iPiiiiii|iili|iii!ipiiii!f§;fl|«ii|iii|i!!!i^ PR ^"^.z* iHt UNIVtHiJilV L)Df\Mrvr ERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DJgO^ lA JCLLA. CALIFORNIA MILTON'S FAME ON THE CONTINENT By J? G. ROBERTSON Read December 10, 1908 MILTON'S FAME ON THE CONTINENT By J. G. ROBERTSON Read December 10, 1908 Milton was the first English poet to inspire respect and win fame for our literature on the Continent of Europe, the first poet to be known and to be adjudged worthy of knowing by continental critics : and he was the only English writer whom the biographical lexicons of the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century considered it necessary to discuss at length. To Paradise Lost was due, to an extent that has not yet been fully realized, the change which came over European ideas in the eighteenth century with regard to the nature and scope of epic poetry ; that work was the mainstay of those adventurous critics who dared to vindicate in the face of French classicism the rights of the imagination over the reason as the creative and motive force in poetry. Milton's influence on the German literature of the eighteenth century was hardly inferior io Shakespeare's, and he cast an equally strong spell over the minds of the pioneers of French Romanticism at the beginning of the nine- teenth century. These facts, if nothing else, are reason enough for considering, on the present occasion of the Tercentenary of the poet's birth, the part he has played in moulding the thought and imagina- tion of the peoples of the Continent. Just as Shakespeare found his way to the Continent through the medium of strolling players who performed garbled versions of his plays in the chief towns of northern Europe, so the knowledge of Milton was spread abroad by means that had even less coimexion with literature. It was not as a poet at all that he first became known, but as the Secretary of the Commonwealth and the notorious defender of regicides. In 1652, John Dury published, by order of the English government, a translation of the Et/coi'OKAaoTTj? into French,^ which materially helped to spread Milton's fame, or rather ' EiKoj-ofcXao-Tijr, ou Repon^e au Livre intitule EIkoiv BaaiXiKrj, traduite de I'Anglois. Londres, 1652. See D. Masson, Life of Milton, iv (1877), p. 448. In October, 1654, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, and sister of Charles I, wrote from the Hague to her son, the Elector Karl Ludwig of the Palatinate, recommending him » I 0^ .,.:ilA ^ PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY notoriety, abroad. Milton was mentioned, but not as a poet, by P. Costar in his Mevwire des gens cle lettres celebres des pays Hrangers^ and the Comte de Coniminges, Louis XIV's ambassador at the court of Charles II, made, in 1663, his famous report to his royal master to the efifect that the arts and sciences had passed to France, and that, if there were any vestiges left in England, ' ce n'est que dans la memoire de Bacon, de Morus, de Bucanan et, dans les derniers siecles, d'un nomme Miltonius qui sVst rendu plus infame par ses dangereux c'crits que les bourreaux et les assassins de leur roi \^ The lexico- graphers, C. Funccius, G. M. Konig, C. Gryphius, and V. Paravicini, give Milton brief notices in their biographical works,^ but they know him only as a political agitator, and especially as the author of Pro Populo Angl'icano Defensio, a book to which universal attention had been drawn on the Continent by the fact of its having been publicly burned at Paris and Toulouse. In 1697, Bayle honoured Milton by devoting to him three pages of his Dictionary^ this being the only English poet mentioned in the work."* Still, it is obvious that it was not Milton the poet, but Milton the political writer, in whom Bayle was interested, and he was content to repeat at second hand that Paradise Lost ' passe pour Tun des plus beaux ouvrages de poesie que Ton ait vu en anglais ', Paradise Regained being 'not nearly so good\ In 1704, when the German scholar J. F. Buddaeus came to compile his Allgemeines historiscJies Lexicon, the first German encyclopaedia to have nothing to do with Dury, who was to pass through Heidelberg, because ' he uritt and printed a booke, where he aproues the king my dear Brothers murther, which I haue read, and he has translated into french Milletons booke airainst the Kings booke, so as I iutreat you, not to see that rascall ..." ( Hriefe der Elisabeth Stuart, Konigin von Bbhmen, an ihren Sohn den Kurfiirsten Carl Luduig von der Pfnlz. Herausgegeben von A. Wendland, Stuttgarter Lit. Verein,vol. ccxxviii, 1902, p. 51). Daniel Heinsius mentioned, in 1651, a transla- tion of the Pro Populo Anglicano DefenMo, but this does not appear to have been published. Chapelain discusses Milton in his correspondence {Lettres, Paris, 1880-3, ii, pp. 103, 110), and also Guy Patin. See J. M. Telleen, Milton dans til tittcrature fran^aise, Paris, 1904, pp. 2 ff., a study to which I must here express my indebtedness. ^ See P. N. Desmolets, Memoires de litterature et d'histoire, Paris, 1726, ii, p. 355 (quoted by J. J. Jusserand, Shakespeare en France, Paris, 1898, p. 107). Costar died in 1(!G0. ^ See J. J. Jusserand, .4 French Ambassador at the Court of Charles II, London, 1892, pp. 58, 205. ^ G. M. Konig, Bibliotheca vetus et nova, Altdorf, 1078, p. 541 ; C. Gryphius, Apparatus sive dissertatio isagogica de scriptoribus historiam seculi XV II illustrantibus , Leipzig, 1710, pp. 320, 333 fF. ; V. Paravicini, Singularia de viris eruditione claris, Basel, 1713, p. 207. * Dictionnaire historique et critique, Rotterdam, 1697, vol. ii, p. 590. MILTON^S FAME ON THE CONTINENT 3 on a large scale, he devoted a comparatively long article to Milton,^ but had not much more to say about Milton's poetry than what he found in Bayle, Still later, J. B. Mencke, who made extensive use of his predecessor's work, had, in his Compendioses Gelehrten-Lexicon (1713), nothing to say of Milton as a poet at all, although he appears to have himself possessed a copy of the edition of Paradise Lost of 1704 ; ^ that is to say, the most generally used German biographical dictionary in the second decade of the eighteenth century did not consider it worth while even to mention Milton's poetry ! As a matter of fact, however, the ignorance of Milton's poetry at the end of the seventeenth century was by no means as great as this would imply, even in Germany. For as early as 1682 — more than forty years before an attempt was made to translate Milton into any other modern European tongue — there appeared at Zerbst a transla- tion of Paradise Lost into German : Das verlustigte Paradeis, auss Johann Miltons zeit seiner Blindheit in Englischer Sprache ahgefassten unvergleichlichen Gedicht,^ by Ernst Gottlieb von Berge, privy secre- tary and interpreter to the Great Elector. And even this was not the first translation of the epic, one having been begun still earlier by a German in England, Theodor Haake, a writer who forms an interesting link between Germany and England in the seventeenth century. Haake was a Rhinelander by birth, and in 1625, at the age of twenty, came over to study at Oxford and Cambridge. He virtually spent the rest of his life in England, where under the Protectorate he played an important political role as mediator between Cromwell and the Continent. He was also one of the first founders of the Royal Society. Haake stood on friendly terms with Milton, and his translation of Paradise Lost — it does not go beyond the beginning of the fourth canto — was made about the end of the seventies. It is much superior to Berge's version, which it seems to have inspired, Haake having circulated his manuscript among his continental friends. His translation, however, was neither finished * Allgemeines historisches Lexicon, iii (I quote from the edition of 1730), p. 569 (2i columns). J. Klefeker devoted no less than eleven pages of his Bibliotheca eruditorum praecocium, Hamburg, 1717 (pp. 233 ff.), to Milton. * See Bibliotheca Menckeniana , Leipzig, 1723, p. 661. ' There is a copy in the British Museum. See G. Jenny, Miltons Verlornes Paradies in der deutschen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts , St. Gallen, 1890, pp. 5 ff. A reprint of Berge's translation, together with Haake's MS., was promised years ago by Professor A. Sauer in his series, Bibliothek alterer deutscher Ubersetzungen , but the series seems to have been discontinued. On Berge, cp. J. Bolte, Die beiden dltesten Verdeutschungen von Miltons Verlorenem Paradies, in the Zeitschrift fiir vergleichende Literaturgeschichte, i (1888), pp. 426 ff. 4 i^ROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY nor published, and a manuscript of it is preserved in the Landes- bibliothek at Cassel.^ Berge's work, it need only be added, is clumsy and uninspired, and attracted little or no attention at the time of its publication, although the reason is perhaps to be sought not so much in its mediocre quality as in the fact that Berge, following his friend's example, made the bold attempt to translate Milton in the rimeless metre of the original. When, many years later, Gottsched and Bodmer unearthed this first German Paradise Lost, they had little that was favourable to say about it.^ In the same year in which it appeared, Daniel Morhof, the first continental writer to mention Shakespeare's name, discussed Milton's rimeless verse in his Unterrkht von der teutschen Sprache und Poesie.^ But in spite of this promising beginning, there was no permanency in Germany's interest in Milton ; Berge's translation was soon com- ' ' Das Verlustigte Paradeiss auss und nach dem Englischen I. M. durch F.H. zu ijbersetzen angefangen — voluisse sat.' On Haake, see H. L. Benthem, Engelldndischer Kirch -und Schulenstaat, Luneburg, 1694, pp. 67 ff. ; also A. Stern, Milton und seine Zeit, iii, Leipzig, 1 879, p. 26. In estimating the value of trans- lations in spreading a knowledge of Milton, it must not be forgotten that Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes were. translated into Latin in 1690 by a Scotchman, William Hog {Paraphrasis poetica in triaJohannis Miltoni poemata, London, 1690). This work seems to have been pretty generally known on the Continent, and it is quoted by Bayle. '^ See Jenny, I.e., pp. 6 ff., where quotations are given from Bodmer's corre- spondence with J. U. von Konig {Literarische Pamphlete aus der Schweiz, nehst Brief en an Bodmer, Zurich, 1781, p. 40, and A. Brandl, Zur ersten Verdeutschung von Miltons Verlorenem Paradies, in Anglia, i 1878, pp. 460 ff.). See also Hans Bodmer, Die Anf'dnge des ziircherischen Milton, in Studien zur Literaturgeschichte M. Bemuys gewidmet, Hamburg, 1893, pp. 177 ff. ' Diese Ubersetzung,' said Bodmer in the preface to the first edition of his translation of Paradise Lost, ' ist in keinen Ruf kommen. Wahr ist, dass Milton sehr verfinstert darinne aussiehet; doch behalt auch der gefallene Poet so viel von seinem angebohrnen Glantze, dass er bey nachsinnenden Lesern ein Aufsehen machen, und zum wenigsten eine Begierde nach dem Original hat erwecken sollen ' (p. 9). Cf. J. U. von Konig's opinion in a letter to Bodmer of May 16, 1725 (A. Brandl, B. H. Brookes, Innsbruck, 1878, p. 142). Gottsched's criticism is to be found in his Beitriige zur criti.