Milton Agonistes

MILTON AND His MODERN CRITICS--Logan Pearsall Smifh--Little, Brown ($1.50).

Milton and His Modern Critics is a little (87-page) book by a critic whom people are beginning to read more & more, about a poet whom people have been reading less & less. Had Milton known that Logan Pearsall Smith would one day defend him, he would probably have cried again: "Avenge O Lord thy slaughter'd Saints." A defense by the dilettante author of Trivia, More Trivia and All Trivia could seem scarcely less incongruous to the author of Paradise Lost than the Restoration.

Logan Pearsall Smith is a New Jersey-born expatriate of the first diaspora (circa 1880). Smith does not like expatriates of the second dispersion. Least of all does he like their chief anti-Miltonians, Expatriates Ezra Pound and Thomas Stearns Eliot. They, he charges, are Delilahs in a cunning campaign to shear the literary locks of the Puritan poetic Samson. Once more Smith raises the now famous question: Why does Ezra Pound?

Smith thinks it has something to do with Ezra's origins. His arch account of Pound's advent in England is almost stage-British: "The first of these Conquistadors to arrive . . . brought with him indeed little beyond an immense self-confidence in his own talents, and an equally immense contempt for those of other writers. . . . His name was Ezra Pound. Though born as late as 1885, his birthplace, like that of Homer, is a matter of dispute. ... I have seen Montana mentioned, and also Idaho. The state of Idaho has, I believe, the stronger claim. There is a story . . . that this youngster from the Wild West made his first English appearance wearing a large cowboy hat, and flourishing in his hand a cowboy whip, which he would crack to emphasize his remarks."

Though also born in "the Wild West" (i.e., St. Louis), T. S. Eliot is treated with more respect--the respect due a scholar and a man who for nine years held a position in Lloyd's Bank. Of The Waste Land Smith observes that "in addition to this form of a literary medley, Eliot seems to have caught from Pound [a] morbid preoccupation with squalor.-" But he agrees with "the best of all living American critics" (Edmund Wilson) that "Eliot, in ten years' time, has left upon English poetry a mark more unmistakable than that of any other poet writing English."

Pound has never minced words about Milton. He dislikes the Puritan epicist for "his asinine bigotry, his beastly hebraism, the coarseness of his mentality." Says Smith, "Mr. Eliot is far too urbane to express his disapproval in such Miltonic terms," but he too carries on a "deft, inconspicuous sniping," has mentioned Dryden as being "far below Shakespeare, and even below Milton." "Note," cries vigilant Defender Smith, "the tiny drop of poison in the phrase . . . 'even Milton.' "

But Pound and Eliot are not the only anti-Miltonians. There are also Middleton Murry, Herbert Read, Bonamy Dobree. Against their stock charges of Milton's logorrhea, his maulings of English syntax, his Puritan intolerance, his philosophic narrowness. Defender Smith has a pat answer -- "Not the thing said makes poetry, but a way of saying it." Milton "is world-great," says Smith quoting Carlyle on Dante, "not because he is worldwide, but because he is world-deep."

Because he keeps his finger pointed to this decisive depth, Logan Pearsall Smith's little book may well point the way to a new appreciation of Milton. The test of the greatness of nations, as of individuals, is the strength they discover in themselves only in their moments of great peril. The test of the richness of literatures is to have recorded in their pasts forgotten voices that give powerful expression to new needs. Milton is such a voice, as Wordsworth discovered during the Napoleonic crisis: "Milton! thou should' st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee!" History is again making Milton a modern. His voice, too loud, too austere, too commanding for workaday use, has become the tone in which troubled men think.

Something indomitable stirs in every human spirit at the thought of the old fighter for freedom -- his life threatened, his work undone -- dictating in blindness to his dull daughters the wisdom of his total defeat: What in me is dark Illumine, what is low raise and support ; That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men.

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