Heavenly muse

PEOPLE quail slightly at the thought of John Milton: the Latin, the theology, the school memories of “Paradise Lost”—there is something inhospitable about it all. A scholar himself, Milton seems to belong to scholars and teachers. Very little is known about his private life. There is a haunting sonnet to a dead wife, but he wrote nothing else about any of his three wives, two of whom died soon after giving birth, nor about his three daughters, nor even about his dead infant son. Anna Beer, in this fair-minded and scholarly biography, cannot disguise her frustration. Could he even have erased them from the record, she wonders, as “beneath his notice”?

Milton, who was born 400 years ago this year, saw himself as a man set apart. Born into an upwardly mobile family, Cambridge educated, trained to dispute in Latin, he seemed cut out for academia, the church or the law. Instead, he saved himself for poetry, with a reading programme and an eye on immortality. He wanted to be the national voice of England, no less. But it wasn't until he was blind and in his 50s that he embarked on “Paradise Lost”, his great epic about the fall of man, about good and evil, reason, free will and authority, which would indeed immortalise him.

What happened in between was England's own fall—its descent, in the 1640s, into civil war and a kind of politics driven by just those philosophical and moral questions. This is the heart of Ms Beer's book, the aspect that brings the reader closest to the man. The bitter dispute between king and parliament about the nature of good government exploded in a storm of ephemeral pamphlets furiously arguing and counter-arguing.

With the fate of the nation at stake, this was Milton's moment. He piled in with pamphlets of his own; tracts expressed in a vivid, word-coining, muscular English, at times high-flown, at others colloquial, sometimes downright rude, but always engaged. What fires him is the whole principle of debate, the battle of wits: “Who ever knew Truth put to the worse”, he wrote, “in a free and open encounter.”

“Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind,” Milton once wrote. It expresses the principle behind his attacks on all the intellectual oppressions of his day, on church dogma, on censorship and monarchical absolutism. And it led, ultimately, to his pamphlet in support of the regicides. Milton was no saintly liberal. His divorce tracts, written when his first wife temporarily left him, are tainted by self-regarding sophistry. He wasn't above working as official censor to the Commonwealth and he failed to question the standard misogyny of the day. Ms Beer makes no apology for him—though she does her best to soften the charge of misogyny in his treatment of Eve in “Paradise Lost”.

Ms Beer roots Milton in his period very well, both historically and physically—in the streets of booksellers and printing presses around St Paul's cathedral in London, near where he lived. But with the restoration of King Charles II, he did become a lonely figure: refusing to flee, suffering arrest and imprisonment, and continuing to tackle the grand questions of life and destiny. Despite her frustrations, Ms Beer clearly admires him, and one can't help doing so too.