8 November: Boreham on John Milton

A Princely Poet
This is the anniversary of the death of John Milton. No figure in our literary annals is more familiar than his. We all seem to have watched him as, with seraphic face, he dictates to one or other of his daughters the glowing stanzas that have made his name immortal. Clad in his suit of coarse grey cloth, he sits in summertime among the sweet-smelling flowers of his well-kept garden; whilst in wintertime, garbed in black velvet, he imprisons himself in his dreary chamber, hung with its rusty green tapestry, and wings his inspired fancy on its most audacious flights. His rich auburn hair, which retained something of its gold to the last, falls over his slightly stooping shoulders, setting off a face remarkable for its sweetness, its strength and its serenity. His soft grey eyes give no hint of their sad secret.

Seldom has a man set himself as deliberately as did he to a colossal task, and, with so little encouragement, carried it to its completion. He was a callow youth when he conceived the stupendous project; he was an old man when he rolled up the finished manuscript. In the interval he travelled far, learned much and became engrossed in many cares. But the dream of his boyhood was never forgotten. Like the Temple, erected without beat of hammer or clink of trowel, the glorious work was silently growing in the poet's soul. He brooded upon it in secret; his masterpiece was always at the back of his mind. "You ask me," he writes as a young fellow in the twenties, "what I am thinking about. Why, with God's help, immortality! Forgive the word. I only whisper it in your ear. Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight!" He felt that there was no hurry. He allowed his earliest conceptions to simmer in his mind. He exposed his plastic fancy to the moulding influence of great events. And a moment's reflection will show that the events of his time were by no means lacking in impressiveness and grandeur.

The Laureate Of A National Transformation
Milton was only seven when Shakespeare died. He was ten when Sir Walter Raleigh was executed. He was twelve when the Mayflower sailed. His youthful enthusiasms were awakened by the tumult of thought that swept the scientific world as a result of the sensational discoveries of Harvey and of Kepler. Much of "Paradise Lost" was written whilst London was being decimated by the Great Plague, and it was amidst the charred ruins of the metropolis that he handed the manuscript to his publisher. He lived through the whole of the Civil War. He mingled freely with the principal actors in those stormy and dramatic scenes. He saw the rise and fall of the Commonwealth, the execution of the King and the death of Cromwell. The pulsations of such momentous happenings stirred the deepest emotions of a singularly sensitive and impressionable spirit; they inscribed themselves indelibly upon his memory; and, taking to themselves weird and fantastic shapes, they wove themselves into the splendid fabric of his priceless epic. For the poem that reads like a story of war among archangels is, in actual fact, the transfigured record of a war among Englishmen.

Milton was the loneliest man of his time, just as, through all the ages, he takes his place as the most solitary figure in either history or fiction. He stands altogether detached, an arresting and pathetic personality. "He dwelt apart," as Wordsworth puts it in his fine apostrophe:—

Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way.

He married three times, and each of his wives regarded his insatiable penchant for composition as a tiresome mania. Even his daughters felt the boredom of his everlasting dictation to be intolerable. And when at last his ponderous manuscript was complete, nobody saw anything in it. Pitying his sightlessness, an enterprising publisher gave him five pounds for the copyright, promising him another five if, by any strange chance, the work reached a second edition.

The Singer Of The Centuries Unborn
On the appearance of the poem the critics surveyed the vast array of incomprehensible stanzas and shook their heads. Edmund Waller, the poet, was then in the heyday of his popularity. "The old schoolmaster, John Milton," wrote Waller, "hath published a tedious poem on the Fall of Man; if its length be not considered a merit, it hath no other." But John Milton was not writing for the likes of Edmund Waller. Waller belonged to Grub Street; Milton belonged to the Seraphim and Cherubim. Milton felt in his bones that he was creating treasure that would be prized when Waller was forgotten. Mark Rutherford declares that, a thousand years hence, a much better estimate of Milton will be possible than that which can be formed today. John Milton had a tryst to keep with the immortals, and it mattered very little to him what the seventeenth century had to say about it. Even in our own time, Milton is rather revered than loved. We never become intimate with him. But we feel at the same time that, by the purity of his personality and the august sweep of his influence, our literature and our history have been incalculably enriched.

During three momentous centuries Milton has slowly but surely grown upon the imaginations of men. He is more reverenced every year. To tear him from our annals and traditions would be to create an aching void that could never by any possibility be filled. "Never," as Dr Garnett once said, "never, before or since has such a splendid figure crossed the broad stage of English public life. He is the Sir Galahad of literature—born a knight."

There are men who stand aside from the period which happens to give them birth. Their genius is embarrassing, majestic, terrifying. The world holds aloof from them. They are the citizens, not of an age, but of the ages. And the ages, quick to identify their own, hail them, applaud them, crown them. Of such stately and deathless spirits, John Milton is the supreme and peerless representative.

F W Boreham

Image: John Milton