One would like to know something of the relations between the two greatest men of the Commonwealth. But there is little or nothing to know. It is plain that in most matters they must have been in close agreement; and in a few, as in the business of the {68} Piedmont massacres, the two great hearts must have beaten as one, while the sword of Cromwell stood ready drawn behind the trumpet of Milton's noble prose and nobler verse. The only surviving act of personal contact between them is to be found in Milton's sonnet; and that is a public tribute with no suggestion of private intimacy in it. Indeed, as Masson has pointed out, it may easily be taken to mean more than it really does; for it was not written because Milton could not keep silence about his admiration of Cromwell, but rather, as its full title shows, as a petition or appeal to Cromwell to save the nation from parliamentary proposals for the setting up of a State Church and for limiting the toleration of dissent from it. The sonnet, then, proves less than it has sometimes been made to prove; and in any case it proves no intimacy. Perhaps after all, in the case of Milton as in that of most men who deal with public affairs, we are apt to exaggerate the importance in their daily lives of these visible official activities. The world thinks it knows men who fight battles, or make speeches, or write books; but it knows nothing of their private thoughts or studies and still less of their private loves and joys and sorrows which to themselves {69} and in truth are much the most real part of their lives. So with Milton during these years; his wife and little children may have been, his second wife and such friends as Cyriack Skinner and Henry Lawrence and Lady Ranelagh and the poet Marvell certainly were, much greater realities to him in his daily thoughts than either the hated Salmasius and Morus of the pamphlets or the admired Cromwell of the sonnet. The "weekly table" he is said to have kept, at the expense of the State, for foreign ministers, must have provided interesting talk; but the true Milton cannot have lived in these gatherings so fully at the time or remembered them afterwards so affectionately as those other more intimate parties of which he gives us a picture in the two sonnets to Lawrence and Skinner which, for lovers of poetry, look so pleasantly back to Horace and so pleasantly forward to Cowper and Tennyson.
"Lawrence, of virtuous father virtuous son,Now that the fields are dank, and ways are mire,Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fireHelp waste a sullen day, what may be wonFrom the hard season gaining? Time will run{70}On smoother, till Favonius re-inspireThe frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attireThe lily and rose, that neither sowed nor spun.What neat repast shall feast us, light and choice,Of Attic taste, with wine, whence we may riseTo hear the lute well touched, or artful voiceWarble immortal notes and Tuscan air?He who of those delights can judge, and spareTo interpose them oft, is not unwise."
This is his own graver and older parallel to what his nephew tells us of his schoolmastering days when he would turn from "hard study and spare diet" to "drop once a month or so into the society of some young sparks of his acquaintance," and with them "would so far make bold with his body as now and then to keep a gawdy day." The sonnet shows that the poet is still the poet ofL'AllegroandIl Penseroso, no narrow fanatic, but a lover of company and the arts, and of the richness and fulness of life. Such occasions as that it describes must have been oases in the desert of controversy and public business abroad and of blindness and loneliness at home. He did not live long in Whitehall, {71} moving in 1652 to a house overlooking St. James's Park, near what is now Queen Anne's Gate. There his first wife died in 1653, or 1654, and her short-lived successor too; there he lived during the remaining years of the Commonwealth, working at his pamphlets and State papers, even beginningParadise Lost, with young friends to read to him, write for him, lead their blind great man about in the Park or elsewhere, till the catastrophe of 1660 arrived and it was no longer safe for the defender of Regicide to be seen in the streets.
Why Milton was not hanged at the Restoration is still something of a mystery. His name must have been more hatefully known to the returning exiles than that of any one except the dead Cromwell whose death did not save his body from a grim ceremony at Tyburn. He had not only defended Charles I's execution before all Europe, and in a tone almost of exultation, but he had pursued the whole Stuart family with vituperation and contempt. Even in the very last weeks, when the bells were already almost ringing for Charles II, he had dared to raise his voice against the "abjured and detested thraldom of kingship"; declaring that he would not be silent though he should but speak "to trees and stones: and had none to cry to, but {72} with the prophet 'O Earth, Earth, Earth!' to tell the very soil itself what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to,"—a passage, if interpreted by its original context, of awful imprecation upon Charles I. A man so famous, so utterly unrepentant, so defiant to the very end, seemed to challenge to himself the gallows. That his challenge would receive its natural answer was the openly expressed opinion of his enemies. No doubt it was also the fear of his friends, who concealed him in Smithfield from May till August 1660. By the 24th of August the danger was over. The Act of Indemnity, which was a pardon to all political offenders not by name excepted in it, became law on that day; and Milton's was not one of the excepted names. How was that managed? There are various stories; perhaps each has some truth in it; many influences may have combined. One is that he had saved Davenant in his danger some years before and now the Cavalier poet in his turn saved the Puritan. But Davenant was not in Parliament, and the real work must have been done by a group of friends who were. The most important of them seem to have been Annesley (afterwards Lord Anglesey), Sir Thomas Clarges, who was Monk's brother-in-law, Monk's secretary Morrice, and the poet's less powerful but {73} still more devoted friend Andrew Marvell. Between them somehow they saved him, aided no doubt by the general pity for a blind man, the general respect for his learning which found expression even in that moment and even in Royalist pamphlets, and, one may hope, by the knowledge of a few of them that this was a man of genius from whom there might be great things yet to come. The names of those who thus made possible the greatest poem in the English language deserve lasting record; and a word of gratitude may be added to Clarendon and to Charles II for refraining from saying the easy and not unnatural word which would have been instantly fatal to their old enemy.
The odd thing is that he was arrested after all. There had been an order of the House of Commons for his arrest and for the burning of his books, possibly, as Masson thinks, obtained by his friends to make it seem unnecessary to except him in the Indemnity Bill. The books were duly burnt, or such copies of them as came to the hands of the hangman; and ultimately, at some uncertain date, Milton himself was got into the custody of the Sergeant-at-Arms. He was soon released, and the story would not be worth relating but for a curious proof it gives of the {74} obstinate courage of the poet. The House ordered his release on December 15; and one would have supposed that he would have been glad to escape into obscurity and safety again on any terms. But no; the Sergeant-at-Arms demanded high fees which Milton thought unreasonable; and even then, when he had almost felt the hangman's rope on his neck, he would not be bullied by any man. He refused to pay: and though the Solicitor-General ominously remarked that he deserved hanging, his friends got the fees referred to a committee and presumably reduced. Before the beginning of 1661 he was definitely a free man to live his final fourteen years of political defeat, isolation and silence, of unparalleled poetic fertility, and, before the end, of acknowledged poetic fame.
He did not return any more to the fashionable and therefore dangerous neighbourhood of Whitehall, but lived the rest of his life in a succession of houses in or near the city, ending in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, where he died. His friends must for years have feared that he might be attacked and perhaps murdered by some drunken Cavalier revellers accidentally coming across the old regicide. And in spite of the Act of Indemnity he can hardly have felt absolutely comfortable on {75} the side of the law when so late as 1664 hisTenure of Kingswas denounced by the censor as still extant and an unfortunate printer was hanged, drawn and quartered for issuing a sort of new version of it. Misfortunes without and fears within might be the summing up, if not of the poet's, at least of the man's life during these first years after the Restoration. To begin with, he was a much poorer man. His salary as Secretary was, of course, gone. But besides that he had lost 2000 pounds, equal to about 7000 pounds now, which he had invested in Commonwealth Securities, as well as some confiscated property he had bought of the Chapter of Westminster; and he was soon to lose, at least temporarily, the rent he received from his father's house in Bread Street which was destroyed by the Fire of London. Masson calculates that he was left after the Restoration with an income about equal to 700 pounds of our money which his further losses and outlay on his daughters had reduced to 300 pounds or 350 pounds before his death; not quite poverty even at the end, but something very different from what the eldest son of a rich man had been accustomed to. A graver misfortune was the gout which afflicted him for the rest of his life and gave him so much pain that he made little of his blindness in {76} comparison with it. Worst of all was his unhappy relation to his daughters. That is the ugliest thing in the story of his life. How things might have gone with his son, if the baby boy had lived, one does not know; but his oriental views of the moral and intellectual inferiority of women, which doubled the dangers of their fascinations, made him certain to be a despotic father to three motherless girls. And so he was. He had plenty of young men eager for the privilege of reading to him: but of course they could not be always with him, and the result was that dreadful picture which comes to us from his nephew, no unfriendly witness, of the daughters "condemned to the performance of reading and exactly pronouncing of all the languages of whatever book he should at one time or other think fit to peruse; viz. the Hebrew (and, I think, the Syriac), the Greek, the Latin, the Italian, Spanish and French," none of which languages they understood. Nor did he show any desire that they should; saying grimly that one tongue was enough for a woman. History and fiction are alike full of the tragedies that result from the blindness of extraordinary minds to ordinary duties; and Milton's case is one of the saddest. The daughters cheated him and made away with {77} his books; he spoke of them gravely and repeatedly as his "unkind children"; one of them is even reported, on very good evidence, to have said, at his third marriage in 1663, that "that was no news to hear of his wedding but, if she could hear of his death, that was something." At last it was thought better that he and they should part; and they were put out, at considerable expense to their father, to learn embroidery work and other "curious and ingenious manufactures" for their living. It is pleasant to hear that the youngest, Deborah, who was visited by Addison not long before he died, and received fifty guineas from Queen Caroline, was "in a transport" of delight when shown a portrait of her father, crying out "'Tis my father, 'tis my dear father, I see him; 'tis him; 'tis the very man! here, here!" as she pointed to some of the features. So one likes to be told, on her authority, that he was delightful company and "the life of the conversation, full of unaffected cheerfulness and civility" when he had his little parties of friends. And to us, if not to her, it is a pleasant story that she could still repeat many lines from Homer, Euripides and Ovid, though she said she did not understand Greek or Latin. The wife of a Spitalfields weaver must at last have felt {78} some pride in these survivals of her childish drudgery, proof audible to all men, if to her unintelligible, that she was the daughter of Mr. Milton, the great scholar and poet.
No more need to be said of sorrow or failure. The rest is a serene and productive old age.Paradise Lostwas published in 1667,Paradise RegainedandSamsonin 1671. Besides these there was, in 1673, a new edition of his earlier poems reprinted, with additions from that of 1645; and many publications of prose works mostly written in earlier years but never printed, such as hisHistory of Britain, and little books on Education, Logic and Grammar. He kept up his strenuous life of study and composition apparently to the end. He is said to have got up at four or five in the morning, and, after hearing a chapter or two from the Hebrew Bible and breakfasting, to have passed the five hours before his midday dinner dictating or having some book read to him. In the afternoon he would walk a little in his garden; all his life a garden had been one of the things he would not do without. Then music and more private study carried him on to an Horatian supper of olives or other "light things"; and so to a pipe of tobacco, a glass of water and bed. He drank but little wine, and that only with his meals. {79} Such a way of life deserved a healthful old age, which, but for that healthy man's disease the gout, he had, and a death such as he had, so easy as to be imperceptible to the bystanders. That was on November 8, 1674. Four days later his body was buried in the church of St. Giles, Cripplegate, where his grave may still be seen; the funeral being accompanied by "all his learned and great friends in London, not without a concourse of the vulgar."
By that time the battle of his life had been won. The astonishing achievements of his last years had more than fulfilled the high promise and proud words of his long distant youth. Perhaps no seven years in all literary history provide a finer record of poetic genius triumphing over difficulties external and internal than these last seven of Milton's life from 1667 to 1674. They had their reward and not only from posterity. There is a still lingering delusion, based chiefly on the five pounds paid for the first edition ofParadise Lost, that Milton's greatness was little recognized in his lifetime. The truth is the exact reverse. He had far more chance of hearing his own praises, if he cared for that, than most of the great English poets: than Keats and Shelley, for instance; than Wordsworth, {80} at least till he was old; nay, in all probability than Shakspeare himself. Which of them heard the most popular poet of their day say of them anything at all like Dryden's famous and generous "This man cuts us all out and the ancients too"? It is not even true thatParadise Lostsold badly. On the contrary, in a year and a half from the day of publication over thirteen hundred copies had been sold, from which the author received 10 pounds and the publisher, it is believed, 50 pounds or 60 pounds. He would be a sanguine publisher to-day who would be quite certain of making in eighteen months the modern equivalent of this sum, say 180 pounds, out of a new epic, even if it were as great as Milton's.
But the money question was not of the first importance to Milton and is of none to us. The interesting thing is the almost immediate recognition of the greatness of the poem. Nothing in the world could be more alien to the tone of the society and literature of the London of Charles II than this long Biblical Puritan poem with its scarcely veiled attacks on the revived Monarchy and Episcopacy and its entirely unveiled attacks on the fashionable men of Belial. Yet it was from the very high priests of this society that the most unstinted praise came. Of its professional men of {81} letters Dryden was already rapidly advancing to the unquestioned primacy which was soon to be his, and to remain his for his life; of its amateurs Lord Dorset had perhaps the most brilliant reputation. It was these two men who, more than any others, made the town recognize the greatness of Milton. Both were as unlike Milton as men could be, and Dryden had just committed himself to a strong championship of rhymed verse as against blank. There is nowhere a finer proof of the compelling power of great art upon those who know it when they see it than the unbounded praise with which Dryden at once saluted Milton. The fact that his admiration at first took the absurd form of turning Milton's epic into a "heroic opera" in rhyme does not detract from the significance of his writing publicly within a year of Milton's death that the blind old regicide's poem was "one of the greatest, most noble and sublime which either this age or nation has produced," and to this he was to add, thirteen years later, the still bolder tribute of the well-known epigram about "three poets in three distant ages born" which gives Milton a place above Homer and Virgil. The lines are in detail absurd; but their absurdity does not destroy the fact that the intellectual life of England was never {82} keener, or more eager to welcome talent in art or letters, than in the reign of Charles II; and nothing is clearer proof of it than the honours received by the rebel Milton from a Court composer like Henry Lawes, a Court physician like Samuel Barrow, a statesman and minister like Lord Anglesey, and a poet laureate like Dryden.
So we may think of him happily enough in these last years. He had now done the work which from his early manhood he had felt it was his task in life to do. When he was not much over thirty he had boldly written in public of what his mind, "in the spacious circuits of her musing, hath liberty to propose to herself, though of highest hope and hardest attempting; whether that epic form whereof the two poems of Homer, and those other two of Virgil and Tasso, are a diffuse and the book of Job a brief model . . . or whether those dramatic constitutions, wherein Sophocles and Euripides reign, shall be found more doctrinal and exemplary to a nation." For the moment nothing seemed to come of these high words; but before he died not one only, but both of his dreams, the drama as well as the epic, were accomplished facts.Paradise Lost, begun as a drama, had become the greatest of modern {83} epics; and the abandoned drama had reappeared inSamson, 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 theParadise Lostis 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}
We think to-day of Milton chiefly as the author ofParadise 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 curatmight 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 ofParadise 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 ofLycidasand the great Ode. What would Milton's fame have rested upon if he had not lived to writeParadise Lostand 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 thatLycidasandComushad been printed before, butComushad appeared anonymously and {91}Lycidashad 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 toLycidasis J. M. It was Lawes the composer, not Milton the author, who publishedComusin 1637. Milton's feelings about it are indicated by the motto on the title page—
"Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus AustrumPerditus—"
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 thatComuswas 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 theOde 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 keepingL'AllegroandIl Penserosoten 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 nobleOde 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 inLycidasand inParadise 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 theOdeandComusandParadise Lost, does not hear some preluding of the authentic strain of Milton in
"Who by his all-commanding mightDid 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 theOde, the "endless morn of Light" of theSolemn Music, the "bosom bright of blazing Majesty and Light" of theEpitaph on Lady Winchester, and, not to multiply quotations, of the "Hail, holy Light" which opens the great invocation of the third book ofParadise Lost?
It may be as well, before discussing theOdeand the other contents of the volume issued in 1645, to mention another poem which is of earlier date than theOde, though it was not printed till 1673: the beautiful Spenserian linesOn 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 blessedThe world's late wonder, and the heaven's new joy;{98}Live ever there, and leave me here distressedWith mortal cares and cumbrous world's annoy."
So sings Spenser of Sidney: and, though Milton is scarcely yet more the equal of Spenser than his baby niece was of Sidney, it is a beautiful echo of his master that he gives us in his
"O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted,Soft silken primrose fading timelessly,"
and in
"Yet can I not persuade me thou art dead,Or that thy corse corrupts in earth's dark womb,Or that thy beauties lie in wormy bed,Hid from the world in a low delvèd tomb."
The poem is full of the then fashionable conceits, which appear again a little in theOde, 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 fireTo scorn the sordid world, and unto Heaven aspire."
But with theOdethe age of imitation is over for Milton and he stands forward at once {99} as himself. The soft graces, somewhat lacking in outline, of theFair Infant, are forgotten in the sonorous strength of theOde. 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-tableTo 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'AllegroandSamsonare 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 thisOdeand theSolemn Music, in the conclusions ofLycidasandIl Penseroso, in the opening ofComus, 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 spotWhich 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 inParadise Lost.
And note one other thing. Milton is only twenty-one, but he is already an incomparable artist. The stanza had been so far the usual form for lyrics, and he adopts it here for the first and last time. But if he accepts the instrument prescribed by tradition, with what a master's hand this wonderful boy of twenty-one touches it, and to what astonishing music! It seems that the stanza itself is his own. Every one has felt the combination in it, as he manages it, of the romantic movement and suggestion which he loved and renounced with the classical strength which is the chief element in the final impression he made on English poetry. As yet the romantic quality is the stronger, and even one of the mighty closing Alexandrines is dedicated to the lovely Elizabethan fancy of the "yellow skirted fayes" who
"Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze."
How such a line as that, or still more plainly the two which end the most romantic stanza of all—
"No nightly trance, or breathèd spell, Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell" {102} found a rejoicing echo in Keats is obvious. This, of course, has often been noticed. But has it ever been remarked that there are also lines in the poem which might have been written by another nineteenth-century poet of equal but very different genius?
"The winds, with wonder whist,Smoothly the waters kissed,Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean;"—
should we be surprised to come upon these elemental loves and joys heralding a new reign of justice and peace in thePrometheus 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 thePassion, a failure which Milton recognized as a failure and abandoned, but yet, characteristically, did not refuse to publish; theEpitaph 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 gravePeace 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 joySphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse."
{104} This was written some years later; and even afterParadise Lostit 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 inParadise 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 ofParadise Lostan 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 presentThat undisturbèd song of pure concent."
They are all the same line, and yet how different. It is difficult to believe that this is the same metre which Waller and Dryden {105} were soon, amid universal applause, to file down into the smooth monotony of—
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,And thin partitions do their bounds divide;Else why should he, with wealth and honour blest,Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?"
For Dryden, as still more for Pope and the school of Pope, the thing to accomplish, so far as possible, is to prevent any of the natural accents falling upon the third, fifth or other odd syllables; there is, for instance, not one which does so in the first fifty lines ofAbsalom and Achitophelor of theEpistle 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 ofParadise Losthas few or no waves of music of more varied unity, of more continuous variety than such lines as—
"As once we did, till disproportioned sinJarred against Nature's chime and with harsh dinBroke the fair music that all creatures madeTo their great Lord, whose love their motion swayedIn perfect diapason whilst they stoodIn first obedience and their state of good."
The chief remaining minor poems of Milton are theAllegroandPenseroso,Comus,Lycidasand the Sonnets. The two first are written {107} in those rhymed eight-syllable lines which he had already used in part of hisSong 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 breastThe 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 tieThe hidden soul of harmony."
{110}
Il Penserosois the praise of Melancholy asL'Allegroof 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 ownComus, 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 astrayThrough the heaven's wide pathless way."
Perhaps no one again, till Shelley came, felt the vastness, the pathlessness, of the heaven as Milton did. Or, to come to earth again, where does poetry set the ear more instantly and actively at the work of imaginative {112} creation than in those finely suggestive lines about the curfew—
"Over some wide-watered shore,Swinging slow with sullen roar"?
And what of that woodland solitude at noon, with memories in it of so many poets of Greece, Rome, Italy and England, the
"shadows brown, that Sylvan loves,Of pine, or monumental oak,Where the rude axe with heavèd strokeWas never heard the Nymphs to dauntOr fright them from their hallowed haunt,"
which carries us on to perhaps the loveliest lines in all theParadise Lost—
"In shadier bower,More sacred and sequestered, though but feigned,Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymphNor Faunus haunted."
There is in the two passages just the difference between the youth and maturity of genius; but that is all. SoIl Penserosopasses 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 maskComus, 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 courtMy mansion is, where those immortal shapesOf bright aerial spirits live inspheredIn regions mild of calm and serene air,Above the smoke and stir of this dim spotWhich 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 servantsAmongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats."
That looks forward toParadise 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 ofComusif 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 inThe Faithful Shepherdesshad taken the same; as Jonson had taken the praise of Temperance, which is also partly Milton's subject, inPleasure 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 whoseShepherdessthe 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 theFaerie 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 unseenWithin thy airy shellBy slow Meander's margent green,And in the violet-embroidered valeWhere the love-lorn nightingaleNightly to thee her sad song mourneth well;Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pairThat likest thy Narcissus are?O, if thou haveHid 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 mouldBreathe such divine enchanting ravishment?Sure something holy lodges in that breast,And with these raptures moves the vocal airTo testify his hidden residence.{118}How sweetly did they float upon the wingsOf silence, through the empty-vaulted night,At every fall smoothing the raven downOf 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—
"SilenceWas took ere she was ware, and wished she mightDeny her nature, and be never moreStill 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 ofParadise 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 inComusbeside 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, thatComuswas 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 ofParadise 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 theVita Nuovaand him who wrote theDivina 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 theNativity Odeand 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 ofComus. 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 ofComus; 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 rosesWhere young Adonis oft reposes,Waxing well of his deep woundIn slumber soft, and on the groundSadly 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 writeComusorAllegroorParadise Lost." For never were unity and continuity of personality more complete than in Milton.
There remainsLycidas, in which Milton out-distances all previous English elegy almost as easily as inComushe had out-distanced all the earlier masks. It stands with the great passages ofParadise Lostas 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 theEpitaphium Damoniswhich is the finest of the Latin poems. Those who read Latin will enjoy its close parallelism withLycidasand 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 wroteAdonaisabout Keats whom he knew very little; SpenserDaphnaïdaabout 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.
AboutLycidascriticism 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 ofLycidas, 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 inLycidasby 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 loveLycidasall 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 theNativity Ode,ComusandAllegroandPenseroso, 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—