Footnotes
Dedication
1. The Poetical Works of Milton. The World’s Classics, 1940.
I: Epic Poetry
1. The unpopular passage in P.R. iv, 347 (‘Sion’s songs to all true tasts excelling’) is better understood if we remember that it reflects a literary opinion which Milton had, in some form or other, held all his life.
II: Is Criticism Possible?
1. A Note on the Verse of John Milton. Essays and Studies, Vol . xxi, 1936.
V: The Subject of Primary Epic
1. Rise of the Greek Epic, p. 211.
2. The Heroic Age, p. 34.
VIII: Defence of This Style
1. Those of the goddess Ceremony.
2. ‘We learn how to do things by doing the things we are learning how to do,’ as Aristotle observes (Ethics, II, i).
X: Milton and St. Augustine
1. No doubt, the Saint’s physiology was superficial. I take it that the involuntary salivation of the mouth in the presence of attractive food is an equally good illustration of the disobedience of our members.
XI: Hierarchy
1. Abrabanel, Dialoghi d’Amore. Trans. Friedeburg-Seeley and Barnes under the title Philosophy of Love by Leone Ebreo. Soncino Press, 1937, p. 183.
XII: The Theology of Paradise Lost
1. On this subject the reader should consult Professor Sewell’s admirable Study in Milton’s Christian Doctrine. To note all the minor agreements and differences between Professor Sewell’s view and my own would demand more footnotes than the modest scope of the present chapter justifies.
2. Tetrachordon, Prose Wks., Bohn, Vol. III, p. 331. Professor Saurat regards the doctrine of sexuality in the Divine Life as supplying the ‘meaning’ of this ‘terrible’ passage. Oddly enough, Milton is actually arguing in defence of the non-sexual element in human marriage! His argument is (a) St. Augustine was wrong in thinking that God’s only purpose in giving Adam a female, instead of a male, companion, was copulation. For (b) there is a ‘peculiar comfort’ in the society of man and woman ‘beside (i.e. in addition to, apart from) the genial bed’; and (c) we know from Scripture that something analogous to ‘play’ or ‘slackening the cords’ occurs even in God. That is why the ‘Song of Songs’ describes ‘a thousand raptures . . . far on the hither side of carnal enjoyment’. If Professor Saurat’s ‘sexual character’ of Divine acts is taken literally, the passage in Tetrachordon seems to me to make against him, not for him; if it means merely ‘sexual’ in the sense in which any social intercourse between the sexes which provides a ‘slackening’ or ‘vacancy’ from the tensions of male society is sexual then the ‘terrible’ passage comes down to something which would have startled no nineteenth-century vicarage.
3. The real question between Professor Saurat and Sir Herbert Grierson on this point is whether a sense which contradicts the rest of the poet’s story is more, or less, probable than one that agrees with it.
4. I do not say anything in the text about the fact that P.L. has so few references to the Holy Ghost, because I suppose that no reader of the poem would notice this till it had been pointed out to him or draw any theological inference from it if he did. He is mentioned in the invocation to Book I, and His operations in the Church are dealt with pretty fully in Book XII (484–530). More than this no one would have expected. The Holy Ghost is not matter for epic poetry. We hear very little of Him, or of the Trinity at all, in Tasso.