John Milton, Alexander Turnbull and Kathleen Coleridge

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 14, Issue 2, 1 October 1981, Page 106

John Milton, Alexander Turnbull and Kathleen Coleridge

D. F. MCKENZIE

Ladies and Gentlemen, We do homage this evening to three people—a poet, John Milton; a collector, Alexander Turnbull; and a scholar, Kathleen Coleridge. Every teacher knows how difficult —and how important —it is to keep the past alive. I need hardly remind this ‘fit audience’ that history expands our mental space by liberating us from the tyranny of the present; and poetry frees us from that circumscription of mind which petty fact daily dictates. There is no evasion in that freedom. For the Renaissance, and for Milton in seventeenth century revolutionary England, it meant only a higher commitment to transcendent truths. What in me is dark Illumine, what is low, raise and support; That to the height of this great argument, I may assert Eternal Providence And justify the ways of God to men. Paradise Lost I. 22-26

For Milton, history and poetry were indissolubly linked: history, properly understood, could prove God’s providence and record a nation’s struggle towards that revelation; the poet’s job was not merely to delight the senses but to direct the soul. Both history and poetry were therefore strongly purposive. Their function was not simply to reflect the world but of course to change it: Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: Methinks I see her as an Eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam . . . Areopagitica

Milton brought formidable powers to that task. He was the last great writer to unite in his work the three main sources of western culture —the classical, hebraic, and Christian. As such, he mediates

an older past; he refashions it in a personal synthesis which shows the vast potential of a mind when it commands such a record and draws life from it; and he projects it into his own age and ours with a poetic force which any growing mind must still find deeply formative.

That poetic force is not so singular as we may sometimes think. It ranges from the delights of L’Allegro: There let Hymen oft appear In saffron robe, with taper clear And pomp, and feast, and revelry, With masque, and antique pageantry, Such sights as youthful poets dream On summer eves by haunted stream. V Allegro, 125-30

Or the carnival of the animals in a still unfallen Eden, even if it is tinged with a little heavy humour: About them frisking played All beasts of th’ Earth, since wild, and of all chase In Wood or wilderness, Forest or Den; Sporting, the Lion ramped, and in his paw Dandled the kid; Bears, tigers, ounces, pards Gambol’d before them; th’ unwieldy Elephant To make them mirth us’d all his might, and wreath’d His lithe proboscis. Paradise Lost IV. 340-47

The beautiful rhythms of the lines describing Eve’s parting from Adam on the fateful day: Her long with ardent look his eye pursued Delighted, but desiring more her stay. Oft he to her his charge of quick return Repeated, she to him as oft engag’d To be return’d by noon amid the bower, And all things in best order to invite Noontide repast, or afternoon’s repose. Paradise Lost IX. 397-403

The tenderness of Adam to Eve after the Fall: Certain, my resolution is to die; How can I live without thee, how. forgo Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined . . . Should God create another Eve, and I Another rib afford, yet loss of thee Would never from my heart; . . . Flesh of flesh, Bone of my bone Thou art, and from thy State Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe. Paradise Lost IX. 907-916

If death Consort with thee, death is to me as life; So forcible within my heart I feel The bond of nature draw me to my own, My own in thee, for what thou art is mine; Our State cannot be severed; we are one, One flesh; to lose thee were to lose myself. Paradise Lost IX. 954—59 The pathos of the lines which describe Milton’s blindness when, in Book 111 of Paradise Lost, he prays for insight:

Then feed on thoughts that voluntary move Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus, with the year, Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine; But cloud instead, and ever-during dark Surrounds me, from the chearful ways of men Cut off; and for the Book of Knowledge fair Presented with a universal blank Of Nature’s works, to me expung’d and ras’d, And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out. Paradise Lost 111. 37-50 The anguish of Samson’s cry is also Milton’s: O dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse Without all hope of day! Samson Agonistes 11. 80-83

But the word we want for Milton is heroic. At a time, indeed on a night,* when the New Zealand ethos is fairly summed up by the two words ‘economy’ and ‘mini’, it’s worth recalling that ‘economy’ is simply the Greek word for house-keeping, whereas ‘poetry’—from the verb poiein, to make —is what the Greeks meant by ‘producation’. And if you want an antonym for ‘mini’, my offer isn’t ‘maxi’ but ‘Miltonic’. The forces of Satan demand a matching verbal power, and few since Milton have commanded the epic armory needed to despatch, with deserved derision, the politically proud:

Him the Almighty Power Hurl’d headlong flaming from the Ethereal Sky With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition, there to dwell In adamantine chains, and penal fire, Who durst defy th’ omnipotent to arms. Paradise Lost I. 44—49

Milton was a great polemicist in prose as well as a great poet; and in turning now from the poetry to thinking of the works as a whole it is fitting that we direct our thoughts to Alexander Turnbull, who set about collecting them. He seems to have started his Milton collection almost casually. As Dr McCormick records, Turnbull wrote to Quaritch on 14 July 1892: ‘I intend forming a Milton collection and making it as complete as possible if I can see my way to do so. . . . The price, I shall have to leave to you and trust that you will do your best for me.’

Later that year (in November 1892) Turnbull was too busy buying a yacht for the arrival of the first Milton item (at £2B) to be noticed by name. Not so when, in 1896, Quaritch advised that he held ‘Milton (John) Lycidas . . . First edition, a remarkably fine copy, almost uncut, old marbled paper wrapper’ and Turnbull’s reply assuring him that ‘I shall be overjoyed to receive this little rarity’.

In 1912, Quaritch reported ‘Milton’s Comus First Edition Good Copy Six Hundred Pounds’. It was a lot for those days, and it’s indicative of the quality of many of the items which Turnbull secured. In June of this year, Christie’s of London sold a copy of Paradise Lost (1667 —first title page —Coleridge, plate 39) for £38,000; a Comus (1637 —plate 35) for £30,000; a Lycidas (1638 —plate 34) for £9,500; and an Areopagitica (1644 —plate 5) for £14,500. Those four items alone —and only four 0f224 editions and translations of Milton’s works printed before 1801 included in the Bibliography—have a value of well over $200,000. It is not of course my intention to justify to this audience the value of the collection in terms of money. What Miss Coleridge’s Descriptive Catalogue now makes almost self-evident is that the collecting urge of Alexander Turnbull, in many ways a naive and simple pleasure, has assumed its sophisticated intellectual fulfilment in the scholarly service of its subject, John Milton. Given the prices I have just cited —and the values our society pursues —it would be impossible now to build a collection of such scale, splendour and utility. It is for that reason that I record our thanks to the spirit of Alexander Turnbull. When in 1630 the young John Milton had to turn a verse for the

second folio of Shakespeare’s works, he rejected the idea of a marble monument: What needs my Shakespeare for his honour’d bones The labour of an age in piled stones . . . Thou, in our wonder and astonishment, Hast built thyself a live-long monument.

For a writer, the work lives on in his books to engender that wonder and astonishment in the minds of his readers. As he said in Areopagitica , ‘Books are not absolutely dead things but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are’. A bibliography of Milton’s books is like an anatomy of his mind, a statement of the man, and a map of his times. A bibliography of a collection is a cultural witness, a document in our own history, an affirmation of our values. In that sense, it is also a monument to Turnbull.

But there is a paradox about collecting which can lead to a distortion of values. The perfectionism of the collector’s search for Milton editions —however distant in time and place—may well serve a chapter in the dissemination of Milton’s thought. But I should like to suggest that, beyond a certain point, contextual-col-lecting is far more important. Miss Coleridge’s inclusion of a section on ancillary material and another on Milton’s library and reading is highly significant. For what matters most is access to his mind. This means collecting, not simply the books that Milton wrote, but also the books that Milton read; and that means a vigorous policy for the acquisition of other seventeenth century books and pamphlets. From 1476 until 1700 there were something like 115,000 different editions of books printed in Great Britain; Turnbull has perhaps 2000 of them. The strength of the Milton collection must ultimately lie in the ancillary works which allow us to place the major ones in their context, the complex of literate life within which Milton wrote. It is not the least of many merits of Miss Coleridge’s Bibliography that it allows us to trace, from the recorded imperatives of publication, the course of many debates in the history of ideas —our ideas. For example, at a time when our legislature is considering a new Family Proceedings Bill, it is not impertinent to recall points made in Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643 —plate 10):

(a) The ignorance and iniquity of Canon Law, which provides for the right of the body in marriage, but nothing for the wrongs and grievances of the mind. (b) God regards love and peace in one family more than a compulsive performance of marriage, which is more broke by a grievous continuance than by a needful divorce.

(c) That adultery is not the greatest breach of matrimony. That there may be other violations as great. (d) The matter of divorce is not to be tried by Law, but by conscience . . . (e) Marriage is not a mere carnal condition but a human society.

In Areopagitica Milton expounds the most fundamental principles of free publication and open debate as guarantees of civil liberty. But Milton’s impulse to write Areopagitica is incomprehensible without the contextual study of the seventeenth century book trade and its products. As an example ofits projective force in the present, one could develop from Areopagitica a defence of the physical book —in contrast to the mechanics of information retrieval. Pre-selected, institutionally controlled, commercially directed and ephemeral ‘information’ is no more accessible to the individual than authority, short-time storage, and sophisticated technology (beyond the means of any individual) will permit. The portability and thoughtful privacy of the physical book, its hospitality (unlike VDU screens) to the formal shaping of consecutively presented thought, and even the coarse and publicly overt means required to suppress, censor or frustrate the adequate housing of physical books,* make it a surer defence against institutional secrecy and its attendant, political tyranny.

I have left myself too little time to testify to the excellence of Miss Coleridge’s scholarship. If I say that we know one another very well, and that it’s a great source of pleasure and pride to me to claim her as a former student, there will be no risk of anyone under-estimating my admiration for her scholarship. It’s scholarship of the best kind —modest, unassuming, ‘enabling’, for it puts at others’ service, with dedicated accuracy, the information they need to train their own minds, and to add their mite to the elucidation of Milton’s. In the words of Areopagitica, she is one of that ‘free and ingenuous sort of such as were evidently born to study, and love learning for itself, not for lucre or any other end, but the service of God and of truth, and perhaps that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have consented shall be the reward of those whose published labours advanced the good of mankind’. This book will give Turnbull’s library a life beyond these shores, a distinction for Milton scholars surpassed only by the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It is with affection, admiration and gratitude that I mark its publication here today.

Speech delivered at the launching of Kathleen Coleridge’s bibliography of the pre-1801 Milton collection in the Library, 25 November 1980.

* On the evening of 25 November, the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, the Right Honourable Mr Robert Muldoon, introduced a supplementary finance bill popularly known as a ‘mini budget’. (Ed.)

*The New Zealand Cabinet had recently declined to proceed at once with the next stage of the projected National Library building (Ed.).