THE STYLE OF MILTON; AND ITS INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH POETRY
When Milton was born, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont, Dekker, Chapman,
Daniel, Drayton, and half a hundred other Elizabethan notables were yet
alive. When he died, Addison, Swift, Steele, and Arbuthnot were already
born. Thus his life bridges the gulf between the age of Elizabeth and the
age of Anne; and this further examination of his style has for object to
inquire what part he may claim in the change of temper, method, subject,
and form which came over English poetry during that period.
The answer usually given to this question is that he had no part at all.
He lived and died alone. He imitated no one, and founded no school. There
was none of his more distinguished contemporaries with whom he was on
terms of intimacy; none whose ideals in poetry remotely resembled his. So
that although he is to be ranged among the greatest of English poets, a
place in the legitimate hereditary succession would, on these
considerations, be denied to him. When Dryden succeeded to the
dictatorship of Jonson, the continuity of literary history was resumed.
The great processes of change which affected English letters during the
seventeenth century are in no way associated with the name of Milton.
Waller and Denham, Davenant and Dryden, "reformed" English verse; Hobbes,
Cowley, Tillotson, Dryden and Sprat remodelled English prose. And in the
meantime, if this account is to be accepted, while English verse and
English prose were in the melting-pot, this splendid efflorescence was an
accident, a by-product, without meaning or causal virtue in the chemical
process that was going forward.
Others will have it that Milton was a belated Elizabethan. But the
difficulty of that theory is that he reversed rather than continued many
of the practices of the Elizabethans, and introduced reforms of his own,
no less striking than the reforms effected by Dryden. Shirley is a good
example of a genuine late Elizabethan. But in Shirley's works there is
nothing that is not an echo. In Milton's, on the other hand, after the
volume of 1645, there is nothing that echoes any earlier English poet
even faintly. He renayed his ancestry; and, if he left no descendants, he
must needs be regarded as "a vast species alone."
The Elizabethans, including even the author of _Sejanus_ and the
translator of Homer, were Romantics. The terms Romantic and Classic are
perhaps something overworn; and, although they are useful to supply a
reason, it may well be doubted whether they ever helped any one to an
understanding. Yet here, if anywhere, they are in place; for Milton is,
by common consent, not only a Classic poet, but the greatest exemplar of
the style in the long bead-roll of English poets. The "Augustans" prided
themselves on their resemblance to the poets of the great age of Rome.
Was there nothing in common between them and Milton, and did they really
borrow nothing and learn nothing from him?
This much is agreed, that of all English styles Milton's is best entitled
to the name of Classic. In his poems may be found every device that
belongs to the Classic manner, as in Shakespeare's plays may be found
every device that belongs distinctively to the Romantic. Perhaps the two
manners are best compared by the juxtaposition of descriptive passages.
In description it is impossible for literature to be exhaustive; a choice
must be made, an aspect emphasised, and by far the greater part left to
the imagination of the reader. A man, for instance, has stature, feature,
bones, muscles, nerves, entrails; his eyes, hair, and skin are of certain
colours; he stands in a particular attitude at a particular spot on the
surface of the earth; he is agitated by certain passions and ideas; every
movement that he makes is related to his constitution and his past
history; he has affinity with other men by the ties of the family, the
society, the State; he thinks and acts more in a minute than a hundred
writers can describe and explain in a year; he is a laughing, weeping,
money-making, clothes-wearing, lying, reasoning, worshipping, amorous,
credulous, sceptical, imitative, combative, gregarious, prehensile,
two-legged animal. He does not cease to be all this and more, merely
because he happens to be at one of his thousand tricks, and you catch him
in the act. How do you propose to describe him?
Broadly speaking, there are two methods available. You may begin with the
more general and comprehensive of the relations that fall in with your
purpose, securing breadth of view and truth in the larger values, leaving
the imagination to supply the more particular and personal details on the
barest of hints from you: or you may fix your gaze exclusively on some
vivid cluster of details, indicating their remoter relations and their
place in a wider perspective by a few vague suggestions.
The first of these ways is Milton's. He maps out his descriptions in bold
outline, attending always to the unity of the picture and the truth of
the larger relations. He is chary of detail, and what he adds is added
for its own immediate importance rather than for its remoter power of
suggestion. Adam and Eve when they are first introduced, are thus
described:--
Two of far nobler shape, erect and tall,
Godlike erect, with native honour clad
In naked majesty, seemed lords of all,
And worthy seemed; for in their looks divine
The image of their glorious Maker shone,
Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure,--
Severe, but in true filial freedom placed,
Whence true authority in men.
As pictorial description this is all but completely empty. It tells you
only that they stood upright, that they were like their Maker, and that
they were possessed of the virtues that their appearance would lead you
to expect. Their physical delineation is to be accommodated by the
imagination of the reader to this long catalogue of moral
qualities,--nobility, honour, majesty, lordliness, worth, divinity,
glory, brightness, truth, wisdom, sanctitude, severity, and purity. In
the following lines the poet proceeds to distinguish the one figure from
the other, adding a few details with regard to each. The epithets he
chooses are still vague. Adam's forehead is "fair" and "large," his eye
is "sublime," his locks are "hyacinthine," and (a detail that has escaped
the notice of many illustrators of _Paradise Lost_) they fall in clusters
as low as his shoulders. From beginning to end of the description the aim
of the poet is to preserve the right key of large emotion, and the words
that he chooses are chosen chiefly for their emotional value. The
emotions are given; the portraiture is left to be filled in by the
imagination.
Shakespeare commonly works in the reverse way. He does not, like Crabbe,
describe "as if for the police"; he chooses his detail with consummate
skill, but he makes use of it to suggest the emotions. It is impossible
to set his description of persons over against Milton's; for the drama
does not describe persons, it presents them in action; and a description,
where it occurs, is often designed merely to throw light on the character
and feelings of the speaker. "Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low"
is a description rather of Lear, as he hangs over the dead body of
Cordelia, refusing to believe that she is dead, than of Cordelia herself.
"An excellent thing in woman" is not a doctrine, but a last heartbreaking
movement of defiance, as if to refute any stander-by who dares to think
that there is something amiss, that a voice should not be so low as to be
inaudible.
The contrast of the methods may, therefore, be better noted in the
description of scenes. There is no very close parallel obtainable; but
the two passages compared by Lessing are not wholly dissimilar in theme,
and serve well enough to illustrate the difference of the styles. The
first, taken from the Seventh Book of _Paradise Lost_, tells how the King
of Glory, from the verge of his heavenly domain, beholds the gulf of
Chaos:--
On Heavenly ground they stood, and from the shore
They viewed the vast immeasurable Abyss,
Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild,
Up from the bottom turned by furious winds
And surging waves, as mountains to assault
Heaven's highth, and with the centre mix the pole.
The other is the imaginary view from Dover Cliff, described by Edgar in
_King Lear_:--
How fearful
And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head;
The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge
That on th' unnumbered idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more;
Lest my brain turn and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.
Johnson objected to this description: "No, sir; it should be all
precipice,--all vacuum. The crows impede your fall. The diminished
appearance of the boats, and other circumstances, are all very good
description, but do not impress the mind at once with the horrible idea
of immense height. The impression is divided; you pass on, by
computation, from one stage of the tremendous space to another."
This criticism is, in effect, a plea for Milton's method, although by a
freak of fate it was uttered in vindication of Congreve. Some years
earlier, in his edition of Shakespeare, Johnson had remarked on the same
passage, and had indicated the poetic method that he approved: "He that
looks from a precipice finds himself assailed by one great and dreadful
image of irresistible destruction."
Johnson's critical opinions on poetry are deserving of the most careful
consideration, and, where they fail to convince, of an undiminished
respect. But not Johnson himself can raise a doubt as to which of the two
passages quoted above is the greater masterpiece of description proper.
Shakespeare sets a scene before your eyes, and by his happy choice of
vivid impression makes you giddy. The crows help, rather than impede your
fall; for to look into illimitable vacuum is to look at nothing, and
therefore to be unmoved. But the classic manner is so careful for unity
of emotional impression that it rejects these humble means for attaining
even to so great an end. It refuses to work by mice and beetles, lest the
sudden intrusion of trivial associations should mar the main impression.
No sharp discords are allowed, even though they should be resolved the
moment after. Every word and every image must help forward the main
purpose. Thus, while the besetting sin of the Romantics is the employment
of excessive, or irrelevant, or trivial or grotesque detail, the
besetting sin of the Classics is so complete an omission of realistic
detail that the description becomes inflated, windy and empty, and the
strongest words in the language lose their vital force because they are
set fluttering hither and thither in multitudes, with no substantial hold
upon reality. There is nothing that dies sooner than an emotion when it
is cut off from the stock on which it grows. The descriptive epithet or
adjective, if only it be sparingly and skilfully employed, so that the
substantive carry it easily, is the strongest word in a sentence. But
when once it loses its hold upon concrete reality it becomes the weakest,
and not all the protests of debility, superlative degrees, and rhetorical
insistence, can save it from neglect.
It is apparent, therefore, how necessary to Milton were the concrete epic
realities with which his poem deals,--the topographical scheme of things,
and the definite embodiment of all his spiritual essences. Keats'
_Hyperion_ fails largely for want of an exact physical system such as
Milton devises. Keats works almost wholly with vague Romantic suggestion,
and there is nothing for the poem to hang on by. Something is happening;
but it is difficult to say what, for we see only dream-imagery, and hear
only muffled echoes. Had Milton made unsparing use of abstraction and
suggestion, his poem would have fallen into windy chaos. The
"philosophical poems" of his age did so fall. Henry More's _Platonick
Song of the Soul_ (1642), wherein are treated the Life of the Soul, her
Immortality, the Sleep of the Soul, the Unity of Souls, and Memory after
Death, is a dust-storm of verbiage. Such words as "calefaction,"
"exility," "self-reduplication," "tricentreity," "individuation,"
"circumvolution," "presentifick circularity," struggle and sprawl within
the narrow room of the Spenserian stanza. Milton keeps us in better
company than this, even in Hell. He uses abstract terms magnificently,
but almost always with a reference to concrete realities, not as the
names of separate entities. By the substitution of abstract nouns for
concrete he achieves a wonderful effect of majesty. He does not name, for
instance, the particular form of wind instrument that the heralds blew in
Hell:--
Four speedy Cherubim
Put to their mouths the sounding alchymy.
He avoids defining his creatures by names that lend themselves to
definite picture: of Death he says--
So spake the grisly Terror;
and he makes Raphael, at the call of Heaven's king, rise
from among
Thousand celestial Ardours.
In the Tenth Book, Death, snuffing the distant scent of mortality,
becomes all nose--
So scented the grim Feature, and upturned
His nostril wide into the murky air.
A superb example of this powerful use of abstract terms is contained in
the First Book of _Paradise Regained_, where is described how Satan,
disguised as an old man, took his leave of the Son of God, and
Bowing low
His gray dissimulation, disappeared
Into thin air diffused.
The word "dissimulation" expresses the fact of the gray hairs assumed,
the purpose of deceit, the cringing attitude, and adds a vague effect of
power. The same vagueness is habitually studied by Milton in such phrases
as "the vast abrupt," "the palpable obscure," "the void immense," "the
wasteful deep," where, by the use of an adjective in place of a
substantive, the danger of a definite and inadequate conception is
avoided.
Milton, therefore, describes the concrete, the specific, the individual,
using general and abstract terms for the sake of the dignity and scope
that they lend. The best of our Romantic poets follow the opposite
course: they are much concerned with abstract conceptions and general
truths, but they bring them home by the employment of concrete and
specific terms, and figures so familiar that they cannot easily avoid
grotesque associations. These grotesque associations, however trivial,
are the delight of humour: Alexander's dust will stop a beer-barrel;
divine ambition exposes
what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell.
The comments made by Johnson on a certain well-known passage in _Macbeth_
are an excellent example of the objections urged against the Romantic
method--a method whereby, says Johnson, poetry is "debased by mean
expressions." He takes for text the invocation of Night by Lady Macbeth--
Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, "Hold, hold!"
Johnson's criticisms, which take up a whole paper in _The Rambler_, may
be conveniently stated in summary. The epithet _dun_, he says, is "an
epithet now seldom heard but in the stable, and _dun_ night may come and
go without any other notice but contempt." A _knife_, again, is "an
instrument used by butchers and cooks in the meanest employments; we do
not immediately conceive that any crime of importance is to be committed
with a _knife_." In the third place, although to wish to elude the eye of
Providence is "the utmost extravagance of determined wickedness," yet
even this great conception is debased by two unfortunate words when the
avengers of guilt are made to _peep_ through a _blanket_.
It is easy, in this case at least, to defend Shakespeare. There is no
need to make much of the fact that Johnson attributes the speech to
Macbeth. The essence of the crime is that it is the treacherous and
cowardly crime of an assassin, committed on a guest while he sleeps.
Implements of war are out of place here; it is the very crime for a
knife, and Lady Macbeth shows her sense of this when she uses the word.
Again, the darkness that she invokes is not the solemn shadow of night,
but the stifling, opaque smoke of Hell. The blanket was perhaps suggested
to Shakespeare by the black canopy that hung over the Elizabethan stage
to represent night; but, in any case, it gives the notion of an
artificial privacy, shutting out light and shutting in sound, a smothered
unnatural secrecy. The use of the word _blanket_, in fact, carries with
it a new fantastic horror. Night herself, who has brought the fatal gift
of sleep to Duncan, is represented as the cowardly accomplice of the
murderers, performing the most dastardly office that can fall to the
hireling of a bravo.
The mean associations, therefore, in so far as they exist, help
Shakespeare's purpose. Milton had no purpose that could be furthered by
such help. The omissions in his descriptions cannot be supplied by an
appeal to experience, for what he describes is outside the pale of human
experience, and is, in that sense, unreal. His descriptions do not so
much remind us of what we have seen as create for us what we are to see.
He is bound, therefore, to avoid the slightest touch of unworthy
association; the use of even a few domestic figures and homely phrases
would bring his hanging palace about his ears. What dangers he escaped
may be well seen in Cowley's _Davideis_, which fell into them all. This
is how Cowley describes the attiring of his Gabriel, who is commissioned
to bear a message to David--
He took for skin a cloud most soft and bright,
That e'er the midday Sun pierced through with light:
Upon his cheeks a lively blush he spred;
Washt from the morning beauties deepest red.
An harmless flaming _Meteor_ shone for haire,
And fell adown his shoulders with loose care.
He cuts out a silk _Mantle_ from the skies,
Where the most sprightly azure pleas'd the eyes.
This he with starry vapours spangles all,
Took in their prime ere they grow _ripe_ and _fall_,--
--and so on. The whole business suggests the arming of Pigwiggin; or the
intricacies of Belinda's toilet in _The Rape of the Lock_. Such a Gabriel
should add the last touch of adornment from a patch-box filled with
sun-spots; and then is fit only to be--
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep.
Milton was not in the least likely to fall into this fantastic-familiar
vein. But he was also debarred from dealing freely in realism; from
carrying conviction by some sudden startling piece of fidelity to the
mixed texture of human experience and human feeling. When the feast is
spread in Eden he remarks, it is true,--"No fear lest dinner cool"; but a
lapse like this is of the rarest. His success--and he knew it--depended
on the untiring maintenance of a superhuman elevation. His choice of
subject had therefore not a little to do with the nature of his diction;
and, through the influence of his diction, as shall be shown hereafter,
with the establishment of the poetic tradition that dominated Eighteenth
Century poetry.
The same motives and tendencies, the same consistent care for remoteness
and loftiness, may be seen in the character of the similes that he most
frequently employs. Almost all his figures and comparisons illustrate
concrete objects by concrete objects, and occurrences in time by other
occurrences later in time. The essentially Romantic sort of figure,
scarcely used by Milton, illustrates subtle conceptual relations by
parable--
Now at the last gasp of Love's latest breath,
When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
And Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,--
Now, if thou would'st, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou might'st him yet recover.
Sometimes, by a curious reversal, poets, especially the more
sophisticated poets of the Romantic Revival, describe a perfectly
definite outward object or scene by a figure drawn from the most complex
abstract conceptions. So Shelley, with whom these inverted figures are
habitual, compares the skylark to
A poet hidden
In the light of thought;
and Byron, describing the rainbow over a waterfall, likens it to
Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.
Both ways are foreign to the epic manner of Milton. His figures may be
called historic parallels, whereby the names and incidents of human
history are made to elucidate and ennoble the less familiar names and
incidents of his prehistoric theme. Sometimes, following Homer, he
borrows a figure from rustic life, as where, for instance, he compares
the devils, crowding into Pandemonium, to a swarm of bees. But he
perceived clearly enough that he could not, for the reasons already
explained, afford to deal largely in this class of figure: he prefers to
maintain dignity and distance by choosing comparisons from ancient
history and mythology, or from those great and strange things in Nature
which repel intimacy--the sun, the moon, the sea, planets in opposition,
a shooting star, an evening mist, a will-o'-the-wisp, a vulture
descending from the Himalayas, the ice-floes on the North-East passage,
the sea-beast leviathan, Xerxes' Hellespontic bridge, the gryphon
pursuing the Arimaspian, the madness of Alcides in Oeta, the rape of
Proserpine, and a hundred more reminiscences of the ancient world.
Even the great events of ancient history seemed to him at times too
familiar, too little elevated and remote to furnish a resting-place for a
song that intended "no middle flight." He transforms his proper names,
both to make them more melodious, and to make them more unfamiliar to the
ear. No praise is too high for his art and skill in this matter. An
example may be found in those four lines--the earliest that have the full
Miltonic resonance--describing the fate of Lycidas, carried by the tide
southward to the Cornish coast:--
Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied,
Sleep'st by the fable of Bellerus old,
Where the great Vision of the guarded mount
Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's hold.
"Bellerus" seems to be a name of Milton's coinage. He had written
"Corineus," and probably disliked the sound, for in this case it can
hardly have been that the name was too familiar. Both reasons concurred
in prompting the allusion to Pharaoh and his Egyptian squadrons as--
Busiris and his Memphian chivalry.
One would think "Italy" a pleasant enough sound, and "Vulcan" a good
enough name for poetry. Neither was musical enough for Milton; both
perhaps had associations too numerous, familiar, and misleading. Vulcan
is mentioned, by that name, in _Comus_; but in _Paradise Lost_, where the
story of his fall from Heaven is told, and the architect of Pandemonium
is identified with him, both names, "Italy" and "Vulcan," are heightened
and improved:--
In Ausonian land
Men called him Mulciber.
"Hephaistos," the name dear to moderns, could have found no place in
Milton's works, unless it had been put in a description of the God's
smithy, or, perhaps, in the sonnet where are pilloried those
harsh-sounding Presbyterian names:--
Collkitto, or Macdonnel, or Galasp.
Milton's use of proper names is a measure of his poetic genius. He does
not forego it even in the lyric. Was there ever so learned a lyric as
that beginning "Sabrina fair"--with its rich stores of marine mythology?
History, not philosophy, was the source that he drew on for his
splendours; and history, according to Milton, had, since the Fall of Man,
furnished nothing but fainter and weaker repetitions of those stupendous
events which filled the early theatre of universal space.
His epic catalogues, which are few in number, show the same predominant
interest in history and geography. The story of the Creation gave him an
excellent opportunity of enumerating the kinds and properties of birds,
beasts, fishes, and reptiles, plants and trees, after the manner of
Chaucer and Spenser. This opportunity he refuses, or, at any rate, turns
to but small account. His general descriptions are highly picturesque,
but he spends little time on enumeration and detail. Of vegetables, only
the vine, the gourd, and the corn are mentioned by name; of the
inhabitants of the sea only the seal, the dolphin, and the whale. Natural
knowledge, although he made a fair place for it in his scheme of
education, was not one of his dearer studies. It was enough for him, as
for Raphael, that Adam knew the natures of the beasts, and gave them
appropriate names. The mere mention, on the other hand, of historic and
geographic names rouses all the poet in him. The splendid roll-call of
the devils, in the First Book of _Paradise Lost_, and the only less
splendid enumeration, in the Eleventh Book, of the Kingdoms of the Earth,
shown to Adam in vision, are a standing testimony to his powers. Compared
with these, the list of human diseases and maladies in the Eleventh Book,
suggested perhaps by Du Bartas, is rehearsed in a slighter and more
perfunctory fashion.
One last point in Milton's treatment must not be left unnoticed. Much
adverse criticism has been spent on his allegorical figures of Sin and
Death. There is good classical precedent for the introduction of such
personified abstractions among the actors of a drama; and, seeing that
the introduction of sin and death into the world was the chief effect of
his main action, Milton no doubt felt that this too must be handled in
right epic fashion, and must not be left to be added to the theme as a
kind of embroidery of moral philosophy. In no other way could he have
treated the topic half so effectively. There is enough of his philosophy
in Milton's Heaven to damp our desire for more of it on his Earth or in
his Hell. And when once we have given him license to deal only in
persons, we are amply rewarded. His management of the poetic figure of
personification is superb. It is a figure difficult to handle, and
generally fails of effect through falling into one of two extremes.
Either the quality, or the person, is forgotten. The figures in the
_Romaunt of the Rose_ are good examples of the one type, of the minute
materialistic personifications of the Middle Ages, pictorial rather than
literary in essence, like the illuminated figures in a psalter. The
feeble abstractions that people Gray's Odes, where, as Coleridge
remarked, the personification depends wholly on the use of an initial
capital, are examples of the other. Neither has the art of combining the
vastness and vagueness of the abstract with the precise and definite
conception of a person, as is done in the great figure of Religion drawn
by Lucretius, as is done also in those other figures--the only creations
of English poetry which approach the Latin in grandeur--the horrible
phantoms of Sin and Death.
These, then, here outlined slightly and imperfectly, are some of the most
noteworthy features of Milton's style. By the measured roll of his verse,
and the artful distribution of stress and pause to avoid monotony and to
lift the successive lines in a climax; by the deliberate and choice
character of his diction, and his wealth of vaguely emotional epithets;
by the intuition which taught him to use no figures that do not heighten
the majesty, and no names that do not help the music of his poem; by the
vivid outlines of the concrete imaginations that he imposes on us for
real, and the cloudy brilliance that he weaves for them out of all great
historical memories, and all far-reaching abstract conceptions, he
attained to a finished style of perhaps a more consistent and unflagging
elevation than is to be found elsewhere in literature. There is nothing
to put beside him. "His natural port," says Johnson, "is gigantick
loftiness." And Landor: "After I have been reading the _Paradise Lost_, I
can take up no other poet with satisfaction. I seem to have left the
music of Handel for the music of the streets, or, at best, for drums and
fifes." The secret of the style is lost; and no poet, since Milton's day,
has recaptured the solemnity and beauty of the large utterance of
Gabriel, or Belial, or Satan.
The success of _Paradise Lost_, when it was published in 1667, was
immediate and startling. Some of the poet's biographers have shed tears
over the ten pounds that was all Milton ever received for his greatest
work; others, magnanimously renouncing the world on his behalf, have
rejoiced in the smallness of the sum paid him for a priceless work.
Lament and heroics are both out of place. London was a small town, and it
may well be doubted whether any modern provincial town of the same size
would buy up in eighteen months thirteen hundred copies of a poem so
serious and difficult and novel as _Paradise Lost_. Moreover, before the
close of the century, six editions had appeared, three of them in folio,
and so--judged by the number of editions--Milton's epic had outrun
Shakespeare's plays in popularity. The folio edition of 1695, with notes
and elucidations by one Patrick Hume, a Scottish scholar, appeared
fourteen years before Nicholas Rowe produced the first critical edition
of Shakespeare. The literary world quickly came to the opinion expressed
by Dryden in the year of Milton's death, that the _Paradise Lost_ was
"one of the greatest, most noble, and most sublime poems which either
this age or nation has produced." Barely twenty years later the editors
of the _Athenian Mercury_ were asked to determine "Whether Milton and
Waller were not the best English Poets; and which the better of the two?"
Their verdict, reflecting, no doubt, the average opinion of the time, ran
thus: "They were both excellent in their kind, and exceeded each other,
and all besides. Milton was the fullest and loftiest; Waller the neatest
and most correct poet we ever had." Long before Addison wrote the papers
on _Paradise Lost_ in the _Spectator_, Milton had received full
recognition in the literary handbooks of that age. Langbaine, in his
_Account of the English Dramatick Poets_ (1691), takes notice of Dryden's
debts to _Samson Agonistes_, and, with an effort to be just, remarks of
Milton:--" Had his Principles been as good as his Parts, he had been an
Excellent Person." Sir Thomas Pope Blount, in his _De Re Poetica_ (1694),
and Bysshe in his _Art of English Poetry_ (1702), bear witness, in their
several ways, to Milton's great and assured fame. Indeed, Thomas Rymer,
of Gray's Inn, Esquire, who in 1677 had sneered at "that Paradise Lost of
Milton's which some are pleased to call a Poem," and William Winstanley,
who, in the _Lives of the Most Famous English Poets_ (1687), had remarked
of Milton that "his Fame is gone out like a Candle in a Snuff, and his
Memory will always stink," were almost alone among the voices of their
time. They were still under the influence of the old political prejudice,
but they did battle for a doomed opinion, and, among judges not
illiterate, they are the poet's last detractors.
The singular thing to note is that the eighteenth century, which broke
with almost every other seventeenth-century poet before Dryden, did not
break with Milton. "Who now reads Cowley?" Pope asked: Cowley, whose works
ran through so many editions that no modern reprint has been called for.
If he had asked, "Who now reads Milton?" the answer must have been,
"Every writer of English verse"; and so it has continued from the time of
Milton's death to the present day. The choice of blank verse for
_Paradise Lost_ established that metre in formidable rivalry to the
heroic couplet, so that it became the usual metre for long poems of a
reflective or descriptive cast. Professed imitations of Milton's verse
were many; among them, Addison's _Translation of a Story out of the Third
Aeneid_, Broome's experiment in the translation of the Eleventh Odyssey,
Fenton's fragments of two books of the _Iliad_, and Christopher Pitt's
paraphrase of Psalm cxxxix. In the first year of the eighteenth century
John Philips showed, in his _Splendid Shilling_, how the style of Milton
might be applied, for the purposes of burlesque, to humble subjects, a
lesson which he further illustrated, with no ostensible comic intent, in
his later poems, _Cyder_ and _Blenheim_. Gay, in _Wine, a Poem_,
Somerville in _The Chase_, Armstrong in _The Oeconomy of Love_ and _The
Art of Preserving Health_, Christopher Smart in The Hop-Garden, Dyer in
_The Fleece_, and Grainger in _The Sugar-Cane_, all followed where
Philips' _Cyder_ had led, and multiplied year by year what may be called
the technical and industrial applications of Milton's style. Among the
many other blank verse poems produced during the middle part of the
century it is enough to name Thomson's _Seasons_; Blair's _Grave_;
Glover's _Leonidas_; Shenstone's _Economy_, _The Ruined Abbey_, and _Love
and Honour_; Young's _Night Thoughts_; Akenside's _Pleasures of the
Imagination_; Thomas Warton's _Pleasures of Melancholy_; Mallet's _The
Excursion_, and _Amyntor and Theodora_; Cooper's _The Power of Harmony_;
and Lyttelton's _Blenheim_. The influence of Milton is not equally
apparent in all of these, but in none is it wholly wanting; in most it is
visible on every page. The mere invocation often tells a tale. Thus
Akenside:--
Thou chief, Poetic Spirit, from the banks
Of Avon, whence thy holy fingers cull
Fresh flowers and dews to sprinkle on the turf
Where Shakespeare lies, be present. And with thee
Let Fiction come; on her aerial wings
Wafting ten thousand colours.
The quotation need not be prolonged; even while he commemorates
Shakespeare, Akenside goes to Milton for his material, and plays a feeble
variation on the Miltonic phrase:--
In his right hand
Grasping ten thousand thunders.
Thus Lyttelton:--
Minerva, thee to my adventurous lyre
Assistant I invoke, that means to sing
Blenheim, proud monument of British fame
Thy glorious work!
"The building, not the field, I sing," he might have added, for Philips
had already chanted the battle of Blenheim in like Miltonic fashion.
Thus, again, the worthy Grainger, flattest of agricultural bards:--
Spirit of Inspiration, that did'st lead
Th' Ascrean poet to the sacred mount,
And taught'st him all the precepts of the swain;
Descend from Heaven, and guide my trembling steps
To Fame's eternal dome, where Maro reigns;
Where pastoral Dyer, where Pomona's bard,
And Smart and Somervile in varying strains,
Their sylvan lore convey: O may I join
This choral band, and from their precepts learn
To deck my theme, which though to song unknown,
Is most momentous to my country's weal!
Grainger frequently echoes Milton; and in the passage where he addresses
the Avon, at Bristol, he pays a more explicit tribute:--
Though not to you, young Shakespeare, Fancy's child,
All-rudely warbled his first woodland notes;
* * * * *
On you reclined, another tuned his pipe,
Whom all the Muses emulously love,
And in whose strains your praises shall endure
While to Sabrina speeds your healing stream.
Better and more striking instances of the Miltonic spell laid on blank
verse are easily to be found for the seeking. But since it is the
omnipresence of this Miltonic influence that is asserted, passages like
these, which catch the eye on any chance page of eighteenth-century blank
verse, and are representative of hundreds more, suffice for the purpose.
There has been a tendency among recent historians of English literature
to group together the poets who, like Dyer in _Grongar Hill_, and Thomas
Warton in _The Pleasures of Melancholy_, echo the strains of Milton's
early poems, and to name them "Miltonics," precursors of the Romantic
Revival. No doubt there is a marked difference between Milton's earlier
manner and his later; not a few of his lovers, if they were forced to
choose, would readily give up the three major poems to save the five best
of the minor. But it is going far to appropriate the name of "Miltonic"
to imitators of the earlier poems. Perhaps the study of _L'Allegro_ and
_Il Penseroso_ and _Comus_ helped forward the Romantic Revival; but the
chief influence of Milton on the development of English poetry was not
this. It was natural enough that those who had been taught from childhood
to read and admire _Paradise Lost_ should find relief and novelty in the
freer and more spontaneous music of these youthful poems. But the truth
is that before ever he abetted the escape, he helped to forge the
fetters; that Milton, as much as any other single writer, was responsible
for the wide and potent sway of the classical convention.
Above all, he may fairly be called the inventor and, by the irony of
fate, the promulgator of that "poetic diction" which, in the time of its
deformity and decay, Wordsworth sought to destroy. Johnson attributes the
invention to Dryden. "There was therefore," he says, "before the time of
Dryden no poetical diction, no system of words, at once refined from the
grossness of domestick use, and free from the harshness of terms
appropriated to particular arts. Words too familiar or too remote defeat
the purpose of a poet."
There is no need to quarrel with this account, if we are careful to
understand exactly what Johnson means. Dryden, he says in effect, wrote
plain, well-bred English; he eschewed technical terms, shunned the florid
licenses of the Elizabethans, and yet, in his more studied verse, never
dropped into the town-gallant vein of some of his contemporaries, the
slang of Butler or Lestrange. Johnson, it should be remembered, thought
the diction of _Lycidas_ "harsh," and it is plain enough from many of his
utterances that he ranged Milton with the poets who use words and phrases
"too remote" from the language of natural intercourse. He was a devoted
adherent of the school of Dryden and Pope; in the _Lives of the Poets_ he
loses no opportunity of expressing his contempt for blank verse; he was
only too likely to exalt the influence of his masters on the poets of his
own time, and to ignore the influence of Milton. Since handbooks of
literature are commonly formed by a process of attrition from such works
as Johnson's _Lives_, his opinions on a point like this persist in
epidemic fashion; they are detached from their authority, and repeated so
often that at last they become orthodox. But no ignoring of Milton can
alter the fact that English verse went Milton-mad during the earlier half
of the eighteenth century. Miltonic cadences became a kind of patter, and
the diction that Milton had invented for the rendering of his colossal
imaginations was applied indifferently to all subjects--to apple-growing,
sugar-boiling, the drainage of the Bedford level, the breeding of
negroes, and the distempers of sheep. Milton's shadowy grandeur, his
avoidance of plain concrete terms, his manner of linking adjective with
substantive, were all necessary to him for the describing of his strange
world; but these habits became a mere vicious trick of absurd periphrasis
and purposeless vagueness when they were carried by his imitators into
the description of common and familiar objects. A reader making his first
acquaintance with Thomson's _Seasons_ might suppose that the poem was
written for a wager, to prove that country life may be described, and
nothing called by its name. The philosophic pride of the eighteenth
century was tickled by the use of general terms in description; the
chosen periphrases are always more comprehensive than the names that they
replace. When Thomson, for instance, speaks of "the feathered nations" or
of "the glossy kind," it is only by the context that we are saved from
supposing him to allude, in the one case to Red Indians, in the other to
moles. And these are but two of some dozen devices for escaping from the
flat vulgarity of calling birds by that name.
Milton himself, it must be admitted, is not wholly free from blame. The
elevation and vagueness of his diction, which were a mere necessity to
him in the treatment of large parts of his subject, are yet maintained by
him in the description of things comparatively familiar. When Sin is
described as "rolling her bestial train" towards the gates of Hell, the
diction is faultless; when the serpent (as yet an innocent reptile in
Paradise),
Insinuating, wove with Gordian twine
His braided train,
it is impossible to cavil; but when Raphael, in conversation with Adam,
describes the formation of the banks--
where rivers now
Stream, and perpetual draw their humid train,
criticism is less at ease. We feel that we are drawing near to the
"poetic diction" of the eighteenth century. Eve's tears are called
precious drops that ready stood
Each in their crystal sluice,
but the description is saved by the lines that immediately precede, where
Milton says the word, and thereby shows that he is not seeking idle
periphrasis:--
But silently a gentle tear let fall
From either eye, and wiped them with her hair.
His constant preference for words of Latin origin certainly brings Milton
near at times to the poetic diction banned by Wordsworth. "Vernal bloom"
for "spring flowers," "humid bow" for "rainbow," the description of the
brooks rolling--
With mazy error under pendent shades,
the use of phrases like "nitrous powder" or "smutty grain" for
"gunpowder," and "optic glass" or "optic tube" for the telescope or
"perspective," are instances of the approximation. A certain number of
these circuitous phrases are justified by considerations of dramatic
propriety. When Raphael describes the artillery used in Heaven, he speaks
of cannon balls as "iron globes" and "balls of missive ruin," and calls
the linstock the "incentive reed pernicious," thereby perhaps drawing
attention to the strange character of the new invention. No such reason
can be invoked for his justification when he tells how the sun receives
from earth
his alimental recompense
In humid exhalations;
still less when, speaking of food, with which he confesses himself to be
familiar, he calls it "corporal nutriment."
But the chief sinner is Adam. If the evil passions of the rebel Angels
invented the pun, it was the pomposity of our father Adam that first
brought "poetic diction" into vogue. When the curse has fallen in Eden he
makes a long speech for the comfort of Eve, in the course of which he
alludes to "the graceful locks of these fair spreading trees," speaks of
the sun as "this diurnal star," and, studying protection against the
newly experienced cold, advises--
how we his gathered beams
Reflected may with matter sere foment,
Or by collision of two bodies grind
The air attrite to fire;
--for all the world as if he were a man of science lecturing to some
Philosophic Institute on the customs of savages.
If, then, the term "poetic diction" is to be used as Wordsworth used it,
Johnson's account of its origin must be amended. There was little or no
poetic diction, of the kind condemned by Wordsworth, before the time of
Milton. In the Elizabethan age all diction was free to poetry, and was
freely used. Drawing on his accumulated stores of literary reminiscence,
and using them for his own special purpose, Milton invented "poetic
diction," and bore a main part in the founding of the English school of
poetry which is called "Classical." His diction is called "poetic,"
because it was absolutely fitted to his purpose, which could have been
conceived only by the loftiest poetic genius. His style was admired,
misunderstood, and imitated for a century. The diction of his imitators
is called "poetic," because, for the most part, they believed that dull
nonsense and trading platitudes could be made into poetry by a borrowed
system of diction.
Even the best poets of the age are not freer than the rest from the
baneful Miltonic infection. Coleridge found the source of "our
pseudo-poetic diction" in Pope's _Homer_. But Pope was from boyhood a
sedulous student of Milton, and a frequent borrower. The mock-heroics of
the _Dunciad_ are stilted on Miltonic phrases; and in the translation of
Homer, above all, reminiscences of Milton abound. In most of them
Milton's phraseology is weakened and misapplied. Two instances among many
may serve. When Vulcan, in the First Iliad, warns Juno against rousing
the anger of Jove, he adds:--
Once in your cause I felt his matchless might,
Hurled headlong downward from th' ethereal height.
The word "flaming" in Milton's splendid line did not suit Pope's
purpose--so it disappears, and with it half the glory of the original. In
place of it, to eke out the syllables, he inserts the idle, if not
foolish, substitute "downward." This is the art of sinking in poetry.
Again, Ulysses, narrating his adventures, in the Ninth Odyssey,
remarks:--
In vain Calypso long constrained my stay,
With sweet, reluctant, amorous delay.
The whole line, so beautiful when it describes the modesty of Eve, in its
new context becomes stark nonsense. It is Ulysses who is "reluctant," and
Calypso who is "amorous." The misuse of Milton's line makes the situation
comic.
James Thomson (to take another example) with a genuine thin vein of
originality, too often conceals it under Miltonic lendings. The trail of
_Paradise Lost_ runs all through _The Seasons_. In such a description as
this of the Moon in Autumn there is a cluster of reminiscences:--
Meanwhile the Moon
Full-orbed and breaking through the scattered clouds,
Shows her broad visage in the crimsoned east.
Turned to the Sun direct, her spotted disk,
Where mountains rise, umbrageous dales descend,
And caverns deep, as optic tube descries,
A smaller Earth, gives all his blaze again,
Void of its flame, and sheds a softer day.
Thomson could not resist the attractions of Milton's stately Latin
vocabulary. Where Milton describes how, in Paradise--
the flowery lap
Of some irriguous valley spread her store;
Thomson follows with--
See where the winding vale its lavish stores
Irriguous spreads.
Where Milton describes how Satan, wounded by Michael--
writhed him to and fro convolved,
Thomson follows with a description of the Spring meadows, where
the sportive lambs
This way and that convolved, in friskful glee
Their frolics play.
The lambs emulating Satan are a kind of epitome and emblem of those
descriptive poets of the eighteenth century who took Milton for their
model.
But perhaps the best example of all is Gray, whose work is full of
Miltonic reminiscence. He frequently borrows; and, like Pope, almost
always spoils in the borrowing. Thus what Milton writes of the
nightingale--
She all night long her amorous descant sung,--
is echoed by Gray in the _Sonnet on the Death of Richard West_:--
The birds in vain their amorous descant join.
Now a "descant" is a variation imposed upon a plain-song. The word
exactly describes the song of the nightingale; but the addition of the
verb "join" robs it of all meaning. Again, the passage in the Second Book
of _Paradise Lost_ where Moloch describes the pains of Hell--
when the scourge
Inexorably, and the torturing hour
Calls us to penance,--
lingered in Gray's memory when he addressed Adversity--
Whose iron scourge and torturing hour
The bad affright, afflict the best.
The "torturing hour" in Gray's line becomes one of the chance possessions
of Adversity, suspended from her belt with the rest of her trinkets.
Observe how the word "hour" has been emptied of its meaning. It affrights
one class of persons, and afflicts another, which anything that is
"torturing" might easily do. In Milton the most awful property of Time is
indicated; the hour "calls--inexorably." Here, then, in two cases, is
plagiarism, which may be defined as unblest theft--the theft of what you
do not want, and cannot use.
In these and many other passages of eighteenth-century verse it may be
seen how literary reminiscence sometimes strangles poetry; and how a
great man suffers at the hands of his disciples and admirers. The thing
has happened so often that it ceases to cause surprise; were not Lydgate
and Occleve pupils (save the mark!) of Chaucer? And yet it remains a
paradox that Milton's, of all styles in the world, unapproachable in its
loftiness, invented by a temper of the most burning zeal and the
profoundest gravity for the treatment of a subject wildly intractable by
ordinary methods, should have been chosen by a generation of
philosophical organ-grinders as the fittest pattern for their
professional melodies; and that a system of diction employed by a blind
man for the description of an imaginary world should have been borrowed
by landscape-gardeners and travelling pedlars for the setting forth of
their works and their wares.
EPILOGUE
In the meantime, while Dryden and Milton both had their schools, most of
our seventeenth-century poetry fell into an almost complete oblivion.
Dryden's satiric, and Milton's epic strains engrossed attention, and
shaped the verses of an age. But the seventeenth century was
extraordinarily wealthy in poetic kinds quite distinct from these: in
metaphysic, and mysticism, in devotional ecstasy, and love-lyric, and
romance. The English genius in poetry is essentially metaphysical and
romantic. Milton was neither. He could not have excelled in any of these
kinds; nor have come near to Suckling, or Crashaw, or Vaughan, or
Herrick, or Marvell, in their proper realms. It is a permissible
indulgence, therefore, in taking leave of Milton, to turn from the
_Paradise Lost_ for a moment, and, escaping from the solid materialism of
the heroic and epic strain, to find passion once more among the Court
lyrists, and spiritual insight among the retired mystics, to find
Religion and Love, and the humility that has access to both. A profound
humility, impossible to Milton, inspired Vaughan when he wrote such a
verse as this:--
There is in God, some say,
A deep but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
O for that night! where I in him
Might live invisible and dim!
There is a natural vision, and there is a spiritual vision; the spiritual
belongs to Vaughan, not to Milton. If Milton persuades us to a willing
suspension of disbelief for the moment, Vaughan thrills us with a sense
of vivid reality. His _Ascension Day_ is a thing seen, as if it were a
memory of yesterday:--
The day-star smiles, and light, with thee deceast,
Now shines in all the chambers of the East.
What stirs, what posting intercourse and mirth
Of Saints and Angels glorifie the earth!
What sighs, what whispers, busie stops and stays;
Private and holy talk fill all the ways!
They pass as at the last great day, and run
In their white robes to seek the risen Sun;
I see them, hear them, mark their haste, and move
Amongst them, with them, wing'd with faith and love.
To the intensity of his aspiration and hushed expectance the world seems
only a turbulent passing pageant, or a hard wayfaring, suffered in a
dream:--
Who stays
Here long must passe
O'er dark hills, swift streames, and steep ways
As smooth as glasse.
Or a brief sickness:--
So for this night I linger here,
And, full of tossings to and fro,
Expect still when thou wilt appear,
That I may get me up and go.
His eyes are fixed on the shining lights that beckon him; the world is
full of voices, but its sights and sounds appeal to him in vain; the
beauties that surround him are things of naught--
Glorious deceptions, gilded mists,
False joyes, phantastick flights.
In the distance before him there shines
An air of glory
Whose light doth trample on my days;
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Meer glimmering and decays;
and he lifts up his voice in passionate desire for the ultimate
deliverance:--
Ah! what time will it come? When shall that crie
_The Bridegroome's comming_! fill the sky?
Shall it in the evening run,
When our words and works are done?
Or will thy all-surprising light
Break at midnight?
He broods over it till nothing else is present to him in the
night-watches:--
I saw Eternity the other night
Like a great ring of calm and endless light.
The history of the struggles and corruption of mankind may close at any
moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at a signal given:--
All's in deep sleep and night; thick darkness lyes
And hatcheth o'er thy people--
But hark! what trumpet's that, what angel cries
_Arise! Thrust in thy sickle!_
Here is a religious poet indeed, a visionary, a mystic, and a Christian;
none of which names can be truly applied to Milton. And if we wish to
find Love enjoying his just supremacy in poetry, we cannot do better than
seek him among the lyrists of the Court of Charles II. Milton,
self-sufficient and censorious, denies the name of love to these songs of
the sons of Belial. Love, he says, reigns and revels in Eden, not
in court amours,
Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenate, which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.
Yet for the quick and fresh spirit of love in the poetry of that time we
must go to the sons of Belial. There is a pathetic passage in one of
Milton's divorce pamphlets, where, speaking of the unhappy choices in
marriage to which "soberest and best governed men" are liable, he
remarks:--"It is not strange though many, who have spent their youth
chastely, are in some things not so quick-sighted while they haste too
eagerly to light the nuptial torch; nor is it therefore that for a modest
error a man should forfeit so great a happiness, and no charitable means
to release him, since they who have lived most loosely, by reason of
their bold accustoming, prove most successful in their matches, because
their wild affections, unsettling at will, have been as so many divorces
to teach them experience."
The wild affections, unsettling at will, wrote better love-songs than the
steadfast principles of the sober and well-governed. Roystering
libertines like Sir Charles Sedley were more edifying lovers than the
austere husbands of Mary Powell and of Eve. Milton would have despised
and detested the pleasure-seeking philosophy of Sedley:--
Let us then ply those joys we have,
'Tis vain to think beyond the grave;
Out of our reach the Gods have laid
Of Time to come th' event,
And laugh to see the Fools afraid
Of what the Knaves invent.
But the self-abandonment and the passion of two or three of Sedley's
songs are out of Milton's reach:--
Not _Celia_ that I juster am,
Or better than the rest,
For I would change each hour like them,
Were not my heart at rest.
But I am ty'd to very thee
By every thought I have,
Thy face I only care to see,
Thy heart I only crave.
All that in woman is ador'd
In thy dear self I find,
For the whole sex can but afford
The handsome and the kind.
Why should I then seek further store,
And still make love anew;
When change itself can give no more,
'Tis easie to be true.
It is like a cup of cold water after the didactic endearments of Adam,
and his repeated apostrophe:
Daughter of God and Man, immortal Eve--
For such thou art, from sin and blame entire.
Then there was John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. He was drunk for five
years on end,--so his biographer, who had it from his own lips,
alleges--and he died at the age of thirty-two. Like Sedley, he professes
no virtues, and holds no far-reaching views. But what a delicate turn of
personal affection he gives to the expression of his careless creed:--
The time that is to come is not,
How can it then be mine?
The present moment's all my lot,
And that, as fast as it is got,
Phyllis, is only thine.
Then talk not of inconstancy,
False hearts, and broken vows
If I by miracle can be
This live-long minute true to thee,
'Tis all that Heaven allows.
Rochester's best love-poetry reaches the topmost pinnacle of achievement
in that kind. None has ever been written more movingly beautiful than
this:--
When, wearied with a world of woe,
To thy safe bosom I retire,
Where love and peace and truth does flow,
May I contented there expire!
Lest, once more wandering from that heaven,
I fall on some base heart unblest--
Faithless to thee, false, unforgiven--
And lose my everlasting rest!
Or than that other piece (too beautiful and too intense to be cited as a
sudden illustration of a thesis) beginning--
Why dost thou shade thy lovely face? O why
Does that eclipsing hand of thine deny
The sunshine of the Sun's enlivening eye?
The wind bloweth where it listeth; the wandering fire of song touches the
hearts and lips of whom it will. Milton built an altar in the name of the
Lord, and he made a great trench about the altar, and he put the wood in
order, and loaded the altar with rich exotic offerings, cassia and nard,
odorous gums and balm, and fruit burnished with golden rind. But the fire
from Heaven descended on the hastily piled altars of the sons of Belial,
and left Milton's gorgeous altar cold.
His fame is now old-established and settled, so there is no place left
for the eloquence of the memorialist, or the studied praises of the
pleader. I have tried to understand Milton; and have already praised him
as well as I know how, with no stinted admiration, I trust, and certainly
with no merely superstitious reverence. If I must round my discourse by
repeating something that I have already said or suggested, it shall be
this--that as he stands far aloof from his contemporaries, so in the
succession of great figures that mark for us the centuries of our
literature he is seen once more singular and a stranger. We bred
Shakespeare in our Midlands; he was nourished from the soil that still
grows our daily bread. But Milton was an alien conqueror. The crowd of
native-born Puritans, who sometimes (not without many searchings of heart
and sharp misgivings) attempt to claim him for their leader, have no
title in him. It is a proof of his dominating power, and no credit to
their intelligence, that they accept him as their representative. His
influence on the destinies and history of our literature might be
compared to the achievement of Napoleon while he was winning the
victories that changed the map of Europe. He could not change the
character of a people, nor perpetuate his dynasty. But nothing is as it
would have been without him. Our literature is as hospitable as the
Hindoo pantheon; the great revolutionary has won a place even in our
creed. And the writer has this advantage, at least, over the conqueror
and legislator, that he has bequeathed to us not maps, nor laws, but
poems, whose beauty, like the World's unwithered countenance, is bright
as at the day of their creation.
INDEX
[For the following Index I am indebted to the kindness of three of my
pupils, Miss F. Marston, Miss E. L. Morice, and Miss D. E. Yates.]
Abdiel, 72, 138-39, 156, 211
Abstract terms, Milton's use of, 227-31
Adam, 32, 35, 54, 64, 82-4, 87, 92, 95-6, 105, 112, 115, 122, 141-45,
148-50, 154-57, 160, 207, 222, 237, 248-50, 261
_Adamo_, 95
Addison, Joseph, 157-58, 206, 218, 242
_AEneid_, Virgil's, 158
Akenside, Mark, 243
Allegorical figures, Milton's, 237-38
_Amyntor and Theodora_, Mallet's, 243
Andreini, 95-7, 104, 106
Angelo, Michael, 88
_Animadversions on the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuus_, 217
_Apology for Smectymnuus_, 16, 69, 71, 74
Arbuthnot, John, 218
_Areopagitica_, 43, 46, 48, 49, 52, 56-7, 65, 76, 180
Arianism, 86
Ariosto, 171
Armstrong, John, 242
_Art of English Poetry_, Bysshe's, 241
_Art of Preserving Health, The_, Armstrong's, 242
Arthurian Legend, 23, 60, 89-90
_Ascension Day_, Vaughan's, 257
Athanasian Creed, 86
_Athenian Mercury_, 240
Augustine, Saint, 112
Bacon, Francis, 1, 198
Barclay, John, 57
Baxter, Richard, 20-21
Beaumont, Francis, 218
Beaumont, Joseph, 176
Beelzebub, 140
Belial, 140, 211-12, 239, 259
Bembo, Pietro, 46
Bentley, Richard, 157-58
_Biron, Tragedy of_, Chapman's, 204
Blair, Robert, 243
_Blenheim_, Lyttelton's, 243
_Blenheim_, Philips's, 242
Blount, Sir Thomas Pope, 241
Bodley, Sir Thomas, 17
Boileau, Nicolas, 178
_Book of Sports_, 25
Bossu, Charles, 158
Boyd, Zachary, 175
Brice, Thomas, 173
Broome, William, 242
Bunyan, John, 147, 155
Burke, Edmund, 40, 47, 77, 134
Burnet, Dr. Thomas, 84
Butler, Samuel, 44, 72, 246
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 233
Bysshe, 241
Caedmon, 106
Cambridge, Milton at, 13
Camden, William, 61
Carew, Thomas, 197
Catalogues, Milton's Epic, 236
Catullus, 206
Chapman, George, 204, 218
Charlemagne, 60
Charles I., 23
Charles II., Court of, 26, 259
_Chase, The_, Somerville's, 242
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 145, 236, 255
Chesterfield, Lord, 133
_Christian Doctrine, Treatise of_, 43, 113, 140
Church of England, 17, 19-21, 24, 34
_City Match, The_, Mayne's, 189
Classic School, 220, 226
Cleveland, John, 72
_Clovis_, Saint-Sorlin's, 178-79, 205
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 127, 151, 173, 214, 238, 251
_Comus_, 28, 93, 162-63, 182, 184, 191, 199, 235, 245
Congreve, William, 147, 225
Cooper, John Gilbert, 243
_Coriolanus_, Shakespeare's, 122
Court lyrists, 259-63
Cowley, Abraham, 72, 177, 206, 219, 231, 242
Crabbe, George, 223
Crashaw, Richard, 106, 256
Cromwell, Oliver, 62-3, 65, 135
_Cyder_, Philips's, 242
_Cynthia, Hymn to_, Jonson's, 185
Dalila, 51, 149, 209-10
Daniel, Samuel, 218
Davenant, William, 177, 180, 206, 219
_Davideis_, Cowley's, 177-78, 231
_De Re Poetica_, Blount's, 241
_Death of a Fair Infant, On the_, 181-82
_Defence of the People of England_, 47, 74, 131
_Defence of the People of England, Second_, 34, 47, 63
Dekker, John, 218
Denham, John, 206, 219
De Quincey, Thomas, 82, 103, 120, 192
_Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure_, Marvell's, 162
_Discourse of Satire_, Dryden's, 202, 205
_Divine Institutes_ of Lactantius, 101
_Divine Weekes and Workes_, Du Bartas's, 18
_Divorce Pamphlets_, 16, 19, 48, 52, 54, 69, 75, 248, 259
Donne, John, 181, 183
Dramatists, influence of, on Milton, 15-16, 185-87
Drayton, Michael, 27, 174, 218
Dryden, John, 10, 17, 133, 180, 202, 203, 206-208, 219, 240-41, 246-47,
256
Du Bartas, Guillaume, 18, 237
_Dunciad_, Pope's, 251
Dyer, John, 242, 245
_Ecclesiastical Pamphlets_, 49
_Ecclesiastical Polity_, Hooker's, 103
_Economy_, Shenstone's, 243
_Economy of Love, The_, Armstrong's, 242
_Education, Of_, 48-9
Eighteenth-century poetry, 233;
influence of Milton on, 241 _seq._
_Eikonoklastes_, 16, 67
Elizabethan Poetry, 116, 173-75, 186-87;
Milton's relation to, 15, 16, 218-20
Ellwood, Thomas, 161, 163
_English Dramatick Poets, Account of the_, Langbaine's, 241
Epic catalogues, Milton's, 236
Etherege, George, 190
Eve,27, 54, 83, 87, 92, 96, 112, 121-22, 142-50, 154-59, 160, 204,
206-207, 222, 249-50, 260
_Excursion, The_, Mallet's, 243
_Faerie Queene_, Spenser's, 199-200
Fenton, Elijah, 242
_Fleece, The_, Dyer's, 242
Fletcher, Giles, 106
Fletcher, Phineas, 106
Ford, John, 117
Gabriel, 72, 129, 135, 154, 239
Galileo, 100
Gay, John, 242
Gibbon, Edward, 138
Glover, Richard, 243
Godwin, William, 185
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 133
_Gondibert_, Davenant's, 177
_Gorboduc_, Sackville's, 196
Grainger, James, 242, 244
_Grave, The_, Blair's, 243
Gray, Thomas, 238, 253-55
_Grongar Hill_, Dyer's, 245
Hall, John, 71
_Hamlet_, Shakespeare's, 142
Hampton Court Conference, 17
Handel, 239
_Harmonie of the Church_, Drayton's, 174
Hazlitt, William, 198
Herbert, George, 174
Herodotus, 100
Herrick, Robert, 21, 256
Hervey, Lord, 203
_History of Britain_, 60, 143
Hobbes, Thomas, 58, 219
Homer, 171, 206, 220, 234
_Homer_, Pope's, 251
_Hop Garden, The_, Smart's, 242
Horace, 202
Horton, 22
Howard, Sir Robert, 180
Hume, Patrick, 240
_Hyperion_, Keats's, 227
_Idylls of the King_, Tennyson's, 193
_Iliad, The_, 242
_Il Penseroso_, 22, 62, 184-85, 195, 245
Johnson, Samuel, 22, 31, 35, 57-8, 127, 149, 175, 216, 224-25, 229-30,
239, 246-47, 251
Jonson, Ben, 18, 27, 185-86, 198, 218-19
Juvenal, 202
Keats, John, 227
King, Edward, 34
Knox, John, 142
Lactantius, 101-102
_L'Allegro_, 22, 24-5, 27, 195, 245
Lamb, Charles, 198
Landor, Walter Savage, 137, 212-13, 239
Langbaine, Gerard, 241
Latinisms, Milton's, 208-10
Laud, Archbishop, 21, 23
Laudian movement, 91
Lawrence, Henry, 8
_Lear, King_, Shakespeare's, 223-24
_Leonidas_, Glover's, 243
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 224
Lestrange, Sir Roger, 246
Licensing Act, 6
_Lives of the Most Famous English Poets_, Winstanley's, 241
_Lives of the Poets_, Johnson's, 247
_Love and Honour_, Shenstone's, 243
Lucretius, 238
_Lycidas_, 23-4, 33, 57, 63, 213, 235, 246
Lydgate, John, 255
Lyttelton, Lord, 243
_Macbeth_, Shakespeare's, 16, 118, 122, 229
Mackenzie, Sir George, 206
Malherbe, Chretien Guillaume de, 205
Mallet, David, 243
Mammon, 140, 172
Manoa, 51
Manso, 88
Marlowe, Christopher, 190
Marot, Clement, 173
Marvell, Andrew, 67, 73, 162, 256
Masson, Professor David, 133
Meredith, George, 118
Metaphors, Milton's use of, 13-14, 213, 234
Michael, 97, 129, 135, 156-57, 167, 253
"Miltonics," the, 245
Miracle plays, 101
Moloch, 140, 254
_Monstrous Regiment of Women_, Knox's, 142
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 57
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de, 62
More, Henry, 227
More, Sir Thomas, 57, 69
Morus, Alexander, 70
Moryson, Fynes, 15
_Nativity, Ode on the Morning of Christ's_, 181, 199
Nicodemus, Apocryphal Gospel of, 164
_Night Thoughts_, Young's, 243
_Nightingale, Sonnet to the_, 30
Occleve, Thomas, 255
_Odes_, Gray's, 238
_Olaus Magnus_, 100
_Old Wives' Tale_, Peele's, 185
_Original Poems_, Dr. Joseph Beaumont's, 176
Ovid, 206, 208
_Paradise Lost_, 28, 32, 45, 52, 58, 72-3, 79, 81 _seq._, 122-24, 127,
133, 140, 143, 150, 153, 158-64, 168, 176, 179, 188, 191, 195, 206,
208, 210, 213-14, 217, 223-24, 235, 237, 239-42, 245, 252, 254, 256
Characters of, 132-69
Chronology of, 110-11
Cosmography of, 107-10
Criticisms of, by Addison, 157-58
Bentley, 157
Coleridge, 127, 151, 173
De Quincey, 82, 103, 120, 192
Dryden, 240
Johnson, 127, 149, 175
Landor, 137, 212-13, 239
Pattison, 83, 101
Pope, 141
Voltaire, 84
Descriptive scenes in, 120-22, 155-58, 225-26
Sources of, 18, 95, 106
Theme of, 81-9, 91-4, 97-106, 127-28
Theology of, 85-7, 126-27, 128-32
Verse of, 179 _seq._, 191-98
_Paradise Regained_, 86, 120, 146-47, 158-59, 161, 163, 211, 228
Parker, Samuel, 67
Parliament, the Long, 56, 140
_Passion, The_, 181
Pattison, Mark, 54, 83, 101
Peele, George, 185, 190
Philips, John, 242, 244
Phillips, Edward, 160
_Phillips, Lives of Edward and John_, Godwin's, 185
Philosophical poetry, 227
_Pilgrim's Progress_, Bunyan's, 156
Pitt, Christopher, 242
_Platonick Song of the Soul_, More's, 227
_Pleasures of the Imagination_, Akenside's, 243
_Pleasures of Melancholy, The_, Warton's, 243, 245
Plutarch, 59
_Poetics_, Boileau's, 178
Pope, Alexander, 141, 203, 242, 247, 251-52, 254
Powell, Mary, 7, 54, 142, 260
_Power of Harmony, The_, Cooper's, 243
Prelatical controversy, 70
Proper names, poetical use of, by Milton, 235-36
Prynne, William, 147
_Psyche_, Beaumont's, 176
Puns, Milton's, 210-12
Puritanism, Milton's, 28-31, 92, 145, 162, 263
Quakerism, 29, 61
Quarles, Francis, 147
_Rape of the Lock, The_, Pope's, 232
Raphael, 97, 111, 115, 130, 144, 146, 202, 208, 228, 237, 248-49
_Reason of Church Government urged against Prelaty_, 50
_Reformation in England, Of_, 42, 62, 91
_Rehearsal Transposed, The_, Marvell's, 67
Religious poetry, 173-77
Renaissance, the, 19, 59, 74, 173
Republicanism, 66
Restoration, the, 26, 35-8, 68
_Richard II._, Shakespeare's, 187
_Richard III._, Shakespeare's, 16
Rogers, Samuel, 214
Romanticism, 55, 220, 226, 229, 233, 245
_Romaunt of the Rose_, 238
Rowe, Nicholas, 240
_Ruined Abbey, The_, Shenstone's, 243
Rymer, Thomas, 241
Salmasius, 49, 69, 70, 71
_Samson Agonistes_, 26, 29, 37, 50-1, 79, 143, 146, 158-59, 162, 167,
168, 195-96, 203, 208-10, 241
Satan, 28, 60, 72, 85, 94, 102, 105, 109, 110-11, 129, 130, 132-39, 146,
152, 158, 160, 167, 211-12, 228, 239, 253
_Seasons, The_, Thomson's, 243, 248, 252
Sedley, Sir Charles, 260
_Sejanus_, Ben Jonson's, 220
Selden, Thomas, 56
Seneca, 189
Seventeenth-century poetry, 175-77, 256-62;
Milton's relation to, 218-20
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 203
_Shakespeare, Lines on_, Milton's, 182
Shakespeare, William, 3, 4, 5, 7, 15, 18, 19, 22, 25, 116, 118, 171, 175,
190, 198, 214, 217, 218, 220, 223, 225, 230, 231, 240, 243, 263
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 233
Shenstone, William, 243
Shirley, James, 219
_Short View of the Stage_, Collier's, 147
Sidney, Sir Philip, 174
Simile, Milton's use of, 234
Simmons, Samuel, 180
Smart, Christopher, 242
Somerville, William, 242
Sophocles, 70
Southwell, Robert, 174
_Spectator, The_, Addison's, 241
Spenser, Edmund, 17, 18, 106, 181, 200, 206, 236
_Splendid Shilling, The_, Philips's, 242
Spratt, Thomas, 219
Steele, Richard, 206, 218
Sternhold, Thomas, 173
Stoicism, 29, 145, 163
Strafford, Earl of, 23
Suckling, Sir John, 147, 188, 256
_Sugar Cane, The_, Grainger's, 242
Swift, Jonathan, 218
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 93
Sylvester, Thomas, 18, 106
Synod of Dort, 17
_Tale of Two Swannes, A_, 179
_Talmud, The_, 87
_Tatler, The_, Steele's, 206
_Tears of Peace_, Chapman's, 204
Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 193
_Tenure of Kings and Magistrates_, 41
Thomson, James, 243, 248, 252-53
Tillotson, John, 219
_Translation of the Eleventh Odyssey_, Broome's, 242
_Translation of a Story out of the Third AEneid_, Addison's, 242
Tudor state system, the, 57
_Vacation Exercise, At a_, 181
Vaughan, Henry, 256-60
_Venus and Adonis_, Shakespeare's, 148
Virgil, 171, 202-203, 206-207
Voiture, 205
Voltaire, 84
Vondel, Joost van den, 106
Waller, Edmund, 206, 219, 240-41
Warton, Thomas, 243, 245
_West, Sonnet on the Death of Richard_, Gray's, 254
Westminster Assembly of Divines, 140
Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester, 261-62
_Wine, a Poem_, Gay's, 242
Winstanley, William, 241
_Winter's Tale_, Shakespeare's, 25, 144
Wither, George, 195
Wood, Anthony a, 173
Wordsworth, William, 214, 246, 249, 251
Wotton, Sir Henry, 199
Young, Thomas, 12, 243