The idea, in short, of a government of laws, instead of a government of men, escaped him. He thought all government was necessarily of men and he could not imagine such a commonwealth as that of the United States of America, in which the Constitution rules (or is supposed to), and all men and women obey it, even the president, who is (supposed to be) the servant rather than the ruler of the people.
Maybe he was able to imagine such a government but could not believe it would ever be a reality. He did believe that good governance exists only where there are good rulers, and that is certainly true whether the state be constitutional or not. At any rate he was able to imagine almost everything else, and to discourse upon it in his book, in his customary brusque, direct, down-to-earth, commonsensical manner.
It is this manner that is the greatest value, I think, in Hobbes’s book. Most of his major conclusions and ideas are better stated by Locke and Rousseau and other political philosophers who followed him. But his comments about all sorts of ordinary things are rich and memorable.
Hobbes is a man to read and ponder over: concerning this sentence or that—is he correct in what he says or not? The pondering leads to a deeper understanding of that commonplace subject. Much of what he has to say deals with the words that were then used to name important philosophical and political ideas. Some of these names have changed since 1651 when Leviathan was published. See if you can detect these changes. When you are able to do so, you have learned an important lesson, for the old name often throws much light on the modern idea, which you knew and understood in another dress.
JOHN MILTON
1608–1674
Paradise Lost
Selected Poems
Areopagitica
Much is known about the life of John Milton—vastly more than about Shakespeare, for example—but this has not added to Milton’s reputation. For the fact is that Milton was, if not an unpleasant, then certainly a difficult man. A very hard worker and a man of absolute integrity, he nevertheless suffered from traits that do not recommend him to moderns: stubbornness, inflexibility, impatience. Even so, his genius was so great that, like Beethoven, who was fully as difficult, we end up admiring him if not loving him as we love Shakespeare and Mozart.
At any rate, Milton was incomparably brilliant; no young man was ever more so. Born in 1608, he excelled in all of his studies, at school and at Christ’s College, Cambridge, learning the three ancient languages—Greek, Latin, and Hebrew—and several modern ones as well. After years of postgraduate study he journeyed to Italy to polish his Italian and there wrote poems in Italian that were hailed by the cognoscenti. He was sharpening his tools, readying himself, as he felt, for the great task that faced him: the task of writing the English epic, as Homer had written the Greek one, Virgil the Latin, and Dante the Italian. The subject would be the so-called matter of Britain, that is, the grand old stories about the half-mythical court of King Arthur and his Round Table of famous knights. Milton returned from abroad in July 1639, apparently ready to begin his work. But great events intervened.
England had been entangled in religious controversy since the beginning of the seventeenth century, now threatening to break out in civil war. Milton, with the certainty that attached to all his moral choices, knew on which side his sympathies lay: with the Parliament and the Puritans, against the King and the established church. He set to with a will to defend those that the King called rebels from the charges of political illegitimacy that flew from all sides. Milton’s superb knowledge of Latin—the international language of the seventeenth century—was a considerable help to the Puritans, who were soon led to victory after victory by the astounding adventurer Oliver Cromwell. The King was defeated, captured, tried, and condemned; Milton justified all of these actions to the world, and when King Charles I was beheaded at Whitehall on January 30, 1649, Milton justified that, too. He worked day and night in his capacity as Latin Secretary, what we might call today press secretary, particularly for communications with foreign governments.
The hard work, combined with a probable congenital weakness, cost him his eyesight. By 1652, when he was only forty-four, Milton was blind. He continued to labor, but with the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658, the cause was lost. Within two years Charles II had returned from France to be a new king of England. The question for Milton was not so much what he would do now as whether he would be allowed to live at all. Only generosity on the part of the new government—prompted, it is said, by the pleas of another poet, Andrew Marvell, Member of Parliament for Hull—made it possible for him to survive.
That hurdle overcome, the decision for Milton was, as usual, clear-cut: he would return to the work he had abandoned in order to throw himself into the defense, as he saw it, of English liberty. But the “matter of Britain” no longer seemed attractive to the experienced man of fifty. A greater story needed to be told in heroic verse, the story of mankind himself, the story of his fall from grace in Eden, that singular event that had made man what he was (and woman, too) and had led to the inexpressibly loving act of God in sending His only begotten Son to purchase man’s forgiveness with His blood.
Milton was at work even before the Restoration, as early as 1655 or 1656, often waking early in the morning—at three or four o’clock—and composing lines in his head. He sometimes wrote a hundred lines or more and then waited, impatient as always, “to be milked” by one of his nephews who took down the old man’s dictation. Thus was Paradise Lost written, being slowly built up, day by day, by the blind bard, on a gigantic plan that Milton had been forming for many years.
By 1665 the poem was finished, all ten books of it. (A second edition of 1674 divided the work into the present twelve books.) It was praised, albeit with some coolness: Its author had been a rebel and had justified the murder of the king, and Milton had chosen to write in blank verse instead of the established heroic couplets of the time. What is more, the Miltonic blank verse is different from anyone else’s; it possesses the grandeur but also the excessiveness of the baroque in art, and for some of Milton’s contemporaries—as for some of us—it was often hard to read.
With all this against it, Paradise Lost nevertheless was soon recognized for what it is: the greatest long poem in the English language, containing descriptive passages of such force and loveliness—and horror—that the blind poet makes you shiver as you read. And this despite an even greater defect, as some view it: the inability of Milton to make his hero, Christ, more interesting than his villain, Satan (Adam and Eve are pawns in the grasp of greater powers). William Blake, who loved Milton, said he was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Whatever the justice of that remark, it is true that Satan possesses a doomed, dark splendor, especially at the beginning of the poem. However, if you read carefully, you perceive the transformation of this archfiend from a classic tragic figure into his final form as an enormous bloated worm, thrashing about in the squalid mud and darkness of Hell. At the end Satan is a loathsome figure, the despised of God, condemned to eternal misery and awareness of his loss.