton's Paradise Lost, rendered into Grammatical Construction; the words of the Text being arranged, at the bottom of each page, in the same natural Order with the Conceptions of the mind; and the Ellipsis properly supplied, without any Alteration in the Diction of the Poem," this is but a third of the complete title! John Gillies's edition of the poem, "illustrated with Texts of Scripture," published in 1788 and reprinted in 1793, affords a further indication of the number of readers who associated Milton, not with 1 Extract from P. L. (1791). In the first book alone such omissions amount to over 220 lines, and include many of the finest passages. A similar free use of the scissors reduces the first five lines of the second book to "High on a throne, Satan exalted sat." A New Version of the P. L., in which the Measure and Versification are corrected and harmonized, the Obscurities elucidated, and the Faults removed [book i only], Oxford, 1756 (said to be the work of G. S. Green). The State of Innocence and Fall of Man, render'd into Prose, with notes from the French of Raymond de St. Maur, "by a Gentleman of Oxford," 1745. At least two prose versions of Paradise Regained were also published, one in 1771 (The Recovery of Man) and the other with Paradise Lost in 1775. 4 Page 11; cf. P. L., i. 192–6. Shakespeare and Spenser, but with Bunyan, Fox, and Watts; for the notes consist simply of passages from the Bible. Even so late as 1830 there appeared in Portland, Maine, the Story of Paradise Lost for Children, an innocuous work of the old Sunday-school-library type which has fortunately passed away. The "story," with many quotations from the original, some of considerable length, is drawn from "Mamma," who talks like a rhetoric, by Eliza, Emily, and William, children of awful goodness and wisdom, all under eleven years of age! Through such paraphrases as these Milton reached a class of persons who read little poetry of any sort and none of the rank of an epic, yet some of whom must have been attracted from the prose versions to the original. The extent of the influence exerted in this way cannot be measured, but no doubt it was in part due to these prose renderings that Paradise Lost was thought to have "contributed more to support the orthodox creed, than all the bodies of divinity that were ever written." 2 But there were reasons other than the religious why Milton's poetry roused more enthusiasm in the days of Pope and of the Wartons than it does now. For one thing, it was much more of a novelty: the dew of its morning was still upon it. Not, of course, that Paradise Lost was new at any time in the eighteenth century; but it was different, people had not become accustomed to it, and in consequence it had not sunk into the position of respected neglect occupied by most classics. Even late in the century a first reading of it often had something of the thrill of discovery. This difference between Milton's work and that of other poets impressed the neo-classicists strongly because their literature, both what they wrote and what they read, was in almost every respect far less like Paradise Lost than ours is. To be sure, Milton's poetry resembles that of the Elizabethans, but about most of this earlier verse his readers knew little and cared less. What struck them as particularly different from their own work was the daring wildness of the epic. It was "read by all sorts of people . . . for its extravagance," we are told. Such terms as "magnificently wild," a "genius 1 By Eliza W. Bradburn. 2 Mo. Rev., enl. ed., 1792, ix. 5 (Good, p. 220). Cf. Huxley's remark apropos of the notion that the universe was suddenly created from chaos: "I believe it is largely to the influence of that remarkable work [Paradise Lost] . . . that this hypothesis owes its general wide diffusion" ("Lectures on Evolution," 1876, in Science and Hebrew Tradition, N. Y., 1894, p. 52). ... 3 R. Potter, Art of Criticism (1789), 185. Philip Neve (Cursory Remarks on English Poets, 1789, p. 141) praises “the terror excited by the sublimity" of Milton's "design." The wildness and extravagance of the epic had impressed people from the first; it was on this account that Addison devoted his Spectator papers to proving the regularity of the poem. |
