So her husband confines his statement to the fact that Milton never engaged in a fight except for human liberty. At the crisis of his country’s peril he was told he had abused his eyes, and that if he did not rest them, he would go blind. He wrote another pamphlet in defense of his cause, thus deliberately sacrificing his sight in the effort to save the republican government. The sacrifice was in vain, for Cromwell died, and the government went to pieces, and the raffish rout came back; “bonnie Prince Charlie,” lecherous, treacherous and vile, with all his herd of noble plunderers. John Milton, foreign secretary out of a job, went into hiding, and his books were burned by the public hangman; later he was arrested and fined--they would have liked to have the hangman deal with him also, but did not quite dare. However, he lost most of his property; and there he was, old, blind and helpless--his very daughters caught the spirit of the new time, and stole his books and sold them to gratify their own desires. That is what happens to men who consecrate their art to a cause; and somehow they have to rise above such circumstances, maintain the supremacy of the human spirit, “and justify the ways of God to man.” The psychoanalysts have made us familiar with the word “sublimation.” Without ever hearing the word, John Milton proceeded to sublimate his sufferings and his balked hopes into one of the greatest of the world’s poems. The first point to get clear about this poem is that it was a piece of propaganda, pure and simple, deliberately so made. Beauty and culture and charm--these things John Milton had known, and in his bitter old age he did not forget them; but the task to which he now set himself was the same task as Dante’s to explain the universe and its divine governance. The epic of English Puritanism has never won its due recognition abroad; the Continental critics have given preference to Byron, who was also a rebel, but a man of the world, a lover, and a lord. Albert Mordell of course includes “Paradise Lost” among his “waning classics”; he has an easy time pointing out the absurdities of its theology, and argues that the interest of the poem is bound up with these. For my part I say about it what I said about Dante; some of its propaganda is out of date, and some of it will be out of date when men cease to consecrate their lives to ends greater than themselves. It is interesting to note how the spirit of Milton broke the fetters of his theology. According to that theology Satan was the father of evil, and there was no excuse for him; he had rebelled against a heavenly king who was all-wise and all-good. But Milton also had rebelled against a king, and could not forget the feeling; he poured his own revolt into the speeches of Satan, making him the most interesting character in the poem.