“Paradoxical as the remark may appear,…no poet has ever had to struggle with more unfavourable circumstances than Milton.”—Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Milton,” in The History of England From 1485 to 1685 (Folio Society edition)
Macaulay’s bio-critical essay on Milton—whose birth occurred 400 years ago today—provides not only a useful starting point for considering the creator of Paradise Lost, but also the Victorian whose History of England From the Ascension of James II influenced the course of historiography with its discussion of socioeconomic aspects of the past.
You might as well forget all notions of objectivity when reading Macaulay; he’s no more impartial than Bill O’Reilly or Michael Moore (not to mention your average blogger). But once you accept this, you’ll find vigorous and provocative contentions—and sometimes real gold in his conclusions.
Now, when I first read “unfavourable circumstances” in the above quote, I assumed that Macaulay meant the poet’s blindness. And let it be noted that the composition of the 12-book epic poem was an almost superhuman achievement, involving the recitation of 40 lines each morning to an assistant for five years running. (And, when the assistant wasn’t around, Milton is supposed to have groused, “I want to be milked. I want to be milked.”)
But what Macaulay really meant, it turns out, were the advantages that Milton possessed: his considerable education, scholarly bent, and linguistic skill, including with Latin. For a great poet in an enlightened society, Macaulay thought, “must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority.”
It’s hard to read this essay—published in the Edinburgh Review in 1825, one year after the death of Lord Byron, while the influence of the Romantic poets was very much at full tide—and not think that Macaulay might have been talking about the disadvantages that Milton faced for 19th century readers, rather than his own time. For the Romantic movement had made direct, personal expression the center of the poetic experience. The shift in consciousness this produced would have resulted in a retrospective upgrade of the reputation of Milton’s sonnet, “On His Blindness,” but a downgrading of the lofty experiment in blank verse, Paradise Lost.
Macaulay’s biases are transparent, even for those not that familiar with the 17th century—often comically so. It’s obvious from a reading of this that he believes that Oliver Cromwell can do no wrong, even if his followers might (how this occurs, who can say?), and that the age that followed the Protectorate was “the darkest and most disgraceful in the English annals” (how this surpasses the capricious reign of terror of King Henry VIII in his final two decades, or even the Regency era just passed in Macaulay’s own time, marked by a licentious aristocracy, economic unrest, and the madness of King George III, the essayist likewise doesn’t indicate). Milton is the beneficiary of all this.
But the historian has much of interest to say in comparing and contrasting the two poets who have probably influenced the Western consciousness about Hell than any others, Milton and Dante. Without preferring one to the other, he shows how the Italian poet’s Inferno was rendered with extraordinary particularity and even vivid disgust, while the power of Milton’s images “depends less on what they directly represent than on what they remotely suggest.”
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