‘I should not choose this manner of writing’

 As those of you who read my blog will know, my job consists of writing all day, every day. Or at least editing, i.e. researching meaning, selecting little specimens of text and putting them in place, rearranging and deleting, and composing new text. An important part of this consists of correctly interpreting passages of English that have been written at various times during the past 1200 years.

The other day I was engaging with a sentence from John Milton’s polemic Areopagitica — subtitle ‘For the liberty of unlicenc’d printing’ — published in 1644.

Every acute reader upon the first sight of a pedantick licence, will be ready with these like words to ding the book a coits distance from him, I hate a pupil teacher, I endure not an instructor that comes to me under the wardship of an overseeing fist.

 

I put my question (which is of no importance for this blog) to my colleague Andrew, a specialist in seventeenth century literature, and in the course of our email discussion, he remarked that he preferred Milton’s prose writings to his poetry — which, given Milton’s fame for writing Paradise Lost, is quite a thing to say. But when I read this opinion of Andrew’s a light bulb went on in my head. Perhaps Milton, contrary to received opinion, was a greater writer of prose treatises than poetic epics?

 

The thing about Milton is that the language of his poetry is quite dazzling and entrancing. But so, too, is the language of his prose (as witness that marvellous expression above ‘to ding the book a quoit’s distance from him’). As we all know, there are three levels to what we simplistically call writing. At the highest level, there’s the universe of action, whether real or invented, that the writer has to imagine into existence; let’s say, for example, the entire goings-on at the Danish court before, during, and after Hamlet meets his father’s ghost. At level 2, there’s the selection of incidents or sampled experience that the writer picks and crafts and shapes for inclusion in the thing she or he writes; for example, Hamlet contemplating suicide. And at level 3, there are the words the writer uses to present those selected scenes or arguments; as in ‘To be, or not to be’.

 

Now, in Milton’s case, he had no worries about level 1, apart from its scale: he decided to write about 

 

Mans first Disobedience, and the Fruit 

Of that Forbidd’n Tree, whose mortal tast 

Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, 

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man 

Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat.

 

Nor is level 3 a problem for Milton. His style and diction are fabulous, wherever you sample them:

 

His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intranst

Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks

In Vallombrosa, where th’Etrurian shades

High overarcht imbowr.

 

Where I think Milton stumbles is at level 2; and my contention is that he didn’t really have a fictive imagination. There’s no space to make this point properly, and it’s a little bit sweeping, as, for example, his scenes of battle between the angels and devils are terrific. But if you have the temerity to portray God the Father and God the Son in conversation, you need a massive dose of creative thinking, and this is where Milton’s writing, though linguistically still supremely poetic, is imaginatively prosaic in the extreme. I can only give you one example, from Paradise Regain’d Book III, where the Son is made to say:

 

For what is glory but the blaze of fame,

The peoples praise, if always praise unmixt?

And what the people but a herd confus’d,

A miscellaneous rabble, who extoll

Things vulgar.

This is not quite the Saviour we know. Milton himself believed that poetry (and that meant ‘fiction’ at that time) was his calling, and that he wrote his numerous prose treatises purely out of duty, and because the crises through which he lived demanded it: ‘I should not choose this manner of writing, wherein knowing myself inferior to myself, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand’, he said. His poems are delightful for their felicitous verbal clothing, but all too often a prosaic, even plodding, sometimes ridiculous or offensive, body shows through.

So down they sat, And to thir viands fell, nor seemingly 

The Angel, nor in mist, the common gloss 

Of Theologians, but with keen dispatch 

Of real hunger, and concoctive heate 

To transubstantiate.

Yes, angels really eat!

All this goes to show that if the greatest writer can be misled about where their talent lies, we too need to think (and pray) about what kind of writing we are called to do — and whether being a writer is really our calling, or simply the person we’d like to be.

Philologus