I've been laid low with flu, garden-variety. It's almost pleasant to be sick enough to stay home from work, conscience free, but not so sick as to be unable to enjoy sedentary pursuits--the divisional race in the American League Central, for example, and Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets. Last night the Twins beat the Royals while the Pale Hose topped the Tigers, thereby lifting the Twins to within a game of first place and freeing me, once the telecasts were concluded, to forge ahead in Johnson's account of the life and work of John Milton.
Though it may not have seemed so to Milton, his life was divided in three parts: (1) youthful apprenticeship; (2) pamphleteer; and (3) epic poet. Johnson, a self-made man dogged for years by the need to make a living, probably regarded the details of (1) with a mixture of asperity and longing. There is no need to speculate about what he, a strong Tory, thought of the details of (2). Almost against his will he could not deny Milton's achievement in (3). One can often sense the opposing forces contending in his inimitable prose style. Having reached the point, on the cusp between (1) and (2), at which Milton returns home to contentious England from his tour of the continent, Johnson writes:
Let not our veneration for Milton forbid us to look with some degree of merriment on great promises and small performance, on the man who hastens home because his countrymen are contending for their liberty, and when he reaches the scene of action, vapours away his patriotism in a private boarding-school. This is the period of his life from which all his biographers seem inclined to shrink.
His contempt for Milton's politics is joined to a coldly ferocious attack on his character:
It has been observed that they who most clamour for liberty do not most liberally grant it. What we know of Milton's character in domestic relations is that he was severe and arbitrary. His family consisted of women, and there appears in his books something like a Turkish contempt of females as subordinate and inferior beings. That his own daughters might not break the ranks, he suffered them to be depressed by a mean and penurious education. He thought woman made only for obedience, and man only for rebellion.
The temperature here seems sufficiently high to make one wonder what his veneration of Milton would preclude. His offhanded dismissal of "Lycidas" is famous (and wrong), and he works into his generally admiring review of Paradise Lost the remark that "none ever wished it longer." (I think he was right about that.) One does nevertheless often detect a kind of grudging veneration, in small things as well as great:
Of his zeal for learning in all its parts, he gave a proof by publishing the next year (1661) Accidence commenced Grammar, a little book which has nothing remarkable but that its author, who had been lately defending the supreme powers of his country and was then writing Paradise Lost, could descend from his elevation to rescue children from the perplexity of grammatical confusion, and the trouble of lessons unnecessarily repeated.
Delmon Young, batting with two out and the bases loaded in the sixth inning of a pitchers' duel, has just delivered a bases-clearing double. It appears the Twins have a good chance of playing a meaningful game on the very last day of the regular season. As a compensation for the flu, all this is first-rate.
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