THE EARLIER POEMS
We think to-day of Milton chiefly as the author of _Paradise Lost_, as
we think of Wren as the builder of St. Paul's. And we are right. When
a man has been the creator of the only very great building in the world
which bears upon it from the first stone to the last the mark of a
single mind, his other achievements, even though they include
Greenwich, Hampton Court, Trinity College Library, and some fifty
churches, inevitably fall into the background. So when the world has
admitted that a poet has disputed the supreme palm of epic with Homer
and Virgil, it hardly cares to remember that he has also challenged all
rivals in such forms as the Pastoral Elegy, the Mask, and the Sonnet.
_De minimis non curat_ might be applied to such cases without any very
violent extravagance. The first thought that must always rise to the
mind at the mention of Milton's name must be the stupendous achievement
of _Paradise Lost_.
Yet if Milton had been hanged at Tyburn {90} in 1660 he would still
unquestionably rank with the half-dozen greatest of the English poets.
Chaucer and Spenser would then have ranked after Shakspeare as higher
names than his: and possibly also Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley. But
he could have feared no other rival: for Dryden is too much a mere man
of letters, Pope too much a mere wit, Byron too exclusively a
rhetorician, Tennyson too exclusively an artist, to rank with a man in
whom burned the divine fire of _Lycidas_ and the great Ode. What would
Milton's fame have rested upon if he had not lived to write _Paradise
Lost_ and its two successors? Upon the volume published in the year
1645, the year of Naseby, when people, one would have supposed, were
not thinking much of poetry, and those who were most likely to be doing
so were just those least inclined to look for it from John Milton, the
Puritan pamphleteer. Yet in that little book was heard for the last
time the voice, now raised above itself, of the old poetry which the
Cavaliers and courtiers had loved.
No single volume has ever contained so much fine English verse by an
unknown or almost unknown poet. It is true that _Lycidas_ and _Comus_
had been printed before, but _Comus_ had appeared anonymously and {91}
_Lycidas_ had been signed only with initials. So that only friends, or
people behind the scenes in the literary world, could know anything of
Milton's poetry. Nor does he seem to have been very anxious that they
should. The other contributors to the volume in memory of Edward King
gave their names: the only signature to _Lycidas_ is J. M. It was
Lawes the composer, not Milton the author, who published _Comus_ in
1637. Milton's feelings about it are indicated by the motto on the
title page--
"Eheu quid volui misero mihi! floribus Austrum
Perditus--"
Quotations can often say for us what we cannot say for ourselves. What
Virgil says for Milton is "Alas what is this that I have done? poor
fool that I am, could not I have kept my tender buds of verse a little
longer from the cutting blasts of public criticism?" Yet no one knew
better than Milton that _Comus_ was incomparably the greatest of the
masks. So in the sonnet on reaching the age of twenty-three he says
that his "late spring no bud or blossom shew'th." Yet he had already
written the _Ode on the Nativity_, a performance sufficient, one would
have {92} thought, to give a young poet reasonable self-satisfaction in
what he had done, as well as confidence in what he would be able to do.
Nor was Milton in the ordinary sense, or perhaps in any, a humble man.
Of that false kind of humility, too often recommended from the pulpit,
which consists in a beautiful woman trying to suppose herself plain, or
an able man trying to be unaware of his ability, no man ever had less
than Milton. Neither from himself nor from others did he ever conceal
the fact that he was a man of genius. In his eyes no kind of untruth,
however specious, could be a virtue. But of a finer humility, built on
truth, he was not without his share. The truly humble man may be a
genius and may know it and may never affect to deny it: he may know
that he has done great things, far greater than have been done by the
men he sees around him: but he is not judging himself by the standard
of other men: he has another standard, that of "the perfect witness of
all-judging Jove," that of "as ever in my great Taskmaster's eye," and
of that he knows how very far he has fallen short. Of this nobler
humility Milton had something all his life and in his youth much. It
is this which reconciles the apparent inconsistency between his many
proud {93} confessions that he knows himself to be a man called to do
great things and his reluctance to let the world see what he had
already done: between his keeping _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ ten
years unpublished and his preserving and ultimately publishing almost
everything he had ever written, even to scraps of boyish and
undergraduate verse. From one point of view his best was nothing: from
the other, more than equally true, the humblest line that had come from
his pen had received a passport to immortality.
What does the famous volume contain? It opens with the noble _Ode on
the Nativity_, as if to give the discerning reader invincible proof in
the first twenty lines put before him that the proud words of the
publisher's preface were amply justified. "Let the event guide itself
which way it will, I shall deserve of the age by bringing into the
light as true a birth as the Muses have brought forth since our famous
Spenser wrote; whose poems in these English ones are as rarely imitated
as sweetly excelled. Reader, if thou art eagle-eyed to censure their
worth, I am not fearful to expose them to thy exactest perusal." So
the preface ends: and then what follows is--
"This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heaven's Eternal King,
{94}
Of wedded maid and virgin mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace."
_Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo_. No one had ever written
such English verse as this before: no one ever would again. Here was a
poet, writing at the age of twenty-one, for whom it was evident that no
theme could be so high that he could not find it fit utterance. Fit
and also peculiar to himself. The peculiar Miltonic note which none of
his innumerable imitators have ever caught for more than a few lines,
which he himself never in all his works loses for more than a moment,
is instantly struck. As Mr. Mackail has said, "there is not a square
inch of his poetry from first to last of which one could not
confidently say, 'This is Milton and no one else.'" One may even go
further than Mr. Mackail. For he seems to make an exception where
certainly none is needed. He is justly insisting that one of the most
remarkable things about Milton is that, while English poetry spoke one
language in his youth and another in his age, he himself spoke neither.
His "accent and speech" alike in _Lycidas_ and in _Paradise Lost_ {95}
are his own, and in marked contrast to those of contemporary poets.
But here Mr. Mackail adds the qualification "if we exclude a few slight
juvenile pieces of his boyhood and those metrical versions of the
Psalms in which he elected not to be a poet." He asserts, that is,
that neither in the Psalms nor in the "juvenile pieces" is Milton
characteristically himself and that in the Psalms he is not a poet at
all. And no one will care to deny that many of the versions of the
Psalms have little Milton and less poetry in them. But is this true of
all? And in particular is it true of the paraphrase of Psalm cxxxvi.
which, with its companion version of Psalm cxiv. is the most "juvenile"
of all? A boy of fifteen has not usually much power of "electing" to
be or not to be a poet. But it can only be inadvertence on Mr.
Mackail's part that would deny that the boy Milton at that age, though
not a great poet, was already himself and, more than that, was already
promising what he was soon to perform. Who, looking back from the
_Ode_ and _Comus_ and _Paradise Lost_, does not hear some preluding of
the authentic strain of Milton in
"Who by his all-commanding might
Did fill the new-made world with light"?
{96} Is it fanciful to note that we have here, no doubt in their barest
primitive form, two of Milton's life-long themes? The Authorized
Version speaks of "him that made great lights": how Miltonically
transformed those words already are in the two quoted lines! De
Quincey said that Milton was "not an author amongst authors, not a poet
amongst poets, but a power amongst powers." However that may be, it is
certain that he, so occupied all his life with thinking and writing
about God, thought of God habitually as a power. For him God is
Creator, Sovereign, Judge, much more often than Father: we hear from
Milton more of his might than of his love. So at once here, at the age
of fifteen, he inserts into the Psalm he is paraphrasing that
characteristic phrase, so splendid and potent itself, so gladly
speaking of potency and splendour,
"Who by his all-commanding might."
And, if power be one of the most frequent elements in the Miltonic
thought, what is more frequent than light in the Miltonic vision? And
is not that substitution of "did fill the new-made world with light"
for the bare scientific statement of the original, a foretaste of the
Milton who, all his life, blind or seeing, felt {97} the joy and wonder
of light as no other man ever did? Do we not rightly hear in it a note
that will soon be enriched into the "Light unsufferable" of the _Ode_,
the "endless morn of Light" of the _Solemn Music_, the "bosom bright of
blazing Majesty and Light" of the _Epitaph on Lady Winchester_, and,
not to multiply quotations, of the "Hail, holy Light" which opens the
great invocation of the third book of _Paradise Lost_?
It may be as well, before discussing the _Ode_ and the other contents
of the volume issued in 1645, to mention another poem which is of
earlier date than the _Ode_, though it was not printed till 1673: the
beautiful Spenserian lines _On the Death of a Fair Infant_. They
afford the most real of the exceptions to the rule that Milton is
always from the beginning to the end unmistakably and solely himself.
In this poem he shows himself at the age of seventeen so soaked in
Spenser and Spenser's school that, when his baby niece dies and he sets
himself to make her an elegy, what he gives us is these graceful verses
conveying as much as a boy of seventeen can catch of the lovely elegiac
note of Spenser.
"O noble Spirit: live there ever blessed
The world's late wonder, and the heaven's new joy;
{98}
Live ever there, and leave me here distressed
With mortal cares and cumbrous world's annoy."
So sings Spenser of Sidney: and, though Milton is scarcely yet more the
equal of Spenser than his baby niece was of Sidney, it is a beautiful
echo of his master that he gives us in his
"O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted,
Soft silken primrose fading timelessly,"
and in
"Yet can I not persuade me thou art dead,
Or that thy corse corrupts in earth's dark womb,
Or that thy beauties lie in wormy bed,
Hid from the world in a low delvèd tomb."
The poem is full of the then fashionable conceits, which appear again a
little in the _Ode_, after which they are for ever put aside by
Milton's imaginative severity and high conception of poetry as a finer
sort of truth than prose, not a more ingenious kind of lying. Once,
and perhaps once only, one hears in it the voice of the Milton of later
years--
"Thereby to set the hearts of men on fire
To scorn the sordid world, and unto Heaven aspire."
But with the _Ode_ the age of imitation is over for Milton and he
stands forward at once {99} as himself. The soft graces, somewhat
lacking in outline, of the _Fair Infant_, are forgotten in the sonorous
strength of the _Ode_. The half-hesitating whisper has become a strain
of mighty music; the uncertain hand has gained self-confidence so that
the design now shows the boldness and decision of a master. At once,
in the second stanza, he is away to heaven, with a curious anticipation
of what was to occupy him so much thirty years later--
"That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
And that far-beaming blaze of majesty,
Wherewith he wont at Heaven's high council-table
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,
He laid aside; and, here with us to be,
Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay."
Milton's genius was universal, in the strict sense of the word, that
is, living in or occupied with the universe. He is as supramundane in
his way as Shelley in his. And no part of the universe was more real
to him than heaven, the abode of God and angels and spirits, the
original and ultimate home of his beloved music and light. It is
noticeable that there is hardly a single poem of his--_L'Allegro_ and
_Samson_ are the only important ones--in {100} which he does not at one
point or other make his escape to heaven. In most of them, as all
through this _Ode_ and the _Solemn Music_, in the conclusions of
_Lycidas_ and _Il Penseroso_, in the opening of _Comus_, this heavenly
flight provides passages of exceptional and peculiarly Miltonic beauty.
The fact is that, though little of a mystic, he was from the first
entirely of that temper, intellectually descended from Plato, morally
from Stoicism and Christianity but more from Stoicism, which cannot be
content to be "confined and pestered in this pinfold here," disdains
the "low-thoughted cares" of mere bodily and temporal life, and
habitually aspires to live the life of the mind and the spirit,
"Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call Earth."
So here at once, in his first important poem, what in other hands might
have been a mere telling of the old human and earthly story of the
first Christmas night becomes in Milton's a vision of all time and all
space, with heaven in it, and the stars, and the music of the spheres,
and the great timeless scheme of redemption with which he was to have
so much to do later, with history, too, and literature, the false gods
of the Old Testament and of the Greek and Roman classics already {101}
anticipating the parts they were to play in _Paradise Lost_.
And note one other thing. Milton is only twenty-one, but he is already
an incomparable artist. The stanza had been so far the usual form for
lyrics, and he adopts it here for the first and last time. But if he
accepts the instrument prescribed by tradition, with what a master's
hand this wonderful boy of twenty-one touches it, and to what
astonishing music! It seems that the stanza itself is his own. Every
one has felt the combination in it, as he manages it, of the romantic
movement and suggestion which he loved and renounced with the classical
strength which is the chief element in the final impression he made on
English poetry. As yet the romantic quality is the stronger, and even
one of the mighty closing Alexandrines is dedicated to the lovely
Elizabethan fancy of the "yellow skirted fayes" who
"Fly after the night-steeds, leaving their moon-loved maze."
How such a line as that, or still more plainly the two which end the
most romantic stanza of all--
"No nightly trance, or breathèd spell,
Inspires the pale-eyed priest from the prophetic cell"
{102} found a rejoicing echo in Keats is obvious. This, of course, has
often been noticed. But has it ever been remarked that there are also
lines in the poem which might have been written by another
nineteenth-century poet of equal but very different genius?
"The winds, with wonder whist,
Smoothly the waters kissed,
Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean;"--
should we be surprised to come upon these elemental loves and joys
heralding a new reign of justice and peace in the _Prometheus Unbound_?
But neither Keats nor Shelley, who both had their affinities to Milton,
had it in him to reach the concentrated Miltonic energy of such lines
as--
"The wakeful trump of doom must thunder through the deep,"
or--
"Than his bright throne or burning axletree could bear."
Almost every one of these final Alexandrines, it is to be observed,
sums up the note of its stanza in a chord of majestic power. They are
the most Miltonic lines in the poem; for it is precisely "majesty"
{103} which is the unique and essential Miltonic quality; and Dryden in
the famous epigram ought to have kept it for him and not given it to
Virgil, though by doing so he would have made his splendid compliment
impossible.
Among the poems that followed in the 1645 edition were the _Passion_, a
failure which Milton recognized as a failure and abandoned, but yet,
characteristically, did not refuse to publish; the _Epitaph on the
Marchioness of Winchester_, which, still youthful as it is and is seen
to be by the frigid and false antithesis of Queen and Marchioness with
which it ends, has yet very beautiful lines--
"Gentle Lady, may thy grave
Peace and quiet ever have!
After this thy travail sore,
Sweet rest seize thee evermore";
the famous lines on Shakspeare, contributed anonymously to the second
Folio; and the noble outburst of heavenly music which begins--
"Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heaven's joy
Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse."
{104} This was written some years later; and even after _Paradise Lost_
it may rank as the most daring and entirely successful of Milton's
long-sustained wheelings of musical flight. The stanza no longer
provides him with space enough: and here his whole twenty-eight lines
are one continuous strain, with no break in them and scarcely any
pause, in ten-syllabled lines of boldly varied rhyme and accent. His
task here is not so difficult as it was to be in _Paradise Lost_, for
he has rhyme to provide him with variety and he admits two verses of
six syllables among his twenty-eight; but already he is completely
master of the possibilities of the ten-syllable line, and can make it
yield as lavish a wealth of variety in unity as was later on to make
the great passages of _Paradise Lost_ an eternal amazement to lovers
and practisers of the art of verse.
"Wed your divine sounds, and mixed power employ,
Dead things with inbreathed sense able to pierce;
And to our high-raised phantasy present
That undisturbèd song of pure concent."
They are all the same line, and yet how different. It is difficult to
believe that this is the same metre which Waller and Dryden {105} were
soon, amid universal applause, to file down into the smooth monotony
of--
"Great wits are sure to madness near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide;
Else why should he, with wealth and honour blest,
Refuse his age the needful hours of rest?"
For Dryden, as still more for Pope and the school of Pope, the thing to
accomplish, so far as possible, is to prevent any of the natural
accents falling upon the third, fifth or other odd syllables; there is,
for instance, not one which does so in the first fifty lines of
_Absalom and Achitophel_ or of the _Epistle to Arbuthnot_. The object
of Milton, on the contrary, is to vary the position of his accents to
the utmost possible extent compatible with the preservation of the
verse. In these four lines his first accent falls on the first
syllable in the first two, probably on the fourth in the third, and on
the second in the last. And the other accents are similarly varied in
place and, it may be added, in number. In Milton's case the listener's
wonder is at the number and intricacy of the variations he can play
upon the theme of his verse; in Pope's it is at the amazing cleverness
with which it can be exactly repeated in {106} different words.
Milton's music, too, is continuous, not broken into couplets sharply
divided from each other. His verses pass into each other as wave melts
into wave on the sea-shore; there is a constant breaking on the beach,
but which will break and which will glide imperceptibly into its
successor we cannot guess though we sit watching for an hour; the
sameness of rise and fall, crash and silence, is unbroken, yet no one
wave is exactly like its predecessor, no two successive minutes give
either eye or ear exactly the same experience. So with Milton's verse;
even the ocean of _Paradise Lost_ has few or no waves of music of more
varied unity, of more continuous variety than such lines as--
"As once we did, till disproportioned sin
Jarred against Nature's chime and with harsh din
Broke the fair music that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion swayed
In perfect diapason whilst they stood
In first obedience and their state of good."
The chief remaining minor poems of Milton are the _Allegro_ and
_Penseroso_, _Comus_, _Lycidas_ and the Sonnets. The two first are
written {107} in those rhymed eight-syllable lines which he had already
used in part of his _Song on May Morning_. Like that beautiful little
poem, they represent him in his simplest mood, the mood of the quiet
years at Horton, spent, more than any other part of his life, in the
open air, and among plain folk unlettered and unpolitical. It is
natural enough, therefore, that they are the most popular as they are
the easiest of all his poems. Their two titles, which mean The
Cheerful Man and The Thoughtful or Meditative Man, point to the two
moods from which they regard life. Both moods are, of course,
described as they might actually be experienced by a highly cultivated
and serious man like Milton himself. The gravity is the gravity of a
man of thought, not of a man of affairs; the pleasures are those of a
scholar and a poet, not those of a trifler, a sportsman, or a
sensualist. Like all Milton's works they borrow freely from earlier
poets, remain entirely original and Miltonic, and are imitated only at
the peril of the imitator. Any one who looks at the parallel passages
in Marlowe and Fletcher will see how very like they are and how very
little the likeness matters. The poems stand alone; there is nothing
of quite the same kind in English. {108} The least unlike pair of
poems is perhaps the two Spring Odes of the present Poet Laureate, than
whom no one has owed more to Milton or repaid the debt with more verse
which Milton would have been glad to inspire. But Mr. Bridges has, of
course, avoided anything approaching a direct imitation; he has merely
used the hint of two contrasted poems on one subject, touching
inevitably, as Milton had touched, upon some of the opposite pleasures
of town and country, and bringing Milton's mood of cheerful gravity to
bear upon them both.
It is unnecessary to discuss in detail poems so well known. But a few
words may be said. Milton was never again to be so genial as he is
here. Never again does he place himself so sympathetically close to
the daily tasks and pleasures of ordinary unimportant men and women.
After characteristically choosing the West Wind and the Dawn as
likelier parents of true mirth than any god of wine or sensual
pleasure, he will go on for once to call for the company of--
"Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides";
he will cast a pleased eye on the birds and flowers and the
sunrise--the latter moving {109} him to the characteristic magnificence
which in this poem he has elsewhere forgone; he will recognize, with
the gratefulness of the tired student, the careless gladness in the
voices of ploughman and milkmaid, as he passes them in his early
morning walk. Then he will give a glance to beauty which such as they
cannot see, or cannot be fully conscious of seeing--
"Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest";
will touch on the romance of old towers and poetic memories of which
they have only dimly heard, and look back at Thyrsis and Corydon and
all the pastoral poetry which such scenes recall to the scholar's
memory. The next section of the poem is taken from a different world,
that of the merry England of the Middle Age with its ale and dances and
Faery Mab; while the final one carries us quite away from the rustics
to the town and the town's pleasures, pageantry and drama and
music--this last, as always, moving the poet to peculiar rapture, and
an answering music of verse--
"The melting voice through mazes running,
Untwisting all the chains that tie
The hidden soul of harmony."
{110}
_Il Penseroso_ is the praise of Melancholy as _L'Allegro_ of Mirth.
But Milton was not a melancholy man in our sense of the word. When
Keats declares that--
"in the very temple of Delight
Veiled Melancholy has her sovran shrine,"
he is interpreting a mood into which Milton could not even in
imagination enter, that of the intellectual sensualist who dreams his
life away and cannot act. Milton was a man of action and character,
and his Melancholy, quite unlike this, is that of the Spirit in his own
_Comus_, who "began--
"Wrapt in a pleasing fit of melancholy,
To meditate my rural minstrelsy."
He hails her at once as a "Goddess sage and holy" and as a "Nun devout
and pure"; and it is evident from the first that her sorrows, so far as
she is sorrowful, are those of aspiring spirit, not those of
self-indulging and disappointed flesh. Her life of quiet studies and
pleasures is self-chosen; there is a note of will and self-control in
the words in which the poet bids her call about her Peace and Quiet and
Spare Fast, Retired Leisure and Contemplation and Silence; and the
descriptions which follow of his walks {111} and studies and pleasures,
in town and country, by night and morning, are those of a man who has
deliberately shaped his life, and means so to live it that he shall
leave it without regret or shame and with the hope of passing from it
to a better.
Nor is it any mood of mere melancholy that has given us in this poem
such pleasant glimpses of his walks abroad and studies at home in these
Horton years. He pays his tribute to Plato, the Greek tragedians and
the dramatists of Elizabethan and Jacobean England; and to his own two
most famous predecessors, Chaucer and Spenser; and we think of the
scholarly hours spent gravely and quietly but far from unhappily. More
delightful still, with more beauty and more happiness in them, are the
poem's well-known landscapes--
"the wandering moon,
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray
Through the heaven's wide pathless way."
Perhaps no one again, till Shelley came, felt the vastness, the
pathlessness, of the heaven as Milton did. Or, to come to earth again,
where does poetry set the ear more instantly and actively at the work
of imaginative {112} creation than in those finely suggestive lines
about the curfew--
"Over some wide-watered shore,
Swinging slow with sullen roar"?
And what of that woodland solitude at noon, with memories in it of so
many poets of Greece, Rome, Italy and England, the
"shadows brown, that Sylvan loves,
Of pine, or monumental oak,
Where the rude axe with heavèd stroke
Was never heard the Nymphs to daunt
Or fright them from their hallowed haunt,"
which carries us on to perhaps the loveliest lines in all the _Paradise
Lost_--
"In shadier bower,
More sacred and sequestered, though but feigned,
Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph
Nor Faunus haunted."
There is in the two passages just the difference between the youth and
maturity of genius; but that is all. So _Il Penseroso_ passes on its
delightful way, ending, of course, in music and heaven.
There, too, "before the starry threshold of Jove's court," the next of
these earlier works of Milton, the mask _Comus_, begins. {113} It
strikes its high note at once in what an old lover of literature boldly
called "the finest opening of any theatrical piece ancient or modern."
"Before the starry threshold of Jove's court
My mansion is, where those immortal shapes
Of bright aerial spirits live insphered
In regions mild of calm and serene air,
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call Earth, and, with low-thoughted care,
Confined and pestered in this pinfold here,
Strive to keep up a frail and feverish being,
Unmindful of the crown that Virtue gives,
After this mortal change, to her true servants
Amongst the enthroned gods on sainted seats."
That looks forward to _Paradise Lost_, not backward to the masks of the
previous generation of poets. The "loud uplifted angel-trumpet" is
sounded in it, and we know that we have travelled a long way from the
trivial, superficial and often coarse entertainments which would have
been the models of _Comus_ if Milton had been the man to accept models
of any kind, least of all of such a kind. Like them his mask was an
aristocratic entertainment, played to a noble {114} audience by the
scions of a great house. But the resemblance scarcely goes further.
The older masks were mainly spectacles; magnificent spectacles indeed,
designed sometimes, as one may see in the Chatsworth Library, by such
artists as Inigo Jones and produced at immense expense; but just for
that reason addressed to the eye much more than to the ear, and
scarcely at all to the mind. Even when written by such a man as Ben
Jonson, the words, except in the lyrics, are of almost no importance.
The business was to show a number of pretty scenes, and noble ladies,
and to give them a chance of exhibiting their clothes, and their
voices. The last gave Jonson his chance; the fine Horatian workman
that he was could always produce a lyric that would fit any situation
and give some dignity to any trivial personage. But the taint of
vanity and fashion, pomp and externality, inevitably clung to the whole
thing. Too many personages were introduced, probably because in such
plays there were always a great many applicants for parts; and the
inevitable result was that in a short piece none of them had space to
develop any character or life. But Milton knew, as the Greeks knew and
Shakspeare did not always, that in the few hours of a {115} stage
performance only a very few characters have time to develop themselves
in such a way as to interest and convince the hearer's imagination, and
that if there are many they never become more than a list of names. So
he, who could not touch anything without giving it character, limits
his personages to four or five that they may at least be human beings
and not mere singers of songs or allegorical abstractions. And, like
some of his predecessors, he takes an ethical theme, the praise and
power of Chastity. Fletcher in _The Faithful Shepherdess_ had taken
the same; as Jonson had taken the praise of Temperance, which is also
partly Milton's subject, in _Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue_, in which a
grosser Comus is one of the characters. But to get any parallel to the
power of conviction with which Milton handles it one has to go behind
Jonson, whose mask is an entirely superficial performance, and even
behind Fletcher, in whose _Shepherdess_ the many beautiful and moving
touches are lost in a crowd of characters and a wilderness of
artificial intrigue; one has to go back to the man whom Milton once
called his "original," to the author of the _Faerie Queen_. No one but
Spenser could have anticipated the scene between Comus and the Lady,
where indeed {116} Milton, like Spenser in the bower of Acrasia, has
lavished such wealth upon his sinner that he has hardly been able to
give a due over-balance to his saint. Yet she is no lay figure, and
one is not surprised that Comus should twice show his consciousness
that she has within her some holy, some more than mortal power. Milton
has given her a song of such astonishing music that one wonders whether
the composer Lawes, for whom the whole was written, could touch it
without injury--
"Sweet Echo, sweetest Nymph, that liv'st unseen
Within thy airy shell
By slow Meander's margent green,
And in the violet-embroidered vale
Where the love-lorn nightingale
Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well;
Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pair
That likest thy Narcissus are?
O, if thou have
Hid them in some flowery cave,
Tell me but where,
Sweet Queen of Parley, Daughter of the Sphere!
So mayst thou be translated to the skies,
And give resounding grace to all Heaven's harmonies."
The lyrics were the chief beauty of the old masks, but the best of them
sink into {117} insignificance before such a masterpiece of art as
this. Perhaps nothing in a modern language comes nearer to giving the
peculiar effect which is the glory of Pindar. Of course there is in it
more of the fanciful, and more of the romantic, than there was in
Pindar; and its style is tenderer, prettier and perhaps altogether
smaller than his. But the elaborate and intricate perfection of its
art and language, the way in which the intellect in it serves the
imagination, is exactly Pindar. In any case it is certainly one of the
most entirely beautiful of English lyrics. One listens with delight to
the musician working out his intricately beautiful theme; or is it
nearer the impression we get to say that we watch the skilful dancer
executing his elaborate figure? In either case we await with sure
confidence the triumphant close. The final couplet, by the way, and
particularly the great Alexandrine, is a curious anticipation of
Dryden's finest manner. But the rest is a music Dryden's ear never
heard. No wonder Comus cries--
"Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould
Breathe such divine enchanting ravishment?
Sure something holy lodges in that breast,
And with these raptures moves the vocal air
To testify his hidden residence.
{118}
How sweetly did they float upon the wings
Of silence, through the empty-vaulted night,
At every fall smoothing the raven down
Of darkness till it smiled!"
The last lines show that Milton has not yet outgrown the Jacobean taste
for conceits. So a little later on we find him writing that--
"Silence
Was took ere she was ware, and wished she might
Deny her nature, and be never more
Still to be so displaced";
a piece of intellectual trickery such as Shakspeare too often played
with, and Donne laboured at; and one of a special interest because we
see it again later transformed and purified in the famous passage of
_Paradise Lost_, in which "Silence was pleased" not only with the
stillness of evening, but also with the song of the bird whose "amorous
descant" alone interrupts it. Yet even that seemed to Warton, the best
of Milton's early critics, a conceit unworthy of the poet. So
difficult it is for "rational" criticism to see the distinction between
an intellectual extravagance and a flight of the imagination.
There are other things in _Comus_ beside conceits which recall
Shakspeare. What can {119} be more exactly in his freshest youngest
manner than such a line as--
"Love-darting eyes and tresses like the morn"?
And what can be closer to the note of the great Histories and Tragedies
than the Elder Brother's outburst of faith--
"If this fail,
The pillared firmament is rottenness,
And earth's base built on stubble"?
I see no reason whatever to doubt, in spite of what has lately been
said by a modern critic and poet, that these speeches of the Brothers
and the Lady, rather than those of Comus, represent Milton's own
conception of life. It is true, of course, that _Comus_ was one of
several masks performed as an aristocratic counterblast to the attack
of Prynne and the Puritans on all stage performances. But that only
strengthens the proof of Milton's own leaning to a grave and temperate
mode of life. Even when he writes a mask he will insist that it shall
be a thing of noble art and serious moral. He was no narrow-minded
fanatic and will write a piece for great ladies to perform when asked
by his accomplished friend Lawes: but he is already {120} the man who
was later to denounce "court amours, Mix'd dance and wanton masque";
and if he writes a mask himself it will be to take the old "high-flown
commonplace" of the magic power of chastity and give it an entirely new
seriousness and beauty. The notion of Mr. Newbolt that there were two
Miltons, one before and the other after the Civil War, and that the one
was "sincerely engaged on the side of liberal manners" while the other
was an ill-tempered enemy of civilization and the arts of life, is a
complete delusion. The "Lady of Christ's" who was unpopular on account
of his severe chastity, was already a strict Puritan of the only sort
he ever became; and the author of _Paradise Lost_, as all the evidence
shows, was no morbid sectary but a lover of learning and music and
society. Of course, no man goes unchanged through a great struggle
such as that to which Milton gave twenty years of life. There is a
development, or a difference, call it what you will, between the Dante
who wrote the _Vita Nuova_ and him who wrote the _Divina Commedia_.
That could not but be; a body that had gone into exile and a soul that
had visited hell must leave their traces on a man. But the essential
Dante remains one and the same all the while. And {121} so does
Milton. Nothing can be more certain than that the grave boy whose
gravity impressed all Cambridge, and had taken immortal shape in the
_Nativity Ode_ and the sonnet of the "great Taskmaster's eye" before he
was much past twenty, did not mean to hold up a drunken sensualist like
Comus as a model for youth. He was not an ascetic, then or later; and
he was writing a dramatic poem; and, of course, had no difficulty in
giving Comus a fine speech about the follies of total abstinence which,
indeed, he loved no better than other monkeries. The Lady, in reply,
as she is dramatically bound, over-exalts her "sage and serious
doctrine of Virginity" as Comus had overstated the case against it; but
what she praises is Temperance, not Abstinence. Her virginity is that
of a free maiden, not that of a vowed nun, and there is nothing in it
to unfit her to play the part which, when Eve plays it, gives Milton
occasion for his well-known apostrophe to true love. Nor is there any
inconsistency between his denunciation of "wanton masks" in that
passage, and his being the author of _Comus_. His own mask was as
different as possible from those others, the common sort, in which he
saw the purveyors of "adulterous lust," and with which, now as then, he
would have nothing whatever {122} to do. His "Lady" alone, even
without her brothers, makes that clear. What she says may not be so
poetically attractive as the speech of Comus; but it has just the note
of exaltation which is heard in all Milton's great ethical and
spiritual outbursts, and plainly utters the other and stronger side of
his convictions. The truth is that from the very beginning to the very
end of his life Milton had all the intensity of Puritanism, more than
all its angry contempt of vice, but nothing whatever of its uncivilized
narrow-mindedness. A large part of the peculiar interest of his
character lies in the fact that he, almost alone of Englishmen, managed
to unite the strength of the Reformation with the breadth of the
Renaissance. We have both in the lovely verses which are the Epilogue
of _Comus_; and if it begins with--
"the gardens fair
Of Hesperus, and his daughters three
That sing about the golden tree:"
and the--
"Beds of hyacinth and roses
Where young Adonis oft reposes,
Waxing well of his deep wound
In slumber soft, and on the ground
Sadly sits the Assyrian queen";
{123} it ends with the Stoic Puritan motto, "Love Virtue, she alone is
free." And that these last six lines were no formal compliment to the
conventions is proved by the fact that Milton chose the final couplet--
"if Virtue feeble were
Heaven itself would stoop to her,"
as the motto he appended to his signature in the album of an Italian
Protestant at Geneva in 1639, adding the significant Latin which claims
the sentiment as utterly his own--
"Caelum, non animum, muto dum trans mare curro."
These words we, looking back on his whole life, may fitly translate: "I
am always the same John Milton, whether in Rome, Geneva, or London,
whether I write _Comus_ or _Allegro_ or _Paradise Lost_." For never
were unity and continuity of personality more complete than in Milton.
There remains _Lycidas_, in which Milton out-distances all previous
English elegy almost as easily as in _Comus_ he had out-distanced all
the earlier masks. It stands with the great passages of _Paradise
Lost_ as the most consummate blending of scholarship and poetry in
Milton and therefore in English. All {124} pastoral poetry is in it,
Theocritus and Virgil, Spenser and Sidney, Drayton and Drummond, with
memories, too, of Ovid and Shakspeare and the Bible; and yet it is pure
and undiluted Milton, with the signet of his peculiar mind and temper
stamped on its every phrase. It was his contribution to a volume of
verses published at Cambridge in 1638 to the memory of Edward King, a
younger contemporary of his at Christ's who was drowned off the Welsh
coast in August 1637. King was already a Fellow of his college, and
one of the most promising young clergymen of his day. Milton had liked
and respected him, no doubt, but had certainly not been so intimate
with him as with young Charles Diodati who died almost exactly a year
later, and was lamented by his great friend in the _Epitaphium Damonis_
which is the finest of the Latin poems. Those who read Latin will
enjoy its close parallelism with _Lycidas_ and its touches of a still
closer bond of affection, as that in which the poet contrasts the easy
friendships of birds and animals, soon won, soon lost and soon replaced
by others, with their hard rareness among men who scarcely find one
kindred spirit in a thousand, and too often lose that one by premature
fate before the fruit of {125} friendship has had time to ripen. But
if the death of Diodati aroused the deeper sorrow in Milton, that of
King produced unquestionably the greater poem. It is a common mistake
to think that to write a great elegy a man must have suffered a great
sorrow. That is not the case. Shelley wrote _Adonais_ about Keats
whom he knew very little; Spenser _Daphnaïda_ about a lady whom he did
not know at all. It is not the actual experience of sorrow that the
elegiac poet needs; but the power of heart and imagination to conceive
it and the power of language to give it fit expression. Moreover, the
poet's real subject is not the death of Keats or King or Mrs. Gorges:
it is the death of all who have been or will be loved in all the world,
and the sorrow of all the survivors, the tragic destiny of youth and
hope and fame, the doom of frailty and transience which has been
eternally pronounced on so many of the fairest gifts of Nature and all
the noblest works of man.
About _Lycidas_ criticism has less to say than to unsay. Johnson's
notorious attack upon it is only the extremest instance of the futility
of applying to poetry the tests of prose and of the general incapacity
of that generation to apply any other. Even {126} Warton, who really
loved these early poems of Milton and did so much to recall them to
public notice, could speak of him as appearing to have had "a very bad
ear"! At such a time it was inevitable that the artificial absurdity
of pastoral poetry which is a prose fact should blind all but the
finest judges to the poetic fact that living spirit can animate every
form it finds prepared for its indwelling. Johnson and the rest were
right in perceiving that pastoral elegy had very commonly been an
insincere affectation, a mere exercise in writing; the age into which
they were born denied them the ear that could hear the amazing music of
_Lycidas_, or perceive the sensuous, imaginative, spiritual intensity
which drowns its incongruities in a flood of poetic life. There is a
still more important truth which that generation could not see. Prose
aims at expressing facts directly, and sometimes succeeds. That is
what Johnson liked, and practised himself with masterly success. But
when he and his asked that poetry should do the same they were asking
that she should deny her nature. She knows that her truth can only be
expressed or suggested by its imaginative equivalents. It is with
poetry as with religion. Religious truth stated directly becomes
philosophy or science, {127} conveying other elements of truth,
perhaps, but failing to convey the element which is specifically
religious; and therefore religion employs parable, ceremony, sacrament,
mystery, to express what scientifically exact prose cannot express. So
poetry can neither deal directly with King's death or Milton's grief
nor be content with a subject which is a mere fact in time and space.
If it did, the effect produced would not be a poetic effect; the
experience of the reader would not be a poetic experience. The poet
must transform or transcend the facts which have set his powers to
work; he must escape from them or rather lift them up with him
new-created into the world of the imagination; he must impose upon them
a new form, invented or accepted by himself, and in any case so heated
by his own fire of poetry that it can fuse and reshape the matter
submitted to it into that unity of beauty which is a work of art. That
is what Milton does in _Lycidas_ by the help of the pastoral fiction;
and what he could not have done without it or some imaginative
substitute for it.
The truest criticism on his pastoralism is really that that mould was
too small and fragile to hold all he wanted to put into it. The great
outburst of St. Peter, with its {128} scarcely disguised assault upon
the Laudian clergy, strains it almost to bursting. Yet no one would
wish it away; for it adds a passage of Miltonic fire to what but for
Phoebus and St. Peter would be too plaintive to be fully characteristic
of Milton whose genius lay rather in strength than in tenderness. Yet
perhaps we love _Lycidas_ all the more for giving us our almost
solitary glimpse of a Milton in whom the affections are more than the
will, and sorrow not sublimated into resolution. Its modesty, too, is
astonishing. He had already written the _Nativity Ode_, _Comus_ and
_Allegro_ and _Penseroso_, and yet he fancies himself still unripe for
poetry and is only forced by the "bitter constraint" of the death of
his friend to pluck the berries of his laurel which seem to him still
"harsh and crude"; for of course these allusions refer to his own
immaturity and not, as Todd thought, to that of his dead friend. And
the presence of the same over-mastering emotion which compelled him to
begin is felt throughout. There is no poem of his in which he appears
to make so complete a surrender to the changing moods of passion. The
verses seem to follow his heart and fancy just where they choose to
lead. We watch him as he thinks first of his friend's death and then
of the {129} duty of paying some poetic tribute to him; and so of his
own death and of some other poet of the future who may write of it and--
"bid fair peace be to my sable shroud."
How natural it is in all its superficial unnaturalness! The walks and
talks and verses made together at Cambridge so inevitably leading to
the "heavy change now thou art gone. Now thou art gone and never must
return"; and the fancy, partly but not wholly a reminiscence of their
classical studies, that the trees and flowers which they had loved
together must now be sharing the survivor's grief; the reproach to
Nature and Nature's divinities following on the thought of Nature's
sympathy, and followed by the first of the two incomparable returns
upon himself which are among the chief beauties of the poem--
"Ay me! I fondly dream!
'Had ye been there,' for what could that have done?"
And so to the vanity of earthly fame and the thought of another fame
which is not vanity. Twice he seems to be going to escape out of the
world of pastoral, as he strikes his own trumpet note of confident
{130} faith and stern judgment; twice the unfailing instinct of art
calls him back and makes a beauty of what might have been a mere
incongruity--
"Return, Alpheus; the dread voice is past,
That shrunk thy streams: return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues."
The flowers come, in their amazing beauty, as poetry knows and names
them, not altogether after the order of nature; till the fine flight is
once more recalled to earth in that second return to the sad reality of
things which provides the most beautiful, and as the manuscript shows,
one of the most carefully elaborated passages in the whole--
"Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
For so, to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurled,
Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides,
{131}
Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide
Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous world."
The least critical reader, when he is told that the daffodil and
amaranthus lines were once in the reverse order, that the "frail
thoughts" were at first "sad," and the "shores" "floods," and above all
that the "whelming tide" was once a thing so insignificant as the
"humming tide," can judge for himself by what a succession of
inspirations a work of consummate art is produced.
There remain the sonnets, whose sufficient praise is given in an
immortal line of Wordsworth, while all that a fine critic had thought
or learnt about them is contained in the scholarly edition of Mark
Pattison. Technically they are remarkable, like everything else of
Milton's, at once for their conservatism and their originality; while
their content has all his characteristic sincerity. They occupy a most
important place in the history of the English sonnet, which had so far
been almost entirely given up to a single theme, that of the poet's
unhappy love, which had commonly little existence outside his verses.
The shadowy mistresses who emulated the glories of Beatrice and Laura
were even less substantial than they; and, though that could {132} not
hinder great poets from making fine poetry out of them, it was fatal to
the ordinary sonnetteer, and gave the sonnet a tradition of overblown
and insincere verbiage. From all this Milton emancipated it and, as
Landor said, "gave the notes to glory." To glory and to other things;
for not all his sonnets are consecrated to glory. They deal with
various subjects; but each, whether its topic be his blindness, the
death of his wife, or the fame of Fairfax or Cromwell, is the product
of a personal experience of his own. No one can read them through
without feeling that he gets from them a true knowledge of the man. At
their weakest, as in that _To a Lady_, they convey, in the words of
Mark Pattison, "the sense that here is a true utterance of a great
soul." The rather commonplace thought and language somehow do not
prevent the total effect from being impressive. He entirely fails only
when he goes below the level of poetry altogether and repeats in verse
the angry scurrility of his divorce pamphlets. And even there some
remnant of his artist's sense of the self-restraint of verse preserves
him from the worst degradations of his prose. For the rest, they give
us his musical and scholarly tastes, his temperate pleasures and his
love of that sort of company which Shelley {133} confessed to
preferring, "such society as is quiet, wise and good"; they give us the
high ideal with which he became a poet, the high patriotism that drew
him into politics, and that sense, both for himself and for others, of
life as a thing to be lived in the presence and service of God which
was the eternally true part of his religion. The four finest are those
on the Massacre in Piedmont, On his Blindness, On attaining the age of
twenty-three, and that addressed to Cromwell, which perhaps has the
finest touch of all in the pause which comes with such tremendous
effect after "And Worcester's laureate wreath." But that to the memory
of his wife and "Captain or Colonel or Knight in Arms," the one
addressed to Lawrence and the first of those addressed to Skinner, come
very near the best; and the whole eight would be included by any good
judge in a collection of the fifty best English sonnets, to which
Milton would make a larger contribution than any one except, perhaps,
Wordsworth and Shakspeare.
And both of these poets, Shakspeare always and Wordsworth often, sinned
as Milton did not against the true genius of the sonnet. No doubt they
had nearly all precedent with them, and their successors down to
Rossetti {134} and Meredith have followed in the same path. But not
even Shakspeare and Petrarch can alter the fact that the genius of the
sonnet is solitary and self-contained. A series of sonnets is an
artistic contradiction in terms. There may be magnificent individual
sonnets in it which can stand alone, without reference to those that
precede or follow; and so far so good; but on the bulk of the series
there inevitably rests the taint of incompleteness. They do not
explain themselves. They are chapters not books, parts of a
composition and not the whole. It is scarcely possible to doubt that,
fine as they may be, the effect they produce is not that of the finest
single sonnets, beginning and ending within their own limits. Milton
may never have been under any special temptation to write a set of
consecutive sonnets; but it is in any case like his habitual submission
of all authority to his own judgment that he wrote sonnets and yet
defied the tradition of writing them as a continuous series, as he had
also disdained the amorous affectations which had been their
established subject. But in this, as in everything else where art was
concerned, he was as much a conservative as a revolutionary. And so
his scholarly interest in the Italian sonnet, and, we may be sure, his
consummate {135} critical judgment, made him set aside the various
sonnet forms adopted by Shakspeare, Spenser and other famous English
poets, and follow the original model of Petrarch more strictly than it
had been followed by any English poet of importance before him; for the
Petrarchan sonnets of Sidney, Constable and Drummond all end with the
unItalian concluding couplet. But here again Milton's example has not
proved decisive. Wordsworth did not always follow it, though he never
deserted it with success. Keats began with it and gave it up for the
Shakspearean model with the concluding couplet. But of him again, it
may be said that, while he only wrote three great sonnets and two of
them are Shakspearean, his single masterpiece is Petrarchan or
Miltonic. Rossetti, on the other hand, has no Shakspearean sonnets,
and his finest are among the best proofs of how much a sonnet gains in
unity by the single pause between the eight lines and the six instead
of Shakspeare's fourfold division, and especially by the interlocking
of the rhymes in the second half of the sonnet as opposed to
Shakspeare's isolated and half-epigrammatic final couplet.
There can be little doubt, though attempts have been made to deny it,
that nothing but {136} the prestige of the greatest of all poetic names
has prevented the superiority of the Petrarchan model from being
universally recognized. Shakspeare could do anything. But the
greatness of his sonnets is due not to their form but simply to their
being his; and the fact that he could triumph over the defects of that
form ought not to make other people fancy that these defects do not
exist. They do; and but for the courage and genius of Milton they
might have dominated the history of the English sonnet to this day.
That is part of our great debt to Milton. He could not give the sonnet
the supple and insinuating sweetness with which Shakspeare often filled
it. He had not got that in him, and perhaps it would scarcely have
proved tolerable except as part of a sequence in which it could be
balanced by sterner matter. Nor, again, could he give it Shakspeare's
infinite tenderness, nor his sense of the world's brooding mystery.
But he could and did give it his own high spirit of courage, sincerity
and strength, and his own masterly cunning of craftsmanship. And no
just reader of the greatest sonnets of the nineteenth century forgets
Milton's share in their greatness. Mr. Lascelles Abercrombie has
lately remarked that it is in the _Prelude_ and _Excursion_ of {137}
Wordsworth that "more profoundly than anywhere out of Milton himself
Milton's spiritual legacy is employed." The same thing may be as truly
said of Wordsworth's sonnets. If, as he said, in Milton's hands "the
thing became a trumpet," there is no doubt that it remained one in his
own. He is a greater master of the sonnet than Milton; the greatest on
the whole that England has known. He used it far more freely than
Milton and for more varied purposes. Perhaps it hardly afforded room
enough for one the peculiar note of whose genius was vastness. It is
seldom possible to do justice to a quotation from _Paradise Lost_
without giving at least twenty lines. The sense, and especially the
musical effect, is incomplete with less; for a Miltonic period is a
series of intellectual and rhythmical actions and reactions which
cannot be detached from each other without loss. It is obvious that a
poet whose natural range is so great can hardly be fully himself in the
sonnet. But Wordsworth had little of this spacious freedom of poetic
energy; to him--
"'twas pastime to be bound
Within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground."
And so he could use it for everything; for great events and also for
very small; not {138} exhausting great or small, but finding in each,
whatever it might be, some single aspect or quality which he could
touch to new power by that meditative tenderness of his to which Milton
was, to his great loss, an entire stranger. The natural mysticism, for
instance, of such sonnets as, "It is a beauteous evening, calm and
free," or, "Earth has not anything to show more fair," is quite out of
Milton's reach. In this and other ways Wordsworth could do much more
with the sonnet than Milton could. But without Milton some of his very
greatest things would scarcely have been attempted. All the sonnets
that utter his magnanimous patriotism, his dauntless passion for
English liberty, his burning sympathy with the oppressed, the "holy
glee" of his hatred of tyranny, are of the right lineage of Milton
himself. One can almost hear Milton crying--
"It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which to the open sea
Of the world's praise from dark antiquity
Hath flowed 'with pomp of waters unwithstood,'
Roused though it be full often to a mood
Which spurns the checks of salutary bands,
That this most famous Stream in Bogs and Sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever."
{139} There and in the "Two Voices" and in the "Inland within a Hollow
Vale" and in the Toussaint l'Ouverture sonnet, and others, we cannot
fail to catch an echo of the poet who first "gave the sonnet's notes to
glory." No one can count up all the things which have united in the
making of any poem, but among those which made these sonnets possible
must certainly be reckoned the Fairfax and Cromwell sonnets, and above
all the still more famous one on the Massacre in Piedmont. The forces
which animated England to defy and defeat Napoleon were only partly
moral; but so far as they were that they found perfect expression
through only one voice, that of Wordsworth. And there is no doubt as
to where he caught the note which he struck again to such high purpose.
He has told us himself--
"Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour;
England hath need of thee."
And, what seems stranger, he has now had in return a kind of reflected
influence upon Milton. The total experience of a reader of poetry is a
thing of many actions and reactions, co-operating and intermingling
with each other. And as we can hardly read Virgil or the Psalms now
without thinking of all {140} that has come of them, and reading some
of it back into the old words whose first creator could not foresee all
that would be found in them, so it is with Milton and Wordsworth.
There are many things in Milton which no Wordsworthian can now read
exactly as they were read in the seventeenth century. Wordsworth's line
"Thy Soul was like a Star and dwelt apart"
was strangely true of Milton as he lived in his own day. But it is
less true now that his place is among the spiritual company of the
English poets and that Wordsworth stands by his side, or sits at his
feet. That does not detract from his greatness. Indeed, it adds to
it; for it is only the greater poets who thus transcend their own day
and cannot be read as if they belonged to it alone. Read the great
sonnet on the Massacre--
"Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones,
{141}
Forget not; in thy book record their groans
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piemontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks.
Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple Tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who, having learnt thy way,
Early may fly the Babylonian woe."
Is there not more in it than the Hebrew prophet or psalmist and the
English Puritan? Is there not, for us now, something beside the past
of which Milton had read, and the present which he knew by experience?
Is there not an anticipation of another struggle against another
tyrant--nay, the creation of the very spirit in which that struggle was
to be faced? So Milton influences Wordsworth and the England of
Wordsworth's day; and they in their turn inevitably influence our minds
as we read him. There lies one part of the secret of his greatness; a
part which is seen at its highest in his sonnets.
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