The Book of Lost Books (22 page)

John Milton

{1608–1674}

IN THE SEVENTEENTH century, every poet knew that the deepest honors and highest praises were reserved for the writer capable of producing an epic. Such an endeavor was, in the words of the poet laureate John Dryden, “undoubtedly the greatest work the soul of man is capable to perform,” and, as such, very few examples of it existed. Homer's
Odyssey
and
Iliad
were the source and fount; Virgil's
Aeneid
and Tasso's
Gerusalemme Liberata
the chief tributaries. Although Spenser's
Faerie
Queene
had the scope and length of an epic, it had drifted and meandered too far from the classical precedents to be considered a successor, or a success. The “heroic poem,” to use the language of the time, was at the beginning of the century an unclaimed prize.

John Milton had the ambition, and knew he had the ability, to write an epic. At the age of just seventeen, in his first year at Cambridge, he started a poem entitled “
In quintum novembris,
” which attempted to recast the events of Guy Fawkes's Gunpowder Plot in terms of Virgilian grandeur. Demonic and supernatural figures intervene in contemporary history. Satan himself suggests the treasonous conspiracy to the pope, and the youthful poet, already a committed Protestant, daringly pries into the pontiff's bedroom (“
neque enim secretus adulter / producit
steriles molli sine pellice noctes,
” “for the secret libertine spends no chilly nights without a supple concubine”). Although it begins with invention and flourish, it ends in an oddly offhand manner, with hasty arrests and clichéd celebration. Young Milton could hit, but not hold, the notes.

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 account 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.