Produced by Al Haines
MILTON
BY
JOHN BAILEY
AUTHOR OF "THE CLAIMS OF FRENCH POETRY,"
"DR. JOHNSON AND HIS CIRCLE," ETC.
LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
[Transcriber's note: Page numbers in this book are indicated by numbers
enclosed in curly braces, e.g. {99}. They have been located where page
breaks occurred in the original book, in accordance with Project
Gutenberg's FAQ-V-99. For its Index, a page number has been placed
only at the start of that section.]
First printed Spring 1915
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I INTRODUCTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
II MILTON'S LIFE AND CHARACTER . . . . . . . . . . . 28
III THE EARLIER POEMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
IV _PARADISE LOST_ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
V _PARADISE REGAINED_ AND _SAMSON AGONISTES_ . . . 190
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254
Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee; she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
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,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
WORDSWORTH.
O Mighty-mouth'd inventor of harmonies,
O skill'd to sing of Time or Eternity,
God-gifted organ-voice of England,
Milton, a name to resound for ages;
Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,
Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,
Tower, as the deep-doomed empyrean
Rings to the roar of an angel onset--
Me rather all that bowery loneliness,
The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,
And bloom profuse and cedar arches
Charm, as a wanderer out in ocean,
Where some refulgent sunset of India
Streams o'er a rich ambrosial ocean isle,
And crimson-hued the stately palm-woods
Whisper in odorous heights of even.
TENNYSON.
{7}
MILTON
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
When a man spends a day walking in hilly country he is often astonished
at the new shape taken on by a mountain when it is looked at from a new
point of view. Sometimes the change is so great as to make it almost
unrecognizable. He who has seen Snowdon from Capel-Curig is reluctant
to admit that what he sees from Llanberis is the same mountain: he who
has seen the Langdale Pikes from Glaramara is amazed at their beauty as
he gazes at them from the garden at Low Wood. These are extreme cases.
But to a less degree every traveller among the mountains is
experiencing the same thing all day. He finds the eternal hills the
most plastic of forms. At each change in his own position there is a
change in the shape of a mountain under which he is passing. He may
keep his eye fixed upon it but insensibly, as he watches, the long {8}
chain will become a vertical peak, the jagged precipice a round green
slope.
Much the same process goes on as the generations of men pass on their
way, with their eyes fixed, as they cannot help being, on the great
human heights of their own and earlier days. Many of these look great
only when you are close to them. At a little distance they are seen to
be small and soon they disappear altogether. The true mountains remain
but they do not keep the same shape. Each succeeding generation sees
the peaks of humanity from a new point of view which cannot be exactly
the same as that of its predecessor. Each age reshapes for itself its
conception of art, of poetry, of religion, and of human life which
includes them all. Of some of the masters in each of these worlds it
feels that they belong not to their own generation only but to all time
and so to itself. It cannot be satisfied, therefore, with what its
predecessors have said about them. It needs to see them again freshly
for itself, and put into words so far as it can its own attitude
towards them.
That is the excuse for the new books which will always be written every
few years about Hebrew Religion, or Greek Art, or the French
Revolution, or about such men as Plato, {9} St. Paul, Shakspeare,
Napoleon. It is the excuse even for a much humbler thing, for the
addition of a volume on Milton to the Home University Library. The
object of this Library is not, indeed, to say anything startlingly new
about the great men with whom it deals. Rather the contrary, in fact:
for to say anything startlingly new about Shakspeare or Plato would
probably be merely to say what is absurd or false. The main outlines
of these great figures have long been settled, and the man who writes a
book to prove that Shakspeare was not a great dramatist, or was an
exact and lucid writer, is wasting his own time and that of his
readers. The mountain may change its aspect from hour to hour, but
when once we have ascertained that it is composed of granite, that
matter is settled, and there is no use in arguing that it is sandstone
or basalt. The object of such volumes as those of this Library is no
vain assault on the secure judgment-seat of the world, no hopeless
appeal against the recorded and accepted decrees of time. It is rather
to re-state those decrees in modern language and from the point of view
of our own day: to show, for instance, how Plato, though no longer for
us what he was for the Neo-Platonists, is {10} still for us the most
moving mind of the race that more than all others has moved the mind of
the world; how Milton, though no longer for us a convincing justifier
of the ways of God to men, is still a figure of transcendent interest,
the most lion-hearted, the loftiest-souled, of Englishmen, the one
consummate artist our race has produced, the only English man of
letters who in all that is known about him, his life, his character,
his poetry, shows something for which the only fit word is sublime.
There was much else beside, of course. The sublime is very near the
terrible, and the terrible is often not very far removed from the
hateful. Dante giving his "daily dreadful line" to the private and
public enemies with whom he grimly populates his hell is not exactly an
amiable or attractive figure. Still less so is Milton in those prose
pamphlets in which he passes so rapidly, and to us so strangely, from
the heights of heaven to the gutter mud of scurrilous personalities.
This is a disease from which our more amiable age seems at last to have
delivered the world. But Milton has at least the excuse of a long and
august tradition, from the days of Demosthenes, equally profuse of a
patriotism as lofty and of personalities as {11} base as Milton's, to
those of a whole line of the scholars of the Renaissance who lived with
the noblest literature of the world and wrote of each other in the
language of Billingsgate fishwives. So the sublimity of his life is
wholly that of an irresistible will, set from the first on achieving
great deeds and victoriously achieving them in defiance of adverse men
and fates. But this is quite compatible with qualities the reverse of
agreeable. It is the business of sublimity to compel amazed
admiration, not to be a pleasant companion. Milton rejoicing over the
tortures bishops will suffer in hell, Milton insulting Charles I,
Milton playing the tyrant to his daughters, none of these are pleasant
pictures. But such incidents, if perhaps unusually grim in the case of
Milton, are apt to happen with Olympians. Experience shows that it is
generally best to listen to their thunder from a certain distance.
Such limitations must not be ignored. But neither must they be unduly
pressed. The important thing about the sun is not its spots but its
light and heat. No great poet in all history, with the possible
exception of Dante, has so much heat as Milton. In prose and verse
alike he burns and glows with fire. At its worst it is a fire of anger
and pride, at {12} its best a fire of faith in liberty, justice,
righteousness, God. Of the highest of all fires, the white flame of
love, it has indeed little. Milton had no Beatrice to teach him how to
show men the loveliness of the divine law, the beauty of holiness. He
could describe the loss of Paradise and even its recovery, but its
eternal bliss, the bliss of those who live in the presence of
l'amor che move il sole e l'altre stelle,
he could not describe. To do that required one who had seen the Vita
Nuova before he saw the Inferno. _In la sua volontade é nostra pace_.
So Dante thought: but not altogether so Milton. It is not a difference
of theological opinion: it is a difference of temper. For Dante the
"will of God" at once suggested both the apostolic and the apocalyptic
love, joy, peace, the supreme and ultimate beatific vision. Bitter as
his life on earth had been, no man ever suffering more from evil days
and evil tongues, no man ever more bitterly conscious of living in an
evil and perverse generation, he had yet within him a perpetual
fountain of peace in the thought of God's will, and the faith that he
was daily advancing nearer to the light of heaven and the divine
presence. Milton, a sincere believer in God {13} if man ever were,
must also at times have had his moments of beatific vision in which the
invisible peace of God became more real than the storms of earthly life
and the vileness of men. Indeed, we see the traces of such moments in
the opening of _Comus_, in the concluding lines of _Lycidas_, in the
sustained ecstasy of _At a Solemn Music_. But they appear to have been
only moments. Milton was a lifelong Crusader who scarcely set foot in
the Holy Land. The will of God meant for him not so much peace as war.
He is a prophet rather than a psalmist. "Woe is me, my Mother, that
thou hast born me a man of strife and contention," he himself complains
in the _Reason of Church Government_. He was not much over thirty when
he wrote those words: and they remained true of him to the end. For
twenty years the strife was active and public; ever, in appearance at
least, more and more successful: then for the final fourteen it became
the impotent wrath of a caged and wounded lion. Never for a moment did
his soul bow to the triumph of the idolaters: but neither could it
forget them, nor make any permanent escape into purer air. _Paradise
Lost_, _Paradise Regained_ and _Samson_, especially the last, are all
plainly the works of a man conscious of {14} having been defeated by a
world which he could defy but could not forget. Sublimely certain of
the righteousness of his cause, he has no abiding certainty of its
victory. He hears too plainly the insulting voices of the sons of
Belial, and broods in proud and angry gloom over the ruin of all his
hopes, personal, political and ecclesiastical. And as his religion was
a thing of intellect and conscience, not a thing of spiritual vision,
he cannot make for himself that mystical trans-valuation of all earthly
doings in the light of which the struggles of political and
ecclesiastical parties are seen as things temporary, trivial and of
little account.
Such are the limitations of Milton. They are those of a man who lived
in the time of a great national struggle, deliberately chose his own
side in it, and from thenceforth saw nothing in the other but folly,
obstinacy and crime. He has in him nothing whatever of the universal,
and universally sympathetic, insight of Shakspeare. And he has paid
the price of his narrowness in the open dislike, or at best grudging
recognition, of that half of the world which is not Puritan and not
Republican, and still looks upon history, custom, law and loyalty with
very different eyes from his. But those who exact that {15} penalty do
themselves at least as much injustice as they do Milton. To deprive
ourselves of Milton because we are neither Puritan moralists nor Old
Testament politicians is an act of intellectual suicide. The wise, as
the world goes on, may differ more and more from some of Milton's
opinions. They can never escape the greatness either of the poet or of
the man. Men's appreciation of Milton is almost in proportion to their
instinctive understanding of what greatness is. Other poets, perhaps,
have things of greater beauty: none in English, none, perhaps, in any
language, fills us with a more exalting conviction of the greatness of
human life. No man rises from an hour with Milton without feeling
ashamed of the triviality of his life and certain that he can, if he
will, make it less trivial. It is impossible not to catch from him
some sense of the high issues, immediate and eternal, on which human
existence ought to be conscious that it hangs. The world will be very
old before we can spare a man who can render us this service. We have
no one in England who renders it so imperiously as Milton.
This part of his permanent claim upon our attention belongs to all that
we know of him, to everything in his life so far as it is recorded,
{16} even to his prose, where its appearances are occasional, as well
as to his verse, where it is continuous and omnipresent. It is, of
course, in connection with the last that we are most conscious of it
and that it is most important. After all, the rest would have been
unknown or forgotten if he had not been a great poet. But it is not
merely by his force of mind and character, nor merely by the influence
they have upon us through the poetry, that he claims our attention
to-day. Altogether independently of that, the study of Milton is of
immense and special value to Englishmen. Except in poetry our English
contribution to the life of the arts in Europe has been comparatively
small. That very Puritanism which had so much to do with the greatness
of Milton has also had much to do with the general failure of
Englishmen to produce fine art, or even to care about it, or so much as
recognize it when they see it. Now Milton, Puritan as he was, was
always, and not least in his final Puritan phase, a supreme artist.
Poetry has been by far our greatest artistic achievement and he is by
far our greatest poetic artist. No artist in any other field, no Inigo
Jones or Wren, no Purcell, no Reynolds or Turner, holds such
unquestioned eminence in any other art as he in his. If {17} the world
asks us where to look for the genius of England, so far as it has ever
been expressed on paper, we point, of course, unhesitatingly to
Shakspeare. But Shakspeare is as inferior to Milton in art as he is
superior in genius. His genius will often, indeed, supply the place of
art; but the possession of powers that are above art is not the same
thing as being continuously and consciously a great artist. We can all
think of many places in his works where for hundreds of lines the most
censorious criticism can scarcely wish a word changed; but we can also
think of many in which the least watchful cannot fail to wish much
changed and much omitted. "Would he had blotted a thousand" is still a
true saying, and its truth known and felt by all but the blindest of
the idolaters of Shakspeare. No one has ever uttered such a wish about
the poetry of Milton. This is not the place to anticipate a discussion
of it which must come later. But, in an introductory chapter which
aims at insisting upon the present and permanent importance of Milton,
it is in place to point out the immense value to the English race of
acquaintance with work so conscientiously perfect as Milton's. English
writers on the whole have had a tendency to be rather slipshod in {18}
expression and rather indifferent to the finer harmonies of human
speech, whether as a thing of pure sound or as a thing of sounds which
have more than mere meaning, which have associations. Milton as both a
lover of music and a scholar is never for a moment unconscious of
either. It would scarcely be going too far to say that there is not a
word in his verse which owes its place solely to the fact that it
expresses his meaning. All the words accepted by his instinctive or
deliberate choice were accepted because they provided him with the most
he could obtain of three qualities which he desired: the exact
expression of the meaning needed for the immediate purpose in hand, the
associations fittest to enhance or enrich that meaning, the rhythmical
or musical effect required for the verse. The study of his verse is
one that never exhausts itself, so that the appreciation of it has been
called the last reward of consummate scholarship. But the phrase does
Milton some injustice. It is true that the scholar tastes again and
again in Milton some flavour of association or suggestion which is not
to be perceived by those who are not scholars, and it is also true that
he consciously understands what he is enjoying more than they possibly
can. But neither Milton's nor any other {19} great art makes its main
appeal to learning. What does that is not art at all but pedantry.
Those who have never read a line of the Greek and Latin poets certainly
miss many pleasures in reading Milton, but, if they have any ear for
poetry at all, they do not miss either the mind or the art of Milton.
The unconquerable will, the high soaring soul, are everywhere audibly
present: and so, even to those who have little reading and no knowledge
at all of matters of rhythm or metre, are the grave Dorian music, the
stately verses rolling in each after the other like great ocean waves
in eternal difference, in eternal sameness. The ignorant ear hears and
rejoices, with a delight that passes understanding, as the ignorant eye
sees a fine drawing or a piece of Greek sculpture and without
understanding enjoys, learns, and unconsciously grows in keenness of
sight. To live with Milton is necessarily to learn that the art of
poetry is no triviality, no mere amusement, but a high and grave thing,
a thing of the choicest discipline of phrase, the finest craftsmanship
of structure, the most nobly ordered music of sound. The ordinary
reader may not be conscious of any such lessons: but he learns them
nevertheless. And from no one else in English can he learn them so
well as from Milton.
{20} For these reasons, these and others, we must cling to our great
epic poet, Shelley's "third among the sons of light." He is not easy
reading: the greatest seldom are: but as with all the greatest, each
new reading is not only easier than the last but fuller of matter for
thought, wonder and delight. At each new reading, too, the things in
him that belonged to his own age, the Biblical literalism, the
theological prepossessions, the political partisanship, recede more and
more into the background and leave us freer to enjoy the things which
belong to all time. And to all peoples. Milton is, indeed, intensely
English and could not have been anything but an Englishman. His
profound conviction of the greatness of moral issues, and his
passionate love of liberty, have both been characteristic of the
Englishmen of whom England is most proud. Till lately too, at any
rate, we should have said that his fierce individualism, intellectual
and political, was English too. But his mind and soul, stored with the
gathered riches of many languages and of an inward experience far too
intense to be confined by national limitations, reach out to a world
wider altogether than this island, wider even than Europe. In _Samson
Agonistes_ it is hard to say who is more vividly present, the English
{21} politician, the Greek tragedian, or the Hebrew prophet. And in
one sense _Paradise Lost_ is the most universal of all poems. Indeed,
that word may be applied to it in its strictest meaning, for the field
of Milton's action is not Greece, or Italy, or England, or even the
whole earth; it is the universe itself. That is one of its
difficulties: but it is also a source of the uplifting and enlarging
quality which is peculiarly Miltonic. With him we are conscious of
treading no petty scene. We have in some respects travelled far from
Milton's way both of stating and of solving his problem, but
nevertheless it is still with us to-day and always: the problem of
man's origin and destiny, of the ways of God to men. And though Milton
is more hampered by literal belief in a particular theological legend
than the authors of the _Book of Job_ and the _Prometheus Vinctus_,
yet, like these, he shows that a great mind and soul will leave the
imprint of power and truth on the most incredible primitive story. To
read his great poem, or indeed any of his poems, is to live for a while
in the presence of one of those royal souls, those natural kings of
men, whom Plato felt to be born to rule and inspire their fellows: and
the heroic temper of the man is in England less rare than the
consummate {22} perfection of art which has eternalized its utterance.
This is Milton: and, though we may be too weak to read him often, we
shall never be able to do without him, never think of him without an
added strength and exaltation of spirit.
{23}