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English literature
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The Renaissance period: 1550–1660
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Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose
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Francis Bacon
PART I
"New Atlantis",
PART II
"THE
ESSAYS OR COUNSELS"
Owen Felltham
Sir Thomas Overbury
Thomas Fuller
Izaak Walton
Robert Burton
"Anatomy of Melancholy"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV
Sir
Thomas Urquhart
Sir Thomas Browne
James
Harrington
John Milton
"Paradise Lost" BOOK 1,
BOOK
2,
BOOK
3,
BOOK
4,
BOOK
5,
BOOK
6 Illustrations by G. Dore
BOOK
7,
BOOK
8,
BOOK
9
Illustrations by J.
Martin,
BOOK 10,
BOOK
11,
BOOK
12
Illustrations by H. Fuseli
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Puritanism also had a powerful effect on early Stuart prose.
The best sellers of the period were godly manuals that ran
to scores of editions, such as Arthur Dent’s Plain Man’s
Pathway to Heaven (25 editions by 1640) and Lewis Bayly’s
Practice of Piety (1611; some 50 editions followed), two
copies of which formed the meagre dowry of preacher and
author
John Bunyan’s first wife. Puritans preferred sermons
in the plain style too, eschewing rhetoric for an austerely
edifying treatment of doctrine, though some famous
preachers, such as Henry Smith and Thomas Adams, believed it
their duty to make the Word of God eloquent. The other
factor shaping prose was the desire among scientists for a
utilitarian style that would accurately and concretely
represent the relationship between words and things, without
figurative luxuriance. This hope, repeatedly voiced in the
1640s and ’50s, eventually bore fruit in the practice of the
Royal Society (founded 1660), which decisively affected
prose after the Restoration. Its impact on earlier writing,
though, was limited; most early Stuart science was written
in a baroque style.
The impetus toward a scientific prose derived ultimately
from
Sir Francis Bacon, the towering intellect of the
century, who charted a philosophical system well in advance
of his generation and beyond his own powers to complete. In
the Advancement of Learning (1605) and the Novum Organum
(1620), Bacon visualized a great synthesis of knowledge,
rationally and comprehensively ordered so that each
discipline might benefit from the discoveries of the others.
The two radical novelties of his scheme were his insight
that there could be progress in learning (i.e., that the
limits of knowledge were not fixed but could be pushed
forward) and his inductive method, which aimed to establish
scientific principles by experimentation, beginning at
particulars and working toward generalities, instead of
working backward from preconceived systems.
Bacon
democratized knowledge at a stroke, removing the tyranny of
authority and lifting scientific inquiry free of religion
and ethics and into the domain of mechanically operating
second causes (though he held that the perfection of the
machine itself testified to God’s glory). The implications
for prose are contained in his statement in the Advancement
that the preoccupation with words instead of matter was the
first “distemper” of learning; his own prose, however, was
far from plain. The level exposition of idea in the
Advancement is underpinned by a tactful but firmly
persuasive rhetoric, and the famous Essays (1597; enlarged
1612, 1625) are shifting and elusive, teasing the reader
toward unresolved contradictions and half-apprehended
complications.
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Francis Bacon, Viscount Saint Alban
PART I
"New Atlantis"
PART II
"THE
ESSAYS OR COUNSELS"
British author, philosopher, and statesman
also called (1603–18) Sir Francis Bacon
born Jan. 22, 1561, York House, London, Eng.
died April 9, 1626, London
Overview
British statesman and philosopher, father of modern scientific method.
He studied at Cambridge and at Gray’s Inn. A supporter of the Earl of
Essex, Bacon turned against him when Essex was tried for treason. Under
James I he rose steadily, becoming successively solicitor general
(1607), attorney general (1613), and lord chancellor (1618). Convicted
of accepting bribes from those being tried in his court, he was briefly
imprisoned and permanently lost his public offices; he died deeply in
debt. He attempted to put natural science on a firm empirical foundation
in the Novum Organum (1620), which sets forth his scientific method. His
elaborate classification of the sciences inspired the 18th-century
French Encyclopedists (see Encyclopédie), and his empiricism inspired
19th-century British philosophers of science. His other works include
The Advancement of Learning (1605), History of Henry VII (1622), and
several important legal and constitutional works.
Main
lord chancellor of England (1618–21). A lawyer, statesman, philosopher,
and master of the English tongue, he is remembered in literary terms for
the sharp worldly wisdom of a few dozen essays; by students of
constitutional history for his power as a speaker in Parliament and in
famous trials and as James I’s lord chancellor; and intellectually as a
man who claimed all knowledge as his province and, after a magisterial
survey, urgently advocated new ways by which man might establish a
legitimate command over nature for the relief of his estate.
Life » Youth and early maturity
Bacon was born Jan. 22, 1561, at York House off the Strand, London, the
younger of the two sons of the lord keeper, Sir Nicholas Bacon, by his
second marriage. Nicholas Bacon, born in comparatively humble
circumstances, had risen to become lord keeper of the great seal.
Francis’ cousin through his mother was Robert Cecil, later earl of
Salisbury and chief minister of the crown at the end of Elizabeth I’s
reign and the beginning of James I’s. From 1573 to 1575 Bacon was
educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, but his weak constitution caused
him to suffer ill health there. His distaste for what he termed
“unfruitful” Aristotelian philosophy began at Cambridge. From 1576 to
1579 Bacon was in France as a member of the English ambassador’s suite.
He was recalled abruptly after the sudden death of his father, who left
him relatively little money. Bacon remained financially embarrassed
virtually until his death.
Life » Youth and early maturity » Early legal career and political
ambitions
In 1576 Bacon had been admitted as an “ancient” (senior governor) of
Gray’s Inn, one of the four Inns of Court that served as institutions
for legal education, in London. In 1579 he took up residence there and
after becoming a barrister in 1582 progressed in time through the posts
of reader (lecturer at the Inn), bencher (senior member of the Inn), and
queen’s (from 1603 king’s) counsel extraordinary to those of solicitor
general and attorney general. Even as successful a legal career as this,
however, did not satisfy his political and philosophical ambitions.
Bacon occupied himself with the tract “Temporis Partus Maximus” (“The
Greatest Part of Time”) in 1582; it has not survived. In 1584 he sat as
member of Parliament for Melcombe Regis in Dorset and subsequently
represented Taunton, Liverpool, the County of Middlesex, Southampton,
Ipswich, and the University of Cambridge. In 1589 a “Letter of Advice”
to the Queen and An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the
Church of England indicated his political interests and showed a fair
promise of political potential by reason of their levelheadedness and
disposition to reconcile. In 1593 came a setback to his political hopes:
he took a stand objecting to the government’s intensified demand for
subsidies to help meet the expenses of the war against Spain. Elizabeth
took offense, and Bacon was in disgrace during several critical years
when there were chances for legal advancement.
Life » Youth and early maturity » Relationship with Essex
Meanwhile, sometime before July 1591, Bacon had become acquainted with
Robert Devereux, the young earl of Essex, who was a favourite of the
Queen, although still in some disgrace with her for his unauthorized
marriage to the widow of Sir Philip Sidney. Bacon saw in the Earl the
“fittest instrument to do good to the State” and offered Essex the
friendly advice of an older, wiser, and more subtle man. Essex did his
best to mollify the Queen, and when the office of attorney general fell
vacant, he enthusiastically but unsuccessfully supported the claim of
Bacon. Other recommendations by Essex for high offices to be conferred
on Bacon also failed.
By 1598 Essex’ failure in an expedition against Spanish treasure
ships made him harder to control; and although Bacon’s efforts to divert
his energies to Ireland, where the people were in revolt, proved only
too successful, Essex lost his head when things went wrong and he
returned against orders. Bacon certainly did what he could to
accommodate matters but merely offended both sides; in June 1600 he
found himself as the Queen’s learned counsel taking part in the informal
trial of his patron. Essex bore him no ill will and shortly after his
release was again on friendly terms with him. But after Essex’ abortive
attempt of 1601 to seize the Queen and force her dismissal of his
rivals, Bacon, who had known nothing of the project, viewed Essex as a
traitor and drew up the official report on the affair. This, however,
was heavily altered by others before publication.
After Essex’ execution Bacon, in 1604, published the Apologie in
Certaine Imputations Concerning the Late Earle of Essex in defense of
his own actions. It is a coherent piece of self-justification, but to
posterity it does not carry complete conviction, particularly since it
evinces no personal distress.
Life » Career in the service of James I
When Elizabeth died in 1603, Bacon’s letter-writing ability was directed
to finding a place for himself and a use for his talents in James I’s
services. He pointed to his concern for Irish affairs, the union of the
kingdoms, and the pacification of the church as proof that he had much
to offer the new king.
Through the influence of his cousin Robert Cecil, Bacon was one of
the 300 new knights dubbed in 1603. The following year he was confirmed
as learned counsel and sat in the first Parliament of the new reign in
the debates of its first session. He was also active as one of the
commissioners for discussing a union with Scotland. In the autumn of
1605 he published his Advancement of Learning, dedicated to the King,
and in the following summer he married Alice Barnham, the daughter of a
London alderman. Preferment in the royal service, however, still eluded
him, and it was not until June 1607 that his petitions and his vigorous
though vain efforts to persuade the Commons to accept the King’s
proposals for union with Scotland were at length rewarded with the post
of solicitor general. Even then, his political influence remained
negligible, a fact that he came to attribute to the power and jealousy
of Cecil, by then earl of Salisbury and the King’s chief minister. In
1609 his De Sapientia Veterum (“The Wisdom of the Ancients”), in which
he expounded what he took to be the hidden practical meaning embodied in
ancient myths, came out and proved to be, next to the Essayes, his most
popular book in his own lifetime. In 1614 he seems to have written The
New Atlantis, his far-seeing scientific utopian work, which did not get
into print until 1626.
After Salisbury’s death in 1612, Bacon renewed his efforts to gain
influence with the King, writing a number of remarkable papers of advice
upon affairs of state and, in particular, upon the relations between
Crown and Parliament. The King adopted his proposal for removing Coke
from his post as chief justice of the common pleas and appointing him to
the King’s Bench, while appointing Bacon attorney general in 1613.
During the next few years Bacon’s views about the royal prerogative
brought him, as attorney general, increasingly into conflict with Coke,
the champion of the common law and of the independence of the judges. It
was Bacon who examined Coke when the King ordered the judges to be
consulted individually and separately in the case of Edmond Peacham, a
clergyman charged with treason as the author of an unpublished treatise
justifying rebellion against oppression. Bacon has been reprobated for
having taken part in the examination under torture of Peacham, which
turned out to be fruitless. It was Bacon who instructed Coke and the
other judges not to proceed in the case of commendams (i.e., holding of
benefices in the absence of the regular incumbent) until they had spoken
to the King. Coke’s dismissal in November 1616 for defying this order
was quickly followed by Bacon’s appointment as lord keeper of the great
seal in March 1617. The following year he was made lord chancellor and
baron Verulam, and in 1620/21 he was created viscount St. Albans.
The main reason for this progress was his unsparing service in
Parliament and the court, together with persistent letters of
self-recommendation; according to the traditional account, however, he
was also aided by his association with George Villiers, later duke of
Buckingham, the King’s new favourite. It would appear that he became
honestly fond of Villiers; many of his letters betray a feeling that
seems warmer than timeserving flattery.
Among Bacon’s papers a notebook has survived, the Commentarius
Solutus (“Loose Commentary”), which is revealing. It is a jotting pad
“like a Marchant’s wast booke where to enter all maner of remembrance of
matter, fourme, business, study, towching my self, service, others,
eyther sparsim or in schedules, without any maner of restraint.” This
book reveals Bacon reminding himself to flatter a possible patron, to
study the weaknesses of a rival, to set intelligent noblemen in the
Tower of London to work on serviceable experiments. It displays the
multiplicity of his concerns: his income and debts, the King’s business,
his own garden and plans for building, philosophical speculations, his
health, including his symptoms and medications, and an admonition to
learn to control his breathing and not to interrupt in conversation.
Between 1608 and 1620 he prepared at least 12 draftings of his most
celebrated work, the Novum Organum, and wrote several minor
philosophical works.
The major occupation of these years must have been the management of
James, always with reference, remote or direct, to the royal finances.
The King relied on his lord chancellor but did not always follow his
advice. Bacon was longer sighted than his contemporaries and seems to
have been aware of the constitutional problems that were to culminate in
civil war; he dreaded innovation and did all he could, and perhaps more
than he should, to safeguard the royal prerogative. Whether his policies
were sound or not, it is evident that he was, as he later said, “no
mountebank in the King’s services.”
Life » Fall from power
By 1621 Bacon must have seemed impregnable, a favourite not by charm
(though he was witty and had a dry sense of humour) but by sheer
usefulness and loyalty to his sovereign; lavish in public expenditure
(he was once the sole provider of a court masque); dignified in his
affluence and liberal in his household; winning the attention of
scholars abroad as the author of the Novum Organum, published in 1620,
and the developer of the Instauratio Magna (“Great Instauration”), a
comprehensive plan to reorganize the sciences and to restore man to that
mastery over nature that he was conceived to have lost by the fall of
Adam. But Bacon had his enemies. In 1618 he fell foul of George Villiers
when he tried to interfere in the marriage of the daughter of his old
enemy, Coke, and the younger brother of Villiers. Then, in 1621, two
charges of bribery were raised against him before a committee of
grievances over which he himself presided. The shock appears to have
been twofold because Bacon, who was casual about the incoming and
outgoing of his wealth, was unaware of any vulnerability and was not
mindful of the resentment of two men whose cases had gone against them
in spite of gifts they had made with the intent of bribing the judge.
The blow caught him when he was ill, and he pleaded for extra time to
meet the charges, explaining that genuine illness, not cowardice, was
the reason for his request. Meanwhile, the House of Lords collected
another score of complaints. Bacon admitted the receipt of gifts but
denied that they had ever affected his judgment; he made notes on cases
and sought an audience with the King that was refused. Unable to defend
himself by discriminating between the various charges or cross-examining
witnesses, he settled for a penitent submission and resigned the seal of
his office, hoping that this would suffice. The sentence was harsh,
however, and included a fine of £40,000, imprisonment in the Tower of
London during the King’s pleasure, disablement from holding any state
office, and exclusion from Parliament and the verge of court (an area of
12 miles radius centred on where the sovereign is resident). Bacon
commented to Buckingham: “I acknowledge the sentence just, and for
reformation’s sake fit, the justest Chancellor that hath been in the
five changes since Sir Nicolas Bacon’s time.” The magnanimity and wit of
the epigram sets his case against the prevailing standards.
Bacon did not have to stay long in the Tower, but he found the ban
that cut him off from access to the library of Charles Cotton, an
English man of letters, and from consultation with his physician more
galling. He came up against an inimical lord treasurer, and his pension
payments were delayed. He lost Buckingham’s goodwill for a time and was
put to the humiliating practice of roundabout approaches to other nobles
and to Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador; remissions came only
after vexations and disappointments. Despite all this his courage held,
and the last years of his life were spent in work far more valuable to
the world than anything he had accomplished in his high office. Cut off
from other services, he offered his literary powers to provide the King
with a digest of the laws, a history of Great Britain, and biographies
of Tudor monarchs. He prepared memorandums on usury and on the prospects
of a war with Spain; he expressed views on educational reforms; he even
returned, as if by habit, to draft papers of advice to the King or to
Buckingham and composed speeches he was never to deliver. Some of these
projects were completed, and they did not exhaust his fertility. He
wrote: “If I be left to myself I will graze and bear natural
philosophy.” Two out of a plan of six separate natural histories were
composed—Historia Ventorum (“History of the Winds”) appeared in 1622 and
Historia Vitae et Mortis (“History of Life and Death”) in the following
year. Also in 1623 he published the De Dignitate et Augmentis
Scientiarum, a Latin translation, with many additions, of the
Advancement of Learning. He also corresponded with Italian thinkers and
urged his works upon them. In 1625 a third and enlarged edition of his
Essayes was published.
Bacon in adversity showed patience, unimpaired intellectual vigour,
and fortitude. Physical deprivation distressed him but what hurt most
was the loss of favour; it was not until Jan. 20, 1622/23, that he was
admitted to kiss the King’s hand; a full pardon never came. Finally, in
March 1626, driving one day near Highgate (a district to the north of
London) and deciding on impulse to discover whether snow would delay the
process of putrefaction, he stopped his carriage, purchased a hen, and
stuffed it with snow. He was seized with a sudden chill, which brought
on bronchitis, and he died at the Earl of Arundel’s house nearby on
April 9, 1626.
Kathleen Marguerite Lea
Anthony M. Quinton, Baron Quinton
Thought and writings » The intellectual background
Bacon appears as an unusually original thinker for several reasons. In
the first place he was writing, in the early 17th century, in something
of a philosophical vacuum so far as England was concerned. The last
great English philosopher, William of Ockham, had died in 1347, two and
a half centuries before the Advancement of Learning; the last really
important philosopher, John Wycliffe, had died not much later, in 1384.
The 15th century had been intellectually cautious and torpid,
leavened only by the first small importations of Italian humanism by
such cultivated dilettantes as Humphrey Plantagenet, duke of Gloucester,
and John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester. The Christian Platonism of the
Renaissance became more established at the start of the 16th century in
the circle of Erasmus’ English friends: the so-called Oxford
Reformers—John Colet, William Grocyn, and Thomas More. But that
initiative succumbed to the ecclesiastical frenzies of the age.
Philosophy did not revive until Richard Hooker in the 1590s put forward
his moderate Anglican version of Thomist rationalism in the form of a
theory of the Elizabethan church settlement. This happened a few years
before Bacon began to write.
In England three systems of thought prevailed in the late 16th
century: Aristotelian Scholasticism, scholarly and aesthetic humanism,
and occultism. Aristotelian orthodoxy had been reanimated in Roman
Catholic Europe after the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation
had lent authority to the massive output of the 16th-century Spanish
theologian and philosopher Francisco Suárez. In England learning
remained in general formally Aristotelian, even though some criticism of
Aristotle’s logic had reached Cambridge at the time Bacon was a student
there in the mid-1570s. But such criticism sought simplicity for the
sake of rhetorical effectiveness and not, as Bacon’s critique was to do,
in the interests of substantial, practically useful knowledge of nature.
The Christian humanist tradition of Petrarch, Lorenzo Valla, and,
more recently, of Erasmus was an active force. In contrast to orthodox
asceticism, this tradition, in some aspects, inclined to glorify the
world and its pleasures and to favour the beauty of art, language, and
nature, while remaining comparatively indifferent to religious
speculation. Attraction to the beauty of nature, however, if it did not
cause was at any rate combined with neglect and disdain for the
knowledge of nature. Educationally it fostered the sharp separation
between the natural sciences and the humanities that has persisted ever
since. Philosophically it was skeptical, nourishing itself, notably in
the case of Montaigne, on the rediscovery in 1562 of Sextus Empiricus’
comprehensive survey of the skepticism of Greek thought after Aristotle.
The third important current of thought in the world into which Bacon
was born was that of occultism, or esotericism, that is, the pursuit of
mystical analogies between man and the cosmos, or the search for magical
powers over natural processes, as in alchemy and the concoction of
elixirs and panaceas. Although its most famous exponent, Paracelsus, was
German, occultism was well rooted in England, appealing as it did to the
individualistic style of English credulity. Robert Fludd, the leading
English occultist, was an approximate contemporary of Bacon. Bacon
himself has often been held to have been some kind of occultist, and,
even more questionably, to have been a member of the Rosicrucian order,
but the sort of “natural magic” he espoused and advertised was
altogether different from that of the esoteric philosophers.
There was a fourth mode of Renaissance thought outside England to
which Bacon’s thinking bore some affinity. Like that of the humanists it
was inspired by Plato, at least to some extent, but by another part of
his thought, namely its cosmology. This was the boldly systematic
nature-philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa and of a number of Italians, in
particular Bernardino Telesio, Francesco Patrizzi, Tommaso Campanella,
and Giordano Bruno. Nicholas of Cusa and Bruno were highly speculative,
but Telesio and, up to a point, Campanella affirmed the primacy of sense
perception. In a way that Bacon was later to elaborate formally and
systematically, they held knowledge of nature to be a matter of
extrapolating from the findings of the senses. There is no allusion to
these thinkers in Bacon’s writings. But although he was less
metaphysically adventurous than they were, he shared with them the
conviction that the human mind is fitted for knowledge of nature and
must derive it from observation, not from abstract reasoning.
Thought and writings » Bacon’s scheme
Bacon drew up an ambitious plan for a comprehensive work that was to
appear under the title of Instauratio Magna (“The Great Instauration”),
but like many of his literary schemes, it was never completed. Its first
part, De Augmentis Scientiarum, appeared in 1623 and is an expanded,
Latinized version of his earlier work the Advancement of Learning,
published in 1605 (the first really important philosophical book to be
written in English). The De Augmentis Scientiarum contains a division of
the sciences, a project that had not been embarked on to any great
purpose since Aristotle and, in a smaller way, since the Stoics. The
second part of Bacon’s scheme, the Novum Organum, which had already
appeared in 1620, gives “true directions concerning the interpretation
of nature,” in other words, an account of the correct method of
acquiring natural knowledge. This is what Bacon believed to be his most
important contribution and is the body of ideas with which his name is
most closely associated. The fields of possible knowledge having been
charted in De Augmentis Scientiarum, the proper method for their
cultivation was set out in Novum Organum.
Third, there is natural history, the register of matters of observed
natural fact, which is the indispensable raw material for the inductive
method. Bacon wrote “histories,” in this sense, of the wind, of life and
death, and of the dense and the rare, and, near the end of his life, he
was working on his Sylva Sylvarum: Or A Natural Historie (“Forest of
Forests”), in effect, a collection of collections, a somewhat uncritical
miscellany.
Fourth, there is the “ladder of the intellect,” consisting of
thoroughly worked out examples of the Baconian method in application,
the most successful one being the exemplary account in Novum Organum of
how his inductive “tables” show heat to be a kind of motion of
particles. Fifth, there are the “forerunners,” or pieces of scientific
knowledge arrived at by pre-Baconian, common sense methods. Sixth and
finally, there is the new philosophy, or science itself, seen by Bacon
as a task for later generations armed with his method, advancing into
all the regions of possible discovery set out in the Advancement of
Learning. The wonder is not so much that Bacon did not complete this
immense design but that he got as far with it as he did.
Thought and writings » The idols of the mind
In the first book of Novum Organum Bacon discusses the causes of human
error in the pursuit of knowledge. Aristotle had discussed logical
fallacies, commonly found in human reasoning, but Bacon was original in
looking behind the forms of reasoning to underlying psychological
causes. He invented the metaphor of “idol” to refer to such causes of
human error.
Bacon distinguishes four idols, or main varieties of proneness to
error. The idols of the tribe are certain intellectual faults that are
universal to mankind, or, at any rate, very common. One, for example, is
a tendency toward oversimplification, that is, toward supposing, for the
sake of tidiness, that there exists more order in a field of inquiry
than there actually is. Another is a propensity to be overly influenced
by particularly sudden or exciting occurrences that are in fact
unrepresentative.
The idols of the cave are the intellectual peculiarities of
individuals. One person may concentrate on the likenesses, another on
the differences, between things. One may fasten on detail, another on
the totality.
The idols of the marketplace are the kinds of error for which
language is responsible. It has always been a distinguishing feature of
English philosophy to emphasize the unreliable nature of language, which
is seen, nominalistically, as a human improvisation. Nominalists argue
that even if the power of speech is given by God, it was Adam who named
the beasts and thereby gave that power its concrete realization. But
language, like other human achievements, partakes of human
imperfections. Bacon was particularly concerned with the superficiality
of distinctions drawn in everyday language, by which things
fundamentally different are classed together (whales and fishes as fish,
for example) and things fundamentally similar are distinguished (ice,
water, and steam). But he was also concerned, like later critics of
language, with the capacity of words to embroil men in the discussion of
the meaningless (as, for example, in discussions of the deity Fortune).
This aspect of Bacon’s thought has been almost as influential as his
account of natural knowledge, inspiring a long tradition of skeptical
rationalism, from the Enlightenment to Comtian positivism of the 19th
and logical positivism of the 20th centuries.
The fourth and final group of idols is that of the idols of the
theatre, that is to say mistaken systems of philosophy in the broadest,
Baconian sense of the term, in which it embraces all beliefs of any
degree of generality. Bacon’s critical polemic in discussing the idols
of the theatre is lively but not very penetrating philosophically. He
speaks, for example, of the vain affectations of the humanists, but they
were not a very apt subject for his criticism. Humanists were really
anti-philosophers who not unreasonably turned their attention to
nonphilosophical matters because of the apparent inability of
philosophers to arrive at conclusions that were either generally agreed
upon or useful. Bacon does have something to say about the skeptical
philosophy to which humanists appealed when they felt the need for it.
Insofar as skepticism involves doubts about deductive reasoning, he has
no quarrel with it. Insofar as it is applied not to reason but to the
ability of the senses to supply the reason with reliable premises to
work from, he brushes it aside too easily.
Bacon’s attack on Scholastic orthodoxy is surprisingly rhetorical. It
may be that he supposed it to be already sufficiently discredited by its
incurably contentious or disputatious character. In his view it was a
largely verbal technique for the indefinite prolongation of inconclusive
argument by the drawing of artificial distinctions. He has some
awareness of the central weakness of Aristotelian science, namely its
attempt to derive substantial conclusions from premises that are
intuitively evident, and argues that the apparently obvious axioms are
neither clear nor indisputable. Perhaps Bacon’s most fruitful
disagreement with Scholasticism is his belief that natural knowledge is
cumulative, a process of discovery, not of conservation. Living in a
time when new worlds were being found on Earth, he was able to free
himself from the view that everything men needed to know had already
been revealed in the Bible or by Aristotle.
Against the fantastic learning of the occultists Bacon argued that
individual reports are insufficient, especially since men are
emotionally predisposed to credit the interestingly strange.
Observations worthy to substantiate theories must be repeatable. Bacon
defended the study of nature against those who considered it as either
base or dangerous. He argued for a cooperative and methodical procedure
and against individualism and intuition.
Thought and writings » The classification of the sciences
Book II of the Advancement of Learning and Books II to IX of the De
Augmentis Scientiarum contain an unprecedentedly thorough and detailed
systematization of the whole range of human knowledge. Bacon begins with
a distinction of three faculties—memory, imagination, and reason—to
which are respectively assigned history, “poesy,” and philosophy.
History has an inclusive sense and means all knowledge of singular,
individual matters of fact. “Poesy” is “feigned history” and not taken
to be cognitive at all and so really irrelevant. After subdividing poesy
perfunctorily into narrative, representative (or dramatic), and allusive
(or parabolical) forms, Bacon gives it no further consideration.
History is divided into natural and civil, the civil category also
including ecclesiastical and literary history (which for Bacon is really
the history of ideas). History supplies the raw material for philosophy,
in other words for the general knowledge that is inductively derived
from it. Although Bacon proclaims the universal applicability of
induction, he himself treats it almost exclusively as a means to natural
knowledge and ignores its civil (or social) application.
Two further general distinctions should be mentioned. The first is
between the divine and the secular. Most divine knowledge must come from
revelation, and reason has nothing to do with it. There is such a thing
as divine philosophy (what was later called rational, or natural,
theology), but its sole task and competence is to prove that there is a
God. The second, more pervasive distinction is between theoretical and
practical disciplines, that is, between sciences proper and
technologies, or “arts.”
Bacon acknowledges something he calls first philosophy, which is
secular but not confined to nature or to society. It is concerned with
the principles, such as they are, that are common to all the sciences.
Natural philosophy divides into natural science as theory on the one
hand and the practical discipline of applying natural science’s findings
to “the relief of man’s estate” on the other, which he misleadingly
describes as natural magic. The former is “the inquisition of causes,”
the latter, “the production of effects.”
To subdivide still further, natural science is made up of physics and
metaphysics, as Bacon understands it. Physics, in his interpretation, is
the science of observable correlations; metaphysics is the more
theoretical science of the underlying structural factors that explains
observable regularities. Each has its practical, or technological,
partner; that of physics is mechanics, that of metaphysics, natural
magic. It is to the latter that one must look for the real
transformation of the human condition through scientific progress.
Mechanics is just levers and pulleys.
Mathematics is seen by Bacon as an auxiliary to natural science. Many
subsequent philosophers of science would agree, understanding it to be a
logical means of expressing the content of scientific propositions or of
extracting part of that content. But Bacon is not clear about how
mathematics was to be of service to science and does not realize that
the Galilean physics developing in his own lifetime was entirely
mathematical in form. Although one of his three inductive tables is
concerned with correlated variations in degree (while the others concern
likenesses and differences in kind), he really has no conception of the
role, already established in science, of exact numerical measurement.
Bacon is fairly cursory about “human philosophy.” Four somewhat
quaint sciences of body are sketched—medicine, cosmetic, athletic, and
“the voluptuary arts.” The sciences of mind—logic and ethics—are
practical, consisting of sets of rules for the correct management of
reasoning or conduct, with no suggested theoretical counterpart. Bacon
is unreflectively conventional about moral truth, content to rely on the
deliverances of the long historical sequence of moralists, undisturbed
by their disagreements with one another.
Bacon represents civil philosophy in the same uninquiringly practical
way. It comprises not only the art of government but also
“conversation,” or the art of persuasion, and “negotiation,” or
prudence, the topic of proverbs and, to a considerable extent, of his
own Essayes.
In principle, Bacon is committed to the view that human beings and
society are as well fitted for inductive, and, in 20th-century terms,
scientific study as the natural world. Yet he depicts human and social
studies as the field of nothing more refined than common sense. It was,
of course, an achievement to extricate them from religion, and to do so
without unnecessary provocation. But in his conception they remain
practical arts with no sustaining body of scientific theory to ratify
them. It was left to Thomas Hobbes, for a time Bacon’s amanuensis, to
develop complete systems of human and social science. Bacon’s practice,
however, was better than his program. In his writings on history and law
he went beyond the commonplaces of chronicle and precedent and engaged
in explanation and theory.
Thought and writings » The new method
The core of Bacon’s philosophy of science is the account of inductive
reasoning given in Book II of Novum Organum. The defect of all previous
systems of beliefs about nature, he argued, lay in the inadequate
treatment of the general propositions from which the deductions were
made. Either they were the result of precipitate generalization from one
or two cases, or they were uncritically assumed to be self-evident on
the basis of their familiarity and general acceptance.
In order to avoid hasty generalization Bacon urges a technique of
“gradual ascent,” that is, the patient accumulation of well-founded
generalizations of steadily increasing degrees of generality. This
method would have the beneficial effect of loosening the hold on men’s
minds of ill-constructed everyday concepts that obliterate important
differences and fail to register important similarities.
The crucial point, Bacon realized, is that induction must work by
elimination not, as it does in common life and the defective scientific
tradition, by simple enumeration. Thus he stressed “the greater force of
the negative instance”—the fact that while “all A are B” is only very
weakly confirmed by “this A is B,” it is shown conclusively to be false
by “this A is not B.” He devised tables, or formal devices for the
presentation of singular pieces of evidence, in order to facilitate the
rapid discovery of false generalizations. What survives this eliminative
screening, Bacon assumes, may be taken to be true.
Bacon presents tables of presence, of absence, and of degree. Tables
of presence contain a collection of cases in which one specified
property is found. They are then compared to each other to see what
other properties are always present. Any property not present in just
one case in such a collection cannot be a necessary condition of the
property being investigated. Second, there are tables of absence, which
list cases that are as alike as possible to the cases in the tables of
presence except for the property under investigation. Any property that
is found in the second case cannot be a sufficient condition of the
original property. Finally, in tables of degree proportionate variations
of two properties are compared to see if the proportion is maintained.
Bacon rightly showed some hesitation in arriving at the goal he had
prescribed for himself, namely constructing a method that would yield
general propositions about substantial matters of natural fact that were
certain and beyond reasonable doubt. But he hesitated for an
insufficient, secondary reason. The application of his tables to a mass
of singular evidence, he said, would give only a “first vintage,” a
provisional approximation to the truth, because of the defects of
natural history, that is to say, the defects inherent in the formulation
of the evidence.
There are, however, more serious difficulties. An obvious one is that
Bacon assumed both that every property natural science can investigate
actually has some other property which is both its necessary and
sufficient condition (a very strong version of determinism) and also
that the conditioning property in each case is readily discoverable.
What he had himself laid down as the task of metaphysics in his sense
(theoretical natural science in 20th-century terms), namely the
discovery of the hidden “forms” that explain what is observed, ensured
that the tables could not serve for that task since they are confined to
the perceptible accompaniments of what is to be explained. This point is
implied by critics who have accused Bacon of failing to recognize the
indispensable role of hypotheses in science. In general he adopted a
naive and unreflective view about the nature of causes, ignoring their
possible complexity and plurality (pointed out by John Stuart Mill) as
well as the possibility that they could be at some distance in space and
time from their effects.
Another weakness, not sufficiently emphasized, is Bacon’s
preoccupation with the static. The science that came to glorious
maturity in his own century was concerned with change, and, in
particular, with motion, as is the natural science of the 20th century.
It was with this aspect of the natural world that mathematics, whose
role Bacon did not see, came so fruitfully to grips.
The conception of a scientific research establishment, which Bacon
developed in his utopia, The New Atlantis, may be a more important
contribution to science than his theory of induction. Here the idea of
science as a collaborative undertaking, conducted in an impersonally
methodical fashion and animated by the intention to give material
benefits to mankind, is set out with literary force.
Thought and writings » Human philosophy
Although, as was pointed out above, Bacon’s programmatic account of
“human and civic philosophy” (i.e., human and social science) treats it
as a matter of practical art, or technique, his own ventures into
history and jurisprudence, at any rate, were of a strongly theoretical
cast. His Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh is
explanatory, interpretative history, making sense of the King’s policies
by tracing them to his cautious, economical, and secretive character.
Similarly his reflections on law, in De Augmentis Scientiarum and in
Maxims of the Law (Part I of The Elements of the Common Lawes of
England), are genuine jurisprudence, not the type of commentary informed
by precedent with which most jurists of his time were content. In
politics Bacon was as anxious to detach the state from religion as he
was to disentangle science from it—both concerns being indicative of
very little positive enthusiasm for religion, despite the formal
professions of profound respect convention extracted from him. He
endorsed the Tudor monarchy and defended it against Coke’s legal
obstruction because it was rational and efficient. He had no patience
with the inanities of divine right with which James I was infatuated.
Bacon wrote little about education, but his memorable assault on the
Scholastic obsession with words—an obsession largely carried over, if to
different words, by the humanists—bore fruit in the educational theory
of Comenius, who acknowledged Bacon’s influence in his argument that
children should study actual things as well as books.
Thought and writings » Assessment and influence
Bacon’s personality has usually been regarded as unattractive: he was
cold-hearted, cringed to the powerful, and took bribes, and then had the
impudence to say he had not been influenced by them. There is no reason
to question this assessment in its fundamentals. It was a hard world for
someone in his situation to cut a good figure in, and he did not try to
do so. The grimly practical style of his personality is reflected in the
particular service he was able to provide of showing a purely secular
mind of the highest intellectual power at work. No one who wrote so well
could have been insensitive to art. But no one before him had ever quite
so uncompromisingly excluded art from the cognitive domain.
Bacon was a hero to Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle, founders of the
Royal Society. Jean d’Alembert, classifying the sciences in the
Encyclopédie, saluted him. Kant, rather surprisingly for one so
concerned to limit science in order to make room for faith, dedicated
the Critique of Pure Reason to him. He was attacked by Joseph de Maistre
for setting man’s miserable reason up against God but glorified by
Auguste Comte.
It has been suggested that Bacon’s thought received proper
recognition only with 19th-century biology, which, unlike mathematical
physics, really is Baconian in procedure. Darwin undoubtedly thought so.
Bacon’s belief that a new science could contribute to the relief of
man’s estate also had to await its time. In the 17th century the chief
inventions that flowed from science were of instruments that enabled
science to progress further. Today Bacon is best known among
philosophers as the symbol of the idea, widely held to be mistaken, that
science is inductive. Although there is more to his thought than that,
it is, indeed, central; but even if it is wrong, it is as well to have
it so boldly and magnificently presented.
Anthony M. Quinton, Baron Quinton
Philosophical works
The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon. Of the Proficience and Advancement of
Learning Divine and Humane (1605); Instauratio Magna (1620), also known
as Novum Organum; Historia Naturalis et Experimentalis ad Condendam
Philosophiam: Sive Phaenomena Universi (1622), also known as Historia
Ventorum; Historia Vitae & Mortis (1623); De Dignitate et Augmentis
Scientiarum (1623).
Literary and historical works
Essayes (1597), 10 essays enlarged to 38 as The Essaies of Sr Francis
Bacon Knight (1612), and to 58 as The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and
Morall (1625); Francisci Baconi De Sapientia Veterum Liber (1609); The
Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (1622).
Political works
A Declaration of the Practices & Treasons Attempted and Committed by
Robert, Late Earle of Essex (1601); Certain Considerations Touching the
Better Pacification, and Edification of the Church of England (1604);
Sir Francis Bacon His Apologie, in Certaine Imputations Concerning the
Late Earle of Essex (1604).
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The
Essays are masterworks in the new Stuart genre of the
prose of leisure, the reflectively aphoristic prose piece in
imitation of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Lesser
collections were published by Sir William Cornwallis
(1600–01), Owen Felltham (1623), and
Ben Jonson (Timber; or,
Discoveries, published posthumously in 1640). A related
genre was the “character,” a brief, witty description of a
social or moral type, imitated from Theophrastus and
practiced first by
Joseph Hall (Characters of Virtues and
Vices, 1608) and later by Sir Thomas Overbury, John Webster,
and
Thomas Dekker. The best characters are
John Earle’s
(Micro-cosmography, 1628). Character-writing led naturally
into the writing of biography; the chief practitioners of
this genre were Thomas Fuller, who included brief sketches
in The Holy State (1642; includes The Profane State), and Izaak Walton, the biographer of Donne, George Herbert, and
Richard Hooker. Walton’s biographies are entertaining, but
he manipulated facts shamelessly; these texts seem
lightweight when placed beside
Fulke Greville’s tragic and
valedictory Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney (c. 1610;
published 1652). The major historical work of the period was
Sir Walter Raleigh’s unfinished
History of the World (1614),
with its rolling sentences and sombre skepticism, written
from the Tower of London during his disgrace. Raleigh’s
providential framework would recommend his History to
Cromwell and Milton; King James I found it “too saucy in
censuring princes.”
Bacon’s History of the Reign of King
Henry the Seventh (1622) belongs to a more secular,
Machiavellian tradition, which valued history for its
lessons in pragmatism.
Owen Felltham
born 1602?
died Feb. 23, 1668, London
English essayist and poet, best known for his
essays Resolves Divine, Morall, and Politicall,
in which the striking images (some borrowed by
the poet Henry Vaughan) are held to be more
original than the ideas.
Felltham wrote the first edition of Resolves
(1623), which contained 100 essays, when he was
18. The second edition, Resolves, a Second
Centurie, published in 1628, contained a further
100 essays. After becoming the Earl of Thomond’s
steward sometime before 1640, Felltham printed A
brief Character of the Low Countries under the
States (1652), which appeared in a reissue of
the Resolves in 1661 together with 41 poems,
some letters, and occasional pieces. Felltham
spent most of his life at Great Billing,
Northamptonshire, or at the Earl of Thomond’s
London house.
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Sir Thomas Overbury
baptized June 18, 1581, Compton Scorpion,
Warwickshire, England
died September 15, 1613, London
English poet and essayist, victim of an infamous
intrigue at the court of James I. His poem A
Wife, thought by some to have played a role in
precipitating his murder, became widely popular
after his death, and the brief portraits added
to later editions established his reputation as
a character writer.
Overbury was educated at Oxford and entered the
Middle Temple, London, in 1598. Having traveled
in the Low Countries, in 1606 he became
secretary and close adviser to Robert Carr, the
king’s favourite who was to become earl of
Somerset. Overbury was knighted in 1608, and
Carr became Viscount Rochester in 1611.
That same year Rochester became enamoured of
Frances Howard, wife of the Earl of Essex. Lady
Essex soon secured a divorce from her husband
with the intention of marrying Rochester.
Overbury feared that Rochester’s prospective
marriage would reduce his own influence over
Rochester, however, and he tried strongly to
dissuade the latter from marrying her.
Overbury’s A Wife, which described the virtues
that a young man should demand of a woman, was
also circulating in manuscript at the court,
where it was interpreted as an indirect attack
on Lady Essex. Her powerful relatives tried to
maneuver Overbury out of the way by having him
appointed to diplomatic missions overseas, but
he refused to go and was imprisoned in the Tower
of London on a charge of treason. Rochester
acceded to Overbury’s imprisonment only until he
could marry Lady Essex, but she herself was
evidently determined to have Overbury murdered
there. She secretly arranged to have him slowly
poisoned to death, which he was.
Three months after Overbury died, Rochester,
now Earl of Somerset, married Lady Essex. Two
years passed before public suspicions were
aroused over what had taken place, but then
investigations were undertaken and the
participants in Overbury’s murder were put on
trial. Four accomplices in the murder were
convicted and executed; the Earl and Countess of
Somerset were also convicted but were pardoned
by the king.
Overbury’s A Wife was published in 1614 and
went through several editions within a year
because of the publicity aroused by Overbury’s
death. Its real literary value lies in the
Characters, ultimately 82, that were added to
the second and subsequent editions. These prose
portraits of Jacobean types, drawn with wit and
satire, give a vivid picture of contemporary
society and are important as a step in the
development of the essay. Several were by
Overbury, but most were contributed by John
Webster, Thomas Dekker, and John Donne.
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Thomas Fuller
born June 19, 1608, Aldwincle,
Northamptonshire, Eng.
died Aug. 16, 1661, London
British scholar, preacher, and one of the most
witty and prolific authors of the 17th century.
Fuller was educated at Queens’ College,
Cambridge (M.A., 1628; B.D., 1635). Achieving
great repute in the pulpit, he was appointed
preacher at the Chapel Royal, Savoy, London, in
1641. He officiated there until 1643, when the
deteriorating political situation, which had led
to the first battles of the English Civil Wars a
year before, forced him to leave London for
Oxford.
For a time during the fighting, he served as
chaplain to the Royalist army and, for nearly
two years, was in attendance on the household of
the infant princess Henrietta at Exeter. He
returned to London in 1646 and wrote Andronicus,
or the Unfortunate Politician (1646), a satire
against Oliver Cromwell. In 1649 he was given
the parish of Waltham Abbey, Essex, where he
became a friend of the other leading biographer
of the age, Izaak Walton.
Fuller was again appointed to a pulpit in
London (1652). There he completed The
Church-History of Britain (1655), notable for
its number of excellent character sketches, and
added to it The History of the University of
Cambridge and The History of Waltham-Abbey in
Essex (1655). In 1658 he was given the parish of
Cranford, near London, and continued to preach
in the capital. Upon the reestablishment of the
monarchy (1660), all Fuller’s ecclesiastical
privileges were restored, and he became a doctor
of divinity at Cambridge.
By enriching his factual accounts with
descriptions of psychological oddities and other
details of human interest, Fuller widened the
scope of English biographical writing. His
History of the Worthies of England, published
posthumously in 1662, was the first attempt at a
dictionary of national biography. He was also a
historian who gathered facts from original
sources, producing works that provide much
valuable antiquarian information. He acquired a
reputation for quaintness because his writings
abound with epigrams, anecdotes, puns, and other
conceits, but he also paid careful attention to
literary form.
For the modern reader, Fuller’s most
interesting work is probably The Holy State, the
Profane State (1642), an entertaining collection
of character sketches important to the historian
of English literature.
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Izaak Walton
born Aug. 9, 1593, Stafford, Staffordshire,
Eng.
died Dec. 15, 1683, Winchester, Hampshire
English biographer and author of The Compleat
Angler (1653), a pastoral discourse on the joys
and stratagems of fishing that has been one of
the most frequently reprinted books in English
literature.
After a few years of schooling, Walton was
apprenticed to a kinsman in the linendrapers’
trade in London, where he acquired a small shop
of his own and began to prosper. Despite his
modest education he read widely, developed
scholarly tastes, and associated with men of
learning. Walton lived and worked close to St.
Dunstan’s Church, and he became active in parish
affairs and a friend and fishing companion of
the vicar, John Donne. Donne died in 1631, and,
when his poems were published two years later,
Walton composed “An Elegie” for the volume. In
1640 he wrote The Life and Death of Dr. Donne to
accompany a collection of Donne’s sermons. The
Life was revised and enlarged in 1658.
During the Civil Wars, Walton, a staunch
Royalist, quit London for the relative security
of his native Staffordshire. After the Royalist
defeat at Worcester in 1651, he took part in a
successful adventure to preserve a jewel
belonging to Charles II. He spent the remainder
of his life reading, writing and editing,
fishing, and visiting among the eminent
clergymen who were his friends.
The second of Walton’s biographies, The Life
of Sir Henry Wotton (provost of Eton), appeared
in 1651. Two years later the work that made
Walton immortal, The Compleat Angler, or, the
Contemplative Man’s Recreation, was published.
Walton enlarged and improved the work through
four subsequent editions, a quest for perfection
also evident in repeated revisions of the
biographies. He wrote The Life of Mr. Richard
Hooker, the Elizabethan bishop, in 1665 and
revised it the next year. In 1670 he issued The
Life of Mr. George Herbert, the poet, and in the
same year he brought out an edition containing
all four lives.
Upon the Restoration, one of Walton’s
Royalist friends, George Morley, was made bishop
of Winchester and offered Walton residence in
the bishop’s palace, where he stayed for the
rest of his life. His final personal revision
(the fifth edition) of The Compleat Angler
appeared in 1676 and included additional
material written by his friend Charles Cotton.
Walton published a biography of Bishop Sanderson
in 1678.
Since the late 18th century, more than 300
editions of The Compleat Angler have appeared,
and the unpretentious treatise, of which Walton
did not even claim authorship on its first
appearance, became a household word. Many of its
devotees have been fishermen, but Walton’s
attractive style in dialogue and description,
his enthusiasm for innocent outdoor recreation,
and his genial partiality for the past have
lifted The Compleat Angler out of the category
of handbooks into that of the pastoral. The book
opens on the first day of May, as three
sportsmen—Auceps the fowler, Venator the hunter,
and Piscator the fisherman—compare their
favoured pastimes while traveling through the
English countryside along the River Lea. The
discourse is enlivened by songs and poems,
country folklore, recipes, anecdotes, moral
meditations, quotes from the Bible and from
classic literature, and lore about fishing and
waterways. The central character, Piscator, is
not simply a champion and expositor of the art
of angling but a man of tranquil, contented
temper, pious and sententious, with a relish for
the pleasures of friendship, verse and song,
good food, and drink.
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Prose styles
Anatomy of Melancholy
The essayists and character writers initiated a reaction
against the orotund flow of serious Elizabethan prose that
has been variously described as metaphysical,
anti-Ciceronian, or Senecan, but these terms are used
vaguely to denote both the cultivation of a clipped,
aphoristic prose style, curt to the point of obscurity, and
a fashion for looseness, asymmetry, and open-endedness. The
age’s professional stylists were the preachers, and in the
sermons of
Donne and Lancelot Andrewes the clipped style is
used to crumble the preacher’s exegesis into tiny, hopping
fragments or to suggest a nervous, agitated restlessness. An
extreme example of the loose style is
Robert Burton’s
Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a massive encyclopaedia of
learning, pseudoscience, and anecdote strung around an
investigation into human psychopathology.
Burton’s
compendiousness, his fascination with excess, necessitated a
style that was infinitely extensible; his successor was
Sir Thomas Urquhart, whose translation of François Rabelais’s
Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653) outdoes even its author in
invention. In the Religio Medici (1635) and in The Garden of
Cyrus and Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial; or, A Discourse of the
Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk (both printed 1658)
of Sir Thomas Browne, the loose style serves a mind
delighting in paradox and unanswerable speculation, content
with uncertainty because of its intuitive faith in ultimate
assurance. Browne’s majestic prose invests his confession of
his belief and his antiquarian and scientific tracts alike
with an almost Byzantine richness and melancholy.
These were all learned styles, Latinate and
sophisticated, but the appearance in the 1620s of the first
corantos, or courants (news books), generated by interest in
the Thirty Years’ War, heralded the great 17th-century shift
from an elite to a mass readership, a change consolidated by
the explosion of popular journalism that accompanied the
political confusion of the 1640s. The search for new kinds
of political order and authority generated an answering
chaos of styles, as voices were heard that had hitherto been
denied access to print. The radical ideas of educated
political theorists like Hobbes and the republican James
Harrington were advanced within the traditional decencies of
polite (if ruthless) debate, but they spoke in competition
with writers who deliberately breached the literary canons
of good taste—Levelers, such as John Lilburne and Richard
Overton, with their vigorously dramatic manner; Diggers,
such as Gerrard Winstanley in his Law of Freedom (1652); and
Ranters, whose language and syntax were as disruptive as the
libertinism they professed. The outstanding examples are
Milton’s tracts against the bishops (1641–42), which
revealed an unexpected talent for scurrilous abuse and
withering sarcasm. Milton’s later pamphlets—on divorce,
education, and free speech (Areopagitica, 1644) and in
defense of tyrannicide (The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates,
1649)—adopt a loosely Ciceronian sonorousness, but their
language is plain and always intensely imaginative and
absorbing.
Robert Burton
"Anatomy of Melancholy"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV
born
Feb. 8, 1577, Lindley, Leicestershire, Eng.
died Jan. 25, 1640, Oxford
English scholar, writer, and Anglican clergyman
whose Anatomy of Melancholy is a masterpiece of
style and a valuable index to the philosophical
and psychological ideas of the time.
Burton was educated at Oxford, elected a student
(life fellow) of Christ Church (one of the
colleges of the university) in 1599, and lived
there the rest of his life, becoming a bachelor
of divinity in 1614 and vicar of St. Thomas’
Church, Oxford, in 1616. He also held livings in
Lincolnshire (1624–31) and Leicestershire, the
latter bestowed by his patron, Lord Berkeley.
His “silent, sedentary, solitary” life, as he
himself described it, lent his view of mankind
an ironic detachment, but it certainly did not
make it that of a scholar remote from reality:
he is as informative on the pastimes of his day
as on the ideas of the ancients, and as keen to
recommend a rational diet as to relate human
disorders to his own essentially Christian view
of the universe.
Burton’s
first work was the Latin comedy Philosophaster
(1606; edited with an English translation by P.
Jordan-Smith, 1931), a vivacious exposure of
charlatanism that has affinities with Ben
Jonson’s The Alchemist. It was acted at Christ
Church in 1618.
The
Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is; with all the
Kindes, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes and
Several Cures of it: In Three Maine Partitions
With Their Several Sections, Members, and
Subsections, Philosophically, Medicinally,
Historically Opened and Cut up, by Democritus
Junior appeared in 1621, and five subsequent
editions (1624, 1628, 1632, 1638, and 1651)
incorporated Burton’s revisions and alterations.
In the treatise, Burton sets himself in the
first part to define melancholy, discuss its
causes, and set down the symptoms. The second
part is devoted to its cure. Love melancholy is
the subject of the lively first three sections
of the third part. A master of narrative, Burton
includes as examples most of the world’s great
love stories, again showing a modern approach to
psychological problems. The fourth section deals
with religious melancholy, and on the cure of
despair he rises to heights of wisdom and of
meditation.
Burton’s
colloquial style is as individual as his matter.
It is imaginative and eloquent, full of
classical allusions and Latin tags that testify
to his love of curious and out-of-the-way
information as well as to his erudition. He is a
master of lists and catalogs, but their sonorous
roll is often broken by his humorous asides.
The
Anatomy, widely read in the 17th century, lapsed
for a time into obscurity, but in the 18th it
was admired by Samuel Johnson, and Laurence
Sterne’s borrowings from it are notorious. In
the 19th century the devotion of Charles Lamb
helped to bring the Anatomy into favour with the
Romantics. The standard modern edition is The
Anatomy of Melancholy, 6 vol., edited by Thomas
C. Faulkner, Nicolas K. Kiessling, and Rhonda L.
Blair (1989–2000).
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Sir
Thomas Urquhart
born
1611, Cromarty, Scot.
died 1660
Scottish author best known for his translation
of the works of François Rabelais, one of the
most original and vivid translations from any
foreign language into English.
Urquhart studied at King’s College, Aberdeen,
and fought against the Covenanters at Turriff
(1639). He was knighted by Charles I in 1641.
His strong Royalist convictions led him to join
the army of Charles II in 1651. Taken prisoner
at the Battle of Worcester, he was incarcerated
in the Tower of London and at Windsor. Cromwell
allowed his release on parole, and after 1653 he
appears to have been at liberty, probably taking
refuge on the European continent with other
Cavaliers. He died abroad, allegedly “in a fit
of excessive laughter, on being informed by his
servant that the King was restored,” in 1660.
In the
1640s and early ’50s Urquhart published several
fantastical works that combined an obscure
symbolism with sharply drawn autobiographical
reminiscences. Urquhart eventually found the
perfect medium for his rich, inventive,
idiosyncratic style in translating Rabelais. In
the Works of Mr. Francis Rabelais (books i–ii,
1653; part of book iii, 1693), his linguistic
exuberance and his sympathy with Rabelais’s
spirit combined to make this translation the
long-established English-language version. Peter
Anthony Motteux completed book iii (1693–94), as
well as books iv and v (1708).
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Sir Thomas Browne
born
Oct. 19, 1605, London
died Oct. 19, 1682, Norwich, Norfolk, Eng.
English physician and author, best known for his
book of reflections, Religio Medici.
After studying at Winchester and Oxford, Browne
probably was an assistant to a doctor near
Oxford. After taking his M.D. at Leiden in 1633,
he practiced at Shibden Hall near Halifax, in
Yorkshire, from 1634, until he was admitted as
an M.D. at Oxford; he settled in Norwich in
1637. At Shibden Hall Browne had begun his
parallel career as a writer with Religio Medici,
a journal largely about the mysteries of God,
nature, and man, which he himself described as
“a private exercise directed to myself.” It
circulated at first only in manuscript among his
friends. In 1642, however, it was printed
without his permission in London and so had to
be acknowledged, an authorized version being
published in 1643. An immediate success in
England, the book soon circulated widely in
Europe in a Latin translation and was also
translated into Dutch and French.
Browne
began early to compile notebooks of
miscellaneous jottings and, using these as a
quarry, he compiled his second and larger work,
Pseudodoxia Epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very
many received Tenets, and commonly presumed
truths (1646), often known as Browne’s Vulgar
Errors. In it he tried to correct many popular
beliefs and superstitions. In 1658 he published
his third book, two treatises on antiquarian
subjects, Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, or, A
Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found
in Norfolk, and The Garden of Cyrus, or the
Quincunciall Lozenge, or Net-Work Plantations of
the Ancients. Around the theme of the urns he
wove a tissue of solemn reflections on death and
the transience of human fame in his most
luxuriant style; in The Garden, in which he
traces the history of horticulture from the
garden of Eden to the Persian gardens in the
reign of Cyrus, he is especially fascinated by
the quincunx. A smaller work of great beauty and
subtlety, entitled A Letter to a Friend, Upon
occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend,
was published posthumously in 1690.
Browne
had always been a Royalist, and his fame both as
doctor and as writer gained him a knighthood
when Charles II visited Norwich in 1671. He
seldom left the city but corresponded with such
men of learning as John Evelyn, Sir William
Dugdale, and John Aubrey. Most of his surviving
letters, however, were written to his eldest
son, Edward Browne, and these give an intimate
picture of his medical practice and his
relations with his family. Browne has been
criticized for the part he played in 1664 as a
witness in the condemnation of two women as
witches.
The
first edition of Browne’s collected works was
published in 1686; the standard edition
(including letters) is Works, edited by Geoffrey
Keynes, 4 vol., new ed. (1964). Keynes also
compiled A Bibliography of Sir Thomas Browne Kt.
M.D., 2nd ed. rev. and augmented (1968).
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James
Harrington
born
Jan. 7, 1611, Upton, Northamptonshire, Eng.
died Sept. 11, 1677, London
English
political philosopher whose major work, The
Common-wealth of Oceana (1656), was a
restatement of Aristotle’s theory of
constitutional stability and revolution.
Although Harrington was sympathetic to
republicanism, he was a devoted friend of King
Charles I and was briefly imprisoned shortly
before the King was executed in 1649 in the
course of the English Civil War. His views did
not favourably impress Oliver Cromwell, lord
protector (1653–58) during the Commonwealth;
Oceana was seized from its printer, and the
intervention of Cromwell’s daughter Elizabeth
(Mrs. John Claypoole) was required to release
the book for publication. Imprisoned in the
early 1660s on a dubious charge of plotting
against the restored monarchy under Charles II,
Harrington was freed after his physical and
mental health had been permanently impaired.
Oceana
presents Harrington’s vision of the ideal
state—an aristocracy of limited, balanced
powers. Harrington believed that democracy is
most stable where a strong middle class exists
and that revolution is a consequence of the
separation of economic and political power.
These beliefs particularly influenced U.S. Pres.
Thomas Jefferson’s democratic agrarianism and
the antitrust policies of Theodore Roosevelt and
Woodrow Wilson. Harrington also advocated the
division of the country into landholdings of a
specified maximum value, a referendum on each
law proposed by the legislature, and a
complicated scheme of rotation for public
officials. His ideas are said to have been
partly responsible for such U.S. political
developments as written constitutions, bicameral
legislatures, and the indirect election of the
president.
An
edition of Oceana prepared by Sten Bodvar
Liljegren appeared in 1924.
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Milton
John Milton, the last great poet of the English Renaissance,
laid down in his work the foundations for the emerging
aesthetic of the post-Renaissance period. Milton had a
concept of the public role of the poet even more elevated,
if possible, than Jonson’s; he early declared his hope to do
for his native tongue what “the greatest and choicest wits
of Athens, Rome, or modern Italy” had done for theirs. But
where Jonson’s humanism had led him into court service,
Milton’s was complicated by a respect for the conscience
acting in pursuance of those things that it, individually,
knew were right; he wished to “contribute to the progress of
real and substantial liberty; which is to be sought for not
from without, but within.” His early verse aligned him,
poetically and politically, with the Spenserians: religious
and pastoral odes; Lycidas (1637), a pastoral elegy that
incidentally bewails the state of the church; and Comus
(1634), a masque against “masquing,” performed privately in
the country and opposing a private heroism in chastity and
virtue to the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. But he
was also well read in Latin and modern Italian literature
and ambitious to write in English a poem to compare with
Virgil’s Aeneid.
During the Civil Wars and the Cromwellian republic
(1642–60),
Milton saw his role as the intellectual serving
the state in a glorious cause. He devoted his energies to
pamphleteering, first in the cause of church reform and then
in defense of the fledgling republic, and he became Latin
secretary to Cromwell’s Council of State. But the republic
of virtue failed to materialize, and the Cromwellian
settlement was swept aside in 1660 by the returning
monarchy. Milton showed himself virtually the last defender
of the republic with his tract The Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660), a courageous but
desperate program for a permanent oligarchy of the Puritan
elect, the only device he could suggest to prevent the
return to royal slavery.
Milton’s greatest achievements were yet to come, for
Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes were
not published until after the Restoration. But their roots
were deep in the radical experience of the 1640s and ’50s
and in the ensuing transformations in politics and society.
With its antihero, Satan, in flawed rebellion against an
all-powerful divine monarchy,
Paradise Lost revisits the
politics of the last generation; its all-too-human
protagonists, turned out of Eden into a more difficult world
where they have to acquire new and less-certain kinds of
heroism, are adjusting to a culture in which all the
familiar bearings have been changed, the old public
certainties now rendered more private, particular, and
provisional. For Milton and his contemporaries, 1660 was a
watershed that necessitated a complete rethinking of
assumptions and a corresponding reassessment of the literary
language, traditions, and forms appropriate to the new age.
M.H. Butler
John Milton
"Paradise Lost"
BOOK 1,
BOOK
2,
BOOK
3,
BOOK
4,
BOOK
5,
BOOK
6
Illustrations by G. Dore
BOOK
7,
BOOK
8,
BOOK
9
Illustrations by J.
Martin
BOOK 10,
BOOK
11,
BOOK
12
Illustrations by H. Fuseli
born Dec. 9, 1608, London, Eng.
died Nov. 8, 1674, Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire
one of the greatest poets of the English language. He also
was a noted historian, scholar, pamphleteer, and civil
servant for the Parliamentarians and the Puritan
Commonwealth.
Milton ranks second only to Shakespeare among English poets;
his writings and his influence are an important part of the
history of Englishliterature, culture, and libertarian
thought. He is best known for Paradise Lost, which is
generally regarded as the greatest epic poem in the English
language. Milton's prose works, however, are also important
as a valuable interpretation of the Puritan revolution, and
they have their place in modern histories of political and
religious thought.
Milton's grandfather, an Oxfords hire yeoman, had been a
staunch Roman Catholic who had disinherited his son, the
poet's father, for turning Protestant. John Milton, Sr.,
went to London, where he made his way to prominence and a
comfortable fortune as a scrivener, or notary, and through
the collateral business of private banking or money lending.
Milton was to pay repeated tributes to his father's
generous concern with his education. Of his mother (d. 1637)
Milton said only that she was well esteemed and known for
her charities. He had an older sister, Anne, and a younger
brother, Christopher, who became a lawyer.
Education and early poems
Milton was educated at St. Paul's School, London. The
conventional date given for his admission is 1620, but it
may have been as early as 1615. In addition to his regular
schoolwork in Latin, Greek, and, later, Hebrew, the boy had
instruction at home, perhaps partly in modern languages,
from private tutors. Milton was a voracious student; he
traced the initial cause of his later blindness to his
having, from his 12th year, rarely quit his books before
midnight. Along with a couple of Latin exercises that have
survived, his earliest attempts at verse, made when he was
15, were rhymed paraphrases of Psalms 114 and 136. Milton's
closest friend, at school and later, was Charles Diodati,
the son of a prominent physician of Italian origin, who went
from St. Paul's to Oxford.
On April 9, 1625, Milton entered Christ's College,
Cambridge; he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in
March1629 and his Master of Arts in July 1632. His
experience at Cambridge can be partly gathered from his
abundant Latin verse and his seven Latin prolusions (public
speeches that were expected to display the speaker's
learning and rhetorical and argumentative powers).
Apparently in March 1626 he clashed in some way with his
tutor and was suspended temporarily. On his return to the
university he was assigned to another tutor and graduated at
the normal time.
Milton's nickname at the university, “the Lady,” was
apparently bestowed because of his handsome and delicate
features and a purity of mind and behaviour that disdained
the diversions of his coarser fellows. During his seven
years at Cambridge he seems to have moved from some
unpopularity to general respect and, among dons and
cultivated students, to high esteem. He did not love the
scholastic logic that dominated the curriculum; then, as
well as later, he denounced it as barren. In his last
prolusion (c. 1631/32) he proclaimed the fervent creed and
dream of a young Renaissance humanist who was at once a
Christian and a Platonist. By Milton's own account, his
early enthusiasm for the sensual poetry of Ovid and other
Roman writers gave way to an appreciation of the idealism of
Dante, Petrarch, and Edmund Spenser. He then moved on to
Platonic philosophy and finally came to hold the mysticism of
the biblical Book of Revelation in the highest esteem.
Meanwhile, Milton had been learning his craft and sometimes
revealing his inner self in writing Latin verse. (Latin was
then the standard language of the university world.) The
young poet's sensuous instincts were revealed inthese poems
and were further displayed, along with his mastery of
Italian, in six Italian pieces (1630?), with which his first
English sonnet, “O Nightingale,” may be linked.
Early in 1628 Milton wrote the first of his extant English
poems (apart from the two psalms), “On the Death of a Fair
Infant,” an elegy, in the Elizabethan vein, on his baby
niece, Anne Phillips. In part of an academic prolusion in
English couplets (“At a Vacation Exercise,” July 1628) he
declared his devotion to his native language, a style free
from eccentricity, and exalted themes concerning nature and
humanity. And in the Latin “Elegy VI,” addressed to Diodati
in the Christmas season of 1629–30, he praised the light
verse kindled by wine and love but turned from that to
celebrate the ascetic purity of the heroic poet. The elegy
ended with a reference to a poem he had just written, his
first great poem in English, “On the Morning of Christ's
Nativity.” Such a poem, composed shortly after his 21st
birthday, may be taken as a kind of announcement of his
poetical coming of age and future direction, both in its
religious theme and in its mastery of conception and form and
image and rhythm. Probably in 1631 Milton wrote the
companion poems “L'Allegro” and “Il Penseroso.” Though less
ambitious in theme than the “Nativity,” they have their own
complexity, concealed beneath a unique grace and charm.
Milton had lately (1630) also written the lines “On
Shakespeare,” which were printed in the Shakespearean Second
Folio, 1632.
Milton's scholarly and literary gifts had from childhood
marked him out in the minds of his family and teachers for
the ministry; in his later prose he said he had refused to
“subscribe slave” in a church governed by prelacy, but the
date of his negative decision is not known. As his academic
career approached its end, the problem of an occupation came
up, and the poem “Ad Patrem”—though some scholars link it
with Comus (1634)—may well have been written in 1631–32. In
“Ad Patrem” (“To Father”), with a mixture of filial gratitude,
firmness, and confidence in poetry and himself, Milton
assumes or urges that he should not be pushed into some
basely lucrative profession by a father who has fostered his
literary pursuits and is himself a devotee of the muses.
Paradise Lost.
Illustrations by G. Dore
Horton period (1632–38)
On taking his Master of Arts degree in July 1632, Milton
retired to his father's house—until 1635 at Hammersmith,
then at the country estate at Horton, near Windsor—and
proceeded to give himself the liberal education Cambridge
had not provided. It was in these years that he laid the
foundation or set the direction of his liberal thinking. He
sought to digest the mass of history, literature, and
philosophy, to gain the “insight into all seemly and
generousarts and affairs” needed by the citizen-poet who
would be a leader and teacher.
Two short religious poems written at this time, “On Time”
and “At a Solemn Musick” (1632–33?), are early renderings
ofthe beatific vision that always kindled Milton's
imagination. Both contrast the grossness of temporal life,
the jarring discord of sin, with the eternity and harmony of
heaven and good. The same contrast is sounded in the masque
known as Comus . During 1630–34, perhaps in 1632, Milton
had, at the invitation probably of the musician Henry Lawes,
written Arcades, a miniature masque of Jonsonian
courtliness. This presumably led to a request from Lawes for
another masque.Comus was presented on Sept. 29, 1634, before
John Egerton, earl of Bridgewater, at Ludlow Castle in
Shropshire, in honour of his becoming lord president of
Wales. The acted version of Comus, though somewhat shorter
than the text familiar to readers, in length and elevated
seriousness went far beyond the limits of the usual court
masque, which emphasized lavish costumes, spectacle, music,
and dancing. Comus is a masque against “masquing,”
contrasting a private heroism in chastity and virtue with
the courtly round of revelry and pleasure. It was Milton's
first dramatizing of his great theme, the conflict of good
and evil.
The allegorical story in Comus centres on a virtuous Lady
who becomes separated from her two brothers while traveling
in the woods. The Lady encounters the evil sorcerer Comus,
son of Bacchus and Circe, who imprisons her by magic in his
palace. In debate the Lady rejects Comus' hedonistic
philosophy and defends temperance and chastity. The chastity
the Lady represents is not mere abstinence; it is a positive
love of the good that is both Christian and Platonic. Comus,
who is portrayed with a dramatic irony that anticipates the
treatment of Satan in Paradise Lost, puts forth specious
naturalistic arguments which the Lady answers first on the
rational level; then, with a conscious change of tone, she
rises to an impassioned religious affirmation of chastity,
and the masque's epilogue celebrates the love of virtue.
If Comus is, in a way, a song of innocence, “Lycidas”
(written in November 1637) is a song of experience—Milton's
first attempt to justify the ways of God to himself and to
men. His former fellow collegian, Edward King, was drowned
in a shipwreck in the Irish Sea in August 1637, and Milton
was asked to contribute to a volume of elegies; “Lycidas,”
signed“J.M.,” appeared at the end of an undistinguished
collection of pieces in Latin, Greek, and English (1638).
The classical pastoral elegy had, from its Greek beginnings,
proved its value as a dramatic vehicle for almost anything
that a poet wished to say. Milton, working as usual within a
venerable tradition, as usual re-created it. He had no
reason to feel deep personal sorrow, but the drowning of a
virtuous and promising young man, on the threshold of
service as a clergyman, brought home the whole enigma of
life and death, of the rightness of things in a world where
such events could happen. What if his own talents—which
during his years of study he had been nurturing—should be
cut off? At the poem's end, divine justice and providence
and the conditions of earthly life are vindicated not by
reason but by the beatific vision of Lycidas' soul received
into heaven. It is impossible to summarize the complexities
and depths of the poem, its reverberating solidity of
reference, its rich variety of pace and tone, the artistic
control that dominates turbulent emotions and ends with the
high serenity of victory won. “Lycidas” may be the greatest
short poem in the English language.
Italian tour (1638–39)
In May 1638, a year after his mother's death, Milton set
off—with one servant—on a visit to Italy. He sojourned
chiefly in Florence, Rome, and Naples. Milton and some of
his early Latin poems were cordially welcomed among men of
letters and patrons and their academies. This experience
warmed his heart and nourished his self-confidence. (It
should be remembered that at home he had very little
literary acquaintance and, outside a small circle, no poetic
reputation.) In Naples he was the guest of Giambattista
Manso, marchese di Villa, who had been the patron of
Torquato Tasso, and in Florence he made a call—later
recorded in Areopagitica—on the aged astronomer Galileo
Galilei, who was under house arrest because his views on
the universe conflicted with the doctrine of the Roman
Catholic church. Milton felt obliged to forgo a visit to
Sicily and Greece because of news of mounting political
tension in England, although he lingered some time longer in
Italy. In August 1638 Milton's friend Diodati died. Milton
had been informed of his loss while in Italy; on his way
home he stopped to see Diodati's uncle, Giovanni Diodati,
who was professor of theology at the University of Geneva.
Middle period (1641–60)
Milton returned to England in July 1639, settled in a house
in London, and prepared to take in pupils. He composed an
elaborate pastoral elegy on Diodati, “Epitaphium Damonis”
(c. 1640), which has commonly been ranked as his finest
Latin poem, though as an elegy it is inferior to “Lycidas.”
Milton had returned to England with plans for an Arthurian
epic; like other ambitious poets of the Renaissance, he
hoped to write the great modern heroic poem. But he was also
deeply anxious about the Puritan cause. In his denunciation
of hireling clergy in “Lycidas,” Milton had virtually
declared his Puritan allegiance, and the years 1641–60 he
gave almost wholly to pamphleteering in the cause of
religious and civil liberty. There is an important personal
passage in his fourth tract, The Reason of Church-Government
Urg'd Against Prelaty (1642), that show sit was a heavy
sacrifice to put aside his craving for poetic immortality
and leave his cherished studies to “embark in a troubled sea
of noises and hoarse disputes.” And, as his work went on, he
was sustained by the conviction that in his many and varied
defenses of liberty he was, in another way, fulfilling his
epic and patriotic aspirations. His first five pamphlets
(1641–42) were contributions to the attack made on prelacy
in the Anglican church by a group of Presbyterian divines
(called, from their initials, the “Smectymnuus” group). The
attack was directed chiefly against the church's episcopal
hierarchy, The Book of Common Prayer, and ritual, as being a
compromise with Rome. The group urged a return to the
democratic simplicity and purity of the apostolic church.
Milton's first tract was Of Reformation Touching Church
Discipline in England (1641). This begins by assailing the
Anglican service and ends with a vision of the new and grand
Reformation. In a personal passage in his fourth pamphlet,
The Reason of Church-Government, Milton explains his
religious conception of poetry and the deferment of his
great epic because of what he feels to be his public duty.
Notoriety came in 1643, with Milton's pamphlet Doctrine and
Discipline of Divorce (enlarged edition 1644), which was
followed by three more tracts in 1644 and 1645 on the same
theme. His preoccupation with the subject of divorce was
presumably hastened by his own marital disaster. In June(?)
1642, several months before the outbreak of the Civil Wars,
Milton had married Mary Powell, the daughter of a royalist
squire of Oxfords hire who owed money to his father.
Success could hardly be predicted for the marriage of a
scholar and poet of 33 to an uneducated girl half his age
from a large, easygoing household. The young wife, visiting
her family a little later, declined—doubtless with their
backing—to return to her new husband's household. The shock
must have been especially severe for a man who—as one may
infer from the anguished cries that recur in the
Doctrine—had approached marriage with high hopes and earnest
prayers, and there was no release from such a tragic mistake.
In the tracts Milton argued that the sole cause admitted for
divorce—adultery—might be less valid than incompatibility
and that the forced yoke of a loveless marriage was a crime
against human dignity. For this he was attacked as a
libertine by royalists and Presbyterians alike. In 1645
friends brought about a reunion between Milton and his wife,
and in1646, when the Powells had been ruined by the war, he
took into his house, for nearly a year, the whole noisy
family of 10. Three daughters, Anne, Mary, and Deborah, were
born in 1646, 1648, and 1652. A son died in infancy. Mrs.
Milton dieda few days after Deborah's birth.
In 1644 Milton published what are for modern readers his
best-known pamphlets, Of Education and Areopagitica . Of
Education is one of the last in a long line of European
expositions of Renaissance humanism. His aim was to mold
boys into enlightened, cultivated, responsible citizens and
leaders on the basis of the study of the ancient classics,
in due subordination to the Bible and Christian teaching.
But he also gave notable emphasis to science. Areopagitica is
on the freedom of the press and was specifically written to
protest an order issued by Parliament the previous year
requiring government approval and licensing of all
published books. Milton argues that to mandate licensing is
to follow the example of the detested papacy. He defends the
free circulation of ideas as essential to moral and
intellectual development and reasserts above all his belief
in the power of truth to triumph over falsehood through free
inquiry and discussion. Areopagitica is now regarded as a
classic plea on behalf of civil liberties and democratic
values, but the tract seems to have had very little effect
in its own time.
During the next four years Milton may have worked chiefly on
his The History of Britain (1670). On Feb. 13, 1649, two
weeks after the execution of Charles I, Milton's first
political tract, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates ,
appeared. In it he expounds the doctrine that power resides
always in the people, who delegate it to a sovereign but
may, if it is abused, resume it and depose or even execute
the tyrant. A month later he was invited to become secretary
for foreign languages to Cromwell's Council of State.
Hitherto a detached observer, Milton, in spite of his
private studies, was doubtless eager to have a hand in the
workings of government. He was not on the policy-making
level, but he had the easy command of Latin needed for
foreign correspondence. Also, as a publicist of demonstrated
sympathy with the revolution, he was expected to continue
his defense of the cause against the multiplying attacks on
the regicides.
Milton's first effort in this line was Eikonoklastes
(October 1649), one of a number of answers to Eikon Basilike,
a book edited from the late king's papers by his chaplain,
John Gauden. During 1651 Milton was censor and supervisory
editor of the chief Commonwealth newspaper, Mercurius
Politicus, edited by Marchamont Needham. In this year
appeared his Latin Defence of the People of England.
CharlesII, in exile, had engaged Claudius Salmasius (Claude
de Saumaise), the most eminent of classical scholars, to
arraignthe regicides (Defensio Regia pro Carolo I, 1649).
Milton was less effective in legal argument than in
discrediting Salmasius by personal abuse; like some other
crusaders, he tended to see opponents as monstrous enemies
of a sacred cause who must be destroyed by any means.
If he was, then and later, uplifted by the vanquishing of a
renowned antagonist, he was inevitably and profoundly
depressed by the loss of his eyesight; it had been failing
for years, and blindness became complete in the winter of
1651–52. Milton was only 43, and the great poem was still
unwritten. Blindness reduced his strictly secretarial
duties, though he continued through 1659 as a translator of
state letters.
The Second Defence of the People of England—also in Latin,
since it was also addressed to Europe at large—was much more
worthy of its subject and its author. In it he celebrated
the achievements of the Commonwealth leaders (though he was
bold enough to warn Cromwell against one-man rule). In 1659
two more tracts on church and state were published. In A
Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes Milton
argued for religious freedom (except for Roman Catholics,
since Catholicism had shown itself a danger to national
security). In Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to
Remove Hirelings out of the Church he reasserted the ideal
of a clergy of apostolic simplicity of life.
His last political pamphlet, The Readie and Easie Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth, was published in March 1660
and again, enlarged, in April. It was an act no less
courageous than futile, since machinery was patently moving
to bring back Charles II and install him as king (he made
his triumphal entry on May 29). Milton's pamphlet is a cry of
incredulity and despair from the last champion of “the good
Old Cause.” The glories of the Commonwealth, to which he
himself had given 20 years and his eyesight, were being
swept away by a nation of slaves “now choosing them a
captain back for Egypt.” The Restoration was the last and
heaviest of Milton's many disillusionments.
The Restoration government executed the Commonwealth leader
Sir Henry Vane the Younger and exhumed and hangedat Tyburn
the bodies of Cromwell, Henry Ireton, and John Bradshaw.
Milton himself, as a noted defender of the regicides, was in
real danger. In the summer of 1660 a warrant was out for his
arrest; he was kept in hiding by friends. In August the Act
of Oblivion, granting pardon to most Commonwealth
supporters, was passed. Milton was safe within its terms but
was nevertheless taken into custody (and released on
December 15). According to various early stories, his life
was spared through the intercession either of the poet
Andrew Marvell, who in 1657 had become a fellow secretary
and was now a member of Parliament, or of the royalist
playwright Sir William Davenant, whose life Milton had
earlier been the means of saving. It may have been decided
that the blind writer was now harmless and that token
proceedings against him would be enough.
The large bulk of Milton's prose—which fills four times as
many volumes as his poetry—is read only by scholars, but
much of it is important for several reasons. In an age of
great prose, Milton's, at its best, has an individual if
often undisciplined greatness, and Areopagitica at least is
a classic document. Moreover, as the record of Milton's
growth (a leftward growth, in religion and politics) and of
his dreams and disillusionments, his prose works are the
essential introduction to Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained,
and Samson Agonistes, providing a bridge between the radiant
idealism of his youth and the much-tried faith and fortitude
of his later years. In particular, his A Treatise on
Christian Doctrine held a central place in his thoughts and
labours. He seems to have finished it by about 1658–60 (it
was first printed and translated by Charles Sumner in 1825).
Its importance is that it expounds, with differences, the
theological frame of Paradise Lost. Viewed in perspective,
most of Milton's essential beliefs are those of traditional
Christianity, but he does depart from orthodoxy on a few
points, notably his denial of predestination. Brought up,
like most Anglicans of his time, as a Calvinist, he regarded
himself as one at least until 1644, but his final belief was
in the Arminian doctrine—the salvation not of a predestined
few but of all believers, who constitute the true elect.
Milton above all insisted on humanity's rational freedom and
responsible power of choice.
Sonnets and other poems (1642–58)
Milton's early poems, in English, Latin, Greek, and Italian,
were published at the beginning of 1646 (dated 1645). During
the 20 years given to public affairs he was mostly cut off
from poetry but did write 17 occasional sonnets, versifieda
number of psalms, and began the composition of Paradise
Lost. Some of the sonnets are deeply personal: two on his
blindness (1652–55) and one on the death in 1658, some
months after childbirth, of his second wife, Katherine
Woodcock, whom he had married in 1656.
The major sonnets have much poetical as well as
autobiographical interest, and as a group they illustrate
(with “Lycidas”) both in texture and rhythm the beginnings
of the grand style (i.e., a literary style marked by a
sustained and lofty dignity and sublimity) that was to have
full scope in Paradise Lost. One is less conscious of sonnet
structure and of rhymes than of a single massive unit that
approaches a paragraph of Milton's blank verse.
Paradise Lost.
Illustrations by
by H.
Fuseli
Paradise Lost
By 1650 Milton had given up the idea of composing a
Britishepic. Instead he chose what was considered the most
momentous event, next to the life and death of Christ, in
the world's history—the fall of mankind from grace. It is
not known when Paradise Lost was actually begun. Guesses
have centred on 1655–58. Clearly, the lines on the poet's
having fallen on evil days, in the prelude to Book 7, were
composed after the Restoration, and the whole may have been
done pretty much in the order in which it stands. It was
finished by 1665. The first edition of 1667 was in 10 books;
this was reissued in 1668 and 1669, and in some of these
issues Milton added the prefatory note on his use of blank
verse and “The Argument.” In the second edition (1674),
Books 7 and 10 were each split into two, making a total of
12 books. The arguments, which summarize the contents of
each book and were formerly grouped together, were placed at
the head of the respective books.
Paradise Lost is an epic poem written in blank verse—i.e.,
unrhymed iambic pentameter verse. It tells the story of
Satan's rebellion against God and his expulsion from
heaven and the subsequent temptation and expulsion of Adam
and Eve from the Garden of Eden. By Milton's time the Fall
of Man had already received innumerable literary treatments,
narrative and dramatic, so that the simple tale in Genesis
and the more shadowy role of Satan in heaven, earth, and
hell had acquired a good deal of interpretative and concrete
embellishment. So the main motives and events of Paradise
Lost had abundant literary precedent, though they were
handled with powerful originality; Milton, like a Greek
dramatist, was reworking a story familiar in outline to his
audience. His story, moreover, gave him the advantage of
immemorial belief and association in the minds of his
earlier readers. This advantage no longer operates in the
same way—although, for modern readers, the fable still
possesses at least the immemorial and universal import of
archetypal myth.
The story of the Fall of Man had little of the solidity and
variety of character and action of the classical epics,
however, and so Milton the classicist naturally borrowed
much in the way of form and style and epic convention. While
he was said to have known the Homeric poems by heart, his
great classical model was Virgil's Aeneid, with which
Paradise Lost has some inner as well as surface affinities.
Some Virgilian features of Paradise Lost are easily
observable. Milton centres the magnificent first two books
of his poem on the figure of Satan and his legions as they
lie in hell. Virgil has a roll call of the Italian chiefs
who gather to oppose Aeneas; Milton's roll call of the
leaders of the fallen angels, in making them individuals,
also becomes a survey of the spread of heathen idolatry over
the Eastern world. The realistic power of the debate of the
fallen angels in hell dwarfs all other epic councils. Epic
accounts of Hades are combined, in Milton's pictures of
hell, with Christian lore, but the lurid and dismal scenes
and the physical and mental diversions of the fallen angels
symbolize their spiritual death and futile striving. The
wars of gods and Titans and giants in classical literature
supply details for the war in heaven in Paradise Lost, which
is a large metaphor for the anarchy of sin. And Odysseus'
and Aeneas' retellings of past events become the archangel
Raphael's account of Satan's revolt and war and the Son's
creation of the world.
Much has been written about Milton's powerful
characterization of Satan, who is one of the supreme figures
in world literature. Satan has, on a superhuman scale, the
strength, the courage, and the capacity for leadership that
belong to the ancient epic hero, but these qualities are all
perverted in being devoted to evil and self-aggrandizement.
In his first grand speech to his lieutenant Beelzebub,
Satan's defiance of God manifests his egoistic pride, his
false conception of freedom, and his alienation from all
good; and his other public harangues reinforce and amplify
our sense ofpower that is religiously and morally corrupt
and blind. Against the background of hell, Satan maintains
the false magnificence of his “heroic” stature, but outside
of hell he loses even that. In his soliloquy addressed to
the Sun, he reveals, like Dr. Faustus or Macbeth, his
despairing consciousness of his own evil and damnation, a
consciousness that gives him potentially tragic dimensions.
Thus Satan and his fellows are enveloped in dramatic irony
because—though the corruption of man is achieved—they fight
and scheme in ignorance of the unshakable power of God and
goodness.
Adam and Eve are enveloped in a parallel kind of irony. The
picture of the Garden of Eden is a symbolic rendering of
Milton's vision of perfection, but it is presented when the
reader accompanies Satan into the garden, so that idyllic
innocence and happiness are seen only under the shadow of
evil. Though the pair have had warnings, Eve is beguiled by
an appeal to her vanity and ambition, by the hubristic dream
of attaining godlike knowledge and power; and Adam allows
his love for Eve to oversway his love for God. Both, far
from attaining godlike knowledge, succumb to animal lust;
yet, when grace and penitence begin to work in them, they
have astrength beyond the reach of Satan. On the other hand,
though there is promised redemption for the faithful, and
though the poem is, logically, a divine comedy with a happy
ending, Milton's panorama of human history gives little
ground for hope on earth. Irony, profoundly compassionate
irony, pervades the moving last lines which describe Adam
and Eve as they depart from Eden—not now the majestic lords
of creation but two frail human beings beginning life anew
in the world of sin and sorrow and death, though “with
Providence their guide” and the hope of achieving a
“paradise within.”
The more one reads Paradise Lost the more one recognizes
Milton's powers of imagination and organization. Everywhere,
on the largest or the smallest scale, in abstract idea or
concrete act, theme and material are closely knit through
parallel and contrast. The central conflict and contrast
between good and evil are reflected and intensified in the
contrasts between heaven and hell, light and darkness,order
and chaos, love and hate, humility and pride, reason and
passion. In the council in hell, Satan alone volunteers
forthe perilous journey to earth to bring about the Fall of
Man; inthe council in heaven, the Son alone volunteers to
suffer on earth for man's salvation. Satan unlooses the
destructive anarchy of war; the Son creates the world. Eve
and Adam reenact the sin and fall of Satan. The boundless
scene of Paradise Lost is indeed only a backdrop or
magnified reflection of the drama that goes on in the hearts
of the human protagonists, and, when they fall, the ideal
world of eternal spring and eternal life becomes the world
we live in.
To speak of the setting in more literal terms, Milton's
imagination fills space so immense that the created
universe—the Ptolemaic one—hangs from heaven like one of the
smallest stars close to the Moon. Milton showed his
awareness of the Copernican universe, but the Ptolemaic one
had the advantages of traditional familiarity and of keeping
earth and man at the focal centre. In his handling of vast
space Milton's imagination and language work with a
suggestive vagueness that is very different from the minute
particularity of Dante's world. He is excited by the starry
dance of the cosmic order and, likewise, by the fecundity of
Eden, and his account of creation is alive with the sense of
movement and growth. The poem is rich in its appeal to both
the eye and the ear.
Milton's preface stresses the novelty and rightness of
blank verse for a heroic poem, and his manipulation of rhythm
and sound is of course one of his supreme achievements. The
continuous flow of his long sentences and paragraphs is
naturally unlike the dramatic blank verse of Shakespearean
dialogue, and it builds up a continuous onward pressure.
While the iambic pentameter line remains the norm, there may
be extra syllables, and there is endless variety in the
number, weight, and position of stresses. At the same time
there is a secondary and still more fluid system of rhythmic
units, which flow from the caesura in one line to the
caesura in the next, resulting in an infinity of
permutations and combinations. Milton's blank verse is never
monotonous, and the pattern of sound is so wedded to the
pattern of sense that each is essential to the other.
Milton's frequently Latinate syntax and diction have
sometimes been censured, especially by modern poets and
critics for whom colloquial speech and rhythm are the only
acceptable medium. But Milton's means of achieving the
elevation required by a lofty theme is intermixed with pure
simplicity. His use of Latinate syntax or structure and his
freedom in the placing of phrases and clauses greatly
enlarge and enrich his range of emphasis and his use of
economy, contrast, suspension, all the devices of forceful
utterance—devices often really colloquial. Many other
functional elements of the grand style can be noted:
periphrasis, epic similes, geographic, historical, and
mythological allusions, and so on.
Paradise Lost. Illustrations by J. Martin
Last major works
In Paradise Lost (Book 9) Milton had spoken of “patience and
heroic martyrdom” as themes unsung, though nobler than
martial prowess, and this “better fortitude” was celebrated
in the epic poem Paradise Regained and the tragedy Samson
Agonistes (published in the same volume in1671). Paradise
Regained is a natural sequel to Paradise Lost : Christ, the
second Adam, wins back for man what the first Adam had lost.
But Milton did not, as might have been expected, deal with
the Crucifixion; instead, he showed Christ in the wilderness
overcoming Satan the tempter, thereby proving his fitness
for his ultimate trial and, in his human role, showing what
humankind might achieve throughstrong integrity and humble
obedience to the divine will. Although the poem has been
found cold by the mass of readers and critics, it
nevertheless has all the fire of Milton's religious and
moral passion and his reverence for true heroism.
For some readers, the drama of Samson Agonistes is the most
powerful and completely satisfying of Milton's major works.
It is by far the greatest English drama on the Greek model
and is known as a closet tragedy—i.e., one more suitedfor
reading than performance. The play deals with the final
phase of Samson's life and recounts the story as told in the
Book of Judges of the Old Testament. The action, up to the
reported catastrophe, is wholly psychological; it is the
process by which Samson, “eyeless in Gaza at the mill with
slaves,” moves from preoccupation with his misery and
disgrace to selfless humility and renewed spiritual
strength, so that he can once more feel himself God's chosen
champion. He is granted a return of his old strength and
pullsdown the pillars that support the temple of the
Philistine god Dagon (also spelled Dagan), crushing himself
along with his captors. The drama must owe a great deal of
its power to Milton's sense of kinship with his hero; he has
been eyelessin London among a nation of slaves. But nowhere
does the classical impersonality and restraint of Milton's
art show so strongly; there is nothing in the drama that
does not belong to the story of Samson. And Milton's
classical style appears in a new phase, in a rugged, sinewy,
colloquial texture, and inirregular rhythms of new
expressiveness.
Altogether, if Samson was his last epic poem, it was a grand
testament. Like Samson, Milton was able to conquer despairor
to sublimate it in his last three great poems. These
expressed not his earlier revolutionary faith in men and
movements but a purified faith in God and the regenerative
strength of the individual soul.
Last years (1658–74)
The poet's final 16 years of life, during which these three
works were finished or composed, were peaceful, although
there were concrete troubles: a frugal domestic economy
necessitated by greatly diminished resources; blindness
and what was sometimes a more severe affliction, the pains of
gout; and a degree of friction with his daughters, due
probably to faults on both sides. Apart from the publication
of books, the chief events of these years were Milton's
marriage (1663) to a third wife, the young and amiable
Elizabeth Minshull, who survived him, and the removal,
during the plague of 1665, to a house (now a Milton museum)
at Chalfont St. Giles, Buckinghamshire.
The publications of Milton's late years were Paradise Lost
(1667), for which he received £10; textbooks of simplified
Latin grammar (1669) and logic (1672); The History of
Britain(1670); Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes
(1671); the second, enlarged edition of the Poems of 1645
(1673); the second, revised edition of Paradise Lost (1674);
and Epistolae Familiares with the Prolusiones Oratoriae
(1674). A Brief History of Moscovia appeared in 1682. A Latin
dictionary on which Milton had long worked was completed by
others and published in 1693. Edward Phillips translated
Letters of State (1694). Milton's great epic poems were, of
course, composed in his head, especially at night, as famous
allusions in Paradise Lost indicate; when he was ready “to
be milked,” he would dictate, often with one leg flung over
the arm of his chair. The taking of dictation, the
correcting of copy, and reading aloud in various languages
were services performed by paid assistants, his two nephews,
his younger daughters, and friends and disciples.
In religion Milton had moved from the low-church Anglicanism
of his parents to Presbyterianism to Independency to
independence. In the latter part of his life, according to
his early biographer John Toland, “he was not a professed
member of any particular sect among Christians, he
frequented none of their assemblies, nor made use of their
peculiar rites in his family.” But, as Samuel Johnson
observed, “his studies and meditations were an habitual
prayer.” Milton died “of the gout stuck in,” just before his
66th birthday. His burial in the churchyard of St. Giles,
Cripplegate, was attended by “all his learned and great
friends in London, not without a friendly concourse of the
vulgar.”
Reputation
Milton's reputation grew steadily after 1667 and was well
established before Joseph Addison's papers on Paradise
Lostappeared in The Spectator (1712); these were
instrumental in extending the poet's fame to the Continent.
His influence on 18th-century verse was immense. In the 19th
century two main streams of critical opinion are evident. On
the one hand, the revolutionary Romantic poets William Blake
and Percy Bysshe Shelley launched the “Satanist”
misinterpretation of Paradise Lost and made its author, like
themselves, a rebel; their attitude is summed up in Blake's
saying that Milton was of the devil's party without knowing
it (in other words, that he had projected himself into
Satan, who was the poem's real hero). On the other hand,
other critics—also concentrating on the epic—threw overboard
Milton's beliefs and ideas as long-dead fundamentalism and
attended to the poem's purely literary qualities.
The poet's influence waned during the Victorian age, and in
the 20th century the new poetry and criticism launched by
Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot were strongly anti-Milton and
pro-John Donne. But during the 1940s and '50s a shift in
critical attitudes took place, and dozens of books and
hundreds of articles were given to the ideas and beliefs of
the thinker, the publicist, and the poet and brought a new
refinement of perception and analysis to the aesthetic study
of Milton's poetry. By the second half of the 20th century
his works had regained their place in the canon of Western
literature.
Douglas Bush
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