This would've resonated with Milton.

Maybe use at the top of the chapter. But check to see if Kerrigan does as well...

It is not simple inconsistency of character with which Aristophanes charges the tragedian; it is that Euripides does not submit his ethos, that of the play, to a higher one, that of Athens. He has rejected the responsibility of the poet toward a larger context:

AESCHYLUS: So answer me: what is it in a poet one admires? EurRIPIDES: Wise counsels, which make the citizens better. AgESCHYLUuS: And if you have failed in this duty, if out of honest and pureminded men you have made rogues, what punishment do you think is your meet? Dionysus: Death. I will answer for him.

Aristophanes rejects the limited sense of decorum, surface consistency of character in gods or men, and substitutes the decorum of artistic responsibility to a large philosophical or religious context." [[ 13-14

"The Platonic system of ethics is rooted in the concept of efficiency. The moral terms themselves—dpetn, dya06c, cogia; virtue, good (the adjective), wisdom — have reference to trained intelligence or skill.1° The prime qualification for trained intelligence is to aim at “limit” or “measure” and, having attained it, to be satisfied.

This idea of a limit, up to which you try to go, is that of a standard of perfection or of rightness which you try to hit off exactly. It appears, then, that in all arts the mark of skill and understanding is that the man who has them (the cogdc or émtothum@v) knows when that wisdom is reached. He does not, Plato says, go beyond another person who understands his art; or, as we should rather say, he does not go beyond what he knows to be the principle of his art.” " pp 15

definition of decorom

"Decorum, 16 mpénov, is for the Greek world of Plato, the offspring of the idea of the proper functioning of parts in a whole. Every thing has its function, dictated by its natural limits." pp 15

Ariosto and Tosso's influence on decorum and form

"One cannot deny the significance of sixteenth century Italian criticism. The struggle of these men towards a new classicism and an independent dignity for literature was to influence deeply two hundred years of continental and English literature. And the debts of Milton to these critics are abundantly documented. But in terms of a dynamic concept of decorum, in terms of abrasive but nourishing contact with the living literature of England, the Italian classicists are of less interest to our purposes than the quieter but more central tradition of Christian humanism flowing through the Oxford Reformers. English criticism follows the Italians, and Sidney is a celebrated case, but there is in Renaissance English poetry, including Jonson and Milton, no slavish adherence to the dramatic unities, genres, or character decorum of Italian criticism. " pp 38

Alongside the discoirdant theology emerging out of the protestant reformation, there also existed an instability surrounding the notion of decorum""

"For the Elizabethans, the term decorum has something of the Protean quality of the term wit. " pp 38

Milton's problem of decorum. mention this early on in relation to the talents

"But of course Milton is not content to inherit; the parable of the talent is not casually present in his ambitions. The poet and prophet who aims at representing his people to history and to God is not likely to be satisfied with what he has received from the past he loves. The received idea of decorum is to be tested and enriched, submitted to the rigors of the great polemical ideas of the early part of the century. Milton’s concept of decorum will be defined by him in the midst of struggle. " pp50

Fire

"I have chosen for examination the antiprelatical tracts, the divorce tracts and the three Defences. I have chosen these groups because they have a unity of subject matter within the group, and because the individual essay is likely to show slightly different pressures on the concept of decorum. I have chosen these groups also because they move chronologically and because they represent clear and rapid public expression. Allied to the rapidity and publicity of the essays is the reaction of contemporaries, who again and again accuse the grand master of decorum of'indecorum. " pp 50

Preklacy tracts

"Milton’s antiprelatical tracts have been often viewed as embarrassing mixtures of raptures and venom, rhetorically skilful but not finally worthy of the poet of Paradise Lost. " pp 51

Milton no stranger to gross imagery

"Occasionally however, there are lapses into apology for Milton’s “‘masses of infamy, without discrimination’’,® and a kind of opposition is set up between the more or less temperate tenor of Bishop Hall’s prose and the harshness of Milton’s. In a note on that famous image of God vomiting over the bishops’ deficiencies Don M. Wolfe and William Alfred write: This image ... is a figure no one of Milton’s Anglican opponents would have dared to use, even against the Puritans. For such a harsh metaphor Milton has tried to prepare his readers in the apologetic passage on “vehement Expressions”’.”

What is directly involved is Milton’s decorum and our understanding of it, especially in comparison with Anglican decency. " pp 52

"Anglican decency, its ceremonious wardrobe and language, is the object of Milton’s furious attack. It becomes, too, a kind of inverse mirror which illuminates in a classic Miltonic procedure, “‘knowing good by evil’, Milton’s idea of radiant unity. I shall call this idea of unity, and the strategy of subordinating and relating local texture to that unity, decorum. " pp 52-53

good rheotrical summaries of On Reformation and On Prelatical Episcopacy

"At the beginning of Of Reformation, Milton refers to “‘the Jewish beggery, of old cast rudiments ... the new-vomited Paganisme of sensuall Idolatry”.1 ... This theme of garishness in clothing is related to the theme of excess in language.!* Milton refuses to “run into a paroxysm of citations” ;!4 he denounces the ‘“‘knotty Africanisms, the pamper’d metafors; the intricat, and involv’d sentences of the Fathers; besides the fantastick, and declamatory flashes; the crosse-jingling periods which cannot but disturb, and come thwart a setl’d devotion worse then the din of bells, and rattles”.1° Milton attacks those who call for Antiquity because “‘they feare the plain field of the Scriptures, the chase is too hot; they seek the dark, the bushie, the tangled Forrest, they would imbosk...”?%

Of Prelatical Episcopacy continues with this imagery of excess in language and dress. Since the piece sets out to challenge the fathers,!’ there is more nearly total concern with “the broken reed of tradition’’ ;18 Milton mocks “that indigested heap, and frie of Authors, which they call Antiquity”.*® In one high-colored passage he skilfully combines the images of clothing, nourishment, language and tradition: " pp 53-54

On the propriety of Miltonic decorum

"The whole preface is immediately relevant. Here is a defence of the grim laughter in terms of the concept of decorum — appropriateness to place, time, person, and especially subject — but one which scrupulously avoids mention of the many classical antecedents. It is easy to see this as purely a matter of strategy —1.e. the refusal to use authority because the opponent falls back on it. But Milton has not tried to suppress the question of decorum; he has insisted on making it completely overt. In a very real sense the question of decorum in the performance of religious duties and in the teaching of religion becomes the theme. The definition of the proper harmony between inner and outer, form and content, appearance and reality, becomes the major consideration. Milton could have cited Aristotle, Horace, Demetrius, even Scaliger in defence of his roughness. But he does not; he cites instead Solomon and Christ. And this is in keeping with the pervasive imagery of the total harmony of the inner and the outer man, and the attack on disharmony, excess, imbalance of the inner and outer man. " pp 55

Lol cite in a FN

"For be not deceav’d, Readers, by men that would overawe your eares with big names and huge Tomes that contradict and repeal one another, because they can cramme a margent with citations. Do but winnow their chaffe from their wheat, ye shall see their great heape shrink and wax thin past beliefe.?’"

"The point about the abundance of the imagery of excess in language, dress, and “authority” is i think clear. And I have by no means exhausted the examples. The antiprelatical tracts are full of them. Often they are brilliantly fused with images of bodily illness. These images of illness are startling and have already received attention,?® but I should like to reexamine them, to show they are related to the images discussed above, and to suggest that Milton has organized his tracts around the master image of excess and disharmony; only if we recognize this master image can we grasp the remarkable coherence, the true decorum of this prose. " pp 56

This image of harmonty is perfected in his representation of the angels

"Again we must remember Milton’s injunction on knowing good by knowing evil, and we must point, with Professor Svendsen, to the ease, consistency, and appropriateness of the images of bodily disorder in the prose.** As one examines the imagery of the prose, he becomes more and more aware of the obsessive image of unity in Milton. It is shown again and again in the way he relates inner to outer, in the way the outer portrays the inner, and the way the inner flows out to the outer. A study of the prose of Milton becomes in large part a study of the way things are complexly unified or related, and the dangerous ways in which they are disunified. The images of unity show fluid and complex ways of unity; the images of disunity show fluid and complex disarrangements. Internal corruption or disarrangement flows out into external sores or vomit; "

"Separation, disparity, pretentiousness and impurity in the religious experience become compulsive concerns of Milton in this prose. Milton speaks of “your inside nakednesse’’®* and scorns “your Priest under the Gospell that thinks himselfe the purer, or the cleanlier in his office for his new washt Surplesse”’.*4 Referring to Isaiah, he writes: "

Dialectics remain the most instructive mode of parsing the problematic poem

"The reason for the critical miscalculation here, and elsewhere in criticism of the prose, is the failure to see that Milton’s various streams of abuse are united under the theme of excess or disharmony and that this master theme of itself asserts the existence of its opposite: order, harmony, decorum.

We are dealing with two contexts which oppose each other and yet use each other for definition. Decency is a conception of elegant moderation to Bishop Hall, of nauseating lukewarmness to Milton. "

"The Anglicans often cite from I Corinthians, Let all things be done decently and in order; the Puritans use Revelation 3:16, So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. Both texts summon long and rich traditions.*! Herbert comes immediately to mind as a native of Anglican decency, while the Puritan tradition of religious zeal and opposition to lukewarmness is at its peak in Milton. " pp 65

History of the pamphlet

"He attacks Anglican speciousness in language whether for ornateness or for pretentious simplicity.” But he is not averse to stressing the surface conformities when they are useful. This is especially true in the last of the antiprelatical tracts An Apology Against A Pamphlet ..., where Milton answers and enters a number of quibbles on his style and that of his opponent,® the anonymous author of A Modest Confutation of a Slanderous and Scurrilous Libell, Entituled, Animadversions, etc. The modest confuter had attacked Milton’s style, learning and character and had shown special indignation at Milton’s defence according to the precepts of Solomon and Christ:

Horrid blasphemy! You that love Christ and know this miscreant wretch, stone him to death, least yourselves smart for his impunity.®°® " pp 66

For someone who denies the Logos, and also absolutely refuses to appeal to authority, Milton places a shitton of stock in the efficacy of words alone

"What emerges from this study of the antiprelatical tracts is a pervading concept of harmony, radiant unity, decorum which takes life from, and gives life to, the rhetoric of disharmony, illness, excess. There emerges, too, Milton’s refusal to mention the rhetorical issues in other than their religious applications. There emerges an insistence on freedom of style based upon the propriety of it in terms of the subject, the goal of the inquiry. Only in the Apology does Milton heavily reinforce this argument with literary examples from scripture and rhetorical rules based on these religious occasions. No where does Milton deny the beauty of language, its embellishment. Almost everywhere he insists on the suppleness, flexibility, and range of language. Everywhere he insists on the inner life of the word. Milton uses the word carnall freely and pejoratively. But his description of the healthy body, or language, or garment is rarely crabbed or ascetic. " pp 68

Divorce

"The episode of Milton’s marriage has been called by Professor Hanford ‘‘the pons asinorum of his biographers’’.®> One feels that much of the twentieth century baiting of the poet uses this event to generalize on Milton’s personality and then to impose those generalizations on his verse. So the clichés of Robert Graves’ novel contribute to the working vocabulary for a critic like A. J. A. Waldock or John Peter.®* The result is, I think, a kind of critical error which is indulging itself in talk about the failure of human relations or humanity in the great poems, after having failed to engage precisely the human relations and humanity of the prose. One can approach the divorce tracts in such a way as to read them only as corroborative material to the tradition of Milton’s anti-feminism and egoism. I hope my reading does not succumb to this convenient singlesightedness. " pp 71

worth listing all of them when introduced + including in the timeline. Maybe also summarizing them.

Maybe also summairzing the prelacy tracts

"The divorce tracts are a group in subject and in time; all five (including the second and much expanded edition of the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce) were published between August, 1643, and March, 1645.8* The two editions of the Doctrine and Discipline and the Tetrachordon strike the reader as major works, with Milton deeply engaged. The Judgment of Martin Bucer and Colasterion are “incidental salvos’’, 8° but consistent and often intensive. The divorce tracts occupied Milton for two years of his maturity. They represent a major phase in his middle years. " pp 72

Marriage in the Tetrachordon

"In the divorce tracts the main image is that of the man and wife in “‘fit conversation’’. The healthy, pure, free body of the antiprelatical tracts is placed in graceful conjunction with another body — another whole body, with an inside as well as an outside; the result is a new, larger, perhaps warmer harmony. The anti-image is that of the couple in loathesome conjunction, bound by custom, specious rhetoric, false decorum, canon law. This evil conjunction can be either lustful or ascetic; it is opposed to the pure and whole satisfaction of fit conversation.

Milton’s scriptural authority begins in Genesis 2:18 where he finds the concept of meet help:

And the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone. I will make a helpe meet for him.

The critical term here is ‘““‘helpe meet for him’’, and Milton glosses it at length in the Tetrachordon, as “‘effectuall conformity of disposition and affection to be heerby signify’d’’, as ‘‘another self, a second self, a very self it self”.®! " pp 73

Some good quotations surrounding the quoptation

He's incredibly radical for championing divorce

"It is important to stress the amount of positive energy that Milton’s master image here gives off, especially on a subject often cited to show what a truculent, dour, intractable man he was. Relevant to the vigor and joy of real marriage is that image, tenderly and ingenuously ambitious, of the heroic rationalist: "

Thomas Becon’s version of matrimony glows like Milton’s:

One man and one woman are coupled and knit together in one fleshe and body in the feare and love of God, by the free, lovinge, harty, and good consente of them both.

The Hallers suggest that it was the very magnification of the religious significance of marriage which led Puritan thought “to magnify the emotional], romantic, and idealistic aspects of the marriage relation’”’.1°° Contemporary reactions to Milton’s divorce tracts have clouded the fact that Milton starts from a conventional Puritan position:

Godliness in the heroic age of Puritanism did not necessarily spell repression and negation but quite the opposite, and, when preachers called for godliness in wives, they called women to an intensely active existence on the emotional and spiritual as well as the physical and practical level.1°® pp76

Good summary of tetra

"If spiritual values are first in true marriage, then they should be first in the question of divorce. And if physical love is important, why condemn the unhappily married man to abstinence? The characteristic strategy of Milton’s honesty is to arrange things in a hierarchy of values, and then to attend to all levels. So in the divorce tracts he insists that mental and spiritual fitness is the basis of true " pp 76

"And yet Milton’s sympathy for the body is often poignant:

God loves not to plow out the heart of our endeavours with overhard and sad tasks. God delights not to make a drudge of vertue... Forc’t vertu is as a bolt overshot, it goes neither forward not backward, & does no good as it stands.!1° " pp 77

Curious how secular modernity embraces divorce on less but uses these arguments to paint Milton a misogynist

"Milton’s attack on asceticism as a way out of the problems of marriage is more vigorous than his attack on lust:

Those commands therfore which compell us to self-cruelty above our strength, so hardly will help forward to perfection, that they hinder & set backward in all the common rudiments of Christianity...1! " pp 77

Rejection of decorum as mere custom

"The dead letter is almost one with the unjust law and obsolete custom. Milton warns against “the prostrate worshippers of Custom’’;!#4 custom, error, superstition are almost synonyms in the early prose:" pp 78

"Milton has an explicit enough task: to defend a public act, the killing of a king, and later to defend the defence and the defender of the killing of a king. But as we read the pamphlets, we are shocked at Milton’s political technique, and we apply our modern arsenal of logical terminology to the argument. What emerge are three gross argumenta ad homines. What has Salmasius’ wife to do with regicide? What has Alexander More’s sex life to do with the harmonious vision? " pp 83

Good context going into the regicide treatises

"The stage upon which the Defences are argued is the largest Milton ever mounted. He is defending the justice of his nation’s cause, after the thrilling event of Charles’ execution, against the greatest scholar in Europe and before an international audience of the learned. One can understand the grandeur of Milton’s expectations. And here the Latin is appropriate; and the cadences of that Latin magnificent. " pp 83-84

Salmasius was a ccholar of international renown and research, should intro him alongside Milton when discussing regicide treaties

SEE PG 85 86 FOR EXAMPLES OF HIM LAMBASTING SALMA

"Milton’s attack on misused language, false rhetoric, garrulity, continues to be a major theme in the prose. In the Defensio Prima the attack on specious rhetoric reaches a climax. Salmasius is after all an international figure, a scholar of the first rank in reputation. But Milton tirelessly attacks the rhetorical copiousness and exaggerations of his rival. He speaks of Salmasius’ “‘silliness and verbosity’’ ;148 of “‘this outlandish rhetorician’s wanton lies”’ ;!*° “‘this bore of a pedant, and the squallings of his professorial tongue” ;!°° “his counterfeit fountain of night-lucubrated tears’’.1°! In this work, rhetoric is used again and again pejoratively:

[examples]" pp 85

ctx for the 1st defense

But it is no secret that Milton called Salmasius names. The critical point is whether or not that ‘“‘name-calling”’ had a place in this work, and for us further whether this is any kind of comment on decorum. The traditional modern attitude toward the First Defence is to find it “‘a pathetic work”’,1® largely because of this scurrility. Professor Tillyard, no foe to Milton’s prose, finds the First Defence

the longest and one of the most ephemeral of Milton’s pamphlets. His furious plungings into controversy are more ridiculous than impressive. And there is an unbalanced, feverish quality in his protestations that fills the reader not with admiration but with sorrow.!**

In this most impersonal of works, commanded by the Council of State, and in answer to a kind of abstraction of an opponent, i.e. the hired great foreign scholar, Milton rises to heights of the most personal attacks. The character of Salmasius becomes almost the chief issue. And Milton will cite his own achievement here as “‘the highest that I for my part have set before me in this life’’.1® I cannot analyse away the disparity between Milton’s attitude and my reactions. But I think that something of his attitude is explainable.

The whole idea of the worthy poet operates here. In the First Defence, Milton shows the impropriety, the indecorum of a foreigner, a hired man, a rhetorician, a grammarian, a sophist arguing against the English people in a matter of august dimensions. If the idea of unity and harmony between poet and poem, of congruity" pp87

ctx for the 2nd defense

"But perhaps this matter is more clearly seen in the Second Defence which is in some ways, as Professor Parker says, ““more a defence of Milton himself than of the English people’’.1®? Here along with an extraordinary attack on Alexander More we have an extraordinary defence of self, and moving addresses to Cromwell and the English people. The Second Defence is “‘successful’’+®§ — and partly because it gives itself more completely to the question of congruence between actor and deed. It is a study of character, praising the man who is good from within out and urging the people toward the perfection of their inner as well as outer lives. The negative corollary of course is to show that Alexander More, alleged successor to Salmasius in the controversy, is inadequate to his task of moral judgment, a contradiction to his profession. Milton is less diffuse than in the attack on Salmasius, at once more scurrilous and surer of the final use of the scurrility: " pp 88

Inner vs. outer self

"This splendid admonition to know thyself animates the whole of the Second Defence and less purely but nevertheless vehemently the First Defence and the Author’s Defence of Himself. And whereas, for us, “Know Thyself” means ““Learn to Put Up With Yourself”, to Milton it meant ““Make Thyself Whole’’. " 91

Decorum, for Milton, is a matter of itnegrity

"If one sacrifices certain ‘““modern’’ questions on anachronism while watching that unity work, it is only in the interests of allowing the works their full statement for the present. If we suspend our commitments to the necessity for modern logical and psychological dissection and comment would we see as the most significant factor in the Defences Milton’s egregious egoism and bad manners? Or would we see Milton’s insistence on an ultimate decorum personae: a man must be worthy of his life, of the tasks he undertakes, of the words he uses. " 92

"It is consistent for Milton to present here the harmonious relation of doer and deed as essential, as he presented the relation of poet and poem in his early work. And consistent too is the reiteration, on the highest classical authority, of the propriety of “vehement expressions’’, “‘grim laughter’. " 93

Cite Eikon in the ctx of putting evil in Adam's mouth

"In Eikonoklastes, Milton in speaking of the piety of Charles says: The Poets also, and som English, have bin in this point so mindfull of Decorum, as to put never more pious words in the mouth of any person, then of a Tyrant.1%*

Milton then cites the piety which Shakespeare puts in the mouth of Richard III, and commends him for observance of decorum. " pp 97

Which is ironic prima facie, but his target is prelacy & polemics. And he doesn't mince words

"Milton attacks over-elaborate, pretentious language steadily, from the time of the Prolusions through to Samson Agonistes. In this attack, Milton insists that exterior propriety is not enough. It must be allied in a proper way to inner purity. Therefore, when he attacks his opponents on the grounds of decorum personae, | see this attack as subsumed under a larger concept, even when the two concepts would seem, temporarily, to clash. I cannot conceive how Milton could use the term decorum in a limited sense without being conscious of its subservience to a higher use. " pp 100

"Steadily throughout the controversial pamphlets answering him runs the accusation of indecorum, of excess in language. Are the accusers simply repeating Milton’s argument? No, because they lack the comprehensiveness, the radiance and breadth of Milton’s master concept-image. In general, Milton is accused of being improper, while Milton accuses his enemies of being wrong. To ignore this distinction, or to try to attribute Milton’s judgment to peevishness, intolerance, or personal inadequacy is to ignore the whole vast complexity of his language itself. " 101

Miltonic power – should mention his decorum

"It is through his defences of the violent style, in Of Reformation, Animadyersions, An Apology, Colasterion, the Second Defence, the Defence of Himself that Milton seeks to link the two decorums. Milton insists on decorum personae in the moral sense. If a man is bad and claims to be worthy of moral statement, he may be impugned in any terms. If a man, on the other hand, is good and arguing for the good, he is free of the necessity of ordinary niceness. The decorous Christian is the one who has great flexibility of expression but no moral relativism. " 102

What's more, the imposition of modernity onto the 17th century is viable if you're not an ass!

"It is not only the tone of surface and induced indignation which is objectionable here. It is the setting up of a decorum of “psychological’’ backing up and filling in which is a cliché of sophomore creative writing nurtured on the fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Itisa criticism as hidebound in its insistence on modern motivation as seventeenth century critics (say Thomas Rymer) were in their insistence on decorum personae. " pp 106

"Here I wish to engage the charge that Milton “degrades” Satan. Professor Waldock argues that the character himself is not richly and continuously developed from his first appearance, but rather in a series of arbitrarily connected emblems. " pp 119-120

Must includein Book II to tee up the son's exaltation

"The complexity of Satan and the extent to which our knowledge of the character grows even in Book I is attested by the fact that we accept the opening of Book II, with its scintillating paradox:

Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d To that bad eminence. (5-6)

We accept without complaint the double perspective on Satan, the pomp and pomposity at once, as a just culmination of the facts of Hell we have already experienced. And we continue to experience this double perspective throughout the Council in Hell. " pp 120

height of degradation

"We are now on Mt. Niphates. Satan is in full light. He is away from the followers to whom he is ““bound’’. He is at an advanced stage of the decay of the whole self (internal and external) which results from the worship of the self isolated from God. And he is psychologically wound too tightly. All the subterranean complexities of Satan erupt into a confession that strikes us as simple and ingenuous: " pp 124

the hero's voyage parallel's Milton's own

"The great journey from Hell is the closest thing to heroism and its termini affect our view of it." pp 126

The poem, indeed all of Milton's work, resists being taken piecemeal and so such critiques like Waldock's do not withstand the acid test

"Professor Waldock’s unfairness to the final scene in Hell, his insistence on the simple emblematic degradation of the villain, is symptomatic of his whole reading of Satan. Waldock refuses to read continuously and with anything like sympathy for the subtle qualifications of character." pp 128

Satan accomodates himself to everyone but God, and God accomodates himself to no one, while simultaneously to everyone

"Unlike Satan, He does not change as the occasion demands. He is not adaptable to person, place, or thing. He is not answerable to the exigencies of His fate. Satan adapts himself, to Sin and Death, to Eve, to his followers, to everyone but God; in this paradoxical worship of self he arrives at something not-self; he becomes virtually a technique of relativism. God is immutable. " pp 130

empson can eat shit

"He is eminently not human; hence sympathy in its root and profound sense is impossible.

The assertion that Man will be saved through divine grace and not his own will, for example, however true, can only smack of self-aggrandizement when it is made by God himself. (174-178)*°

God is criticized for being egocentric, (but it is hard to know why God shouldn’t be, since He is the center) and self-aggrandizing. This would be indecorous in a good father, a good king, a good man, or for that matter, a good angel. God the Father is outside of category. Irene Samuel has put the matter efficiently:

What we learn, to begin with, is that, unfortunately for Satan, the God of Paradise Lost is not merely another being on whose pattern he can model his rebel state, but Total Being, the Primal Energy, the Voice of Reason, the Moral Law that makes possible a physical cosmos. He is the Creator ... the Intelligence ... To try to read the dialogue that follows (III, 77) without allowing the first speaker his full nature would indeed make nonsense of the scene.*° " pp 131

C.f. Ross & Decorum

"Ross’s conclusion is intimately related to the problem of decorum:

The validity of symbols with social reference is determined by society, and not by the genius of the individual, however great that genius be... The artist is a social animal.*®

The concern is for the decorum of words, not the decorum of words in context. " pp 133

God as an antiphon for the Son on behalf of the angels + us

"After insisting upon the uniqueness and un-sympathy and the rational assertiveness of God the Father, Milton will portray Christ. And this is the third important point. God is in fact a kind of antiphon. The opening scene in Heaven carefully moves from God’s opening statement of Justice through his transitional last lines on Mercy. Christ almost literally echoes and contextually expands that Mercy in his speech:" pp 134

Even before the incarnatiion, the Son mediates/intercedes on behalf of man.

Christ is the perfection of decorum. Whose words are made flesh

"The muteness of the Heavenly Choir is followed by Christ’s lovely speech of sacrifice:

Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life I offer, on mee let thine anger fall; Account mee man; I for his sake will leave Thy bosom... (236-239)

This scene with its balancing speeches of aspects of deity and its choral interludes and finale is both magnificent and moving. Again and again in the poem, Christ will echo the divine justice in some human way. In Book V Christ translates that divine justice into laughter; in Book VI, into destructive power; in Book VII, into creative love: " pp 134

"This is the charge of many critics, that Milton has created difficulties for his poem by a simple-minded insistence on the doctrinal:

It is hard not to feel some slight impatience with a poet who prefers to double the intrinsic difficulties: who, not content with a God who must, however matters are contrived, appear somewhat vindictive, goes out of his way to convict him on his very first appearance of flagrant disingenuousness and hypocrisy ... The human impression is what is important.®°

I tack on the last sentence because it is a key to Professor Waldock’s position, and to that of Mr. Peter who bears burden to this popular song:

Thus Theology’s demand for a clearness at the outset about Man’s Free Will and Poetry’s demand for a characterization of God that will support our love and reverence cannot on Milton’s terms be reconciled.*?

Milton would reject ‘“‘Poetry’s demand’, at least as it is put here. " pp 135

All my homies hate Empson

"“The human impression is what is important’ — but not in the sense Professor Waldock insists on. And it is a matter of decorum, of what the standard for human is to be. Is this human decorum the twentieth century one which rejects the concept of deity or at least the possibility of its expression in other than warm, fathering terms? I suggest that Waldock, Peter, and Mr. Empson are insisting on a decorum personae for God that is as rigid as Thomas Rymer’s for Othello and as limited in its regard for the poem as an organism. Empson’s God is answerable to Empson’s man; satisfactions Empson demands from Milton’s God are based on a conception of human nature which omits God from that nature, not the manhood in Grace which Milton insists on everywhere in his work. To impart a modern decorum for God’s performance into the reading of the poem is an act of critical irresponsibility, especially since the human nature which serves to create that decorum has changed radically during the time since Milton. What “feels right’ for Mr. Empson is not finally what feels right for Milton or indeed for many twentieth century readers.*” " pp 136

Fire for the final thoughts on PL? Evaluation of the degree to which Milton succeeds

"Justice is not always pleasant. The religious experience is not always euphoric. Fallen man is fallen and man, and man is something more than rational beast. Milton engages these facts in his treatment of God. " pp 137

Decorum of the wayes of God, Justice & mercy

"It is only the kind of honesty that wants praise for its brave fellow-ness that smacks of pride. One does not sacrifice one’s self to God easily, or because one is incomplete. The Christian who is “‘a lively sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” will be rational and aware in his humility. " pp 137

guilt for treating hell first?

"Milton approaches the garden last of his three moral arenas or places, topoi in the basic Aristotelian sense. He has started at the edges of the known universe and worked in to the Garden. The mythic sense is generally Ptolemaic, one assumes; in any case the working spatialization of the poem creates a pronounced sense of ‘arrival’? when the poem reaches Paradise. " pp 137

Example of thir work which can be referenced in the Fall IX

"The next paragraph describes the “‘work’”’ which Adam and Eve are to do. Here, the Garden is an elegant analogue to the married bliss in moral hierarchy of Adam and Eve; the couple go

   where any row

Of Fruit-trees overwoodie reachd too farr Thir pamperd boughes, and needed hands to check Fruitless imbraces: or they led the Vine To wed her Elm; she spous’d about him twines Her mariageable arms, and with her brings Her dowr th’ adopted Clusters, to adorn His barren leaves. (212-219)

It is a richly natural, but also private and domestic, Adam and Eve now before us. " pp 142

"The great Christian epic is, in fact, able to sustain even the adjustment to comedy. Our thin decorum is nervous about admitting the comic to proximity with the official sublime. Milton is more daring. Just as his prose sometimes tests the boundaries between scurrility and polemic, his poetry tests the boundaries between comic and sublime. His conception of decorum is able to contain harmonniously the magnificent and tragic and the modest and comic. " pp 143

use these synonyms for Raphael

"Raphael is consistent throughout the poem; he is in Book VII, “the affable Arch-Angel” (1. 41); in Book VIII he is ““Benevolent and facil” (1. 65); and in Book XI, he is remembered as “‘sociably mild” (1. 234). This identification and indeed imaginative classification is part of the operation of decorum. " pp 144

Wanton'd + Raphael's flight vs. Satan's flight. More parallels

"Raphael’s fragrance meets those of earth:

Into the blissful field, through Groves of Myrrhe, And flouring Odours, Cassia, Nard, and Balme; A Wilderness of sweets; for Nature here Wantond as in her prime, and plaid at will Her Virgin Fancies, pouring forth more sweet, Wilde above Rule or Art; enormous bliss. (292-297)

This is a different garden from the one Milton shows in Book IV. It is at once less formidable and wilder, a gentler and more natural place. Another delicate adjustment of the decorum has been made, and one means of change is the shift from the sense of sight to smell. " pp146

Humorously domestic decorum – to the point that critics fault his decorum.

"Angel and man arrive at the table genially described. Then comes one of the genuinely achieved comic lines in English:

A while discourse they hold; No fear lest Dinner coole...

The line has disturbed a long series of influential readers: Addison, Tennyson, Taine among others.®* And the history of the line is almost a history of the understanding of Milton’s decorum. Milton exploits the naturalness of the scene and the supernaturalness of the angel, as God’s representative, to create a comic disparity. " pp 150

On digestion – reference DDC

"For Milton digestion is an orderly disposition, used often by him metaphorically, as in the Christian Doctrine where he speaks of matter being ‘“‘adorned and digested into order by the hand of God”’.”4 "

Summers on the functionality of Miltonic decorum

"Working chiefly from the Paradise Lost, Professor Joseph Summers has arrived at a similar conclusion:

Whatever Milton may have thought earlier, by the time he came to write Paradise Lost he seems to have reached the general enlightened conclusion that literary decorum could not be judged apart from the materials and aims of the particular literary work. Decorum concerned the proper relations between the parts and the whole, the propriety of means and ends. The “‘decorous”’ in this sense, like our modern ‘‘functional”’, implies that beautiful detail must contribute to or reflect the whole; but unlike the modern word, Milton’s term also implies that harmony is natural to man and that man is more than the sum of his activities. It was precisely this sense of the harmonious whole which required that Paradise Lost should continuously challenge the abstracted and conventional decorums of the past. The parts and the whole of this poem must be proper for the end of celebrating the ways of God and of human history, those ways which have violated the sense of decorum of most civilizations, most literatures, most ruling classes, and most men.!

Mr. Summers has stated elegantly what, it seems to me, is the most important aspect of Milton’s whole work. The ideal of unity and the means of attaining it are everywhere in Milton. H" pp 156

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