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The Historical Criticism of Milton
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
As i understand the assignment given to me, it is to suggest a definition and defence of Historical Criticism as applied to Milton, while Mr. Brooks is to tell us how the New Criticism (as it is called) would deal with the poet. So short a time has elapsed since Mr. Eliot took down the sign reading “No Thoroughfare,” and directing an elaborate detour around Milton, that Mr. Brooks enjoys, I imagine, a freedom from embarrassing examples, which I can only envy. Again, he has at command a growing body of theory; for the New Critics have been concerned to provide their own dialectic, whereas historical students of literature have tended to work by a silent instinct of accumulation like the bee. Obviously, no one can hope to supply in a thirty-minute paper a theory of Historical Criticism, though I shall try to set down a few points towards the formation of such a theory. Nor is it any part of my purpose to attack the New Criticism in its theory or practice. First, because I do not know enough about it, being indeed somewhat in the case of Lord Monboddo. (“Have you read my last book?” asked Lord Kames. “No, my lord,” said Monboddo; “I can't read as fast as you can write.”) But secondly (and seriously) because we have had enough, I think, of mutual recrimination, and it is time for each side to make plain, without polemics, what it can do for the elucidation of Milton, in the hope that students who care more for literature than for labels may find something of use to them in both schools. For criticism, of whatever school, is a means, not an end; and the test to be applied to it is purely pragmatic: Does it or does it not throw new light on, or minister to an understanding of, the work or the author under examination? By that test alone it must stand or fall.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1951
Footnotes
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This paper was read before the Milton Group of the Modern Language Association of America on 28 December 1950. It was followed by a paper on “Milton and Critical Re-estimates” by Cleanth Brooks.—ED.
References
Note 1 in page 1038 Those of William Haller, Arthur Barker, Merritt Y. Hughes, Arnold Williams, and a host of others.
Note 2 in page 1041 In his “Criticism and Literary History,” Sewanee Rev., LV (1947), 199–222.
Note 3 in page 1043 “The Light Symbolism in ‘L'Allegro-Il Penseroso,‘ ” in The Well Wrought Urn (1947), pp. 47–61. I remarked above, “Whatever may be said of other poets, Milton's aesthetic patterns rely on a foundation, or rather perhaps a framework, of conceptual thought, and they cannot be elucidated without reference to it.” This suggests a reservation which must not be overlooked. The method of analysis employed by the New Criticism appears to consist in a frontal attack on the imagery of the poem, with little or no attention to its theme as presented in action or argument. Applied to imagist verse, this method, corresponding to the intention of the poet, will yield whatever is to be discovered. Applied to poetry such as Milton's, it will, by itself, yield only results which, however valuable, are secondary and supplemental. This limitation, as it seems to me, is illustrated both in Mr. Brooks's essay on V'Allegro and 77 Penseroso and in the part of his paper dealing with the image of “the fruit of the tree of Knowledge” in Paradise Lost. For, Dr. Tillyard to the contrary notwithstanding, the theme of L'Allegro and II Penseroso is not day and night, but two contrasting ways of life, or two moods, as the titles indicate; day and night enter the poems because of the temporal sequence in which Milton has found his structural pattern; the images of light and darkness do not reveal the theme, but they support and supplement it. And so with “the fruit of the tree of Knowledge”: everything that Mr. Brooks says of it may well be true, and (if true) illuminating. (Indeed an historical critic would find confirmation in Bacon's “philosophy of fruits,” with which Milton must have been familiar.) But the suggestions conveyed by this image—one among many—are secondary and supplemental to Milton's theme of the Fall and his central interpretation thereof. The role of imagery in Milton would appear to be twofold: to support the main theme presented in action or argument, but also to supplement it by other and not inconsistent suggestions, and thereby to give the poem that density and richness of suggestion which differentiates it from any mere summary of its theme, as revealed through action, argument, or structural pattern. When this relation is recognized, the technique of the New Criticism in exploring Milton's imagery seems to me of the highest value, and exemplary.