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Milton

by John Cann Bailey · English · Gutenberg #22286 · 333,205 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Milton

Author: John Cann Bailey


        
Release date: August 9, 2007 [eBook #22286]
                Most recently updated: January 2, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MILTON ***




Produced by Al Haines








MILTON


BY

JOHN BAILEY


AUTHOR OF "THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY,"
  "DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE," ETC.




LONDON

WILLIAMS AND NORGATE




[Transcriber's note: Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers
enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}.  They have been located where page
breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with Project
Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99.  For its Index, a page number has been placed
only at the start of that section.]




First printed Spring 1915




CONTENTS


CHAP.

   I INTRODUCTORY  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    7
  II MILTON'S LIFE AND CHARACTER . . . . . . . . . . .   28
 III THE EARLIER POEMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   89
  IV _PARADISE LOST_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  143
   V _PARADISE REGAINED_ AND _SAMSON AGONISTES_  . . .  190
     BIBLIOGRAPHY  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  250
     INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  254




  Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
  England hath need of thee; she is a fen
  Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
  Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
  Have forfeited their ancient English dower
  Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
  Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
  And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
  Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
  Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;
  Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
  So didst thou travel on life's common way,
  In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
  The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
          WORDSWORTH.



  O Mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,
  O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
    God-gifted organ-voice of England,
      Milton, a name to resound for ages;
  Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
  Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
    Tower, as the deep-doomed empyrean
      Rings to the roar of an angel onset--
  Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
  The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
    And bloom profuse and cedar arches
      Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,
  Where some refulgent sunset of India
  Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
    And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods
      Whisper in odorous heights of even.
          TENNYSON.




{7}

MILTON


CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

When a man spends a day walking in hilly country he is often astonished
at the new shape taken on by a mountain when it is looked at from a new
point of view.  Sometimes the change is so great as to make it almost
unrecognizable.  He who has seen Snowdon from Capel-Curig is reluctant
to admit that what he sees from Llanberis is the same mountain: he who
has seen the Langdale Pikes from Glaramara is amazed at their beauty as
he gazes at them from the garden at Low Wood.  These are extreme cases.
But to a less degree every traveller among the mountains is
experiencing the same thing all day.  He finds the eternal hills the
most plastic of forms.  At each change in his own position there is a
change in the shape of a mountain under which he is passing.  He may
keep his eye fixed upon it but insensibly, as he watches, the long {8}
chain will become a vertical peak, the jagged precipice a round green
slope.

Much the same process goes on as the generations of men pass on their
way, with their eyes fixed, as they cannot help being, on the great
human heights of their own and earlier days.  Many of these look great
only when you are close to them.  At a little distance they are seen to
be small and soon they disappear altogether.  The true mountains remain
but they do not keep the same shape.  Each succeeding generation sees
the peaks of humanity from a new point of view which cannot be exactly
the same as that of its predecessor.  Each age reshapes for itself its
conception of art, of poetry, of religion, and of human life which
includes them all.  Of some of the masters in each of these worlds it
feels that they belong not to their own generation only but to all time
and so to itself.  It cannot be satisfied, therefore, with what its
predecessors have said about them.  It needs to see them again freshly
for itself, and put into words so far as it can its own attitude
towards them.

That is the excuse for the new books which will always be written every
few years about Hebrew Religion, or Greek Art, or the French
Revolution, or about such men as Plato, {9} St. Paul, Shakspeare,
Napoleon.  It is the excuse even for a much humbler thing, for the
addition of a volume on Milton to the Home University Library.  The
object of this Library is not, indeed, to say anything startlingly new
about the great men with whom it deals.  Rather the contrary, in fact:
for to say anything startlingly new about Shakspeare or Plato would
probably be merely to say what is absurd or false.  The main outlines
of these great figures have long been settled, and the man who writes a
book to prove that Shakspeare was not a great dramatist, or was an
exact and lucid writer, is wasting his own time and that of his
readers.  The mountain may change its aspect from hour to hour, but
when once we have ascertained that it is composed of granite, that
matter is settled, and there is no use in arguing that it is sandstone
or basalt.  The object of such volumes as those of this Library is no
vain assault on the secure judgment-seat of the world, no hopeless
appeal against the recorded and accepted decrees of time.  It is rather
to re-state those decrees in modern language and from the point of view
of our own day: to show, for instance, how Plato, though no longer for
us what he was for the Neo-Platonists, is {10} still for us the most
moving mind of the race that more than all others has moved the mind of
the world; how Milton, though no longer for us a convincing justifier
of the ways of God to men, is still a figure of transcendent interest,
the most lion-hearted, the loftiest-souled, of Englishmen, the one
consummate artist our race has produced, the only English man of
letters who in all that is known about him, his life, his character,
his poetry, shows something for which the only fit word is sublime.

There was much else beside, of course.  The sublime is very near the
terrible, and the terrible is often not very far removed from the
hateful.  Dante giving his "daily dreadful line" to the private and
public enemies with whom he grimly populates his hell is not exactly an
amiable or attractive figure.  Still less so is Milton in those prose
pamphlets in which he passes so rapidly, and to us so strangely, from
the heights of heaven to the gutter mud of scurrilous personalities.
This is a disease from which our more amiable age seems at last to have
delivered the world.  But Milton has at least the excuse of a long and
august tradition, from the days of Demosthenes, equally profuse of a
patriotism as lofty and of personalities as {11} base as Milton's, to
those of a whole line of the scholars of the Renaissance who lived with
the noblest literature of the world and wrote of each other in the
language of Billingsgate fishwives.  So the sublimity of his life is
wholly that of an irresistible will, set from the first on achieving
great deeds and victoriously achieving them in defiance of adverse men
and fates.  But this is quite compatible with qualities the reverse of
agreeable.  It is the business of sublimity to compel amazed
admiration, not to be a pleasant companion.  Milton rejoicing over the
tortures bishops will suffer in hell, Milton insulting Charles I,
Milton playing the tyrant to his daughters, none of these are pleasant
pictures.  But such incidents, if perhaps unusually grim in the case of
Milton, are apt to happen with Olympians.  Experience shows that it is
generally best to listen to their thunder from a certain distance.

Such limitations must not be ignored.  But neither must they be unduly
pressed.  The important thing about the sun is not its spots but its
light and heat.  No great poet in all history, with the possible
exception of Dante, has so much heat as Milton.  In prose and verse
alike he burns and glows with fire.  At its worst it is a fire of anger
and pride, at {12} its best a fire of faith in liberty, justice,
righteousness, God.  Of the highest of all fires, the white flame of
love, it has indeed little.  Milton had no Beatrice to teach him how to
show men the loveliness of the divine law, the beauty of holiness.  He
could describe the loss of Paradise and even its recovery, but its
eternal bliss, the bliss of those who live in the presence of

  l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle,

he could not describe.  To do that required one who had seen the Vita
Nuova before he saw the Inferno.  _In la sua volontade é nostra pace_.
So Dante thought: but not altogether so Milton.  It is not a difference
of theological opinion: it is a difference of temper.  For Dante the
"will of God" at once suggested both the apostolic and the apocalyptic
love, joy, peace, the supreme and ultimate beatific vision.  Bitter as
his life on earth had been, no man ever suffering more from evil days
and evil tongues, no man ever more bitterly conscious of living in an
evil and perverse generation, he had yet within him a perpetual
fountain of peace in the thought of God's will, and the faith that he
was daily advancing nearer to the light of heaven and the divine
presence.  Milton, a sincere believer in God {13} if man ever were,
must also at times have had his moments of beatific vision in which the
invisible peace of God became more real than the storms of earthly life
and the vileness of men.  Indeed, we see the traces of such moments in
the opening of _Comus_, in the concluding lines of _Lycidas_, in the
sustained ecstasy of _At a Solemn Music_.  But they appear to have been
only moments.  Milton was a lifelong Crusader who scarcely set foot in
the Holy Land.  The will of God meant for him not so much peace as war.
He is a prophet rather than a psalmist.  "Woe is me, my Mother, that
thou hast born me a man of strife and contention," he himself complains
in the _Reason of Church Government_.  He was not much over thirty when
he wrote those words: and they remained true of him to the end.  For
twenty years the strife was active and public; ever, in appearance at
least, more and more successful: then for the final fourteen it became
the impotent wrath of a caged and wounded lion.  Never for a moment did
his soul bow to the triumph of the idolaters: but neither could it
forget them, nor make any permanent escape into purer air.  _Paradise
Lost_, _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson_, especially the last, are all
plainly the works of a man conscious of {14} having been defeated by a
world which he could defy but could not forget.  Sublimely certain of
the righteousness of his cause, he has no abiding certainty of its
victory.  He hears too plainly the insulting voices of the sons of
Belial, and broods in proud and angry gloom over the ruin of all his
hopes, personal, political and ecclesiastical.  And as his religion was
a thing of intellect and conscience, not a thing of spiritual vision,
he cannot make for himself that mystical trans-valuation of all earthly
doings in the light of which the struggles of political and
ecclesiastical parties are seen as things temporary, trivial and of
little account.

Such are the limitations of Milton.  They are those of a man who lived
in the time of a great national struggle, deliberately chose his own
side in it, and from thenceforth saw nothing in the other but folly,
obstinacy and crime.  He has in him nothing whatever of the universal,
and universally sympathetic, insight of Shakspeare.  And he has paid
the price of his narrowness in the open dislike, or at best grudging
recognition, of that half of the world which is not Puritan and not
Republican, and still looks upon history, custom, law and loyalty with
very different eyes from his.  But those who exact that {15} penalty do
themselves at least as much injustice as they do Milton.  To deprive
ourselves of Milton because we are neither Puritan moralists nor Old
Testament politicians is an act of intellectual suicide.  The wise, as
the world goes on, may differ more and more from some of Milton's
opinions.  They can never escape the greatness either of the poet or of
the man.  Men's appreciation of Milton is almost in proportion to their
instinctive understanding of what greatness is.  Other poets, perhaps,
have things of greater beauty: none in English, none, perhaps, in any
language, fills us with a more exalting conviction of the greatness of
human life.  No man rises from an hour with Milton without feeling
ashamed of the triviality of his life and certain that he can, if he
will, make it less trivial.  It is impossible not to catch from him
some sense of the high issues, immediate and eternal, on which human
existence ought to be conscious that it hangs.  The world will be very
old before we can spare a man who can render us this service.  We have
no one in England who renders it so imperiously as Milton.

This part of his permanent claim upon our attention belongs to all that
we know of him, to everything in his life so far as it is recorded,
{16} even to his prose, where its appearances are occasional, as well
as to his verse, where it is continuous and omnipresent.  It is, of
course, in connection with the last that we are most conscious of it
and that it is most important.  After all, the rest would have been
unknown or forgotten if he had not been a great poet.  But it is not
merely by his force of mind and character, nor merely by the influence
they have upon us through the poetry, that he claims our attention
to-day.  Altogether independently of that, the study of Milton is of
immense and special value to Englishmen.  Except in poetry our English
contribution to the life of the arts in Europe has been comparatively
small.  That very Puritanism which had so much to do with the greatness
of Milton has also had much to do with the general failure of
Englishmen to produce fine art, or even to care about it, or so much as
recognize it when they see it.  Now Milton, Puritan as he was, was
always, and not least in his final Puritan phase, a supreme artist.
Poetry has been by far our greatest artistic achievement and he is by
far our greatest poetic artist.  No artist in any other field, no Inigo
Jones or Wren, no Purcell, no Reynolds or Turner, holds such
unquestioned eminence in any other art as he in his.  If {17} the world
asks us where to look for the genius of England, so far as it has ever
been expressed on paper, we point, of course, unhesitatingly to
Shakspeare.  But Shakspeare is as inferior to Milton in art as he is
superior in genius.  His genius will often, indeed, supply the place of
art; but the possession of powers that are above art is not the same
thing as being continuously and consciously a great artist.  We can all
think of many places in his works where for hundreds of lines the most
censorious criticism can scarcely wish a word changed; but we can also
think of many in which the least watchful cannot fail to wish much
changed and much omitted.  "Would he had blotted a thousand" is still a
true saying, and its truth known and felt by all but the blindest of
the idolaters of Shakspeare.  No one has ever uttered such a wish about
the poetry of Milton.  This is not the place to anticipate a discussion
of it which must come later.  But, in an introductory chapter which
aims at insisting upon the present and permanent importance of Milton,
it is in place to point out the immense value to the English race of
acquaintance with work so conscientiously perfect as Milton's.  English
writers on the whole have had a tendency to be rather slipshod in {18}
expression and rather indifferent to the finer harmonies of human
speech, whether as a thing of pure sound or as a thing of sounds which
have more than mere meaning, which have associations.  Milton as both a
lover of music and a scholar is never for a moment unconscious of
either.  It would scarcely be going too far to say that there is not a
word in his verse which owes its place solely to the fact that it
expresses his meaning.  All the words accepted by his instinctive or
deliberate choice were accepted because they provided him with the most
he could obtain of three qualities which he desired: the exact
expression of the meaning needed for the immediate purpose in hand, the
associations fittest to enhance or enrich that meaning, the rhythmical
or musical effect required for the verse.  The study of his verse is
one that never exhausts itself, so that the appreciation of it has been
called the last reward of consummate scholarship.  But the phrase does
Milton some injustice.  It is true that the scholar tastes again and
again in Milton some flavour of association or suggestion which is not
to be perceived by those who are not scholars, and it is also true that
he consciously understands what he is enjoying more than they possibly
can.  But neither Milton's nor any other {19} great art makes its main
appeal to learning.  What does that is not art at all but pedantry.
Those who have never read a line of the Greek and Latin poets certainly
miss many pleasures in reading Milton, but, if they have any ear for
poetry at all, they do not miss either the mind or the art of Milton.
The unconquerable will, the high soaring soul, are everywhere audibly
present: and so, even to those who have little reading and no knowledge
at all of matters of rhythm or metre, are the grave Dorian music, the
stately verses rolling in each after the other like great ocean waves
in eternal difference, in eternal sameness.  The ignorant ear hears and
rejoices, with a delight that passes understanding, as the ignorant eye
sees a fine drawing or a piece of Greek sculpture and without
understanding enjoys, learns, and unconsciously grows in keenness of
sight.  To live with Milton is necessarily to learn that the art of
poetry is no triviality, no mere amusement, but a high and grave thing,
a thing of the choicest discipline of phrase, the finest craftsmanship
of structure, the most nobly ordered music of sound.  The ordinary
reader may not be conscious of any such lessons: but he learns them
nevertheless.  And from no one else in English can he learn them so
well as from Milton.

{20} For these reasons, these and others, we must cling to our great
epic poet, Shelley's "third among the sons of light."  He is not easy
reading: the greatest seldom are: but as with all the greatest, each
new reading is not only easier than the last but fuller of matter for
thought, wonder and delight.  At each new reading, too, the things in
him that belonged to his own age, the Biblical literalism, the
theological prepossessions, the political partisanship, recede more and
more into the background and leave us freer to enjoy the things which
belong to all time.  And to all peoples.  Milton is, indeed, intensely
English and could not have been anything but an Englishman.  His
profound conviction of the greatness of moral issues, and his
passionate love of liberty, have both been characteristic of the
Englishmen of whom England is most proud.  Till lately too, at any
rate, we should have said that his fierce individualism, intellectual
and political, was English too.  But his mind and soul, stored with the
gathered riches of many languages and of an inward experience far too
intense to be confined by national limitations, reach out to a world
wider altogether than this island, wider even than Europe.  In _Samson
Agonistes_ it is hard to say who is more vividly present, the English
{21} politician, the Greek tragedian, or the Hebrew prophet.  And in
one sense _Paradise Lost_ is the most universal of all poems.  Indeed,
that word may be applied to it in its strictest meaning, for the field
of Milton's action is not Greece, or Italy, or England, or even the
whole earth; it is the universe itself.  That is one of its
difficulties: but it is also a source of the uplifting and enlarging
quality which is peculiarly Miltonic.  With him we are conscious of
treading no petty scene.  We have in some respects travelled far from
Milton's way both of stating and of solving his problem, but
nevertheless it is still with us to-day and always: the problem of
man's origin and destiny, of the ways of God to men.  And though Milton
is more hampered by literal belief in a particular theological legend
than the authors of the _Book of Job_ and the _Prometheus Vinctus_,
yet, like these, he shows that a great mind and soul will leave the
imprint of power and truth on the most incredible primitive story.  To
read his great poem, or indeed any of his poems, is to live for a while
in the presence of one of those royal souls, those natural kings of
men, whom Plato felt to be born to rule and inspire their fellows: and
the heroic temper of the man is in England less rare than the
consummate {22} perfection of art which has eternalized its utterance.
This is Milton: and, though we may be too weak to read him often, we
shall never be able to do without him, never think of him without an
added strength and exaltation of spirit.




{23}

CHAPTER II

MILTON'S LIFE AND CHARACTER

We know far more about Milton than about any other English poet born so
long ago.  There are three reasons for this.  One is that from his
earliest years he was very much interested in himself, was quite aware
that he was a man above the stature of ordinary men, and had the most
deliberate intention and expectation of doing great things.
Consequently he is not only, like most good poets, fond of bringing
more or less concealed autobiography into his poetry, but still more in
his prose works he inclines often to insert long passages about
himself, his studies, travels, projects, friends and character.  It is
these more than anything else which now keep those works alive: and,
coming from a man so proudly truthful as Milton evidently was, they are
of the greatest interest and value.  The second reason why we know so
much about him is that he played an active part in politics, a far more
certain way of {24} attracting contemporary attention in England than
writing _Hamlet_ or building St. Paul's Cathedral.  And the third is
that his life has been made the subject of perhaps the most minute and
elaborate biography in the language.  Mr. Masson's labours enable us to
know, if we choose, every fact, however insignificant, which the most
laborious investigation can discover, not only about Milton himself
but, one may almost say, about everybody who was ever for five minutes
in Milton's company.

From this mass of material, all that can be touched here is a few of
the most salient facts of the life and the most striking features of
the character.

Milton's life is naturally divided into three periods.  The first is
that of his education and early poems.  It extends from his birth in
1608 to his return from his foreign travels in 1639.  The second is
that of his political activity, and extends from 1639 to the
Restoration.  The third is that of _Paradise Lost_, _Paradise Regained_
and _Samson_.  It concludes with his death, on November 8, 1674.

Milton was born on December 9, 1608, at a house in Bread Street,
Cheapside.  The house is gone, but the street is a very short one, and
it is still pleasant to step out of the {25} roar of Cheapside into its
quietness, and think that there, on the left, close by, under the
shadow of Bow Church, was born the greatest poet to whom the greatest
city of the modern world has given birth.  London ought to hold fast to
the honour of Milton, for his honour is peculiarly hers.  He was not
only born a Londoner but lived in London nearly all his life.  And his
mind is throughout that of the citizen.  Neither agriculture nor sport
means much to him; and, much as he loves the sights and sounds of the
open country, his allusions to them are those of the delighted but
still wondering alien, not those of the native.  None is more often
quoted than the passage in the ninth book of _Paradise Lost_--

  "As one who, long in populous city pent,
  Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
  Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe
  Among the pleasant villages and farms
  Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight--
  The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
  Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound--
  If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,
  What pleasing seemed for her now pleases more,
  She most, and in her look sums all delight."

{26} And the secret of its charm obviously lies partly in the note of a
personal experience.  Just in that way must Milton, as boy and man,
have often issued forth from the weariness of his studies and the noise
and confinement of the streets, for a walk among the open fields that
then lay so close at hand for the Londoner.  And perhaps, as the
inhabitants of towns often do, he took a pleasure in the very hedgerows
unknown to those who saw them every day.  The present Poet Laureate,
who has spent most of his life in the country, has asked a question to
which it is not easy for the countryman to give the answer he would
like--

  "Whose spirit leaps more high,
  Plucking the pale primrose,
  Than his whose feet must fly
  The pasture where it grows?"

If the town-dweller never attains to that mystical communion with the
secret soul of Nature which Wordsworth and such as Wordsworth owe to a
life spent in the "temple's inmost shrine," yet his eye, undulled by
familiarity, commonly sees more in trees and flowers than the eyes of
nearly all those who live every day among them.  At its highest
familiarity breeds intimacy, but more often what it breeds is
indifference.  A man who {27} reads the Bible for the first time in
middle life will never live inside it as some saints have lived; but he
will see much that is hidden from most of those who have been reading
it every day since they could read at all.

Milton remained in London, so far as we know, for the first sixteen
years of his life.  He was educated at St. Paul's School by a private
tutor, one Thomas Young, who was later a conspicuous Presbyterian
figure, and by his father, to whom he owed far more than to any one
except himself.  The elder John Milton was a remarkable man.  He had,
to begin with, deserted the religious views of his family and taken a
line of his own, a course which may not always indicate wisdom, but
always indicates force of character.  The poet's grandfather, who lived
in the Oxford country, had adhered very definitely to Roman Catholicism
and is said to have cast off his son for becoming a Protestant and
something of a Puritan.  The son went to London, set up in business as
a scrivener, that is, as something like a modern solicitor, and
prospered so much that by 1632 he was able to retire and live in the
country.  He had considerable musical talents, and his compositions are
found in collections of tunes to which such {28} men as Morley, Dowland
and Orlando Gibbons contributed.  His house was no doubt full of music,
as were, indeed, many others in that most musical of English centuries,
and it must have been primarily to him that the poet owed the intense
delight in music which appears in all his works.  No poet speaks of
music so often, and none in his poetry so often suggests that art.  The
untaught music of lark or nightingale he has not; but no poet has so
much of the music which is one of the most consciously elaborate of
those arts by which man expresses at once his senses, his mind and his
soul.

In the spring of 1625, just a month or two after the accession of the
king whose tragical fate was to be the original source of Milton's
European fame and very nearly the cause of his mounting a scaffold
himself, the future author of _Paradise Lost_ went into residence at
Cambridge where he remained for seven years.  The college that can
boast his name among its members is Christ's.  Unlike so many poets he
had a successful university career, took the ordinary degrees, and
evidently made an impression on his contemporaries.  No doubt the
strong natural bias to a studious life which he had from a child made
him apter for university discipline {29} than is usually the case with
genius.  From the beginning he had the passion of the student.  He says
of himself that from his twelfth year he scarce ever went to bed before
midnight; and Aubrey reports much the same and says that his father
"ordered the maid to sit up for him."  And his studies were in the main
the accepted studies of the time, not, like Shelley's, a defiance of
them.  All through his life he had a scholar's respect for learning,
and for the great tradition of literature which it is the true business
of scholarship to maintain.  Radical and rebel as he was in politics
and theology, contemptuous of law, custom and precedent, he was always
the exact opposite in his art.  There he never attempted the method of
the _tabula rasa_, or clean slate, which made his political pamphlets
so barren.  The greatest of all proofs of the strength of his
individuality is that it so entirely dominates the vast store of
learning and association with which his poetry is loaded.  Such a man
will at least give his university a chance; and, though Milton did not
in later life look back on Cambridge with great affection or respect,
there can be no doubt that the seven years he spent within the walls of
a college were far from useless to the poet who more than any other
{30} was to make learning serve the purposes of poetry.

So strong, self-reliant and proudly virtuous a nature was not likely to
be altogether popular either with the authorities or with his
companions.  Nor was he, at any rate at first.  He had some difference
with his tutor, had to leave Cambridge for a time, and is alleged, on
very doubtful evidence, to have been flogged.  But, whatever his fault
was, it was nothing that he was ashamed of, for he publicly alluded to
the affair in his Latin poems, and was never afraid to challenge
inquiry into his Cambridge career.  Nor did it injure him permanently
with the authorities.  He took his degrees at the earliest possible
dates, and ten years after he left Cambridge was able to write publicly
and gratefully of "the more than ordinary respect which I found, above
many of my equals, at the hands of those courteous and learned men, the
Fellows of that college wherein I spent some years: who, at my parting
after I had taken two degrees, as the manner is, signified many ways
how much better it would content them that I would stay: as by many
letters full of kindness and loving respect, both before that time and
long after, I was assured of their singular good affection towards me."
The {31} Fellows were no doubt clerical dons of the ordinary sort:
indeed, we know they were; but they could not have Milton among them
for seven years without discovering that he was something above the
ordinary undergraduate.  Wood, who died in 1695 and therefore writes as
a contemporary, says of Milton that while at Cambridge he was "esteemed
to be a virtuous and sober person yet not to be ignorant of his own
parts."  Such young men may not be popular, but if they have the real
thing in them they soon compel respect.  By the undergraduates Milton
was called "The Lady of Christ's."  And it is plain, from his own
references to this nickname in a Prolusion delivered in the college,
that he owed it not only to his fair complexion, short stature and
great personal beauty, but also to the purity, delicacy and refinement
of his manners.  He contemptuously asks the audience who had given him
the nickname whether the name of manhood was to be confined to those
who could drain great tankards of ale or to peasants whose hands were
hard with holding the plough.  He disdains the implied charge of
prudery, and indeed his language is what could not have been used by an
effeminate or a coward.  No braver man ever held a pen.  Wood says {32}
that "his deportment was affable, his gait erect, bespeaking courage
and undauntedness," and he himself tells us that "he did not neglect
daily practice with his sword," and that "when armed with it, as he
generally was, he was in the habit of thinking himself quite a match
for any one and of being perfectly at ease as to any injury that any
one could offer him."  Evidently he owed his title of "Lady" to no
weakness, but to a disgust at the coarse and barbarous amusements then
common at the universities.  He says of himself that he had no faculty
for "festivities and jests," as indeed was to be witnessed by all his
writings.  The witticisms, if such they can be called, which occur in
his poetry and oftener in his prose are akin to what are now called
practical jokes, that is jokes made by the bodies of those whose minds
are not capable of joking.  This was partly the common fault of an age
whose jests, as may be seen sometimes even in Shakspeare, appear to us
to alternate between the merely obvious, the merely verbal, and the
merely barbarous; but it was partly also the peculiar temperament of
Milton, whose sense of humour, like that of many learned and serious
men, was so sluggish that it could only be moved by a very violent
stimulus.  {33} But in the main with Milton there was no question of
jests, good or bad.  It is evident from his own proud confessions that
he was always intensely serious, at least from his Cambridge days,
always conscious of the greatness of life's issues, always uplifted
with the noblest sort of ambition.  He says of himself that, however he
might admire the art of Ovid and poets of Ovid's sort, he soon learnt
to dislike their morals and turned from them to the "sublime and pure
thoughts" of Petrarch and Dante.  And his "reasonings, together with a
certain niceness of nature, an honest haughtiness, and self-esteem
either of what I was or what I might be (which let envy call
pride) . . . kept me still above those low descents of mind beneath
which he must deject and plunge himself that can agree to saleable and
unlawful prostitutions."  And in repudiating an impudently false charge
against his own character he boldly announces a doctrine far above his
own age, one, indeed, to which ours has not yet attained.  "Having had
the doctrine of Holy Scripture unfolding these chaste and high
mysteries with timeliest care infused that 'the body is for the Lord
and the Lord for the body,' thus also I argued to myself,--that, if
unchastity in a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be {34}
such a scandal and dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the
image and glory of God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be
much more deflowering and dishonourable. . . .  Thus large I have
purposely been that, if I have been justly taxed with this crime, it
may come upon me after all this my confession with a tenfold shame."

Such was the man from the first, severe with others and with himself,
conscious, almost from boyhood, in his own famous words, that "he who
would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable
things ought himself to be a true poem"; a somewhat strange figure, no
doubt, among the tavern-haunting undergraduates of the seventeenth
century, a stranger still to be honoured, a hundred and fifty years
later, in the rooms which then and now were remembered as his, by the
single act of drunkenness in the long and virtuous life of Wordsworth.
When he left the university in 1632 Milton had conquered respect,
though probably not popularity.  The tone of the sixth of the academic
Orations, which he delivered at Cambridge and allowed to be published
in his old age, shows that, being still aware that he was not popular,
he was surprised and pleased at the applause with which a previous
discourse of {35} his had been received and at the large gathering
which had crowded to hear the one he was delivering.  He says that
"nearly the whole flower of the university" was present; and, after
allowing for compliments, it is plain that only a man whose name
aroused expectations could draw an audience which could be so described
without obvious absurdity.

We may well then believe that there is no great exaggeration in his
nephew's statement, substantially confirmed as it is by other evidence,
that when Milton left Cambridge in 1632 he was already "loved and
admired by the whole university, particularly by the Fellows and most
ingenious persons of his House."  He had, as Wood says, "performed the
collegiate and academical exercises to the admiration of all."  The
power of his mind, the grave strength of his character, could not but
be plain to all who had come into close contact with him, and even for
those who had not he was a man who had distinction plainly written on
his face.  It is possible, even, that he was already known as a poet.
Before he left Cambridge he had written several of the poems which we
still read in his works: the beautiful stanzas _On the Death of a Fair
Infant_, so like and so unlike the early poems of Shakspeare, the noble
_Ode {36} on the Nativity_ begun probably on Christmas Day 1629, though
this is not certain; the pretty little _Song on May Morning_ which one
likes to fancy having been sung at some such Cambridge greeting of the
rising May Day sun as those which are still performed on Magdalen Tower
at Oxford; certainly the remarkable lines which are his tribute to
Shakspeare: certainly also the beautiful _Epitaph on the Marchioness of
Winchester_; and, to mention no more, the autobiographical sonnet on
attaining the age of twenty-three.  None of these except the lines on
Shakspeare are known to have been published before they appeared in the
volume of Milton's poems issued in 1645.  But the fact that those lines
were printed, though without Milton's name, among the commendatory
verses prefixed to the 1632 Folio Edition of Shakspeare, may imply that
Milton was already known as a young poet.  There is also a story that
the poem on the death of Lady Winchester was printed in a contemporary
Cambridge collection.  But whether this were so or not (and no such
volume is known to have existed), it seems almost certain that some of
Milton's poems would have got known by being passed about in manuscript
copies.  He himself from the first undervalued nothing he wrote, and
was {37} not afraid to say publicly, in his _Reason of Church
Government_, that, from his early youth, it had been found that,
"whether aught was imposed me by them that had the overlooking, or
betaken to of mine own choice in English or other tongue, prosing or
versing, but chiefly this latter, the style, by certain signs it had,
was likely to live."  He published these bold words in 1641, when he
had given no public proof at all of their truth.  Such a man was not
likely to be unwilling that his verses should be seen: and in
particular such poems as the epitaph on Lady Winchester, whose death
aroused much public interest, or the _Ode on the Nativity_, plainly
challenging the greatest of his predecessors by its high theme and
noble art, are almost sure to have got about and won him some fame.

He had earned distinction, then, and aroused expectation before the end
of his university career.  But what surprised his contemporaries was
that for the next seven or eight years he appeared to do little or
nothing to justify the one or fulfil the other.  Leaving Cambridge when
he was twenty-three, he entered no profession, but lived till he was
past twenty-nine in studious retirement at his father's country house
at Horton near Windsor.  His father, and other friends, very {38}
naturally remonstrated at this apparent inactivity.  To them all the
answer is the same.  He cannot now enter the Church, as he had
intended, because he would not "subscribe slave" and take oaths that he
could not keep.  He is not surrendering himself to "the endless delight
of speculation," or to the pleasure of "dreaming away his years in the
arms of studious retirement."  No; he has other things in view than
these: but for their performance he demands time for himself and
patience from his friends: his own thought is not of being early or
late but of being fit.  And the work for which he is preparing is in
his own mind a settled thing.  It is literature, poetry, and, in
particular, as will soon appear more definitely, a great poem to take
its place among the great poems of the world.

The writing of poetry has never been a recognized and seldom a
lucrative profession.  Most poets, like other artists, have had to face
family opposition and the danger of poverty in obeying their inward
call.  In this matter Milton is one of the great exceptions.  Many
poets have had fathers as rich as his, but it would not be easy to find
one who resigned himself so cheerfully to the prospect of having a
poetic son.  The elder Milton was, however, as we have seen, no
ordinary man.  His sense {39} of the value of the things of the mind
was almost as great as his faith in his son and far greater than his
ambition for his son's visible success in the eyes of the world.  He
had naturally hoped that that son's evident abilities would be
exhibited in the ordinary course in a recognized profession; and he
evidently made some protest against the apparently objectless studies
which, even after leaving Cambridge, Milton seemed to regard as his
sole business in life.  The record of this survives in the Latin poem
_Ad Patrem_ which is plainly a reply to some such remonstrance.  It is
an appeal, and one of very confident tone, to his father not to scorn
the Muses to whom he himself owes his own great musical gifts.  Why
should he, a musician, be astonished to find that his son is a poet?
Poetry more than any of man's other gifts is the proof of his divine
origin: music and poetry rank together; may it not be that he and his
father have divided between them the two great gifts of Apollo?

  "Dividuumque Deum genitorque puerque tenemus."

The poem rings with the scorn of wealth, from which one must suppose
that the old man of business had pointed out that the {40} scholar's
life was not usually lived under the smiles of Fortune.  How can you,
of all men, replies his son, ask me to care much for that?  You trained
me from the first for learning, not for the City or the Bar; the father
who had his son taught not only Latin, but Greek and Hebrew, French and
Italian, astronomy and physical science, cannot ask him to regard money
making as the object of life.  I have chosen a better part than that:
and you were the inspirer of my choice.  And I know that at heart you
agree with it and share it.

The poem is one of the most interesting of Milton's Latin poems, being
rather less affected than most of them by that artificiality of
classical allusion which is the bane of such productions.  So far as we
know, it was the last word on its subject.  From henceforth no one
questioned Milton's right to be a poet and himself.  If he ever
afterwards deserted his poetic vocation it was at what he believed to
be a still higher call.  For the present he lived on quietly at Horton,
near the Church where his mother's grave may still be seen; walking
often, as we may suppose, about that quietly beautiful country washed
by the Thames and crowned by Windsor Castle; and sometimes, as we know
from his own words, travelling the seventeen or eighteen miles to {41}
London to buy books or learn "anything new in Mathematics or in Music,
in which sciences I then delighted."  Some of these visits to London
evidently lasted days or weeks.

The interesting thing about these six years at Horton is that they are
the only part of his life during which the least rural of our poets
lived continuously in the country.  And perhaps we may say that they
bore their natural fruit; for it was while he was at Horton that Milton
wrote _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, in which he touched rural life
and rural scenes with a freshness and directness which he never again
equalled.  And the most important of the other poems written during
these years, _Arcades_, _Comus_, and above all, _Lycidas_, show the
same influence.  _Arcades_ and _Comus_ point also to the effect of his
visits to London and the musical world: for both of these were written
for the music of his friend Henry Lawes, and probably at his
suggestion; and, written as they were for entertainments given by
members of the noble families of Stanley and Egerton, they show that
Milton's plan of life did not involve cutting himself off from the
great world, where they must have caused his name to be talked of.  His
life at Horton was evidently not that of a mere recluse, {42}
forgetting the world outside and forgotten by it.  _Arcades_ and
_Comus_, and still more the wonderful outburst _At a Solemn Music_, are
visible links with the cultivated circles of the town, as _Lycidas_,
which followed them in 1637 and was printed in 1638 at Cambridge with
other poems to the memory of Edward King, is a visible link with his
old university.

The mention of the poems of these years, the most delightful that
Milton was ever to write, show that the six years spent at Horton were
not entirely what he calls them, "a complete holiday spent in reading
over the Greek and Latin writers."  If he had never written another
line, he had written enough by the time he left Horton to give him a
place among the very greatest men who have practised the art of poetry
in England.  When he started abroad in 1638 he must have known, and his
father too, that his daring choice had already justified itself.  "You
ask what I am about, what I am thinking of," he writes to his friend
Diodati at the end of the Horton time; "why, with God's help, of
immortality."  It is the voice of a man who knows he has already done
great things but counts them as nothing compared with what he is to do
later on.

Man proposes.  In 1637 Milton was "pluming {43} his wings" for the very
mightiest of poetic flights, for such a poem as would give full scope
to his genius and place him among the great poets of the world.  But in
the result he actually wrote less poetry in the next twenty years than
he had written in the previous five: less in quantity and far less in
quality and importance.  The first interruption was the completion of
his elaborate education by a grand tour.  His generous father, who was
well-to-do rather than rich, had acquiesced in his not so far earning
one penny for himself, and was now prepared to provide him with about a
thousand pounds of our present money to enable him to go abroad for a
year or two in comfortable style and with the attendance of a servant.
Leaving England in the spring of 1638, he spent a few days in Paris,
where he was civilly entertained by the famous Grotius, then Swedish
Ambassador there, as well as by the English Ambassador, Lord Scudamore,
but soon moved south, entering Italy by Nice and Genoa and arriving at
Florence in August or September.  There he spent two months, and was
enthusiastically received by the various academies or clubs of men of
letters which then flourished in Florence, one of whose still existing
minute {44} books records that at its meeting on September the 16th a
certain John Milton, an Englishman, read to the members a Latin
hexameter poem showing great learning.  There also he paid his famous
visit to Galileo, now old and blind, and still a sort of nominal
prisoner of the Inquisition, for the sin, as Milton says in the
_Areopagitica_, of "thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan
and Dominican licensers thought."  One may be sure that it was not
merely the interest of the new theory about the motion of the earth
which drew him back so often to that question in _Paradise Lost_.  The
blind astronomer, whose scientific heresies had placed him in some
danger of the thumbscrew, must have been a very near and moving memory
to the blind poet whose political and ecclesiastical heresies had so
nearly brought him to the gallows.

From Florence Milton went on to Rome, where his scholarly tastes
gratified themselves for two months in the study of what remained of
the ancient city.  The famous picture of Rome in _Paradise Regained_
may owe something to these weeks.  There, too, he was well received by
several of Rome's most distinguished scholars who paid him compliments
of Italian extravagance.  There, too, he heard the famous Leonora
Baroni {45} sing, and was so moved as to write three Latin epigrams in
her praise.  But it was at Naples, whither he passed on before winter,
that he made the acquaintance which, except that of Galileo, is the
most interesting his Italian tour brought him.  It was that of the
Neopolitan patrician, Giovanni Manso, who had been intimate with Tasso
and Marini and had been celebrated by Tasso in the _Gerusalemme
Conquistata_.  His courtesy to a foreigner was soon to procure him a
still greater honour; for before leaving Naples Milton addressed to him
a Latin poem thanking him for his kindness, speaking openly of his own
poetic ambitions and praying that, if he lives to write the great
Arthurian Epic which he was then planning, he may find such a friend as
Tasso found to welcome his poem, comfort his old age and cherish his
fame.  The only difficulty which separated Manso and Milton was that of
religion, where Milton's unguarded frankness embarrassed his host.  So,
when he abandoned his intended tour in Greece because he thought it
"base" to be "travelling abroad at case for intellectual culture while
his fellow-countrymen were fighting at home for liberty," he was warned
that the Jesuits at Rome had their eyes on him.  But he stayed there
two {46} months nevertheless, fearlessly keeping his resolution, not
indeed to introduce or invite religious controversy but, if questioned,
then, as he says, "whatsoever I should suffer to dissemble nothing."
By February he was again in Florence; and after visits to Bologna,
Ferrara and Venice, whence he characteristically shipped "a chest or
two of choice music books" for England, he crossed the Alps, spent a
week or two at Geneva and in France, and was at home by August 1639.

The elaborate education was now formally complete;  and what ordinary
men call practical life was at last to begin for Milton.  Now for the
first time he had an abode of his own, a lodging in St. Bride's, Fleet
Street, and soon afterwards a house in Aldersgate Street where he
settled with a young nephew whom he undertook to educate.  But the real
work which he had in view was that of a poet, not of a schoolmaster.
The high expectations which he knew he had excited among Italian men of
letters had reinforced those of his English friends; and he was now
more than ever inclined to follow that "inward prompting which now grew
daily upon me that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my
portion in this life), joined with the strong propensity of nature, I
might {47} perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes as they
should not willingly let it die."  So, as his extant notes show, he was
weighing a large number of subjects for the great poem, slowly settling
on a Biblical one, and indeed on that of the Fall of Man, and perhaps
writing some earliest lines of what we now know as _Paradise Lost_.

But in November 1640 occurred an event which governed Milton's life for
the next twenty years.  The Long Parliament met, and, from that time
forward till its final meeting in 1660 to dissolve itself and prepare
the way for Charles II, politics were the dominant interest of Milton's
mind.  It is his age of prose; during it he wrote very little verse of
any kind, and none of importance except the finer of his eighteen
Sonnets which nearly all belong to these years.  On the other hand,
most of his prose works were written between 1640 and 1660.  Of these
it is enough to say that they are perhaps the most curious of all
illustrations of the great things which a poet alone can bring to prose
and of the dangers which he runs in bringing them.  A poet of the
stature of Milton is ready at all times to catch all kinds of fire, not
only the fires of faith and zeal and enthusiasm, but also, as a rule,
those of a scorn {48} that knows no limit and a hatred that knows no
mercy.  Such a man needs a strongly made vessel to control his boiling
ardours.  Prose is not such a vessel: and they too often overflow from
it in extravagance and violence.  Poetry in all its severer forms
places a restraint upon the poet from which as the mood of art gains
upon him he has no desire to escape.  Law and limitation, willing
obedience to the prescribed conditions, are of the very essence of art.
And this is as true of the greatest of the arts as of any other.  It is
not merely that the poet accepts the bondage of rhymes, or stanzas, or
numbered syllables, as the painter accepts those of a flat canvas and
the sculptor those of bronze or marble; it is that they all alike
submit to the mood of art which is always universal and eternal as well
as individual and temporal and therefore disdains such crudities of
personal violence as are to be found everywhere in Milton's prose and
nowhere in his poetry.

But if a poet's prose has its inevitable disadvantages it has also some
great qualities which only a poet can supply.  In 1640 Milton plunged
into a great struggle in which his attitude throughout was that of an
angry and contemptuous partisan.  And his pamphlets exhibit all the
distortion of facts, {49} injustice to opponents, and narrowness of
view which are the inevitable if often unconscious vices of the man who
writes in the interest of a party.  But they also contain flights of
noble eloquence, in which, as in the passage about the City of London
in the _Areopagitica_, the soul of partisanship has undergone a fiery
purification and emerges free of all its grosser elements, a pure
essence of zeal and faith and spiritual vision.

The first stage of the struggle was largely ecclesiastical, and Milton
plunged into it with five pamphlets in 1641 and 1642, fiercely
demanding the abolition of Episcopacy and the establishment of a
Presbyterian system in England.  Fortunately for himself, as he was
soon to see, the views he advocated did not in the end prevail.  For
the next step he took in the way of pamphlet writing would assuredly
have got him into difficulties with any possible kind of ecclesiastical
jurisdiction, whether after the model of Laud or of Calvin.  It grew
out of the most important and disastrous event in the whole of his
private life.  In the spring of 1643 he went into Oxfordshire, from
which county his father had originally come, and, to the surprise of
his friends, who knew nothing of his intention, returned a married man.
His wife was one {50} Mary Powell, the daughter of a Justice of the
Peace at Forest Hill, near Oxford.  The Powell family owed the Milton
family five hundred pounds, which may have been the poet's introduction
to them.  If so, the marriage to which it led had the results that
might be expected from such a beginning.  The war had then already
begun, the King was at Oxford and the Powells were Cavaliers; so that
when Mrs. Milton, who had been accompanied to London by her relations,
was to be left alone with a husband of twice her age, and of severe
tastes, she shrank from the prospect, got away on a visit to her family
and did not return till 1645, by which time the King was ruined and
with him the Powells.

When Shelley deserted his wife he wrote to her asking her to come and
live with him and the lady who had supplanted her.  When Milton's wife
deserted him he wrote a series of pamphlets advocating divorce at the
will of the husband.  Such are the extravagances of those whose eyes
are so accustomed to a brighter light that when brought into that of
common day they see nothing, and make mistakes which are justly
ridiculous to the children of this world.  It is an old story: Plato's
philosopher in the cave, the saint in politics, the modern poet in the
world of war, {51} commerce, or industry: the eye that sees heaven
often blunders on earth.  Milton's divorce pamphlets, like nearly all
his controversial writings, have three fatal defects.  They are utterly
blind to the temper of those to whom they were addressed, to the
reasonable arguments of opponents, and to the practical difficulties
inherent in their proposals.  He argues that, as the law gives relief
to a man whose wife disappoints him of the physical end of marriage, it
is an outrage that he should have none when deprived of the social and
intellectual companionship which is its moral end.  But he takes no
note of the awkward fact that the dismissed wife is not and cannot be
in the same position as she was before her marriage.  Nor does he give
the wife any corresponding rights to get rid of her husband.  These,
and a hundred other difficulties all too visible to duller eyes, he
utterly ignores as he proceeds on his violent way of deliverance from
what he calls "imaginary and scarecrow sins."  Nothing is allowed to
stand in his path.  For instance, the awkward texts in the Bible, whose
authority he accepts, are given new interpretations with which it is to
be feared his temper had more to do than his knowledge of the meaning
of Greek words.  But {52} there is not a hint of his own case in all he
says, and it is not desertion that he discusses but incompatibility of
temper.  Masson even sees reason to think that he began the first
pamphlet before his wife left him, but when, no doubt, her unfitness to
be his wife was only too evident.  However all that may be, we can only
think with wondering pity of those summer weeks of 1643 and of the two
years which followed.  Everything in Milton's life and writings shows
him a man unusually susceptible to the attraction of women, one whose
love was of that strongest sort which is built on a chastity born not
of coldness but of purity and self-control.  Such a man, in such a
plight, with the added misery of knowing that he owed it to his own
rash folly, may be pardoned for forgetting the true bearing of his own
doctrine that laws are made for the "common lump of men."  Cases like
his are the real tragedies, the tragedies of life so much more bitter
than the more visible ones of death; and no thinking or feeling man
will lightly decide that they must remain unrelieved.  But neither
Milton nor any of his successors must look at the problem from his own
point of view alone.  Laws are made, and ought to be, as he himself
says, for the "lump of men"; and the wisdom or {53} unwisdom of
facilities for divorce must be judged, not merely by the relief they
afford in unhappy marriages, but also by the danger of disturbance they
produce in the far more numerous marriages which, though experiencing
their days of doubt or difficulty, are on the whole happy or at least
not unhappy.  Perhaps Milton himself might have hesitated if he could
have foreseen the consequences of an application of his theories.
Modern divorce laws have filled our newspapers with just that
"clamouring debate of utterless things" which he dreaded and abhorred,
while few will argue that they have increased the number of unions
which answer to his conception of "the true intent of marriage."

After all, Milton's own story illustrates the advantages of putting
delays and difficulties in the way of divorce.  According to his nephew
he had planned to act upon his principles and marry "a very handsome
and witty gentlewoman"; but the lady had more regard than he to the
world's opinion.  And she did Milton a service by her reluctance.  For
the rumour of her, helped by their own misfortunes, brought the Powells
to their senses; and with the help of Milton's friends they managed the
well-known scene at a room in St. Martin's the Grand, in which he was
{54} surprised by the sight of his wife on her knees before him.

        "Soon his heart relented
  Towards her, his life so late, and sole delight,
  Now at his feet submissive in distress."

So he glances back at the scene twenty years later when he was drawing
to the close of his great poem.  Meanwhile he received back his wife,
who bore him three daughters and died in 1653 or 1654.  He was to marry
again in 1656; but this second wife, the "espoused saint" of his
sonnet, lived little more than a year; and in 1663 he married his third
wife who long survived him.  But to return to the house in the
Barbican, to which he removed with his wife in 1645.  With him there
were also his father, two nephews and other boys whom it was his
principal occupation to teach.  It is somewhat surprising that he found
pupils, as his views on the divorce question had naturally caused
scandal in all quarters and received little support in any.  He could
now see that the Presbyterian Church discipline which he had advocated
so eagerly in his first pamphlets might have its inconveniences; the
elders of an English kirk would be no more merciful than his detested
bishops to such freedom of thought, speech and action as he now
demanded.  {55} From henceforth he is an Independent and more than an
Independent; for he was attached to no congregation, apparently
attended no church regularly, and maintained that profoundly religious
temper which is even more visible in his last works than in his first
without the support of any authority, creed or companionship in prayer.
With these views growing upon him it was natural that, when the
struggle came between the Presbyterian Parliament and the Independent
Army, he had no hesitation in supporting the Army; nor is it surprising
that such a man of no compromise as he had shown himself to be was
ready to come forward, even before the deed was done, with a defence of
the execution of Charles I.  It is in connection with that event that
his name first became known to all Europe and was soon so famous that
foreigners visiting England desired to see two men above all others,
Oliver Cromwell and John Milton.  This Milton, from henceforth a
European celebrity, was not the author of _Paradise Lost_ which was not
yet written, nor of his earlier poems which were little known in
England and quite unknown elsewhere.  He was the apologist of the
Regicides, the Foreign Secretary of the world-famed Protector.

{56}

For the next eleven years, from 1649 to 1660, Milton had a public and
official as well as a private life.  Charles was executed on January
30, 1649.  Within a few days after appeared Milton's _Tenure of Kings
and Magistrates_, largely written, of course, before the execution, and
justifying it and all the other proceedings of the Army without any
hesitation or compromise.  It has some breathings of the Miltonic
grandeur; but that is all.  For the rest it is a mere party polemic
written for the moment; and, as is the case with all pamphlets, the
very qualities which gave it its contemporary interest make it
unreadable to posterity.  Part of it is a sweeping assertion of the
inalienable right of the whole people to choose, judge and depose their
rulers; a democratic doctrine which a few years later, when England had
grown tired of the Army and the Puritans, he was to find as
inconvenient as he had already found his early advocacy of the
Presbyterian system in matters ecclesiastical.  For the moment,
however, the pamphlet made him a person of importance.  Such a man,
learned, eloquent, of high character, of visible sincerity, of utter
fearlessness, was not an ally to be despised by a Government which had
outraged public opinion at home and abroad.  Within a few {57} weeks he
was appointed Secretary for Foreign Tongues to the Council of State;
and from henceforth till after the death of Cromwell he wrote the
weightiest of the vindications, remonstrances and authoritative demands
which the great Protector addressed to an astonished and overawed
Europe.  We can read them still.  Many are insignificant, dealing with
petty personal details; but the best, especially those that deal with
the universal cause of Protestantism and freedom, rise on spiritual
wings far above the language of diplomacy and officialism, letting us
hear the authentic voice of Milton preluding the thunders of Cromwell
and Blake.

But the first important work required of Milton belonged rather to the
man of letters than to the Foreign Secretary.  The horror aroused both
at home and abroad by the execution of Charles, already great enough in
itself to be very inconvenient to the Government, was greatly increased
by the publication of a book called _Eikon Basilike_ which purported to
be the work of the king himself and appeared immediately after his
death.  It is a kind of religious portrait of Charles, reporting his
spiritual meditations and containing a justification of his life.  Its
success was prodigious; fifty editions are said {58} to have appeared
within a year.  It was obviously necessary that some reply should be
attempted; and the task was naturally assigned to Milton, who published
his _Eikonoklastes_, or Image-Breaker, in October.  It is a mere
pamphlet, even more violent than the _Tenure of Kings_, not ashamed to
rake up such absurdities as the alleged poisoning of James I by
Buckingham, with the usual Miltonic inconsistencies, such as that which
denounces Charles for the crime of refusing his consent to bills passed
by Parliament and forgets that the Government on whose behalf he is
writing established itself by a forcible suppression of the
Parliamentary majority.  It survives now only by the curious passage in
it which tells us that William Shakspeare was "the closet companion" of
Charles I in the "solitudes" of the end of his life; and by the
puritanical allusion to the "vain amatorious poem of Sir Philip
Sidney's _Arcadia_" from which, however "full of worth and wit" in its
own kind, it was a disgrace to the king to borrow a prayer at so grave
an hour.  Perhaps as a mark of their approval of _Eikonoklastes_, the
Council of State gave Milton lodgings in Whitehall; and soon
afterwards, in January 1650, called upon him to reply to another
Royalist book which was making a {59} great stir.  The result was the
beginning of a political and personal controversy which lasted almost
as long as it was safe for Milton to write about politics at all.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries great scholars had a
position which they are never likely to occupy again.  In those
cosmopolitan days when an Italian governed France, and regiments and
even armies were often commanded by foreigners, the honour of
possessing a celebrated scholar was eagerly disputed not only by
universities, but by cities, sovereign states, and even kings.
Learning had then a market value in the world: for then, as always,
especially since the invention of printing, European opinion was worth
having on one's side; and in the days before journalism the practice
was to hire distinguished scholars to write to a political brief.
After the death of Charles I it was obviously the policy of Charles II
to secure support by a powerful indictment of the iniquity of the
rulers of the English Commonwealth.  For this purpose his advisers
obtained the services of a certain Claude de Saumaise, or, as he was
generally called, Salmasius.  This man, forgotten now except for
Milton, was then a scholar of such fame that his presence was disputed
between Oxford {60} and Venice, the French and the Dutch, between the
Pope who wanted him at Rome and Christina of Sweden who was soon to
persuade him to go to Stockholm.  So it is not altogether surprising
that Charles II was advised to pay him, and perhaps paid him, much more
than he could afford for writing a book called _Defensio Regia_, which
was to be before all Europe the public statement of the case against
the new rulers of England.  Milton spent a year in preparing his reply,
which came out in the beginning of 1651.  The _Pro Populo Anglicano
Defensio_ is now pleasanter reading for Milton's detractors than for
those who honour his name.  The unbridled insults which it heaps upon
Charles I and still more upon Salmasius, for whom its least offensive
titles are such as "blockhead," "liar" and "apostate," exceed even the
wide limits of abuse customary in these days.  _Corruptio optimi
pessima_: such a man as Milton, if he once descends to the bandying of
foul language, will beat the very bargemen themselves.  But what
astonished his contemporaries was not his violence but his courage.  An
unknown Englishman had dared to meet the giant of learning on his own
ground and had at least held his own.  It may have been partly as the
result of this {61} that Salmasius no longer found Holland a pleasant
place of residence and removed to Sweden.  A more certain result is
that the English David who had stood up to Goliath was from henceforth
a European celebrity.  With his usual proud courage he had put his own
name on the title-page of his book, challenging to himself both the
glories and the dangers that might come of it.  He was not to be
disappointed of either.

From henceforth he was in the thick of a violent controversy, which
made so much more noise than it deserved in its own day that it need
make none here.  Replies came out both to his _Eikonoklastes_ and to
his _Defensio_: new books grew out of the controversy; Milton's nephew
wrote on his behalf, and anonymous friends of Salmasius on his; the
adversaries of Milton no more spared his character than he had spared
theirs; a _Defensio Secunda_ from his own hand seemed necessary, and
appeared in 1654; and so with minor pamphlets and second editions we
get on to the end of the weary controversy, in which for contemporaries
there was perhaps some fire and light, but for us now little but smoke
and darkness of confusion.

Such was the work which was Milton's chief occupation during the
Commonwealth, to the {62} doing of which he deliberately sacrificed his
eyesight.  Within a year after the publication of his book against
Salmasius its foreseen result was complete.  From henceforth Milton was
dependent upon the eyes of others.  He was only forty-four when
overtaken by this calamity.  Yet his courage seems never to have failed
him.  "I argue not," he tells Cyriack Skinner in his sonnet--

  "Against Heaven's hand or will, nor bate a jot
    Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer
  Right onward.  What supports me, dost thou ask?
    The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
    In Liberty's defence, my noble task,
  Of which all Europe rings from side to side."


Whoever had begun to have doubts about the course taken in 1649 and
since, he had none; and no one had suffered more in defence of it.  The
other and greater sonnet on his blindness--

  "When I consider how my light is spent
    Ere half my days in this dark world and wide"

shows him content if need be to take his place among those whose desire
to serve {63} God must find its peace in the thought that

  "They also serve who only stand and wait."

In the same spirit, perhaps, is the motto which he appended to his
signature in the album of a learned foreigner in 1651: "I am made
perfect in weakness."  But nothing of weakness, not even its
perfection, could ever come near Milton.  He played a greater part in
this world without his eyes than ever he had played with them.  Without
their help he did what prose could do towards justifying the ways of
England to Europe, and was very soon to do what verse could do towards
justifying the ways of God to men.  He cannot, perhaps, be said to have
succeeded in either, but one at least of the failures is a whole heaven
above what ordinary men call success.

A few words may be said of his attitude towards men and measures during
this political period of his life.  His unqualified and immediate
support of the King's execution had, of course, united him with the
Cromwellian party who had brought it about.  And his anti-Presbyterian
views carried him in the same direction.  So we are not surprised to
find that, when Cromwell got rid of the Parliament by military force
and soon {64} afterwards became Protector, Milton approved his action
and gladly continued to serve under him.  Nor was Milton the man to be
disturbed by the Protector's rapid dissolution of his first Parliament,
by the period of personal Government which followed, or by his angry
breach with his second Parliament.  Poets have seldom understood
politics, and Milton, the most political of poets, perhaps less than
any.  No man ever had less of that sense of law and custom, of the need
of continuity, which is the very centre and secret of politics.  Few
great statesmen have been able to maintain perfect consistency; but the
least consistent have generally been aware that there was something in
inconsistencies that needed explanation.  Milton never shows any
consciousness of the patent incongruity between his early exaltation of
the indefeasible rights of Parliaments and his support of the
Cromwellian attitude towards them: between his angry denunciation of
Charles I for presuming to retain the ancient right of the kings to
refuse their assent to Bills submitted to them and his approval of
Cromwell's dismissal of a Parliament for attempting to deny the same
right to the Protector: between the extreme doctrine of free printing
claimed in the _Areopagitica_ and the fact that its author {65} was
afterwards concerned in licensing books under a Government which
vigorously suppressed "seditious" publications.  But inconsistencies by
themselves are of little importance, particularly in revolutionary
times; they would be of none, in Milton's case, if he had ever admitted
that he had learnt from experience and consequently changed his mind.
But he never did.  Parliaments remained sacred when they were for
pulling down bishops, profane when they were for establishing
Presbyterianism, and utterly detestable when they were for restoring
Charles II.  The fact is, of course, that Milton, like most men of much
imagination and no political experience, saw a vision of certain things
in the value of which he believed with all his soul, and saw none of
the objections to them and none of the difficulties that stood in their
way.  At the very end, when the bonfires for Charles II were almost
lighted in the streets, he could publish _A Ready and Easy Way to
Establish a Free Commonwealth_; and the title he chose for that book
was typical of his whole attitude in all practical matters.  He had to
an extreme degree the man of vision's blindness to the all-important
fact that the mass of men would not have what he aims at if they {66}
could and could not if they would.  At least in a free country the
statesman knows that he has got to work through stupid people, with
their consent, and with regard to the measure of their capacities.  For
such men as Milton stupid people either do not exist or are to be
merely ignored.  That is his attitude all through.  Alike in the matter
of divorce and in the matter of education, in the ecclesiastical
problem and in the political, he was always eager to put forward a
"ready and easy way" which entirely ignored the nature of the human
material which was to walk in it.  He simply chose not to see that in
all these matters men had for centuries been walking in a way which was
not his, a way which had in fact by now diverged many miles from his;
and that they could not possibly, even if they would, transport
themselves in a moment, at a mere wave of his wand, across the
intervening bogs and forests which the lapse of years had rendered
impassable.  He never appears to have had a single glimpse of the truth
that the essential business of the statesman is to be always moving
from the past to the future without ever letting the bridge between
them break down.  The principal food of a political people is custom,
and to break the bridge is to cut off the only source {67} of its
supply.  The greatest proof that Cromwell was really a statesman and
not a mere political emergency man of unusual character and ability is
that in his last years he was evidently seeing more and more plainly
that the right metaphor for a statesman is taken from grafting and not
from "root and branch" operations.  It is clear that he had seen that
political branches may be pruned away but roots can very seldom be
safely disturbed; and that among the roots in English politics were a
hereditary Monarchy and an established Church.  Dynasty and formularies
might perhaps be safely changed; but the things themselves were of the
root, and the tree would not flourish if they were touched.  It is
characteristic of Milton that in both these matters he was strongly
opposed to the policy towards which Cromwell was feeling his way.  Ten
years had taught him nothing, and the death of Cromwell found him as
blind to political possibilities as the death of Charles I.

One would like to know something of the relations between the two
greatest men of the Commonwealth.  But there is little or nothing to
know.  It is plain that in most matters they must have been in close
agreement; and in a few, as in the business of the {68} Piedmont
massacres, the two great hearts must have beaten as one, while the
sword of Cromwell stood ready drawn behind the trumpet of Milton's
noble prose and nobler verse.  The only surviving act of personal
contact between them is to be found in Milton's sonnet; and that is a
public tribute with no suggestion of private intimacy in it.  Indeed,
as Masson has pointed out, it may easily be taken to mean more than it
really does; for it was not written because Milton could not keep
silence about his admiration of Cromwell, but rather, as its full title
shows, as a petition or appeal to Cromwell to save the nation from
parliamentary proposals for the setting up of a State Church and for
limiting the toleration of dissent from it.  The sonnet, then, proves
less than it has sometimes been made to prove; and in any case it
proves no intimacy.  Perhaps after all, in the case of Milton as in
that of most men who deal with public affairs, we are apt to exaggerate
the importance in their daily lives of these visible official
activities.  The world thinks it knows men who fight battles, or make
speeches, or write books; but it knows nothing of their private
thoughts or studies and still less of their private loves and joys and
sorrows which to themselves {69} and in truth are much the most real
part of their lives.  So with Milton during these years; his wife and
little children may have been, his second wife and such friends as
Cyriack Skinner and Henry Lawrence and Lady Ranelagh and the poet
Marvell certainly were, much greater realities to him in his daily
thoughts than either the hated Salmasius and Morus of the pamphlets or
the admired Cromwell of the sonnet.  The "weekly table" he is said to
have kept, at the expense of the State, for foreign ministers, must
have provided interesting talk; but the true Milton cannot have lived
in these gatherings so fully at the time or remembered them afterwards
so affectionately as those other more intimate parties of which he
gives us a picture in the two sonnets to Lawrence and Skinner which,
for lovers of poetry, look so pleasantly back to Horace and so
pleasantly forward to Cowper and Tennyson.

  "Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,
  Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire,
  Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire
  Help waste a sullen day, what may be won
  From the hard season gaining?  Time will run
{70}
  On smoother, till Favonius re-inspire
  The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire
  The lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun.
  What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,
  Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may rise
  To hear the lute well touched, or artful voice
  Warble immortal notes and Tuscan air?
  He who of those delights can judge, and spare
  To interpose them oft, is not unwise."


This is his own graver and older parallel to what his nephew tells us
of his schoolmastering days when he would turn from "hard study and
spare diet" to "drop once a month or so into the society of some young
sparks of his acquaintance," and with them "would so far make bold with
his body as now and then to keep a gawdy day."  The sonnet shows that
the poet is still the poet of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, no narrow
fanatic, but a lover of company and the arts, and of the richness and
fulness of life.  Such occasions as that it describes must have been
oases in the desert of controversy and public business abroad and of
blindness and loneliness at home.  He did not live long in Whitehall,
{71} moving in 1652 to a house overlooking St. James's Park, near what
is now Queen Anne's Gate.  There his first wife died in 1653, or 1654,
and her short-lived successor too; there he lived during the remaining
years of the Commonwealth, working at his pamphlets and State papers,
even beginning _Paradise Lost_, with young friends to read to him,
write for him, lead their blind great man about in the Park or
elsewhere, till the catastrophe of 1660 arrived and it was no longer
safe for the defender of Regicide to be seen in the streets.

Why Milton was not hanged at the Restoration is still something of a
mystery.  His name must have been more hatefully known to the returning
exiles than that of any one except the dead Cromwell whose death did
not save his body from a grim ceremony at Tyburn.  He had not only
defended Charles I's execution before all Europe, and in a tone almost
of exultation, but he had pursued the whole Stuart family with
vituperation and contempt.  Even in the very last weeks, when the bells
were already almost ringing for Charles II, he had dared to raise his
voice against the "abjured and detested thraldom of kingship";
declaring that he would not be silent though he should but speak "to
trees and stones: and had none to cry to, but {72} with the prophet 'O
Earth, Earth, Earth!' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse
inhabitants are deaf to,"--a passage, if interpreted by its original
context, of awful imprecation upon Charles I.  A man so famous, so
utterly unrepentant, so defiant to the very end, seemed to challenge to
himself the gallows.  That his challenge would receive its natural
answer was the openly expressed opinion of his enemies.  No doubt it
was also the fear of his friends, who concealed him in Smithfield from
May till August 1660.  By the 24th of August the danger was over.  The
Act of Indemnity, which was a pardon to all political offenders not by
name excepted in it, became law on that day; and Milton's was not one
of the excepted names.  How was that managed?  There are various
stories; perhaps each has some truth in it; many influences may have
combined.  One is that he had saved Davenant in his danger some years
before and now the Cavalier poet in his turn saved the Puritan.  But
Davenant was not in Parliament, and the real work must have been done
by a group of friends who were.  The most important of them seem to
have been Annesley (afterwards Lord Anglesey), Sir Thomas Clarges, who
was Monk's brother-in-law, Monk's secretary Morrice, and the poet's
less powerful but {73} still more devoted friend Andrew Marvell.
Between them somehow they saved him, aided no doubt by the general pity
for a blind man, the general respect for his learning which found
expression even in that moment and even in Royalist pamphlets, and, one
may hope, by the knowledge of a few of them that this was a man of
genius from whom there might be great things yet to come.  The names of
those who thus made possible the greatest poem in the English language
deserve lasting record; and a word of gratitude may be added to
Clarendon and to Charles II for refraining from saying the easy and not
unnatural word which would have been instantly fatal to their old enemy.

The odd thing is that he was arrested after all.  There had been an
order of the House of Commons for his arrest and for the burning of his
books, possibly, as Masson thinks, obtained by his friends to make it
seem unnecessary to except him in the Indemnity Bill.  The books were
duly burnt, or such copies of them as came to the hands of the hangman;
and ultimately, at some uncertain date, Milton himself was got into the
custody of the Sergeant-at-Arms.  He was soon released, and the story
would not be worth relating but for a curious proof it gives of the
{74} obstinate courage of the poet.  The House ordered his release on
December 15; and one would have supposed that he would have been glad
to escape into obscurity and safety again on any terms.  But no; the
Sergeant-at-Arms demanded high fees which Milton thought unreasonable;
and even then, when he had almost felt the hangman's rope on his neck,
he would not be bullied by any man.  He refused to pay: and though the
Solicitor-General ominously remarked that he deserved hanging, his
friends got the fees referred to a committee and presumably reduced.
Before the beginning of 1661 he was definitely a free man to live his
final fourteen years of political defeat, isolation and silence, of
unparalleled poetic fertility, and, before the end, of acknowledged
poetic fame.

He did not return any more to the fashionable and therefore dangerous
neighbourhood of Whitehall, but lived the rest of his life in a
succession of houses in or near the city, ending in Artillery Walk,
Bunhill Fields, where he died.  His friends must for years have feared
that he might be attacked and perhaps murdered by some drunken Cavalier
revellers accidentally coming across the old regicide.  And in spite of
the Act of Indemnity he can hardly have felt absolutely comfortable on
{75} the side of the law when so late as 1664 his _Tenure of Kings_ was
denounced by the censor as still extant and an unfortunate printer was
hanged, drawn and quartered for issuing a sort of new version of it.
Misfortunes without and fears within might be the summing up, if not of
the poet's, at least of the man's life during these first years after
the Restoration.  To begin with, he was a much poorer man.  His salary
as Secretary was, of course, gone.  But besides that he had lost 2000
pounds, equal to about 7000 pounds now, which he had invested in
Commonwealth Securities, as well as some confiscated property he had
bought of the Chapter of Westminster; and he was soon to lose, at least
temporarily, the rent he received from his father's house in Bread
Street which was destroyed by the Fire of London.  Masson calculates
that he was left after the Restoration with an income about equal to
700 pounds of our money which his further losses and outlay on his
daughters had reduced to 300 pounds or 350 pounds before his death; not
quite poverty even at the end, but something very different from what
the eldest son of a rich man had been accustomed to.  A graver
misfortune was the gout which afflicted him for the rest of his life
and gave him so much pain that he made little of his blindness in {76}
comparison with it.  Worst of all was his unhappy relation to his
daughters.  That is the ugliest thing in the story of his life.  How
things might have gone with his son, if the baby boy had lived, one
does not know; but his oriental views of the moral and intellectual
inferiority of women, which doubled the dangers of their fascinations,
made him certain to be a despotic father to three motherless girls.
And so he was.  He had plenty of young men eager for the privilege of
reading to him: but of course they could not be always with him, and
the result was that dreadful picture which comes to us from his nephew,
no unfriendly witness, of the daughters "condemned to the performance
of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever
book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse; viz. the
Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian,
Spanish and French," none of which languages they understood.  Nor did
he show any desire that they should; saying grimly that one tongue was
enough for a woman.  History and fiction are alike full of the
tragedies that result from the blindness of extraordinary minds to
ordinary duties; and Milton's case is one of the saddest.  The
daughters cheated him and made away with {77} his books; he spoke of
them gravely and repeatedly as his "unkind children"; one of them is
even reported, on very good evidence, to have said, at his third
marriage in 1663, that "that was no news to hear of his wedding but, if
she could hear of his death, that was something."  At last it was
thought better that he and they should part; and they were put out, at
considerable expense to their father, to learn embroidery work and
other "curious and ingenious manufactures" for their living.  It is
pleasant to hear that the youngest, Deborah, who was visited by Addison
not long before he died, and received fifty guineas from Queen
Caroline, was "in a transport" of delight when shown a portrait of her
father, crying out "'Tis my father, 'tis my dear father, I see him;
'tis him; 'tis the very man! here, here!" as she pointed to some of the
features.  So one likes to be told, on her authority, that he was
delightful company and "the life of the conversation, full of
unaffected cheerfulness and civility" when he had his little parties of
friends.  And to us, if not to her, it is a pleasant story that she
could still repeat many lines from Homer, Euripides and Ovid, though
she said she did not understand Greek or Latin.  The wife of a
Spitalfields weaver must at last have felt {78} some pride in these
survivals of her childish drudgery, proof audible to all men, if to her
unintelligible, that she was the daughter of Mr. Milton, the great
scholar and poet.

No more need to be said of sorrow or failure.  The rest is a serene and
productive old age.  _Paradise Lost_ was published in 1667, _Paradise
Regained_ and _Samson_ in 1671.  Besides these there was, in 1673, a
new edition of his earlier poems reprinted, with additions from that of
1645; and many publications of prose works mostly written in earlier
years but never printed, such as his _History of Britain_, and little
books on Education, Logic and Grammar.  He kept up his strenuous life
of study and composition apparently to the end.  He is said to have got
up at four or five in the morning, and, after hearing a chapter or two
from the Hebrew Bible and breakfasting, to have passed the five hours
before his midday dinner dictating or having some book read to him.  In
the afternoon he would walk a little in his garden; all his life a
garden had been one of the things he would not do without.  Then music
and more private study carried him on to an Horatian supper of olives
or other "light things"; and so to a pipe of tobacco, a glass of water
and bed.  He drank but little wine, and that only with his meals.  {79}
Such a way of life deserved a healthful old age, which, but for that
healthy man's disease the gout, he had, and a death such as he had, so
easy as to be imperceptible to the bystanders.  That was on November 8,
1674.  Four days later his body was buried in the church of St. Giles,
Cripplegate, where his grave may still be seen; the funeral being
accompanied by "all his learned and great friends in London, not
without a concourse of the vulgar."

By that time the battle of his life had been won.  The astonishing
achievements of his last years had more than fulfilled the high promise
and proud words of his long distant youth.  Perhaps no seven years in
all literary history provide a finer record of poetic genius triumphing
over difficulties external and internal than these last seven of
Milton's life from 1667 to 1674.  They had their reward and not only
from posterity.  There is a still lingering delusion, based chiefly on
the five pounds paid for the first edition of _Paradise Lost_, that
Milton's greatness was little recognized in his lifetime.  The truth is
the exact reverse.  He had far more chance of hearing his own praises,
if he cared for that, than most of the great English poets: than Keats
and Shelley, for instance; than Wordsworth, {80} at least till he was
old; nay, in all probability than Shakspeare himself.  Which of them
heard the most popular poet of their day say of them anything at all
like Dryden's famous and generous "This man cuts us all out and the
ancients too"?  It is not even true that _Paradise Lost_ sold badly.
On the contrary, in a year and a half from the day of publication over
thirteen hundred copies had been sold, from which the author received
10 pounds and the publisher, it is believed, 50 pounds or 60 pounds.
He would be a sanguine publisher to-day who would be quite certain of
making in eighteen months the modern equivalent of this sum, say 180
pounds, out of a new epic, even if it were as great as Milton's.

But the money question was not of the first importance to Milton and is
of none to us.  The interesting thing is the almost immediate
recognition of the greatness of the poem.  Nothing in the world could
be more alien to the tone of the society and literature of the London
of Charles II than this long Biblical Puritan poem with its scarcely
veiled attacks on the revived Monarchy and Episcopacy and its entirely
unveiled attacks on the fashionable men of Belial.  Yet it was from the
very high priests of this society that the most unstinted praise came.
Of its professional men of {81} letters Dryden was already rapidly
advancing to the unquestioned primacy which was soon to be his, and to
remain his for his life; of its amateurs Lord Dorset had perhaps the
most brilliant reputation.  It was these two men who, more than any
others, made the town recognize the greatness of Milton.  Both were as
unlike Milton as men could be, and Dryden had just committed himself to
a strong championship of rhymed verse as against blank.  There is
nowhere a finer proof of the compelling power of great art upon those
who know it when they see it than the unbounded praise with which
Dryden at once saluted Milton.  The fact that his admiration at first
took the absurd form of turning Milton's epic into a "heroic opera" in
rhyme does not detract from the significance of his writing publicly
within a year of Milton's death that the blind old regicide's poem was
"one of the greatest, most noble and sublime which either this age or
nation has produced," and to this he was to add, thirteen years later,
the still bolder tribute of the well-known epigram about "three poets
in three distant ages born" which gives Milton a place above Homer and
Virgil.  The lines are in detail absurd; but their absurdity does not
destroy the fact that the intellectual life of England was never {82}
keener, or more eager to welcome talent in art or letters, than in the
reign of Charles II; and nothing is clearer proof of it than the
honours received by the rebel Milton from a Court composer like Henry
Lawes, a Court physician like Samuel Barrow, a statesman and minister
like Lord Anglesey, and a poet laureate like Dryden.

So we may think of him happily enough in these last years.  He had now
done the work which from his early manhood he had felt it was his task
in life to do.  When he was not much over thirty he had boldly written
in public of what his mind, "in the spacious circuits of her musing,
hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest
attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and
those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse and the book of Job
a brief model . . . or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein
Sophocles and Euripides reign, shall be found more doctrinal and
exemplary to a nation."  For the moment nothing seemed to come of these
high words; but before he died not one only, but both of his dreams,
the drama as well as the epic, were accomplished facts.  _Paradise
Lost_, begun as a drama, had become the greatest of modern {83} epics;
and the abandoned drama had reappeared in _Samson_, not the greatest of
English tragedies, but the one which best recalls the peculiar
greatness of the drama of Greece.  Self-confident young men have always
been common enough, but there are two differences between them and
Milton: their performance falls far short of their promise instead of
exceeding it; and neither promise nor performance is marked by this
exalting and purifying sense of a thing divinely inspired and divinely
aided.  Such work can wait, as his did, being such as is "not to be
raised from the heat of youth or the vapours of wine; like that which
flows at waste from the pen of some vulgar amourist, or the trencher
fury of a rhyming parasite; nor to be obtained by the invocation of
dame memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to that
eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge, and
sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch
and purify the lips of whom he pleases."

Now the task is done; and he can sit alone in his upstairs room in
Artillery Walk and thank God that in spite of blindness, private
sorrows and public disappointments, he had been enabled at last to bear
the witness of a work of immortal beauty to the high truth {84} that
had been in him even from a boy.  So it may have been in the graver
moments of solitude; while, as we know from several sources, there were
other times, when he would enjoy the companionship of friends and the
homage of learned strangers by whom we are told he was "much visited,
more than he did desire."  The picture suggested to us is that of a man
who at sixty-five, then a greater age than now, retained all his powers
of mind and much of the physical beauty which had been so remarkable in
his youth; who was gracious but somewhat reserved and dignified with
strangers; a delightful companion to friends and especially to younger
men; full of literature, especially of poetry, and with a memory that
enabled him to recite long passages from Homer and Virgil; above all,
an ardent lover of music, making a practice, so far as possible, of
hearing some, whether vocal or instrumental, every afternoon.  His ears
were eyes to him; and when he heard a lady sing finely he would say:
"Now will I swear this lady is handsome."  All kinds of music, and not
only the severer, were delightful to the "organ-voice of England."

That is not the least interesting thing about him.  The greatest of
England's Puritans {85} was also the greatest of her artists.  He had
nothing in him of the morbid scrupulosity which is such an inhuman
feature in French Jansenism and some of the English sects.  His was a
large nature which demanded a free expansion of life.  Lonely figure as
he is in our literary history, with no real predecessors or followers,
his mighty arch yet bridges the gulf between Elizabeth and the
Revolution, and is of nearer or less distant kin to Shakspeare than to
Pope.  His prose is the swan song of the old eloquence, as inspired and
as confused as an oracle.  To read it when it is at its best is to soar
on wings through the empyrean and despise Swift and Addison walking in
neat politeness on the pavement.  There as everywhere, in his verse, in
his character, in his mind, in his life, he has the strength and the
weakness of an aristocrat.  The youth who in his Cambridge days was
"esteemed a virtuous person yet not to be ignorant of his parts" did
not belie the opinion formed of him in either of those respects.  His
Republicanism was of the proud Roman sort, and at least as near
Coriolanus as Gracchus; a boundless faith in the State and a boundless
desire to spend and be spent in its service, a total and scornful
indifference to the opinions of all {86} those, though they might be
five-sixths of the nation, who did not desire to be served in the way
which he had decided to be for their good.  The modern way of deciding
matters of State by counting heads may very likely be the best of many
unsatisfactory ways of accomplishing a very difficult business; but it
has always been peculiarly exasperating to men of genius who see their
way plainly and cannot understand why a million blind men are to keep
them out of it.  Milton liked the voice of the majority well enough
when he could plead it against Charles I; but when he found it calling
for Charles II he treated it as a mere impertinent absurdity; the vain
babble of a "misguided and abused multitude" with whom wise men have
nothing to do except to keep them in their place.  And it is in the
latter attitude that he is most really himself.  His is, of course, an
aristocracy of mind and character, not of birth and wealth; but the
self-sufficient scorn which was almost a virtue in Aristotle's eyes,
and is in ours the besetting sin of even the noblest of aristocrats, is
too frequent a note in all his prose, and even in his poetry; and it is
sometimes poured out upon those who are fitter subjects for tenderness
than for contempt.  One can scarcely imagine a child {87} or an
ignorant man being quite at ease in Milton's company.

But these are the penalties that greatness has too often to pay for
being itself.  So long as we remain human beings and not divine, it
will be found hard to unite humility, ease of manner, and the glad
sufferance of fools with a mind struggling in a storm of sublime
thoughts, with powers that are and know themselves to be far above
those of ordinary men.  It will never be easy for men of supreme genius
to behave to their inferiors as if they were their equals.  But that is
not the side of Milton of which we ought to think most often now.  It
is more just as well as more merciful to him, and it is of more use to
ourselves, to fix our eyes on his strength, and not on the weakness
that more or less inevitably accompanied it.  The ancients admired
strength more than the moderns have, at least until lately.  But no one
can refuse to admire such strength as Milton's, so continuous, so
triumphant over exceptional obstacles, so disdainful of all petty or
personal ends.  There is a majesty about it to which one scarcely knows
any real parallel.  Strength implies purpose and art implies unity of
conception; the instinct of art was only less strong in Milton than the
resolute will; so that it {88} is not surprising that scarcely any life
has such unity as his.  It is itself a perfect work of art.  If we put
aside, as we may fairly, the partial political inconsistencies, the
rest is absolutely of one piece; a great building, nobly planned from
the beginning and nobly executed to the last harmonious detail of the
original design.  We men are, most of us, weak creatures who accomplish
but the tiniest fragments of even such poor designs as we make for our
lives.  There is something that uplifts us in the spectacle of the
triumphant completion of so great a plan as the life of Milton.  We are
exalted by the thought that, after all, we are of the same flesh and
blood, nay, even of the same breed, as this wonderful man.  To read the
_Paradise Lost_ is to realize, in the highest degree, how the poet's
imagination can impose a majestic order on the tumultuous confusion of
human speech and knowledge.  To read its author's life is to realize,
with equally exalting clearness, how a strong man's will can so
victoriously mould a world of adverse circumstances that affliction,
defeat--nay, even the threatening shadow of death itself--are made the
very instruments by which he becomes that which he has, from the
beginning of his years, chosen for himself to be.




{89}

CHAPTER III

THE EARLIER POEMS

We think to-day of Milton chiefly as the author of _Paradise Lost_, as
we think of Wren as the builder of St. Paul's.  And we are right.  When
a man has been the creator of the only very great building in the world
which bears upon it from the first stone to the last the mark of a
single mind, his other achievements, even though they include
Greenwich, Hampton Court, Trinity College Library, and some fifty
churches, inevitably fall into the background.  So when the world has
admitted that a poet has disputed the supreme palm of epic with Homer
and Virgil, it hardly cares to remember that he has also challenged all
rivals in such forms as the Pastoral Elegy, the Mask, and the Sonnet.
_De minimis non curat_ might be applied to such cases without any very
violent extravagance.  The first thought that must always rise to the
mind at the mention of Milton's name must be the stupendous achievement
of _Paradise Lost_.

Yet if Milton had been hanged at Tyburn {90} in 1660 he would still
unquestionably rank with the half-dozen greatest of the English poets.
Chaucer and Spenser would then have ranked after Shakspeare as higher
names than his: and possibly also Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley.  But
he could have feared no other rival: for Dryden is too much a mere man
of letters, Pope too much a mere wit, Byron too exclusively a
rhetorician, Tennyson too exclusively an artist, to rank with a man in
whom burned the divine fire of _Lycidas_ and the great Ode.  What would
Milton's fame have rested upon if he had not lived to write _Paradise
Lost_ and its two successors?  Upon the volume published in the year
1645, the year of Naseby, when people, one would have supposed, were
not thinking much of poetry, and those who were most likely to be doing
so were just those least inclined to look for it from John Milton, the
Puritan pamphleteer.  Yet in that little book was heard for the last
time the voice, now raised above itself, of the old poetry which the
Cavaliers and courtiers had loved.

No single volume has ever contained so much fine English verse by an
unknown or almost unknown poet.  It is true that _Lycidas_ and _Comus_
had been printed before, but _Comus_ had appeared anonymously and {91}
_Lycidas_ had been signed only with initials.  So that only friends, or
people behind the scenes in the literary world, could know anything of
Milton's poetry.  Nor does he seem to have been very anxious that they
should.  The other contributors to the volume in memory of Edward King
gave their names: the only signature to _Lycidas_ is J. M.  It was
Lawes the composer, not Milton the author, who published _Comus_ in
1637.  Milton's feelings about it are indicated by the motto on the
title page--

  "Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus Austrum
  Perditus--"

Quotations can often say for us what we cannot say for ourselves.  What
Virgil says for Milton is "Alas what is this that I have done? poor
fool that I am, could not I have kept my tender buds of verse a little
longer from the cutting blasts of public criticism?"  Yet no one knew
better than Milton that _Comus_ was incomparably the greatest of the
masks.  So in the sonnet on reaching the age of twenty-three he says
that his "late spring no bud or blossom shew'th."  Yet he had already
written the _Ode on the Nativity_, a performance sufficient, one would
have {92} thought, to give a young poet reasonable self-satisfaction in
what he had done, as well as confidence in what he would be able to do.
Nor was Milton in the ordinary sense, or perhaps in any, a humble man.
Of that false kind of humility, too often recommended from the pulpit,
which consists in a beautiful woman trying to suppose herself plain, or
an able man trying to be unaware of his ability, no man ever had less
than Milton.  Neither from himself nor from others did he ever conceal
the fact that he was a man of genius.  In his eyes no kind of untruth,
however specious, could be a virtue.  But of a finer humility, built on
truth, he was not without his share.  The truly humble man may be a
genius and may know it and may never affect to deny it: he may know
that he has done great things, far greater than have been done by the
men he sees around him: but he is not judging himself by the standard
of other men: he has another standard, that of "the perfect witness of
all-judging Jove," that of "as ever in my great Taskmaster's eye," and
of that he knows how very far he has fallen short.  Of this nobler
humility Milton had something all his life and in his youth much.  It
is this which reconciles the apparent inconsistency between his many
proud {93} confessions that he knows himself to be a man called to do
great things and his reluctance to let the world see what he had
already done: between his keeping _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ ten
years unpublished and his preserving and ultimately publishing almost
everything he had ever written, even to scraps of boyish and
undergraduate verse.  From one point of view his best was nothing: from
the other, more than equally true, the humblest line that had come from
his pen had received a passport to immortality.

What does the famous volume contain?  It opens with the noble _Ode on
the Nativity_, as if to give the discerning reader invincible proof in
the first twenty lines put before him that the proud words of the
publisher's preface were amply justified.  "Let the event guide itself
which way it will, I shall deserve of the age by bringing into the
light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous
Spenser wrote; whose poems in these English ones are as rarely imitated
as sweetly excelled.  Reader, if thou art eagle-eyed to censure their
worth, I am not fearful to expose them to thy exactest perusal."  So
the preface ends: and then what follows is--

  "This is the month, and this the happy morn,
  Wherein the Son of Heaven's Eternal King,
{94}
  Of wedded maid and virgin mother born,
  Our great redemption from above did bring;
  For so the holy sages once did sing,
  That he our deadly forfeit should release,
  And with his Father work us a perpetual peace."

_Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo_.  No one had ever written
such English verse as this before: no one ever would again.  Here was a
poet, writing at the age of twenty-one, for whom it was evident that no
theme could be so high that he could not find it fit utterance.  Fit
and also peculiar to himself.  The peculiar Miltonic note which none of
his innumerable imitators have ever caught for more than a few lines,
which he himself never in all his works loses for more than a moment,
is instantly struck.  As Mr. Mackail has said, "there is not a square
inch of his poetry from first to last of which one could not
confidently say, 'This is Milton and no one else.'"  One may even go
further than Mr. Mackail.  For he seems to make an exception where
certainly none is needed.  He is justly insisting that one of the most
remarkable things about Milton is that, while English poetry spoke one
language in his youth and another in his age, he himself spoke neither.
His "accent and speech" alike in _Lycidas_ and in _Paradise Lost_ {95}
are his own, and in marked contrast to those of contemporary poets.
But here Mr. Mackail adds the qualification "if we exclude a few slight
juvenile pieces of his boyhood and those metrical versions of the
Psalms in which he elected not to be a poet."  He asserts, that is,
that neither in the Psalms nor in the "juvenile pieces" is Milton
characteristically himself and that in the Psalms he is not a poet at
all.  And no one will care to deny that many of the versions of the
Psalms have little Milton and less poetry in them.  But is this true of
all?  And in particular is it true of the paraphrase of Psalm cxxxvi.
which, with its companion version of Psalm cxiv. is the most "juvenile"
of all?  A boy of fifteen has not usually much power of "electing" to
be or not to be a poet.  But it can only be inadvertence on Mr.
Mackail's part that would deny that the boy Milton at that age, though
not a great poet, was already himself and, more than that, was already
promising what he was soon to perform.  Who, looking back from the
_Ode_ and _Comus_ and _Paradise Lost_, does not hear some preluding of
the authentic strain of Milton in

  "Who by his all-commanding might
  Did fill the new-made world with light"?

{96} Is it fanciful to note that we have here, no doubt in their barest
primitive form, two of Milton's life-long themes?  The Authorized
Version speaks of "him that made great lights": how Miltonically
transformed those words already are in the two quoted lines!  De
Quincey said that Milton was "not an author amongst authors, not a poet
amongst poets, but a power amongst powers."  However that may be, it is
certain that he, so occupied all his life with thinking and writing
about God, thought of God habitually as a power.  For him God is
Creator, Sovereign, Judge, much more often than Father: we hear from
Milton more of his might than of his love.  So at once here, at the age
of fifteen, he inserts into the Psalm he is paraphrasing that
characteristic phrase, so splendid and potent itself, so gladly
speaking of potency and splendour,

  "Who by his all-commanding might."

And, if power be one of the most frequent elements in the Miltonic
thought, what is more frequent than light in the Miltonic vision?  And
is not that substitution of "did fill the new-made world with light"
for the bare scientific statement of the original, a foretaste of the
Milton who, all his life, blind or seeing, felt {97} the joy and wonder
of light as no other man ever did?  Do we not rightly hear in it a note
that will soon be enriched into the "Light unsufferable" of the _Ode_,
the "endless morn of Light" of the _Solemn Music_, the "bosom bright of
blazing Majesty and Light" of the _Epitaph on Lady Winchester_, and,
not to multiply quotations, of the "Hail, holy Light" which opens the
great invocation of the third book of _Paradise Lost_?

It may be as well, before discussing the _Ode_ and the other contents
of the volume issued in 1645, to mention another poem which is of
earlier date than the _Ode_, though it was not printed till 1673: the
beautiful Spenserian lines _On the Death of a Fair Infant_.  They
afford the most real of the exceptions to the rule that Milton is
always from the beginning to the end unmistakably and solely himself.
In this poem he shows himself at the age of seventeen so soaked in
Spenser and Spenser's school that, when his baby niece dies and he sets
himself to make her an elegy, what he gives us is these graceful verses
conveying as much as a boy of seventeen can catch of the lovely elegiac
note of Spenser.

  "O noble Spirit: live there ever blessed
  The world's late wonder, and the heaven's new joy;
{98}
  Live ever there, and leave me here distressed
  With mortal cares and cumbrous world's annoy."

So sings Spenser of Sidney: and, though Milton is scarcely yet more the
equal of Spenser than his baby niece was of Sidney, it is a beautiful
echo of his master that he gives us in his

  "O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted,
  Soft silken primrose fading timelessly,"

and in

  "Yet can I not persuade me thou art dead,
  Or that thy corse corrupts in earth's dark womb,
  Or that thy beauties lie in wormy bed,
  Hid from the world in a low delvèd tomb."

The poem is full of the then fashionable conceits, which appear again a
little in the _Ode_, after which they are for ever put aside by
Milton's imaginative severity and high conception of poetry as a finer
sort of truth than prose, not a more ingenious kind of lying.  Once,
and perhaps once only, one hears in it the voice of the Milton of later
years--

  "Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire
  To scorn the sordid world, and unto Heaven aspire."


But with the _Ode_ the age of imitation is over for Milton and he
stands forward at once {99} as himself.  The soft graces, somewhat
lacking in outline, of the _Fair Infant_, are forgotten in the sonorous
strength of the _Ode_.  The half-hesitating whisper has become a strain
of mighty music; the uncertain hand has gained self-confidence so that
the design now shows the boldness and decision of a master.  At once,
in the second stanza, he is away to heaven, with a curious anticipation
of what was to occupy him so much thirty years later--

  "That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
  And that far-beaming blaze of majesty,
  Wherewith he wont at Heaven's high council-table
  To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
  He laid aside; and, here with us to be,
  Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
  And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay."


Milton's genius was universal, in the strict sense of the word, that
is, living in or occupied with the universe.  He is as supramundane in
his way as Shelley in his.  And no part of the universe was more real
to him than heaven, the abode of God and angels and spirits, the
original and ultimate home of his beloved music and light.  It is
noticeable that there is hardly a single poem of his--_L'Allegro_ and
_Samson_ are the only important ones--in {100} which he does not at one
point or other make his escape to heaven.  In most of them, as all
through this _Ode_ and the _Solemn Music_, in the conclusions of
_Lycidas_ and _Il Penseroso_, in the opening of _Comus_, this heavenly
flight provides passages of exceptional and peculiarly Miltonic beauty.
The fact is that, though little of a mystic, he was from the first
entirely of that temper, intellectually descended from Plato, morally
from Stoicism and Christianity but more from Stoicism, which cannot be
content to be "confined and pestered in this pinfold here," disdains
the "low-thoughted cares" of mere bodily and temporal life, and
habitually aspires to live the life of the mind and the spirit,

  "Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
  Which men call Earth."


So here at once, in his first important poem, what in other hands might
have been a mere telling of the old human and earthly story of the
first Christmas night becomes in Milton's a vision of all time and all
space, with heaven in it, and the stars, and the music of the spheres,
and the great timeless scheme of redemption with which he was to have
so much to do later, with history, too, and literature, the false gods
of the Old Testament and of the Greek and Roman classics already {101}
anticipating the parts they were to play in _Paradise Lost_.

And note one other thing.  Milton is only twenty-one, but he is already
an incomparable artist.  The stanza had been so far the usual form for
lyrics, and he adopts it here for the first and last time.  But if he
accepts the instrument prescribed by tradition, with what a master's
hand this wonderful boy of twenty-one touches it, and to what
astonishing music!  It seems that the stanza itself is his own.  Every
one has felt the combination in it, as he manages it, of the romantic
movement and suggestion which he loved and renounced with the classical
strength which is the chief element in the final impression he made on
English poetry.  As yet the romantic quality is the stronger, and even
one of the mighty closing Alexandrines is dedicated to the lovely
Elizabethan fancy of the "yellow skirted fayes" who

  "Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze."

How such a line as that, or still more plainly the two which end the
most romantic stanza of all--

  "No nightly trance, or breathèd spell,
  Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell"
{102} found a rejoicing echo in Keats is obvious.  This, of course, has
often been noticed.  But has it ever been remarked that there are also
lines in the poem which might have been written by another
nineteenth-century poet of equal but very different genius?

  "The winds, with wonder whist,
  Smoothly the waters kissed,
  Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean;"--

should we be surprised to come upon these elemental loves and joys
heralding a new reign of justice and peace in the _Prometheus Unbound_?

But neither Keats nor Shelley, who both had their affinities to Milton,
had it in him to reach the concentrated Miltonic energy of such lines
as--

  "The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep,"

or--

  "Than his bright throne or burning axletree could bear."

Almost every one of these final Alexandrines, it is to be observed,
sums up the note of its stanza in a chord of majestic power.  They are
the most Miltonic lines in the poem; for it is precisely "majesty"
{103} which is the unique and essential Miltonic quality; and Dryden in
the famous epigram ought to have kept it for him and not given it to
Virgil, though by doing so he would have made his splendid compliment
impossible.

Among the poems that followed in the 1645 edition were the _Passion_, a
failure which Milton recognized as a failure and abandoned, but yet,
characteristically, did not refuse to publish; the _Epitaph on the
Marchioness of Winchester_, which, still youthful as it is and is seen
to be by the frigid and false antithesis of Queen and Marchioness with
which it ends, has yet very beautiful lines--

  "Gentle Lady, may thy grave
  Peace and quiet ever have!
  After this thy travail sore,
  Sweet rest seize thee evermore";

the famous lines on Shakspeare, contributed anonymously to the second
Folio; and the noble outburst of heavenly music which begins--

  "Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy
  Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse."

{104} This was written some years later; and even after _Paradise Lost_
it may rank as the most daring and entirely successful of Milton's
long-sustained wheelings of musical flight.  The stanza no longer
provides him with space enough: and here his whole twenty-eight lines
are one continuous strain, with no break in them and scarcely any
pause, in ten-syllabled lines of boldly varied rhyme and accent.  His
task here is not so difficult as it was to be in _Paradise Lost_, for
he has rhyme to provide him with variety and he admits two verses of
six syllables among his twenty-eight; but already he is completely
master of the possibilities of the ten-syllable line, and can make it
yield as lavish a wealth of variety in unity as was later on to make
the great passages of _Paradise Lost_ an eternal amazement to lovers
and practisers of the art of verse.

  "Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ,
  Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce;
  And to our high-raised phantasy present
  That undisturbèd song of pure concent."

They are all the same line, and yet how different.  It is difficult to
believe that this is the same metre which Waller and Dryden {105} were
soon, amid universal applause, to file down into the smooth monotony
of--

  "Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
  And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
  Else why should he, with wealth and honour blest,
  Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?"


For Dryden, as still more for Pope and the school of Pope, the thing to
accomplish, so far as possible, is to prevent any of the natural
accents falling upon the third, fifth or other odd syllables; there is,
for instance, not one which does so in the first fifty lines of
_Absalom and Achitophel_ or of the _Epistle to Arbuthnot_.  The object
of Milton, on the contrary, is to vary the position of his accents to
the utmost possible extent compatible with the preservation of the
verse.  In these four lines his first accent falls on the first
syllable in the first two, probably on the fourth in the third, and on
the second in the last.  And the other accents are similarly varied in
place and, it may be added, in number.  In Milton's case the listener's
wonder is at the number and intricacy of the variations he can play
upon the theme of his verse; in Pope's it is at the amazing cleverness
with which it can be exactly repeated in {106} different words.
Milton's music, too, is continuous, not broken into couplets sharply
divided from each other.  His verses pass into each other as wave melts
into wave on the sea-shore; there is a constant breaking on the beach,
but which will break and which will glide imperceptibly into its
successor we cannot guess though we sit watching for an hour; the
sameness of rise and fall, crash and silence, is unbroken, yet no one
wave is exactly like its predecessor, no two successive minutes give
either eye or ear exactly the same experience.  So with Milton's verse;
even the ocean of _Paradise Lost_ has few or no waves of music of more
varied unity, of more continuous variety than such lines as--

  "As once we did, till disproportioned sin
  Jarred against Nature's chime and with harsh din
  Broke the fair music that all creatures made
  To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed
  In perfect diapason whilst they stood
  In first obedience and their state of good."


The chief remaining minor poems of Milton are the _Allegro_ and
_Penseroso_, _Comus_, _Lycidas_ and the Sonnets.  The two first are
written {107} in those rhymed eight-syllable lines which he had already
used in part of his _Song on May Morning_.  Like that beautiful little
poem, they represent him in his simplest mood, the mood of the quiet
years at Horton, spent, more than any other part of his life, in the
open air, and among plain folk unlettered and unpolitical.  It is
natural enough, therefore, that they are the most popular as they are
the easiest of all his poems.  Their two titles, which mean The
Cheerful Man and The Thoughtful or Meditative Man, point to the two
moods from which they regard life.  Both moods are, of course,
described as they might actually be experienced by a highly cultivated
and serious man like Milton himself.  The gravity is the gravity of a
man of thought, not of a man of affairs; the pleasures are those of a
scholar and a poet, not those of a trifler, a sportsman, or a
sensualist.  Like all Milton's works they borrow freely from earlier
poets, remain entirely original and Miltonic, and are imitated only at
the peril of the imitator.  Any one who looks at the parallel passages
in Marlowe and Fletcher will see how very like they are and how very
little the likeness matters.  The poems stand alone; there is nothing
of quite the same kind in English.  {108} The least unlike pair of
poems is perhaps the two Spring Odes of the present Poet Laureate, than
whom no one has owed more to Milton or repaid the debt with more verse
which Milton would have been glad to inspire.  But Mr. Bridges has, of
course, avoided anything approaching a direct imitation; he has merely
used the hint of two contrasted poems on one subject, touching
inevitably, as Milton had touched, upon some of the opposite pleasures
of town and country, and bringing Milton's mood of cheerful gravity to
bear upon them both.

It is unnecessary to discuss in detail poems so well known.  But a few
words may be said.  Milton was never again to be so genial as he is
here.  Never again does he place himself so sympathetically close to
the daily tasks and pleasures of ordinary unimportant men and women.
After characteristically choosing the West Wind and the Dawn as
likelier parents of true mirth than any god of wine or sensual
pleasure, he will go on for once to call for the company of--

  "Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
  And Laughter holding both his sides";

he will cast a pleased eye on the birds and flowers and the
sunrise--the latter moving {109} him to the characteristic magnificence
which in this poem he has elsewhere forgone; he will recognize, with
the gratefulness of the tired student, the careless gladness in the
voices of ploughman and milkmaid, as he passes them in his early
morning walk.  Then he will give a glance to beauty which such as they
cannot see, or cannot be fully conscious of seeing--

  "Mountains on whose barren breast
  The labouring clouds do often rest";

will touch on the romance of old towers and poetic memories of which
they have only dimly heard, and look back at Thyrsis and Corydon and
all the pastoral poetry which such scenes recall to the scholar's
memory.  The next section of the poem is taken from a different world,
that of the merry England of the Middle Age with its ale and dances and
Faery Mab; while the final one carries us quite away from the rustics
to the town and the town's pleasures, pageantry and drama and
music--this last, as always, moving the poet to peculiar rapture, and
an answering music of verse--

  "The melting voice through mazes running,
  Untwisting all the chains that tie
  The hidden soul of harmony."


{110}

_Il Penseroso_ is the praise of Melancholy as _L'Allegro_ of Mirth.
But Milton was not a melancholy man in our sense of the word.  When
Keats declares that--

        "in the very temple of Delight
  Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,"

he is interpreting a mood into which Milton could not even in
imagination enter, that of the intellectual sensualist who dreams his
life away and cannot act.  Milton was a man of action and character,
and his Melancholy, quite unlike this, is that of the Spirit in his own
_Comus_, who "began--

  "Wrapt in a pleasing fit of melancholy,
  To meditate my rural minstrelsy."

He hails her at once as a "Goddess sage and holy" and as a "Nun devout
and pure"; and it is evident from the first that her sorrows, so far as
she is sorrowful, are those of aspiring spirit, not those of
self-indulging and disappointed flesh.  Her life of quiet studies and
pleasures is self-chosen; there is a note of will and self-control in
the words in which the poet bids her call about her Peace and Quiet and
Spare Fast, Retired Leisure and Contemplation and Silence; and the
descriptions which follow of his walks {111} and studies and pleasures,
in town and country, by night and morning, are those of a man who has
deliberately shaped his life, and means so to live it that he shall
leave it without regret or shame and with the hope of passing from it
to a better.

Nor is it any mood of mere melancholy that has given us in this poem
such pleasant glimpses of his walks abroad and studies at home in these
Horton years.  He pays his tribute to Plato, the Greek tragedians and
the dramatists of Elizabethan and Jacobean England; and to his own two
most famous predecessors, Chaucer and Spenser; and we think of the
scholarly hours spent gravely and quietly but far from unhappily.  More
delightful still, with more beauty and more happiness in them, are the
poem's well-known landscapes--

        "the wandering moon,
  Riding near her highest noon,
  Like one that had been led astray
  Through the heaven's wide pathless way."

Perhaps no one again, till Shelley came, felt the vastness, the
pathlessness, of the heaven as Milton did.  Or, to come to earth again,
where does poetry set the ear more instantly and actively at the work
of imaginative {112} creation than in those finely suggestive lines
about the curfew--

  "Over some wide-watered shore,
  Swinging slow with sullen roar"?

And what of that woodland solitude at noon, with memories in it of so
many poets of Greece, Rome, Italy and England, the

        "shadows brown, that Sylvan loves,
  Of pine, or monumental oak,
  Where the rude axe with heavèd stroke
  Was never heard the Nymphs to daunt
  Or fright them from their hallowed haunt,"

which carries us on to perhaps the loveliest lines in all the _Paradise
Lost_--

        "In shadier bower,
  More sacred and sequestered, though but feigned,
  Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph
  Nor Faunus haunted."

There is in the two passages just the difference between the youth and
maturity of genius; but that is all.  So _Il Penseroso_ passes on its
delightful way, ending, of course, in music and heaven.

There, too, "before the starry threshold of Jove's court," the next of
these earlier works of Milton, the mask _Comus_, begins.  {113} It
strikes its high note at once in what an old lover of literature boldly
called "the finest opening of any theatrical piece ancient or modern."

  "Before the starry threshold of Jove's court
  My mansion is, where those immortal shapes
  Of bright aerial spirits live insphered
  In regions mild of calm and serene air,
  Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
  Which men call Earth, and, with low-thoughted care,
  Confined and pestered in this pinfold here,
  Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being,
  Unmindful of the crown that Virtue gives,
  After this mortal change, to her true servants
  Amongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats."

That looks forward to _Paradise Lost_, not backward to the masks of the
previous generation of poets.  The "loud uplifted angel-trumpet" is
sounded in it, and we know that we have travelled a long way from the
trivial, superficial and often coarse entertainments which would have
been the models of _Comus_ if Milton had been the man to accept models
of any kind, least of all of such a kind.  Like them his mask was an
aristocratic entertainment, played to a noble {114} audience by the
scions of a great house.  But the resemblance scarcely goes further.
The older masks were mainly spectacles; magnificent spectacles indeed,
designed sometimes, as one may see in the Chatsworth Library, by such
artists as Inigo Jones and produced at immense expense; but just for
that reason addressed to the eye much more than to the ear, and
scarcely at all to the mind.  Even when written by such a man as Ben
Jonson, the words, except in the lyrics, are of almost no importance.
The business was to show a number of pretty scenes, and noble ladies,
and to give them a chance of exhibiting their clothes, and their
voices.  The last gave Jonson his chance; the fine Horatian workman
that he was could always produce a lyric that would fit any situation
and give some dignity to any trivial personage.  But the taint of
vanity and fashion, pomp and externality, inevitably clung to the whole
thing.  Too many personages were introduced, probably because in such
plays there were always a great many applicants for parts; and the
inevitable result was that in a short piece none of them had space to
develop any character or life.  But Milton knew, as the Greeks knew and
Shakspeare did not always, that in the few hours of a {115} stage
performance only a very few characters have time to develop themselves
in such a way as to interest and convince the hearer's imagination, and
that if there are many they never become more than a list of names.  So
he, who could not touch anything without giving it character, limits
his personages to four or five that they may at least be human beings
and not mere singers of songs or allegorical abstractions.  And, like
some of his predecessors, he takes an ethical theme, the praise and
power of Chastity.  Fletcher in _The Faithful Shepherdess_ had taken
the same; as Jonson had taken the praise of Temperance, which is also
partly Milton's subject, in _Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue_, in which a
grosser Comus is one of the characters.  But to get any parallel to the
power of conviction with which Milton handles it one has to go behind
Jonson, whose mask is an entirely superficial performance, and even
behind Fletcher, in whose _Shepherdess_ the many beautiful and moving
touches are lost in a crowd of characters and a wilderness of
artificial intrigue; one has to go back to the man whom Milton once
called his "original," to the author of the _Faerie Queen_.  No one but
Spenser could have anticipated the scene between Comus and the Lady,
where indeed {116} Milton, like Spenser in the bower of Acrasia, has
lavished such wealth upon his sinner that he has hardly been able to
give a due over-balance to his saint.  Yet she is no lay figure, and
one is not surprised that Comus should twice show his consciousness
that she has within her some holy, some more than mortal power.  Milton
has given her a song of such astonishing music that one wonders whether
the composer Lawes, for whom the whole was written, could touch it
without injury--

  "Sweet Echo, sweetest Nymph, that liv'st unseen
      Within thy airy shell
    By slow Meander's margent green,
  And in the violet-embroidered vale
    Where the love-lorn nightingale
  Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well;
  Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pair
    That likest thy Narcissus are?
      O, if thou have
    Hid them in some flowery cave,
      Tell me but where,
    Sweet Queen of Parley, Daughter of the Sphere!
    So mayst thou be translated to the skies,
  And give resounding grace to all Heaven's harmonies."

The lyrics were the chief beauty of the old masks, but the best of them
sink into {117} insignificance before such a masterpiece of art as
this.  Perhaps nothing in a modern language comes nearer to giving the
peculiar effect which is the glory of Pindar.  Of course there is in it
more of the fanciful, and more of the romantic, than there was in
Pindar; and its style is tenderer, prettier and perhaps altogether
smaller than his.  But the elaborate and intricate perfection of its
art and language, the way in which the intellect in it serves the
imagination, is exactly Pindar.  In any case it is certainly one of the
most entirely beautiful of English lyrics.  One listens with delight to
the musician working out his intricately beautiful theme; or is it
nearer the impression we get to say that we watch the skilful dancer
executing his elaborate figure?  In either case we await with sure
confidence the triumphant close.  The final couplet, by the way, and
particularly the great Alexandrine, is a curious anticipation of
Dryden's finest manner.  But the rest is a music Dryden's ear never
heard.  No wonder Comus cries--

  "Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould
  Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment?
  Sure something holy lodges in that breast,
  And with these raptures moves the vocal air
  To testify his hidden residence.
{118}
  How sweetly did they float upon the wings
  Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night,
  At every fall smoothing the raven down
  Of darkness till it smiled!"

The last lines show that Milton has not yet outgrown the Jacobean taste
for conceits.  So a little later on we find him writing that--

        "Silence
  Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might
  Deny her nature, and be never more
  Still to be so displaced";

a piece of intellectual trickery such as Shakspeare too often played
with, and Donne laboured at; and one of a special interest because we
see it again later transformed and purified in the famous passage of
_Paradise Lost_, in which "Silence was pleased" not only with the
stillness of evening, but also with the song of the bird whose "amorous
descant" alone interrupts it.  Yet even that seemed to Warton, the best
of Milton's early critics, a conceit unworthy of the poet.  So
difficult it is for "rational" criticism to see the distinction between
an intellectual extravagance and a flight of the imagination.

There are other things in _Comus_ beside conceits which recall
Shakspeare.  What can {119} be more exactly in his freshest youngest
manner than such a line as--

  "Love-darting eyes and tresses like the morn"?

And what can be closer to the note of the great Histories and Tragedies
than the Elder Brother's outburst of faith--

        "If this fail,
  The pillared firmament is rottenness,
  And earth's base built on stubble"?


I see no reason whatever to doubt, in spite of what has lately been
said by a modern critic and poet, that these speeches of the Brothers
and the Lady, rather than those of Comus, represent Milton's own
conception of life.  It is true, of course, that _Comus_ was one of
several masks performed as an aristocratic counterblast to the attack
of Prynne and the Puritans on all stage performances.  But that only
strengthens the proof of Milton's own leaning to a grave and temperate
mode of life.  Even when he writes a mask he will insist that it shall
be a thing of noble art and serious moral.  He was no narrow-minded
fanatic and will write a piece for great ladies to perform when asked
by his accomplished friend Lawes: but he is already {120} the man who
was later to denounce "court amours, Mix'd dance and wanton masque";
and if he writes a mask himself it will be to take the old "high-flown
commonplace" of the magic power of chastity and give it an entirely new
seriousness and beauty.  The notion of Mr. Newbolt that there were two
Miltons, one before and the other after the Civil War, and that the one
was "sincerely engaged on the side of liberal manners" while the other
was an ill-tempered enemy of civilization and the arts of life, is a
complete delusion.  The "Lady of Christ's" who was unpopular on account
of his severe chastity, was already a strict Puritan of the only sort
he ever became; and the author of _Paradise Lost_, as all the evidence
shows, was no morbid sectary but a lover of learning and music and
society.  Of course, no man goes unchanged through a great struggle
such as that to which Milton gave twenty years of life.  There is a
development, or a difference, call it what you will, between the Dante
who wrote the _Vita Nuova_ and him who wrote the _Divina Commedia_.
That could not but be; a body that had gone into exile and a soul that
had visited hell must leave their traces on a man.  But the essential
Dante remains one and the same all the while.  And {121} so does
Milton.  Nothing can be more certain than that the grave boy whose
gravity impressed all Cambridge, and had taken immortal shape in the
_Nativity Ode_ and the sonnet of the "great Taskmaster's eye" before he
was much past twenty, did not mean to hold up a drunken sensualist like
Comus as a model for youth.  He was not an ascetic, then or later; and
he was writing a dramatic poem; and, of course, had no difficulty in
giving Comus a fine speech about the follies of total abstinence which,
indeed, he loved no better than other monkeries.  The Lady, in reply,
as she is dramatically bound, over-exalts her "sage and serious
doctrine of Virginity" as Comus had overstated the case against it; but
what she praises is Temperance, not Abstinence.  Her virginity is that
of a free maiden, not that of a vowed nun, and there is nothing in it
to unfit her to play the part which, when Eve plays it, gives Milton
occasion for his well-known apostrophe to true love.  Nor is there any
inconsistency between his denunciation of "wanton masks" in that
passage, and his being the author of _Comus_.  His own mask was as
different as possible from those others, the common sort, in which he
saw the purveyors of "adulterous lust," and with which, now as then, he
would have nothing whatever {122} to do.  His "Lady" alone, even
without her brothers, makes that clear.  What she says may not be so
poetically attractive as the speech of Comus; but it has just the note
of exaltation which is heard in all Milton's great ethical and
spiritual outbursts, and plainly utters the other and stronger side of
his convictions.  The truth is that from the very beginning to the very
end of his life Milton had all the intensity of Puritanism, more than
all its angry contempt of vice, but nothing whatever of its uncivilized
narrow-mindedness.  A large part of the peculiar interest of his
character lies in the fact that he, almost alone of Englishmen, managed
to unite the strength of the Reformation with the breadth of the
Renaissance.  We have both in the lovely verses which are the Epilogue
of _Comus_; and if it begins with--

        "the gardens fair
  Of Hesperus, and his daughters three
  That sing about the golden tree:"

and the--

  "Beds of hyacinth and roses
  Where young Adonis oft reposes,
  Waxing well of his deep wound
  In slumber soft, and on the ground
  Sadly sits the Assyrian queen";

{123} it ends with the Stoic Puritan motto, "Love Virtue, she alone is
free."  And that these last six lines were no formal compliment to the
conventions is proved by the fact that Milton chose the final couplet--

        "if Virtue feeble were
  Heaven itself would stoop to her,"

as the motto he appended to his signature in the album of an Italian
Protestant at Geneva in 1639, adding the significant Latin which claims
the sentiment as utterly his own--

  "Caelum, non animum, muto dum trans mare curro."

These words we, looking back on his whole life, may fitly translate: "I
am always the same John Milton, whether in Rome, Geneva, or London,
whether I write _Comus_ or _Allegro_ or _Paradise Lost_."  For never
were unity and continuity of personality more complete than in Milton.

There remains _Lycidas_, in which Milton out-distances all previous
English elegy almost as easily as in _Comus_ he had out-distanced all
the earlier masks.  It stands with the great passages of _Paradise
Lost_ as the most consummate blending of scholarship and poetry in
Milton and therefore in English.  All {124} pastoral poetry is in it,
Theocritus and Virgil, Spenser and Sidney, Drayton and Drummond, with
memories, too, of Ovid and Shakspeare and the Bible; and yet it is pure
and undiluted Milton, with the signet of his peculiar mind and temper
stamped on its every phrase.  It was his contribution to a volume of
verses published at Cambridge in 1638 to the memory of Edward King, a
younger contemporary of his at Christ's who was drowned off the Welsh
coast in August 1637.  King was already a Fellow of his college, and
one of the most promising young clergymen of his day.  Milton had liked
and respected him, no doubt, but had certainly not been so intimate
with him as with young Charles Diodati who died almost exactly a year
later, and was lamented by his great friend in the _Epitaphium Damonis_
which is the finest of the Latin poems.  Those who read Latin will
enjoy its close parallelism with _Lycidas_ and its touches of a still
closer bond of affection, as that in which the poet contrasts the easy
friendships of birds and animals, soon won, soon lost and soon replaced
by others, with their hard rareness among men who scarcely find one
kindred spirit in a thousand, and too often lose that one by premature
fate before the fruit of {125} friendship has had time to ripen.  But
if the death of Diodati aroused the deeper sorrow in Milton, that of
King produced unquestionably the greater poem.  It is a common mistake
to think that to write a great elegy a man must have suffered a great
sorrow.  That is not the case.  Shelley wrote _Adonais_ about Keats
whom he knew very little; Spenser _Daphnaïda_ about a lady whom he did
not know at all.  It is not the actual experience of sorrow that the
elegiac poet needs; but the power of heart and imagination to conceive
it and the power of language to give it fit expression.  Moreover, the
poet's real subject is not the death of Keats or King or Mrs. Gorges:
it is the death of all who have been or will be loved in all the world,
and the sorrow of all the survivors, the tragic destiny of youth and
hope and fame, the doom of frailty and transience which has been
eternally pronounced on so many of the fairest gifts of Nature and all
the noblest works of man.

About _Lycidas_ criticism has less to say than to unsay.  Johnson's
notorious attack upon it is only the extremest instance of the futility
of applying to poetry the tests of prose and of the general incapacity
of that generation to apply any other.  Even {126} Warton, who really
loved these early poems of Milton and did so much to recall them to
public notice, could speak of him as appearing to have had "a very bad
ear"!  At such a time it was inevitable that the artificial absurdity
of pastoral poetry which is a prose fact should blind all but the
finest judges to the poetic fact that living spirit can animate every
form it finds prepared for its indwelling.  Johnson and the rest were
right in perceiving that pastoral elegy had very commonly been an
insincere affectation, a mere exercise in writing; the age into which
they were born denied them the ear that could hear the amazing music of
_Lycidas_, or perceive the sensuous, imaginative, spiritual intensity
which drowns its incongruities in a flood of poetic life.  There is a
still more important truth which that generation could not see.  Prose
aims at expressing facts directly, and sometimes succeeds.  That is
what Johnson liked, and practised himself with masterly success.  But
when he and his asked that poetry should do the same they were asking
that she should deny her nature.  She knows that her truth can only be
expressed or suggested by its imaginative equivalents.  It is with
poetry as with religion.  Religious truth stated directly becomes
philosophy or science, {127} conveying other elements of truth,
perhaps, but failing to convey the element which is specifically
religious; and therefore religion employs parable, ceremony, sacrament,
mystery, to express what scientifically exact prose cannot express.  So
poetry can neither deal directly with King's death or Milton's grief
nor be content with a subject which is a mere fact in time and space.
If it did, the effect produced would not be a poetic effect; the
experience of the reader would not be a poetic experience.  The poet
must transform or transcend the facts which have set his powers to
work; he must escape from them or rather lift them up with him
new-created into the world of the imagination; he must impose upon them
a new form, invented or accepted by himself, and in any case so heated
by his own fire of poetry that it can fuse and reshape the matter
submitted to it into that unity of beauty which is a work of art.  That
is what Milton does in _Lycidas_ by the help of the pastoral fiction;
and what he could not have done without it or some imaginative
substitute for it.

The truest criticism on his pastoralism is really that that mould was
too small and fragile to hold all he wanted to put into it.  The great
outburst of St. Peter, with its {128} scarcely disguised assault upon
the Laudian clergy, strains it almost to bursting.  Yet no one would
wish it away; for it adds a passage of Miltonic fire to what but for
Phoebus and St. Peter would be too plaintive to be fully characteristic
of Milton whose genius lay rather in strength than in tenderness.  Yet
perhaps we love _Lycidas_ all the more for giving us our almost
solitary glimpse of a Milton in whom the affections are more than the
will, and sorrow not sublimated into resolution.  Its modesty, too, is
astonishing.  He had already written the _Nativity Ode_, _Comus_ and
_Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, and yet he fancies himself still unripe for
poetry and is only forced by the "bitter constraint" of the death of
his friend to pluck the berries of his laurel which seem to him still
"harsh and crude"; for of course these allusions refer to his own
immaturity and not, as Todd thought, to that of his dead friend.  And
the presence of the same over-mastering emotion which compelled him to
begin is felt throughout.  There is no poem of his in which he appears
to make so complete a surrender to the changing moods of passion.  The
verses seem to follow his heart and fancy just where they choose to
lead.  We watch him as he thinks first of his friend's death and then
of the {129} duty of paying some poetic tribute to him; and so of his
own death and of some other poet of the future who may write of it and--

  "bid fair peace be to my sable shroud."

How natural it is in all its superficial unnaturalness!  The walks and
talks and verses made together at Cambridge so inevitably leading to
the "heavy change now thou art gone.  Now thou art gone and never must
return"; and the fancy, partly but not wholly a reminiscence of their
classical studies, that the trees and flowers which they had loved
together must now be sharing the survivor's grief; the reproach to
Nature and Nature's divinities following on the thought of Nature's
sympathy, and followed by the first of the two incomparable returns
upon himself which are among the chief beauties of the poem--

  "Ay me!  I fondly dream!
    'Had ye been there,' for what could that have done?"

And so to the vanity of earthly fame and the thought of another fame
which is not vanity.  Twice he seems to be going to escape out of the
world of pastoral, as he strikes his own trumpet note of confident
{130} faith and stern judgment; twice the unfailing instinct of art
calls him back and makes a beauty of what might have been a mere
incongruity--

  "Return, Alpheus; the dread voice is past,
  That shrunk thy streams: return, Sicilian Muse,
  And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
  Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues."

The flowers come, in their amazing beauty, as poetry knows and names
them, not altogether after the order of nature; till the fine flight is
once more recalled to earth in that second return to the sad reality of
things which provides the most beautiful, and as the manuscript shows,
one of the most carefully elaborated passages in the whole--

  "Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
  And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
  To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
  For so, to interpose a little ease,
  Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
  Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
  Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled,
  Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
{131}
  Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
  Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world."

The least critical reader, when he is told that the daffodil and
amaranthus lines were once in the reverse order, that the "frail
thoughts" were at first "sad," and the "shores" "floods," and above all
that the "whelming tide" was once a thing so insignificant as the
"humming tide," can judge for himself by what a succession of
inspirations a work of consummate art is produced.

There remain the sonnets, whose sufficient praise is given in an
immortal line of Wordsworth, while all that a fine critic had thought
or learnt about them is contained in the scholarly edition of Mark
Pattison.  Technically they are remarkable, like everything else of
Milton's, at once for their conservatism and their originality; while
their content has all his characteristic sincerity.  They occupy a most
important place in the history of the English sonnet, which had so far
been almost entirely given up to a single theme, that of the poet's
unhappy love, which had commonly little existence outside his verses.
The shadowy mistresses who emulated the glories of Beatrice and Laura
were even less substantial than they; and, though that could {132} not
hinder great poets from making fine poetry out of them, it was fatal to
the ordinary sonnetteer, and gave the sonnet a tradition of overblown
and insincere verbiage.  From all this Milton emancipated it and, as
Landor said, "gave the notes to glory."  To glory and to other things;
for not all his sonnets are consecrated to glory.  They deal with
various subjects; but each, whether its topic be his blindness, the
death of his wife, or the fame of Fairfax or Cromwell, is the product
of a personal experience of his own.  No one can read them through
without feeling that he gets from them a true knowledge of the man.  At
their weakest, as in that _To a Lady_, they convey, in the words of
Mark Pattison, "the sense that here is a true utterance of a great
soul."  The rather commonplace thought and language somehow do not
prevent the total effect from being impressive.  He entirely fails only
when he goes below the level of poetry altogether and repeats in verse
the angry scurrility of his divorce pamphlets.  And even there some
remnant of his artist's sense of the self-restraint of verse preserves
him from the worst degradations of his prose.  For the rest, they give
us his musical and scholarly tastes, his temperate pleasures and his
love of that sort of company which Shelley {133} confessed to
preferring, "such society as is quiet, wise and good"; they give us the
high ideal with which he became a poet, the high patriotism that drew
him into politics, and that sense, both for himself and for others, of
life as a thing to be lived in the presence and service of God which
was the eternally true part of his religion.  The four finest are those
on the Massacre in Piedmont, On his Blindness, On attaining the age of
twenty-three, and that addressed to Cromwell, which perhaps has the
finest touch of all in the pause which comes with such tremendous
effect after "And Worcester's laureate wreath."  But that to the memory
of his wife and "Captain or Colonel or Knight in Arms," the one
addressed to Lawrence and the first of those addressed to Skinner, come
very near the best; and the whole eight would be included by any good
judge in a collection of the fifty best English sonnets, to which
Milton would make a larger contribution than any one except, perhaps,
Wordsworth and Shakspeare.

And both of these poets, Shakspeare always and Wordsworth often, sinned
as Milton did not against the true genius of the sonnet.  No doubt they
had nearly all precedent with them, and their successors down to
Rossetti {134} and Meredith have followed in the same path.  But not
even Shakspeare and Petrarch can alter the fact that the genius of the
sonnet is solitary and self-contained.  A series of sonnets is an
artistic contradiction in terms.  There may be magnificent individual
sonnets in it which can stand alone, without reference to those that
precede or follow; and so far so good; but on the bulk of the series
there inevitably rests the taint of incompleteness.  They do not
explain themselves.  They are chapters not books, parts of a
composition and not the whole.  It is scarcely possible to doubt that,
fine as they may be, the effect they produce is not that of the finest
single sonnets, beginning and ending within their own limits.  Milton
may never have been under any special temptation to write a set of
consecutive sonnets; but it is in any case like his habitual submission
of all authority to his own judgment that he wrote sonnets and yet
defied the tradition of writing them as a continuous series, as he had
also disdained the amorous affectations which had been their
established subject.  But in this, as in everything else where art was
concerned, he was as much a conservative as a revolutionary.  And so
his scholarly interest in the Italian sonnet, and, we may be sure, his
consummate {135} critical judgment, made him set aside the various
sonnet forms adopted by Shakspeare, Spenser and other famous English
poets, and follow the original model of Petrarch more strictly than it
had been followed by any English poet of importance before him; for the
Petrarchan sonnets of Sidney, Constable and Drummond all end with the
unItalian concluding couplet.  But here again Milton's example has not
proved decisive.  Wordsworth did not always follow it, though he never
deserted it with success.  Keats began with it and gave it up for the
Shakspearean model with the concluding couplet.  But of him again, it
may be said that, while he only wrote three great sonnets and two of
them are Shakspearean, his single masterpiece is Petrarchan or
Miltonic.  Rossetti, on the other hand, has no Shakspearean sonnets,
and his finest are among the best proofs of how much a sonnet gains in
unity by the single pause between the eight lines and the six instead
of Shakspeare's fourfold division, and especially by the interlocking
of the rhymes in the second half of the sonnet as opposed to
Shakspeare's isolated and half-epigrammatic final couplet.

There can be little doubt, though attempts have been made to deny it,
that nothing but {136} the prestige of the greatest of all poetic names
has prevented the superiority of the Petrarchan model from being
universally recognized.  Shakspeare could do anything.  But the
greatness of his sonnets is due not to their form but simply to their
being his; and the fact that he could triumph over the defects of that
form ought not to make other people fancy that these defects do not
exist.  They do; and but for the courage and genius of Milton they
might have dominated the history of the English sonnet to this day.
That is part of our great debt to Milton.  He could not give the sonnet
the supple and insinuating sweetness with which Shakspeare often filled
it.  He had not got that in him, and perhaps it would scarcely have
proved tolerable except as part of a sequence in which it could be
balanced by sterner matter.  Nor, again, could he give it Shakspeare's
infinite tenderness, nor his sense of the world's brooding mystery.
But he could and did give it his own high spirit of courage, sincerity
and strength, and his own masterly cunning of craftsmanship.  And no
just reader of the greatest sonnets of the nineteenth century forgets
Milton's share in their greatness.  Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie has
lately remarked that it is in the _Prelude_ and _Excursion_ of {137}
Wordsworth that "more profoundly than anywhere out of Milton himself
Milton's spiritual legacy is employed."  The same thing may be as truly
said of Wordsworth's sonnets.  If, as he said, in Milton's hands "the
thing became a trumpet," there is no doubt that it remained one in his
own.  He is a greater master of the sonnet than Milton; the greatest on
the whole that England has known.  He used it far more freely than
Milton and for more varied purposes.  Perhaps it hardly afforded room
enough for one the peculiar note of whose genius was vastness.  It is
seldom possible to do justice to a quotation from _Paradise Lost_
without giving at least twenty lines.  The sense, and especially the
musical effect, is incomplete with less; for a Miltonic period is a
series of intellectual and rhythmical actions and reactions which
cannot be detached from each other without loss.  It is obvious that a
poet whose natural range is so great can hardly be fully himself in the
sonnet.  But Wordsworth had little of this spacious freedom of poetic
energy; to him--

        "'twas pastime to be bound
  Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground."

And so he could use it for everything; for great events and also for
very small; not {138} exhausting great or small, but finding in each,
whatever it might be, some single aspect or quality which he could
touch to new power by that meditative tenderness of his to which Milton
was, to his great loss, an entire stranger.  The natural mysticism, for
instance, of such sonnets as, "It is a beauteous evening, calm and
free," or, "Earth has not anything to show more fair," is quite out of
Milton's reach.  In this and other ways Wordsworth could do much more
with the sonnet than Milton could.  But without Milton some of his very
greatest things would scarcely have been attempted.  All the sonnets
that utter his magnanimous patriotism, his dauntless passion for
English liberty, his burning sympathy with the oppressed, the "holy
glee" of his hatred of tyranny, are of the right lineage of Milton
himself.  One can almost hear Milton crying--

  "It is not to be thought of that the Flood
  Of British freedom, which to the open sea
  Of the world's praise from dark antiquity
  Hath flowed 'with pomp of waters unwithstood,'
  Roused though it be full often to a mood
  Which spurns the checks of salutary bands,
  That this most famous Stream in Bogs and Sands
  Should perish; and to evil and to good
  Be lost for ever."

{139} There and in the "Two Voices" and in the "Inland within a Hollow
Vale" and in the Toussaint l'Ouverture sonnet, and others, we cannot
fail to catch an echo of the poet who first "gave the sonnet's notes to
glory."  No one can count up all the things which have united in the
making of any poem, but among those which made these sonnets possible
must certainly be reckoned the Fairfax and Cromwell sonnets, and above
all the still more famous one on the Massacre in Piedmont.  The forces
which animated England to defy and defeat Napoleon were only partly
moral; but so far as they were that they found perfect expression
through only one voice, that of Wordsworth.  And there is no doubt as
to where he caught the note which he struck again to such high purpose.
He has told us himself--

  "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour;
  England hath need of thee."

And, what seems stranger, he has now had in return a kind of reflected
influence upon Milton.  The total experience of a reader of poetry is a
thing of many actions and reactions, co-operating and intermingling
with each other.  And as we can hardly read Virgil or the Psalms now
without thinking of all {140} that has come of them, and reading some
of it back into the old words whose first creator could not foresee all
that would be found in them, so it is with Milton and Wordsworth.
There are many things in Milton which no Wordsworthian can now read
exactly as they were read in the seventeenth century.  Wordsworth's line

  "Thy Soul was like a Star and dwelt apart"

was strangely true of Milton as he lived in his own day.  But it is
less true now that his place is among the spiritual company of the
English poets and that Wordsworth stands by his side, or sits at his
feet.  That does not detract from his greatness.  Indeed, it adds to
it; for it is only the greater poets who thus transcend their own day
and cannot be read as if they belonged to it alone.  Read the great
sonnet on the Massacre--

  "Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
    Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
    Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
    When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
{141}
  Forget not; in thy book record their groans
    Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
    Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
    Mother with infant down the rocks.
      Their moans
  The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
    To heaven.  Their martyred blood and ashes sow
    O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
  The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
    A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
    Early may fly the Babylonian woe."

Is there not more in it than the Hebrew prophet or psalmist and the
English Puritan?  Is there not, for us now, something beside the past
of which Milton had read, and the present which he knew by experience?
Is there not an anticipation of another struggle against another
tyrant--nay, the creation of the very spirit in which that struggle was
to be faced?  So Milton influences Wordsworth and the England of
Wordsworth's day; and they in their turn inevitably influence our minds
as we read him.  There lies one part of the secret of his greatness; a
part which is seen at its highest in his sonnets.




{142}

CHAPTER IV

_PARADISE LOST_

_Paradise Lost_ is in several ways one of the most wonderful of the
works of man.  And not least in the circumstances of its composition.
The Restoration found Milton blind, and to blindness it added
disappointment, defeat, obscurity, and fear of the public or private
revenge of his victorious enemies.  Yet out of such a situation as this
the most indomitable will that ever inhabited the soul of a poet
produced three great poems, every one of which would have been enough
to give him a place among the poets who belong to the whole world.

The first and greatest of these was, of course, _Paradise Lost_.
Unlike many great poems, but like all the great epics of the world, it
obtained recognition at once.  It sold well for a work of its bulk and
seriousness, and it received the highest praise from those whose word
was and deserved to be law in questions of literature.  Throughout the
eighteenth {143} century its fame and popularity increased.  Literary
people read it because Dryden and Addison and all the established
authorities recommended it to them, and also because those of them
whose turn for literature was a reality found that these
recommendations were confirmed by their own experience.  But the poem
also appealed to another and a larger public.  To the serious world it
appeared to be a religious book and as such enjoyed the great advantage
of being thought fit to be read on the only day in the week on which
many people were accustomed to read at all.  This distinction grew in
importance with the progress of the Wesleyan revival and with it grew
the number of Milton's admirers.  When Sunday readers were tired of the
Bible they were apt to turn to _Paradise Lost_.  How many of them did
so is proved by the influence Milton has had on English religious
beliefs.  To this day if an ordinary man is asked to give his
recollections of the story of Adam and Eve he is sure to put Milton as
well as Genesis into them.  For instance, the Miltonic Satan is almost
sure to take the place of the scriptural serpent.  The influence Milton
has had is unfortunately also seen in less satisfactory ways.  He
claimed to justify the ways of God to men.  Perhaps he did so to his
own mind {144} which, in these questions, was curiously matter-of-fact,
literal, legal and unmystical.  He was determined to explain everything
and provide for all contingencies by his legal instrument of the
government of the world: and he did so after the cold fashion of a
lawyer defining rights on each side, and assuming that the stronger
party will exert his strength.  So far as his genius made his readers
accept his views of the relation between God and man it cannot be
denied that he did a great injury to English religious thought.
Everybody who stops to reflect now feels that the attitude of his God
to the rebel angels and to man is hard and unforgiving, below the
standard of any decent human morality, far below the Christian charity
of St. Paul.  The atmosphere of the poem when it deals with these
matters is often suggestive of a tyrant's attorney-general whose
business is to find plausible excuses for an arbitrary despot.  Milton
had his share in creating that bad sort of fear of God which is always
appearing as the thorn in the theological rose-bed of the eighteenth
century, and, later on, becomes the nightmare of the Evangelical
revival.  None of these conceptions, the capricious despot, the
remorseless creditor, the Judge whose {145} invariable sentence is hell
fire, have proved easy to get rid of: and part of their permanence may
be laid to the account of _Paradise Lost_.

But Milton, who is like the Bible in so many ways, is not least like it
in his happy unconsciousness of his own immorality.  The writer of the
story of Samuel and Agag, or that of Rebekah and Jacob, was perfectly
unaware that he was immoral: and so was Milton in _Paradise Lost_: and
so also and for that very reason were the majority of their readers.
Happily most of us when we read a book that makes for righteousness are
like children reading Shakspeare, who simply do not notice the things
that make their elders nervous.  It is not that we refuse the evil and
choose the good: we are quite unaware of the presence of the evil at
all.  No doubt that sometimes makes its influence the more powerful
because unperceived: and for this kind of subtle influence both Milton
and the Old Testament have to answer.  But with many happy natures an
escape is made by the process of selection: and, as they manage to
acquire the God-fearing righteousness of the Old Testament without its
ferocity, so they manage to receive from Milton his high emotional
consciousness of life as the glad and {146} free service of God and to
ignore altogether his intellectual description of it as a very
one-sided bargain with a very dangerous Potentate.

Nor must Milton be made, as he often is, to bear more blame in this
matter than he deserves.  Divine tyranny with hell as its sanction was
no invention of his.  The Catholic Church, as all her art shows, had
always made full use of it.  And the new horror of his own day, the
Calvinist predestination, he expressly and frequently repudiates.  The
free will of man is the very base of his system.  In it men may suffer,
as it seems to us, out of all proportion to their guilt; but at least
they suffer only for deeds done of their own free will.

But the true answer to the charge of corrupting English religious
thought so often brought against Milton is that while the harm he did
must be admitted it was far outweighed by the good.  It could not be
for nothing that generations of readers, as they turned over Milton's
pages, found themselves listening to the voice of a man to whom God's
presence was the most constant of realities, the most active of daily
and hourly influences: who, from his youth up, visibly glowed with an
ardent desire for the service of God and man: who, whatever his faults
were, had nothing {147} base or mean about him, habitually thought of
life as a thing to be lived on the heights, and by his exalted spirit
and unconquerable will enlarges for those who know him the whole
conception of what a human being may achieve.  It could not be for
nothing that on the topmost heights of English poetry stood a man who
could scarcely finish a single one of his poems without some soaring
ascent to heaven and heavenly things: whose most characteristic
utterances for himself are such lines as

  "Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven";

or--

  "As ever in my great Task-Master's eye:"

and for others as well as for himself such a hope as that which
concludes his _At a Solemn Music_--

  "O, may we soon again renew that song,
  And keep in tune with Heaven, till God ere long
  To his celestial concert us unite,
  To live with Him, and sing in endless morn of light!"

_Tu habe Deum prae oculis tuis_, says the author of _The Imitation_:
"Have thou God {148} before Thine eyes."  And so by his poetry and by
his life says Milton.  The influence of such a man, whatever the faults
of his intellectual creed, can hardly on the whole have been anything
but a good one, either on those who heard his living voice or on those
who for two hundred years have caught what they may of it from the
printed pages of his books.

So much it seemed worth while to say in defence of Milton whose sins in
these matters have always been exaggerated by his ecclesiastical and
political opponents.  But the effect, good or bad, which a great poem
produces on opinion is a mere by-product: its essential business is
nothing of that sort but the production in the minds of competent
readers of the pleasure proper to a great work of the imagination.  And
this is the criterion by which the _Paradise Lost_, like every other
work of the kind, must primarily be judged.

The poem, as we have it, is the long delayed result of an intention
formed in Milton's strangely ripe and resolute youth.  Before he was
thirty he spoke openly to his friends of writing a great poem which
was, as he shortly afterwards had no hesitation in telling the public,
to be of the sort that the world does not willingly let die.  At first
the subject was to have been the Arthurian legend which {149} poets of
all ages have found so fruitful.  But that was soon abandoned,
apparently for the reason that a little examination of the authorities
convinced the poet that it was not historically true.  This fact has a
literary as well as a biographical importance.  Great artist as Milton
was, he seems to have confused truth of art with truth of fact.  He
preferred a Biblical subject because it was his belief that every
statement in the Bible was literally true.  This belief, except from
the emotional fervour it inspired in him, was a positive disadvantage
to him as a poet.  It circumscribed his freedom of invention, it
compelled him to argue that the action of his drama as he found it was
already reasonable and probable instead of letting his imagination work
upon it and make it so; it made him aim too often at producing belief
instead of delight in his hearers.  This, of course, had obvious
drawbacks as soon as people ceased to regard the first chapters of
Genesis as a literal prose record of events which actually happened.
For a hundred and fifty years many people read the _Paradise Lost_ and
supposed themselves to be enjoying the poem when what they were really
enjoying was simply the pleasure of reading their own beliefs expressed
in magnificent verse.  In the same way many {150} religious people
imagine that they enjoy early Italian art when they in fact enjoy
nothing but its religious sentiment.  But neither art nor poetry can
live permanently on these extraneous supports.  So when less interest
came to be felt in Adam and Eve there were fewer readers for _Paradise
Lost_.  But the readers who were lost were not those that matter.  For
it is a complete mistake to say, as is sometimes said, that the fact
that the story of _Paradise Lost_ was once believed and now is so no
longer is fatal to the interest of the poem.  That is not so for the
right reader: or at least, so far as it is so, it is Milton's fault and
not that of his subject.  The _Aeneid_ loses no more by our disbelief
in the historical reality of Aeneas or Dido than _Othello_ loses by our
ignorance whether such a person ever existed.  The difficulty, so far
as there is one, is not that many readers disbelieve the story of
Milton's poem: it is that he himself passionately believed it.  If he
had been content with offering us his poem as an imaginative creation,
if he had not again and again insisted on its historical truth and
theological importance, no changes in the views of his readers, no
merely intellectual or historical criticism, could have touched him
more than they can Virgil.  As a poet he is {151} perfectly
invulnerable by any such attacks: it is only so far as he deserted
poetry for the pseudo-scientific matter-of-fact world of prose that he
fails and irritates us.  All the poetry of _Paradise Lost_ is as true
to-day as when it was first written: it is only the science and logic
and philosophy, in a word the prose, which has proved liable to decay.
There is always that difference between the works of the imagination
and those of the intellect.  A hundred theories about the Greek legends
of the Centaurs or the Amazons may establish themselves, have a vogue,
undergo criticism and finally be exploded as absurdities: that is the
common fate of intellectual products after they have done their work.
But the Centaurs of the Parthenon and the Amazons of the Mausoleum are
immortally independent of all changes of opinion.

This is the first disadvantage of the subject chosen by Milton, that he
believed in it too much.  The fact that he did so and thought its prose
truth all-important at once limited the freedom of his imagination and
diverted him from the single-minded pursuit of the proper end of
poetry.  He was evidently quite unaware of this drawback and it has
been little, if at all, noticed by his critics.  {152} On the other
hand, he was perfectly aware of what would appear to other people to be
the disadvantages involved in the choice of a subject so unlike those
of previous epics.  He speaks more than once of the novelty of this
theme, the best-known allusion being the beautiful introduction to Book
IX., in which he describes his subject, that of the human sin and the
divine anger

  "That brought into this World a world of woe,
  Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery,
  Death's harbinger:"

and contrasts it with those other sins and other angers on which Homer
and Virgil built their poems.  But he is not afraid of the contrast: he
thinks it is all to his own advantage--

  "Sad task! yet argument
  Not less but more heroic than the wrath
  Of stern Achilles on his foe pursued
  Thrice fugitive about Troy wall; or rage
  Of Turnus for Lavinia disespoused;
  Or Neptune's ire or Juno's, that so long
  Perplexed the Greek, and Cytherea's son:
  If answerable style I can obtain
  Of my celestial Patroness who deigns
  Her nightly visitation unimplored,
  And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
  Easy my unpremeditated verse,
{153}
  Since first this subject for heroic song
  Pleased me, long choosing and beginning late,
  Not sedulous by nature to indite
  Wars, hitherto the only argument
  Heroic deemed--"

The whole passage is too long for quotation.  Indeed, as we have
already had occasion to notice, it is one of the difficulties of
discussing Milton that quotation is almost always compelled to do him
an injury by giving less than the whole of any one of those
long-sustained flights of music in which he rises and falls, turns to
the left hand or the right, as his imagination leads him, but always on
unflagging wings of undoubted and easy security.  But enough has been
quoted here to illustrate the poet's direct challenge of Homer and
Virgil in this matter of subject.  He was perfectly well aware that he
was making an entirely new departure, not only from the subject of the
ancients but also, as is shown by his detailed condemnation of "tilting
furniture, emblazoned shields" and the rest, from those of such poets
as Ariosto, Tasso and Spenser.  He did it deliberately, with open eyes.
And there is no doubt that he was at least partly right.  To this day
he and Dante, in their different ways, enjoy a common advantage {154}
over Homer, and still more over a poet mainly of fancy like Tasso, in
the fact that their subject, that of the meaning and destiny of human
life, is one in itself of profound and absorbing interest to all
thinking men and women.  Even if their treatment of it be in some parts
and for some people unsatisfying or irritating they at least have
started with that advantage.  A dangerous advantage because, as we have
seen in Milton's case and might also see in Dante's, tempting them to
go outside the pure business of their art; but still in itself an
advantage.  Milton was probably also right in feeling that the fighting
element in the old poets had been greatly overdone.  The most
interesting parts of the _Iliad_ for us to-day are not battles, but
such things as the parting of Hector and Andromache and the scene
between Priam and Achilles.  Where the fighting still moves us, as in
the case of Hector and Achilles, or Virgil's Turrus and Pallas, it is
mainly for the sake of an accompanying human and moral interest
altogether above its own.  The miscellaneous details of weapons and
wounds which evidently once gave so much pleasure are now equally
tedious to us whether it is Homer or Malory or Morris who narrates
them.  They can no longer give interest; they can only receive it {155}
from such intrinsic interest as may belong to the combatants.

So far Milton had some justification for preferring his own subject to
those of Homer and Virgil.  But, so far as we can judge, he was
entirely unconscious of its disadvantages: as well of those which it
shares with the _Iliad_ and _Aeneid_ as of those peculiar to itself.
Of the former, the most conspicuous is that inevitably involved in the
introduction of divine persons into the action.  Everybody feels that
Homer's gods constantly spoil the interest and probability of his
story, while very rarely enhancing its dignity.  One never understands
why they can do so much, and yet do no more, to affect the action.
Their interference is always irritating, generally immoral, and on the
whole ineffective.  Their omnipotence is occasional and irrational:
they are limited in the use of it by each other, and all alike, even
Zeus, are limited by a shadowy Law or Fate in the background.  Their
interventions only make the struggle seem unfair or unreal, and we are
glad to be rid of them.

Milton is still more deeply involved in the same difficulty.  All his
personages except two are superhuman.  It is his great disadvantage as
compared with Dante that the {156} main lines of his story are all
scriptural and therefore outside the influence of his invention, that
his actors are divine, angelic, or sinless beings, and therefore such
as can provide little of the uncertainty of issue or variety of temper
and experience which are the stuff of drama.  He is hampered by having
constantly to assert the true free will and responsibility of Satan for
his rebellion and of Adam for his disobedience, even to the extent of
putting argumentative soliloquies confessing it into their own mouths.
So far he succeeds: both are felt to be free in their fatal choice.
But the war in heaven can arouse no interest because its issue is
obviously foregone, and much of the action of the rebel angels
necessarily conflicts with the frequent statements that they can do
nothing except as permitted by their Conqueror.  At one moment they
know their powerlessness, at another they hope for revenge and victory.
These are grave difficulties which deprive large parts of the poem of
that illusion of probability or truth without which poetry cannot do
its proper work.  A further difficulty, from which ancient poets were
free, arises from the purely intellectual and spiritual nature of the
Christian God.  It is as if Homer had had to deal with the divine unity
of Plato instead of {157} with his family of loving, quarrelling,
fighting gods and goddesses.  A being who is Incomprehensible as well
as Almighty and Omniscient can hardly be an actor in a poem written for
human readers.  The gods in the _Iliad_ shock us because they are too
like ourselves: Milton's God may sometimes shock us too: but He is more
often in danger of fatiguing us by His utter remoteness from our
experience, by His dwelling not merely, not indeed so often as we could
wish, in clouds and darkness, but in a world of theological mysteries
which necessarily lose more in sublimity than they gain in clearness by
being perpetually discussed and explained.  Dante's poem is at least as
full as Milton's of obscure theological doctrines and attempts at their
explanation; but, either by virtue of the plan of the _Divina Commedia_
or by some finer instinct of reserve and reverence in the poet, we
never find ourselves in Dante as we do in Milton exercising our
critical faculties, whether we will or no, on the very words of God
Himself.  If we reject an argument as unconvincing or fallacious, it is
on Virgil or Statius, Beatrice or Thomas Aquinas, that we sit in
judgment.  The Divine Mind, intensely and constantly felt as its
presence is from the first canto of the poem to the last, is yet felt
always as from behind a {158} curtain which can never be raised for the
sight of mortal eyes.

Still, it must be admitted that, impossible as was the task of making
the Infinite and Eternal an actor and speaker in a human poem, Milton's
very failure in it is sublime.  His prodigious powers are nowhere more
wonderfully displayed than in trying to do what no one, not even
himself, could do.  The second half of his third book, for instance, is
far more interesting than the first, but it may well be doubted whether
the mere fact of his accomplishing the first at all is not a greater
proof of his poetic genius.  Nowhere does that unfailing certainty of
style, in which he has scarcely an equal among the poets of the whole
world, stand him in such astonishing stead as in these difficult
dialogues in heaven.

  "Father, thy word is passed, Man shall find grace;
  And shall Grace not find means, that finds her way,
  The speediest of thy wingèd messengers.
  To visit all thy creatures, and to all
  Comes unprevented, unimplored, unsought?
  Happy for Man, so coming;"

On the side of invention there is nothing remarkable; but, on the side
of art, what a {159} divine graciousness there is in its tone and
manner; what incomparable skill in the management of the verse!  Note
the quiet monosyllabic beginning, taking note, as it were, of the
decree of mercy, and then the expansion of it, the loving voice
pressing forward in freer movement as it confidently proclaims the
happy results that cannot fail to follow.  And observe the peculiarly
Miltonic interlacing of the whole, line leading to line and word to
word: the "grace" of the first line giving the key to the "grace" of
the second, the repeated "find" of the second line and the repeated
"all" of the fourth, the "comes" of the fifth line leading on to the
"coming" of the sixth.  To make a list of such details as these is not
to explain the effect which they produce; that is the secret of
Milton's genius.  So is that cunning variety in the rhythm of the
verses: three pauses in the first line, two in the second, only one in
the third: the principal pause after the sixth syllable in both the
first two lines, and yet the words and their accents so artfully varied
that not the slightest monotony is felt; the suggestion of easy flight
in the smooth unbroken movement of the third line--

  "The speediest of thy wingèd messengers."

{160} Milton knew that an utterance of this kind, in which the Bible
had anticipated him a hundred times, admitted of no novelty in itself;
and his reverence forbade him to give his invention free rein in these
high matters.  But what he could do he did.  The matter of the speech
he leaves as he found it; what the Son says every reader has heard
before: but after this manner he has not heard it.  In passing through
Milton's hands all has been transformed into a new birth by the
consummate craftsmanship of a supreme artist.

Thus the poet escapes, as far as it was possible to escape, from the
difficulties created for him by his acceptance of divine Persons as
actors in his drama.  But the escape could only be partial.  It is true
that as Johnson says, "whatever be done the poet is always great": but
greatness of style often struggles in vain against the incongruity of a
verbose and argumentative Deity.  Such gods as Virgil's Venus and Juno
may hurl rhetorical speeches at each other without much ill effect, but
we feel that it was a lack of the sense of mystery in Milton that kept
him from realizing that the one God, Creator, Father and Judge of all,
cannot with fitness debate or argue: He can only decree.  "Let thy
words be few"; that is even truer, we {161} instinctively feel, of
words put into His mouth than of words addressed to Him.  Milton's God
suffers even more than Shakspeare's Ghosts from a garrulity which
destroys the sense of the awe properly belonging to a supernatural
being; and the grim laughter of the Miltonic heaven is in its different
way even more fatal to that awe than the Jack-in-the-box appearances
and disappearances of the dead Hamlet and Banquo.

Such are some of the difficulties, in part overcome by the poet and in
part unperceived, inherent in the subject of _Paradise Lost_.  One
more, the greatest of all, remains.  Poetry is a human art and its
subject is human life.  In the story Milton set himself to tell there
are only two human figures; and how can they, living as they do in
isolated perfection and sinlessness, without children or friends,
without learning or art or business, without hopes or fears or
memories, without the experience of disease or the expectation of
death, and therefore without the joy, as we know it, of life and
health, how can they provide material for a poem that can interest
beings so utterly unlike them as ourselves?  The answer is twofold.  It
is partly that they do fail to provide that material.  The _Paradise
Lost_ has in fact far less of ordinary human life in {162} it, far less
variety of action, than the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_.  This was probably
unavoidable but it was probably also Milton's deliberate intention.  It
was not his nature to care much about the small doings of ordinary
people in everyday life.  The line which he most often repeats in
_Paradise Lost_ is the very opposite of those which are repeated so
often in the _Iliad_, verses of no noticeable poetic quality, just
doing their plain duty of linking two speeches or two paragraphs
together: such as--

_hos oi men toiauta pros allêlous agoreuon_

What Milton chooses for repetition is, on the other hand, one of his
stateliest lines, the magnificent--

  "Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers."

The choice is characteristic of the man.  His "natural port," as
Johnson well said, "is gigantic loftiness," and his end to "raise the
thoughts above sublunary cares or pleasures."  So it may well be that
this disadvantage of his subject did not weigh with him as much as it
would have done with most poets.  But he was not altogether blind to
it, and the amazing skill he shows in partly getting over it is the
other half of the answer to {163} the question asked just now.  His
action up to the moment of the Fall is the inhuman one of a few days in
hell, heaven, and a small sinless spot of earth: and the Fall does not
increase the number of actors.  Yet into the mouths of this tiny group
of persons Milton may be said to have brought all the history of the
world and all its geography, art, science and learning, the Jew, the
Christian and the Pagan, Greek philosophy and Roman politics, classical
myth, mediaeval romance, and even the contemporary life of his own
experience.  This is partly done, as Virgil had done it, by the way of
a prophecy of future ages: but to a much greater extent by the way of
similes which are more elaborate and learned in Milton than in any
poet.  By their assistance he gives rest to the imagination exhausted
by the sublimity of heaven and hell, bringing it home to its own
familiar earth, to scenes whose charm, unlike that of Eden or
Pandemonium, lies not, in the wonder their strangeness excites but in
the old habits, experiences and memories which they recall.  So, after
the strain of the great debate with which the second book opens, he
soothes us with the beautiful simile of the evening after storm--

  "Thus they their doubtful consultations dark
  Ended, rejoicing in their matchless Chief;
{164}
  As, when from mountain-tops the dusky clouds
  Ascending, while the North-wind sleeps, o'erspread
  Heaven's cheerful face, the louring element
  Scowls o'er the darkened landskip snow or shower,
  If chance the radiant sun, with farewell sweet,
  Extend his evening beam, the fields revive,
  The birds their notes renew, and bleating herds
  Attest their joy, that hill and valley rings."


Note how large and general it is.  Its method is the classical appeal
to universal knowledge and feeling, not the romantic method of
strangeness of sentiment and detailed particularity of truth.  Matthew
Arnold once recommended those who cannot read Greek or Latin to read
Milton as a far better key than any translation can be to the secret of
the greatness of the ancient poets.  This is the truth: and not only
for the reason on which Arnold laid just stress--the "sure and flawless
perfection of rhythm and diction" in which, as he truly says, Milton is
unique among English poets: but also for his classical habit of mind,
for his central sanity, for the sureness with which he makes his call
on the thoughts and emotions, not of eccentric {165} or exceptional
individuals, but of the men and women of all times and all nations.

Yet he can use his similes, as we said, to introduce the life of his
own day and still generally carry his classical manner with him.  So in
the following simile he begins with the Homeric wolf and ends with the
Roman and Laudian clergy.  Satan has leapt over the wall of Paradise:
and the simile begins--

        "As when a prowling wolf,
  Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,
  Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve
  In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,
  Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the fold:
  Or as a thief bent to unhoard the cash
  Of some rich burgher, whose substantial doors,
  Cross-barred and bolted fast, fear no assault,
  In at the window climbs, or o'er the tiles:
  So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold:
  So since into his Church lewd hirelings climb."

The last line smacks perhaps more of the angry pamphleteer than fits
with classical sanity: but how admirably the London citizen's house
gives vivid reality to the beautiful remoteness of the wolf which
English shepherds had long forgotten to fear; how the recollection,
present to every reader's {166} mind, of that very same simile in the
Gospel of St. John, prepares the way for its religious application
here: how the attention is seized by that magnificent line of arresting
mono-syllables, each heavy with the sense of fate--

  "So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold!"


It used to be said that Milton uses mono-syllables to express slowness
of action.  But that is notably not the case here.  And in the main it
seems that he uses them, as Shakspeare often did, for expressing the
solemnity of grave crisis, or for deep emotion, when anything fanciful,
ornate or verbose would be fatal to the simplicity, akin to silence,
which all men find fitting at great moments.  So Shakspeare makes Kent
say at Lear's death--

  "Vex not his ghost; O let him pass! he hates him
  That would upon the rack of this tough world
  Stretch him out longer."

And so Milton uses these tremendous mono-syllables, like a bell tolling
into the silence of midnight, to force our attention on the doom of all
the world that took its beginning when Satan entered Paradise--

{167}

  "So clomb this first grand Thief into God's fold."

So again, with less solemnity as befitting a less awful person but
still with arresting and delaying emphasis, he records the actual
eating of the fatal apple--

        "she plucked, she eat:
  Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
  Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe,
  That all was lost."

So he suspends the flow of the richest and most elaborate of his
similes by the slow-moving monosyllables of

        "which cost Ceres all that pain
  To seek her through the world:"

So he strikes the deepest note, beyond all politics, of his debate in
hell:

  "And that must end us; that must be our cure--
  To be no more:"

So again he closes the first Act of _Paradise Regained_ with a verse of
solitary awe--

  "And now wild beasts come forth the woods to roam."


{168}

But to return to the similes.  Milton uses them, as we have seen, to
introduce things familiar and contemporary into the remote and majestic
theme of his poem.  But he also uses them to introduce the whole world
into Eden, all later history into the beginning of the world, all the
varied glories of art and war, poetry and legend, with which his memory
was stored, into an action which was only partly human and provided no
scope at all for any human activities except of the most primitive
order.  So the palace of Hell is, he tells us, something far beyond the
magnificence of "Babylon, or great Alcairo"; and the army of rebel
angels far exceeds those

  "That fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side
  Mixed with auxiliar gods; and what resounds
  In fable or romance of Uther's son,
  Begirt with British and Armoric knights;
  And all who since, baptized or infidel,
  Jousted in Aspramont or Montalban,
  Damasco, or Marocco or Trebisond,
  Or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore,
  When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
  By Fontarabbia."

So, in another of his returns to those tales and fancies of the Middle
Age which, in spite {169} of his intellectual and moral rejection of
their falsity, yet always moved hi

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