LES CHEVEUX ET LES YEUX

Les lecteurs du Paradis Perdu savent que les cheveux et les yeux de Milton se sont prêtés à la poésie. Belle façon de survivre dans son corps comme dans son oeuvre! En 1818, John Keats écrit "On seeing a lock of Milton's Hair"; la même année, son ami Leigh Hunt offre un sonnet "To Robert Batty, M.D., on His Giving Me a Lock of Milton's Hair" (il en écrira un autre sur le même thème en 1833) : 

                           There seems a love in hair, though it be dead.

                           It is the gentlest, yet the stronger thread

                           Of our frail plant. 

Mais le visage sans regard de Milton apparaît aussi dans le célèbre sonnet de l'auteur lui-même (1652) : 

                     When I consider how my light is spent,

                     Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide

et à Cyriack Skinner en 1655 :

                                                               these eyes

                     Bereft of light, their seeing have forgot;

                     Nor to their idle orbs doth sight appear

                     Of sun, or moon, or stars. 

On sait moins que, plus de trois siècles après, un autre poète, Stephen  Phillips, est revenu sur ce thème dans un beau poème, "Milton, - Blind" (Poems, 1908) : 

                He who said suddenly, "Let there be light!"

                     To thee the dark deliberately gave

dans une belle célébration de la cécité commuée en lumière intérieure.

 

   

 

A DISREGARDED NOVELIST

The revered, law-making Concise Cambridge History of English Literature (1941; often reprinted) speaks in a somewhat disparaging manner of George Moore's two major novels (which, in fact, in the author's mind, were but one), Evelyn Innes (1898) and Sister Teresa (1901) : "as a novel, Evelyn Innes (with its continuation) does not rank very high - there is some return to the flashy manner" (p. 953). This seems unfair. In spite of some occasional clumsiness in the writing, perhaps, these two novels, dealing with the career of an opera-singer who finally converts herself and becomes a nun, raise momentous questions about religion, faith, the sense of sin and the knotty point of sex interfering with art in woman's nature. The scene in Sister Teresa when Evelyn, now Sister Teresa, tempts two nuns by singing Wagner's music (from Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde) is significant in this respect (ch. XXXIII) : "she began to feel she was possessed by the devil".