LECTURE VIIMILTON(Tuesday Evening, January 30, 1855)VII
(Tuesday Evening, January 30, 1855)
VII
Between Spenser and Milton occurred the most truly imaginative period of English poetry. It is the time of Shakspeare and of the other dramatists only less than he. It seems to have been the moment in which the English mind culminated.
Even if we subtract Shakspeare, the age remains without a parallel. The English nature was just then giving a great heave and yearn toward freedom in politics and religion, and literature could not fail to partake of the movement.
A wave of enthusiasm seemed to break over England; all that was poetical in the people found expression in deed or word. Everything tasted of it—sermons and speeches as well as verses. The travelers could not write a dry journal, but they somehow blundered into a poetical phrase that clings to the memory like a perfume. The sensations of men were as fresh as Adam’s, and the words they found to speak them in could be beautifulor fragrant with as little effort as it costs violets to be blue.
It is a remarkable fact that the poetry of Shakspeare is at the same time more English and more universally human than any that was ever written. The two great poets who came before Shakspeare had both of them enlarged the revenues of the English muse. Chaucer had added character and incident, and had shown the capacities of the language and of the metre. Spenser left it enriched with a luxury of diction, with harmony of verse, and with the lovely images of the classical mythology. But Shakspeare came in like an unthrift heir. He squandered everything. From king to clown he used up all character; there is no passion, or fancy, or feeling that he has not spent; no question of philosophy, morals, politics, or metaphysics that he has not solved; he poured out all the golden accumulations of diction like water. And his younger brethren, the other dramatists, helped him. What was there left? Certainly, this wonderful being has expressed every sentiment, every thought, that is universal in its relations. All the poetry of this world he exhausted. Accordingly, in the time immediately following this splendidly imaginative period, we find only a development of fancy under one or other of its disguises. Fancy dealswith limited and personal experiences, and interests us by the grace or perfectness of its expression of these. The Dramatists were tremendously in earnest, as they had need to be, to please a people who were getting in earnest themselves. But now the time itself was preparing a drama, and on no mimic scene, but with England for a stage and with all Europe for spectators. A real historical play was in rehearsal, no petty war of York and Lancaster, but the death-grapple of two eras. The time was in travail with the Ishmael of Puritanism who, exiled from his father’s house, was to found here in this Western wilderness an empire for himself and his wandering descendants. England herself was turning poet, and would add her rhapsody to the great epic of the nations.
That was a day of earnest and painful thinking, and poetical temperaments naturally found relief in turning away from actual life to the play of the fancy. We find no trace of high imagination here. Certainly, Herbert and Vaughan and even Quarles are sometimes snatched into something above common fancy by religious fervor, but how cold and experimental is the greater part of their poetry—not poetry, indeed, but devotional exercises in verse. Cowley wrote imaginary love-songs to an imaginary mistress, and Waller the same sort ofstuff to a real one. Catullus revived in Herrick, a country parson. Wither, a Puritan, wrote some poems full of nature and feeling, and remarkable for purity of sentiment. Donne, a deep thinker, carried on his anatomical studies into his verse, and dissected his thoughts and feelings to the smallest nerve. A great many nice things got said, no doubt, and many charming little poems were written—but thegreatstyle appears no longer.
It was during this lull, as we may call it, that followed the mighty day of the Dramatists, that Milton was growing up. He was born in London on the ninth of December, 1608, and was therefore in his eighth year when Shakspeare died. His father was of a good family, which still adhered to the Roman Catholic faith. What is of more importance, he was disinherited byhisfather for having adopted Puritan principles; and he was a excellent musician. Milton was very early an indefatigable student, even in his twelfth year seldom leaving his books before midnight. At the university he was distinguished as a Latin scholar and writer of Latin verses. He was intended for the Church, but had already formed opinions of his own which put conformity out of the question. He was by nature an Independent, and could not, as he says, “subscribeslave.”
Leaving the university in 1632, he passed the five following years in a studious seclusion at his father’s house at Horton, in Buckinghamshire. During these five years he wrote most of his smaller poems. In 1638 he set out for Italy. The most important events of his stay in that country were his meetings with Galileo, and the Marquis Manso, who had been Tasso’s friend. After refreshing his Protestantism at Geneva, he passed through France and came back to England to find the Civil War already begun.
Dr. Johnson sneers at Milton for having come home from Italy because he could not stay abroad while his countrymen were struggling for their freedom, and then quietly settling down as a teacher of a few boys for bread. It might, with equal reason, have been asked of the Doctor why, instead of writing “Taxation no Tyranny,” he did not volunteer in the war against the rebel American provinces? Milton sacrificed to the cause he thought holy something dearer to him than life—the hope of an earthly immortality in a great poem. He suffered his eyes to be put out for the sake of his country as deliberately as Scævola thrust his hand into the flame. He gave to freedom something better than a sword—words that were victories. Around the memories of Bradshaw andhis illustrious brethren his deathless soldiery still pitch their invincible tents, still keep their long-resounding march, sure warders against obloquy and oblivion.
After the death of Cromwell, Milton continued faithful to republicanism, and on the very eve of the Restoration published his last political tract, showing a short and easy way to establish a Christian commonwealth. He had long ago quarreled with the Presbyterians in discipline, and separated from the Independents in doctrine. For many years he did not go within any church and had become a Unitarian. He had begun “Paradise Lost” in 1658, and after the Restoration, with a broken fortune, but with a constancy which nothing could break, shattered in health, blind, and for a time in danger, he continued the composition of it. It was complete in 1665, when Elwood, the Quaker, had the reading of it, and it was published in 1667.
The translation of the Bible had to a very great extent Judaized the Puritan mind. England was no longer England, but Israel. Those fierce enthusiasts could always find Amalek and Philistia in the men who met them in the field, and one horn or the other of the beast in every doctrine of their theological adversaries. The spiritual provincialism of the Jewish race found something congenialin the Anglo-Saxon intellect. This element of the Puritan character appears in Milton also, as in that stern sonnet:
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bonesLie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,Even them who kept thy truth so pure of oldWhen all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bonesLie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,Even them who kept thy truth so pure of oldWhen all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.
Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bonesLie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold,Even them who kept thy truth so pure of oldWhen all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.
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 worshipped stocks and stones.
In Milton’s prose there is a constant assertion of himself as a man set apart to a divine ministry. He seems to translate himself out of Hebrew into English. And yet so steeped was he in Greek culture that it is sometimes hard to say whether he would rather call himself the messenger of Jehovah or the son of Phœbus. Continually the fugitive mists of dialectics are rent, and through them shine down serene and solemn peaks that make us feel that we are encamped about by the sacred mounts of song, but whether of Palestine or of Greece is doubtful. We may apply to Milton what Schiller says of the poet, “Let the kind divinity snatch the suckling from his mother’s breast, nourish him with the milk of a better age, and let him come to maturity beneath a distant Grecian sky. Then when he has become a man let him return, a foreign shape, into his century, not to delight it with his apparition, but terrible, like Agamemnon’s son, to purify it.”
I said that Milton had a sublime egotism. The egotism of a great character is inspiration because it generalizes self into universal law. It is a very different thing from the vulgar egotism of a little nature which contracts universal Law into self. The one expands with a feeling that it is a part of the law-making power, the other offers an amendment in town-meeting as if it came from Sinai. Milton’s superb conception of himself enters into all he does; ifheis blind, it is with excess of light—it is a divine favor, an overshadowing with angel’s wings. Phineus and Tiresias are admitted among the prophets because they, too, had lost their sight. There is more merit in the blindness of Mæonides than in his “Iliad” or “Odyssey.” If the structure ofhismind is undramatic, why, then the English drama is barbarous, and he will write a tragedy on a Greek model with blind Samson for a hero.
It results from this that no great poet is so uniformly self-conscious as he. Dante is individual rather than self-conscious, and the cast-iron Dante becomes pliable as a field of grain at the breath of Beatrice, and his whole nature, rooted as it is, seems to flow away in waves of sunshine. But Milton never lets himself go for a moment. As other poets are possessed by their theme, so is he always self-possessed, his great theme being Milton, and his dutybeing that of interpreter between John Milton and the world. I speak it reverently—he was worth translating.
We should say of Shakspeare that he had the power of transforming himself into everything, and of Milton that he had that of transforming everything into himself. He is the most learned of poets. Dante, it is true, represents all the scholarship of his age, but Milton belonged to a more learned age, was himself one of the most learned men in it, and included Dante himself among his learning. No poet is so indebted to books and so little to personal observation as he. I thought once that he had created out of his own consciousness those exquisite lines in “Comus”:
A thousand fantasiesBegin to throng into my memoryOf calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,And airy tongues that syllable men’s namesOn sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
A thousand fantasiesBegin to throng into my memoryOf calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,And airy tongues that syllable men’s namesOn sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
A thousand fantasiesBegin to throng into my memoryOf calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,And airy tongues that syllable men’s namesOn sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
A thousand fantasies
Begin to throng into my memory
Of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,
And airy tongues that syllable men’s names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses.
But I afterwards found that he had built them up out of a dry sentence in Marco Polo’s “Travels.” The wealth of Milton in this respect is wonderful. He subsidizes whole provinces of learning to spend their revenues upon one lavish sentence, and meltshistory, poetry, mythology, and philosophy together to make the rich Miltonic metal of a single verse.
The first noticeable poem of Milton is his “Hymn of the Nativity,” and the long-enwoven harmony of the versification is what chiefly deserves attention in it. It is this which marks the advent of a new power into English poetry.
In Spenser meaning and music are fused together; in Shakspeare the meaning dominates always (and I intend the sentiment as included in the word meaning); but in Milton the music is always a primary consideration. He is always as much musician as poet. And he is a harmonist, not a melodist. He loves great pomps and sequences of verse, and his first passages move like long processions, winding with sacred chant, and priestly robes rich with emblematic gold, and waving of holy banners, along the echoing aisles of some cathedral. Accordingly, no reader of Milton can fail to notice that he is fond of lists of proper names which can have only an acquired imaginative value, and in that way serve to excite our poetic sensibility, but which also are of deep musical significance.
This was illustrated by reading various passages from “Paradise Lost.”
Another striking peculiarity of Milton is the feelingofspaciousnesswhich his poetry gives us, and that not only in whole paragraphs, but even in single words. His mind was one which demanded illimitable room to turn in. His finest passages are those in which the imagination diffuses itself over a whole scene or landscape, or where it seems to circle like an eagle controlling with its eye broad sweeps of champaign and of sea, bathing itself in the blue streams of air, and seldom drawn earthward in the concentrated energy of its swoop.
This shows itself unmistakably in the epithets of his earlier poems. In “Il Penseroso,” for example, where he hears
The far-off curfew soundOver somewide-wateredshoreSwinging slow with sullen roar;
The far-off curfew soundOver somewide-wateredshoreSwinging slow with sullen roar;
The far-off curfew soundOver somewide-wateredshoreSwinging slow with sullen roar;
The far-off curfew sound
Over somewide-wateredshore
Swinging slow with sullen roar;
where he sees
Gorgeous TragedyIn sceptered pall come sweeping by,
Gorgeous TragedyIn sceptered pall come sweeping by,
Gorgeous TragedyIn sceptered pall come sweeping by,
Gorgeous Tragedy
In sceptered pall come sweeping by,
or calls up the great bards who have sung
Of forests and enchantments drearWhere more is meant than meets the ear.
Of forests and enchantments drearWhere more is meant than meets the ear.
Of forests and enchantments drearWhere more is meant than meets the ear.
Of forests and enchantments drear
Where more is meant than meets the ear.
Milton seems to produce his effects by exciting or dilating our own imaginations; and this excitementaccomplished, he is satisfied. Shakspeare, on the other hand, seldom leaves any work to be done by the imagination of his readers; and after we have enjoyed the total effect of a passage, we may always study the particulars with advantage. Shakspeare never attaches any particular value to his thoughts, or images, or phrases, but scatters them with a royal carelessness. Milton seems always to respect his; he lays out broad avenues for the triumphal processions of his verse; covers the ground with tapestry inwoven with figures of mythology and romance; builds up arches rich with historic carvings for them to march under, and accompanies them with swells and cadences of inspiring music. “Paradise Lost” is full of what may be calledvistasof verse. Notice, for example, how far off he begins when he is about to speak of himself—as at the beginning of the third book and of the seventh. When you read “Paradise Lost” the feeling you have is one ofvastness. You float under a great sky brimmed with sunshine, or hung with constellations; the abyss of space is around you; thunders mutter on the horizon; you hear the mysterious sigh of an unseen ocean; and if the scene changes, it is with an elemental movement like the shifting of mighty winds. Of all books it seems most purely the work of a disembodied mind. Of all poets he could mosteasily afford to be blind; of all, his poetry owes least to the senses, except that of hearing; everything, except his music, came to him through a mental medium, and perhaps even that may have been intellectual—as in Beethoven, who composed behind the veil of deafness.
Milton is a remarkable instance of a great imaginative faculty fed by books instead of Nature. One has only to read the notes of the commentators upon his poems to see how perfectly he made whatever he took his own. Everything that he touches swells and towers into vastness. It is wonderful to see how, from the most withered and juiceless hint that he met in his reading, his grand images “rise like an exhalation”; how from the most hopeless-looking leaden box that he found in that huge drag-net with which he gathered everything from the waters of learning, he could conjure a tall genius to do his bidding.
That proud consciousness of his own strength, and confidence at the same time that he is the messenger of the Most High, never forsake him. It is they which give him his grand manner, and make him speak as if with the voice of a continent. He reverenced always the sacredness of his own calling and character. As poet, full of the lore of antiquity, and, as prophet, charged to vindicate theways of God, it seems to me that I see the majestic old man laying one hand upon the shoulder of the Past, and the other upon that of the Future, and so standing sublimely erect above that abject age to pour his voice along the centuries. We are reminded of what is told of Firdusi, whose father on the night he was born dreamed he saw him standing in the middle of the earth and singing so loud and clear that he was heard in all four quarters of the heavens at once.
I feel how utterly inadequate any single lecture must be on such a theme, and how impossible it is to say anything about Milton in an hour. I have merely touched upon three or four points that seemed to me most characteristic of his style, for our concern with him is solely as a poet. Yet it would be an unpardonable reticence if I did not say, before I close, how profoundly we ought to reverence the grandeur of the man, his incorruptible love of freedom, his scholarly and unvulgar republicanism, his scorn of contemporary success, his faith in the future and in God, his noble frugality of life.
The noise of those old warfares is hushed; the song of Cavalier and the fierce psalm of the Puritan are silent now; the hands of his episcopal adversaries no longer hold pen or crozier—they and their works are dust; but he who loved truth more thanlife, who was faithful to the other world while he did his work in this; his seat is in that great cathedral whose far-echoing aisles are the ages whispering with blessed feet of the Saints, Martyrs, and Confessors of every clime and creed; whose bells sound only centurial hours; about whose spire crowned with the constellation of the cross no meaner birds than missioned angels hover; whose organ music is the various stops of endless changes breathed through by endless good; whose choristers are the elect spirits of all time, that sing, serene and shining as morning stars, the ever-renewed mystery of Creative Power.