Art ’N’ Soul: Of John Milton’s ‘Areopagitica’ and speaking truth to power

This is true Liberty when free born men

Having to advise the public

may speak free,

Which he who can, and will,

deserves high praise,

Who neither can nor will,

may hold his peace;

What can be juster in a State than this?

— Euripides, The Suppliants, 5th century BC

“For books are not dead things…; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God’s Image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty attained that wise men look for.

— John Milton, Areopagitica

WE were not told, or taught, anything about Milton — the great poet whose poem On His Blindness was part of our English course reading in college — other than this one sonnet. Nothing of his Paradise Lost, nothing of Samson Agonistes, nothing either of his great ‘speech’ to the parliament against the banning of books: Areopagitica. Perhaps we were considered too young, too raw, to be able to take in those lofty things at that age. This sonnet we got to know well, however: the moving opening lines — When I consider how my light is spent/Ere half my days in this dark world and wide — we readily committed to memory. And the final line — They also serve who only stand and wait — always came in handy to poke fun at the laziest among us. Who exactly was John Milton, when was he born and when did he die, what poetic heights did he attain in his lifetime, what exactly were the circumstances of his life and his turbulent times which saw the Civil War, the Puritan Protectorate, the Restoration, were not brought even to the fringe of our awareness then. In a small-town college.

It is, fortunately, different now. Just the other day, a single, seductively worded line — asking why should we ‘silence all the airs and madrigals, that whisper softness in chambers’, quoted by some author in an article in the New York Times — sent me hurtling to locate its source and led me to what many regard as ‘a controversial tract’, but most others as a document that is ‘part of the heritage of mankind’. The Areopagitica, which derives its name from ‘Areopagus’ (Hill of Ares), from which the high court of Athens in ancient Greece was used to administer its jurisdiction. Milton wrote this 40-page ‘pamphlet’ disguised or ‘mis-named’ as a ‘Speech’ addressed to ‘the parliament of England’ in 1644. Born in 1608, he had already won recognition as the greatest poet of post-Shakespeare times. Incidentally, the very first poem he published was in homage to Shakespeare, a remarkably well-travelled man of letters who was equally at home in English, Latin, Italian and Greek, a singular polemicist, and a committed civil servant. But this tract or pamphlet — couched in ringing poetic prose, not poetry — was occasioned by his seething anger against censorship, against the curtailment of liberties. He was cut to the quick by the Licensing Order of 1643, passed by the parliament, which required all works to be submitted to authorities before they could be published. “No book, pamphlet or paper,” the Order had imperiously stated, “shall henceforth be published or imported without license or without registration in the register of the Stationers’ Company.” There were detailed provisions of course, vesting authority to decide in a few persons. Picking them one by one, Milton railed and fumed, likening the Order to the Spanish Inquisition: using eloquence and argument; dipping now into history, now into reason; mixing civilised condemnation with silky persuasion.

“In old Athens and Rome,” he reminded everyone, “two kinds of writings only were kept down: (1) the blasphemous and theatheistical; and (2) the libellous, while philosophy, though skeptical, and general satire, had free scope.” Today, all writing, of whatever kind, was being asked to be submitted to a small, very narrow, group of ‘deciders’. “No man, studious, learned, judicious enough to be a competent licenser will endure the drudgery. The present Licensers make no secret of their weariness; future Licensers will be either ignorant, imperious and remiss, or venal.” How is the system going to work, he asked? In effect, these Orders mean that “Learning is discouraged. The Order is the real downfall of learning. No really learned man, with any spirit, could brook being made a schoolboy again and put under the rule of a tutor. When a man writes for the world, he puts forth his strength and strives to master his subject: is he, in spite of years, industry, proved knowledge and ability, to be baffled, unless he approves himself to the hasty glance of a licenser without leisure and perhaps without knowledge? …Are twenty men enough to estimate all the genius and the good sense of England? Is there to be a monopoly of knowledge; are the products of all English brains to be stamped like broadcloth and woolpacks?”

This is the way John Milton went on. If the present Order continues to remain on the law-book, he warned, there will be nothing but disaster. “The waters of truth have been likened to a fountain; but they will stagnate now into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.” Freedom to speak, to write, to publish, is what this country will flourish on. The character and present spirit of the English nation is what we need to continue to take pride in. He turned squarely to the members of the parliament of England, looking them in the eye, as it were. “Let the Lords and Commons of England consider what a nation it is whereof they are the governors; a nation of high genius and great energy.” To them, he said: “If you would crush the knowledge that is daily springing up, you must first suppress yourselves, for it is your free government which has made this free spirit. If you would have us slaves, you must be tyrants. Who will stand by you?”

Everyone who writes on Areopagitica today concludes by adding, wistfully, that this great utterance met with no success at the hands of the parliament then. But everyone — everywhere, in all parts of today’s fractious world — also adds that whatever happened then, it is words like these that we must keep close to our hearts.