TOMKINS AND "PARADISE LOST."

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16144, 23 February 1918, Page 7

TOMKINS AND "PARADISE LOST."

—* I The Kight Hon. Augus!ir.e Birr*!.', K.C was recently the guest or tho Wh.tefriaj Ciub, and he an altogether churn ing epocch on litoratnre and libeny, ac part o: it is printe<i in the "-N'ariou. "It has of ton given me a litt! needful relaxation while reading 'Par: dise Lost' to recall the fact that tli first man on whom was cast the dut of rending this famous epic all throuy (for El I won d read the manuscript i 1665 for pleasure and from friendship was a clerical gentleman of the nam of Toirkins —Thomas Tomkins, who i 1666-67 chanced to be Archbishop She don's Chaplain and Deputy Licenser c Poetry, whether amatorious or m£ jestical," said Mr Birrell. "Oliver Cromwell, when he cam into his own, abolished the Twent Presbyterians, who in tho early day I of the Copimonwealth had been stituted State Licensers; and agains v/horo therefore the mighty shafts o the 'Aeropagitica' (November, 1640 had been hurled with all the force am fury of a demi-god; but the Seconi Charles, when restored, also restorei the Censor, not, we may be sure, ii the interest of religion or morality, bu for the sake of a quiet, sensible, life, and then proceeded to classic literature into subjects; and with th;i ironical humour of his, which mus have made Sir Charles Sedley (tin only man in his Royal Master's ex pressed opinion fit to be 'Apollo': Viceroy') scream with laughter £nc roll on the floor, assigned poetry, ii all its branches, to the Archbishop o Canterbury, who, in his turn, passct the job on to his Chaplain. "And so it came about in this ex ceodingly well-governed universe tha some time towards the end of 166f the manuscript of 'Paradise Lost' ftl into tho hands of Tomkins, whos( plain duty it was to sit down and reai it through carefully and with wakefu eyes—for did it not como from a 'sus pect' quarter? "Some of Milton's biographers, p.nc like most great poets he has had toe many, have thought it seemly to pok< fun at Tomkins; and yet to be forced as he was by virtue of his office, tc bo tho first to givo judgment. upor the effect likely to be produced the sudden appearance of such a poen as this of Milton's, in such a city a the City of London, in the year *1667 was no joke; and so Tomkins fount out as he went on with ..his reading. "The Archbishop's Chaplain was i highly-educated man, being a Fellow of All Souls, even as are to-day Lore Curzon, Sir John Simon, the Editoi (by no means to be confused with the proprietor) of "The Times" newspaper, and many another living pundit, all of notoriously good taste. Whai is more, he was a poet on his own account. lam confident that no bettei equipped man could be found to-day by any Government, however well constructed,. to consent to discharge the duty of a censor than was. in 1667, this accomplished Fellow of "All Souls. "But consider for a moment the situation. On one side we discern the sublime author of the 'Aeropagitica,' blind, baffled, poor, solitary, almost in hiding, in precarious health, and never at the best of times of the sweetest of tempers, feverishly anxious to see the poem he had been for so long composing by night and dictating by day, a poem which he knew, once published, must secure for him that immortality of fame on which he had set his heart since boyhood, well ppnted and off his mind, ere the 'blind fury with abhorred shears' should enter his dark chamber and slit "his 'thin-spun life.' "On the other side we see Tomkins in his room in Lambeth House, with the ten books of 'Paradise Lost' spread out before him, wondering what his duty was with regard to this puzzling poem, written by a man who, not so many years ago, had made all Europe resound with his 'defences' of the murder of a King. Tomkins may have taken his time over the perusal of 'Paradise Lost,' but do we not tho same? "The author, shut up in his perpetual darkness in Artillery Walk, leading to those Bunhill Fields where tho author of 'The Pilgrim's Progress,-" another troubled Nonconformist, was soon destined to lie, fretted .and fumed, and employing the abusive vocabulary of a Carlyle, inflamed by the genuin© passion of a Dante, cursed Tomkins day and night. Tho Chaplain still read on, and the more he read the less he liked. "I can well understand it. What made' the Censor restive and uncomfortable was not so much a passage up and down, but the revelation in its entirety of the Miltonic spirit, which seemed to him, sitting there, in Lambeth. to call up from the vasty deep of Revolution, " 'Gorgons, Hydras, and Chimsoras direj* . . Returning to Tomkins; he doggedly went on reading a hit every day, and finally, with a groan, passed the book. A long-established tradition, and I am a firm believer in literary traditions, tells us that tho lines which continued to trouble him up to the last moment were those famous ones occurring in the first book describing a solar eclipse:— " 'As when the sun, new risen, Looks through the horizontal, misty air, Shorn of its beams, or from behind the moon, In dim eclipse, disastrous twilight sheds On half the nations, and with fear of change Perplexes Monarchs.' "There are still mr.ny who deem these lines to be truly glorious, and, for all we know, Tomkins may have done so, though that is perhaps unlikely, so diverse aro they from his own. But Tomkins had nothing to do with glory; his job was Treason. "Were the King to be turned out of Hampton Court, that loveliest of palaces, what might not happen to Tomkins-s own snug quarters by the shores of the same ancient river? The Chaplain bit his pen, and, only half convinced, signed the 'Imprimatur.' So have I seen the Chairman of Committees in the High Court of Parliament, when sorely badgered over an amendment, fling himself back, saying, 1 am still in doubfc on the point of order, but I will give the honourable member tho benefit of it, and now call upon him to move his amendment.' After this fashion, and after no other, did 'Paradise Lost' appear in 1667, 'licensed and entered according to order.' "Tomkins died young, in his thirtyseventh year, only surviving by a twelvemonth the great poet whose name alone has kept his alive. According to the TXN.B.,' he is buried in the chancel of a -parish church in Worcestershire. His portrait, if one is extant, should certainly be hung up in the Dining Hall of All Souls; and if no portrait is procurable, it might be well, in order to keep his memory green in his old college, to hang up ono of Milton's in its stead. "I may observe, whilst passing awav from this branch of my subject that the manuscript 6 'Paradise Lost' has never been recovered. Would it be worth while looking for it in the grave of Tomkins.-'" A one-time garage in a business street in Eastbourne has been converted by the owner, a motor engineer ! into a farmyard Realising t h??mportance of food production at the !