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Footnote 34:
An address delivered in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, on the
13th of February 1888, at the unveiling of a Memorial Window presented
by Mr. George W. Childs of Philadelphia.
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The most eloquent voice of our century uttered, shortly before leaving
the world, a warning cry against “the Anglo-Saxon contagion.” The
tendencies and aims, the view of life and the social economy of the
ever-multiplying and spreading Anglo-Saxon race, would be found
congenial, this prophet feared, by all the prose, all the vulgarity
amongst mankind, and would invade and overpower all nations. The true
ideal would be lost, a general sterility of mind and heart would set in.
The prophet had in view, no doubt, in the warning thus given, us and our
colonies, but the United States still more. There the Anglo-Saxon race
is already most numerous, there it increases fastest; there material
interests are most absorbing and pursued with most energy; there the
ideal, the saving ideal, of a high and rare excellence, seems perhaps to
suffer most danger of being obscured and lost. Whatever one may think of
the general danger to the world from the Anglo-Saxon contagion, it
appears to me difficult to deny that the growing greatness and influence
of the United States does bring with it some danger to the ideal of a
high and rare excellence. The _average man_ is too much a religion
there; his performance is unduly magnified, his shortcomings are not
duly seen and admitted. A lady in the State of Ohio sent to me only the
other day a volume on American authors; the praise given throughout was
of such high pitch that in thanking her I could not forbear saying that
for only one or two of the authors named was such a strain of praise
admissible, and that we lost all real standard of excellence by praising
so uniformly and immoderately. She answered me with charming good
temper, that very likely I was quite right, but it was pleasant to her
to think that excellence was common and abundant. But excellence is not
common and abundant; on the contrary, as the Greek poet long ago said,
excellence dwells among rocks hardly accessible, and a man must almost
wear his heart out before he can reach her. Whoever talks of excellence
as common and abundant, is on the way to lose all right standard of
excellence. And when the right standard of excellence is lost, it is not
likely that much which is excellent will be produced.
To habituate ourselves, therefore, to approve, as the Bible says, things
that are really excellent, is of the highest importance. And some
apprehension may justly be caused by a tendency in Americans to take,
or, at any rate, attempt to take, profess to take, the average man and
his performances too seriously, to over-rate and over-praise what is not
really superior.
But we have met here to-day to witness the unveiling of a gift in
Milton’s honor, and a gift bestowed by an American, Mr. Childs of
Philadelphia; whose cordial hospitality so many Englishmen, I myself
among the number, have experienced in America. It was only last autumn
that Stratford-upon-Avon celebrated the reception of a gift from the
same generous donor in honor of Shakespeare. Shakespeare and Milton—he
who wishes to keep his standard of excellence high, cannot choose two
better objects of regard and honor. And it is an American who has chosen
them, and whose beautiful gift in honor of one of them, Milton, with Mr.
Whittier’s simple and true lines inscribed upon it, is unveiled to-day.
Perhaps this gift in honor of Milton, of which I am asked to speak, is,
even more than the gift in honor of Shakespeare, one to suggest edifying
reflections to us.
Like Mr. Whittier, I treat the gift of Mr. Childs as a gift in honor of
Milton, although the window given is in memory of his second wife,
Catherine Woodcock, the “late espoused saint” of the famous sonnet, who
died in child-bed at the end of the first year of her marriage with
Milton, and who lies buried here with her infant. Milton is buried in
Cripplegate, but he lived for a good while in this parish of St.
Margaret’s, Westminster, and here he composed part of _Paradise Lost_,
and the whole of _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson Agonistes_. When death
deprived him of the Catherine whom the new window commemorates, Milton
had still some eighteen years to live, and Cromwell, his “chief of men,”
was yet ruling England. But the Restoration, with its “Sons of Belial,”
was not far off; and in the meantime Milton’s heavy affliction had laid
fast hold upon him, his eyesight had failed totally, he was blind. In
what remained to him of life he had the consolation of producing the
_Paradise Lost_ and the _Samson Agonistes_, and such a consolation we
may indeed count as no slight one. But the daily life of happiness in
common things and in domestic affections—a life of which, to Milton as
to Dante, too small a share was given—he seems to have known most, if
not only, in his one married year with the wife who is here buried. Her
form “vested all in white,” as in his sonnet he relates that after her
death she appeared to him, her face veiled, but with “love, sweetness,
and goodness” shining in her person,—this fair and gentle daughter of
the rigid sectarist of Hackney, this lovable companion with whom Milton
had rest and happiness one year, is a part of Milton indeed, and in
calling up her memory, we call up his.
And in calling up Milton’s memory we call up, let me say, a memory upon
which, in prospect of the Anglo-Saxon contagion and of its dangers
supposed and real, it may be well to lay stress even more than upon
Shakespeare’s. If to our English race an inadequate sense for perfection
of work is a real danger, if the discipline of respect for a high and
flawless excellence is peculiarly needed by us, Milton is of all our
gifted men the best lesson, the most salutary influence. In the sure and
flawless perfection of his rhythm and diction he is as admirable as
Virgil or Dante, and in this respect he is unique amongst us. No one
else in English literature and art possesses the like distinction.
Thomson, Cowper, Wordsworth, all of them good poets who have studied
Milton, followed Milton, adopted his form, fail in their diction and
rhythm if we try them by that high standard of excellence maintained by
Milton constantly. From style really high and pure Milton never departs;
their departures from it are frequent.
Shakespeare is divinely strong, rich, and attractive. But sureness of
perfect style Shakespeare himself does not possess. I have heard a
politician express wonder at the treasures of political wisdom in a
certain celebrated scene of _Troilus and Cressida_; for my part I am at
least equally moved to wonder at the fantastic and false diction in
which Shakespeare has in that scene clothed them. Milton, from one end
of _Paradise Lost_ to the other, is in his diction and rhythm constantly
a great artist in the great style. Whatever may be said as to the
subject of his poem, as to the conditions under which he received his
subject and treated it, that praise, at any rate, is assured to him.
For the rest, justice is not at present done, in my opinion, to Milton’s
management of the inevitable matter of a Puritan epic, a matter full of
difficulties, for a poet. Justice is not done to the _architectonics_,
as Goethe would have called them, of _Paradise Lost_; in these, too, the
power of Milton’s art is remarkable. But this may be a proposition which
requires discussion and development for establishing it, and they are
impossible on an occasion like the present.
That Milton, of all our English race, is by his diction and rhythm the
one artist of the highest rank in the great style whom we have; this I
take as requiring no discussion, this I take as certain.
The mighty power of poetry and art is generally admitted. But where the
soul of this power, of this power at its best, chiefly resides, very
many of us fail to see. It resides chiefly in the refining and elevation
wrought in us by the high and rare excellence of the great style. We may
feel the effect without being able to give ourselves clear account of
its cause, but the thing is so. Now, no race needs the influences
mentioned, the influences of refining and elevation, more than ours; and
in poetry and art our grand source for them is Milton.
To what does he owe this supreme distinction? To nature first and
foremost, to that bent of nature for inequality which to the worshippers
of the average man is so unacceptable; to a gift, a divine favor. “The
older one grows,” says Goethe, “the more one prizes natural gifts,
because by no possibility can they be procured and stuck on.” Nature
formed Milton to be a great poet. But what other poet has shown so
sincere a sense of the grandeur of his vocation, and a moral effort so
constant and sublime to make and keep himself worthy of it? The Milton
of religious and political controversy, and perhaps of domestic life
also, is not seldom disfigured by want of amenity, by acerbity. The
Milton of poetry, on the other hand, is one of those great men “who are
modest”—to quote a fine remark of Leopardi, that gifted and stricken
young Italian, who in his sense for poetic style is worthy to be named
with Dante and Milton—“who are modest, because they continually compare
themselves, not with other men, but with that idea of the perfect which
they have before their mind.” The Milton of poetry is the man, in his
own magnificent phrase, of “devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit that
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.” And finally, the Milton of poetry is, in his own words
again, the man of “industrious and select reading.” Continually he lived
in companionship with high and rare excellence, with the great Hebrew
poets and prophets, with the great poets of Greece and Rome. The Hebrew
compositions were not in verse, and can be not inadequately represented
by the grand, measured prose of our English Bible. The verse of the
poets of Greece and Rome no translation can adequately reproduce. Prose
cannot have the power of verse; verse-translation may give whatever of
charm is in the soul and talent of the translator himself, but never the
specific charm of the verse and poet translated. In our race are
thousands of readers, presently there will be millions, who know not a
word of Greek and Latin, and will never learn those languages. If this
host of readers are ever to gain any sense of the power and charm of the
great poets of antiquity, their way to gain it is not through
translations of the ancients, but through the original poetry of Milton,
who has the like power and charm, because he has the like great style.
Through Milton they may gain it, for, in conclusion, Milton is English;
this master in the great style of the ancients is English. Virgil, whom
Milton loved and honored, has at the end of the _Æneid_ a noble passage,
where Juno, seeing the defeat of Turnus and the Italians imminent, the
victory of the Trojan invaders assured, entreats Jupiter that Italy may
nevertheless survive and be herself still, may retain her own mind,
manners, and language, and not adopt those of the conqueror.
“Sit Latium, sint Albani per secula reges!”
Jupiter grants the prayer; he promises perpetuity and the future to
Italy—Italy reinforced by whatever virtue the Trojan race has, but
Italy, not Troy. This we may take as a sort of parable suiting
ourselves. All the Anglo-Saxon contagion, all the flood of Anglo-Saxon
commonness, beats vainly against the great style but cannot shake it,
and has to accept its triumph. But it triumphs in Milton, in one of our
own race, tongue, faith, and morals. Milton has made the great style no
longer an exotic here; he has made it an inmate amongst us, a leaven,
and a power. Nevertheless he, and his hearers on both sides of the
Atlantic, are English, and will remain English—
“Sermonem Ausonii patrium moresque tenebunt.”
The English race overspreads the world, and at the same time the ideal
of an excellence the most high and the most rare abides a possession
with it forever.