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MILTON
by
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
Author of
'Style,' 'Wordsworth,' &c.
Tenth Impression
London
Edward Arnold
41 & 43 Maddox Street, Bond Street, W.
1915
TO
R. A. M. STEVENSON
WHOSE RADIANT AND SOARING INTELLIGENCE
ENLIGHTENED AND GUIDED ME
DURING THE YEARS OF OUR LOST COMPANIONSHIP
THIS UNAVAILING TRIBUTE OF
MEMORY AND LOVE
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PAGE
"Sciences of conceit"; the difficulties and imperfections of literary
criticism; illustrated in the case of Shakespeare; and of Milton;
the character and temper of Milton; intensity, simplicity,
egotism; his estimate of himself 1
CHAPTER I
John Milton
His birth, and death; his education; early life in London; ships and
shipping; adventurers and players; Milton and the Elizabethan
drama; the poetic masters of his youth; state of the Church of
England; Baxter's testimony; growing unrest; Milton's early
poems; the intrusion of politics; the farewell to mirth; the
Restoration, and Milton's attitude; the lost paradise of the
early poems; Milton's Puritanism; his melancholy; the political
and public preoccupations of the later poems; the drama of
Milton's life; his egotism explained; an illustration from
_Lycidas_; the lost cause; the ultimate triumph 12
CHAPTER II
The Prose Works
Poets and politics; practical aim of Milton's prose writings; the
reforms advocated by him, with one exception, unachieved;
critical mourners over Milton's political writings; the mourners
comforted; Milton's classification of his prose tracts; the
occasional nature of these tracts; allusions in the early prose
works to the story of Samson, and to the theme of _Paradise
Lost_; Milton's personal and public motives; his persuasive vein;
his political idealism; Johnson's account of his political
opinions; the citizen of an antique city; Milton's attitude
towards mediaeval romance, and towards the mediaeval Church; his
worship of liberty; and of greatness; his belief in human
capacity and virtue; Milton and Cromwell; Milton's clear logic;
his tenacity; his scurrility, and its excuse; his fierce and
fantastic wit; reappearance of these qualities in _Paradise
Lost_; the style of his prose works analysed and illustrated; his
rich vocabulary; his use of Saxon; the making of an epic poet 39
CHAPTER III
Paradise Lost: The Scheme
Vastness of the theme; scenical opportunities; the poetry independent
of the creed; Milton's choice of subject; King Arthur; _Paradise
Lost_; attractions of the theme: primitive religion, natural
beauty, dramatic interest; difficulties of the theme, and
forbidden topics; how Milton overcomes these difficulties by his
episodes, his similes, and the tradition that he adopts
concerning the fallen angels; the cosmography of _Paradise Lost_;
its chronology; some difficulties and inconsistencies; Milton's
spiritual beings, their physical embodiment; the poem no treasury
of wisdom, but a world-drama; its inhumanity, and artificial
elevation; the effect of Milton's simpler figures drawn from
rural life; De Quincey's explanation of this effect; another
explanation; the homelessness of Eden; the enchanted palace and
its engineer; the tyranny of Milton's imagination; its effect on
his diction 81
CHAPTER IV
Paradise Lost: The Actors. The Later Poems
Milton's argumentative end; its bearing on the scenes in Heaven; his
political bias, and materialism; Milton's Deity; his Satan; the
minor devils; Adam; Eve; personal memories; Adam's eulogy of Eve,
criticised by Raphael; Milton's philosophy of love and beauty;
the opinions of Raphael, of Satan, and of Mrs. Millamant; the
comparative merits of Adam and Eve; Milton's great epic effects;
his unity and large decorum; morning and evening; architectural
effects; the close of _Paradise Lost_; Addison and Bentley;
_Paradise Regained;_ the choice of subject; Milton's favourite
theme--temptation; other possible subjects; the Harrying of Hell;
_Samson Agonistes;_ the riddle of life. 126
CHAPTER V
The Style of Milton: Metre and Diction
Difficulties of literary genealogy; the ledger school of criticism;
Milton's strength and originality; his choice of a sacred
subject; earlier attempts in England and France; Boileau's
opinion; Milton's choice of metre an innovation; the little
influence on Milton of Spenser, and of Donne; Milton a pupil of
the dramatists; the history of dramatic blank verse; Milton's
handling of the measure; the "elements of musical delight";
Tennyson's blank verse; Milton's metrical licenses; the Choruses
of _Samson Agonistes_; Milton's diction a close-wrought mosaic;
compared with the diffuser diction of Spenser; conciseness of
Virgil, Dryden, Pope, Milton; Homer's repetitions; repetitions
and "turns of words and thoughts" rare in Milton; double meanings
of words; Milton's puns; extenuating circumstances; his mixed
metaphors and violent syntax, due to compression; Milton's
poetical style a dangerous model; the spontaneity and license of
his prose 170
CHAPTER VI
The Style of Milton; and its Influence on English Poetry
The relation of Milton's work to the 17th-century "reforms" of verse
and prose; the Classicism of Milton, and of the Augustans;
Classic and Romantic schools contrasted in their descriptions;
Milton's Chaos, Shakespeare's Dover Cliff; Johnson's comments;
the besetting sins of the two schools; Milton's physical
machinery justified; his use of abstract terms; the splendid use
of mean associations by Shakespeare; Milton's wise avoidance of
mean associations, and of realism; nature of his similes and
figures; his use of proper names; his epic catalogues; his
personifications; loftiness of his perfected style; the
popularity of _Paradise Last_; imitations, adaptations, and
echoes of Milton's style during the 18th century; his enormous
influence; the origin of "poetic diction"; Milton's phraseology
stolen by Pope, Thomson, and Gray; the degradation of Milton's
style by his pupils and parodists 218
EPILOGUE
Milton's contemporaries; the poetry of Religion, and of Love; Henry
Vaughan; the Court lyrists; Milton's contempt for them; how they
surpass him; Sedley; Rochester; the prophet of the Lord and the
sons of Belial; unique position of Milton in the history of our
literature 256
Index 265
INTRODUCTION
Francis Bacon, in one of his prose fragments, draws a memorable
distinction between "arts mechanical" and "sciences of conceit." "In arts
mechanical," he says, "the first device comes shortest, and time addeth
and perfecteth. But in sciences of conceit the first author goeth
farthest, and time leeseth and corrupteth.... In the former, many wits
and industries contributed in one. In the latter, many men's wits spent
to deprave the wit of one."
I fear that literary criticism of the kind that I propose to myself in
these chapters on Milton must be classified with the "sciences of
conceit." Indeed, Bacon puts it out of question that he himself would so
have regarded it, for he goes on to explain how, after the deliverances
of a master, "then begin men to aspire to the second prizes, to be a
profound interpreter and commentor, to be a sharp champion and defender,
to be a methodical compounder and abridger. And this is the unfortunate
succession of wits which the world hath yet had, whereby the patrimony of
all knowledge goeth not on husbanded and improved, but wasted and
decayed."
The blow is aimed at the scholastic philosophers, but it falls heavy on
the critics of literature, on all who "aspire to the second prizes," or
who think "that a borrowed light can increase the original light from
whom it is taken." It is a searching arraignment of all who set
themselves to expound in words the meaning and purpose of a master of
verbal expression. Yet the very breadth of the indictment brings comfort
and a means of escape. For the chief difficulties of an attempt to
understand and judge Milton are difficulties inherent in the nature, not
only of all criticism in the large sense, but also of all reading. In
this association with great spirits which we call reading we receive but
what we give, and take away only what we are fit to carry. Milton himself
has stated the doctrine in its most absolute form, and has sought an
enhanced authority for it by attributing it to the Christ--
Who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior
(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore.
Literally taken, this is the negation of all the higher functions of
criticism, and the paralysis of all learning. Only his peers, it is
argued, can read Shakespeare intelligently; and, as if that did not give
him few enough readers, they are further told that they will be wasting
their time! But love, unlike this proud Stoicism, is humble, and
contented with a little. I would put my apology in the language of love
rather than of philosophy. I know that in Shakespeare, or in Milton, or
in any rare nature, as in Faire Virtue, the mistress of Philarete--
There is some concealed thing
So each gazer limiting,
He can see no more of merit
Than beseems his worth and spirit.
The appreciation of a great author asks knowledge and industry before it
may be attempted, but in the end it is the critic, not the author, who is
judged by it, and, where his sympathies have been too narrow, or his
sight too dim, condemned without reprieve, and buried without a
tombstone.
Imperfect sympathy, that eternal vice of criticism, is sometimes
irremediable, sometimes caused by imperfect knowledge. It takes forms as
various as the authors whom it misjudges. In the case of Shakespeare,
when we attempt to estimate him, to gauge him, to see him from all sides,
we become almost painfully conscious of his immensity. We can build no
watch-tower high enough to give us a bird's-eye view of that "globe of
miraculous continents." We are out of breath when we attempt to accompany
him on his excursions, where he,
through strait, rough, dense, or rare,
With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way,
And swims, or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flies.
He moves so easily and so familiarly among human passions and human
emotions, is so completely at home in all societies and all companies,
that he makes us feel hide-bound, prejudiced and ill-bred, by the side of
him. We have to widen our conception of human nature in order to think of
him as a man. How hard a thing it is to conceive of Shakespeare as of a
human spirit, embodied and conditioned, whose affections, though higher
mounted than ours, yet, when they stooped, stooped with the like wing, is
witnessed by all biographies of Shakespeare, and by many thousands of the
volumes of criticism and commentary that have been written on his works.
One writer is content to botanise with him--to study plant-lore, that is,
with a theatrical manager, in his hard-earned leisure, for teacher.
Another must needs read the Bible with him, although, when all is said,
Shakespeare's study was but little on the Bible. Others elect to keep him
to music, astronomy, law, hunting, hawking, fishing. He is a good
companion out of doors, and some would fain keep him there, to make a
country gentleman of him. His incorrigible preoccupation with humanity,
the ruling passion and employment of his life, is beyond the range of
their complete sympathy; they like to catch him out of hours, to draw him
aside and bespeak his interest, for a few careless minutes, in the trades
and pastimes that bulk so largely and so seriously in their own
perspective of life. They hardly know what to make of his "unvalued
book"; but they know that he was a great man, and to have bought a
wool-fell or a quarter of mutton from him, that would have been
something! Only the poet-critics attempt to see life, however brokenly,
through Shakespeare's eyes, to let their enjoyment keep attendance upon
his. And from their grasp, too, he escapes by sheer excess.
In the case of Milton the imperfection of our sympathy is due to other
causes. In the first place, we know him as we do not know Shakespeare.
The history of his life can be, and has been, minutely written. The
affairs of his time, political and religious, have been recorded with
enormous wealth of detail; and this wealth, falling into fit hands, has
given us those learned modern historians to whom the seventeenth century
means a period of five thousand two hundred and eighteen weeks. Milton's
own attitude towards these affairs is in no way obscure; he has explained
it with great fulness and candour in numerous publications, so that it
would be easy to draw up a declaration of his chief tenets in politics
and religion. The slanders of his adversaries he met again and again with
lofty passages of self-revelation. "With me it fares now," he remarks in
one of these, "as with him whose outward garment hath been injured and
ill-bedighted; for having no other shift, what help but to turn the
inside outwards, especially if the lining be of the same, or, as it is
sometimes, much better." In his poetry, too, he delights to reveal
himself, to take the knowing reader into his confidence, to honour the
fit audience with a confession.
But the difficulty is there none the less. Few critics have found Milton
too wide or too large for them; many have found him too narrow, which is
another form of imperfect sympathy. His lack of humour has alienated the
interest of thousands. His ardent advocacy of toleration in the noblest
of his prose treatises has been belittled by a generation which prides
itself on that flaccid form of benevolence, and finds the mere repeal of
the Licensing Act the smallest part of it. His pamphlets on divorce and
on government have earned him the reputation of a theorist and dreamer.
The shrewd practical man finds it easy to despise him. The genial
tolerant man, whose geniality of demeanour towards others is a kind of
quit-rent paid for his own moral laxity, regards him as a Pharisee. The
ready humourist devises a pleasant and cheap entertainment by dressing
Adam and Eve in modern garments and discussing their relations in the
jargon of modish frivolity. Even the personal history of the poet has
been made to contribute to the gaiety of nations, and the flight of Mary
Powell, the first Mrs. Milton, from the house in Aldersgate Street, has
become something of a stock comic episode in the history of English
literature. So heavy is the tax paid, even by a poet, for deficiency in
breadth and humour. Almost all men are less humorous than Shakespeare;
but most men are more humorous than Milton, and these, it is to be
feared, having suffered themselves to be dragooned by the critics into
professing a distant admiration for _Paradise Lost_, have paid their last
and utmost tribute to the genius of its author.
It may be admitted without hesitation that his lonely greatness rather
forces admiration on us than attracts us. That unrelenting intensity;
that lucidity, as clear as air and as hard as agate; that passion which
burns with a consuming heat or with a blinding light in all his writings,
have endeared him to none. It is impossible to take one's ease with
Milton, to induce him to forget his principles for a moment in the name
of social pleasure. The most genial of his personal sonnets is addressed
to Henry Lawrence, the son of the President of Cromwell's Council, and is
an invitation to dinner. The repast promised is "light and choice"; the
guest is apostrophised, somewhat formidably, as "Lawrence, of virtuous
father, virtuous son," and is reminded, before he has dined, that
He who of these delights can judge, and spare
To interpose them oft, is not unwise.
But the qualities that make Milton a poor boon-companion are precisely
those which combine to raise his style to an unexampled loftiness, a
dignity that bears itself easily in society greater than human. To attain
to this height it was needful that there should be no aimless expatiation
of the intellect, no facile diffusion of the sympathies over the wide
field of human activity and human character. All the strength of mind and
heart and will that was in Milton went into the process of raising
himself. He is like some giant palm-tree; the foliage that sprang from it
as it grew has long since withered, the stem rises gaunt and bare; but
high up above, outlined against the sky, is a crown of perennial verdure.
It is essential for the understanding of Milton that we should take
account of the rare simplicity of his character. No subtleties; no tricks
of the dramatic intellect, which dresses itself in a hundred masquerading
costumes and peeps out of a thousand spy-holes; no development, one might
almost say, only training, and that self-imposed. There is but one
Milton, and he is throughout one and the same, in his life, in his prose,
and in his verse; from those early days, when we find him, an uncouth
swain,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay,
to the last days when, amid a swarm of disasters, he approved himself
like Samson, and earned for himself the loftiest epitaph in the language,
his own--
Nothing is here for tears, nothing to wail
Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise, or blame; nothing but well and fair,
And what may quiet us in a death so noble.
The world has not wholly misunderstood or failed to appreciate this
extraordinary character, as one curious piece of evidence will serve to
show. Milton is one of the most egotistic of poets. He makes no secret of
the high value he sets upon his gifts--"gifts of God's imparting," as he
calls them, "which I boast not, but thankfully acknowledge, and fear also
lest at my certain account they be reckoned to me many rather than few."
Before he has so much as begun his great poem he covenants with his
reader "that for some few years yet I may go on trust with him toward the
payment of what I am now indebted, as being a work not to be raised from
the heat of youth or the vapours of wine; ... nor to be obtained by the
invocation of dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer
to that eternal Spirit, who can enrich with all utterance and knowledge,
and sends out his seraphim, with the hallowed fire of his altar, to touch
and purify the lips of whom he pleases; to this must be added industrious
and select reading, steady observation, insight into all seemly and
generous arts and affairs; till which in some measure be compassed, at
mine own peril and cost, I refuse not to sustain this expectation from as
many as are not loth to hazard so much credulity upon the best pledges
that I can give them." And when he came to redeem his pledge, in the very
opening lines of his epic, trusting to the same inspiration, he
challenges the supremacy of the ancients by his
adventrous song
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
"This man cuts us all out, and the Ancients too," Dryden is reported to
have said. But this man intended to do no less, and formally announced
his intention. It is impossible to outface Milton, or to abash him with
praise. His most enthusiastic eulogists are compelled merely to echo the
remarks of his earliest and greatest critic, himself. Yet with all this,
none of the later critics, not the most cavalier nor the dullest, has
dared to call him vain. His estimate of himself, offered as simple fact,
has been accepted in the same spirit, and one abyss of ineptitude still
yawns for the heroic folly, or the clownish courage, of the New
Criticism.
CHAPTER I
JOHN MILTON
John Milton, the son of a middle-aged scrivener, was born on Friday,
December the 9th, 1608, at his father's house in Bread Street, Cheapside;
and died on Sunday, November the 8th, 1674, in a small house, with but
one room on a floor, in Artillery Walk, Bunhill Fields, London. Of his
father the records that remain show him to have been a convinced member
of the Puritan party in the Church, a man of liberal culture and
intelligence, a lover of music (which taste Milton inherited), a wise and
generous friend to the son who became a poet. We owe it to his wisdom
rather than to his prosperity that Milton was allowed to live at home
without any ostensible profession until he was thirty years of age and
more.
For the first sixteen years of his life Milton was educated partly at
home, by a Presbyterian tutor called Thomas Young, partly at St. Paul's
School, which he attended for some years as a day-scholar. From his
twelfth year onward he was an omnivorous reader, and before he left
school had written some boyish verses, void of merit. The next fourteen
years of his life, after leaving school, were spent at Cambridge, in
Buckinghamshire, and in foreign travel, so that he was thirty years old
before he lived continuously in London again.
We know pretty well how he spent his time at Cambridge and at Horton,
sedulously turning over the Greek and Latin classics, dreaming of
immortality. We know less about his early years in London, where there
were wider and better opportunities of gaining an insight into "all
seemly and generous arts and affairs." London was a great centre of
traffic, a motley crowd of adventurers and traders even in those days,
and the boy Milton must often have wandered down to the river below
London Bridge to see the ships come in. His poems are singularly full of
figures drawn from ships and shipping, some of them bookish in their
origin, others which may have been suggested by the sight of ships. Now
it is Satan, who, after his fateful journey through chaos, nears the
world,
And like a weather-beaten vessel holds
Gladly the port, though shrouds and tackle torn.
Now it is Dalila, whom the Chorus behold approaching.
Like a stately ship
Of Tarsus, bound for the isles
Of Javan or Gadire,
With all her bravery on, and tackle trim,
Sails filled, and streamers waving,
Courted by all the winds that hold them play.
Or, again, it is Samson reproaching himself,
Who, like a foolish pilot, have shipwracked
My vessel trusted to me from above,
Gloriously rigged.
The bulk of Satan is compared to the great sea-beast Leviathan, beheld
off the coast of Norway by
The pilot of some small night-founder'd skiff.
In his approach to the happy garden the Adversary is likened to
them who sail
Beyond the Cape of Hope, and now are past
Mozambic, off at sea north-east winds blow
Sabaean odours from the spicy shore
Of Araby the Blest, with such delay
Well pleased they slack their course, and many a league
Cheered with the grateful smell old Ocean smiles;
So entertained those odorous sweets the Fiend.
And when he draws near to Eve in the rose-thicket,
sidelong he works his way,
As when a ship, by skilful steersman wrought,
Nigh river's mouth, or foreland, where the wind
Veers oft, as oft so steers, and shifts her sail.
There is nothing here that is not within the reach of any inland reader,
but Milton's choice of nautical similitudes may serve to remind us how
much of the interest of Old London centred round its port. Here were to
be heard those tales of far-sought adventure and peril which gave even to
the boisterous life of Elizabethan London an air of triviality and
security. Hereby came in "the variety of fashions and foreign stuffs,"
which Fynes Moryson, writing in Milton's childhood, compares to the stars
of heaven and the sands of the sea for number. All sorts of characters,
nationalities, and costumes were daily to be seen in Paul's Walk,
adjoining Milton's school. One sort interests us pre-eminently. "In the
general pride of England," says Fynes Moryson, "there is no fit
difference made of degrees; for very Bankrupts, Players, and Cutpurses go
apparelled like gentlemen." Shakespeare was alive during the first seven
years of Milton's life, and was no doubt sometimes a visitor to the
Mermaid, a stone's throw from the scrivener's house. Perhaps his cloak
brushed the child Milton in the street. Milton was born in the golden age
of the drama, and a score of masterpieces were put upon the London stage
while he was in his cradle. But the golden age passed rapidly; the
quality of the drama degenerated and the opposition to it grew strong
before he was of years to attend a play. Perhaps he never saw a play by
the masters during his boyhood, and his visits
to the well-trod stage anon,
If Jonson's learned sock be on,
Or sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
Warble his native woodnotes wild,
were either excursions of the imagination or belong to his later
occasional sojourns in London. In his _Eikonoklastes_ he quotes certain
lines from _Richard III._, and here and there in his prose, as well as in
his verse, there are possibly some faint reminiscences of Shakespearian
phrases. So, for instance, in _The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_,
he seems to echo a famous speech of Macbeth, while he claims that his
remedy of free divorce "hath the virtue to soften and dispel rooted and
knotty sorrows, and without enchantment." But these are doubtless the
memories of reading. In the _Apology for Smectymnuus_, when he has to
reply to the charge that he "haunted playhouses" during his college days,
he retorts the charge, it is true, rather than denies it. Yet the retort
bespeaks a certain severity and preciseness in judging of plays and their
actors, which can hardly have found gratification in the licenses and
exuberances of the contemporary drama. It was not difficult, he remarks,
to see plays, "when in the Colleges so many of the young divines, and
those in next aptitude to divinity, have been seen so often upon the
stage, writhing and unboning their clergy limbs to all the antic and
dishonest gestures of Trinculoes, buffoons, and bawds." "If it be
unlawful," he continues, "to sit and behold a mercenary comedian
personating that which is least unseemly for a hireling to do, how much
more blameful is it to endure the sight of as vile things acted by
persons either entered, or presently to enter into the ministry; and how
much more foul and ignominious for them to be the actors!"
It was, at least, a happy chance that the first of Milton's verses to
appear in print should have been _An Epitaph on the Admirable Dramatick
Poet, W. Shakespeare_, contributed to the Second Folio in 1632. The main
interests of the household at the Spread Eagle in Bread Street must have
been far enough remote from the doings of the companies of players. John
Milton the elder would probably have agreed with Sir Thomas Bodley, who
called plays "riffe-raffes," and declared that they should never come
into his library. The Hampton Court Conference, the Synod of Dort, the
ever-widening divisions in the Church, between Arminian and Calvinist,
between Prelatist and Puritan, were probably subjects of a nearer
interest, even to the poet in his youth, than the production of new or
old plays upon the stage. Milton's childhood was spent in the very
twilight of the Elizabethan age; it was greatly fortunate for him, and
for us, that he caught the after-glow of the sunset upon his face. He
read Spenser while Spenser was still the dominant influence in English
poetry. "He hath confessed to me," said Dryden, "that Spenser was his
original,"--an incredible statement unless we understand "original" in
the sense of his earliest admiration, his poetic godfather who first won
him to poetry. He read Shakespeare and Jonson in the first editions. He
read Sylvester's translation of _Du Bartas, His Divine Weekes and
Workes_; and perhaps thence conceived the first vague idea of a poem on a
kindred subject. It is necessary to insist on his English masters,
because, although the greater part of his time and study was devoted to
the classics, the instrument that he was to use was learned in a native
school. His metre, his magnificent vocabulary, his unerring phraseology,
took learning and practice. He attached a high value to his study of
English poetry. When he spoke of "our sage and serious Spenser (whom I
dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas)," he was
conscious that he was maintaining what seemed a bold paradox in an age
when scholasticism still controlled education. It is pleasant to think of
Milton during these early years, whether in London or at Christ's
College, in his "calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and
confident thoughts," before ever he had a hint that he must perforce
"embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, put from
beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of
delightful studies." From the first, we may be sure, he read the poets as
one poet reads another, and apprenticed himself to them for their craft.
He was never drawn out of the highroad of art by the minuter and more
entangling allurements of scholarship. In one of his Divorce pamphlets he
tells, with the inevitable touch of pride, how he never could delight in
long citations, much less in whole traductions, "whether it be natural
disposition or education in me, or that my mother bore me a speaker of
what God made mine own, and not a translator."
Milton was intended by his family, and by his own early resolves, for the
service of the Church. The growing unrest, therefore, in matters
ecclesiastical during the early part of the seventeenth century could not
but affect him. The various parties and tendencies in the Church of
England had never, since the Reformation, attained to a condition of
stable equilibrium. But the settlement under Elizabeth was strengthened,
and the parties bound together for thirty years, by the ever-present fear
of Rome. When that fear was allayed, and the menace that hung over the
very existence of the nation removed by the defeat of the Armada, the
differences within the Church broke out afresh, and waxed fiercer every
year. Shakespeare grew to manhood during the halcyon years between the
Marian persecutions and the Marprelate pamphlets--a kind of magic oasis,
which gave us our English Renaissance. Milton's youth breathed a very
different air. The Church, as it was, pleased hardly any party. Much of
the old temple had been hastily pulled down; the new government offices
that were to replace it had as yet been but partially built, and
commanded no general approval. Considered as a social organisation,
moreover, the Church throughout large parts of the country had fallen
into a state not unlike decay. Richard Baxter, whose testimony there is
no sufficient reason to reject, tells of its state in Shropshire during
the years of his youth, from 1615 onwards:--"We lived in a country that
had but little preaching at all: In the Village where I was born there
was four Readers successively in Six years time, ignorant Men, and two of
them immoral in their lives; who were all my School-masters. In the
Village where my Father lived, there was a Reader of about Eighty years
of Age that never preached, and had two Churches about Twenty miles
distant: His Eyesight failing him, he said Common-Prayer without Book;
but for the Reading of the Psalms and Chapters he got a Common Thresher
and Day-Labourer one year, and a Taylor another year: (for the Clerk
could not read well): And at last he had a Kinsman of his own (the
excellentest Stage-player in all the Country, and a good Gamester and
good Fellow) that got Orders and supplied one of his Places.... After him
another Neighbour's Son took Orders, when he had been a while an
Attorney's Clerk, and a common Drunkard, and tipled himself into so great
Poverty that he had no other way to live.... These were the
School-masters of my Youth ... who read Common Prayer on Sundays and Holy
Days, and taught School and tipled on the Weekdays, and whipt the Boys
when they were drunk, so that we changed them very oft. Within a few
miles about us were near a dozen more Ministers that were near Eighty
years old apiece, and never preached; poor ignorant Readers, and most of
them of Scandalous Lives." Some few there were, Baxter admits, who
preached in the neighbourhood, but any one who went to hear them "was
made the Derision of the Vulgar Rabble under the odious Name of a
_Puritane_."
In one of his Latin letters written from Cambridge, Milton himself speaks
of the ignorance of those designed for the profession of divinity, how
they knew little or nothing of literature and philosophy. The high
prelacy and ritualism of Laud on the one hand, the Puritan movement on
the other, each in some measure a protest against this state of things,
were at fierce variance with each other, and Milton's ear, from his youth
upward, was "pealed with noises loud and ruinous." The age of Shakespeare
was irrecoverably past, and it was impossible for any but a few
imperturbable Cyrenaics, like Herrick, to "fleet the time carelessly, as
they did in the golden world." The large indifference of Shakespeare to
current politics was impossible for Milton. "I had as lief be a Brownist
as a politician," said the folly of Sir Andrew Aguecheek and the wisdom
of Shakespeare. But now the Brownists and the politicians had it their
own way; and Milton was something of both.
His notable early poems, written at College and during his retreat in
Buckinghamshire, have therefore a singular interest and pathos. He was
not long for the world in which these poems move with so ineffable a
native grace. They are the poems of his youth, instinct with the
sensibility of youth, and of a delicate and richly nurtured imagination.
But they are also the poems of an age that was closing, and they have a
touch of the sadness of evening. "I know not," says Dr. Johnson, speaking
of _L'Allegro_ and _Il Penseroso_, "whether the characters are kept
sufficiently apart. No mirth can indeed be found in his melancholy, but I
am afraid that I always meet some melancholy in his mirth." It is true;
for both characters are Milton himself, who embodies in separate poems
the cheerful and pensive elements of his own nature--and already his
choice is made. There is something disinterested and detached about his
sketches of the merriment which he takes part in only as a silent
onlooker, compared with the profound sincerity of the lines--
And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The hairy gown and mossy cell,
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every star that heaven doth shew,
And every herb that sips the dew,
Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain.
The rising tide of political passion submerged the solemn Arcadia of his
early fancies. Like Lycidas, he was carried far from the flowers and the
shepherds to visit "the bottom of the monstrous world." Hence there may
be made a whole index of themes, touched on by Milton in his early poems,
as if in promise, of which no fulfilment is to be found in the greater
poems of his maturity. His political career under the Commonwealth is
often treated, both by those who applaud and by those who lament it, as
if it were the merest interlude between two poetic periods. It was not
so; political passion dominates and informs all his later poems,
dictating even their subjects. How was it possible for him to choose King
Arthur and his Round Table for the subject of his epic, as he had
intended in his youthful days; when chivalry and the spirit of chivalry
had fought its last fight on English soil, full in the sight of all men,
round the forlorn banner of King Charles? The policy of Laud and
Stratford kept Milton out of the Church, and sent him into retirement at
Horton; the same policy, it may be plausibly conjectured, had something
to do with the change in the subject of his long-meditated epic. From the
very beginning of the civil troubles contemporary events leave their mark
on all his writings. The topical bias (so to call it) is very noticeable
in many of the subjects tentatively jotted down by him on the paper that
is now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The corrupted
clergy, who make so splendid and, as some think, so irrelevant an
appearance in _Lycidas_, figure frequently, either directly or by
implication, in the long list of themes.
Without misgiving or regret, when the time came, Milton shut the gate on
the sequestered paradise of his youth, and hastened downward to join the
fighters in the plain. Before we follow him we may well "interpose a
little ease" by looking at some of the beauties proper to the earlier
poems, and listening to some of the simple pastoral melodies that were
drowned when the organ began to blow. _L'Allegro_ is full of them--
Sometimes, with secure delight,
The upland hamlets will invite,
When the merry bells ring round,
And the jocund rebecks sound
To many a youth and many a maid
Dancing in the chequered shade,
And young and old come forth to play
On a sunshine holiday.
That is Merry England of Shakespeare's time. But already the controversy
concerning the _Book of Sports_ had begun to darken the air. Already the
Maypole, that "great stinking idol," as an Elizabethan Puritan called it,
had been doomed to destruction. Some years before _L'Allegro_ was
written, a bard, who hailed from Leeds, had lamented its downfall in the
country of his nativity--
Happy the age, and harmelesse were the dayes,
(For then true love and amity was found)
When every village did a May-pole raise,
And Whitson Ales and May games did abound;
And all the lusty Yonkers in a rout
With merry Lasses danced the rod about;
Then friendship to their banquets bid the guests,
And poor men far'd the better for their feasts.
The next verse recalls that scene in _The Winter's Tale_ where
Shakespeare draws a vivid picture of Elizabethan country merrymaking--
The Lords of Castles, Manners, Townes, and Towers
Rejoyc'd when they beheld the Farmers flourish,
And would come down unto the Summer-Bowers
To see the Country gallants dance the Morrice,
And sometimes with his tenant's handsome daughter
Would fall in liking, and espouse her after
Unto his Serving-man, and for her portion
Bestow on him some farme, without extortion.
Alas poore Maypoles, what should be the cause
That you were almost banish't from the earth?
You never were rebellious to the lawes,
Your greatest crime was harmelesse honest mirth;
What fell malignant spirit was there found
To cast your tall _Piramides_ to ground?
* * * * *
And you my native towne, which was of old,
(When as thy Bon-fires burn'd and May-poles stood,
And when thy Wassell-cups were uncontrol'd)
The Summer Bower of Peace and neighbourhood,
Although since these went down, thou ly'st forlorn,
By factious schismes and humours over-borne,
Some able hand I hope thy rod will raise,
That thou maist see once more thy happy daies.
The hopes of the bard of Leeds were fulfilled at the Restoration.
Merriment, of a sort, came back to England; but it found no congenial
acceptance from Milton. The Court roysterers, the Hectors, Nickers,
Scourers, and Mohocks, among whom were numbered Sedley and Rochester, and
others of the best poets of the day, are celebrated by him incidentally
in those lines, unsurpassable for sombre magnificence, which he appends
to his account of Belial--
In courts and palaces he also reigns,
And in luxurious cities, where the noise
Of riot ascends above their loftiest towers,
And injury and outrage; and, when night
Darkens the streets, then wander forth the sons
Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine.
The public festivals of these later days are glanced at in _Samson
Agonistes_--
Lords are lordliest in their wine;
And the well-feasted priest then soonest fired
With zeal, if aught religion seem concerned;
No less the people on their holy-days
Impetuous, insolent, unquenchable.
There is no relaxation, no trace of innocent lightheartedness, in any of
the later poems. Even the garden of Paradise, where some gentle mirth
might perhaps be permissible, is tenanted by grave livers, majestic, but
not sprightly. In _L' Allegro_ the morning song of the milk-maid is
"blithe," and the music of the village dance is "jocund." But Eve is
described as "jocund" and "blithe" only when she is intoxicated by the
mortal fruit of the tree; and the note of gaiety that is heard faintly,
like a distant echo, in the earlier poems, is never sounded again by
Milton.
So it is also with other things. The flowers scattered on the laureate
hearse of Lycidas make a brighter, more various, and withal a homelier
display than ever meets the eye in the Hesperian wildernesses of Eden. Or
take the world of fairy lore that Milton inherited from the
Elizabethans--a world to which not only Shakespeare, but also laborious
and arrogant poet-scholars like Jonson and Drayton had free right of
entry. Milton, too, could write of the fairies--in his youth--
With stories told of many a feat,
How Faery Mab the junkets eat.
But even in _Comus_ the most exquisite passage of fairy description is
put into the mouth of Comus himself, chief of the band of ugly-headed
monsters in glistering apparel--
The sounds and seas, with all their finny drove,
Now to the moon in wavering morrice move;
And on the tawny sands and shelves
Trip the pert fairies and the dapper elves.
By dimpled brook and fountain-brim,
The wood-nymphs decked with daisies trim,
Their merry wakes and pastimes keep:
What hath night to do with sleep?
The song and the dance are broken off, never to be resumed, when the
staid footfall of the lady is heard approaching. Milton cannot draw
ugliness; it turns into beauty or majesty on his hands. Satan has a large
and enthusiastic party among readers of _Paradise Lost_. Comus, we are
told, stands for a whole array of ugly vices--riot, intemperance,
gluttony, and luxury. But what a delicate monster he is, and what a
ravishing lyric strain he is master of! The pleasure that Milton forswore
was a young god, the companion of Love and Youth, not an aged Silenus
among the wine-skins. He viewed and described one whole realm of pagan
loveliness, and then he turned his face the other way, and never looked
back. Love is of the valley, and he lifted his eyes to the hills. His
guiding star was not Christianity, which in its most characteristic and
beautiful aspects had no fascination for him, but rather that severe and
self-centred ideal of life and character which is called Puritanism. It
is not a creed for weak natures; so that as the nominal religion of a
whole populace it has inevitably fallen into some well-merited disrepute.
Puritanism for him was not a body of law to be imposed outwardly on a
gross and timid people, but an inspiration and a grace that falls from
Heaven upon choice and rare natures--
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 remember'd;
so sings the Chorus in _Samson Agonistes_--
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.
Under one form or another Puritanism is to be found in almost all
religions, and in many systems of philosophy. Milton's Puritanism enabled
him to combine his classical and Biblical studies, to reconcile his pagan
and Christian admirations, Stoicism, and the Quakers. It was with no
sense of incongruity that he gave to the Christ a speech in praise of--
Quintus, Fabricius, Curius, Regulus,...
Who could do mighty things, and could contemn
Riches, though offered from the hand of Kings.
To reject common ambitions, to refuse common enticements, to rule
passions, desires, and fears, "neither to change, nor falter, nor
repent,"--this was the wisdom and this the virtue that he set before
himself. There is no beatific vision to keep his eyes from wandering
among the shows of earth. Milton's heaven is colder than his earth, the
home of Titans, whose employ is political and martial. When his
imagination deals with earthly realities, the noble melancholy of the
Greeks lies upon it. His last word on human life might be translated into
Greek with no straining and no loss of meaning--
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.
He is therefore one of the few English poets (alone in this respect among
the greatest) who have not sung of Love. His only English love-poem, the
sonnet _To the Nightingale_, is his earliest and poorest sonnet. He
elected in his later poems to sing of Marriage, its foundation in reason,
its utility, its respectability and antiquity as an institution, and,
above all, its amazing dangers. He has thus lost the devotion of the
young, who, while they read poetry by the ear and eye for its sonorous
suggestions, and its processions of vague shapes, love Milton; but when
they come to read it for its matter and sentiment, leave him--in most
cases never to return. The atmosphere of his later poems is that of some
great public institution. Heaven is an Oriental despotism. Hell is a
Secession parliament. In the happy garden itself there is no privacy, no
individualism; it is the focus of the action, the central point of the
attack and the defence; and a great part of the conversation of its
inhabitants turns on the regulations under which they live. They never
forget that they are all mankind, and when their psalm goes up in
grateful adoration to their Creator, it is like the unanimous voice of
all nations and kindreds and people and tongues.
"The plan of _Paradise Lost_" says Johnson, "has this inconvenience, that
it comprises neither human actions nor human manners. The man and woman
who act and suffer are in a state which no other man and woman can ever
know. The reader finds no transaction in which he can be engaged; beholds
no condition in which he can by any effort of imagination place himself;
he has, therefore, little natural curiosity and sympathy." Milton, he
goes on to explain, "knew human nature only in the gross, and had never
studied the shades of character, nor the combinations of concurring or
the perplexity of contending passions."
He knew human nature only in the gross. He treated nothing less momentous
than the fortunes of the race. It is precisely from this cause that the
incomparable grandeur of Milton's characters and situations springs. The
conversations that he records are like international parleyings. Eve is
the official Mother of mankind. Adam walks forth to meet the angel, in
ambassadorial dignity, the accredited representative of the human race--
Without more train
Accompanied than with his own complete
Perfections; in himself was all his state,
More solemn than the tedious pomp that waits
On princes, when their rich retinue long
Of horses led and grooms besmeared with gold
Dazzles the crowd and sets them all agape.
And if the other characters of _Paradise Lost_ have this generic stamp,
it is because the chief character of all has it--the character of the
poet himself. It lends a strange dignity to the story of Milton's life
that in all his doings he felt himself to be a "cause," an agent of
mighty purposes. This it is that more than excuses, it glorifies, his
repeated magniloquent allusions to himself throughout the prose works.
Holding himself on trust or on commission, he must needs report himself,
not only to his great Taskmaster, but also from time to time to men, his
expectant and impatient beneficiaries. Even in _Lycidas_ he is thinking
of himself as much as of his dead companion--
So may some gentle Muse
With lucky words favour _my_ destined urn,
And as he passes turn,
And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud.
What if he die young himself? Are his dreams and hopes for his own future
an illusion? He agonises with the question in the famous digression on
poetry and poetic fame. But he consoles himself by appeal to a Court
where the success and the fame of this world are as straw in the furnace;
and then, having duly performed the obsequies of his friend, with
reinvigorated heart he turns once more to the future--"To-morrow to fresh
woods and pastures new." A singular ending, no doubt, to an elegy! But it
is blind and hasty to conclude that therefore the precedent laments are
"not to be considered as the effusion of real passion." A soldier's
burial is not the less honoured because his comrades must turn from his
grave to give their thought and strength and courage to the cause which
was also his. The maimed rites, interrupted by the trumpet calling to
action, are a loftier commemoration than the desolating laments of those
who "weep the more because they weep in vain." And in this way Milton's
fierce tirade against the Church hirelings, and his preoccupation with
his own ambitions support and explain each other, and find a fit place in
the poem. He is looking to his equipment, if perchance he may live to do
that in poetry and politics, which Edward King had died leaving
unaccomplished. When his own time came he desired to be lamented in no
other way--
Come, come; no time for lamentation now,
Nor much more cause. Samson hath quit himself
Like Samson, and heroicly hath finished
A life heroic, on his enemies
Fully revenged.
This overmastering sense of the cause breathes through all his numerous
references to himself. He stands in the Forum,
Disturbed, yet comely, and in act
Raised, as of some great matter to begin;
and addresses himself, as he boasts in _The Second Defence of the People
of England_, to "the whole collective body of people, cities, states, and
councils of the wise and eminent, through the wide expanse of anxious and
listening Europe." Having sacrificed the use of his eyes to the service
of the commonweal, he bates not a jot of heart or hope--
What supports me, dost thou ask?
The conscience, friend, to have lost them overplied
In Liberty's defence, my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side.
And while thus his fighting years are filled with the exaltation of
battle, as he plumes and lifts himself upon the cause that is going
forward, the story of his closing years has in it much of the pathos of a
lost cause. It was remarked by Johnson that there is in the _Paradise
Lost_ little opportunity for the pathetic; only one passage, indeed, is
allowed by him to be truly deserving of that name. But the description of
the remorse and reconcilement of Adam and Eve, which Johnson doubtless
intended, will not compare, for moving quality, with the matchless
invocation to the Seventh Book--
More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged
To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East. Still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.
Then the noise that he had heard, in imagination only, thirty years
earlier, assails his bodily ears; as evening sets in, the wonted roar is
up, not in the wild woods of fancy inhabited by the sensual magician and
his crew, but in the unlighted streets of Restoration London, as a chorus
of cup-shotten brawlers goes roaring by. The king is enjoying his own
again; and the poet, hunted and harassed in his last retreat, raises his
petition again to the Muse whom he had invoked at the beginning of his
task,--not Clio nor her sisters, but the spirit of heavenly power and
heavenly wisdom; his mind reverts to that story of Orpheus which had
always had so singular and personal a fascination for him; of Orpheus,
who, holding himself aloof from the mad amorists of Thrace, was by them
torn to pieces during the orgy of the Dionysia, and sent rolling down the
torrent of the Hebrus; and he prays to his goddess and guardian--
But drive far off the barbarous dissonance
Of Bacchus and his revellers, the race
Of that wild rout that tore the Thracian bard
In Rhodope, where woods and rocks had ears
To rapture, till the savage clamour drowned
Both harp and voice; nor could the Muse defend
Her son. So fail not thou, who thee implores;
For thou art heavenly, she an empty dream.
Disappointed of all his political hopes, living on neglected and poor for
fourteen years after the Restoration, and dying a private citizen,
passably obscure, Milton yet found and took a magnanimous revenge upon
his enemies. They had crippled only his left hand in silencing the
politician, but his right hand, which had hung useless by his side for so
many years while he served the State, was his own still, and wielded a
more Olympian weapon. In prose and politics he was a baffled man, but in
poetry and vision he found his triumph. His ideas, which had gone
a-begging among the politicians of his time, were stripped by him of the
rags of circumstance, and cleansed of its dust, to be enthroned where
they might secure a hearing for all time. The surprise that he prepared
for the courtiers of the Restoration world was like Samson's revenge, in
that it fell on them from above; and, as elsewhere in the poem of _Samson
Agonistes_, Milton was thinking not very remotely of his own case when he
wrote that jubilant semi-chorus, with the marvellous fugal succession of
figures, wherein Samson, and by inference Milton himself, is compared to
a smouldering fire revived, to a serpent attacking a hen-roost, to an
eagle swooping on his helpless prey, and last, his enemies now silent for
ever, to the phoenix, self-begotten and self-perpetuating. The Philistian
nobility (or the Restoration notables) are described, with huge scorn, as
ranged along the tiers of their theatre, like barnyard fowl blinking on
their perch, watching, not without a flutter of apprehension, the vain
attempts made on their safety by the reptile grovelling in the dust
below--
But he, though blind of sight,
Despised, and thought extinguished quite,
With inward eyes illuminated,
His fiery virtue roused
From under ashes into sudden flame,
And as an evening dragon came,
Assailant on the perched roosts
And nests in order ranged
Of tame villatic fowl, but as an eagle
His cloudless thunder bolted on their heads.
So Virtue, given for lost,
Depressed and overthrown, as seemed,
Like that self-begotten bird
In the Arabian woods embost,
That no second knows nor third,
And lay erewhile a holocaust,
From out her ashy womb now teemed,
Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most
When most unactive deemed;
And, though her body die, her fame survives.
A secular bird, ages of lives.