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XXVIII: Milton as Satirist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

J. Milton French
J. Milton French*
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College
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Extract

He pronounced the letter R (littera canina) very hard—a certaine signe of a satyricall witt—from John Dreyden. Extreme pleasant in his conversation, and at dinner, supper, etc.; but satyricall. MANY people still picture John Milton as a forbidding Puritan, dividing his time about equally between hounding his poor daughters and lifting his soul in ecstatic, mystic raptures to the tremendously imposing Jehovah of his poems. They remember with some disdain his pride in his studiousness, his temperance, his chastity, and other not so popular virtues. Hence they are unfair and myopic. We have no right to belittle Milton's essential humanity. His soul was not always like a star and dwelt apart; on the contrary, he led an unusually busy social and political career, coming in habitual contact with people of many types, and usually making a very favorable impression on them. He could laugh and jest and talk well; and above all he had an astonishing command of satire, begun early and developed by years of hard and constant training. If satire had held the place in the mid-seventeenth century that it occupied in the 1590's or the post-Restoration years, Milton might have been in quality what Bishop Hall pretended to be in chronology—the first English satirist. Even during a period when satire as a type was suffering a depression, his achievements are more striking than we often realize.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , June 1936 , pp. 414 - 429
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1936

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References

1 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark (Oxford, 1898), ii, 67–68.

2 E. K. Rand, “Milton in Rustication,” SP, xix (1922), 116.

3 Quoted in Milton's Of Education, etc., ed. Laura E. Lockwood (Boston, 1911), p. xxxiii.

4 Aubrey, op. cit., ii, 67.

5 Quoted in Milton's Prose Works (Bohn), v, 123.

6 Ibid., v, 124.

7 Ibid., v, 124.

8 P.W., iii, 131–132.

9 P.W., iii, 132.

10 P.W., iii, 43.

11 P.W., iii, 44.

12 P.W., iii, 130.

13 P.W., iii, 101.

14 P.W., iii, 124.

15 P.W., iii 141.

16 Works (Columbia edition), ix, 201.

17 Ibid., ix, 113.

18 Ibid., ix, 113.

19 P.W., i, 7, 12.

20 P.W., i, 67; v, 219.

21 P.W., v, 219.

22 P.W., i, 16, 48, 205, 241; iii, 132, 367; iv, 100.

23 P.W., iii, 141.

24 P.W., ii, 478.

25 P.W., iii, 141.

26 P.W., iii, 168, 343, 426; iv, passim.

27 P.W., iii, 48, 65.

28 P. B. Tillyard, Milton Private Correspondence and Academic Exercises (Cambridge, 1932), pp. 65–66.

29 Ibid., 65.

30 Ibid., 69.

31 Ibid., 86.

32 Ibid., 93.

33 Ibid., 94.

34 P.W., ii, 365.

35 P.W., ii, 365.

36 P.W., ii, 388–389.—For other examples see pp. 374, 375, 378, 382, 391, 401, 415–416, 419. Space forbids my quoting any but the most concentrated examples.

37 P.W., ii, 406.

38 P.W., iii, 61.

39 P.W., iii, 69.—Cf. Satan's punning on his cannons in Paradise Lost, vi, 558–567.

40 P.W., iii, 73.

41 P.W., iii, 90.

42 P.W., iii, 90–91.

43 P.W., iii, 46.

44 P.W., iii, 47.

45 P.W., iii, 48.

46 P.W., iii, 50.

47 P.W., iii, 51.

48 P.W., iii, 54.

49 P.W., iii, 57.

50 P.W., iii, 58–59.

51 P.W., iii, 79.

52 P.W., iii, 80.

53 P.W., iii, 89.

54 P.W., iii, 88.

55 P.W., iii, 86.

55 a P.W., ii, 444.

56 P.W., ii, 467–468.

57 P.W., iii, 99.

58 P.W., iii, 108.

59 P.W., iii, 109, 123.

60 P.W., iii, 135.

61 P.W., iii, 460–461.

62 P.W., iii, 449.

63 P.W., iii, 452.

64 P.W., iii, 453.

65 P.W., ii, 5.

66 P.W., ii, 7.

67 P.W., ii, 45.

67 a P.W., i, 225.

68 P.W., i, 225.

69 P.W., i, 225.

70 P.W., i, 229.

71 P.W., i, 232.

72 P.W., i, 241.

73 P.W., i, 242.

74 P.W., i, 244.

75 P.W., i, 247.

76 P.W., i, 251.

77 P.W., i, 262.

78 Works, Columbia edition, ix, 119.

79 Ibid., ix, 119–121.

80 Ibid., ix, 123.

81 Ibid., ix, 240.—I quote the English translation from this edition, though it is very unsatisfactory:

As your belly, Pontia, 'gins to swell,

From tread of the Gallican;

That under More, you've been Mored well,

Deny it not a man.

Ibid., ix, 241.—The translator obviously misses the puns.

82 Ibid., ix, 191.

83 J. M. French, “Milton as a Historian,” PMLA, l, 469–479.