3.7. The Age of Milton
3.7.1. Davenant
3.7.2. Hobbes
3.7.3. Milton
3.7.1 Sir William Davenant (1608-1668)
The tendency towards neoclassicism that is discerned in Jonson's criticism is increased in the work of Royalist critics who were influenced by the French. French doctrine (Rapin, Le Bossu) was more rigidly classical and prescriptive. When the future king Charles II went into exile to the Netherlands and France, many poets followed him. Poetry was associated with the system of patronage and with the nobility. This is why the Civil War marks a real critical border between the Renaissance and the neoclassical age in England. In the theater especially the gap is drastic: the Long Parliament closed all theatres in 1642, and no public entertainments were allowed until 1658; actors were to be whipped if they insisted on following their trade.
Davenant was a royalist, one of the upholders of the tradition against the strictures of the Commonwealth; he was given a licence to establish a company just before the ban on plays. He was also responsible for the first dramatic entertainments and the first theatre company after the ban on plays. He also wrote a third-rate heroic poem, Gondibert (1651), and in his preface, addressed to Thomas Hobbes, he states his critical attitudes. His ideas on style are neoclassical: he rejects the obscurity and the taste for complex conceits characteristic of the Metaphysical poets. He opposes Spenser's allegory and archaism, as well as his patriotic conception of the epic. In Gondibert, it is love and not heroism which is foremost; it is a prelude to the "heroic plays" which will become so fashionable during the Restoration. However, Davenant believes that poetry has a political role, in making the people satisfied with their king: it gives an idealized image of the king and it is a part of the circenses which he bestows on his people.
3.7.2. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
Hobbes is the heir to Bacon's empiricism and the theoriser of absolute monarchy in his Leviathan (1651). He lived in France during the Commonwealth, and it is there that he writes his "Answer to Davenant's preface to Gondibert" (1651). Both authors are influenced by French criticism. In them we have a foretaste of the kind of criticism which will be made in England during the Restoration.
Hobbes provides the philosophical bases of neoclassicism. The poet will no longer be considered an inspired being (in fact, Hobbes' system of philosophy is thoroughly materialist and atheist). Hobbes believes that reason and wisdom are better foundations for poetry than inspiration, where the poet is "like a bagpipe" (214) not speaking by himself. There is not much talk of genius of even of imagination; Hobbes sees poetry from an empiricist viewpoint, as a somewhat mechanical result of experience, of judgement and "fancy":
Time and education begets experience; experience begets memory; memory begets Judgement and Fancy; Judgement begets the strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a poem. (214).
"Fancy" is a weak term for the creative faculty, but then Hobbes wants a weak term. He is all for reason and experience; we may see that at the start of the creative process we find "time and education", not even a favourable disposition. Memory, says Hobbes, is the ground of all. It is the source of comprehension, and the poet must never try to express more than is perfectly conceived: he would fall into obscurity. Even fancy is guided by philosophy. Hobbes favours clear expression, with a view to comprehension. He is against the fantastic, and only allows the actual and the possible as subjects for poetry:
beyond the actual works of nature a poet may now go; but beyond the conceived posssibility of nature, never. (215).
Hobbes' system of philosophy, being materialist, is also nominalist. Concepts are not immovable essences: they can be manipulated, added or substracted through language. In this sense Hobbes' philosophy is a foreshadowing of Locke's. The opposition established by Hobbes between fancy and judgement could be described as an opposition between a synthetic and an analytic principle. Fancy sees the resemblances between dissimilar things (metaphor would be a good example of this procedure), while judgement finds differences in what seems similar. This definition is misleading because it underestimates the synthetic element of rational thought as well as the analytic element of poetic thought, but it is interesting as an attempt to relate poetry to psychology. It will become a critical catchword and we will find it again in a slightly different form among the Romantics.
The aim of poetry is
by imitating human life in delightful and measured lines, to avert men from vice and incline them to virtuous and honourable actions. (213).
Verse is a better vehicle than prose, which cannot contend in style with it. But verse alone does not make poetry: the poem must have also a special subject, the manners of men.
Through his theory of poetry Hobbes wants also to justify his theory of a stable and hierarchical society. Just as there are three regions in nature (celestial, aerial and terrestrial), there are three corresponding regions of mankind: court, city and country. Each has a particular poetical genre suitable to it: heroic, scommatic, and pastoral. And each genre has a particular emotion associated to it: the heroic produces admiration, the scommatic mirth. As there are two manners of representation, dramatic and narrative, there are six genres in all: epic poetry, satire, comedy, pastoral, and pastoral comedy. All must be subject to propriety and decorum: for instance, no vices shall be ascribed to noble persons. Here the theory is deliberately conservative and aristocratic.
3.7.3. John Milton (1608-1674)
During the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, Milton was known not only as a great poet, but also as an active pamphleteer. He was a strong opponent of the king and the Church of England, and he stood on the side of the Parliament. What he demanded was essentially more freedom: from a law of divorce (The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1643), to freedom of the press (Areopagitica: A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc'd Printing, to the Parliament of England, 1644 --in fact censorship was not suppressed until 1695). Milton often opposed the Puritan policies at home, but justified the Commonwhealth against the ideological attacks from other countries.
Milton's criticism is also written in the spirit of the Civil War. There are no important theoretical works during these years; the disruption of literary life brought about by the revolution was not favourable to speculation on literature. Literature belonged mostly to the upper classes: most writers (like actors) were Royalists.
Milton regards the poet as the enemy of tyranny. The true poetic power is a gift of God, and therefore the role of the poet is that of a prophet and a guide. His role is to educate the people in virtue, liberty and justice, as well as in the true faith. That is no doubt what he tried to do in his own works. The magistrates of the Commonwealth must promote the writing of the kind of poetry they wish for the welfare of the state. But we must not forget that Milton defends liberty of print, that he is against censorship (unlike Plato). Tyranny and genius are opposed to one another. In the new commonwealth, Milton believes, a new poetry will flourish, moral and patriotic, which was stifled by the old régime. Of course, Paradise Lost (1667) and Paradise Regained (1671) would be the models for such poetry, being epic poems with a sacred subject. With Milton we see another influence added to the Classics: the Bible, in which he finds, as Bede had done, models for different literary genres. It is the Bible, and not only the Aeneid, which provides the model for Milton's epic. In the preface to Samson Agonistes (1671), a tragedy telling the death of Samson, he speaks out for the adequacy of sacred themes and of classical genres, and incidentally he gives the first English interpretation of the idea of catharsis, an indication that Aristotle was becoming better known:
Tragedy, as it was antiently compos'd, hath ever been held the gravest, moralest, and most profitable of all other Poems; therefore said by Aristotle to be of power by raising pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those and such like passions, that is to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind of delight, stirr'd up by reading or seeing those passions well imitated.
The end of the poem refers to the spectators instructed into God's ways by the great event portrayed, and going "With peace and consolation . . . / And calm of mind all passion spent."
Milton's best known theoretical statement is found in the preface to Paradise Lost. There he follows the tradition of Webbe, Stanyhurst and Campion, and advocates the use of blank verse, as being more dignified than rime ("the invention of a barbarous age") and nearer to the poetry of the classics. Blank verse is fitter for
true musical delight; which consists in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another, not in the jingling sound of like endings.
The debate on this subject was a heated one during the classical age in Britain, owing in part to a long-standing tradition of great writers blank verse, such as Shakespeare and Milton himself.