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The Function of the Prologues in Paradise Lost

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2021

John S. Diekhoff
John S. Diekhoff*
Affiliation:
Queens College
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Extract

It was Milton's habit in his controversial prose to write at considerable length about himself. This habit has been cited often enough as proof of his arrogance, his pride, his self-concern. No doubt it is. There is a great deal of self-concern, and some arrogance, in Milton. But if he liked to write of himself, he made good use of the liking—a use which he explains among other places in the Apology for Smectymnuus:

. . . I conceav'd my selfe to be now not as mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was perswaded, and whereof I had declar'd openly to be a partaker. Whereupon I thought it my duty, if not to my selfe, yet to the religious cause I had in hand, not to leave on my garment the least spot, or blemish in good name so long as God should give me to say that which might wipe it off.1

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 1942 , pp. 697 - 704
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1942

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References

Notes

1 The Works of John Milton, edited by Frank A. Patterson and others (New York, 1931-38), iii, i, 284. Reference hereafter will be made to “Columbia Milton.”

2 Columbia Milton, iii, i, 296-297.

3 Columbia Milton, xii, 119. Translation by T. O. Mabbott and Nelson McCrea.

4 Lane Cooper, The Rhetoric of Aristotle (New York, 1932), p. 9.

5 Columbia Milton, iii, i, 287.

6 In a letter to Henry DeBrass. Columbia Milton, xii, 93. Masson's translation.

7 The parallel with the description of Satan's eloquence (P.L. i, 529) is obvious. The falsity of the speeches of the rebel angels is more than rhetorical in any narrow sense of the word. Their evil counsel springs from their own evil. Not even Beelzebub is evil enough to father the plan adopted in the council of the second book. It comes from Satan,

for whence

But from the father of all ill could spring

So deep a malice? (ii, 380-382).

8 Columbia Milton, iii, i, 303. Miss Ida Langdon, Milton's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (New Haven, 1924), pp. 174-175, brings together passages from Strabo and Longinus, and ancients less explicit than they, as background for this opinion, and cites Ben Jonson to show its currency in the English Renaissance. See also D. L. Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance (New York, 1922), pp. 159-160.

9 The passage is given its final interpretation by Professor Greenlaw, “A Better Teacher than Aquinas,” SP, xiv (1917), 196-217.

10 Columbia Milton, iii, i, 237.

11 In the same passage in Areopagitica. Columbia Milton, iv, 311.

12 Columbia Milton, iii, i, 239.

13 E. M. W. Tillyard, Milton (London, 1934), pp. 237-256.

14 Op. cit., pp. 248-252.

15 Op. cit., p. 245.

16 The claim of divine guidance is a common one in the prose, where it is obviously ethical proof. Even in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton claims it, arguing that it cannot be explained on any other principle that two champions of “domestic freedom” (himself and Martin Bucer) should have been independently raised up for the instruction of Englishmen.