46. Douglas Bush, Paradise Lost in Our Time: Some Comments
In this book Dr Bush publishes his Messenger Lectures of 1944. It is packed with good meat, and its zest and wit (do not miss the excellent application of Johnson's ‘Was ever poet so trusted before?’ on p. 9) are a pleasing proof that the author's spirit has not been broken by his late gigantic labours for the Oxford History of English Literature.
Dr Bush's first chapter is (almost inevitably) devoted to an account of that controversy which at present divides opinion about Milton in England. He both summarises and contributes. Of his contribution, since I am myself on his side, I cannot claim to be a neutral judge. If I wished any points added to his summary (and especially for the benefit of his American audience) they would be these. (1) That Dr Leavis, for fidelity of observation and consistency of thought, is in a different class from the other Miltonoclasts. You may disagree with his judgement, but he keeps his eye on the object and knows exactly what he would be at. Some of his colleagues, in my opinion, do not.
(2) That the debate is not between two, but between three parties. The school of Pearsall Smith and that of Charles Williams are as opposed to one another as either is to that of Dr Leavis. If they find themselves sometimes joining in an attack on the same enemy, this is almost an accident, on noticing that both tend to exclaim fervently haud tali auxilio! On the other hand, Williams and Dr Leavis are united by certain serious demands. I suspect that Milton himself, with his grave Renaissance doctrine of the poet's office, would be equally repelled by the naturalism of Dr Leavis and the aestheticism of Pearsall Smith, thinking the one barbaric and the other frivolous. The conflict is thus extremely complicated, and something more than the reputation of a particular poet is involved. Milton's poetry is, at the moment, a touchstone which reveals divergent tendencies of great importance in our own culture.
The bulk of Dr Bush's literary criticism comes in his third and fourth chapters. The third deals with the ‘characters and drama’ of Paradise Lost, and the fourth examines its ‘poetic texture’ mainly by detailed analysis of particular passages. In such analysis no two critics ever wholly agree, but I have learned much from this chapter. Dr Bush rightly points out how small variations within the self-imposed limits of a stylised art may, in the actual reading, have a value equivalent to that of the most violent and obvious devices in a looser manner. He adds that ‘there are always critics who, seeing the surface of the ocean smooth, take it for a pond’.
The second chapter, on ‘Religious and Ethical Principles’, is the most original in the book. In the attempt to classify Milton's thought Dr Bush goes behind the popular (and perhaps not very useful) antitheses of Puritan and Humanist, or Puritan and Anglican. For him the important contrast is that between thinkers who regard Reason, and thinkers who regard Will, as the basis of Law (whether Divine or human) – if you will, between Rationalists and Dynamists. In Theology the supreme example of Rationalism would be Hooker; his conception of the law of Nature has been characterized by Professor d’Entrèves as implying ‘that this law has a value and a meaning apart from God Himself – licet Deus non esset’.
The extreme instance of Dynamism would be Paley. In Politics the convinced Rationalists (Aristotle and the Scholastics) are few and come only at the peaks of a culture: the Dynamists, from Hobbes to Hitler, are innumerable. Dr Bush's contention is that Milton stood with Hooker and the Cambridge Platonists on the Rationalist side and, like them, based his Theology on the de jure, not the de facto, sovereignty of God. This would put an even sharper chasm than has yet been acknowledged between his thought and that of orthodox Puritanism, which was usually dynamistic and anti-intellectual.
Dr Bush brings evidence to support his view, but his case requires fuller development than the limits of a lecture allowed him to give it. For my own part, I am still only willing to be convinced. Both types of thought seem to be represented in Milton. Nor do I quite understand why Dr Bush thinks it ‘quaint’ (p. 40) that Mr. Murry should bring against Milton charges ‘essentially the same as those brought against Whichcote by his quondam tutor, the Calvinist Anthony Tuckney’. If Milton is really a Rationalist (in the sense defined above) surely this is just what we ought to expect? At no stage in his career has Mr. Murry been a Rationalist in any sense; at no stage would he have been safe among our ancestors from the imputation of ‘enthusiasm’. Nothing can be more alien to most characteristically modern modes of thought – Barthian, Marxist, or Bergsonian-Shavian – than an interest in that which has authority de jure.
English readers will be a little puzzled at the ‘semi-official’ character which Dr Bush attributes to the Oxford Book of Verse (p. 23) and to the Times Literary Supplement (p. 25). Our constitution knows (as yet) no office to which either could be even semi-attached. The statement (p. 39) that for certain seventeenth-century thinkers ‘God and nature are one’, even with the qualification which Dr Bush gives it, seems to me simply false. But no book is without a careless sentence – or, more strictly, no prose book – and we may be grateful for what Dr Bush has given us. My own gratitude takes the form of a wish that he may hereafter deal more fully with some of the points touched on in these lectures.