Paradise Lost
A Biography
By Alan Jacobs
Princeton, 224 pages, $24.95
I am often afraid to meet an author whose work I love. What if they turn out mean or petty or arrogant? Will it lessen the work? Could I ever read it the same? How do we understand the relation between biography and creation, and can the two ever be separated?
Such questions come to the fore in Alan Jacobs’ marvelous history of Paradise Lost. No one would claim that Milton was a decent chap. Among other offenses, he made his daughters “read to him from texts in foreign languages that they could not understand but had been taught to pronounce.” Milton treated the women of his family as human tools for the advancement of his art. As Samuel Johnson once wrote, “His family consisted of women; and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females, as subordinate and inferior beings.”
Such details dog Paradise Lost. In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), for example, Shirley says to her friend Cary, “Milton was great; but was he good? Milton tried to see the first woman; but, Cary, he saw her not. … It was his cook that he saw.” How much does Milton’s treatment of his family affect his depiction of Eve? And how have women responded?
Virginia Woolf offers one approach: she hated Milton’s Eve and loved his epic. Milton “was the first of the masculinists,” she declares. Yet Paradise Lost stands apart: “What poetry! … I can conceive that this is the essence, of which almost all other poetry is the dilution.” She was, perhaps, a far more generous reader than most. Many sift authors for proper behavior and sort texts for right beliefs, judging artist and artwork together.
Even so, the question of Milton’s beliefs seems appropriate to Paradise Lost. As Jacobs writes, “Milton is passionately concerned to identify certain central beliefs of the Christian faith, to portray them dramatically, and to expose their significance for those of us who live in the aftermath of the Eden story.” The poem may not enhance our devotions (as even C.S. Lewis admitted), but it does transform systematic theology into epic story.
What, then, did Milton believe (about women and all other matters)? It’s hard to say—and always complicated, including his view of women. In one of his many good lines, Jacobs writes, “I think the most accurate thing you can say about Milton’s theology is that he was the first Miltonist.” Milton insisted on discovering the truth through Holy Scripture, searching with no aid of others. That is why Milton swerved through competing orthodoxies. It is also why he often found himself alone.
It takes a certain ego to believe that one can hunt down and catch hold of holy truth by one’s stalwart willpower. Like Ahab’s quest for Moby-Dick, Milton led a monomaniacal, unholy-holy pursuit to “strike through the mask” and harpoon the truth, even if it entailed sinking a ship—or, in his case, the beheading of a king. Milton set out to “justify the ways of God to man.” In that vast struggle, sprawling through twelve books of verse that flesh out three chapters of Scripture, Milton left in his wake a series of poetic lines that even now still move and stir.
The great author Madeleine L’Engle once wrote, “When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist.” Paradise Lost is better than John Milton. “None ever wished it longer than it is,” Samuel Johnson once proclaimed. Maybe so. But which of those resonant, deep, perceptive lines would an editor ever dare cut to make it shorter?
If we live in the shadow of Eden’s loss and look toward a future won but not yet come, we wander in the wake of Paradise Lost. And we would do well, sometime in all our wanderings, to walk through the lines of that epic poem and dwell with Milton’s depiction of our state. In all that wrangling beauty, something still strikes through the mask and leaves a mark.
Abram Van Engen is the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.
