RESIDENCE AT HORTON--L'ALLEGRO--IL PENSEROSO--ARCADES--COMUS--LYCIDAS.
Milton had been sent to college to quality for a profession. The
church, the first intended, he had gradually discovered to be
incompatible. Of the law, either his father's branch, or some other,
he seems to have entertained a thought, but to have speedily dismissed
it. So at the age of twenty-four he returned to his father's house,
bringing nothing with him but his education and a silent purpose. The
elder Milton had now retired from business, with sufficient means but
not with wealth. Though John was the eldest son, there were two other
children, a brother, Christopher, and a sister, Anne. To have no
profession, even a nominal one, to be above trade and below the status
of squire or yeoman, and to come home with the avowed object of
leading an idle life, was conduct which required justification. Milton
felt it to be so. In a letter addressed, in 1632, to some senior
friend at Cambridge, name unknown, he thanks him for being "a good
watchman to admonish that the hours of the night pass on, for so I
call my life as yet obscure and unserviceable to mankind, and that the
day with me is at hand, wherein Christ commands all to labour." Milton
has no misgivings. He knows that what he is doing with himself is the
best he can do. His aim is far above bread-winning, and therefore his
probation must be long. He destines for himself no indolent tarrying
in the garden of Armida. His is a "mind made and set wholly on the
accomplishment of greatest things." He knows that the looker-on will
hardly accept his apology for "being late," that it is in order to
being "more fit." Yet it is the only apology he can offer. And he is
dissatisfied with his own progress. "I am something suspicious of
myself, and do take notice of a certain belatedness in me."
Of this frame of mind the record is the second sonnet, lines which are
an inseparable part of Milton's biography--
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol'n on his wing my three-and-twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth
That I to manhood am arrived so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th.
Yet, be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven.
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Taskmaster's eye.
With aspirations thus vast, though unformed, with "amplitude of mind
to greatest deeds," Milton retired to his father's house in the
country. Five more years of self-education, added to the seven years
of academical residence, were not too much for the meditation of
projects such as Milton was already conceiving. Years many more than
twelve, filled with great events and distracting interests, were to
pass over before the body and shape of _Paradise Lost_ was given to
these imaginings.
The country retirement in which the elder Milton had fixed himself was
the little village of Horton, situated in that southernmost angle of
the county of Buckingham, which insinuates itself between Berks and
Middlesex. Though London was only about seventeen miles distant, it
was the London of Charles I., with its population of some 300,000
only; before coaches and macadamised roads; while the Colne, which
flows through the village, was still a river, and not the kennel of a
paper-mill. There was no lack of water and woods meadow and pasture,
closes and open field, with the regal towers of Windsor--"bosom'd high
in tufted trees," to crown the landscape. Unbroken leisure, solitude,
tranquillity of mind, surrounded by the thickets and woods, which
Pliny thought indispensable to poetical meditation (Epist.9.10), no
poet's career was ever commenced under more favourable auspices. The
youth of Milton stands in strong contrast with the misery, turmoil,
chance medley, struggle with poverty, or abandonment to dissipation,
which blighted the early years of so many of our men of letters.
Milton's life is a drama in three acts. The first discovers him in
the calm and peaceful retirement of Horton, of which _L'Allegro_, _Il
Penseroso_, and _Lycidas_ are the expression. In the second act he
is breathing the foul and heated atmosphere of party passion and
religious hate, generating the lurid fires which glare in the
battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets. The three great poems,
_Paradise Lost_, _Paradise Regained_, and _Samson Agonistes_, are the
utterance of his final period of solitary and Promethean grandeur,
when, blind, destitute, friendless, he testified of righteousness,
temperance, and judgment to come, alone before a fallen world.
In this delicious retirement of Horton, in alternate communing with
nature and with books, for five years of persevering study he laid in
a stock, not of learning, but of what is far above learning, of wide
and accurate knowledge. Of the man whose profession is learning, it
is characteristic that knowledge is its own end, and research its own
reward. To Milton all knowledge, all life, virtue itself, was already
only a means to a further end. He will know only "that which is of use
to know," and by useful, he meant that which conduced to form him for
his vocation of poet.
From a very early period Milton had taken poetry to be his vocation,
in the most solemn and earnest mood. The idea of this devotion was the
shaping idea of his life. It was, indeed, a bent of nature, with roots
drawing from deeper strata of character than any act of reasoned will,
which kept him out of the professions, and now fixed him, a seeming
idler, but really hard at work, in his father's house at Horton. The
intimation which he had given of his purpose in the sonnet above
quoted had become, in 1641, "an inward prompting which grows daily
upon me, that by labour and intent study, which I take to be my
portion in this life, joined with the strong propensity of nature,
I might perhaps leave something so written to after times, as they
should not willingly let it die."
What the ultimate form of his poetic utterance shall be, he is in no
hurry to decide. He will be "long choosing," and quite content to be
"beginning late." All his care at present is to qualify himself
for the lofty function to which he aspires. No lawyer, physician,
statesman, ever laboured to fit himself for his profession harder
than Milton strove to qualify himself for his vocation of poet.
Verse-making is, to the wits, a game of ingenuity; to Milton, it is
a prophetic office, towards which the will of heaven leads him. The
creation he contemplates will not flow from him as the stanzas of the
_Gerusalemme_ did from Tasso at twenty-one. Before he can make a poem,
Milton will make himself. "I was confirmed in this opinion, that he
who would not be frustrated of his hope to write well hereafter in
laudable things ought himself to be a true poem.... not presuming to
sing high praises of heroic men or famous cities, unless he have
in himself the experience and practise of all that which is
praiseworthy."
Of the spontaneity, the abandon, which are supposed to be
characteristic of the poetical nature, there is nothing here; all
is moral purpose, precision, self-dedication. So he acquires ail
knowledge, not for knowledge' sake, from the instinct of learning, the
necessity for completeness, but because he is to be a poet. Nor will
he only have knowledge, he will have wisdom; moral development shall
go hand in hand with intellectual. A poet's soul should "contain of
good, wise, just, the perfect shape." He will cherish continually a
pure mind in a pure body. "I argued to myself that, if unchastity in
a woman, whom St. Paul terms the glory of man, be such a scandal and
dishonour, then certainly in a man, who is both the image and glory of
God, it must, though commonly not so thought, be much more deflouring
and dishonourable." There is yet a third constituent of the poetical
nature; to knowledge and to virtue must be added religion. For it is
from God that the poet's thoughts come. "This is not to be obtained
but by devout prayer to that Eternal Spirit that can enrich with all
utterance and knowledge, and sends out his seraphim with the hallowed
fire of his altar, to touch and purify the life of whom he pleases. To
this must be added industrious and select reading, steady observation,
and insight into all seemly and generous acts and affairs; till which
in some measure be compast, I refuse not to sustain this expectation."
Before the piety of this vow, Dr. Johnson's morosity yields for a
moment, and he is forced to exclaim, "From a promise like this, at
once fervid, pious, and rational, might be expected the _Paradise
Lost_."
Of these years of self-cultivation, of conscious moral architecture,
such as Plato enacted for his ideal State, but none but Milton ever
had the courage to practise, the biographer would gladly give a minute
account. But the means of doing so are wanting. The poet kept no diary
of his reading, such as some great students, e.g. Isaac Casaubon, have
left. Nor could such a record, had it been attempted, have shown us
the secret process by which the scholar's dead learning was transmuted
in Milton's mind into living imagery. "Many studious and contemplative
years, altogether spent in the search of religious and civil
knowledge" is his own description of the period. "You make many
inquiries as to what I am about;" he writes to Diodati--"what am I
thinking of? Why, with God's help, of immortality! Forgive the word, I
only whisper it in your ear! Yes, I am pluming my wings for a flight."
This was in 1637, at the end of five years of the Horton probation.
The poems, which, rightly read, are strewn with autobiographical
hints, are not silent as to the intention of this period. In _Paradise
Regained_ (i. 196), Milton reveals himself. And in _Comus_, written
at Horton, the lines 375 and following are charged with the same
sentiment,--
And wisdom's self
Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude,
Where, with her best nurse, contemplations
She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings,
That in the various bustle of resort
Were all-to ruffled and sometimes impair'd.
That at Horton Milton "read all the Greek and Latin writers" is one of
Johnson's careless versions of Milton's own words, "enjoyed a complete
holiday in turning over Latin and Greek authors." Milton read, not as
a professional philologian, but as a poet and scholar, and always in
the light of his secret purpose. It was not in his way to sit down to
read over all the Greek and Latin writers, as Casaubon or Salmasius
might do. Milton read with selection, and "meditated," says Aubrey,
what he read. His practice conformed to the principle he has himself
laid down in the often-quoted lines (_Paradise Regained_, iv. 322)--
Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself.
Some of Milton's Greek books have been traced; his _Arattis,
Lyeophron, Euripides_ (the Stepharnis of 1602), and his _Pindar_ (the
Benedictus of 1620), are still extant, with marginal memoranda, which
should seem to evince careful and discerning reading. One critic
even thought it worth while to accuse Joshua Barnes of silently
appropriating conjectural emendations from Milton's _Euripides_. But
Milton's own poems are the beat evidence of his familiarity with all
that is most choice in the remains of classic poetry. Though the
commentators are accused of often, seeing an imitation where there
is none, no commentary can point out the ever-present infusion of
classical flavour, which bespeaks intimate converse far more than
direct adaptation. Milton's classical allusions, says Hartley
Coleridge, are amalgamated and consubstantiated with his native
thought.
A commonplace book of Milton's, after having lurked unsuspected for
200 years in the archives of Netherby, has been disinterred in our
own day (1874). It appears to belong partly to the end of the Horton
period. It is not by any means an account of all that he is reading,
but only an arrangement, under certain heads, or places of memoranda
for future use. These notes are extracted from about eighty different
authors, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and English. Of Greek authors
no less than sixteen are quoted. The notes are mostly notes of
historical facts, seldom of thoughts, never of mere verbal expression.
There is no trace in it of any intention to store up either the
imagery or the language of poetry. It may be that such notes were
made and entered in another volume; for the book thus accidentally
preserved to us seems to refer to other similar volumes of
collections. But it is more likely that no such poetical memoranda
were ever made, and that Milton trusted entirely to memory for the
wealth of classical allusion with which his verse is surcharged. He
did not extract from the poets and the great writers whom he was
daily turning over, but only from the inferior authors and secondary
historians, which he read only once. Most of the material collected
in the commonplace book is used in his prose pamphlets. But when so
employed the facts are worked into the texture of his argument, rather
than cited as extraneous witnesses.
In reading history it was his aim to get at a conspectus of the
general current of affairs rather than to study minutely a special
period. He tells Diodati in September, 1637, that he has studied
Greek history continuously, from the beginning to the fall of
Constantinople. When he tells the same friend that he has been long
involved in the obscurity of the early middle ages of Italian History
down to the time of the Emperor Rudolph, we learn from the commonplace
book that he had only been reading the one volume of Sigonius's
_Historia Regni Italici_. From the thirteenth century downwards he
proposes to himself to study each Italian state in some separate
history. Even before his journey to Italy he read Italian with as much
ease as French. He tells us that it was by his father's advice that he
had acquired these modern languages. But we can, see that they were
essential parts of his own scheme of self-education, which included,
in another direction, Hebrew, both Biblical and Rabbinical and even
Syriac.
The intensity of his nature showed itself in his method of study. He
read, not desultorily, a bit here and another there, but "when I take
up with a thing, I never pause or break it off, nor am drawn away from
it by any other interest, till I have arrived at the goal I proposed
to myself," He made breaks occasionally In this routine of study by
visits to London, to see friends, to buy books, to take lessons in
mathematics, to go to the theatre, or to concerts. A love of music was
inherited from his father.
I have called this period, 1632-39, one of preparation, and not of
production. But though the first volume of poems printed by Milton did
not appear till 1645, the most considerable part of its contents was
written during the period included in the present chapter.
The fame of the author of _Paradise Lost_ has overshadowed that of the
author of _L'Allegro, Il Penseroso,_ and _Lycidas_. Yet had _Paradise
Lost_ never been written, these three poems, with _Comus_, would have
sufficed to place their author in a class apart, and above all those
who had used the English language for poetical purposes before him. It
is incumbent on Milton's biographer to relate the circumstances of the
composition of _Comus_, as it is an incident in the life of the poet.
Milton's musical tastes had brought him the acquaintance of Henry
Lawes, at that time the most celebrated composer in England. When the
Earl of Bridgewater would give an entertainment at Ludlow Castle to
celebrate his entry upon his office as President of Wales and the
Marches, it was to Lawes that application was made to furnish the
music. Lawes, as naturally, applied to his young poetical acquaintance
Milton, to write the words. The entertainment was to be of that
sort which was fashionable at court, and was called a Mask. In that
brilliant period of court life which was inaugurated by Elisabeth and
put an end to by the Civil War, a Mask was a frequent and favourite
amusement. It was an exhibition in which pageantry and music
predominated, but in which dialogue was introduced as accompaniment or
explanation.
The dramatic Mask of the sixteenth century has been traced by the
antiquaries as far back as the time of Edward III. But in its
perfected shape it was a genuine offspring of the English renaissance,
a cross between the vernacular mummery, or mystery-play, and the Greek
drama. No great court festival was considered complete without such a
public show. Many of our great dramatic writers, Beaumont, Fletcher,
Ben Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, Shirley, Carew, were constrained by the
fashion of the time to apply their invention to gratify this taste for
decorative representation. No less an artist than Inigo Jones must
occasionally stoop to construct the machinery.
The taste for grotesque pageant in the open air must have gradually
died out before the general advance of refinement. The Mask by a
process of evolution would have become the Opera. But it often happens
that when a taste or fashion is at the point of death, it undergoes a
forced and temporary revival. So it was with the Mask. In 1633,
the Puritan hatred to the theatre had blazed out in Prynne's
_Histriomastix_, and as a natural consequence, the loyal and cavalier
portion of society threw itself into dramatic amusements of every
kind. It was an unreal revival of the Mask, stimulated by political
passion, in the wane of genuine taste for the fantastic and
semi-barbarous pageant, in which the former age had delighted. What
the imagination of the spectators was no longer equal to, was to
be supplied by costliness of dress and scenery. Those last
representations of the expiring Mask were the occasions of an
extravagant outlay. The Inns of Court and Whitehall vied with each
other in the splendour and solemnity with which they brought out,--the
Lawyers, Shirley's _Triumph of Peace_,--the Court, Carew's _Coelum
Britannicum_.
It was a strange caprice of fortune that made the future poet of the
Puritan epic the last composer of a cavalier mask. The slight plot, or
story, of _Comus_ was probably suggested to Milton by his recollection
of George Peele's _Old Wives' Tale_, which he may have seen on the
stage. The personage of _Comus_ was borrowed from a Latin extravaganza
by a Dutch professor, whose _Comus_ was reprinted at Oxford in
1634, the very year in which Milton wrote his _Mask_. The so-called
tradition collected by Oldys, of the young Egertons, who acted in
_Comus_, having lost themselves in Haywood Forest on their way to
Ludlow, obviously grew out of Milton's poem. However casual the
suggestion, or unpromising the occasion, Milton worked out of it a
strain of poetry such as had never been heard in England before. If
any reader wishes to realise the immense step upon what had gone
before him, which was now made by a young man of twenty-seven, he
should turn over some of the most celebrated of the masks of the
Jacobean period.
We have no information how _Comus_ was received when represented at
Ludlow, but it found a public of readers. For Lawes, who had the MS.
in his hands, was so importuned for copies that, in 1637, he caused an
edition to be printed off. Not surreptitiously; for though Lawes does
not say, in the dedication to Lord Brackley, that he had the author's
leave to print, we are sure that he had it, only from the motto. On
the title page of this edition (1637), is the line,--
Eheu! quid volui miscro mihi! floribus anstrum
Perditus--
The words are Virgil's, but the appropriation of them, and their
application in this "second intention" is too exquisite to have been
made by any but Milton.To the poems of the Horton period belong also
the two pieces _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, and _Lycidas_. He was
probably in the early stage of acquiring the language, when he
superscribed the two first poems with their Italian titles. For there
is no such word as "Penseroso," the adjective formed from "Pensiero"
being "pensieroso". Even had the word been written correctly, its
signification is not that which Milton intended, viz. thoughtful, or
contemplative, but anxious, full of cares, carking. The rapid
purification of Milton's taste will be best perceived by comparing
_L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ of uncertain date, but written after
1632, with the _Ode on the Nativity_, written 1629. The Ode, notwith-
standing its foretaste of Milton's grandeur, abounds in frigid conceits,
from which the two later pieces are free. The Ode is frosty, as written
in winter, within the four walls of a college chamber. The two idylls
breathe the free air of spring and summer, and of the fields round
Horton. They are thoroughly naturalistic; the choicest expression our
language has yet found of the fresh charm of country life, not as that
life is lived by the peasant, but as it is felt by a young and lettered
student, issuing at early dawn, or at sunset, into the fields from his
chamber and his books. All rural sights and sounds and smells are here
blended in that ineffable combination, which once or twice perhaps in
our lives has saluted our young senses before their perceptions were
blunted by
alcohol, by lust, or ambition, or diluted by the social
distractions of great cities.
The fidelity to nature of the imagery of these poems
has been impugned by the critics.
Then to come, in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good morrow.
The skylark never approaches human habitations in this way, as the
redbreast does, Mr. Masson replies that the subject of the verb "to
come" is, not the skylark, but L'Allegro, the joyous student. I cannot
construe the lines as Mr. Masson does, even though the consequence
were to convict Milton, a city-bred youth, of not knowing a skylark
from a sparrow when he saw it. A close observer of things around us
would not speak of the eglantine as twisted, of the cowslip as wan,
of the violet as glowing, or of the reed as balmy. Lycidas' laureate
hearse is to be strewn at once with primrose and woodbine, daffodil
and jasmine. When we read "the rathe primrose that forsaken dies," we
see that the poet is recollecting Shakespeare (Winter's Tale, 4. 4),
not looking at the primrose. The pine is not "rooted deep as high"
(_P.R._ 4416), but sends its roots along the surface. The elm, one of
the thinnest foliaged trees of the forest, is inappropriately named
starproof (_Arc_. 89). Lightning does not singe the tops of trees
(_P.L._ i. 613), but either shivers them, or cuts a groove down the
stem to the ground. These and other such like inaccuracies must be set
down partly to conventional language used without meaning, the vice
of Latin versification enforced as a task, but they are partly due to
real defect of natural knowledge.
Other objections of the critics on the same score, which may be met
with, are easily dismissed. The objector, who can discover no reason
why the oak should be styled "monumental," meets with his match in
the defender who suggests, that it may be rightly so called because
monuments in churches are made of oak. I should tremble to have to
offer an explanation to critics of Milton so acute as these two. But
of less ingenious readers I would ask, if any single word can be found
equal to "monumental" in its power of suggesting to the imagination
the historic oak of park or chase, up to the knees in fern, which has
outlasted ten generations of men; has been the mute witness of the
scenes of love, treachery, or violence enacted in the baronial hall
which it shadows and protects; and has been so associated with man,
that it is now rather a column and memorial obelisk than a tree of the
forest?
These are the humours of criticism. But, apart from these, a
naturalist is at once aware that Milton had neither the eye nor the
ear of a naturalist. At no time, even before his loss of sight, was he
an exact observer of natural objects. It may be that he knew a
skylark from a redbreast, and did not confound the dog-rose with the
honeysuckle. But I am sure that he had never acquired that interest in
nature's things and ways, which leads to close and loving watching
of them. He had not that sense of outdoor nature, empirical and not
scientific, which endows the _Angler_ of his cotemporary Walton, with
its enduring charm, and which is to be acquired only by living in the
open country in childhood. Milton is not a man of the fields, but of
books. His life is in his study, and when he steps abroad into the air
he carries his study thoughts with him. He does look at nature, but he
sees her through books. Natural impressions are received from without,
but always in those forms of beautiful speech, in which the poets of
all ages have clothed them. His epithets are not, like the epithets of
the school of Dryden and Pope, culled from the _Gradus ad Parnassum_;
they are expressive of some reality, but it is of a real emotion in
the spectator's soul, not of any quality detected by keen insight
in the objects themselves. This emotion Milton's art stamps with an
epithet, which shall convey the added charm of classical reminiscence.
When, e.g., he speaks of "the wand'ring moon," the original
significance of the epithet comes home to the scholarly reader with
the enhanced effect of its association with the "errantem lunam" of
Virgil. Nor because it is adopted from Virgil has the epithet here the
second-hand effect of a copy. If Milton sees nature through books, he
still sees it.
To behold the wand'ring moon,
Riding near her highest noon,
Like one that had been led astray.
Through the heaven's wide pathless way,
And oft, as if her head she bow'd,
Stooping through a fleecy cloud.
No allegation that "wand'ring moon" is borrowed from Horace can hide
from us that Milton, though he remembered Horace, had watched the
phenomenon with a feeling so intense that he projected his own soul's
throb into the object before him, and named it with what Thomson calls
"recollected love".
Milton's attitude towards nature is not that of a scientific
naturalist, nor even that of a close observer. It is that of a poet
who feels its total influence too powerfully to dissect it. If, as I
have said, Milton reads books first and nature afterwards, it is not
to test nature by his books, but to learn from both. He is learning
not books, but from books. All he reads, sees, hears, is to him but
nutriment for the soul. He is making himself. Man is to him the
highest object; nature is subordinate to man, not only in its more
vulgar uses, but as an excitant of fine emotion. He is not concerned
to register the facts and phenomena of nature, but to convey the
impressions they make on a sensitive soul. The external forms of
things are to be presented to us as transformed through the heart and
mind of the poet. The moon is endowed with life and will, "stooping",
"riding", "wand'ring", "bowing her head", not as a frigid
personification, and because the ancient poets so personified her, but
by communication to her of the intense agitation which the nocturnal
spectacle rouses in the poet's own breast.
I have sometimes read that these two idylls are "masterpieces of
description". Other critics will ask if in the scenery of _L'Allegro_
and _Il Penseroso_ Milton has described the country about Horton, in
Bucks, or that about Forest Hill, in Oxfordshire; and will object that
the Chiltern Hills are not high enough for clouds to rest upon their
top, much less upon their breast. But he has left out the pollard
willows, says another censor, and the lines of pollard willow are the
prominent feature in the valley of the Colne, even more so than the
"hedgerow elms." Does the line "Walk the studious cloister's pale,"
_mean_ St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey? When these things can continue
to be asked, it is hardly superfluous to continue to repeat, that
truth of fact and poetical truth are two different things. Milton's
attitude towards nature is not that of a "descriptive poet", if indeed
the phrase be not a self-contradiction.
In Milton, nature is not put forward as the poet's theme. His theme
is man, in the two contrasted moods of joyous emotion, or grave
reflection. The shifting scenery ministers to the varying mood.
Thomson, in the _Seasons_ (1726), sets himself to render natural
phenomena as they truly are. He has left us a vivid presentation in
gorgeous language of the naturalistic calendar of the changing year.
Milton, in these two idylls, has recorded a day of twenty-four
hours. But he has not registered the phenomena; he places us at the
standpoint of the man before whom they deploy. And the man, joyous
or melancholy, is not a bare spectator of them; he is the student,
compounded of sensibility and intelligence, of whom we are not told
that he saw so and so, or that he felt so, but with whom we are
made copartners of his thoughts and feeling. Description melts into
emotion, and contemplation bodies itself in imagery. All the charm of
rural life is there, but it is not tendered to us in the form of a
landscape; the scenery is subordinated to the human figure in the
centre.
These two short idylls are marked by a gladsome spontaneity which
never came to Milton again. The delicate fancy and feeling which play
about _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_ never reappear, and form a strong
contrast to the austere imaginings of his later poetical period. These
two poems have the freedom and frolic, the natural grace of movement,
the improvisation, of the best Elizabethan examples, while both
thoughts and words are under a strict economy unknown to the diffuse
exuberance of the Spenserians.
In _Lycidas_ (1637) we have reached the high-water mark of English
Poesy and of Milton's own production. A period of a century and a half
was to elapse before poetry in England seemed, in Wordsworth's _Ode
on Immortality_ (1807), to be rising again towards the level of
inspiration which it had once attained in _Lycidas_. And in the
development of the Miltonic genius this wonderful dirge marks the
culminating point. As the twin idylls of 1632 show a great advance
upon the _Ode on the Nativity_ (1629), the growth of the poetic mind
during the five years which follow 1632 is registered in _Lycidas_.
Like the _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, _Lycidas_ is laid out on the
lines of the accepted pastoral fiction; like them it offers exquisite
touches of idealised rural life. But _Lycidas_ opens up a deeper vein
of feeling, a patriot passion so vehement and dangerous, that, like
that which stirred the Hebrew prophet, it is compelled to veil itself
from power, or from sympathy, in utterance made purposely enigmatical.
The passage which begins "Last came and last did go", raises in us a
thrill of awe-struck expectation which. I can only compare with that
excited by the Cassandra of Aeschylus's _Agamemnon_. For the reader to
feel this, he must have present in memory the circumstances of England
in 1637. He must place himself as far as possible in the situation of
a contemporary. The study of Milton's poetry compels the study of his
time; and Professor Masson's six volumes are not too much to enable
us to understand that there were real causes for the intense passion
which glows underneath the poet's words--a passion which unexplained
would be thought to be intrusive.
The historical exposition must be gathered from the English history of
the period, which may be read in Professor Masson's excellent summary.
All I desire to point out here is, that in _Lycidas_, Milton's
original picturesque vein is for the first time crossed with one
of quite another sort, stern, determined, obscurely indicative of
suppressed passion, and the resolution to do or die. The fanaticism of
the covenanter and the sad grace of Petrarch seem to meet in Milton's
monody. Yet these opposites, instead of neutralising each other, are
blended into one harmonious whole by the presiding, but invisible,
genius of the poet. The conflict between the old cavalier world--the
years of gaiety and festivity of a splendid and pleasure-loving court,
and the new puritan world into which love and pleasure were not to
enter--this conflict which was commencing in the social life of
England, is also begun in Milton's own breast, and is reflected in
_Lycidas_.
For we were nurs'd upon the self-same hill.
Here is the sweet mournfulness of the Spenserian time, upon whose joys
Death is the only intruder. Pass onward a little, and you are in presence
of the tremendous
Two-handed engine at the door,
the terror of which is enhanced by its obscurity. We are very sure
that the avenger is there, though we know not who he is. In these
thirty lines we have the preluding mutterings of the storm which was
to sweep away mask and revel and song, to inhibit the drama, and
suppress poetry. In the earlier poems Milton's muse has sung in the
tones of the age that is passing away; the poet is, except in his
austere chastity, a cavalier. Though even in _L'Allegro_ Dr. Johnson
truly detects "some melancholy in his mirth." In _Lycidas_, for a
moment, the tones of both ages, the past and the coming, are combined,
and then Milton leaves behind him for ever the golden age, and one
half of his poetic genius. He never fulfilled the promise with which
_Lycidas_ concludes, "Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new."