Tea at Trianon: The Two John Miltons

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, January 14, 2022

The Two John Miltons

From LitHub:

There have always been two John Miltons. The prophet and the scholar; the radical and the know-it-all. In fact that’s not quite true, or at least it’s somewhat too simple. Better to say that, since I first read Paradise Lost and began to think about his poetry, I have had these two John Miltons in mind. I don’t necessarily love or like or admire or respect one of them, the prophet or the scholar, more than the other, and I don’t exactly find it easier to imagine one than the other, though I do have times and moods when one dominates and distracts me from his curious doppelgänger. I don’t want to let go of either of them, and yet I have no idea how to keep them together—whether to place them side by side or try to make them occupy the same place in my mind.

Part of the problem with trying to place the two Miltons is that both are, as I find myself imagining them, utterly out of place. Distinct though they are from one another, both are in different ways, to use one of Milton’s own favorite words, transported—literally carried beyond the confines of themselves, whether by divine forces or by bubblings of recollection. Seated at home in their respective chairs in the Buckinghamshire village of Chalfont St. Giles, whether sleeping or waking, the two Miltons are at the same time profoundly displaced, exploring the realms of inspiration or of memory. And, if the two Miltons are in different ways both in and out of place, they are no less in and out of time: on the one hand quite precisely located, at this point, in the mid-1660s; on the other hand, locked in ecstatic communion with somewhen else altogether—with the remembered past, with the words of ancient writers dead for centuries, or with the timeless and eternal Divine.

How to understand, or write about, a life divided in this way? Is it possible to write a biography of these various Miltons? Conventional wisdom would say no: if an account of a life should stick to its known or sensibly inferred facts, then the facts of Milton’s life are well-documented, unusually interesting, and have often been related. Already in 1779, just over a century after Milton’s death, Samuel Johnson felt compelled to begin his rather bad-tempered and brilliantly readable biography by admitting that “[t]he life of Milton has already been written in so many forms, and with such minute enquiry,” that he wondered whether he might limit himself to “the addition of a few notes” to these previous biographies rather than writing his own from scratch. If this was true in 1779 then it is truer still nearly two and a half centuries later, with every aspect of Milton’s life and the traces he left having been meticulously pored over.

If Milton seems like a dream for a biographer, it is partly because—unlike the protean and elusive Shakespeare—he is so prominently and obviously in his works. When, in Paradise Lost, the narrator places himself “In darkness, and with dangers compassed round, / And solitude,” surely we can only understand these lines if we know that “darkness” refers to Milton’s own blindness, and that “dangers” reflect the genuine peril in which he was placed by the restoration to the throne of King Charles II, whose father’s execution Milton had thunderously justified in public. (Read more.)