chapter I
judge that we here begin our long-anticipated debate with H. L. Mencken!”
“No,” replies her husband, “we shall hew to the line of John Milton; but of course, if one of the chips happens to hit Mencken in the eye--”
“He will let us know,” says Mrs. Ogi.
“First we have to have some of the despised sociology. We have to mention that human institutions arise, and serve their day, and then degenerate. The shell which at one time protects the crab becomes an encumbrance and has to be split and cast off. The English monarchy once served to break the power of the rebellious nobles, and to give the country unity; but now came Parliament, pushing the kings aside. The people who brought about that change were the Puritans: and for a century they represented such freedom of conscience and freedom of intellect as England had. Incidentally, they settled the North American continent, cleared out the savages, and made a civilization. We owe them more than we owe to any other single group; and if nowadays we identify Puritanism with the Society for the Prevention of Vice, we shall be just as narrow and as bigoted as Anthony Comstock himself.”
Says Mrs. Ogi: “There goes a chip straight for Mencken’s eye!”
The society in which John Milton grew up was very much like the Harding-Coolidge era which we know. There was the same raffish crew in control of government, selling everything in sight, and trampling civil rights. Men were thrown wholesale into prison, they were beaten and tortured for their opinions’ sake. A small handful stood out, and suffered martyrdom; they appealed to the public, and the public seemed dead and indifferent--exactly as it seems today.
John Milton had a fortunate and happy youth. His father was prosperous, and gave his son the best guidance and education. At Christ’s College they called the boy “the lady,” because he was beautiful and refined. He returned to his father’s home to live a life of quiet study, and to write poems of imperishable beauty. If “art for art’s sake” degenerates care to know how poetry can have all the graces and sensuous charms, and still be clean, they are referred to these early poems of the young English Puritan. It is worth while to point out explicitly how little his creed meant narrowness and contempt for art. All that came later, as a result of the civil war. But Milton in his youth acquired all the culture of his time; he was a thorough-going humanist, personally graceful and attractive; he traveled in Italy and met the leading men of his age, including the old blind Galileo, who had been forced under threat of torture to recant his belief that the earth moves around the sun.
The efforts of the most Catholic King Charles I to break the parliament of England brought Milton home from Italy. The parliament resisted, and civil war broke out, and he put aside his poetry and teaching, and plunged into the work of saving free government. Even today we find leisure-class critics bewailing the fact that a great poet should have wasted himself in a political career. But I venture the opinion that John Milton has given us more great poetry than we take time to appreciate; and it was worth while also to give us a life, and demonstrate that a poet can be a man.
For twenty years John Milton was the world voice of the Republican cause. In order to defend it he made himself master of the finest English prose style known up to that time. He defended his cause also in Latin, in French, and in Italian; he defended it so well that it now prevails over most of the world, and so we fail to realize what it seemed in the poet’s day. The parliamentary army met the king in battle, and took him prisoner, held him for three years, and then, because of his infinite and incurable treachery, tried him and cut off his head. To the orthodox respectability of the seventeenth century this was the most horrible thing that had happened since the crucifixion of Christ.
You know how Bolsheviks and Socialists are reputed to practice free love, and worse yet, to preach it. John Milton was that kind of wicked person, also. He married a giddy young Royalist wife, and she left him; whereupon he wrote two pamphlets in favor of divorce. When he could not get permission to print such diabolical documents, he printed them without license; and when he was attacked for this, he published another pamphlet, maintaining the unthinkable theory that men should be free to print what they pleased. I have seen, within a few miles of my own home, bookstores and printing offices raided, and their contents smashed and burned, both by mobs and by officers of the law; I have seen one of my friends fined thirty thousand dollars for publishing a book in favor of the atrocious idea that human beings should not shed one another’s blood; so I believe that I can understand how this Puritan poet was regarded by the cultured world of his time.
He was a grim fighter. It was the fashion in those days to abuse your opponents, and Milton gave as good as he got. People who think that Upton Sinclair is too personal in his controversial writing--
“Won’t think it any the less because he compares himself with Milton!” says Mrs. Ogi. “Go on with your story.”
So her husband confines his statement to the fact that Milton never engaged in a fight except for human liberty. At the crisis of his country’s peril he was told he had abused his eyes, and that if he did not rest them, he would go blind. He wrote another pamphlet in defense of his cause, thus deliberately sacrificing his sight in the effort to save the republican government. The sacrifice was in vain, for Cromwell died, and the government went to pieces, and the raffish rout came back; “bonnie Prince Charlie,” lecherous, treacherous and vile, with all his herd of noble plunderers. John Milton, foreign secretary out of a job, went into hiding, and his books were burned by the public hangman; later he was arrested and fined--they would have liked to have the hangman deal with him also, but did not quite dare.
However, he lost most of his property; and there he was, old, blind and helpless--his very daughters caught the spirit of the new time, and stole his books and sold them to gratify their own desires. That is what happens to men who consecrate their art to a cause; and somehow they have to rise above such circumstances, maintain the supremacy of the human spirit, “and justify the ways of God to man.”
The psychoanalysts have made us familiar with the word “sublimation.” Without ever hearing the word, John Milton proceeded to sublimate his sufferings and his balked hopes into one of the greatest of the world’s poems. The first point to get clear about this poem is that it was a piece of propaganda, pure and simple, deliberately so made. Beauty and culture and charm--these things John Milton had known, and in his bitter old age he did not forget them; but the task to which he now set himself was the same task as Dante’s to explain the universe and its divine governance.
The epic of English Puritanism has never won its due recognition abroad; the Continental critics have given preference to Byron, who was also a rebel, but a man of the world, a lover, and a lord. Albert Mordell of course includes “Paradise Lost” among his “waning classics”; he has an easy time pointing out the absurdities of its theology, and argues that the interest of the poem is bound up with these. For my part I say about it what I said about Dante; some of its propaganda is out of date, and some of it will be out of date when men cease to consecrate their lives to ends greater than themselves.
It is interesting to note how the spirit of Milton broke the fetters of his theology. According to that theology Satan was the father of evil, and there was no excuse for him; he had rebelled against a heavenly king who was all-wise and all-good. But Milton also had rebelled against a king, and could not forget the feeling; he poured his own revolt into the speeches of Satan, making him the most interesting character in the poem.
If you live in New York or visit there, you may see in the public library a painting of Milton as he sat in his home, dictating “Paradise Lost.” We have a description from the pen of a visitor; it was a poor little house, with only one room to the floor, and the poet sat in a chair, in a rusty black suit, old and blind, pale and tormented with rheumatism. Ten pounds he got for England’s great epic, and thirteen hundred copies of it were sold during his lifetime. Yet his spirit never wavered, and he lived to write “Samson Agonistes,” a drama in the Greek style, neglected by the critics. As a rule there is nothing more futile than imitations of outworn art forms; but once in a while it happens that a man lives the old life, and can write in the old manner. Milton writes a Greek drama about a Jewish strong man--and it turns out to be a picture of the poet’s own soul at bay!
Having praised Milton highly in this chapter, I recall my opening statement as to the superiority of present-day technique. You will expect me to justify this, and an interesting opportunity presents itself here. In 1655 occurred a massacre of Swiss Protestants by Italian Catholics under the Duke of Savoy. Milton, being then in office as foreign secretary, wrote a sonnet voicing his indignation. It is rated by critics as one of the greatest of English sonnets. For your convenience I quote it:
ON THE LATE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT
Avenge, O Lord! thy slaughter’d Saints, whose bones Lie scatter’d on the Alpine mountains cold; Even them who kept Thy truth so pure of old When all our fathers worshipt stocks and stones. Forget not: In Thy book record their groans Who were Thy sheep, and in their ancient fold Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that roll’d Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans The vales redoubled to the hills, and they To Heaven. Their martyr’d blood and ashes sow O’er all the Italian field, where still doth sway The triple Tyrant, that from these may grow A hundred-fold, who, having learnt Thy way, Early may fly the Babylonian woe.
Francis Turner Palgrave, named by Tennyson as the best judge of poetry of his time, says in the notes to his “Golden Treasury”: “this ‘collect in verse,’ as it has been justly called, is the most mighty Sonnet in any language known to the Editor.” So you see, we are setting a high standard. What modern work shall we compare with it?
In the year 1914 there occurred in Colorado, in the Rocky Mountains cold, the “Ludlow massacre” of the wives and children of miners on strike. It caused a demonstration in front of the office of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., at 26 Broadway, New York, about which you may read in “The Brass Check.” A young poet who happened at that time to be my secretary, and who has since made a success as a novelist, was moved by these events to write a sonnet, which I sent to the Scripps newspapers, getting for the poet the unprecedented sum of twenty-five dollars. I now quote the sonnet, and invite you to study the two, comparing them by all tests of poetry known to you. I give my own opinion: that in their propaganda impulse these two sonnets are identical; that in simplicity, directness, and fervor of feeling they are as nearly identical as two art works can be; and that in technical skill the modern work is superior.
TO A CERTAIN RICH YOUNG RULER
By Clement Wood
White-fingered lord of murderous events, Well are you guarding what your father gained; With torch and rifle you have well maintained The lot to which a heavenly providence Has called you; laborers risen in defense Of liberty and life, lie charred and brained About your mines, whose gutted hills are stained With slaughter of these newer innocents.
Ah, but your bloody fingers clenched in prayer! Your piety, which all the world has seen! The godly odor spreading through the air From your efficient charity machine! Thus you rehearse for your high rôle up there, Ruling beside the lowly Nazarene!
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