Word: macaulay
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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MILTON - Hilaire Belloc - Lippincott ($4). MILTON - Rose Macaulay - Harper...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...high standard of artistic conscience." Not everybody will agree with Fry that the portrait of Lord Heathfield is Reynold's masterpiece, but everybody will be glad to read his tribute to Gainsborough, whom he salutes as an artist unique in the XVIIIth century, who "saw and felt plastically." Even Macaulay's schoolboy must have been struck by the curious inability of the XVIIITH century to draw a Gothic tower that did not look "faked," perhaps Gainsborough's realism came from his scepticism about the validity of the laws of the school. "When Sir Joshua declared that the main mass...