45. Logan Pearsall Smith, Milton and his Modern Critics
The request that Lewis review Logan Pearsall Smith's Milton and his Modern Critics was timely. Milton had long been one of Lewis's favourite poets, and in Hilary Term 1937 he gave a series of lectures in the Oxford School of English on ‘Milton and the Epic Tradition’. But nothing had intensified Lewis's appreciation of Milton as much as the lectures on Comus his friend, Charles Williams, gave to the University of Oxford in February 1940. Then, about the time Lewis was asked to review Logan Pearsall Smith's book, he was invited to give three talks on Milton to University College in North Wales. The book that resulted from those talks in December 1941 was A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942). In the meantime, Charles Williams included much of his Comus lectures in an introduction to The English Poems of John Milton (1940). When Lewis read that introduction he not only dedicated A Preface to Paradise Lost to Charles Williams, but wrote a dedicatory letter in which he insisted that Williams's introduction amounted to ‘the recovery of a true critical tradition after more than a hundred years of laborious misunderstanding’ (p. v).
The two purposes of this book are to flay alive the critics whom Mr. Pearsall Smith happily calls Miltonoclasts (such as Mr. Eliot and Dr Leavis) and to defend Milton. The flaying alive is well done, if you like that kind of thing; it is the old style of ‘culinary coolness’, and very unlike the spluttering brutality of most modern polemics. But the defence of Milton has made me very uneasy. Dr Leavis attacks Milton from the ground of a poetic theory which makes poetry one of the highest ventures of consciousness in search of its adjustment with reality. Mr. Pearsall Smith, urbane, delicate, and sophisticated, and at bottom (I think) quite sceptical about the possibility of truth and the majesty of moral virtue, admits that ‘what the Muses think is of little interest’ to him, concedes to Miss Macaulay that Milton had an ‘exotic, monstrous mind’, and is satisfied with a defence of Milton which turns on the ‘charm’ and ‘enchantment’ of his words. Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis.
If Mr. Pearsall Smith, to whose books I owe much delight and knowledge, will forgive me for saying so, he is playing straight into his enemies’ hands. If anything could make Dr Leavis more certain that Milton is not a great poet, Mr. Pearsall Smith's book is that thing. His defence would anger the real Milton much more than Dr Leavis's attack. Milton's robust Renaissance theory of poetry is very much closer to Dr Leavis than either of them is to that of Mr. Pearsall Smith. The paradox is that Mr. Pearsall Smith really agrees with Dr Leavis's view of Milton; he thinks that Milton has nothing of real moment to say, and so does Dr Leavis. The only difference is that Mr. Pearsall Smith thinks this doesn't matter.
Compared with a real Miltonist, such as Mr. Charles Williams shows himself to be in his preface to the poet's works in The World's Classics, they are both in the same camp – both people who have simply failed to see what is in Paradise Lost. And there are reasons for avoiding it. In one or other of the ‘states of being’ which it delineates, every reader finds himself; [the one] in which we most commonly find ourselves is indicated by the romantic special pleading for Satan. Of course Satan is like Milton: but equally like Dr Leavis, Mr. Pearsall Smith, Mr. Williams, and myself. Fallen men and fallen angels are very alike. This cosmic coxcomb who ‘thought himself impaired’, this egoist who can never utter ten lines without getting back to himself and his film star's ‘sense of injured merit’, who hardly ever says anything that is quite true, this great sulker with his rants and melodrama and eternal inferiority complex, is simply Everyman in one of his worst moments.
Over against him, as Mr. Williams shows, stands the hierarchical pattern of reality, the dignity and joy of unequal loves, of ruling and obeying, the humility of [a] derived being which knows it is derived and is happy in the fact. For the whole poem is what Mr. Williams would call an ‘appearance of Byzantium’, an assertion of Order, a grand illustration of the speech on ‘Degree’ which Shakespeare put into the mouth of Ulysses. So far from being a remote or ‘escapist’ work it is relevant to every reader at almost every moment.
It would be impertinent to accuse any one contemporary by name of deliberately evading this relevance, but I find it hard to explain the resentment with which Milton is attacked and the almost patronizing fashion in which he is defended except on the hypothesis of a widespread wish not to see what is there. And indeed we all have, if not good, yet cogent, motives for not looking at, say, the war in heaven too steadily: that Satanic ridiculousness at which even Deity must laugh, and that moment (Mr. Williams is very great on this) when the whole world becomes a ‘blaze of eyes’, have a meaning that no one receives without disquiet. Keats was quite right: ‘there is death’ in the poem; death and life, both the fullest sense. All this Dr Leavis and Mr. Pearsall Smith equally ignore. After that, it makes very little difference that one should call Milton a good, and the other, a bad, poet. But it makes some. I think it would be easier for Dr Leavis some day to read Milton aright than for Mr. Pearsall Smith, who thinks he is on Milton's side already. I do not mean to be insolent; but a great matter is at stake.