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 delved 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 breathed 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 undisturbed 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 heaved 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 Daphnaida 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.



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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.