History of the Period.--James I. (1603-1625), son of Mary Stuart,
Queen of Scots, and the first of the Stuart line to reign in England,
succeeded Elizabeth. His stubbornness and folly not only ended the
intense patriotic feeling of the previous reign, but laid the
foundation for the deadly conflict that resulted. In fifty-four years
after the defeat of the Armada, England was plunged into civil war.
The guiding belief of James I. was that kings governed by divine
right, that they received from the Deity a title of which no one could
lawfully deprive them, no matter how outrageously they ruled, and that
they were not in any way responsible to Parliament or to the people.
In acting on this belief, he first trampled on the religious liberty
of his subjects. He drove from their churches hundreds of clergymen
who would not take oath that they believed that the prayer book of the
Church of England agreed in every way with the _Bible_. He boasted
that he would "harry out of the kingdom" those who would not conform.
During the reign of James I. and that of his son, Charles I.
(1625-1649) a worse ruler on the same lines, thousands of Englishmen
came to New England to enjoy religious liberty. The Pilgrim Fathers
landed at Plymouth in 1620. The exodus was very rapid during the next
twenty years, since those who insisted on worshiping God as they chose
were thrown into prison and sometimes had their ears cut off and their
noses mutilated. In the sixteenth century, the religious struggle was
between Catholics and Protestants, but in this age both of the
contestants were Protestant. The Church of England (Episcopal church)
was persecuting those who would not conform to its beliefs.
Side by side with the religious strife was a struggle for
constitutional government, for legal taxes, for the right of freedom
of speech in Parliament. James I. and Charles I. both collected
illegal taxes. Finally, when Charles became involved in war with
Spain, Parliament forced him in return for a grant of money to sign
the _Petition of Right_ (1628), which was in some respects a new
_Magna Charta_.
Charles did not keep his promises. For eleven years he ruled in a
despotic way without Parliament. In 1642 civil war broke out between
the Puritans, on one side, and the king, nobles, landed gentry, and
adherents of the Church of England, on the other. The Puritans under
the great Oliver Cromwell were victorious, and in 1649 they beheaded
Charles as a "tyrant, traitor and murderer." Cromwell finally became
Protector of the Commonwealth of England. The greatest Puritan writer,
John Milton, not only upheld the Commonwealth with powerful
argumentative prose, but also became the government's most important
secretary. Though his blindness would not allow him to write after
1652, he used to translate aloud, either into Latin or the language of
the foreign country, what Cromwell dictated or suggested. Milton's
under-secretary, Andrew Marvel, wrote down this translation.
[Illustration: CROMWELL DICTATING TO MILTON DISPATCHES TO THE KING OF
FRANCE CONCERNING THE MASSACRE IN PIEDMONT.[1] _From the painting by
Ford Madox Brown._]
The Puritans remained in the ascendancy until 1660, when the Stuart
line was restored in the person of Charles II.
The Puritan Ideals.--The Renaissance had at first seemed to promise
everything, the power to reveal the secrets of Nature, to cause her to
gratify man's every wish, and to furnish a perpetual fountain of happy
youth. These expectations had not been fulfilled. There were still
poverty, disease, and a longing for something that earth had not
given. The English, naturally a religious race, reflected much on
this. Those who concluded that life could never yield the pleasure
which man anticipates, who determines by purity of living to win a
perfect land beyond the shores of mortality, who made the New World of
earlier dreams a term synonymous with the New Jerusalem, were called
Puritans.
Their guide to this land was the _Bible_. Our _Authorized Version_
(1611), the one which is in most common use to-day, was made in the
reign of James I. From this time became much easier to get a copy of
the _Scriptures_, and their influence was now more potent than ever to
shape the ideals of the Puritans. In fact, it is impossible to
estimate the influence which this _Authorized Version_ has had on the
ideals and the literature of the English race. Had it not been for
this _Version_, current English speech and literature would be vastly
different. Such words and expressions as "scapegoat," "a labor of
love," "the eleventh hour," "to cast pearls before swine," and "a
howling wilderness" are in constant use because the language of this
translation of the _Bible_ has become incorporated in our daily
speech, as well as in our best literature.
The Puritan was so called because he wished to purify the established
church from what seemed to him great abuses. He accepted the faith of
John Calvin, who died in 1564. Calvinism taught that no earthly power
should intervene between a human soul and God, that life was an
individual moral struggle, the outcome of which would land the soul in
heaven or hell for all eternity, that beauty and art and all the
pleasures of the flesh were dangerous because they tended to wean the
soul from God.
The Puritan was an individualist. The saving of the soul was to him an
individual, not a social, affair. Bunyan's Pilgrim flees alone from
the wrath to come. The twentieth century, on the other hand, believes
that the regeneration of a human being is both a social and an
individual affair,--that the individual, surrounded by the forces of
evil, often has little opportunity unless society comes to his aid.
The individualism of the Puritan accomplished a great task in
preparing the way for democracy, for fuller liberty in church and
state, in both England and America.
Our study of the Puritan ideals embodied in literature takes us beyond
1660, the date of the Restoration, because after that time two great
Puritan writers, John Milton and John Bunyan, did some of their most
famous work, the one in retirement, the other in jail. Such work,
uninfluenced by the change of ideal after the Restoration, is properly
treated in this chapter. While a change may in a given year seem
sufficiently pronounced to become the basis for a new classification,
we should remember the literary influences never begin or end with
complete abruptness.
THE PROSE OF THE PURITAN AGE
Variety of Subject.--Prose showed development in several directions
during this Puritan age:--
I. The use of prose in argument and controversy was largely extended.
Questions of government and of religion were the living issues of the
time. Innumerable pamphlets and many larger books were written to
present different views. We may instance as types of this class almost
all the prose writings of John Milton (1608-1674).
II. English prose dealt with a greater variety of philosophical
subjects. Shakespeare had voiced the deepest philosophy in poetry, but
up to this time such subjects had found scant expression in prose.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is the great philosophical writer of the
age. In his greatest work, _Leviathan; or, The Matter, Form, and Power
of a Commonwealth_, he considers questions of metaphysical philosophy
and of government in a way that places him on the roll of famous
English philosophers.
III. History had an increasing fascination for prose writers. Sir
Walter Raleigh's _History of the World_ (1614) and Lord Clarendon's
_History of the Great Rebellion_, begun in 1646, are specially worthy
of mention.
IV. Prose was developing its capacity for expressing delicate shades
of humor. In Chaucer and in Shakespeare, poetry had already excelled
in this respect. Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), an Episcopal clergyman,
displays an almost inexhaustible fund of humor in his _History of the
Worthies of England_. We find scattered through his works passages
like these:--
"A father that whipped his son for swearing, and swore at him while
he whipped him, did more harm by his example than good by his
correction."
[Illustration: THOMAS FULLER.]
Speaking of a pious short person, Fuller says:--
"His soul had but a short diocese to visit, and therefore might the
better attend the effectual informing thereof."
Of the lark, he writes:--
"A harmless bird while living, not trespassing on grain, and
wholesome when dead, then filling the stomach with meat, as formerly
the ear with music."
Before Fuller, humor was rare in English prose writers, and it was not
common until the first quarter of the next century.
V. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682), an Oxford graduate and physician,
is best known as the author of three prose works: _Religio Medici
(Religion of a Physician_, 1642), _Vulgar Errors_ (1646), and
_Hydriotaphia_ or _Urn Burial_ (1658). In imagination and poetic
feeling, he has some kinship with the Elizabethans. He says in the
_Religio Medici_:--
"Now for my life, it is a miracle of thirty years, which to relate
were not a history but a piece of poetry, and would sound to common
ears like a fable... Men that look upon my outside, perusing only
my condition and fortunes, do err in my altitude; for I am above
Atlas's shoulders... There is surely a piece of divinity in
us--something that was before the elements and owes no homage unto
the sun."
The _Religio Medici_, however, gives, not the Elizabethan, but the
Puritan, definition of the world as "a place not to live in but to die
in."
_Urn Burial_, which is Browne's masterpiece, shows his power as a
prose poet of the "inevitable hour":--
"There is no antidote against the _opium_ of time... The greater
part must be content to be as though they had not been, to be found
in the register of God, not in the record of man... But man is a
Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave,
solemnizing nativities and deaths with equal luster, not omitting
ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature."
Browne's prose frequently suffers from the infusion of too many words
derived from the Latin, but his style is rhythmical and stately and
often conveys the same emotion as the notes of a great cathedral organ
at the evening twilight hour.
VI. _The Complete Angler_ of Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is so filled
with sweetness and calm delight in nature and life, that one does not
wonder that the book has passed through about two hundred editions. It
manifests a genuine love of nature, of the brooks, meadows, flowers.
In his pages we catch the odor from the hedges gay with wild flowers
and hear the rain falling softly on the green leaves:--
"But turn out of the way a little, good
scholar, towards yonder high honeysuckle
hedge; there we'll sit and sing, whilst this
shower falls so gently on the teeming earth,
and gives yet a sweeter smell to the lovely
flowers that adorn these verdant meadows."
[Illustration: IZAAK WALTON.]
[Illustration: JEREMY TAYLOR.]
VII. Of the many authors busily writing on theology, Jeremy Taylor
(1613-1667), an Episcopal clergyman, holds the chief place. His
imagination was so wide and his pen so facile that he has been called
a seventeenth-century prose Shakespeare. Taylor's _Holy Living_ and
_Holy Dying_ used to be read in almost every cottage. This passage
shows his powers of imagery as well as the Teutonic inclination to
consider the final goal of youth and beauty:--
"Reckon but from the sprightfulness
of youth, and the fair cheeks and full
eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness
and strong texture of the joints of five-and-twenty,
to the hollowness and dead
paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial,
and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very
strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts
of its hood, and at first it was fair as morning, and full with the
dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece ... and at night, having lost some
of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds
and outworn faces."
JOHN BUNYAN, 1628-1688
[Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN. _From the painting by Sadler, National
Portrait Gallery_.]
Life.--The Bedfordshire village of Elstow saw in 1628 the birth of
John Bunyan who, in his own peculiar field of literature, was to lead
the world. His father, Thomas Bunyan, was a brazier, a mender of pots
and pans, and he reared his son John to the same trade. In his
autobiography, John Bunyan says that his father's house was of "that
rank that is meanest and most despised of all the families in the
land."
The boy went to school for only a short time and learned but little
from any books except the _Bible_. The father, by marrying a second
time within a year after his wife's death, wounded the feelings of his
sixteen-year-old son sufficiently to cause the latter to enlist as a
soldier in the Civil War. At about the age of twenty, Bunyan married,
though neither he nor his wife had at the time so much as a dish or a
spoon.
Bunyan tells us that in his youth he was very wicked. Probably he
would have been so regarded from the point of view of a strict
Puritan. His worst offenses, however, seem to have been dancing on the
village green, playing hockey on Sundays, ringing bells to rouse the
neighborhood, and swearing. When he repented, his vivid imagination
made him think that he had committed the unpardonable sin. In the
terror that he felt at the prospect of the loss of his soul, he passed
through much of the experience that enabled him to write the
_Pilgrim's Progress_.
Bunyan became a preacher of God's word. Under trees, in barns, on the
village green, wherever people resorted, he told them the story of
salvation. Within six months after the Restoration, he was arrested
for preaching without Episcopal sanction. The officers took him away
from his little blind daughter. The roisterers of the Restoration
thought a brazier was too coarse to have feelings; yet Bunyan dropped
tears on the paper when he wrote of "the many hardships, miseries, and
wants that my poor family were like to meet with, should I be taken
from them, especially my poor blind child, who lay nearer to my heart
than all besides. Oh, the thoughts of the hardship my poor blind one
might undergo, would break my heart to pieces." In spite of his
dependent family and the natural right of the freedom of speech,
Bunyan was thrust into Bedford jail and kept a prisoner for nearly
twelve years. Had it not been for his imprisonment in this "squalid
den," of which he speaks in the _Pilgrim's Progress_, we should
probably be without that famous work, a part of which, at least, was
written in the jail.
In 1672, as a step toward restoring the Catholic religion, Charles II.
suspended all penal statutes against the dissenting clergy; Bunyan was
thereupon released from jail.
[Illustration: BEDFORD BRIDGE, SHOWING GATES AND JAIL. _From an old
print_.]
After his release, he settled down to his life's work of spreading the
Gospel by both pen and tongue. When he visited London to preach, it
was not uncommon for twelve hundred persons to come to hear him at
seven o'clock in the morning of a week day in winter.
The immediate cause of his death was a cold caught by riding in the
rain, on his way to try to reconcile a father and son. In 1688 Bunyan
died as he uttered these words, "Take me, for I come to Thee."
His Work.--Bunyan achieved the distinction of writing the greatest
of all allegories, the _Pilgrim's Progress_. This is the story of
Christian's journey through this life, the story of meeting Mr.
Worldly Wiseman, of the straight gate and the narrow path, of the
Delectable Mountains of Youth, of the valley of Humiliation, of the
encounter with Apollyon, of the wares of Vanity Fair, "kept all the
year long," of my lord Time-server, of Mr. Anything, of imprisonment
in Doubting Castle by Giant Despair, of the flowery land of Beulah,
lying beyond the valley of the Shadow of Death, through which a deep,
cold river runs, and of the city of All Delight on the other side.
This story still has absorbing interest for human beings, for the
child and the old man, the learned and the ignorant.
Bunyan wrote many other works, but none of them equals the _Pilgrim's
Progress_. His _Holy War_ is a powerful allegory, which has been
called a prose _Paradise Lost_. Bunyan also produced a strong piece of
realistic fiction, the _Life and Death of Mr. Badman_. This shows the
descent of a soul along the broad road. The story is the counterpart
of his great masterpiece, and ranks second to it in point of merit.
[Illustration: BUNYAN'S DREAM. _From Fourth Edition Pilgrim's
Progress, 1680_.]
General Characteristics.--Since the _Pilgrim's Progress_ has been
more widely read in England than any other book except the _Bible_, it
is well to investigate the secret of Bunyan's power.
In the first place, his style is simple. In the second place, rare
earnestness is coupled with this simplicity. He had something to say,
which in his inmost soul he felt to be of supreme importance for all
time. Only a great man can tell such truths without a flourish of
language, or without straining after effect. At the most critical part
of the journey of the Pilgrims, when they approach the river of death,
note that Bunyan avoids the tendency to indulge in fine writing, that
he is content to rely on the power of the subject matter, simply
presented, to make us feel the terrible ordeal:--
"Now I further saw that betwixt
them and the gate was a river; but
there was no bridge to go over, and the
river was very deep... The Pilgrims
then, especially Christian, began
to despond in their minds, and looked
this way and that, but no way could
be found by them by which they might
escape the river... They then addressed
themselves to the water, and
entering, Christian began to sink...
And with that, a great darkness and
horror fell upon Christian, so that he
could not see before him..."
"Now, upon the bank of the river, on the other side, they saw the
two shining men again, who there waited for them... Now you
must note that the city stood upon a mighty hill; but the Pilgrims
went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead
them up by the arms; they had likewise left their mortal garments
behind them in the river; for though they went in with them, they
came out without them."
[Illustration:
Let Badman's broken leg put check
To Badman's course of evil,
Lest, next time, Badman breaks his neck,
And so goes to the devil.
WOODCUT FROM THE FIRST EDITION OF MR. BADMAN]
Of all the words in the above selection, eighty per cent are
monosyllables. Few authors could have resisted the tendency to try to
be impressive at such a climax. One has more respect for this world,
on learning that it has set the seal of its approval on such earnest
simplicity and has neglected works that strive with every art to
attract attention.
Bunyan furthermore has a rare combination of imagination and dramatic
power. His abstractions became living persons. They have warmer blood
coursing in their veins than many of the men and women in modern
fiction. Giant Despair is a living giant. We can hear the clanking of
the chains and the groans of the captives in his dungeon. We are not
surprised to learn that Bunyan imagined that he saw and conversed with
these characters. The _Pilgrim's Progress_ is a prose drama. Note the
vivid dramatic presentation of the tendency to evil, which we all have
at some time felt threatening to wreck our nobler selves:--
"Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the way,
and said, 'I am void of fear in this matter; prepare thyself to die;
for I swear by my infernal den that thou shall go no further; here
will I spill thy soul.'"
It would be difficult to find English prose more simple, earnest,
strong, imaginative, and dramatic than this. Bunyan's style felt the
shaping influence of the _Bible_ more than of all other works
combined. He knew the _Scriptures_ almost by heart.
THE POETRY OF THE PURITAN AGE
Lyrical Verse.--The second quarter of the seventeenth century
witnessed an outburst of song that owed its inspiration to Elizabethan
lyrical verse.
Soon after 1600 a change in lyric poetry is noticeable. The sonnet
fell into disfavor with the majority of lyrists. The two poets of
greatest influence over this period, Ben Jonson and John Donne,
opposed the sonnet. Ben Jonson complained that it compels all ideas,
irrespective of their worth, to fill a space of exactly fourteen
lines, and that it therefore operates on the same principle as the bed
of Procrustes. The lyrics of this period, with the exception of those
by Milton, were usually less idealistic, ethereal, and inspired than
the corresponding work of the Elizabethans. This age was far more
imitative, but it chose to imitate Jonson and Donne in preference to
Shakespeare. The greatest lyrical poet of this time thus addresses
Jonson as a patron saint:--
"Candles I'll give to thee,
And a new altar;
And thou, Saint Ben, shall be
Writ in my psalter."[2]
Cavalier Poets.--Robert Herrick (1591-1674), Thomas Carew
(1598?-1639?), Sir John Suckling (1609-1642), and Richard Lovelace
(1618--1658) were a contemporary group of lyrists who are often called
Cavalier poets, because they sympathized with the Cavaliers or
adherents of Charles I.
[Illustration: ROBERT HERRICK.]
By far the greatest of this school is Robert Herrick, who stands in
the front rank of the second class of lyrical poets. He was a graduate
of Cambridge University, who by an accident of the time became a
clergyman. The parish, or "living," given him by the king, was in the
southwestern part of Devonshire. By affixing the title _Hesperides_ to
his volume of nearly thirteen hundred poems, Herrick doubtless meant
to imply that they were chiefly composed in the western part of
England. In the very first poem of this collection, he announces the
subject of his songs:--
"I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers;
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.
I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes;
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes
* * * * *
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the Fairie-king.
I write of hell; I sing and ever shall,
Of heaven, and hope to have it after all."
His lyric range was as broad as these lines indicate. The most of his
poems show the lightness of touch and artistic form revealed in the
following lines from _To the Virgins_:--
"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may:
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles to-day,
To-morrow will be dying."
His facility in melodious poetic expression is evident in this stanza
from _The Litany_, one of the poems in _Noble Numbers_, as the
collection of his religious verse is called:--
"When the passing-bell doth toll
And the furies in a shoal
Come to fright a parting soul,
Sweet Spirit, comfort me."
The lyric, _Disdain Returned_, of the courtier, Thomas Carew, shows
both a customary type of subject and the serious application often
given:--
"He that loves a rosy cheek,
Or a coral lip admires,
Or from starlike eyes doth seek
Fuel to maintain his fires,
As old time makes these decay,
So his flames must waste away."
Carew could write with facility on the subjects in vogue at court, but
when he ventures afield in nature poetry, he makes the cuckoo
hibernate! In his poem _The Spring_, he says:--
"...wakes in hollow tree
The drowsy Cuckoo and the Humble-bee."
In these lines from his poem _Constancy_, Sir John Suckling shows
that he is a typical Cavalier love poet:--
"Out upon it, I have loved
Three whole days together;
And am like to love three more,
If it prove fair weather."
From Richard Lovelace we have these exquisite lines written in
prison:--
"Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage."
To characterize the Cavalier school by one phrase, we might call them
lyrical poets in lighter vein. They usually wrote on such subjects as
the color in a maiden's cheek and lips, blossoms, meadows, May days,
bridal cakes, the paleness of a lover, and--
"...wassail bowls to drink,
Spiced to the brink."
but sometimes weightier subjects were chosen, when these lighter
things failed to satisfy.
Religious Verse.--Three lyrical poets, George Herbert (1593-1633),
Henry Vaughan (1622-1695), and Richard Crashaw (1612?-1650?), usually
chose religious subjects. George Herbert, a Cambridge graduate and
rector of Bemerton, near Salisbury, wrote _The Temple_, a book of
religious verse. His best known poem is _Virtue_:--
"Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,
The bridal of the earth and sky:
The dew shall weep the fall to night;
For thou must die."
The sentiment in these lines from his lyric _Providence_ has the
genuine Anglo-Saxon ring:--
"Hard things are glorious; easy things good cheap.
The common all men have; that which is rare,
Men therefore seek to have, and care to keep."
Henry Vaughan, an Oxford graduate and Welsh physician, shows the
influence of George Herbert. Vaughan would have been a great poet if
he could have maintained the elevation of these opening lines from
_The World_:--
"I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright."
Richard Crashaw, a Cambridge graduate and Catholic mystic, concludes
his poem, _The Flaming Heart_, with this touching prayer to Saint
Teresa:--
"By all of Him we have in thee
Leave nothing of myself in me.
Let me so read my life that I
Unto all life of mine may die."
His verse, like that of his contemporaries, is often marred by
fantastic conceits which show the influence of Donne. Although much of
Crashaw's poem, _The Weeper_, is beautiful, he calls the eyes of Mary
Magdalene:--
"Two walking baths, two weeping motions,
Portable and compendious oceans."
JOHN MILTON, 1608-1674
[Illustration: JOHN MILTON. _After a drawing by W. Faithorne, at
Bayfordbury_.]
His Youth.--The second greatest English poet was born in London,
eight years before the death of Shakespeare. John Milton's father
followed the business of a scrivener and drew wills and deeds and
invested money for clients. As he prospered at this calling, his
family did not suffer for want of money. He was a man of much culture
and a musical composer of considerable note.
A portrait of the child at the age of ten, the work of the painter to
the court, still exists and shows him to have been "a sweet, serious,
round-headed boy," who gave early promise of future greatness. His
parents, seeing that he acted as if he was guided by high ideals, had
the rare judgment to allow him to follow his own bent. They employed
the best teachers to instruct him at home. At the age of sixteen he
was fully prepared to enter Christ's College. Cambridge, where he took
both the B.A. and M.A. degrees.
[Illustration: JOHN MILTON, AET. 10.]
His Early Manhood and Life at Horton.--In 1632 Milton left Cambridge
and went to live with his father in a country home at Horton, about
twenty miles west of London. Milton had been intended for the church;
but he felt that he could not subscribe to its intolerance, and that
he had another mission to perform. His father accordingly provided
sufficient funds for maintaining him for over five years at Horton in
a life of studious leisure. The poet's greatest biographer, David
Masson, says "Until Milton was thirty-two years of age, if even then,
he did not earn a penny for himself." Such a course would ruin
ninety-nine out of every hundred talented young men; but it was the
making of Milton. He spent those years in careful study and in writing
his immortal early poems.
[Illustration: VISIT OF MILTON TO THE BLIND GALILEO AT THE VILLA
D'ARCETRI NEAR FLORENCE IN 1638. _From the painting by T. Lessi._]
In 1638, when he was in his thirtieth year, he determined to broaden
his views by travel. He went to Italy, which the Englishmen of his day
still regarded as the home of art, culture, and song. After about
fifteen months abroad, hearing that his countrymen were on the verge
of civil war, he returned home to play his part in the mighty tragedy
of the times.
Milton's "Left Hand."--In 1642 the Civil War broke out between the
Royalists and the Puritans. He took sides in the struggle for liberty,
not with his sword, but with his pen. During this time he wrote little
but prose. He regretted that the necessity of the time demanded prose,
in the writing of which, he says, "I have the use, as I may account
it, but of my left hand."
With that "left hand" he wrote much prose. There is one common quality
running through all his prose works, although they treat of the most
varied subjects. Every one of these works strikes a blow for fuller
liberty in some direction,--for more liberty in church, in state, and
in home relations, for the freedom of expressing opinions, and for a
system of education which should break away from the leading strings
of the inferior methods of the past. His greatest prose work is the
_Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing_.
Much of his prose is poetic and adorned with figures of rhetoric. He
frequently follows the Latin order, and inverts his sentences, which
are often unreasonably long. Sometimes his "left hand" astonishes us
by slinking mud at his opponents, and we eagerly await the loosing of
the right hand which was to give us _Paradise Lost_.
His Blindness.--The English government from 1649 to 1660 is known as
the Commonwealth. The two most striking figures of the time were
Oliver Cromwell, who in 1653 was styled the Lord Protector, and John
Milton, who was the Secretary for Foreign Tongues.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF MILTON'S SIGNATURE IN THE ELEVENTH YEAR
OF HIS BLINDNESS._From his application to wed Elizabeth Minshull.
Feb. 11, 1663._]
One of the greatest of European scholars, a professor at Leyden, named
Salmasius, had written a book attacking the Commonwealth and upholding
the late king. The Council requested Milton to write a fitting answer.
As his eyes were already failing him, he was warned to rest them; but
he said that he would willingly sacrifice his eyesight on the altar of
liberty. He accordingly wrote in reply his _Pro Populo Anglicano
Defensio_, a Latin work, which was published in 1651. This effort cost
him his eyesight. In 1652, at the age of forty-three, he was totally
blind. In his _Paradise Lost_, he thus alludes to his affliction:--
"Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But clouds instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off."
Life after the Restoration.--In 1660, when Charles II. was made
king, the leaders of the Commonwealth had to flee for their lives.
Some went to America for safety while others were caught and executed.
The body of Cromwell was taken from its grave in Westminster Abbey,
suspended from the gallows and left to dangle there. Milton was
concealed by a friend until the worst of the storm had blown over.
Then some influential friends interceded for him, and his blindness
probably won him sympathy.
[Illustration: COMUS TITLE PAGE.]
During his old age his literary work was largely dependent on the
kindness of friends, who read to him, and acted as his amanuenses. His
ideas of woman having been formed in the light of the old
dispensation, he had not given his three daughters such an education
as might have led them to take a sympathetic interest in his work.
They accordingly resented his calling on them for help.
During this period of his life, when he was totally blind, he wrote
_Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained_, and _Samson Agonistes_. He died in
1674, and was buried beside his father in the chancel of St. Giles,
Cripplegate, London.
Minor Poems.--In 1629, while Milton was a student at Cambridge, and
only twenty-one years old, he wrote a fine lyrical poem, entitled _On
the Morning of Christ's Nativity_. These 244 lines of verse show that
he did not need to be taught the melody of song any more than a young
nightingale.
Four remarkable poems were written during his years of studious
leisure at Horton,--_L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus,_ and _Lycidas.
L'Allegro_ describes the charms of a merry social life, and _Il
Penseroso_ voices the quiet but deep enjoyment of the scholar in
retirement. These two poems have been universal favourites.
_Comus_ is a species of dramatic composition known as a Masque, and it
is the greatest of its class. It far surpassess any work of a similar
kind by Ben Jonson, that prolific writer of Masques. Some critics,
like Taine and Saintsbury, consider _Comus_ the finest of Milton's
productions. Its 1023 lines can soon be read; and there are few poems
of equal length that will better repay careful reading.
_Comus_ is an immortal apotheosis of virtue. While in Geneva in 1639,
Milton was asked for his autograph and an expression of sentiment. He
chose the closing lines of _Comus_:--
[Illustration: MILTON'S MOTTO FROM COMUS, WITH AUTOGRAPH. _Written
in an album at Geneva_.]
_Lycidas_, one of the world's great elegies, was written on the death
of Milton's classmate, Edward King. Mark Pattison, one of Milton's
biographers, says: "In _Lycidas_ we have reached the high-water mark
of English poesy and of Milton's own production."
He is one of the four greatest English sonnet writers. Shakespeare
alone surpasses him in this field. Milton numbers among his pupils
Wordsworth and Keats, whose sonnets rank next in merit.
Paradise Lost; Its Inception and Dramatic Plan.--Cambridge
University has a list, written by Milton before he was thirty-five, of
about one hundred possible subjects for the great poem which he felt
it was his life's mission to give to the world. He once thought of
selecting Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table; but his final
choice was _Paradise Lost_, which stands first on this special list.
There are in addition four separate drafts of the way in which he
thought this subject should be treated. This proves that the great
work of a man like; Milton was planned while he was young. It is
possible that he may even have written a very small part of the poem
earlier than the time commonly assigned.
All four drafts show that his early intention was to make the poem a
drama, a gigantic Miracle play. The closing of the theaters and the
prejudice felt against them during the days of Puritan ascendancy may
have influenced Milton to forsake the dramatic for the epic form, but
he seems never to have shared the common prejudice against the drama
and the stage. His sonnet on Shakespeare shows in what estimation he
held that dramatist.
Subject Matter and Form.--About 1658, when Milton was a widower,
living alone with his three daughters, he began, in total blindness,
to dictate his _Paradise Lost_, sometimes relying on them but more
often on any kind friend who might assist him. The manuscript
accordingly shows a variety of handwriting. The work was published in
1667, after some trouble with a narrow-minded censor who had doubts
about granting a license.
The subject matter can be best given in Milton's own lines at the
beginning of the poem:--
"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing, Heavenly Muse..."
The poem treats of Satan's revolt in heaven, of his conflict with the
Almighty, and banishment with all the rebellious angels. Their new
home in the land of fire and endless pain is described with such a
gigantic grasp of the imagination, that the conception has colored all
succeeding theology.
The action proceeds with a council of the fallen angels to devise
means for alleviating their condition and annoying the Almighty. They
decide to strike him through his child, and they plot the fall of man.
In short, _Paradise Lost_ is an intensely dramatic story of the loss
of Eden. The greatest actors that ever sprang from a poet's brain
appear before us on the stage, which is at one time the sulphurous pit
of hell, at another the bright plains of heaven, and at another the
Elysium of our first parents.
In form the poem is an epic in twelve books, containing a total of
10,565 lines. It is written in blank verse of wonderful melody and
variety.
Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.--After finishing _Paradise
Lost_, Milton wrote two more poems, which he published in 1671.
_Paradise Regained_ is in great part a paraphrase of the first eleven
verses of the fourth chapters of _St. Matthew_. The poem is in four
books of blank verse and contains 2070 lines. Although it is written
with great art and finish, _Paradise Regained_ shows a falling off in
Milton's genius. There is less ornament and less to arouse human
interest.
_Samson Agonistes_ (Samson the Struggler) is a tragedy containing 1758
lines, based on the sixteenth chapter of _Judges_. This poem, modeled
after the Greek drama, is hampered by a strict observance of the
dramatic unities. It is vastly inferior to the _Paradise Lost. Samson
Agonistes_ contains scarcely any of the glorious imagery of Milton's
earlier poems. It has been called "the most unadorned poem that can be
found."
CHARACTERISTICS OF MILTON'S POETRY
Variety in his Early Work.--A line in _Lycidas_ says:--
"He touched the tender stops of various quills,"
and this may be said of Milton. His early poems show great variety.
There are the dirge notes in _Lycidas_; the sights, sounds, and odors
of the country, in _L'Allegro_; the delights of "the studious
cloister's pale," in _Il Penseroso_; the impelling presence of his
"great Task-Master," in the sonnets.
Although Milton is noted for his seriousness and sublimity, we must
not be blind to the fact that his minor poems show great delicacy of
touch. The epilogue of the Spirit at the end of _Comus_ is an instance
of exquisite airy fancy passing into noble imagination at the close.
In 1638 Sir Henry Wotton wrote to Milton this intelligent criticism of
_Comus_: "I should much commend the tragical part, if the lyrical did
not ravish me with a certain Doric delicacy in your Songs and Odes,
whereunto I must plainly confess to have seen yet nothing parallel in
our language _Ipsa mollities_."
Limitations.--In giving attention to Milton's variety, we should not
forget that when we judge him by Elizabethan standards his limitations
are apparent. As varied as are his excellences, his range is far
narrower than Shakespeare's. He has little sense of humor and less
sympathy with human life than either Shakespeare or Burns. Milton
became acquainted with flowers through the medium of a book before he
noticed them in the fields. Consequently, in speaking of flowers and
birds, he sometimes makes those mistakes to which the bookish man is
more prone than the child who first hears the story of Nature from her
own lips. Unlike Shakespeare and Burns, Milton had the misfortune to
spend his childhood in a large city. Again, while increasing age
seemed to impose no limitations on Shakespeare's genius, his touch
being as delicate in _The Tempest_ as in his first plays, Milton's
style, on the other hand, grew frigid and devoid of imagery toward the
end of his life.
Sublimity.--The most striking characteristic of Milton's poetry is
sublimity, which consists, first, in the subject matter. In the
opening lines of _Paradise Lost_ he speaks of his "adventurous song"--
"That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme."
Milton succeeded in his intention. The English language has not
another poem that approaches _Paradise Lost_ in sustained sublimity.
In the second place, we must note the sublimity of treatment. Milton's
own mind was cast in a sublime mold. This quality of mind is evident
even in his figures of rhetoric. The Milky Way appears to him as the
royal highway to heaven:--
"A broad and ample road, whose dust is gold,
And pavement stars."[3]
When Death and Satan meet, Milton wishes the horror of the scene to
manifest something of the sublime. What other poet could, in fewer
words, have conveyed a stronger impression of the effect of the frown
of those powers?
"So frowned the mighty combatants, that Hell
Grew darker at their frown."[4]
George Saintsbury's verdict is approved by the majority of the
greatest modern critics of Milton: "In loftiness--sublimity of
thought, and majesty of expression, both sustained at almost
superhuman pitch, he has no superior, and no rival except Dante."
Mastery of Verse.--Milton's verse, especially in _Paradise Lost_, is
such a symphony of combined rhythm, poetic expression, and thought; it
is so harmonious, so varied, and yet so apparently simple in its
complexity, that it has never been surpassed in kind.
His mastery of rhythm is not so evident in a single line as in a group
of lines. The first sentence in _Paradise Lost_ contains sixteen
lines, and yet the rhythm, the pauses, and the thought are so combined
as to make oral reading easy and the meaning apparent. The conception
of the music of the spheres in their complex orbits finds some analogy
in the harmony of the combined rhythmical units of his verse.
Denied the use of his eyes as a guide to the form of his later verse,
he must have repeated aloud these groups of lines and changed them
until their cadence satisfied his remarkably musical ear. Lines like
these show the melody of which this verse is capable:--
"Heaven opened wide
Her ever-during gates, harmonious sound
On golden hinges moving."[5]
To begin with, he had, like Shakespeare and Keats an instinctive
feeling for the poetic value of words and phrases. Milton's early
poems abound in such poetic expressions as "the frolic wind," "the
slumbring morn," "linkèd sweetness," "looks commercing with the
skies," "dewy-feathered sleep," "the studious cloister's pale," "a dim
religious light," the "silver lining" of the cloud, "west winds with
musky wing," "the laureate hearse where Lycid lies." His poetic
instinct enabled him to take common prosaic words and, by merely
changing the position of the adjective, transmute them into
imperishable verse. His "darkness visible" and "human face divine" are
instances of this power.
[Illustration: MILTON DICTATING PARADISE LOST TO HIS DAUGHTERS.
_From the painting by Munkacsy_.]
Twentieth century criticism is more fully recognizing the debt of
subsequent poetic literature to Milton. Saintsbury writes:--
"Milton's influence is omnipresent in almost all later English
poetry, and in not a little of later prose English literature. At
first, at second, at third, hand, he has permeated almost all his
successors."[6]
How the Paradise Lost has affected Thought.--Few people realize how
profoundly this poem has influenced men's ideas of the hereafter. The
conception of hell for a long time current was influenced by those
pictures which Milton painted with darkness for his canvas and the
lightning for his brush. Our pictures of Eden and of heaven have also
felt his touch. Theology has often looked through Milton's imagination
at the fall of the rebel angels and of man. Huxley says that the
cosmogony which stubbornly resists the conclusions of science, is due
rather to the account in _Paradise Lost_ than to _Genesis_.
Many of Milton's expressions have become crystallized in modern
thought. Among such we may mention:--
"The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven,
What matter where, if I be still the same?"[7]
"To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven."[8]
"...Who overcomes
By force hath overcome but half his foe."[9]
The effect of _Paradise Lost_ on English thought is more a resultant
of the entire poem than of detached quotations. _L'Allegro_ and _Il
Penseroso_ have furnished as many current quotations as the whole of
_Paradise Lost_.
The Embodiment of High Ideals.---No poet has embodied in his verse
higher ideals than Milton. When twenty-three, he wrote that he
intended to use his talents--
"As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye."[10]
Milton's poetry is not universally popular. He deliberately selected
his audience. These lines from _Comus_ show to whom he wished to
speak:--
"Yet some there be that by due steps aspire
To lay their just hands on that golden key
That opes the palace of eternity.
To such my errand is."
He kept his promise of writing something which speaks for liberty and
for nobility of soul and which the world would not willingly let die.
His ideals react on us and raise us higher than we were. To him we may
say with Wordsworth:--
"Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea,
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free." [11]
SUMMARY
The Puritan age was one of conflict in religious and political ideals.
James I. and Charles I. trampled on the laws and persecuted the
Puritans so rigorously that many of them fled to New England. Civil
war, in which the Puritans triumphed, was the result.
The Puritans, realizing that neither lands beyond the sea nor the New
Learning could satisfy the aspirations of the soul, turned their
attention to the life beyond. Bunyan's Pilgrim felt that the sole duty
of life was to fight the forces of evil that would hold him captive in
the City of Destruction and to travel in the straight and narrow path
to the New Jerusalem. Life became a ceaseless battle of the right
against the wrong. Hence, much of the literature in both poetry and
prose is polemical. Milton's _Paradise Lost_ is an epic of war between
good and evil. The book that had the most influence in molding the
thought of the time was the King James (1611) version of the _Bible_.
The minor prose deals with a variety of subjects. There are
argumentative, philosophical, historical, biographical, and
theological prose works; but only the fine presentation of nature and
life in _The Complete Angler_ interests the general reader of to-day,
although the grandeur of Milton's _Areopagitica_, the humor of Thomas
Fuller, the stately rhythmical prose of Sir Thomas Browne, and the
imagery and variety of Jeremy Taylor deserve more readers.
Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ is the masterpiece of Puritan prose,
written in the simple, direct language of the 1611 version of the
_Bible_. The book is a prose epic of the journey of the Puritan
Christian from the City of Destruction to the New Jerusalem.
The Cavalier poets wrote much lyrical verse, mostly in lighter vein,
but the religious poets strike a deeper note. The work of these minor
poets is often a reflection of the Elizabethan lyrics of Donne and
Jonson.
John Milton, who has the creative power of the Elizabethans, is the
only great poet of the period. His greatest poems are _L'Allegro, Il
Penseroso, Lycidas, Comus,_ and _Paradise Lost_. In sublimity of
subject matter and cast of mind, in nobility of ideals, in expression
of the conflict between good and evil, he is the fittest
representative of the Puritan spirit in literature.
REFERENCES FOR FUTURE STUDY
HISTORICAL
Read the chapters on this period in Gardiner,[12] Walker, Cheney,
Lingard, or Green. For the social life, see Traill, IV. The monumental
history of this time has been written in eighteen volumes by Samuel
Rawson Gardiner. His _Oliver Cromwell_, I vol., is excellent, as is
also Frederick Harrison's _Oliver Cromwell_.
LITERARY
The _Cambridge History of English Literature_, Vol. VII.
Courthope's _History of English Poetry_, Vol. III.
Masterman's _The Age of Milton_.
Saintsbury's _A History of Elizabethan Literature_ (comes down to
1660).
Dowden's _Puritan and Anglican Studies in Literature.
Dictionary of National Biography_ (for lives of minor writers).
Froude's _John Bunyan._
Brown's _John Bunyan, his Life, Times, and Works._
Macaulay's Life of Bunyan in _Encylopaedia Britannica_ or in his
_Essays._
Macaulay's _Essay on Southey's Edition of the Pilgrim's Progress._
Masson's _The Life of John Milton, Narrated in Connection with the
Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary history of his Time_ (6
vols.).
Masson's _Poetical Works of John Milton_, 3 vols., contains
excellent introductions and notes, and is the standard edition.
Raleigh's _Milton_.
Pattison's _Milton_. (E.M.L.)
Woodhull's _The Epic of Paradise Lost_.
Macaulay's _Essay on Milton_.
Lowell's _Milton_ (in _Among My Books_).
Addison's criticisms on Milton, beginning in number 267 of _The
Spectator_, are suggestive.
SUGGESTED READINGS WITH QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS
Prose.--The student will obtain a fair idea of the prose of this age
by reading Milton's _Areopagitica_, Cassell's _National Library_ (15
cents), or _Temple Classics_ (45 cents); Craik,[13] II., 471-475; the
selections from Thomas Hobbes, Craik, II., 214-221; from Thomas
Fuller, Craik, II., 377-387; from Sir Thomas Browne, Craik, II.,
318-335; from Jeremy Taylor, Craik, II., 529-542; and from Izaak
Walton, Craik, II., 343-349. Manly, II., has selections from all these
writers; the _Oxford Treasury_ and _Century_, from all but Hobbes. The
student who has the time will wish to read _The Complete Angler_
entire (Cassell's _National Library_, 15 cents; or _Temple Classics_,
45 cents).
Compare (_a_) the sentences, (_b_) general style, and (_c_) worth of
the subject matter of these authors; then, to note the development of
English prose, in treatment of subject as well as in form, compare
these works with those of (1) Wycliffe and Mandeville in the
fourteenth century, (2) Malory in the fifteenth, and (3) Tyndale,
Lyly, Sidney, Hooker, and Bacon (_e.g._ essay _Of Study_, 1597), in
the sixteenth.
Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_ should be read entire (_Everyman's
Library_, 35 cents; Cassell's _National Library_, 15 cents; _Temple
Classics_, 45 cents). Selections may be found in Craik, III., 148-166;
Manly, II., 139-143; _Oxford Treasury_, 83-85; _Century_, 225-235.
In what does the secret of Bunyan's popularity consist--in his style,
or in his subject matter, or in both? What is specially noteworthy
about his style? Point out some definite ways in which his style was
affected by another great work. Suppose that Bunyan had held the
social service ideals of the twentieth century, how might his idea of
saving souls have been modified?
Lyrical Poetry.--Specimens of the best work of Herrick, Carew,
Suckling, Lovelace, Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw may be found in
Ward, II.; Bronson, II.; _Oxford Treasury_, III.; Manly, I.; and
_Century_.
What is the typical subject matter of the Cavalier poets? What subject
do Herbert, Vaughan, and Crashaw choose? Which lyric of each of these
poets pleases you most? What difference do you note between these
lyrics and those of the Elizabethan age? What Elizabethan lyrists had
most influence on these poets? What are some of the special defects of
the lyrists of this age?
John Milton.--_L'Allegro_, _Il Penseroso_, _Comus_, _Lycidas_
(American Book Company's _Eclectic English Classics_, 20 cents), and
_Paradise Lost_, Books I. and II. (same series), should be read. These
poems, including his excellent _Sonnets_, may also be found in
Cassell's _National Library_, _Everyman's Library_, and the _Temple
Classics_. Selections are given in Ward, II., 306-379; Bronson, II.,
334-423; _Oxford Treasury_, III., 34-70: Manly, I., and _Century_,
_passim_.
Which is the greatest of his minor poets? Why? Is the keynote of
_Comus_ in accord with Puritan ideals? Are there qualities in
_Lycidas_ that justify calling it "the high-water mark" of English
lyrical poetry? Which poem has most powerfully affected theological
thought? Which do you think is oftenest read to-day? Why? What are the
most striking characteristics of Milton's poetry? Contrast Milton's
greatness, limitations, and ideals of life, with Shakespeare's.
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER V:
[Footnote 1: See Milton's Sonnet: _On the Late Massacre in Piedmont_.]
[Footnote 2: Robert Herrick's _Prayer to Ben Jonson_.]
[Footnote 3: _Paradise Lost_, Book VII., lines 577-578.]
[Footnote 4: _Ibid_., Book II., lines 719-720.]
[Footnote 5: _Paradise Lost_, Book VII., lines 207-209.]
[Footnote 6: The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. VII.,
p.156.]
[Footnote 7: _Paradise Lost_, Book I., line 254.]
[Footnote 8: _Ibid_, line 262.]
[Footnote 9: _Ibid_, line 649.]
[Footnote 10: Sonnet: _On His Having Arrived at the Age of
Twenty-three_.]
[Footnote 11: _Milton: A Sonnet._]
[Footnote 12: For full titles, see list on p. 50.]
[Footnote 13: For full titles, see p.6.]