and arrangement of words, independent and distinguished, like the
perfect manners of an eccentric gentleman. Say instead “Put on in death
the weeds of Dominic,” and the whole unique dignity of the line has
broken down. It is something in the quiet but confident inversion of
“Dying put on” which exactly achieves that perpetual slight novelty
which Aristotle profoundly said was the language of poetry. The idea
itself is at best an obvious and even conventional condemnation of
superstition, and in the ultimate sense a rather superficial one. Coming
where it does, indeed, it does not so much suggest moral earnestness as
rather a moralizing priggishness. For it is dragged in very laboriously
into the very last place where it is wanted, before a splendidly large
and luminous vision of the world newly created, and the first innocence
of earth and sky. It is that passage in which the wanderer through space
approaches Eden; one of the most unquestionable triumphs of all human
literature. That one book at least of “Paradise Lost” could claim the
more audacious title of “Paradise Found.” But if it was necessary for
the poet going to Eden to pass through Limbo, why was it necessary to
pass through Lambeth and Little Bethel? Why should he go there viâ Rome
and Geneva? Why was it necessary to compare the débris of Limbo to the
details of ecclesiastical quarrels in the seventeenth century, when he
was moving in a world before the dawn of all the centuries, or the
shadow of the first quarrel? Why did he talk as if the Church was
reformed before the world was made, or as if Latimer lit his candle
before God made the sun and moon? Matthew Arnold made fun of those who
claimed divine sanction for episcopacy by suggesting that when God said
“Let there be light,” He also said “Let there be Bishops.” But his own
favourite Milton went very near suggesting that when God said “Let there
be light,” He soon afterwards remarked “Let there be Nonconformists.” I
do not feel this merely because my own religious sympathies happen to be
rather on the other side. It is indeed probable that Milton did not
appreciate a whole world of ideas in which he saw merely the
corruptions: the idea of relics and symbolic acts and the drama of the
deathbed. It does not enlarge his place in the philosophy of history
that this should be his only relation either to the divine demagogy of
the Dogs of God or to the fantastical fraternity of the Jugglers of God.
But I should feel exactly the same incongruity if the theological animus
were the other way. It would be equally disproportionate if the approach
to Eden were interrupted with jokes against Puritans, or if Limbo were
littered with steeple-crowned hats and the scrolls of interminable
Calvinistic sermons. We should still feel that a book of “Paradise Lost”
was not the right place for a passage from Hudibras. So far from being
morally earnest, in the best sense, there is something almost
philosophically frivolous in the incapacity to think firmly and
magnanimously about the First Things, and the primary colours of the
creative palette, without spoiling the picture with this ink-slinging of
sectarian politics. Speaking from the standpoint of moral earnestness,
I confess it seems to me trivial and spiteful and even a little vulgar.
After which impertinent criticism, I will now repeat in a loud voice,
and for the mere lust of saying it as often as possible:
Dying put on the weeds of Dominic
Or in Franciscan think to pass disguised.
And the exuberant joy I take in it is the nearest thing I have ever
known to art for art’s sake.
In short, it seems to me that Milton was a great artist, and that he was
also a great accident. It was rather in the same sense that his master
Cromwell was a great accident. It is not true that all the moral virtues
were crystallized in Milton and his Puritans. It is not true that all
the military virtues were concentrated in Cromwell and his Ironsides.
There were masses of moral devotion on the other side, and masses of
military valour on the other side. But it did so happen that Milton had
more ability and success in literary expression, and Cromwell more
ability and success in military science, than any of their many rivals.
To represent Cromwell as a fiend or Milton as a hypocrite is to rush to
another extreme and be ridiculous; they both believed sincerely enough
in certain moral ideas of their time. Only they were not, as seems to be
supposed, the only moral ideas of their time. And they were not, in my
private opinion, the best moral ideas of their time. One of them was the
idea that wisdom is more or less weakened by laughter and a popular
taste in pleasure; and we may call this moral earnestness if we like.
But the point is that Cromwell did not succeed by his moral
earnestness, but by his strategy; and Milton did not succeed by his
moral earnestness, but by his style.
And, first of all, let me touch on the highest form of moral earnestness
and the relation of Milton to the religious poetry of his day. “Paradise
Lost” is certainly a religious poem; but, for many of its admirers, the
religion is the least admirable part of it. The poet professes indeed to
justify the ways of God to men; but I never heard of any men who read it
in order to have them justified, as men do still read a really religious
poem, like the dark and almost sceptical Book of Job. A poem can hardly
be said to justify the ways of God, when its most frequent effect is
admittedly to make people sympathize with Satan. In all this I am in a
sense arguing against myself; for all my instincts, as I have said, are
against the æsthetic theory that art so great can be wholly irreligious.
And I agree that even in Milton there are gleams of Christianity. Nobody
quite without them could have written the single line: “By the dear
might of Him that walked the waves.” But it is hardly too much to say
that it is the one place where that Figure walks in the whole world of
Milton. Nobody, I imagine, has ever been able to recognize Christ in the
cold conqueror who drives a chariot in the war in heaven, like Apollo
warring on the Titans. Nobody has ever heard Him in the stately
disquisitions either of the Council in Heaven or of Paradise Regained.
But, apart from all these particular problems, it is surely the general
truth that the great religious epic strikes us with a sense of
disproportion; the sense of how little it is religious considering how
manifestly it is great. It seems almost strange that a man should have
written so much and so well without stumbling on Christian tradition.
Now in the age of Milton there was a riot of religious poetry. Most of
it had moral earnestness, and much of it had splendid spiritual
conviction. But most of it was not the poetry of the Puritans; on the
contrary, it was mostly the poetry of the Cavaliers. The most real
religion--we might say the most realistic religion--is not to be found
in Milton, but in Vaughan, in Treherne, in Crashaw, in Herbert, and even
in Herrick. The best proof of it is that the religion is alive to-day,
as religion and not merely as literature. A Roman Catholic can read
Crashaw, an Anglo-Catholic can read Herbert, in a direct devotional
spirit; I gravely doubt whether many modern Congregationalists read the
theology of “Paradise Lost” in that spirit. For the moment I mention
only this purely religious emotion; I do not deny that Milton’s poetry,
like all great poetry, can awaken other great emotions. For instance, a
man bereaved by one of the tragedies of the Great War might well find a
stoical serenity in the great lines beginning “Nothing is here for
tears.” That sort of consolation is uttered, as nobly as it could be
uttered, by Milton; but it might be uttered by Sophocles or Goethe, or
even by Lucretius or Voltaire. But supposing that a man were seeking a
more Christian kind of consolation, he would not find it in Milton at
all, as he would find it in the lines beginning “They are all gone into
the world of light.” The whole of the two great Puritan epics do not
contain all that is said in saying “O holy hope and high humility.”
Neither hope nor humility were Puritan specialities.
But it was not only in devotional mysticism that these Cavaliers could
challenge the great Puritan; it was in a mysticism more humanistic and
even more modern. They shine with that white mystery of daylight which
many suppose to have dawned with Wordsworth and with Blake. In that
sense they make earth mystical where Milton only made heaven material.
Nor are they inferior in philosophic freedom; the single line of
Crashaw, addressed to a woman, “By thy large draughts of intellectual
day,” is less likely, I fancy, to have been addressed by Adam to Eve, or
by Milton to Mrs. Milton. It seems to me that these men were superior to
Milton in magnanimity, in chivalry, in joy of life, in the balance of
sanity and subtlety, in everything except the fact (not wholly remote
from literary criticism) that they did not write so well as he did. But
they wrote well enough to lift the load of materialism from the English
name; and show us the shining fields of a paradise that is not wholly
lost.
Of such was the Anti-Puritan party; and the reader may learn more about
it from the author of “The Glass of Fashion.” There he may form a
general idea of how, but for the Puritans, England would have been
abandoned to mere ribaldry and licence; blasted by the blasphemies of
George Herbert; rolled in the mire of the vile materialism of Vaughan;
tickled to ribald laughter by the cheap cynicism and tap-room
familiarities of Crashaw and Treherne. But the same Cavalier tradition
continued into the next age, and indeed into the next century; and the
critic must extend his condemnation to include the brutal buffooneries
of Bishop Ken or the gay and careless worldliness of Jeremy Collier.
Nay, he must extend it to cover the last Tories who kept the tradition
of the Jacobites; the careless merriment of Dean Swift, the godless
dissipation of Dr. Johnson. None of these men were Puritans; all of them
were strong opponents of political and religious Puritanism. The truth
is that English literature bears a very continuous and splendid
testimony to the fact that England was not merely Puritan. Ben Jonson in
“Bartholomew Fair” spoke for most English people, and certainly for most
English poets. Anti-Puritanism was the one thing common to Shakespeare
and Dryden, to Swift and Johnson, to Cobbett and Dickens. And the
historical bias the other way has come, not from Puritan superiority,
but simply from Puritan success. It was the political triumph of the
party, in the Revolution and the resultant commercial industrialism,
that suppressed the testimony of the populace and the poets. Loyalty
died away in a few popular songs; the Cromwellians never had any popular
song to die. English history has moved away from English literature. Our
culture, like our agriculture, is at once very native and very
neglected. And as this neglect is regrettable, if only as neglect of
literature, I will pause in conclusion upon the later period, two
generations after Milton, when the last of the true Tories drank wine
with Bolingbroke or tea with Johnson.
The truth that is missed about the Tories of this tradition is that they
were rebels. They had the virtues of rebels; they also had the vices of
rebels. Swift had the fury of a rebel; Johnson the surliness of a
rebel; Goldsmith the morbid sensibility of a rebel; and Scott, at the
end of the process, something of the despair and mere retrospection of a
defeated rebel. And the Whig school of literary criticism, like the Whig
school of political history, has omitted or missed this truth about
them, because it necessarily omitted the very existence of the thing
against which they rebelled. For Macaulay and Thackeray and the average
of Victorian liberality the Revolution of 1688 was simply an
emancipation, the defeat of the Stuarts was simply a downfall of tyranny
and superstition; the politics of the eighteenth century were simply a
progress leading up to the pure and happy politics of the nineteenth
century; freedom slowly broadening down, etc., etc. This makes the
attitude of the Tory rebels entirely meaningless; so that the critics in
question have been forced to represent some of the greatest Englishmen
who ever lived as a mere procession of lunatics and ludicrous
eccentrics. But these rebels, right or wrong, can only be understood in
relation to the real power against which they were rebelling; and their
titanic figures can best be traced in the light of the lightning which
they defied. That power was a positive thing; it was anything but a mere
negative emancipation of everybody. It was as definite as the monarchy
which it had replaced; for it was an aristocracy that replaced it. It
was the oligarchy of the great Whig families, a very close corporation
indeed, having Parliament for its legal form, but the new wealth for its
essential substance. That is why these lingering Jacobites appear most
picturesque when they are pitted against some of the princes of the new
aristocratic order. That is why Bolingbroke remains in the memory,
standing in his box at the performance of “Cato,” and flinging forth his
defiance to Marlborough. That is why Johnson remains rigid in his
magnificent disdain, hurling his defiance at Chesterfield. Churchill and
Chesterfield were not small men, either in personality or in power; they
were brilliant ornaments of the triumph of the world. They represented
the English governing class when it could really govern; the modern
plutocracy when it still deserved to be called an aristocracy also. And
the whole point of the position of these men of letters is that they
were denying and denouncing something which was growing every day in
prestige and prosperity; which seemed to have, and indeed had, not only
the present but the future on its side. The only thing it had not got on
its side was the ancient tradition of the English populace. That
populace was being more and more harried by evictions and enclosures,
that its old common lands and yeoman freeholds might be added to the
enormous estates of the all-powerful aristocracy. One of the Tory rebels
has himself made that infamy immortal in the great lines of the
“Deserted Village.” At least, it is immortal in the sense that it can
never now be lost for lovers of English literature; but even this record
was for a long time lost to the public by under-valuation and neglect.
In recent times the “Deserted Village” was very much of a deserted poem.
But of that I may have occasion to speak later. The point for the moment
is that the psychology of these men, in its evil as well as its good, is
to be interpreted not so much in terms of a lingering loyalty as of a
frustrated revolution. Some of them had, of course, elements of
extravagance and morbidity peculiar to their own characters; but they
grew ten times more extravagant and more morbid as their souls swelled
within them at the success of the shameless and the insolence of the
fortunate. I doubt whether anybody ever felt so bitter against the
Stuarts. Now this misunderstanding has made a very regrettable gap in
literary criticism. The masterpieces of these men are represented as
much more crabbed or cranky or inconsequent than they really were,
because their objective is not seen objectively. It is like judging the
raving of some Puritan preacher without allowing for the fact that the
Pope or the King had ever possessed any power at all. To ignore the fact
of the great Whig families because of the legal fiction of a free
Parliament is like ignoring the feelings of the Christian martyrs about
Nero, because of the legal fiction that the Imperator was only a
military general. These fictions do not prevent imaginative persons from
writing books like the “Apocalypse” or books like “Gulliver’s Travels.”
I will take only one example of what I mean by this purely literary
misunderstanding: an example from “Gulliver’s Travels” itself. The case
of the under-valuation of Swift is a particularly subtle one, for Swift
was really unbalanced as an individual, which has made it much easier
for critics not to keep the rather delicate balance of justice about
him. There is a superficial case for saying he was mad, apart from the
physical accident of his madness; but the point is that even those who
have realized that he was sometimes mad with rage have not realized
what he was in a rage with. And there is a curious illustration of this
in the conclusion of the story of Gulliver. Everyone remembers the ugly
business about the Yahoos, and the still uglier business about the real
human beings who reminded the returned traveller of Yahoos; how Gulliver
shrank at first from his friends, and would only gradually consent to
sit near his wife. And everybody remembers the picturesque but hostile
sketch which Thackeray gives of the satire and the satirist; of Swift as
the black and evil blasphemer sitting down to write his terrible
allegory, of which the only moral is that all things are, and always
must be, valueless and vile. I say that everybody remembers both these
literary passages; but, indeed, I fear that many remember the critical
who do not really remember the creative passage, and that many have read
Thackeray who have not read Swift.
Now it is here that purely literary criticism has a word to say. A man
of letters may be mad or sane in his cerebral constitution; he may be
right or wrong in his political antipathies; he may be anything we
happen to like or dislike from our own individual standpoint. But there
is one thing to which a man of letters has a right, whatever he is, and
that is a fair critical comprehension of any particular literary effect
which he obviously aims at and achieves. He has a right to his climax,
and a right not to be judged without reference to his climax. It would
not be fair to leave out the beautiful last lines of “Paradise Lost” as
mere bathos; without realizing that the poet had a fine intention in
allowing that conclusion, after all the thunder and the trumps of doom,
to fall and fade away on a milder note of mercy and reasonable hope. It
would not be fair to stigmatize the incident of Ignorance, damned at the
very doors of heaven at the end of Bunyan’s book, as a mere blot of
black Calvinist cruelty and spite, without realizing that the writer
fully intended its fearful irony, like a last touch of the finger of
fear. But this justice which is done to the Puritan masters of
imagination has hardly been done to the great Tory master of irony. No
critic I have read has noticed the real point and climax of that passage
about the Yahoos. Swift leads up to it ruthlessly enough, for an artist
of that sort is often ruthless; and it is increased by his natural
talent for a sort of mad reality of detail, as in his description of the
slowly diminished distance between himself and his wife at the
dinner-table. But he was working up to something that he really wished
to say, something which was well worth saying, but which few seem to
have thought worth hearing. He suggests that he gradually lost the
loathing for humanity with which the Yahoo parallel had inspired him,
that although men are in many ways petty and animal, he came to feel
them to be normal and tolerable; that the sense of their unworthiness
now very seldom returns; and indeed that there is only one thing that
revives it. If one of these creatures exhibits Pride----.
That is the voice of Swift, and the cry arraigning aristocracy. It is
natural for a monkey to collect nuts, and it may be pardonable for John
Churchill to collect guineas. But to think that John Churchill can be
proud of his heap of guineas, can convert them into stars and coronets,
and can carry that calm and classic face disdainful above the
multitude! It is natural for she-monkeys to be mated somehow; but to
think that the Duchess of Yarmouth is proud of being the Duchess of
Yarmouth! It may not be surprising that the nobility should have
scrambled like screaming Yahoos for the rags and ribbons of the
Revolution, tripping up and betraying anybody and everybody in turn,
with every dirty trick of treason, for anything and everything they
could get. But that those of them who had got everything should then
despise those who had got nothing, that the rich should sneer at the
poor for having no part of the plunder, that this oligarchy of Yahoos
should actually feel superior to anything or anybody--that does move the
prophet of the losing side to an indignation which is something much
deeper and nobler than the negative flippancies that we call blasphemy.
Swift was perhaps more of a Jeremiah than an Isaiah, and a faulty
Jeremiah at that; but in this great climax of his grim satire he is none
the less a seer and a speaker of the things of God; because he gives the
testimony of the strongest and most searching of human intellects to the
profound truth of the meanness and imbecility of pride.
And the other men of the same tradition had essentially the same
instinct. Johnson was in many ways unjust to Swift, just as Cobbett was
afterwards unjust to Johnson. But looking back up the perspective of
history we can all see that those three great men were all facing the
same way; that they all regretted the rise of a rapacious and paganized
commercial aristocracy, and its conquest over the old popular
traditions, which some would call popular prejudices. When Johnson said
that the devil was the first Whig, he might have merely varied the
phrase by saying that he was the first aristocrat. For the men of this
Tory tradition, in spirit if not in definition, distinguished between
the privilege of monarchy and that of the new aristocracy by a very
tenable test. The mark of aristocracy is ambition. The king cannot be
ambitious. We might put it now by saying that monarchy is authority; but
in its essence aristocracy is always anarchy. But the men of that school
did not criticize the oligarch merely as a rebel against those above;
they were well aware of his activities as an oppressor of those below.
This aspect, as has already been noted, was best described by a friend
of Johnson, for whom Johnson had a very noble and rather unique
appreciation--Oliver Goldsmith.
A recent and sympathetic critic in the _Mercury_ used the phrase that
Mr. Belloc had been anticipated by Disraeli in his view of England as
having evolved into a Venetian oligarchy. The truth is that Disraeli was
anticipated by Bolingbroke and the many highly intelligent men who
agreed with him; and not least by Goldsmith. The whole view, including
the very parallel with Venice, can be found stated with luminous logic
and cogency in the “Vicar of Wakefield.” And Goldsmith attacked the
problem entirely from the popular side. Nobody can mistake his Toryism
for a snobbish submission to a privilege or title:
Princes and lords, the shadow of a shade,
A breath can make them, as a breath has made:
But a bold peasantry, a nation’s pride,
When once destroyed can never be supplied.
I hope he was wrong; but I sometimes have a horrible feeling that he may
have been right.
But I have here, thank God, no cause for touching upon modern politics.
I was educated, as much as my critic, in the belief that Whiggism was a
pure deliverance; and I hope I am still as willing as he to respect
Puritans for their individual virtue as well as for their individual
genius. But it moves all my memories of the unmorality of the ’nineties
to be charged with indifference to the importance of being earnest. And
it is for the sake of English literature that I protest against the
suggestion that we had no purity except Puritanism, or that only a man
like the author of “Paradise Lost” could manage to be on the side of the
angels.
* * * * *