For all these reasons – and no doubt for many more – a determined attempt was made not so long ago to demote Milton, to remove him from the canon. We forget to-day how near it came to success. ‘Milton’s dislodgment, in the past decade, after his two centuries of predominance, was effected with remarkably little fuss.’ So F. R. Leavis wrote, triumphantly if prematurely, in 1936.2 In 1956 the volume of the Penguin Guide to English Literature which succeeded The Age of Chaucer and The Age of Shakespeare was not called The Age of Milton but From Donne to Marvell. The chapter devoted to ‘Milton’s religious verse’ was not enthusiastic.
As late as 1968 W. R. Parker wrote ‘after having disliked Milton’s ideas for three centuries, while admiring his poetry, the English have finally decided … that the poetry too is bad’3 – a statement even more astonishing for what it says about the countrymen of Blake and Shelley, Wordsworth and the Chartists, than for its finality about the present. It is historically quite untrue, but indicative of the success of the propaganda of those whom William Empson calls the ‘neo-Christians’. Fortunately these were not united in their strategy. Over against those who tried to dismiss Milton were others, less politically shrewd perhaps, who with C. S. Lewis at their head believed that they could annex Milton for ‘orthodoxy’. In Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) the poet is represented as a traditional authoritarian who can be used to rebuke the sinful modern world. Eliot himself on second thoughts joined in the game of salvaging as much of Milton as possible for ‘orthodoxy’. It was part of a movement, now one hopes defunct, which saw Shakespeare as a propagandist of something called ‘Christian humanism’, defender of a hierarchical society, and Milton as the product of ‘the Christian tradition’.
It is, in my view, quite wrong to see Milton in relation to anything so vague and generalized as ‘the Christian tradition’. He was a radical Protestant heretic. He rejected Catholicism as anti-Christian: the papist was the only heretic excluded from his wide tolerance. Milton shed far more of mediaeval Catholicism than did the Church of England. His great theological system, the De Doctrina Christiana, arose by a divorcing command from the ambiguous chaos of traditional Christianity.1 Milton rejected the Trinity, infant baptism and most of the traditional ceremonies, including church marriage; he queried monogamy and believed that the soul died with the body. He cannot reasonably be claimed as ‘orthodox’.
Demotion is now impossible. Since Christopher Ricks’s Milton’s Grand Style (1963) routed the Leavisites, Milton’s poetical reputation stands to-day as high as ever. Yet Milton needs to be defended from his defenders almost more than from the declining band of his enemies. There is the immensely productive Milton industry, largely in the United States of America, a great part of whose vast output appears to be concerned less with what Milton wrote (still less with enjoyment of what Milton wrote) than with the views of Professor Blank on the views of Professor Schrank on the views of Professor Rank on what Milton may or may not have written. Milton has been described as ‘the poet of scholars and academic critics’ – no longer either a people’s poet or a poet’s poet.2 What a fate for the arch-enemy of academic pedantry: better dead than buried alive, surely!
Yet how far is Milton read with enjoyment by ordinary people? On the one hand there are those who would persuade us that we must swallow Milton’s theology whole if we are to appreciate his poetry; on the other are those who, in the hope of getting the young to read him, tell us that we must forget that he was a ‘Puritan’ and a classical scholar, things which no one can take seriously in the late twentieth century. We must somehow let the poetry speak to us directly, and then all will be well.1 I applaud the intention, but I doubt whether it will succeed, at any rate with the major poems. Milton was not just a fine writer. He is the greatest English revolutionary who is also a poet, the greatest English poet who is also a revolutionary. The poems will not speak for themselves unless we understand his ideas in their context. But the context is historical, and it is very difficult to grasp Milton’s ideas without placing them in relation to those of his contemporaries. That is what I try to do in this book.
It is not then a straightforward biography of Milton. I am arguing a case, and attempting to refute traditional interpretations and assumptions where they appear to conflict with this case. So I must begin by declaring my hand. I believe that Milton’s ideas were more directly influenced than is usually recognized by the events of the English Revolution in which he was an active participant: and that the influences brought to bear on him were much more radical than has been accepted. Some minimum understanding of the world in which Milton acted and wrote is, I think, necessary if we are to appreciate what his poetry is doing.
A long time ago Milton used to be the great ‘Puritan’ poet, with iron-grey homespun clothes and iron-grey homespun character. Critics nagged away at the problem of how a ‘Puritan’ could also be a humanist. Modern studies of Puritanism have abolished this problem by abolishing the killjoy concept of Puritanism: there was nothing abnormal in a seventeenth-century Puritan loving music, song, wine and plays, or defending, as Milton did, elegance, fine clothes, dancing, theatres, bagpipes and fiddles, ale-houses. Passions and pleasures, he declared in Areopagitica, if ‘rightly tempered, are the very ingredients of virtue’.2 Sexual austerity was at least as likely to be associated with Catholicism in seventeenth-century opinion: radical Protestants were thought to be more sexually indulgent.3 Milton was a ‘roundhead’ whose portraits show him with long hair. It was Archbishop Laud who insisted on undergraduates cutting their hair short: long hair luxuriated in Oxford after the victory of the ‘roundheads’. Milton was not unique in choosing as a symbol of strength and virtue the long flowing locks of Samson.1 The stereotype of the dour Puritan seemed applicable to Milton so long as it was believed that he wrote his first divorce pamphlet within a month of marrying Mary Powell. But historical research long ago disproved that myth.
I believe that other problems can be dissolved by a historical approach. Take the question of the sources of Milton’s ideas. Critics obsessed with the poet’s great reputation and great scholarship tend to look exclusively to literary sources for his ideas – to the Greek and Roman classics, to the early Christian Fathers. There are useful works on Milton and Plato, Milton and Origen, Milton and Lactantius. More to my point, there have been studies of Milton and Servetus, Milton and Ochino, Milton and Du Bartas, Milton and Boehme. My not very daring suggestion is that Milton got his ideas not only from books but also by talking to his contemporaries. As Saurat put it, ‘to take up a thread at the beginning of human culture and follow it up till it reaches Milton is a pure illusion, a mere abstract fabrication of the academic mind.’2 It is a prevalent donnish assumption that ideas are transmitted principally by books. But ‘Marxist’ and ‘Freudian’ ideas are held to-day by people who never opened a book by Marx or Freud. How many of those whom we call ‘Arminian’ in seventeenth-century England had read Arminius? Milton had; but his learning was exceptional. Ideas which scholars solemnly trace back to the fifth century B.C. or the third century A.D. were commonplaces to seventeenth-century Baptists, Levellers, Diggers, Seekers, Behmenists, Socinians, Ranters, Muggletonians, early Quakers and other radical groupings which took part in the free-for-all discussions of the English Revolution. The ideas had previously circulated only in the heretical underground: now they could suddenly be freely discussed. Milton celebrated this ferment in Areopagitica. I see him in permanent dialogue with the plebeian radical thinkers of the English Revolution and I see him drawing on the same traditions as they drew on-traditions which include Servetus, Ochino and Boehme, but which also include Hermeticism, whose rediscovery in the fifteenth century gave new life to many ideas from classical antiquity.3
Milton’s relation to this underworld of thought has not yet been properly investigated. Fifty years ago M. Saurat seized on Milton’s radical heresies but put us on the wrong track by attributing them to Jewish sources. We need more specific studies of Milton and his links with this radical background. The best to date is N. T. Burns’s Christian