Review
Art
Culture
5 min read

Paradise cottage: Milton reimagin’d

Artist Richard Kenton Webb converses with the blind poet in his former home.

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A black and white illustration shows a man holding a walk stick standing among tomb-like structures.
The blind poet. Charcoal and white chalk on paper, 2022.
Richard Kenton Webb.

‘Waiting to Speak to Milton’ shows the artist Richard Kenton Webb on a rain-swept night waiting in a valley for a car whose headlights can just be seen at the crest of the hill. For this image he has imagined himself waiting for a lift from John Milton to discuss the poems Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. As the opening image to Webb’s exhibition at Milton’s Cottage in Chalfont St Giles it is appropriately positioned in the porch by which visitors enter the cottage. 

This image of light appearing in the dark night of the soul symbolises the beginning of Webb’s journey with Milton and his late poems Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes. This has been a 10-year journey that Webb began following a conversation with his son in front of John Martin’s mezzotints for Paradise Lost at the Tate. Following on from his son’s encouragement to begin work, over that period, Webb says Milton has been a companion like Virgil to Dante guiding him through the narrative of his own life including the dark nights of redundancy and lockdown. The result has been 128 drawings, 40 paintings and 12 relief prints forming A Conversation with Milton’s Paradise Lost, a commission of 12 drawings in response to Milton’s pastoral elegy, Lycidas, for the Milton Society of America, and the 13 drawings forming this exhibition, A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes

Milton proved an effective companion because he, too, had passed through his own dark night of the soul. He arrived in Chalfont St Giles to escape the Great Plague of 1665 after the Republican cause to which he had dedicated more than a decade of his life - being Oliver Cromwell’s unofficial spin doctor - had collapsed around him with the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660. He had been lucky to escape with his life following imprisonment and the banning of his books. In addition, he had lost his sight, his beloved second wife, much of his money and all of his influence.   

Despite these traumas, Milton was able to express his love for his Creator wonderfully in Paradise Lost, which was completed at the cottage in Chalfont St Giles, and Paradise Regain’d, which was inspired whilst there. In both Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes Milton deploys his rich verses and visions of spirituality and the forces of good and evil to reflect on the Restoration of the Monarchy and the loss of the English republic, doing so by means of Biblical stories concerning Jesus and Samson.  

In Webb’s view, “Paradise Regain’d is about overcoming impossible situations” while, in Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Redeemer shows “Samson, the blind and foolish man”, “that we can always find hope in our living God even when society does not”. These poems moved Webb out of despair to discover hope because he knew they were heading towards redemption. As a result, he sees Milton as “a great English poet who gives hope, which in itself is a creative act for these difficult times”. 

Although the story of Samson pre-dates that of Jesus being tempted in the wilderness, Webb’s painting series begins with images inspired by Paradise Regain’d, just as Samson Agonistes followed Paradise Regain’d when both were jointly published in 1671, because Jesus’ resistance of temptation ultimately redeems those, like Samson and Adam and Eve, who were unable to resist.    

These are images set against a dark background with the exception of the final Paradise Regain’d image with its white sky depicting a paradise within as Jesus has overcome temptation, is in full communion with God and is about to begin his ministry by calling his first disciples. The images move from the trauma and test of temptation – whether involving hunger, greed, lust, threat, pride or ambition – to a calmness of mind that is equipoise and liberation and which also enables the destruction of false temples. 

They are images in which movement is arrested in still moments which form theatrical tableaux. These, like medieval and early Tudor morality plays, involve the viewer in an epic struggle between good and evil, involving temptation, fall and redemption. Webb’s use of charcoal and white chalk on paper emphasises the binary nature of this struggle. Being formed of charcoal and chalk, despite his use of contemporary equivalents for the temptations, the look and feel of Webb’s images also accords well with their exhibition setting, in rooms of low ceilings, uneven white walls, dark beams and furniture.  

Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own.

As Paradise Lost was the first illustrated poem in the English language, Milton’s poetry has, as Kelly O’Reilly, Director of Milton’s Cottage, has noted “inspired many of our greatest artists, from Blake to Turner, Dore to Dali”. Webb, who consciously works in the continuing tradition of Blake’s visionary art, is extending the tradition of illustrating Milton’s poems. It is appropriate, then, that, by exhibiting these drawings in Milton’s Cottage, they are placed alongside examples of illustrated editions of the poems, plus other paintings and prints relating to Milton.   

Milton’s works are not only a repository of rich verse, which also gifted over 600 new words to the English language, but are also a conversation with scripture, its stories and their interpretation, plus the social and political ramifications of the Reformation in the British Isles. Webb’s works and exhibition also universalise Milton’s own experience of the dark night of the soul by merging that story with Webb’s own and linking those powerfully to the themes of Milton’s poems.  

The key image, in this regard, is the first in the Paradise Regain’d series (‘Modes of Apprehension’), which sees Jesus in the wilderness turning up the corner of the wilderness backdrop, as in a theatre, to reveal another dimension or reality to existence and experience behind it. Hope is discovered in the midst of desolation, resilience found in the face of temptation. In these ways, Webb achieves his own hope for these works, that, “by responding to Milton’s universal themes of creation, destruction, temptation, love and loss”, he “can help new audiences find fresh ways to engage in Milton’s legacy”.     

 

A Conversation with Paradise Regain’d & Samson Agonistes, Milton’s Cottage, 3 July – 8 September 2024.

Column
Culture
Nationalism
Politics
4 min read

What Tom Paine really said about globalism and religion

We can’t live without homelands, but we need to be generous with them.

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A statue of a 18th century man holding a pen and a book.
Richard Croft, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

We live near Lewes in East Sussex, a town surrounded by genteel Conservatism but which inherits a certain edgy radicalism from Thomas Paine, whose utopian politics emerged there in the eighteenth century to inform both the French and American revolutions. 

Paine haunts Lewes and his paraphernalia are everywhere. Walk the streets and it won’t be long before you spot posters quoting his most famous lines, among them “My country is the world and my religion is to do good”, from his seminal work Rights of Man

He was a vicious critic of all organised religion, leading to the widespread assumption that he was an atheist. More accurately, he was a deist, a believer in a God who could and would deliver a global redemption of humankind, if we could and would only work towards that. The bit that’s most often left out of that famous quote is the phrase: “… all mankind are my brethren.” 

Sometimes it takes a prophetic voice from outside mainstream religion to point us towards a world peace and a concord that seems beyond our faithful grasp. As ultra-nationalism is the go-to political ideology of our age, it’s such a voice that demonstrates that these populist creeds are the very antithesis of Paine’s globalist utopia. 

There are tinpot nationalists throughout the world – Erdogan of Hungary, Meloni of Italy, Bolsonaro of Brazil, the list goes on – but it’s the superpowers that demonstrate most starkly the contrast between the narrow, inward and dark heart of ultra-nationalism and the generous, outward and illuminated vision of the globalist revolutionary.  

It’s not just the contrast between what we currently have on the world stage and what we could have that’s remarkable, it’s the similarities between the psyches and prejudices of the ultra-nationalist super-powers, all of which sacrifice any worldview they might hold on the altar of their homeland self-interest. Take Russia, Israel and the United States. Don’t even start me on China. 

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is embarked on an imperial expansionism that is positively tsarist. The attempted annexation of Ukraine is only the start, before reclaiming what are purported to be “Russian” state assets in the Baltics and beyond. Putin channels Peter the Great. This isn’t just demented desire for historical legacy, it speaks at home to the restoration of the motherland.   

It’s the same incentive for Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel. Only continuing to oppress and purge the Palestinian state from its lands can the homeland of Israel be protected. It is precisely to satisfy the ultra-nationalists behind him that pushes him forward. 

President Donald Trump in the US isn’t the peacemaker he fantasises about. To “make America great again” he has to put “America first”. This is about satisfying the baying boot boys that form the sump of Trump’s power base. Americans must live high on the hog at the expense of the rest of the world. Hence tariff wars, watch-the-lady trade deals and pan-arctic territorial aspirations. 

This is not to say that peoples are to live without homelands. But it is precisely to tell us to be generous with them, to be good neighbours and to govern self-sacrificially.

What these three world leaders absolutely have in common is a worldview that predicates itself on satisfaction of nationalism at home that has to be paid for with suffering elsewhere. What they tell us is the exact opposite of Paine: “My borders are my country and my religion is to do harm.” They might add the sub-phrase: “… only my people are my brethren.” 

The difference between patriotism and nationalism spawns many aphorisms. One such is that patriotism prioritises love of one’s own people and nationalism prioritises hate for other people other than one’s own. That’s not quite right, because both still hold the primacy of one’s own people over others, while Paine inferred the primacy of all people. 

That’s what ultimately gives religious fervour to his voice. His declared detestation of religion seemingly ignores the tenets of the three Abrahamic faiths of the world, which have in common the welcome of the stranger, a duty to the poor and equality of all before God.  

These commandments extend patriotism to love of all people. And, rigorously, they leave no room for nationalism at all. As for ultra-nationalism, we’re in the territory of abomination and sacrilege. 

This is not to say that peoples are to live without homelands. But it is precisely to tell us to be generous with them, to be good neighbours and to govern self-sacrificially. That’s admittedly a tall order, but these are qualities that can either be identified in or imported into national identities as diverse as the American Constitution and Zionism.  

The methodology for that is, admittedly, demanding. But it requires the ability to look outwards to the world, rather than inwards towards nation. And that becomes a religious vocation.  

Our instincts, as nations, are inwards, but our callings our outwards. Sometimes it takes an outsider, like Paine, to point us in the right direction, outwards.  

Celebrate our 2nd birthday!

Since March 2023, our readers have enjoyed over 1,000 articles. All for free. This is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Do so by joining Behind The Seen. Alongside other benefits, you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing my reading and reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief