If the biographies of literary men are to assume the bulk which Mr.
Masson is giving to that of Milton, their authors should send a phial of
_elixir vitae_ with the first volume, that a purchaser might have some
valid assurance of surviving to see the last. Mr. Masson has already
occupied thirteen hundred and seventy-eight pages in getting Milton to
his thirty-fifth year, and an interval of eleven years stretches between
the dates of the first and second instalments of his published labors. As
Milton's literary life properly begins at twenty-one, with the "Ode on
the Nativity," and as by far the more important part of it lies between
the year at which we are arrived and his death at the age of sixty-six,
we might seem to have the terms given us by which to make a rough
reckoning of how soon we are likely to see land. But when we recollect
the baffling character of the winds and currents we have already
encountered, and the eddies that may at any time slip us back to the
reformation in Scotland or the settlement of New England; when we
consider, moreover, that Milton's life overlapped the _grand siècle_ of
French literature, with its irresistible temptations to digression and
homily for a man of Mr Masson's temperament, we may be pardoned if a sigh
of doubt and discouragement escape us. We envy the secular leisures of
Methusaleh, and are thankful that _his_ biography at least (if written in
the same longeval proportion) is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject
would that have been for a person of Mr. Masson's spacious predilections!
Even if he himself can count on patriarchal prorogations of existence,
let him hang a print of the Countess of Desmond in his study to remind
him of the ambushes which Fate lays for the toughest of us. For myself, I
have not dared to climb a cherry-tree since I began to read his work.
Even with the promise of a speedy third volume before me, I feel by no
means sure of living to see Mary Powell back in her husband's house; for
it is just at this crisis that Mr. Masson, with the diabolical art of a
practised serial writer, leaves us while he goes into an exhaustive
account of the Westminster Assembly and the political and religious
notions of the Massachusetts Puritans. One could not help thinking, after
having got Milton fairly through college, that he was never more mistaken
in his life than when he wrote,
"How _soon_ hath Time, that subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!"
Or is it Mr. Masson who has scotched Time's wheels?
It is plain from the Preface to the second volume that Mr. Masson himself
has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that Milton
ought somehow to be more than a mere incident of his own biography. He
tells us that, "whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on
the subject from the outside, no one can study the life of Milton as it
ought to be studied without being obliged to study extensively and
intimately the contemporary history of England, and even incidentally of
Scotland and Ireland too.... Thus on the very compulsion, or at least the
suasion, of the biography, a history grew on my hands. It was not in
human nature to confine the historical inquiries, once they were in
progress, within the precise limits of their demonstrable bearing on the
biography, even had it been possible to determine these limits
beforehand; and so the history assumed a co-ordinate importance with me,
was pursued often for its own sake, and became, though always with a
sense of organic relation to the biography, continuous in itself." If a
"hasty person" be one who thinks eleven years rather long to have his
button held by a biographer ere he begin his next sentence, I take to
myself the sting of Mr. Masson's covert sarcasm. I confess with shame a
pusillanimity that is apt to flag if a "to be continued" do not redeem
its promise before the lapse of a quinquennium. I could scarce await the
"Autocrat" himself so long. The heroic age of literature is past, and
even a duodecimo may often prove too heavy [Greek: oion nun brotoi] for
the descendants of men to whom the folio was a pastime. But what does Mr.
Masson mean by "continuous"? To me it seems rather as if his somewhat
rambling history of the seventeenth century were interrupted now and then
by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in
and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what _he_ has been doing in the
mean while. The reader, immersed in Scottish politics or the schemes of
Archbishop Laud, is a little puzzled at first, but reconciles himself on
being reminded that this fair-haired young man is the protagonist of the
drama. _Pars minima est ipsa puella sui_.
If Goethe was right in saying that every man was a citizen of his age as
well as of his country, there can be no doubt that in order to understand
the motives and conduct of the man we must first make ourselves intimate
with the time in which he lived. We have therefore no fault to find with
the thoroughness of Mr. Masson's "historical inquiries." The more
thorough the better, so far as they were essential to the satisfactory
performance of his task. But it is only such contemporary events,
opinions, or persons as were really operative on the character of the man
we are studying that are of consequence, and we are to familiarize
ourselves with them, not so much for the sake of explaining them as of
understanding him. The biographer, especially of a literary man, need
only mark the main currents of tendency, without being officious to trace
out to its marshy source every runlet that has cast in its tiny
pitcherful with the rest. Much less should he attempt an analysis of the
stream and to classify every component by itself, as if each were ever
effectual singly and not in combination. Human motives cannot be thus
chemically cross-examined, nor do we arrive at any true knowledge of
character by such minute subdivision of its ingredients. Nothing is so
essential to a biographer as an eye that can distinguish at a glance
between real events that are the levers of thought and action, and what
Donne calls "unconcerning things, matters of fact,"--between substantial
personages, whose contact or even neighborhood is influential, and the
supernumeraries that serve first to fill up a stage and afterwards the
interstices of a biographical dictionary.
"Time hath a wallet at his back
Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion."
Let the biographer keep his fingers off that sacred and merciful deposit,
and not renew for us the bores of a former generation as if we had not
enough of our own. But if he cannot forbear that unwise inquisitiveness,
we may fairly complain when he insists on taking us along with him in the
processes of his investigation, instead of giving us the sifted results
in their bearing on the life and character of his subject, whether for
help or hindrance. We are blinded with the dust of old papers ransacked
by Mr. Masson to find out that they have no relation whatever to his
hero. He had been wise if he had kept constantly in view what Milton
himself says of those who gathered up personal traditions concerning the
Apostles: "With less fervency was studied what Saint Paul or Saint John
had written than was listened to one that could say, 'Here he taught,
here he stood, this was his stature, and thus he went habited; and O,
happy this house that harbored him, and that cold stone whereon he
rested, this village where he wrought such a miracle.'.... Thus while all
their thoughts were poured out upon circumstances and the gazing after
such men as had sat at table with the Apostles, ... by this means they
lost their time and truanted on the fundamental grounds of saving
knowledge, as was seen shortly in their writings." Mr. Masson has so
_poured out his mind upon circumstances_, that his work reminds us of
Allston's picture of Elijah in the Wilderness, where a good deal of
research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a
conundrum in the landscape where the very ravens could scarce have found
him out, except by divine commission. The figure of Milton becomes but a
speck on the enormous canvas crowded with the scenery through which he
may by any possibility be conjectured to have passed. I will cite a
single example of the desperate straits to which Mr. Masson is reduced in
order to hitch Milton on to his own biography. He devotes the first
chapter of his Second Book to the meeting of the Long Parliament.
"Already," he tells us, "in the earlier part of the day, the Commons had
gone through the ceremony of hearing the writ for the Parliament read,
and the names of the members that had been returned called over by Thomas
Wyllys, Esq., the Clerk of the Crown in Chancery. His deputy, _Agar,
Milton's brother-in-law, may have been in attendance on such an
occasion_. During the preceding month or two, _at all events_, Agar and
his subordinates in the Crown Office had been unusually busy with the
issue of the writs and with the other work connected with the opening of
Parliament." (Vol. II. p. 150.) Mr. Masson's resolute "at all events" is
very amusing. Meanwhile
"The hungry sheep look up and are not fed."
Augustine Thierry has a great deal to answer for, if to him we owe the
modern fashion of writing history picturesquely. At least his method
leads to most unhappy results when essayed by men to whom nature has
denied a sense of what the picturesque really is. The historical
picturesque does not consist, in truth of costume and similar
accessaries, but in the grouping, attitude, and expression of the
figures, caught when they are unconscious that the artist is sketching
them. The moment they are posed for a composition, unless by a man of
genius, the life has gone out of them. In the hands of an inferior
artist, who fancies that imagination is something to be squeezed out of
color-tubes, the past becomes a phantasmagoria of jackboots, doublets,
and flap-hats, the mere property-room of a deserted theatre, as if the
light had been scenical and illusory, the world an unreal thing that
vanished with the foot-lights. It is the power of catching the actors in
great events at unawares that makes the glimpses given us by
contemporaries so vivid and precious. And St. Simon, one of the great
masters of the picturesque, lets us into the secret of his art when he
tells us how, in that wonderful scene of the death of Monseigneur, he saw
"_du premier coup d'oeil vivement porté_, tout ce qui leur échappoit et
tout ce qui les accableroit." It is the gift of producing this reality
that almost makes us blush, as if we had been caught peeping through a
keyhole, and had surprised secrets to which we had no right,--it is this
only that can justify the pictorial method of narration. Mr. Carlyle has
this power of contemporizing himself with bygone times, he cheats us to
"Play with our fancies and believe we see";
but we find the _tableaux vivants_ of the apprentices who "deal in his
command without his power," and who compel us to work very hard indeed
with our fancies, rather wearisome. The effort of weaker arms to shoot
with his mighty bow has filled the air of recent literature with more
than enough fruitless twanging.
Mr. Masson's style, at best cumbrous, becomes intolerably awkward when he
strives to make up for the want of St. Simon's _premier coup d'oeil_ by
impertinent details of what we must call the pseudo-dramatic kind. For
example, does Hall profess to have traced Milton from the University to a
"suburb sink" of London? Mr. Masson fancies he hears Milton saying to
himself, "A suburb sink! has Hall or his son taken the trouble to walk
all the way down to Aldersgate here, to peep up the entry where I live,
and so have an exact notion of my whereabouts? There has been plague in
the neighborhood certainly; and I hope Jane Yates had my doorstep tidy
for the visit." Does Milton, answering Hall's innuendo that he was
courting the graces of a rich widow, tell us that he would rather "choose
a virgin of mean fortunes honestly bred"? Mr. Masson forthwith breaks
forth in a paroxysm of what we suppose to be picturesqueness in this
wise: "What have we here? Surely nothing less, if we choose so to
construe it, than a marriage advertisement! Ho, all ye virgins of England
(widows need not apply), here is an opportunity such as seldom occurs: a
bachelor, unattached; age, thirty-three years and three or four months;
height [Milton, by the way, would have said _highth_] middle or a little
less; personal appearance unusually handsome, with fair complexion and
light auburn hair; circumstances independent; tastes intellectual and
decidedly musical; principles Root-and-Branch! Was there already any
young maiden in whose bosom, had such an advertisement come in her way,
it would have raised a conscious flutter? If so, did she live near
Oxford?" If there _is_ anything worse than an unimaginative man trying to
write imaginatively, it is a heavy man when he fancies he is being
facetious. He tramples out the last spark of cheerfulness with the broad
damp foot of a hippopotamus.
I am no advocate of what is called the dignity of history, when it means,
as it too often does, that dulness has a right of sanctuary in gravity.
Too well do I recall the sorrows of my youth, when I was shipped in
search of knowledge on the long Johnsonian swell of the last century,
favorable to anything but the calm digestion of historic truth. I had
even then an uneasy suspicion, which has ripened into certainty, that
thoughts were never draped in long skirts like babies, if they were
strong enough to go alone. But surely there should be such a thing as
good taste, above all a sense of self-respect, in the historian himself,
that should not allow him to play any tricks with the dignity of his
subject. A halo of sacredness has hitherto invested the figure of Milton,
and our image of him has dwelt securely in ideal remoteness from the
vulgarities of life. No diaries, no private letters, remain to give the
idle curiosity of after-times the right to force itself on the hallowed
seclusion of his reserve. That a man whose familiar epistles were written
in the language of Cicero, whose sense of personal dignity was so great
that, when called on in self-defence to speak of himself, he always does
it with an epical stateliness of phrase, and whose self-respect even in
youth was so profound that it resembles the reverence paid by other men
to a far-off and idealized character,--that he should be treated in this
offhand familiar fashion by his biographer seems to us a kind of
desecration, a violation of good manners no less than of the laws of
biographic art. Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the
back with impunity. Better the surly injustice of Johnson than such
presumptuous friendship as this. Let the seventeenth century, at least,
be kept sacred from the insupportable foot of the interviewer!
But Mr. Masson, in his desire to be (shall I say) idiomatic, can do
something worse than what has been hitherto quoted. He can be even
vulgar. Discussing the motives of Milton's first marriage, he says, "Did
he come seeking his £500, and did Mrs. Powell _heave a daughter at him?_"
We have heard of a woman throwing herself at a man's head, and the image
is a somewhat violent one; but what is this to Mr. Masson's improvement
on it? It has been sometimes affirmed that the fitness of an image may be
tested by trying whether a picture could be made of it or not. Mr. Masson
has certainly offered a new and striking subject to the historical school
of British art. A little further on, speaking of Mary Powell, he says,
"We have no portrait of her, nor any account of her appearance; but on
the usual rule of the elective affinities of opposites, Milton being
fair, _we will vote her_ to have been dark-haired." I need say nothing of
the good taste of this sentence, but its absurdity is heightened by the
fact that Mr. Masson himself had left us in doubt whether the match
was one of convenience or inclination. I know not how it may be
with other readers, but for myself I feel inclined to resent this
hail-fellow-well-met manner with its jaunty "_we_ will vote." In some
cases, Mr. Masson's indecorums in respect of style may possibly be
accounted for as attempts at humor by one who has an imperfect notion of
its ingredients. In such experiments, to judge by the effect, the pensive
element of the compound enters in too large an excess over the hilarious.
Whether I have hit upon the true explanation, or whether the cause lie
not rather in a besetting velleity of the picturesque and vivid, I shall
leave the reader to judge by an example or two. In the manuscript copy of
Milton's sonnet in which he claims for his own house the immunity which
the memory of Pindar and Euripides secured for other walls, the title had
originally been, "_On his Door when the City expected an Assault_."
Milton has drawn a line through this and substituted "_When the Assault
was intended to the City_." Mr. Masson fancies "a mood of jest or
semi-jest in the whole affair"; but we think rather that Milton's quiet
assumption of equality with two such famous poets was as seriously
characteristic as Dante's ranking himself _sesto tra cotanto senno_. Mr.
Masson takes advantage of the obliterated title to imagine one of Prince
Rupert's troopers entering the poet's study and finding some of his
"Anti-Episcopal pamphlets that had been left lying about inadvertently.
'Oho!' the Cavalier Captain might then have said, 'Pindar and Euripides
are all very well, by G----! I've been at college myself; and when I meet
a gentleman and scholar, I hope I know how to treat him; but neither
Pindar nor Euripides ever wrote pamphlets against the Church of England,
by G----! It won't do, Mr. Milton!'" This, it may be supposed, is Mr.
Masson's way of being funny and dramatic at the same time. Good taste is
shocked with this barbarous dissonance. Could not the Muse defend her
son? Again, when Charles I., at Edinburgh, in the autumn and winter of
1641, fills the vacant English sees, we are told, "It was more than an
insult; it was a sarcasm! It was as if the King, while giving Alexander
Henderson his hand to kiss, had winked his royal eye over that reverend
Presbyter's back!" Now one can conceive Charles II. winking when he took
the Solemn League and Covenant, but never his father under any
circumstances. He may have been, and I believe he was, a bad king, but
surely we may take Marvell's word for it, that
"He nothing common did or mean,"
upon any of the "memorable scenes" of his life. The image is, therefore,
out of all imaginative keeping, and vulgarizes the chief personage in a
grand historical tragedy, who, if not a great, was at least a decorous
actor. But Mr. Masson can do worse than this. Speaking of a Mrs.
Katherine Chidley, who wrote in defence of the Independents against
Thomas Edwards, he says, "People wondered who this she-Brownist,
Katherine Chidley, was, and did not quite lose their interest in her when
they found that she was an oldish woman, and a member of some
hole-and-corner congregation in London. Indeed, _she put her nails into
Mr. Edwards with some effect_." Why did he not say at once, after the
good old fashion, that she "set her ten commandments in his face"? In
another place he speaks of "Satan standing with his _staff_ around him."
Mr. Masson's style, a little Robertsonian at best, naturally grows worse
when forced to condescend to every-day matters. He can no more dismount
and walk than the man in armor on a Lord Mayor's day. "It [Aldersgate
Street] stretches away northwards a full fourth of a mile as one
continuous thoroughfare, until, crossed by Long Lane and the Barbican, it
parts with the name of Aldersgate Street, and, under the new names of
Goswell Street and Goswell Road, _completes its tendency towards the
suburbs_ and fields about Islington." What a noble work might not the
Directory be if composed on this scale! The imagination even of an
alderman might well be lost in that full quarter of a mile of continuous
thoroughfare. Mr. Masson is very great in these passages of civic
grandeur; but he is more surprising, on the whole, where he has an image
to deal with. Speaking of Milton's "two-handed engine" in Lycidas, he
says: "May not Milton, whatever else he meant, have meant a coming
English Parliament with its two Houses? Whatever he meant, his prophecy
had come true. As he sat among his books in Aldersgate Street, the
two-handed engine at the door of the English Church was on the swing.
Once, twice, thrice, it had swept its arcs to gather energy; now it was
on the backmost poise, and the blow was to descend." One cannot help
wishing that Mr. Masson would try his hand on the tenth horn of the beast
in Revelation, or on the time and half a time of Daniel. There is
something so consoling to a prophet in being told that, no matter what he
meant, his prophecy had come true, and that he might mean "whatever else"
he pleased, so long as he _may_ have meant what we choose to think he
did, reasoning backward from the assumed fulfilment! But perhaps there
may be detected in Mr. Masson's "swept its arcs" a little of that
prophetic hedging-in vagueness to which he allows so generous a latitude.
How if the "two-handed engine," after all, were a broom (or besom, to be
more dignified),
"Sweeping--vehemently sweeping,
No pause admitted, no design avowed,"
like that wielded by the awful shape which Dion the Syracusan saw? I make
the suggestion modestly, though somewhat encouraged by Mr. Masson's
system of exegesis, which reminds one of the casuists' doctrine of
probables, in virtue of which a man may be _probabiliter obligatus_ and
_probabiliter deobligatus_ at the same time. But perhaps the most
remarkable instance of Mr. Masson's figures of speech is where we are
told that the king might have established a _bona fide_ government "by
giving public ascendency to the popular or Parliamentary element in his
Council, and _inducing the old leaven in it either to accept the new
policy, or to withdraw and become inactive."_ There is something
consoling in the thought that yeast should be accessible to moral
suasion. It is really too bad that bread should ever be heavy for want of
such an appeal to its moral sense as should "induce it to accept the new
policy." Of Mr. Masson's unhappy infection with the _vivid_ style an
instance or two shall be given in justification of what has been alleged
against him in that particular. He says of London that "he was committed
to the Tower, where for more than two months he lay, with as near a
prospect as ever prisoner had of a _chop_ with the executioner's axe on a
scaffold on Tower Hill." I may be over-fastidious, but the word "chop"
offends my ears with its coarseness, or if that be too strong, has
certainly the unpleasant effect of an emphasis unduly placed. Old
Auchinleck's saying of Cromwell, that "he gart kings ken they had a lith
in their necks," is a good example of really vivid phrase, suggesting the
axe and the block, and giving one of those dreadful hints to the
imagination which are more powerful than any amount of detail, and whose
skilful use is the only magic employed by the masters of truly
picturesque writing. The sentence just quoted will serve also as an
example of that tendency to _surplusage_, which adds to the bulk of Mr.
Masson's sentences at the cost of their effectiveness. If he had said
simply "chop on Tower Hill" (if chop there must be), it had been quite
enough, for we all know that the executioner's axe and the scaffold are
implied in it. Once more, and I have done with the least agreeable part
of my business. Mr. Masson, after telling over again the story of
Strafford with needless length of detail, ends thus: "On Wednesday, the
12th of May, that proud _curly_ head, the casket of that brain of power,
rolled on the scaffold of Tower Hill." Why _curly_? Surely it is here a
ludicrous impertinence. This careful thrusting forward of outward and
unmeaning particulars, in the hope of giving that reality to a picture
which genius only has the art to do, is becoming a weariness in modern
descriptive writing. It reminds one of the Mrs. Jarley expedient of
dressing the waxen effigies of murderers in the very clothes they wore
when they did the deed, or with the real halter round their necks
wherewith they expiated it. It is probably very effective with the torpid
sensibilities of the class who look upon wax figures as works of art.
True imaginative power works with other material. Lady Macbeth striving
to wash away from her hands the damned spot that is all the more there to
the mind of the spectator because it is not there at all, is a type of
the methods it employs and the intensity of their action.
Having discharged my duty in regard to Mr. Masson's faults of manner,
which I should not have dwelt on so long had they not greatly marred a
real enjoyment in the reading, and were they not the ear-mark of a school
which has become unhappily numerous, I turn to a consideration of his
work as a whole. I think he made a mistake in his very plan, or else was
guilty of a misnomer in his title. His book is not so much a life of
Milton as a collection of materials out of which a careful reader may
sift the main facts of the poet's biography. His passion for minute
detail is only to be equalled by his diffuseness on points mainly if not
altogether irrelevant. He gives us a Survey of British Literature,
occupying one hundred and twenty-eight pages of his first volume, written
in the main with good judgment, and giving the average critical opinion
upon nearly every writer, great and small, who was in any sense a
contemporary of Milton. I have no doubt all this would be serviceable and
interesting to Mr. Masson's classes in Edinburgh University, and they may
well be congratulated on having so competent a teacher; but what it has
to do with Milton, unless in the case of such authors as may be shown to
have influenced his style or turn of thought, one does not clearly see.
Most readers of a life of Milton may be presumed to have some knowledge
of the general literary history of the time, or at any rate to have the
means of acquiring it, and Milton's manner (his style was his own) was
very little affected by any of the English poets, with the single
exception, in his earlier poems, of George Wither. Mr. Masson also has
something to say about everybody, from Wentworth to the obscurest
Brownist fanatic who was so much as heard of in England during Milton's
lifetime. If this theory of a biographer's duty should hold, our
grandchildren may expect to see "A Life of Thackeray, or who was who in
England, France, and Germany during the first Half of the Nineteenth
Century." These digressions of Mr. Masson's from what should have been
his main topic (he always seems somehow to be "completing his tendency
towards the suburbs" of his subject), give him an uneasy feeling that he
must get Milton in somehow or other at intervals, if it were only to
remind the reader that he has a certain connection with the book. He is
eager even to discuss a mere hypothesis, though an untenable one, if it
will only increase the number of pages devoted specially to Milton, and
thus lessen the apparent disproportion between the historical and the
biographical matter. Milton tells us that his morning wont had been "to
read good authors, or cause them to be read, till the attention be weary,
or memory have his full fraught; then with useful and generous labors
preserving the body's health and hardiness, to render lightsome, clear,
and not lumpish obedience to the mind, to the cause of religion and our
country's liberty when it shall require firm hearts in sound bodies to
stand and cover their stations rather than see the rum of our
Protestantism and the enforcement of a slavish life." Mr. Masson snatches
at the hint: "This is interesting," he says; "Milton, it seems, has for
some time been practising drill! The City Artillery Ground was near....
Did Milton among others make a habit of going there of mornings? Of this
more hereafter." When Mr. Masson returns to the subject he speaks of
Milton's "all but positive statement ... that in the spring of 1642, or a
few months before the breaking out of the Civil War, he was in the habit
of spending a part of each day in _military exercise somewhere not far
from his house in Aldersgate Street_." What he puts by way of query on
page 402 has become downright certainty seventy-nine pages further on.
The passage from Milton's tract makes no "statement" of the kind it
pleases Mr. Masson to assume. It is merely a Miltonian way of saying that
he took regular exercise, because he believed that moral no less than
physical courage demanded a sound body. And what proof does Mr. Masson
bring to confirm his theory? Nothing more nor less than two or three
passages in "Paradise Lost," of which I shall quote only so much as is
essential to his argument:--
"And now
Advanced in view they stand, a horrid front
Of dreadful length and dazzling arms, in guise
Of warriors old with _ordered_ spear and shield,
Awaiting what command their mighty chief
Had to impose."[359]
Mr. Masson assures us that "there are touches in this description (as,
for example, the _ordering_ of arms at the moment of halt, and without
word of command) too exact and technical to have occurred to a mere
civilian. Again, at the same review....
"'He now prepared
To speak; whereat their doubled ranks they bend
From wing to wing, and half enclose him round
With all his peers; _attention_ held them mute.'[360]
"To the present day this is the very process, or one of the processes,
when a commander wishes to address his men. They wheel inward and stand
at 'attention.'" But his main argument is the phrase "_ported_ spears,"
in Book Fourth, on which he has an interesting and valuable comment. He
argues the matter through a dozen pages or more, seeking to prove that
Milton _must_ have had some practical experience of military drill. I
confess a very grave doubt whether "attention" and "ordered" in the
passages cited have any other than their ordinary meaning, and Milton
could never have looked on at the pike-exercise without learning what
"ported" meant. But, be this as it may, I will venture to assert that
there was not a boy in New England, forty years ago, who did not know
more of the manual than is implied in Milton's use of these terms. Mr.
Masson's object in proving Milton to have been a proficient in these
martial exercises is to increase our wonder at his not entering the army.
"If there was any man in England of whom one might surely have expected
that he would be in arms among the Parliamentarians," he says, "that man
was Milton." Milton may have had many an impulse to turn soldier, as all
men must in such times, but I do not believe that he ever seriously
intended it. Nor is it any matter of reproach that he did not. It is
plain, from his works, that he believed himself very early set apart and
consecrated for tasks of a very different kind, for services demanding as
much self-sacrifice and of more enduring result. I have no manner of
doubt that he, like Dante, believed himself divinely inspired with what
he had to utter, and, if so, why not also divinely guided in what he
should do or leave undone? Milton wielded in the cause he loved a weapon
far more effective than a sword.
It is a necessary result of Mr. Masson's method, that a great deal of
space is devoted to what might have befallen his hero and what he might
have seen. This leaves a broad margin indeed for the insertion of purely
hypothetical incidents. Nay, so desperately addicted is he to what he
deems the vivid style of writing, that he even goes out of his way to
imagine what might have happened to anybody living at the same time with
Milton. Having told us fairly enough how Shakespeare, on his last visit
to London, perhaps saw Milton "a fair child of six playing at his
father's door," he must needs conjure up an imaginary supper at the
Mermaid. "Ah! what an evening ... was that; and how Ben and Shakespeare
_be-tongued_ each other, while the others listened and wondered; and how,
when the company dispersed, the sleeping street heard their departing
footsteps, and the stars shone down on the old roofs." Certainly, if we
may believe the old song, the stars "had nothing else to do," though
their chance of shining in the middle of a London November may perhaps be
reckoned very doubtful. An author should consider how largely the art of
writing consists in knowing what to leave in the inkstand.
Mr. Masson's volumes contain a great deal of very valuable matter,
whatever one may think of its bearing upon the life of Milton. The
chapters devoted to Scottish affairs are particularly interesting to a
student of the Great Rebellion, its causes and concomitants. His analyses
of the two armies, of the Parliament, and the Westminster Assembly, are
sensible additions to our knowledge. A too painful thoroughness, indeed,
is the criticism we should make on his work as a biography. Even as a
history, the reader might complain that it confuses by the multiplicity
of its details, while it wearies by want of continuity. Mr. Masson lacks
the skill of an accomplished story-teller. A fact is to him a fact, never
mind how unessential, and he misses the breadth of truth in his devotion
to accuracy. The very order of his title-page, "The Life of Milton,
narrated in Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary
History of his Time," shows, it should seem, a misconception of the true
nature of his subject. Milton's chief importance, it might be fairly said
his only importance, is a literary one. His place is fixed as the most
classical of our poets.
Neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics, did Milton leave any
distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in the history of
opinion. In both these lines of his activity circumstances forced upon
him the position of a controversialist whose aims and results are by the
necessity of the case desultory and ephemeral. Hooker before him and
Hobbes after him had a far firmer grasp of fundamental principles than
he. His studies in these matters were perfunctory and occasional, and his
opinions were heated to the temper of the times and shaped to the instant
exigencies of the forum, sometimes to his own convenience at the moment,
instead of being the slow result of a deliberate judgment enlightened by
intellectual and above all historical sympathy with his subject. His
interest was rather in the occasion than the matter of the controversy.
No aphorisms of political science are to be gleaned from his writings as
from those of Burke. His intense personality could never so far
dissociate itself from the question at issue as to see it in its larger
scope and more universal relations. He was essentially a _doctrinaire_,
ready to sacrifice everything to what at the moment seemed the abstract
truth, and with no regard to historical antecedents and consequences,
provided those of scholastic logic were carefully observed. He has no
respect for usage or tradition except when they count in his favor, and
sees no virtue in that power of the past over the minds and conduct of
men which alone insures the continuity of national growth and is the
great safeguard of order and progress. The life of a nation was of less
importance to him than that it should be conformed to certain principles
of belief and conduct. Burke could distill political wisdom out of
history because he had a profound consciousness of the soul that
underlies and outlives events, and of the national character that gives
them meaning and coherence. Accordingly his words are still living and
operative, while Milton's pamphlets are strictly occasional and no longer
interesting except as they illustrate him. In the Latin ones especially
there is an odd mixture of the pedagogue and the public orator. His
training, so far as it was thorough, so far, indeed, as it may be called
optional, was purely poetical and artistic. A true Attic bee, he made
boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic honey.
Milton, indeed, could hardly have been a match for some of his
antagonists in theological and ecclesiastical learning. But he brought
into the contest a white heat of personal conviction that counted for
much. His self-consciousness, always active, identified him with the
cause he undertook. "I conceived myself to be now not as mine own person,
but as a member incorporate into that truth whereof I was persuaded and
whereof I had declared myself openly to be the partaker."[361]
Accordingly it does not so much seem that he is the advocate of
Puritanism, Freedom of Conscience, or the People of England, as that all
these are _he_, and that he is speaking for himself. He was not nice in
the choice of his missiles, and too often borrows a dirty lump from the
dunghill of Luther; but now and then the gnarled sticks of controversy
turn to golden arrows of Phoebus in his trembling hands, singing as they
fly and carrying their messages of doom in music. Then, truly, in his
prose as in his verse, his is the large utterance of the early gods, and
there is that in him which tramples all learning under his victorious
feet. From the first he looked upon himself as a man dedicated and set
apart. He had that sublime persuasion of a divine mission which sometimes
lifts his speech from personal to cosmopolitan significance; his genius
unmistakably asserts itself from time to time, calling down fire from
heaven to kindle the sacrifice of irksome private duty, and turning the
hearthstone of an obscure man into an altar for the worship of mankind.
Plainly enough here was a man who had received something other than
Episcopal ordination. Mysterious and awful powers had laid their
unimaginable hands on that fair head and devoted it to a nobler service.
Yet it must be confessed that, with the single exception of the
"Areopagitica," Milton's tracts are wearisome reading, and going through
them is like a long sea-voyage whose monotony is more than compensated
for the moment by a stripe of phosphorescence heaping before you in a
drift of star-sown snow, coiling away behind in winking disks of silver,
as if the conscious element were giving out all the moonlight it had
garnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed upon its pallid regent.
Which, being interpreted, means that his prose is of value because it is
Milton's, because it sometimes exhibits in an inferior degree the
qualities of his verse, and not for its power of thought, of reasoning,
or of statement. It is valuable, where it is best, for its inspiring
quality, like the fervencies of a Hebrew prophet. The English translation
of the Bible had to a very great degree Judaized, not the English mind,
but the Puritan temper. Those fierce enthusiasts could more easily find
elbow-room for their consciences in an ideal Israel than in a practical
England. It was convenient to see Amalek or Philistia in the men who met
them in the field, and one unintelligible horn or other of the Beast in
their theological opponents. The spiritual provincialism of the Jewish
race found something congenial in the English mind. Their national
egotism quintessentialized in the prophets was especially sympathetic
with the personal egotism of Milton. It was only as an inspired and
irresponsible person that he could live on decent terms with his own
self-confident individuality. There is an intolerant egotism which
identifies itself with omnipotence,[362] and whose sublimity is its
apology; there is an intolerable egotism which subordinates the sun to
the watch in its own fob. Milton's was of the former kind, and
accordingly the finest passages in his prose and not the least fine in
his verse are autobiographic, and this is the more striking that they are
often unconsciously so. Those fallen angels in utter ruin and combustion
hurled, are also cavaliers fighting against the Good Old Cause; Philistia
is the Restoration, and what Samson did, that Milton would have done if
he could.
The "Areopagitica" might seem an exception, but that also is a plea
rather than an argument, and his interest in the question is not one of
abstract principle, but of personal relation to himself. He was far more
rhetorician than thinker. The sonorous amplitude of his style was better
fitted to persuade the feelings than to convince the reason. The only
passages from his prose that may be said to have survived are emotional,
not argumentative, or they have lived in virtue of their figurative
beauty, not their weight of thought. Milton's power lay in dilation.
Touched by him, the simplest image, the most obvious thought,
"Dilated stood
Like Teneriffe or Atlas....
.... nor wanted in his grasp
What _seemed_ both spear and shield."
But the thin stiletto of Macchiavelli is a more effective weapon than
these fantastic arms of his. He had not the secret of compression that
properly belongs to the political thinker, on whom, as Hazlitt said of
himself, "nothing but abstract ideas makes any impression." Almost every
aphoristic phrase that he has made current is borrowed from some one of
the classics, like his famous
"License they mean when they cry liberty,"
from Tacitus. This is no reproach to him so far as his true function,
that of poet, is concerned. It is his peculiar glory that literature was
with him so much an art, an end and not a means. Of his political work he
has himself told us, "I should not choose this manner of writing,
wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself (led by the genial power of
nature to another task), I have the use, as I may account, but of my left
hand."
Mr. Masson has given an excellent analysis of these writings, selecting
with great judgment the salient passages, which have an air of
blank-verse thinly disguised as prose, like some of the corrupted
passages of Shakespeare. We are particularly thankful to him for his
extracts from the pamphlets written against Milton, especially for such
as contain criticisms on his style. It is not a little interesting to see
the most stately of poets reproached for his use of vulgarisms and low
words. We seem to get a glimpse of the schooling of his "choiceful sense"
to that nicety which could not be content till it had made his native
tongue "search all her coffers round." One cannot help thinking also that
his practice in prose, especially in the long involutions of Latin
periods, helped him to give that variety of pause and that majestic
harmony to his blank-verse which have made it so unapproachably his own.
Landor, who, like Milton, seems to have thought in Latin, has caught
somewhat more than others of the dignity of his gait, but without his
length of stride. Wordsworth, at his finest, has perhaps approached it,
but with how long an interval! Bryant has not seldom attained to its
serene equanimity, but never emulates its pomp. Keats has caught
something of its large utterance, but altogether fails of its nervous
severity of phrase. Cowper's muse (that moved with such graceful ease in
slippers) becomes stiff when (in his translation of Homer) she buckles on
her feet the cothurnus of Milton. Thomson grows tumid wherever he assays
the grandiosity of his model. It is instructive to get any glimpse of the
slow processes by which Milton arrived at that classicism which sets him
apart from, if not above, all our other poets.
In gathering up the impressions made upon us by Mr. Masson's work as a
whole, we are inclined rather to regret his copiousness for his own sake
than for ours. The several parts, though disproportionate, are valuable,
his research has been conscientious, and he has given us better means of
understanding Milton's time than we possessed before. But how is it about
Milton himself? Here was a chance, it seems to me, for a fine bit of
portrait-painting. There is hardly a more stately figure in literary
history than Milton's, no life in some of its aspects more tragical,
except Dante's. In both these great poets, more than in any others, the
character of the men makes part of the singular impressiveness of what
they wrote and of its vitality with after times. In them the man somehow
overtops the author. The works of both are full of autobiographical
confidences. Like Dante, Milton was forced to become a party by himself.
He stands out in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great
movement of the Civil War, apart from the supine acquiescence of the
Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man. Very
much alive he certainly was in his day. Has Mr. Masson made him alive to
us again? I fear not. At the same time, while we cannot praise either the
style or the method of Mr. Masson's work, we cannot refuse to be grateful
for it. It is not so much a book for the ordinary reader of biography as
for the student, and will be more likely to find its place on the
library-shelf than the centre-table. It does not in any sense belong to
light literature, but demands all the muscle of the trained and vigorous
reader. "Truly, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect
that it is Milton's life it is naught."
Mr. Masson's intimacy with the facts and dates of Milton's career renders
him peculiarly fit in some respects to undertake an edition of the
poetical works. His edition, accordingly, has distinguished merits. The
introductions to the several poems are excellent and leave scarcely
anything to be desired. The general Introduction, on the other hand,
contains a great deal that might well have been omitted, and not a little
that is positively erroneous. Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's
English seem often to be those of a Scotsman to whom English is in some
sort a foreign tongue. It is almost wholly inconclusive, because confined
to the Miltonic verse, while the basis of any altogether satisfactory
study should surely be the Miltonic prose; nay, should include all the
poetry and prose of his own age and of that immediately preceding it. The
uses to which Mr. Masson has put the concordance to Milton's poems tempt
one sometimes to class him with those whom the poet himself taxed with
being "the mousehunts and ferrets of an index." For example, what profits
a discussion of Milton's [Greek: hapax legomena], a matter in which
accident is far more influential than choice?[363] What sensible addition
is made to our stock of knowledge by learning that "the word _woman_ does
not occur in any form in Milton's poetry before 'Paradise Lost,'" and
that it is "exactly so with the word _female_"? Is it any way remarkable
that such words as _Adam, God, Heaven, Hell, Paradise, Sin, Satan_, and
_Serpent_ should occur "very frequently" in "Paradise Lost"? Would it not
rather have been surprising that they should not? Such trifles at best
come under the head of what old Warner would have called cumber-minds. It
is time to protest against this minute style of editing and commenting
great poets. Gulliver's microscopic eye saw on the fair skins of the
Brobdignagian maids of honor "a mole here and there as broad as a
trencher," and we shrink from a cup of the purest Hippocrene after the
critic's solar microscope has betrayed to us the grammatical,
syntactical, and, above all, hypothetical monsters that sprawl in every
drop of it. When a poet has been so much edited as Milton, the temptation
of whosoever undertakes a new edition to see what is not to be seen
becomes great in proportion as he finds how little there is that has not
been seen before.
Mr. Masson is quite right in choosing to modernize the spelling of
Milton, for surely the reading of our classics should be made as little
difficult as possible, and he is right also in making an exception of
such abnormal forms as the poet may fairly be supposed to have chosen for
melodic reasons. His exhaustive discussion of the spelling of the
original editions seems, however, to be the less called-for as he himself
appears to admit that the compositor, not the author, was supreme in
these matters, and that in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to the
thousand Milton had no system, but spelt by immediate inspiration. Yet
Mr. Masson fills nearly four pages with an analysis of the vowel sounds,
in which, as if to demonstrate the futility of such attempts so long as
men's ears differ, he tells us that the short _a_ sound is the same in
_man_ and _Darby_, the short _o_ sound in _God_ and _does_, and what he
calls the long _o_ sound in _broad_ and _wrath_. Speaking of the
apostrophe, Mr. Masson tells us that "it is sometimes inserted, not as a
possessive mark at all, but merely as a plural mark: _hero's_ for
_heroes_, _myrtle's_ for _myrtles_, _Gorgons_ and _Hydra's_, etc." Now,
in books printed about the time of Milton's the apostrophe was put in
almost at random, and in all the cases cited is a misprint, except in the
first, where it serves to indicate that the pronunciation was not heróës
as it had formerly been.[364] In the "possessive singular of nouns
already ending in _s_" Mr. Masson tells us, "Milton's general practice is
not to double the _s_; thus, _Nereus wrinkled look, Glaucus spell_. The
necessities of metre would naturally constrain to such forms. In a
possessive followed by the word _sake_ or the word _side_, dislike to
[of] the double sibilant makes us sometimes drop the inflection. In
addition to '_for righteousness' sake_' such phrases as '_for thy name
sake_' and '_for mercy sake_,' are allowed to pass; _bedside_ is normal
and _riverside_ nearly so." The necessities of metre need not be taken
into account with a poet like Milton, who never was fairly in his element
till he got off the soundings of prose and felt the long swell of his
verse under him like a steed that knows his rider. But does the dislike
of the double sibilant account for the dropping of the _s_ in these
cases? Is it not far rather the presence of the _s_ already in the sound
satisfying an ear accustomed to the English slovenliness in the
pronunciation of double consonants? It was this which led to such forms
as _conscience sake_ and _on justice side_, and which beguiled Ben Jonson
and Dryden into thinking, the one that _noise_ and the other that _corps_
was a plural,[365] What does Mr. Masson say to _hillside, Bankside,
seaside, Cheapside, spindleside, spearside, gospelside_ (of a church),
_nightside, countryside, wayside, brookside_, and I know not how many
more? Is the first half of these words a possessive? Or is it not rather
a noun impressed into the service as an adjective? How do such words
differ from _hilltop, townend, candlelight, rushlight, cityman_, and the
like, where no double _s_ can be made the scapegoat? Certainly Milton
would not have avoided them for their sibilancy, he who wrote
"And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses,"
"So in his seed all nations shall be blest,"
"And seat of Salmanasser whose success,"
verses that hiss like Medusa's head in wrath, and who was, I think,
fonder of the sound than any other of our poets. Indeed, in compounds of
the kind we always make a distinction wholly independent of the doubled
_s_. Nobody would boggle at _mountainside_; no one would dream of saying
_on the fatherside_ or _motherside_.
Mr. Masson speaks of "the Miltonic forms _vanquisht, markt, lookt_, etc."
Surely he does not mean to imply that these are peculiar to Milton?
Chapman used them before Milton was born, and pressed them farther, as in
_nak't_ and _saf't_ for _naked_ and _saved_. He often prefers the
contracted form in his prose also, showing that the full form of the past
participle in _ed_ was passing out of fashion, though available in
verse.[366] Indeed, I venture to affirm that there is not a single
variety of spelling or accent to be found in Milton which is without
example in his predecessors or contemporaries. Even _highth_, which is
thought peculiarly Miltonic, is common (in Hakluyt, for example), and
still often heard in New England. Mr. Masson gives an odd reason for
Milton's preference of it "as indicating more correctly the formation of
the word by the addition of the suffix _th_ to the adjective _high_." Is
an adjective, then, at the base of _growth_, _earth_, _birth_, _truth_,
and other words of this kind? Horne Tooke made a better guess than this.
If Mr. Masson be right in supposing that a peculiar meaning is implied in
the spelling _bearth_ (Paradise Lost, IX. 624), which he interprets as
"collective produce," though in the only other instance where it occurs
it is neither more nor less than _birth_, it should seem that Milton had
hit upon Horne Tooke's etymology. But it is really solemn trifling to lay
any stress on the spelling of the original editions, after having
admitted, as Mr. Masson has honestly done, that in all likelihood Milton
had nothing to do with it. And yet he cannot refrain. On the word
_voutsafe_ he hangs nearly a page of dissertation on the nicety of
Milton's ear. Mr. Masson thinks that Milton "must have had a reason for
it,"[367] and finds that reason in "his dislike to [of] the sound _ch_,
or to [of] that sound combined with _s_.... His fine ear taught him not
only to seek for musical effects and cadences at large, but also to be
fastidious as to syllables, and to avoid harsh or difficult conjunctions
of consonants, except when there might be a musical reason for harshness
or difficulty. In the management of the letter _s_, the frequency of
which in English is one of the faults of the speech, he will be found, I
believe, most careful and skilful. More rarely, I think, than in
Shakespeare will one word ending in _s_ be found followed immediately in
Milton by another word beginning with the same letter; or, if he does
occasionally pen such a phrase as _Moab's sons_, it will be difficult to
find in him, I believe, such a harsher example as _earth's substance_, of
which many writers would think nothing. [With the index to back him Mr.
Masson could safely say this.] The same delicacy of ear is even more
apparent in his management of the _sh_ sound. He has it often, of course;
but it may be noted that he rejects it in his verse when he can. He
writes _Basan_ for _Bashan_, _Sittim_ for _Shittim_, _Silo_ for _Shiloh_,
_Asdod_ for _Ashdod_. Still more, however, does he seem to have been wary
of the compound sound _ch_ as in _church_. Of his sensitiveness to this
sound in excess there is a curious proof in his prose pamphlet entitled
'An Apology against a Pamphlet, called A Modest Completion, etc.,' where,
having occasion to quote these lines from one of the Satires[368] of his
opponent, Bishop Hall,
"'Teach each hollow grove to sound his love,
Wearying echo with one changeless word,'
"he adds, ironically, 'And so he well might, and all his auditory besides,
with his _teach each!_'" Generalizations are always risky, but when
extemporized from a single hint they are maliciously so. Surely it needed
no great sensitiveness of ear to be set on edge by Hall's echo of _teach
each_. Did Milton reject the _h_ from _Bashan_ and the rest because he
disliked the sound of _sh_, or because he had found it already rejected
by the Vulgate and by some of the earlier translators of the Bible into
English? Oddly enough, Milton uses words beginning with _sh_ seven
hundred and fifty four times in his poetry, not to speak of others in
which the sound occurs, as, for instance, those ending in _tion_. Hall,
had he lived long enough, might have retorted on Milton his own
"Manli_est_, resolut_est_, br_east_,
As the magnetick hard_est_ iron draws,"
or his
"What moves thy inquisition?
Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall,
And my promotion thy destruction?"
With the playful controversial wit of the day he would have hinted that
too much _est-est_ is as fatal to a blank-verse as to a bishop, and that
danger was often incurred by those who too eagerly _shun_ned it. Nay, he
might even have found an echo almost tallying with his own in
"To begirt the almighty throne
Beseeching or besieging,"
a pun worthy of Milton's worst prose. Or he might have twitted him with
"a _seq_uent king who _seeks_." As for the _sh_ sound, a poet could
hardly have found it ungracious to his ear who wrote,
"Gna_sh_ing for angui_sh_ and despite and _sh_ame,"
or again,
"Then bursting forth
Afre_sh_ with con_sc_ious terrors vex me round
That rest or intermi_ssion_ none I find.
Before mine eyes in oppos_ition_ sits
Grim Death, my son."
And if Milton disliked the _ch_ sound, he gave his ears unnecessary pain
by verses such as these,--
"Straight cou_ch_es close; then, rising, _ch_anges oft
His cou_ch_ant wat_ch_, as one who _ch_ose his ground";
still more by such a juxtaposition as "matchless chief."[369] The truth
is, that Milton was a harmonist rather than a melodist. There are, no
doubt, some exquisite melodies (like the "Sabrina Fair ") among his
earlier poems, as could hardly fail to be the case in an age which
produced or trained the authors of our best English glees, as ravishing
in their instinctive felicity as the songs of our dramatists, but he also
showed from the first that larger style which was to be his peculiar
distinction. The strain heard in the "Nativity Ode," in the "Solemn
Music," and in "Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as regards metrical
construction, than anything that had thrilled the English ear before,
giving no uncertain augury of him who was to show what sonorous metal lay
silent till he touched the keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various
language, that have never since felt the strain of such prevailing
breath. It was in the larger movements of metre that Milton was great and
original. I have spoken elsewhere of Spenser's fondness for dilatation as
respects thoughts and images. In Milton it extends to the language also,
and often to the single words of which a period is composed. He loved
phrases of towering port, in which every member dilated stands like
Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and passages that stamp him great, the
verses do not dance interweaving to soft Lydian airs, but march rather
with resounding tread and clang of martial music. It is true that he is
cunning in alliterations, so scattering them that they tell in his
orchestra without being obvious, but it is in the more scientific region
of open-voweled assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet withhold
it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them), that he is an artist and a
master. He even sometimes introduces rhyme with misleading intervals
between and unobviously in his blank-verse:--
"There rest, if any rest can harbour _there_;
And, reassembling our afflicted powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how re_pair_,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not, what resolution from des_pair_."[370]