CHAPTER V

_PARADISE REGAINED_ AND _SAMSON AGONISTES_

_Paradise Regained_, like the _Odyssey_, the _Aeneid_ and the second

part of _Faust_, has been an inevitable victim of the human taste for

comparison. It cannot fail to be compared with _Paradise Lost_ and

cannot fail to suffer by it. The poets and critics have indeed been

kinder to it than the public. Johnson said that if it had not been

written by Milton "it would receive universal praise." Wordsworth

thought it "the most perfect in execution of anything written by

Milton." But the great body of readers finds an epic with only two

main actors in it, and hardly anything that can be called a story, too

severe a demand upon its poetic taste. And when unprofessional opinion

remains constant for several generations, as it has in this case, it is

never wise to ignore or defy it. _Paradise Regained_ is a very bare

poem. It has none of the splendours of its predecessor: no {197}

scenes in which we hear the full voice of that Milton

"Whose Titan angels, Gabriel, Abdiel,

Starr'd from Jehovah's gorgeous armouries,

Tower, as the deep-domed empyrean

Rings to the roar of an angel onset;"

nor yet any of those others which delighted Tennyson even more, the

scenes of Adam's

"bowery loneliness,

The brooks of Eden mazily murmuring,

And bloom profuse and cedar arches."

It has no love, no sin, no quarrel, no reconciliation, no central

moment of tragic suspense, indeed no human action at all. And Milton

has refrained almost absolutely from adorning it with the similes which

are among the chief glories of _Paradise Lost_. It is, in fact, as

Mark Pattison has said, "probably the most unadorned poem extant in any

language."

At the very beginning of _Paradise Lost_ Milton had cast his eye on to

that second chapter in the Christian history of man without which the

first is a mere picture of despair. His subject was to be man's first

disobedience and its results; death, woe and loss of Eden

"till one greater Man

Restore us and regain the blissful seat."

{198} Whether he then had any thought of attempting to deal with that

restoration we do not know. Nor do we know what motives induced him to

choose the story of the Temptation in the Wilderness as the action in

which the new order of things was to be manifested. Some critics have

been surprised that he did not take the Crucifixion or the

Resurrection. And it is obvious that the first, with the Tree of

Calvary pointing back to the Tree in the Garden, would have afforded a

natural sequence to _Paradise Lost_. Others have wondered that he did

not use the Descent into Hell in which the liberation of Satan's

captives would have followed on the story of how they fell into his

power. And it is obvious that there were great poetic, and especially

Miltonic, possibilities in the theme of the victorious Son of God

entering the very kingdom in which the Satan of _Paradise Lost_ had

exercised such splendid rule, and setting free the saints and prophets

and kings of the Old Testament. But it is possible, as Sir Walter

Raleigh has suggested, that Milton was no longer in the vein for

grandiose themes of external majesty and might such as this story would

have afforded. "His interest was now centred rather in the sayings of

the wise than in the deeds of the mighty." That {199} may be so:

though his _Samson_ which was yet to come is certainly not without its

mighty deeds. But, whatever were his reasons for putting aside such

subjects as the Descent into Hell, it is not difficult to discover

several which he probably found decisive in inducing him to prefer the

Temptation to the Passion. To begin with, he must have been conscious

of the immensely greater difficulty of handling the story of the

Passion in such a way that Christian readers could bear to read it.

Then, even more certainly operative on his mind was the fact that the

Passion is related to us in great detail, the Temptation in a few words

of mysterious import; so that the one leaves almost no freedom of

invention to the poet, while the other scarcely binds him at all. Then

again there is the close parallelism between the temptation in the

Garden and the temptation in the Wilderness; and finally, most

important of all, the fact that the Temptation is the only event in the

life of Christ in which Satan plays a visible and important part. A

poem that was to be a second part of _Paradise Lost_ could not do

without Satan; and in fact he is even more prominent in _Paradise

Regained_, where he is present throughout, than in its predecessor of

which there are several books which scarcely so {200} much as mention

him. This was no doubt decisive.

So Milton chose the Temptation in the Wilderness as his subject, with

Satan once more as one of the two principal actors in his story. But

the actor is even more changed than the story. The Satan of the later

poem is no longer the splendid rebel of _Paradise Lost_. _Paradise

Regained_ has in it no heavenly battles and its council of devils is a

mere shadow of the great parliament of hell. It has, therefore, no

place either for the general of the infernal armies or for the Prime

Minister of the infernal Senate. The magnificent figure who imposes

himself on the imagination--

"Like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved"--

becomes in it something far less impressive, a political theorist

instead of a statesman, a student of the balance of power instead of a

soldier, a casuistical disputant about culture and morals in place of a

devil venturing all for empire and revenge. It is as if Alexander were

exchanged for Aristotle: almost as if St. George were replaced by Mr.

Worldly Wiseman. The imagination is affected by the inevitable loss of

colour, and _Paradise Regained_ is the sufferer in fame and popularity.

It also suffers from the old difficulty {201} inherent in supernatural

personages which affects it even more than _Paradise Lost_. The whole

action is a succession of Temptations. The question how far such

attempts by a devil upon a Divine Being can afford any hope to the one

or any fear or danger to the other is a mystery of which the Church

itself scarcely claims to offer a full explanation. Into the

theological difficulty this is not the place to enter. It is only with

the corresponding poetic difficulty which we are concerned. Just as in

_Paradise Lost_ it is impossible not to feel the unreality of the war

in heaven, so in _Paradise Regained_ it is impossible not to feel, in

spite of some inconsistency of language on the subject, that Satan

commonly knows who it is whom he is assailing and is known by Him in

return, and that consequently the whole action has for poetic purposes

a certain unreality. He knows that Jesus is the Son of God; with a

right to the homage of all nature and the power to take all as His own.

He asks--

"Hast thou not right to all created things?

Owe not all creatures, by just right, to thee service?"

Yet he discusses with Him various very human methods of arriving at

power, just as {202} if He were subject to the same conditions as other

men who desire to rule or influence the world. The consequence is

that, although the speeches contain much interesting thought and much

fine poetry, they are seldom or never dramatically convincing. Our

Lord, in particular, instead of the gracious and winning figure of the

Gospels, becomes a kind of self-sufficient aristocratic moralist. His

speeches, as Milton gives them, display rather the defiant virtue of

the Stoic, or the self-conscious righteousness of the Pharisee, than

the simple and loving charity of the Christian. The weapon of moral

and intellectual contempt, so freely employed in them and so natural

both to Jew and to Greek, strikes to us a false and jarring note when

put into the mouth of Him who taught His disciples that the only way of

entry into His kingdom was that of being born again and becoming as

little children.

These are all serious drawbacks and they are not the only ones. If

from one point of view Milton in _Paradise Regained_ is too little of a

Christian, from another he is too much. One of the gravest

difficulties with which Christian apologists have always had to contend

is the entire indifference of the New Testament and, generally

speaking, of the {203} Church in all ages, especially the most devout,

not only to economic and material progress, but to all elements except

the ethical and spiritual in the higher civilization of humanity. At

its friendliest the Church has hardly ever been willing to allow to

such things any inherent or independent importance of their own. Those

who feel that they owe an incalculable debt to art and poetry and

philosophy and therefore to the Greeks, have inevitably found this

attitude a stumbling-block. And they will always read with exceptional

surprise and indignation the narrow obscurantism of the speech which

Milton, scholar and artist as he was, is not ashamed to put into the

mouth of Christ in the fourth book. He cannot himself have been a

victim of the shallow fallacy expressed in line 325 (he who reads gets

little benefit unless he brings judgment to his reading "and what he

brings what need he elsewhere seek?"); and his lifelong practice shows

that he did not think Greek poetry was

"Thin-sown with aught of profit or delight."

Nor could he have seriously thought that the Hebrew prophets taught

"the solid rules of civil government," of which in fact they knew

nothing except on the moral side, better than the statesmen and

philosophers of Rome and {204} Athens. The explanation is, perhaps,

partly that Milton was an Arian, and therefore felt at liberty to

emphasize the Jewish limitations of Christ: limitations the possibility

of which, as recent controversies have shown, even Athanasian opinion

has been forced to face. But, in any case, in the _Paradise Regained_

stress is necessarily, for dramatic purposes, laid on the Hebrew and

Messianic character of Christ, and from that point of view it is not

unnatural to make Him the spokesman of Hebrew resistance to the

intellectual encroachments of Greece and Rome. Another part of the

explanation is that the strong Biblical and Hebraic element in Milton's

character does seem to have increased in strength during his later

years. It was far from getting exclusive possession even then, and all

the evidence shows that he was always the very opposite of the

narrow-minded Puritan fanatics of his day. But his tendencies in that

direction would be exaggerated while he was occupied with a purely

Biblical subject. And he may have thought, if he thought about the

question at all, that the contemptuous tone adopted about classical

culture in the speech of Christ was not only dramatically defensible,

but balanced by the far finer passage, evidently written from his {205}

heart, in which Satan exalts the glories of Athens. It is, perhaps,

the most famous thing in the poem.

"Look once more, ere we leave this specular mount,

Westward, much nearer by south-west; behold

Where on the Aegean shore a city stands,

Built nobly, pure the air and light the soil--

Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts

And eloquence, native to famous wits

Or hospitable, in her sweet recess,

City or suburban, studious walks and shades.

See there the olive-grove of Academe,

Plato's retirement, where the Attic bird

Trills her thick-warbled notes the summer long;

There flow'ry hill Hymettus, with the sound

Of bees' industrious murmur, oft invites

To studious musing; there Ilissus rolls

His whispering stream. Within the walls then view

The schools of ancient sages, his who bred

Great Alexander to subdue the world,

Lyceum there; and painted Stoa next.

There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power

Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit

By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,

Aeolian charms and Dorian lyric odes,

And his who gave them breath, but higher sung,

{206}

Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called,

Whose poem Phoebus challenged for his own.

Thence what the lofty grave Tragedians taught

In chorus or iambic, teachers best

Of moral prudence, with delight received

In brief sententious precepts, while they treat

Of fate, and chance, and change in human life,

High actions and high passions best describing."

It is plainly the very voice of the poet himself, and he may have felt

certain that we should so understand it. But it is difficult not to

regret that it is the Devil who is made to pay Milton's great debt to

Athens and Christ who is made to repudiate it.

Yet, in spite of all this, in spite of its disdain of the obvious

attractions open to poetry, in spite of much in it that alienates the

sympathies of many, the _Paradise Regained_ has received very high

praise from the finest judges of English poetry. Johnson and

Wordsworth have already been quoted, and to them may be added

Coleridge, who says of it that "in its kind it is the most perfect poem

extant," and Mr. Mackail, who has spoken of its "unique poetic

qualities." Why have the poets and critics been so much {207} more

favourable to it than the public? Perhaps because artists are always

inclined to value work in proportion to its difficulties. Indeed, this

fallacy seems natural to all classes of men about their own work.

Gardeners in England tend to admire a man who grows indifferent oranges

more than a man who grows good strawberries. It is like what Johnson

said of the preaching lady: "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's

walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised

to find it done at all." This tendency to let surprise sit in the seat

which belongs to judgment is greatly intensified by professional

knowledge. The architect is apt to exaggerate the merit of a building

placed on a very awkward site, the artist to think a piece of very

difficult foreshortening more beautiful than it really is. The public

may not be so good a judge either of the building or of the drawing:

but, knowing nothing of the technical difficulties, it at least forms

its judgment on the true criterion which is, of course, the value of

the product, not the surprisingness of its having been produced or the

difficulties overcome in its production.

Something of this kind may account for the fact that _Paradise

Regained_ has been more appreciated by the poets than by the public.

{208} The public finds it rather bare and dry and judges accordingly.

The poets know how infinitely hard a task it was that Milton set

himself, and find no praise too great for the man who did not fail in

it. They see a poem of two thousand lines whose single subject is the

attempt of a devil who knows himself doomed to defeat to persuade a

divine Person who knows Himself assured of victory to be false to the

law of His being. And into this barren theme they see art and nature,

ethics and politics, luxury and splendour and empire, cunningly

interwoven and

"Eden raised in the waste Wilderness."

They see a style stripped of almost all ornament especially in the

speeches of our Lord: the poet deliberately walking always on the very

edge of the gulf of prose and yet always as one perfectly assured that

into that gulf his feet can never fall. Here and there, as when we

come upon such lines as

"I never liked thy talk, thy offers less,"

we are nervous as we watch: but the poet passes on his way serenely

unconscious of our fears, and in the very next speech is on the heights

of poetry with the great description {209} of Athens. Once only,

perhaps, in the reply to Satan after the storm--

"Me worse than wet thou find'st not,"

we feel that the cunningly maintained balance has failed and that the

limit has been passed which divides the severe from the grotesque.

The truth is that, if the narrowness of its subject and the austerity

of its style be admitted, _Paradise Regained_ is a poetic achievement

as great as it is surprising. It cannot be _Paradise Lost_, of course,

and that is the fault for which it has not been forgiven. And its fine

things are even less evident, much less evident, at a first reading

than those of _Paradise Lost_. But Milton has left nothing more

Miltonic. He did greater things but nothing in which he stands so

entirely alone. There is no poem in English, perhaps none in any

language of the world, which exhibits to the same degree the inherent

power of style itself, in its naked essence, unassisted by any of its

visible accessories. There are in it, of course, some passages of

characteristic splendour, the banquet in the wilderness, the vision of

Rome, and others; but a large part of the poem is as bare as the

mountains and, to the luxurious and conventional, as bleak and

forbidding. Its grave Dorian music, scarcely {210} heard by the

sensual ear, is played by the mind to the spirit and by the spirit to

the mind. Ever present as its art is, it is an art infinitely removed

from that to which all the world at once responds and surrenders. It

is not at first seen to be art at all. The verse which in truth dances

so cunningly appears to the uninitiated to stumble and halt. The

music, which the common ear is so slow to catch, makes us think of

those Platonic mysteries of abstract number seen only in their

perfection by some godlike mathematician who lives rapt above sense and

matter in the contemplation of the Idea of Good.

But, if there is much in an art so consummate as Milton's which escapes

analysis, there are also elements which can be measured and weighed.

Here as in the _Paradise Lost_ students of metre can count and compare

his stresses and pauses, and set out some finite portion of the

infinite variety of rhythms which, even more needed here than in

_Paradise Lost_, sustain the poem in its difficult flight over so

apparently barren a country. The art of the poet as distinct from the

musician is less difficult to trace. An avowed sequel has to recall

its predecessor and yet not to recall it too much. _Paradise Regained_

recalls _Paradise Lost_ by its central action, a {211} temptation, by

its council of devils, by its assembly of the heavenly host, by a

hundred echoes of phrase and circumstance. But though the heavenly

host is itself unchanged, though it is still the old "full frequence

bright Of Angels" yet there is now no real council. The Son, the only

spokesman who can address the Father, is no longer present, and even

the hymn of the angels gets no more than a vague description. A

greater change has come over the infernal council: scarcely any longer

infernal, for their leader can now open his address to them with

"O ancient Powers of Air and this wide World,"

and the meeting is held in mid air and no longer in hell. Nor is any

rivalry attempted with the great debate of _Paradise Lost_: only enough

to awaken its memory in the reader and to enable the poet to find a

place in the second meeting for the most obvious of temptations which

yet reverence forbade him to introduce into the main action. And note

how this contains at least one of those small dramatic touches for

which, except from Mr. Mackail, Milton has got too little credit.

Satan asks how he is to assail the new enemy: and Belial, who stands

for the sensualist man of the world, at once offers his suggestion.

{212} He is sure, as such men always are, that the lowest motive is

invariably the true mainspring and explanation of all human actions:

there is no beating about the bush with him: he is frank and cynical,

and begins at once without shame, apology or preface--

"Set women in his eye and in his walk."

What could be more exactly in the downright manner affected by men of

his type in the world of to-day and every day? And there are other

similar touches. Then again the sequel recalls its predecessor when we

hear Satan strike the very note he struck so often in _Paradise Lost_--

"'Tis true, I am that Spirit unfortunate,"

and when we see him fall in ruin at the awful end of the long debate--

"Now shew thy progeny; if not to stand

Cast thyself down; safely, if Son of God;

For it is written: 'He will give command

Concerning thee to his Angels: in their hands

They shall uplift thee, lest at any time

Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.'

To whom thus Jesus: Also it is written

'Tempt not the Lord thy God.' He said, and stood:

But Satan, smitten with amazement, fell."

{213}

Nor must it be supposed by those who have not read the _Paradise

Regained_ that the bareness of its style is invariable. Most

conspicuous, for reasons of reverence no doubt, in the speeches of

Christ, it is far less marked in those of Satan and disappears

altogether in some of the descriptive passages. Take, for instance,

the famous temptation of the banquet--

"He spake no dream; for, as his words had end,

Our Saviour, lifting up his eyes, beheld

In ample space under the broadest shade,

A table richly spread in regal mode,

With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort

And savour; beasts of chase, or fowl of game,

In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled,

Grisamber-steamed; all fish from sea or shore

Freshet or purling brook, of shell or fin,

And exquisitest name, for which was drained

Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast.

Alas, how simple, to these cates compared,

Was that crude apple that diverted Eve!

And at a stately sideboard, by the wine,

That fragrant smell diffused, in order stood

Tall stripling youths rich-clad, of fairer hue

Than Ganymed or Hylas; distant more,

Under the trees now tripped, now solemn stood,

Nymphs of Diana's train, and Naiades

With fruits and flowers from Amalthea's horn,

{214}

And ladies of the Hesperides, that seemed

Fairer than feigned of old, or fabled since

Of faery damsels met in forest wide

By knights of Logres, or of Lyones,

Lancelot, or Pelleas, or Pellenore."

_Paradise Lost_ itself contains no more intricately beautiful passage

than this. It is one of those things that have been the delight and

despair of poets ever since. For all his disdain of the follies of the

Middle Age Milton can never touch the old romances, as Joseph Warton

well noted, without immediately rising into the most exquisite poetry:

and this reluctant homage of classical genius is the greatest tribute

ever paid to their undying fascination.

But of course such a passage as this is not typical of the poem: it is

one of its far-shining heights which cannot be altogether missed even

by eyes quite blind to the beauties of the lower country through which

_Paradise Regained_ takes the most part of its course. Ordinarily the

poem is grave, plain and unadorned, engaged in the discussion of moral

problems which give little opportunity for the more obvious graces of

poetry. The interest of the speeches which constitute the bulk of it

is threefold: technical, in the rhythmical or metrical skill by which

Milton sustains an {215} abstract discourse expressed in unadorned

language and keeps it at the level of high poetry; moral or

intellectual, the interest of the subjects discussed; and, the greatest

of all for many readers, autobiographical, the interest of the evidence

they afford of the poet's own thoughts and character. All may be seen,

for instance, in such a confession as that of Satan in the first book--

"Envy, they say, excites me, thus to gain

Companions of my misery and woe!

At first it may be; but, long since with woe

Nearer acquainted, now I feel by proof

That fellowship in pain divides not smart,

Nor lightens aught each man's peculiar load."

There is scarcely a word in it that prose cannot use even to-day. The

thought is one that might come from any moralist; there is nothing

daring or imaginative about it. Yet out of this what poetry Milton has

made! The personal emotion of it, the note of confession and

individual experience, has lifted it altogether above the level of the

cold maxims of the preacher who gives no sign of having suffered, or

sinned, or so much as lived, himself. Then the art of it: so entirely

unperceived by the ordinary reader, so invincible in its effect upon

him. The whole secret of it defies analysis: but a few ingredients can

{216} be detected. There is comparatively little of Milton's favourite

alliteration: the tone of the passage is too quiet for the free use of

an artistic device so instantly visible. But note the beautiful line--

"Companions of my misery and woe"--

itself free flowing without a pause of any kind, so as to prepare the

better for the full pause both of sense and of rhythm which separates

it from what follows. Then there is the vivid conversational "At first

it may be," and its pause, contrasting so finely with the next line

where the pause is also after the fifth syllable, but with a totally

different effect. Note again the variety of rhythm which distinguishes

the last two lines. Neither has any strong pause in it: and they might

so easily have been a monotonous repetition. Is it fanciful to think

that, perhaps half unconsciously, Milton has suggested the quick stab

of pain or sorrow in the swift movement of the first: and that the

long-drawn rhythm of the second is meant to convey something of the

dull years of misery which so often follow? Its first six syllables--

"Nor lightens aught each man's,"

if given their full effect of sound, take perhaps half as long again to

read as the first six of the {217} preceding line. In any case,

whatever was meant by it, the line is a most beautiful one in itself,

as well as full of one of the most moving of human things, a strong

man's confession that his strength does not always suffice him.

These obviously autobiographical passages are to be found all through

the poem. There are the stately Roman embassies coming and going in

all their pomp: in which it is surely Cromwell's Foreign Secretary who

sees nothing but

"tedious waste of time, to sit and hear

So many hollow compliments and lies,

Outlandish flatteries."

There is the old contempt of war and those who in virtue of their

victories

"swell with pride, and must be titled Gods,"

and of the mob who praise and admire

"they know not what,

And know not whom, but as one leads the other;

And what delight to be by such extolled,

To live upon their tongues and be their talk?

Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise,

His lot who dares be singularly good."

There is the contempt of wealth--

"Extol not riches then, the toil of fools,

The wise man's cumbrance, if not snare;"

{218} a contempt which Milton shares with nearly all saints and heroes

and most philosophers; a little ungratefully, perhaps, as if forgetting

that, compared with the mass of men, he had himself always been rich,

and that what he owed to the toil of his father had not proved in his

case a snare or a cumbrance, but the necessary condition of the

learning and the leisure he had used so nobly. Finally, to give no

more instances, there is the confession at once so personal and so

representative of the feeling of all men who have ever made the

smallest effort to live well--

"Hard are the ways of truth, and rough to walk,

Smooth on the tongue discoursed, pleasing to the ear,

And tunable as sylvan pipe or song."

Who knows whether behind such words as these there lies the memory of

some rapturous vision of the new world of love as St. Paul saw it,

which had been cooled only too soon by humbling experience of the

difficulty of "bearing all things" when all things included Salmasius,

or an unthankful daughter?

This grave introspective note, present from the first in everything

written by Milton and far more conspicuous in _Paradise Regained_ than

in _Paradise Lost_, is felt still more in the {219} last of his works,

the drama _Samson Agonistes_. It is in the Greek form with a Chorus:

and is as broodingly full as Aeschylus or Sophocles of the folly of man

and the uncertainty and sadness of human life; but Milton has added an

angry sternness of judgment on the one hand, and on the other an

assured faith in divine deliverance, both of which are rather Hebrew

than Greek. Into this strange drama, so alien from all the literature

of his day, Milton has poured all the thoughts and emotions with which

the spectacle of his own life filled him. All through it we hear a

faith that was strong but never blind battling with the spectacle of

the wickedness of men and the dark uncertainty of the ways of God. The

Philistines have triumphed, lords sit "lordly in their wine" at

Whitehall, the Dagon of prelatism is once more enthroned throughout the

land, the saints are dispersed and forsaken, and he himself, who had as

he thought so signally borne his witness for God, sits blind and sad in

his lonely house, "to visitants a gaze Or pitied object," with no hope

left of high service to his country and no prospect but that of a

"contemptible old age obscure." No doubt he did not always feel like

that, for the evidence shows him cheerful and friendly in company: and,

of {220} course, the picture has undergone the imaginative heightening

of art besides being coloured by the story of Samson, so much sadder

than Milton's own. But the lonely hours of a blind man of genius who

has fought for a great cause and been utterly defeated must often be

full of the hopeless half-resigned and half-rebellious broodings in

which throughout _Samson_ we hear so plainly the voice of Milton

himself.

"God of our fathers! what is Man,

That thou towards him with hand so various--

Or might I say contrarious?--

Temper'st thy providence through his short course;

Not evenly, as thou rulest

The angelic orders and inferior creatures mute,

Irrational and brute?

Nor do I name of men the common rout,

That wandering loose about

Grow up and perish as the summer fly,

Heads without name, no more remembered;

But such as thou hast solemnly elected,

With gifts and graces eminently adorned,

To some great work, thy glory,

And people's safety, which in part they effect:

Yet toward these thus dignified thou oft,

Amidst their highth of noon,

Changest thy countenance and thy hand, with no regard

Of highest favours past

From thee on them, or them to thee of service."

{221} This is Milton undisguised speaking of and for himself. And so

is the still sadder outburst in the very first speech of Samson--

"O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,

Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse

Without all hope of day!

O first-created beam, and thou great Word,

'Let there be light, and light was over all';

Why am I thus bereaved thy prime decree?

The Sun to me is dark

And silent as the Moon

When she deserts the night,

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.

Since light so necessary is to life,

And almost life itself, if it be true

That light is in the soul,

She all in every part, why was the sight

To such a tender ball as the eye confined,

So obvious and so easy to be quenched,

And not, as feeling, through all parts diffused,

That she might look at will through every pore?

Then had I not been thus exiled from light,

As in the land of darkness, yet in light,

To live a life half dead, a living death,

And buried; but, O yet more miserable!

Myself my sepulchre, a moving grave;

Buried, yet not exempt,

By privilege of death and burial,

From worst of other evils, pains, and wrongs,

But made hereby obnoxious more

{222}

To all the miseries of life,

Life in captivity

Among inhuman foes."

This sublime music in which the soul's emotion finds and obeys its own

law was scarcely audible to the age which followed Milton's death, when

poets had concentrated all their art on the effort to make both

language and metre as instantaneously intelligible as possible. They

succeeded much better in the second task than in the first: for the

truth is that the exact meaning of a verse is much more often difficult

to ascertain in the case of Pope than in the case of Milton. But no

one has ever doubted how to read aloud a line of Pope or Dryden. And

this has obvious advantages and was, of course, at first a great source

of pleasure. It made Pope's poetry the most immediately popular we

have ever had, as it still is the most effective for public quotation.

Almost everybody, as Mr. Bridges has said, "has a natural liking for

the common fundamental rhythms" and "it is only after long familiarity

with them that the ear grows dissatisfied and wishes them to be

broken." But in poetry as in music the more cultivated the ear the

sooner it gets tired of being given too little to do: and as soon as

every warbler had Pope's {223} tune by heart critical readers began to

wish for something less obvious. The ultimate result of that

dissatisfaction was the metrical experiments of Coleridge and the rich

harvest of varied rhythms and melody with which Shelley and Tennyson

and Swinburne enriched the nineteenth century. And all this movement

had also, of course, a retrospective effect. It may be true that, as

Mr. Bridges says, "there are very few persons indeed who take such a

natural delight in rhythm for its own sake that they can follow with

pleasure a learned rhythm which is very rich in variety, and the beauty

of which is its perpetual freedom to obey the sense and diction;" but

it could not fail to be the case that their number was increased by the

comparative sensitiveness to the more intricate music of words which

was inevitably produced in those who had learnt much Shelley or

Tennyson by heart. And such people at once heard things in Milton

which were absolutely inaudible to the ears of Dr. Johnson's

generation. The comparative subtlety, both in imagination and in form,

of the poetry of the nineteenth century made it impossible for poets to

compete with journalists for the attention of the big public as Pope

had done triumphantly; but as a set off against that loss it gave a far

{224} richer delight to those who were capable of that interaction of

the natural ear and the spiritual to which all great poetry makes its

appeal. This led straight back to Milton who made that double appeal

as only a very few poets in all the world have ever made it. And the

more poetry is studied and loved as the greatest of the arts, as the

medium through which that combination of the vision of genius with the

slow trained cunning of the craftsman, which is what great art is,

finds its most perfect expression, the more will men, or at least

Englishmen, return to Milton. And especially, in some ways, to

_Samson_, where his art is at its boldest and freest, and where it

suffered longest from the indifference of dull ears.

A little book of this kind is not the place for a discussion of English

metre, or even, in any detail, of Milton's. Those who wish to go into

such studies will find much of what they want in the Poet Laureate's

book on _Milton's Prosody_. It is possible to disagree with some of

his proposed scansions of doubtful lines, but it is impossible not to

learn a great deal from suggestions as to the rhythmical effects

intended by Milton which come, as these do, from one who is himself a

master of rhythm and has never concealed the fact {225} that Milton's

was one of the schools in which he passed his apprenticeship. So his

analysis, line by line, of the opening of the first chorus of _Samson_

will be a revelation to many of what they have, perhaps, never felt at

all, or felt only unconsciously without understanding anything of what

it was which they felt or why. But even without such help no one whose

ear has had the smallest training can fail to notice some of the more

daring of Milton's metrical effects. In the lines quoted above, for

instance, who can miss the triple stab of passionate agony in the

thrice repeated, strongly accented "dark, dark, dark"? The most

careless reader cannot fail to be arrested by the line, though he may

not realize the means employed by Milton to enforce attention, the rare

six stresses in a ten-syllabled line, the still rarer effect of three

strongly stressed syllables following immediately upon one another, the

inversion of three out of the five stresses of the next line,

"irrecoverably dark" suggesting the spasmodic disorder of violent

grief. These are certainly devices deliberately chosen for producing

the required effects. And so, probably, are the more regular rhythm of

the words which express the calming aspiration up to the throne of God,

and the quiet {226} mono-syllabic simplicity of the divine utterance,

"Let there be light," which continues its softening influence over the

return in the following lines to his own sad conditions. How smoothly

the complaint now goes: "The sun to me is dark And silent as the moon."

It is in comparison with the earlier abruptness as if he had gone

through something like the process of the psalmist, "until I went into

the sanctuary of God: then understood I" what had before been "too

painful for me." Then there is the comparatively unmarked rhythm of

the intellectual argumentative passage which follows: till emotion

begins again to overwhelm reflection, and shows itself in the strong

alliteration of "light," "land," "light," "live," "life," "living," and

in the strong caesura after "buried," the more marked for coming so

early in the verse.

Such poor noting of technicalities as this gives, of course, no more of

the secret of Milton's wonderful poetry than anatomy gives of the power

and beauty of the human body. But it has its interest and even its

use: provided that too much importance is not attributed to it and that

no one makes the mistake of the lady who, according to the story,

hopefully asked the painter what he mixed {227} his paints with, and

received the crushing reply, "With my brains, Madam."

_Samson Agonistes_ stands in marked contrast to its predecessor,

_Paradise Regained_. And not only in being a drama. Its intense

omnipresent emotion makes a still more important difference. In

passing from one to the other we pass from the least to the most

emotional of Milton's works. This would in any case have been a gain

for most readers: but the gain is made more important by the extreme

severity of Milton's final poetic manner. A style which excludes

almost all ornament stands in especial need of the support of a visibly

felt emotion. It has been said by a living writer that "when reason is

subsidiary to emotion verse is the right means of expression, and, when

emotion to reason, prose." This is roughly true, though the poetry of

mere emotion is poor stuff. The special faculty of the poet, as

Johnson well said, is that of joining music with reason. That is to

say that the poet unites thought and feeling and gives them perfect

expression. They are not distinct: they become in his hands a new

single life, a unity. You cannot separate the emotion from the thought

in any great line of poetry. When Wordsworth talks of the

"unimaginable touch of time," there is {228} plainly emotion as well as

thought and memory in his words: when Shelley cries in his despair--

"Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar,

Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight

No more--O never more!"

it is no mere cry of the heart: the mind is in it too: and neither in

him nor in Wordsworth can you get the two apart again after the poet

has joined them together.

Now, though in _Paradise Regained_ the intellect is not allowed, as in

much eighteenth-century poetry, to become so dominant as to make us

feel that prose and not verse was the proper medium for what the poet

had to say, yet it does play a greater part than it can commonly play

with safety, perhaps a greater part than it plays in any other English

poem of the first rank. It is only Milton's unfailing gift of poetic

style which saves the situation. He could do what Wordsworth could

not: conduct long discussions on abstract questions without descending

from the note of poetry to that of the lecture-room. The gallant

explorer who fights his way through the _Prelude_ and the _Excursion_

wins, as he deserves, a great reward, and a greater still if he does it

a second time and a third, {229} when he has learnt that they both have

marshy valleys into which he need not twice descend. But he has paid a

price for the lesson, paid it in the endurance of a great deal of solid

and heavy prose. That is partly because Wordsworth often thinks

without feeling or imagining: he gives us his thought as it is in

itself, as a professor of moral philosophy gives it, without passing it

through the transforming processes of the emotions and the imagination.

These hardly fail Milton half a dozen times in all his poetry: and the

result is the difference between such lines as--

"This is the genuine course, the aim, and end

Of prescient reason; all conclusions else

Are abject, vain, presumptuous, and perverse:"

and such as Milton writes when he is nearest to bare thinking--

"Who therefore seeks in these

True wisdom, finds her not, or by delusion

Far worse, her false resemblance only meets,

An empty cloud."

The difference is also partly due to what, indeed, is another side of

the same distinction; the fact that Wordsworth has not and Milton has a

constant possession of the great or grand style. This is plain in such

passages as those just quoted: it is plainer still where the poets come

close to each other in {230} descriptive passages; as, for instance, in

Wordsworth's--

"Negro ladies in white muslin gowns,"

and Milton's--

"Dusk faces with white silken turbans wreathed;"

between which yawns an obviously impassable gulf.

Milton is sometimes harsh, crabbed, grim in expression as in thought:

but these things are not at all necessarily fatal to poetry as is the

cool and contented obviousness of Wordsworth's weak moments. Milton is

occasionally contented in his own lofty fashion, but he is never cool,

and never less so than in _Samson_. All through it he is face to face

with a tremendous issue in which he himself is supremely interested: he

is "enacting hell," to use Goethe's curious phrase, which fits Milton

so much better than it fits the serenity of Homer. Twenty years before

he had written, in quite another connection, "No man knows hell like

him who converses most in heaven": and now in his old age he embodies

that tremendous truth in his last poem. All his poems are intensely

emotional and personal: but none so much so as _Samson Agonistes_,

where he is fixing all eyes on the {231} tragedy of his own life. The

parallel between Samson and Milton does not extend, of course, to all

the details. But even of them many correspond, such as the blindness,

the disastrous marriage with "the daughter of an infidel," the old age

of a broken and defeated champion of God become a gazing-stock to

triumphant profanity. But more than any special circumstance it is the

whole general position of Samson as a man dedicated from his birth to

the service of God, and gladly accepting the dedication, yet failing in

his task and apparently deserted by his God, which makes of him a type

in which Milton can see himself and the Cromwellian saints who lie

ground under the heels of the victorious Philistines of the

Restoration. To him as to Samson the situation is one that makes

questionings on the dark and doubtful ways of God unavoidable: darker

to him even than to Samson: for he has no guilty memory of a supreme

act of folly to explain the divine desertion.

The action of the drama is extremely simple. Samson is found enjoying

a brief respite from his punishment. The day is a feast of Dagon, and

the Philistine "superstition" allows no work to be done on it.

Accordingly an attendant who is a mute person is leading {232} him to a

bank where he is accustomed to take what rest he is allowed and enjoy

"The breath of heaven fresh blowing, pure and sweet

With day-spring born;"

that sensation of delicate scents and cool breezes which, as Milton

knew only too well, mean so much more to the blind than to those who

can see. Then his restless thoughts begin to crowd upon him--

"Why was my breeding ordered and prescribed

As of a person separate to God,

Designed for great exploits?"

The whole passage belongs naturally enough to Samson: but obviously

here, as well as in the blindness, the poet is already thinking of

himself. So again, when Samson proceeds to speak of being

"exposed

To daily fraud, contempt, abuse, and wrong,"

one can scarcely miss a reference to the daughters who purloined and

sold the blind father's books. When the soliloquy draws to an end the

Chorus, men of his tribe, come to visit Samson. Not even Milton ever

made the arrangement and sound of words do more to enforce their

meaning than he does in this wonderful opening chorus--

{233}

"This, this is he; softly a while;

Let us not break in upon him.

O change beyond report, thought, or belief!"

They chant their inevitable wonder at the contrast between what Samson

was and what he is.

"O mirror of our fickle state,

Since man on earth, unparalleled!

The rarer thy example stands,

By how much from the top of wondrous glory,

Strongest of mortal men,

To lowest pitch of abject fortune thou art fallen."

No reader of Greek can fail to be reminded of more than one chorus in

the _Oedipus_ of Sophocles--

_io geneai broton_

_hôs hymas isa chai to mêden zôsas enarithmô--_

"Alas, ye generations of men, how utterly a thing of nought I count the

life ye have to live! For what man is there who wins more of happiness

than just the seeming and after the semblance a falling away. With thy

fate before mine eyes, unhappy Oedipus, I can call no earthly creature

blest." Here and there, as in this passage, the parallel is very

close. But Milton's genius is too great and self-reliant for mere

imitation. He sometimes recalls the very words of Greek poets as he

{234} does those of the Bible: but that is not because he is

artificially imitating either, but because he has assimilated the

spirit of both and made them a part of himself.

The Chorus express their sympathy with Samson and he replies, bitterly

reproaching his own folly and that of the rulers of Judah who gave him

up to their enemies. But human blindness will not ultimately defeat

the ways of God: and the Chorus sing their song of faith, in which

rhyme is called in to give its touch of impatient contempt at the folly

of the atheist.

"Just are the ways of God,

And justifiable to men;

Unless there be who think not God at all.

If any be, they walk obscure;

For of such doctrine never was there school,

But the heart of the fool,

And no man therein doctor but himself."

So ends the first act or episode of the drama. The second is the visit

of Samson's father Manoah, whose cry is--

"Who would be now a father in my stead?"

He is trying to negotiate for his son's ransom: but Samson refuses, not

desiring life, desiring rather to pay the full penalty of his sin. He

cannot share his father's hopes that God will give him back the sight

he so misused--

{235}

"All otherwise to me my thoughts portend,

That these dark orbs no more shall treat with light,

Nor the other light of life continue long,

But yield to double darkness nigh at hand:

So much I feel my genial spirits droop,

My hopes all flat; Nature within me seems

In all her functions weary of herself;

My race of glory run, and race of shame,

And I shall shortly be with them that rest."

So Manoah leaves him, and in a noble lyric he laments over his greatest

sufferings, which are not those of the body but those of the mind--

"which no cooling herb

Or med'cinal liquor can assuage,

Nor breath of vernal air from snowy Alp."

A choral song on the mysterious dealings of God closes this episode

which is followed by the most dramatically effective in the poem, that

of the visit of Dalila. The moment the blind man is told that it is

"Dalila, thy wife," he cries--

"My wife! my traitress! let her not come near me:"

and his reply to her offer of penitence, affection and help, begins

with the daringly expressive line--

"Out, out, hyaena! these are thy wonted arts."

A long and telling debate follows, in which {236} Dalila makes very

good points, one of them recalling the scene in which Eve reproaches

Adam for indulging her instead of exercising his right to command and

control the weakness of her sex. To this argument Dalila receives the

stern, characteristically Miltonic reply--

"All wickedness is weakness: that plea, therefore

With God or man will gain thee no remission,"

He refuses her intercession with the Philistine lords, forbids her even

to touch his hand;

"Not for thy life, lest fierce remembrance wake

My sudden rage to tear thee joint by joint,"

and drives her to remind him defiantly that, whatever he and his

Hebrews may say of her, she appeals to another tribunal of fame--

"In Ecron, Gaza, Asdod, and in Gath,

I shall be named among the famousest

Of women, sung at solemn festivals,

Living and dead recorded."

So she goes out, and the Chorus make Miltonic meditations on the

unhappiness of marriage and the divinely appointed subjection of women.

The next visitor is Harapha, the Philistine giant, who comes to taunt

Samson, and is defied by him to mortal combat. This {237} episode is

perhaps the least interesting, but it advances the action by exhibiting

Samson's returning sense that God is still with him and will yet do

some great work through him. It fitly leads to the chorus--

"O, how comely it is, and how reviving

To the spirits of just men long oppressed,

When God into the hands of their deliverer

Puts invincible might,

To quell the mighty of the earth, the oppressor,

The brute and boisterous force of violent men,

Hardy and industrious to support

Tyrannic power, but raging to pursue

The righteous and all such as honour truth!"

In the next scene an officer comes to demand Samson's presence at the

feast of Dagon that he may entertain the Philistine lords with feats of

strength. He at first dismisses the messenger with a contemptuous

refusal: but, with a premonition of the end which recalls Oedipus at

Colonus, he suddenly changes his mind--

"I begin to feel

Some rousing motions in me, which dispose

To something extraordinary my thoughts.

If there be aught of presage in the mind,

This day will be remarkable in my life

By some great act, or of my days the last."

{238}

"Go, and the Holy One

Of Israel be thy guide,"

sing the Chorus: and he leaves the scene, like Oedipus, to return no

more, but to be more felt in his absence than in his presence. Manoah

re-enters to utter his further hopes of ransom, in which there is a

note of Sophoclean irony recalling the ignorant optimism of Oedipus in

the _Tyrannus_; and as he and the Chorus talk they hear at first a loud

shouting, apparently of triumph, and then another louder and more

terrible--

_Manoah._

"O what noise!

Mercy of Heaven! what hideous noise was that?

Horribly loud, unlike the former shout."

_Chorus._

"Noise call you it, or universal groan,

As if the whole inhabitation perished?"

They dare not enter the city: and, as they speculate on what this great

event can be, a Hebrew spectator of the catastrophe comes up and, after

some brief exchange of question and answer exactly in the manner of the

Greek tragedians, tells the whole story at length. The end has come.

Samson is dead, but death is swallowed up in victory: what has happened

is the last and most tremendous {239} triumph of the divinely chosen

hero whose death is more fatal to his country's enemies than even his

life had been. There is nothing left to do but to close the drama, as

most Greek tragedies close, with a brief choral song of submission to

the divine governance of the world:

"All is best, though we oft doubt

What the unsearchable dispose

Of Highest Wisdom brings about,

And ever best found in the close.

Oft He seems to hide his face,

But unexpectedly returns,

And to his faithful champion hath in place

Bore witness gloriously; whence Gaza mourns,

And all that band them to resist

His uncontrollable intent.

His servants He, with new acquist

Of true experience from this great event,

With peace and consolation hath dismissed,

And calm of mind, all passion spent."

Such is Milton's drama: a thing worth dwelling on as entirely unique in

any modern language. Some good judges have thought it the finest of

his works. That will not be admitted if poetry is to be judged either

by universality of appeal or by extent and variety of range.

_L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ will always have far more readers: and

_Paradise Lost_ embraces an immeasurably {240} greater span of human

life. But, if not the greatest, _Samson_ is probably for its own

audience the most moving of Milton's works. It is not everybody who

has in him the grave emotions to which it appeals: but whoever has will

find them stirred by Samson as few other books in all the literature of

the world can stir them.

It is curious to think of Milton composing such a drama in the midst of

the theatrical revival of the Restoration. Did ever poet set himself

in such opposition to the literary current of his day? Dryden's

unbounded admiration for him is well known: but he understood the

genius of _Paradise Lost_ so little as to make an opera out of it, and

he must have understood even less of Samson. The drama was then so

much the most fashionable form of literature that he may have felt that

in writing _The State of Innocence_ and its preface he was taking the

best means of directing public attention to _Paradise Lost_. But he

would scarcely have tried to do the same for _Samson_. He had wished,

perhaps, as Mr. Verrall has suggested, to write an epic and had failed

to do so: hence his profound reverence for the man who had not failed.

But he had written many dramas and here he had succeeded: he had

pleased both his {241} contemporaries and himself. He would feel no

need there to take lessons from Milton. Nor is he to be blamed. He

and his fellow dramatists are justly criticized for many things, but

there is nothing to complain of in their unlikeness to Milton. They

wrote for the stage. He avowedly did not. They wrote in the spirit of

the theatre of their day, with the object of providing themselves with

a little money and "the town" with a few hours of more or less

intellectual amusement. He wrote out of his own mind and soul, not for

the entertainment of the idle folk of his own or any other day, but for

men who in all times and countries should prove capable of knowing a

great work when they saw it. Besides, his contemporary dramatists

followed, quite legitimately, the theatrical traditions of England or

France: he the very different dramatic system of the Greeks. His drama

is what Greek tragedies were, an act of religion. It could take its

place quite naturally, as they did, as part of a great national

religious festival performed on a holy day. It is like them in the

solemn music of its utterance: in its deep sense of the gravity of the

issues on which human life hangs. It is like them also in technical

points such as the use of a Chorus to give expression to the {242}

spectator's emotions, the paucity of actors present on the stage at any

moment, the curious imitation, to be seen also in _Comus_, of the Greek

_stichomuthia_, in which a verbal passage of arms is conducted on the

principle of giving each speaker one line for his attack or retort.

There are, indeed, some fundamental differences. They are important

enough to have led so great a critic as Professor Jebb to argue that

Milton's drama is too Hebrew to be Hellenic at all. His point is that

Greek tragedy aims at producing an imaginative pleasure by arousing a

"sense, on the one hand, of the heroic in man; on the other hand, of a

superhuman controlling power"; and he asserts that this is not the

method adopted by Milton in _Samson_. Samson is throughout a free man;

his misfortunes are the fruit of his own folly. God is still on his

side and his death is a patriotic triumph, not, like the death of

Heracles, who resembles him in so many ways, merely the final proof of

the all-powerful malignity of fate.

No one will venture to differ from Jebb on such a question without a

sense of great temerity. But perhaps the truth is that one who had

lived all his life, as Jebb had, in the closest intimacy with the Greek

drama, would be apt to feel small differences from {243} it too much

and broad resemblances too little. To the shepherd all his sheep

differ from each other: the danger for him is to forget, what the

ignorant stranger sees, that they are also all very much alike. So

Jebb is no doubt perfectly right in the distinction he makes: but he is

surely blinded by his own knowledge when he argues from it that _Samson

Agonistes_ "is a great poem and a noble drama; but neither as poem nor

as drama is it Hellenic." Of that question comparative ignorance is

perhaps a better judge. For it can still see that the broad division

which separates the world's drama into two kinds is a real thing, and

that Milton's drama belongs in spite of differences unquestionably to

the Greek kind and not to the other, both by its method and by its

spirit. There can be no real doubt that it is far more like the

_Prometheus_ or the _Oedipus_ than it is like _Hamlet_ or _All for

Love_. Probably no great tragedy of any sort can be made without that

sense of the contrast between man's will and the "superhuman

controlling power" of which Jebb speaks as peculiarly Greek. Certainly

it is present in the greatest of Shakspeare's tragedies, and not seldom

finds open expression. "There's a divinity that shapes our ends."

{244}

But the point is that in _Samson_, the note of which is always the

classical, never the mystical or romantic, this sense is present, not

in Shakspeare's way, but substantially in the Greek way. The fact that

Samson is free and that his God is his friend does not prevent his

feeling just in the Greek way that God's ways are dark and inscrutable,

past man's finding out, and far above out of the reach of his control.

It does not prevent his being helpless as well as heroic, fully

conscious that all his strength leaves him still a weak child at the

absolute disposal of incomprehensible Omnipotence. So the whole

atmosphere of the play, as well as its formal mould, will always recall

the Greek tragedies. And rightly: the likenesses of every kind are far

greater than the differences. The distinctions which led Jebb to

declare it was not Hellenic at all are far less important than the

kinship which made a still greater critic, the poet Goethe, declare

that it had "more of the antique spirit than any production of any

other modern poet."

A more obvious and perhaps more important difference than that on which

Jebb lays such stress is, of course, the fundamental one that the Greek

plays were written for performance and that many of them have {245}

elaborately contrived "plots." No one supposes that _Samson_ would be

effective on the stage; but the modern dramatist who could make his

play as exciting to the spectator as the _Oedipus Tyrannus_ or

_Electra_ of Sophocles, or the _Hippolytus_ or _Medea_ of Euripides,

would assuredly be no ordinary playwright. This Milton did not

attempt. His drama resembles rather the earlier Greek tragedies where

the lyrical element is still the principal thing while the "plot" and

the persons who act its story play a comparatively subordinate part.

It is, at any rate in form, more like Aeschylus than Sophocles, and

more like the _Persae_ and the _Prometheus_ than the Oresteian Trilogy.

To the _Prometheus_, indeed, it bears particularly close and obvious

resemblances; for instance, both have a heroic and defiant prisoner as

their principal figure, and as their minor figures a succession of

friends and enemies who visit him.

However, literary parallels and precedents of this kind are perhaps

rather interesting than important. Milton's greatness is his own.

Only the fact remains that, as it was of an order that need not fear to

measure itself with the Greeks and as he happened to put its dramatic

expression into a Greek form, he has given us something which comes far

{246} nearer to producing on us the particular impression of sublimity

made by the greatest Greek dramas than anything else in English or

perhaps in any modern language. In English nothing worth mentioning of

the kind has been attempted, till in our own day the present Poet

Laureate wrote his _Prometheus the Fire-Giver_ and _Achilles in

Scyros_. But, interesting and beautiful as these are, they make no

pretence to rival _Samson Agonistes_. They are altogether on a smaller

scale of art, of thought, of emotion.

_Samson Agonistes_ is Milton's last word and on the whole his saddest.

Yet the final effect of great art is never sad. The sense of greatness

transcends all pain. In the preface of _Samson_ Milton alludes to

Aristotle's remark that it is the function of tragedy to effect through

pity and fear a proper purgation of these emotions. Whatever be the

precise meaning of that famous and disputed sentence, there is no doubt

that Milton gives part of its general import truly enough when he

paraphrases it "to temper and reduce them to just measure with a kind

of delight stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well

imitated." And its application extends far beyond the mere field of

tragedy. So far as other kinds of poetry, or indeed any of the arts,

deal with {247} subjects that arouse any of the deeper human emotions,

the law of purification by a kind of delight is one by which they stand

or fall. A crucifixion which is merely painful, as many primitive

crucifixions are, or merely disgusting, as many later ones are, is so

far a failure. It has not done the work art has to do. Shakspeare

knew this well enough, though he very likely never thought about it.

The final word of his great tragedies is one of sorrow overpassed and

transformed. "The rest is silence;" "Dost thou not see my baby at my

breast That sucks the nurse asleep?" "I have almost forgot the taste of

fears;" "My heart doth joy that yet in all my life I found no man but

he was true to me!" This is the note always struck before the very end

comes. And Milton, so unlike Shakspeare both as man and as artist, is

no less conspicuous than he in the strict observance of this practice.

All his poems, without exception, end in quietness and confidence. The

beauty of the last lines of _Paradise Lost_, to which early critics

were so strangely blind, is now universally celebrated--

"Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose

{248}

Their place of rest, and Providence their guide.

They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way."

The storm and stress of day are over and are followed by the

passionless quiet of evening. So in _Paradise Regained_. A modern

poet would have been tempted to end at line 635, with a kind of

dramatic fall of the curtain--

"on thy glorious work

Now enter, and begin to save Mankind."

Not so Milton. As after the most aweinspiring death known to

literature the _Oedipus Coloneus_ closes on the note of acquiescent

peace--

"Come, cease lamentation, lift it up no more;

for verily these things stand fast;"

so Milton ends the long debate of his poem, not with victory, but with

silence--

"He, unobserved,

Home to his mother's house private returned."

It is indeed just the opposite in one way of the conclusion of

_Paradise Lost_. The man and woman who had fallen before the Tempter

had no home to return to: they must seek a new "place of rest"

elsewhere in the new world that was before them. The Man who {249} had

vanquished him could go back quietly to the home of his childhood. But

the contrast is external, the likeness essential. For the first man as

well as the second there is an appointed place of rest and a Providence

to guide: the two poems can both end on the same note of that peace

which follows upon the right understanding of all great experiences.

This, which is only implied in his earlier poems, is almost expressly

set forth in the last of all Milton's words, the already quoted

conclusion of Samson--

"His servants He, with new acquist

Of true experience from this great event,

With peace and consolation hath dismissed,

And calm of mind, all passion spent."

Milton was a passionate man who lived in passionate times. Neither his

passions nor those of the men of his day are of very much matter to us

now. But the art in which he "spent" them, in which, that is to say,

he embodied, transcended and glorified them, till through it he and we

alike attain to consolation and calm, is an eternal possession not only

of the English race but of the whole world.

{250}

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The literature that in one way or another deals with Milton is, of

course, immense. His name fills more than half of one of the volumes

of the great British Museum Catalogue, more than sixteen pages being

devoted to the single item of _Paradise Lost_. They afford perhaps the

most striking of all proofs of the universality of his genius; for they

include translations into no fewer than eighteen languages, many of

which possess a large choice of versions. Into more than a very small

fraction of such a vast field it is obviously impossible to enter here.

Only a few notes can be given, under the four headings of Poetry,

Prose, Biography and Criticism.

POETRY

Of the poetry, it may be worth saying, though MSS. hardly come within

the scope of a brief bibliography of this sort, that a manuscript,

mainly in the handwriting of Milton himself and containing many of his

early poems, is preserved in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge.

The printed copies, of course, begin with those published in his own

lifetime. They contain practically the whole of his poetry. The most

important are the volume containing his early poems issued in 1645,

_Paradise Lost_ which first appeared in 1667, _Paradise Regained_ and

_Samson Agonistes_ which followed in 1671, and a re-issue in 1673, with

additions, of the volume of his minor poems already printed in 1646.

The first complete edition was _The Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton_,

issued by Jacob Tonson in 1695.

So much for the bare text. Annotation naturally soon followed. The

earliest commentator was Patrick Hume who published an edition of the

poems with notes on _Paradise Lost_ in 1695. But the most famous,

though also least important, of Milton's early critics was the greatest

of English scholars, Richard Bentley, who in 1732 issued an edition of

_Paradise Lost_ in which whole passages were relegated to the margin as

the spurious interpolations of an imaginary editor. Such a book is, of

course, merely a curiosity connecting two {251} great names. The real

beginning in the work of editing Milton as a classic should be edited

was made by Thomas Newton, afterwards Bishop of Bristol, who in 1749

brought out an edition of _Paradise Lost_, "with Notes of Various

Authors," and followed it in 1752 with a similar volume including

_Paradise Regained_ and the minor poems. Newton's work was often

reprinted, and remained the standard edition till it was superseded by

that of the Rev. H. J. Todd which first appeared in 1801. The final

issue of Todd is that of 1826 in six volumes which, in spite of many

notes which are defective, many which are antiquated and some which are

superfluous, may still claim to be the best library edition of Milton.

Among the best of those which have appeared since are Thomas

Keightley's, published in 1859, which contains excellent notes, and

Prof. David Masson's, which is the work of the most learned and devoted

of all Milton's editors. Both of these have the advantage of Todd in

some respects; Keightley in acuteness and penetration, Masson in

completeness of knowledge. But no single editor's work can be a

perfect substitute for a _variorum_ edition like that of Todd, giving

the comments and suggestions of many different minds. The most

complete edition of Masson's work is the final library one in three

volumes, 1890; there is also a convenient smaller issue, based on this,

but omitting some of its editorial matter. It was last printed in

three volumes 1893. It contains a Memoir, rather elaborate

Introductions to all the poems, an Essay on Milton's English and

Versification, and reduced Notes.

A text with Critical Notes by W. Aldis Wright was issued by the

Cambridge University Press in one volume, 1903. The text of the

earliest printed editions of the several poems was reprinted in 1900 in

an edition prepared for the Clarendon Press by the Rev. H. C. Beeching.

It may be worth while adding that Milton's Latin and Italian poems were

translated by the poet Cowper and printed in 1808 by his biographer,

Hayley, in a beautiful quarto volume with designs by Flaxman. These

translations are reprinted in the "Aldine" edition of Milton, 1826.

Masson has also given translations of most of them in his _Life of

Milton_ and in his 1890 library edition of the Poems.

PROSE

The Prose works were, of course, mostly issued as books or pamphlets in

Milton's lifetime. They were collected by Toland in three volumes

_folio_, 1698. There are several more modern editions; as that

published in 1806 in seven volumes {252} with a _Life_ by Charles

Symmons; that of Pickering, who included them in his fine eight-volume

edition. _The Works of John Milton in Verse and Prose, Edited by John

Mitford, 1851_; and that in Bohn's Standard Library, in six volumes,

edited, with some notes of a somewhat controversial character, by J. A.

St. John, 1848. The first volume of a new edition edited by Sir Sidney

Lee appeared in 1905. One of the most curious of the prose works, the

_De Doctrina Christiana_ or _Treatise of Christian Doctrine_, was not

known till 1823, when it was discovered in the State Paper Office. It

was edited, with an English translation, by the Rev. C. R. Sumner in

1825 and is included in Bohn's edition.

BIOGRAPHY

The earliest sources for the biography of Milton, outside his own

works, are the account given in the _Fasti Oxonienses_ of Anthony à

Wood, 1691, the _Brief Lives of John Aubrey_, and the Life prefixed by

the poet's nephew, Edward Phillips, to an edition of the _Letters of

State_, printed in 1694. A very large number of _Lives of Milton_ have

been written since, based on these materials and those collected from a

few other sources. The most famous and in some ways the best, in spite

of its unfairness, is that of Johnson, to be found in his _Lives of the

Poets_. The best short modern Life is Mark Pattison's masterly, though

occasionally wilful, little book in the English Men of letters Series.

For the library and for students all other biographies have been

superseded by the great work of David Masson, who spared no labours to

investigate every smallest detail of the life of Milton and to place

the whole in the setting of an elaborate history of England in Milton's

day. The value of the book is somewhat impaired by the very strong

Puritan and anti-Cavalier partisanship of the writer; and its style

suffers from an imitation of Carlyle. But nothing can seriously

detract from the immense debt every student of Milton owes to the

author of this monumental biography which appeared in seven volumes,

1859-1894.

An interesting critical discussion of the various portraits

representing or alleged to represent Milton is prefixed to the

Catalogue of the Exhibition held at Christ's College Cambridge during

the Milton Tercentenary in 1908. It is by Dr. G. C. Williamson.

CRITICISM

A poet at once so learned and so great as Milton inevitably invited

criticism. The first and most generous of his critics {253} was his

great rival Dryden, who, in a few words of the preface to _The State of

Innocence_, published the year after Milton's death, led the note of

praise, which has been echoed ever since by speaking of _Paradise Lost_

as "one of the greatest, most noble and most sublime poems which either

this age or nation has produced." The next great name in the list is

that of Addison, who contributed a series of papers on Milton to the

_Spectator_ in 1712. Like all criticism except the work of the supreme

masters, they are written too exclusively from the point of view of

their own day to retain more than a small fraction of their value after

two hundred years have passed. But they are of considerable historical

interest and may still be read with pleasure, like everything written

by Addison. A less sympathetic but finer piece of work is the critical

part of Johnson's famous _Life_. It is full of crudities of every

sort, such as the notorious remark that "no man could have fancied that

he read _Lycidas_ with pleasure had he not known the author"; and

perhaps nothing Johnson over wrote displayed more nakedly the narrow

limits of his appreciation of poetry. But, in spite of all its

defects, it exhibits its writer's great gifts; and its absolute and

unshrinking sincerity, its half-reluctant utterance of some of the

truest praise ever spoken of Milton, its profound knowledge of the way

in which the human mind approaches both literature and life, will

always preserve it as one of the most interesting criticisms which

Milton has provoked. Johnson's friend, Thomas Warton, in his edition

of the minor poems issued in 1785, led the way to an understanding of

much in Milton to which Johnson and his school were entirely blind.

This movement has continued ever since, and is seen in the immense

influence Milton had upon the poets of the nineteenth century,

especially upon Wordsworth and Keats; an influence of exactly the

opposite sort to that which he exercised with such disastrous effect

upon many poets of the century immediately succeeding his own. It is

also seen in the finer intelligence of the critical studies of his

work. These are far too many to mention here. Among the best are

Hazlitt's Lecture on Shakspeare and Milton in his _Lectures on the

English Poets_; Matthew Arnold's speech at the unveiling of a Milton

memorial, printed in the second series of his _Essays in Criticism_;

Sir Walter Raleigh's volume, _Milton_, published in 1900, and _The

Epic_, by Lascelles Abercrombie, 1914, which is full of fine and

suggestive criticism of Milton. _Milton's Prosody by Robert Bridges,

1901_, is the best study of the metre and scansion of Milton's later

poems, especially of _Paradise Lost_.

{254}

INDEX TO PRINCIPAL PERSONS, PLACES, AND WORKS MENTIONED

Abercrombie, L., 136-7, 253

_Absalom and Achitophel_, 105

_Achilles in Scyros_, 246

Addison, Joseph, 77, 253

_Adonais_, 125

_Ad Patrem_, 39-40.

_Aeneid, The_, 150, 175, 196

Aeschylus, 245

À Kempis, Thomas, 147

Aldersgate Street, 46

_All for Love_, 243

_Allegro, L'_, 41, 70, 93, 99, 106 _et sqq._, 123, 239

Anglesey, Earl of, 72, 82

Annesley, Arthur, 72

Aquinas, Thomas, 157

_Arbuthnot, Epistle to_, 105

_Arcades_, 41, 42

_Arcadia_, 58

_Areopagitica_, 44, 49, 64

Arianism, 204

Ariosto, 153

Aristotle, 86, 200

Arnold Matthew, 164, 253

Arthurian Epic (planned), 45, 148-9

_At a Solemn Music_, 13, 42, 97, 100, 103, 147

Athens, 205-6, 209

Aubrey, John, 29, 252

Barbican, the, 54

Baroni, Leonora, 44-5

Barrow, Samuel, 82

Beeching, Rev. H. C., 251

Bentley, Richard, 250

Bibliography, 250-3

Blake, Admiral, 57

Bohn's Standard Library, 252

Bow Church, 25

Bread Street, 24, 75

Bridges, Robert, 26, 108, 222, 223, 246, 253

_Brief Lives_, 252

Buckingham, Duke of, 58

Byron, Lord, 90

Cambridge, 28, 29, 30, 31-7, 39, 42, 85, 120, 121, 124, 250, 252

Carlyle, Thomas, 262

Caroline, Queen, 77

Charles I, 11, 28, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72, 86

Charles II, 47, 60, 65, 71, 73, 82, 86

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 90, 111

Christina, Queen of Sweden, 60

Christ's College, Cambridge, 28, 29, 120, 121, 124, 252

Clarendon, Earl of, 73

Clarges, Sir Thomas, 72

Coleridge, S. T., 206

_Comus_, 13, 41, 42, 95, 100, 110, 112-13 _et sqq._, 128, 242

Constable, 135

Coriolanus, 85

Cowper, William, 69, 251

Criticisms, 252-3

Cromwell, Oliver, 55, 57, 63, 64, 67, 68, 69, 71, 133, 139, 176

Dante, 10, 11-12, 33, 120, 153-7

_Daphnaïda_, 125

Davenant, William, 72

_Defensio Regia_, 60, 61

_Defensio Secunda_, 61

De Quincey, Thomas, 96

Diodati, Charles, 42, 124, 125

_Divina Commedia, La_, 120, 157

Divorce pamphlets, 50 _et sqq._

_Doctrina Christiana, De_, 252

Dorset, Earl of, 81

Dowland, Robert, 28

Drayton, Michael, 124

Drummond, William, 124, 135

Dryden, John, 80-2, 90, 103, 104-5, 117, 241, 253

_Eikon Basilike_, the, 57-8

_Eikonoklastes_, 58, 61

_Electra, The_, 245

Elizabeth, Queen, 85

_English Men of Letters Series_, 252

_Epic, The_, 253

Epigrams, Latin, on La Baroni, 45

_Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester_, 36, 37, 97, 103

_Epitaphium Damonis_, 124

_Essays in Criticism_, 253

Euripides, 77, 82, 245

_Excursion, The_, 136, 228-9

_Faerie Queen, The_, 115

Fairfax, General, 139, 171

_Faithful Shepherdess, The_, 115

_Fasti Oxonienses_, 252

_Faust_, 196

Fire of London, 75

Flaxman, John, 251

Fletcher, John, 107, 115

Florence, 43, 44, 46

France, 43, 46, 59

Galileo, 44, 45

_Gerusalemme Conquistata_ (Tasso), 45

Gibbons, Orlando, 28

Goethe, J. W. von, 230, 244

Gorges, Mrs., 125

Grotius, Hugo, 43

_Hamlet_, 24, 243

Hampden, John, 171

Hayley, William, 251

Hazlitt, William, 253

_Hippolytus_, 245

_History of Britain_, 78

Homer, 77, 82, 84, 89, 152, 153, 155, 171, 230

Horace, 69

Horton, 37, 40, 41, 42, 111

Hume, Patrick, 250

_Iliad, The_, 154, 155, 157, 162

_Imitation, The, of Christ_, 147-8

Indemnity, Act of, 72, 73, 74

Independent Army, The, 55, 56

Italian travels, 43-6

James I, 58

Jebb, Prof., 242-3, 244

_Job, Book of_, 21, 82

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 125, 126, 160, 162, 175, 194, 196, 206,

207, 227, 252, 253

Jones, Inigo, 16, 114

Jonson, Ben, 114, 115

Keats, John, 79, 90, 102, 110, 125, 253

Keightley, Thomas, 251

King, Edward, 42, 91, 124, 125, 127, 128-31

Landor, Walter Savage, 132

Lawes, Henry, 41, 82, 91, 116, 119

Lawrence, Henry, 69-70, 133

_Lectures on the English Poets_, 253

Lee, Sir Sidney, 252

_Letters of State_, 252

Lives of Milton, 251, 252, 253

_Lives of the Poets_, 252

London, 25, 49; fire of, 75

Long Parliament, 47, 63, 64, 171

_Lycidas_, 13, 41, 42, 90, 91, 100, 106, 123 _et sqq._

Mackail, J. W., 94-5, 206, 211

Manso, Giovanni, 45

Marini, 45

Marlowe, Christopher, 107

Marvell, Andrew, 69, 73

Massacres in Piedmont, sonnets on, 68, 133, 139, 140-1

Masson, D., 24, 52, 68, 73, 75, 251

_Medea, The_, 245

Meredith, George, 134

_Milton_, 253

_Milton's Prosody_, 224, 253

Milton's relations:--

Daughters, 11, 54, 69, 75-77, 218

Deborah, 77-8

Father, 27, 29, 37, 38-40, 42, 43, 49, 54, 75

Infant son, 76

Mother, 40

Nephews, 46, 54, 61, 70, 252

Wives--

First, _see_ Powell, Mary.

Second, 54, 69, 71

Third, 54

Mitford, John, 252

Monk, General, 72

Morley, Thomas, 28

Morrice, --, 72

Morus, 69

Napoleon, 9, 139

Newbolt, Henry, 120

Newton, Thomas, 251

_Ode on the Nativity_, 35-6, 37, 91, 93-4, 97, 98-103

_Odyssey, The_, 162, 196

_Oedipus Coloneus_, 237, 248

_Oedipus Tyrannus_, 233, 238, 243

_On Attaining the Age of Twenty-three_, sonnet, 91, 133

_On His Blindness_, sonnet, 62-3, 133

_On the Death of a Fair Infant_, 35, 97-9

_Orations_, 34-5

_Othello_, 150

Ovid, 33, 77, 124

Pamphlets, 49, 56, 69, 71

_Paradise Lost_, 13, 24, 25, 28, 44, 47, 55, 71, 78, 79,

80, 82, 88, 89, 90, 94, 95, 97, 101, 104, 106, 112, 113,

118, 120, 123, 125, 137, 142 _et sqq._, 196, 197 _et sqq._,

239, 240, 247, 248, 250, 251, 253

_Paradise Regained_, 13, 24, 44, 78, 167, 196 _et sqq._,

227, 248, 250, 251

_Passion, The_, 103

Pattison, Mark, 131, 132, 197, 252

_Penseroso, Il_, 41, 70, 93, 100, 106 _et sqq._, 239

_Persae, The_, 245

Petrarch, 33, 134, 135

Phillips, Edward, 252

Pickering, William, 252

Pindar, 117

Plato, 8, 9-10, 21, 111, 156

_Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue_, 115

_Poems, editions of_, 250-1, 252

_Poetical Works, The, of Mr. John Milton_, 250

Pope, A., 85, 90, 91, 105, 222, 223

Portraits, 252

Powell family, 50, 53

Powell, Mary, 50-4, 69, 71

_Prelude, The_, 136, 228-9

_Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio_, 60, 61

_Prometheus the Fire-Giver_, 246

_Prometheus Unbound_, 102

_Prometheus Vinctus_, 21, 243, 245

Prose Works, 47 _et sqq._, 251-2

Psalms, the, 139-40; paraphrases of, 95

Purcell, Henry, 16

Pym, John, 171

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 198, 253

Ranelagh, Lady, 69

_Ready and Easy Way A, to

Establish a Free Commonwealth_, 65

_Reason, The, of Church Government_, 13, 37

Regicides, the, 55, 63, 71, 74

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 16

Rome, 44, 209

Rossetti, Dante G., 133, 135

St. Brides', Fleet Street, 46

St. Giles' Church, Cripplegate, 79

St. John, J. A., 252

St. Paul, 9, 144, 218

St. Paul's Cathedral, 89, 193

Salmasius, 59-62, 69, 218

_Samson Agonistes_, 13, 20, 24, 78, 83, 99, 199, 219 _et sqq._, 250

Sansovino's Library, Venice, 193

Saumaise, _see_ Salmasius.

Scudamore, Lord, 43

Shakspeare, W., 9, 14, 17, 32, 35, 36, 80, 85, 90, 103, 114, 118,

145, 166, 247; sonnets, 133-5, 253

Shelley, P. B., 20, 29, 50, 79, 90, 99, 102, 111, 125, 228

Shelley, Mrs. P. B., 50

Sidney, Sir Philip, 58, 98, 124, 135

Skinner, Cyriack, 62, 133

Smithfield, 72

_Song on May Morning_, 36, 107

_Sonnets_, 47, 54, 62-3, 68, 69, 91, 106, 131 _et sqq._

Sophocles, 82, 233, 245

_Spectator, The_, 253

Spenser, Edmund, 93, 97, 98, 111, 115, 116, 124, 125, 153

_State, The, of Innocence_, 240, 253

Statius, 157

Strafford, Earl of, 171

Sumner, Rev. C. R., 252

Symmons, Charles, 252

Tasso, Torquato, 45, 82, 153, 164

Tennyson, Alfred, 69, 90, 197

_Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_, 56, 58, 75

Theocritus, 124

Todd, Rev. H. J., 251

Toland, John, 251

Tonson, Jacob, 250

_Treatise of Christian Doctrine_, 252

Trinity College Library, 89, 250

Turner, J. W. M., 16

Tyburn, 71, 90

Verrall, A. W., 240

Virgil, 82, 84, 89, 91, 124, 139, 150, 152, 153, 155, 157, 163, 175

_Vita Nuova, La_, 120

Waller, Edmund, 104

Warton, Joseph, 118, 126, 214

Warton, Thomas, 253

Whitehall, 58, 70, 74, 219

Williamson, Dr. G. C., 252

Winchester, Marchioness of, 36

Windsor, 37

Windsor Castle, 40

Wood, Anthony à, 31, 35, 252

Wordsworth, W., 26, 34, 79, 90, 131, 133, 135, 137, 140, 141,

206, 227-30; sonnets, 137-41, 253

_Works, The, of John Milton, in Prose and Verse_, 252

Wren, Sir Christopher, 16, 89

Wright, W. Aldis, 251

Young, Thomas, 27