Poet Scanned

MILTON -- Hilaire Belloc -- Lippincott ($4). MILTON -- Rose Macaulay -- Harper ($2).

John Milton is no longer biographical news. Unlike Shakespeare's, his life has no tantalizingly mysterious blind spots. And no one, since bull-roaring Sam Johnson made his blundering attempt, has tried to debunk Milton; even the Lytton Strachey school of butterfly-breakers has let him respectfully alone. Not because Biographers Belloc and Macaulay were likely to disclose any startling Miltonic discoveries but because both are prominent professional writers, readers last week wanted to see what they had to say about their great predecessor.

Readers who know that Hilaire Belloc is himself a poet, a lusty controversialist and a belligerent Roman Catholic, anticipated some pyrotechnic digressions, and they were not disappointed. Author Belloc's Milton resounds with Bellockian bellows, on every subject from the present state of the nation to the sniveling rascality of a 17th Century renegade. On Milton the poet he casts a keen professional eye, melting with reverence most often but sometimes, when he catches Milton sporting with a mediocre Muse, sparkling with contempt. To Milton the man he is bluffly antipathetic, regards him as the arch-heretic of an heretical age, a humorless megalomaniac.

Milton is traditionally supposed to have been the great Puritan poet, but Belloc says the tradition is wrong: Milton was not a Puritan but a Unitarian. During his lifetime he shocked England by his turgid pamphleteering for divorce; at his death he cautiously left unpublished a lengthy Latin treatise, De Doctrina Christiana, "a refutation of the Trinity, of Monogamy, of the absolute Creator, even of the immortal soul." When Charles II was restored, Milton hurriedly got rid of a mass of incriminating papers, including the dangerous De Doctrina. The manuscript eventually found its way to the Record Office, lay there forgotten until 1823, when it was discovered and translated. But so firmly fixed is Milton's reputation as a Calvinist poet, says Belloc. that even now few people know that Milton put himself on record for polygamy, definitive death, a finite God.

Last month veteran 64-year-old Hilaire Belloc landed at Manhattan, to see his U. S. publisher and rest up before beginning his next book (he has written between 80 and 100. confesses he has lost track of the total). His first visit to the U. S. was in 1896, when he married a California girl (Elodie Agnes Hogan; died 1914). Newshawks found Author Belloc tired and old. He grumbled: "I hate my trade. . . . Everybody hates his trade. I'd like to be a banker, without any work to do in the bank." Author Belloc's prolific output includes histories, essays, biographies, critical studies, children's books, travel books, political polemics, satires, sonnets, novels, light verse, defenses of the Catholic faith.

Rose Macaulay's brief (153 pp.) study of Milton is a neat literary lecture. Though her biography, like Author Belloc's, is well this side idolatry, she seems more awed by the grandeur of the Miltonic tradition, approaches his fame with an informed but sight-seeing mind. She does not share Belloc's sturdy contempt for Milton's rodomontadinous prose, sees in some of it "Milton at his extraordinary best and worst, splendid, exasperating, scurrilous, moving, repulsive, and grandiose by turns."

Neither biographer has any light to shed on Milton's darkly unhappy domestic life. His first wife left him after a month, was forced back to him three years later; the other two he married after he was blind. His only son died young, and his understandably unfilial daughters, according to tradition, were made to read aloud to him in languages he had never troubled to teach them. And Biographer Macaulay. like Belloc. advances no cogent reason for Milton's immunity at Charles II's restoration.

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